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Here is the progress report I will be delivering later today sans formatting:-( .

Morgan Sims

Question: What is the best method for developing student awareness of their composition process?

Moffett, James. “Writing, Inner Speech, and Meditation.” College English 44.3 (1982). JSTOR.
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At once entertaining and thought provoking, this essay explores the use of meditation as a tool for enhancing student composition and is part of Moffett’s larger project to inform the field.

James Moffett’s intriguing essay is an attempt to apply the principals of his meditation practice to the process of composition. Using concepts ranging from those of the Russian psycholinguists to his own guru Swami Sivalingam, Moffett describes how the disordered stream of sense impression, memory, experience, and reflections can be observed, suspended, and ultimately ordered by the writer into authoring for an audience. Moffett explores several techniques he believes can facilitate the authoring process including: Gazing—Rapt absorption in outer object, eyes open; Visualizing—Imagining of inner object, eyes closed; Witnessing Inner Speech—Watching as bystander the inner stream; Focusing Inner Speech—Narrowing down to and developing a subject intensively with all faculties of mind and heart together; and Suspending Inner Speech—Holding the mind on one point until it transcends discourse and culture and merges with cosmos, in trance. These concepts, backed up as they are by Moffett’s careful use of previous studies and anecdotal information, are all tied to the act of reflection, and indeed are meant to guide reflection in a composing subject, whether that subject be a spiritual devotee or a student of composition. The strengths of this essay lie in Moffett’s willingness to explore the subject of meditation freely. He points out that people often conflate meditation with foreign religious practice as well as our culture’s difficulty with intense reflection as barriers to the implementation of meditative study in schools. But his argument for this implementation is based on studies and observations proving the validity of the learning power of gazing and contemplation.





Berthoff, Ann E. The Making of Meaning. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton, 1981.

Berthoff’s assertive style and direct assault on those she considers backwater thinkers has made her work influential to numerous freshly-launched cohorts of composition teachers. Although at times didactic in her assault on those she considers misguided, Berthoff nonetheless makes a convincing case for the pursuit of a philosophy of composition.

In the first essay titled “The Intelligent Eye and the Thinking Hand” from section two of The Making of Meaning titled “Composing is Forming” (to attempt to summarize a larger section of this book would court disaster) Berthoff declares the need for a philosophy of composition to allow for the formation of a working pedagogy. Observation, visualization, and abstraction are all concepts Berthoff shares with Moffett, although she takes issue with the idea of a “ladder of abstraction” a concept Moffett explores positively in Teaching the Universe of Discourse. Imagination coupled with intention creates a process that is not so much visible or measurable as constitutive of concept for Berthoff, who advocates for the recognition of the mind’s power. Thinkers and writers such as I.A. Richards (whose ideas were influential in the development of modern literary criticism) and C.S. Pierce (father of semiotics) are emblematic of the type of conceptualization work Berthoff proposes will reclaim composition theory from “false philosophers” worshipful of the “idols of the laboratory” namely physicalism, mathematization, objectivity, methodology, and jargon. Berthoff’s strengths lie in her ability to proposition (or preposition), a method calling for the contribution of others in order to form a complete approach to teaching. This strength is also a weakness since her “theory of imagination” conceives of “composing as forming and forming as proceeding by means of abstraction,” provides a not altogether clear path of process.

My research and thinking thus far are woefully incomplete, but I do see potential in linking Berthoff with Moffett. Although Berthoff’s firebrand calls to arms establish urgency, Moffett’s work has a greater feeling of concreteness and practical applicability that may provide the necessary partner in a marriage of theory and practice that I hope will emerge out of the tumultuous courtship of this paper.