WPA-L November 2005 Part 1

I recall attending a lecture some years ago — at least a decade - - by Joseph Williams of U of Chicago, who was one of those advocating Chicago’s “critical thinking” movement and whose textbook on writing seemed to be one of the best I had seen. Williams made a memorable point about transferability: namely, that it doesn’t really exist. He contended, based on some data, that when people take up a new kind of thinking or doing, they inevitably regress to the lowest level of competence even if they have already mastered a similar or nearly identical skill set. So teaching a person to write about lit (or anything else) does NOT really prepare him or her to write within another rhetorical or disciplinary field. Hence the marriage of WAC to critical thinking in some of that Comp/Rhet work of the 1980s and 1990s. But I don’t know if Williams is right about this. Do you? If so, I’d like to have some references to studies on transferability.