I am Matthew Williams and You are Not

"I can identify at least two fundamentally different understandings of the concept of 'purpose.' One approach to 'purpose' presents the purposes for writing as conventional and public--limited in number and chosen by writers prior to composing--while another presents the purposes for writing as unique to the particular author and occasion--not chosen prior to the composing but discovered anew in and through the composing process." (118)

"Further more, the formal approach to 'purpose' suggest that each type of writing has its own distinctive mode or method of production, leaving students with the impression that a given set of strategies will produce a particular type of writing, which is also not true, they [Knoblauch and Brannon] claim." (120)

"Second, according to Kinneavy's critics, the association of 'purpose' with genre suggests that writers choose a purpose prior to composing. But the critics insist that in fact the writers discover their purpose in the process of writing. Writing should be seen as a dynamic activity by which writers discover and 'make meaning' as they respond to an evolving thought process that is their text." (120)

"Finally, Kinneavy's critics claim that linking 'purpose' to genre implies that works have singular purposes when really all texts pursue multiple purposes." (121)

"Probing them [ambiguities] will show that 'purpose' is often not an objective technical term, even when it is presented as one, but often a subjective, evaluative term. We may learn much about our attitude toward the teaching of writing by examining further the ambiguities of 'purpose.'" (125)

"Kinneavy links 'purpose' with genre because for him, the telos of the writing process is to link students with what he calls in the title of his textbook 'the liberal arts tradition.' For him, genres provide this link. They are not the rhetorical straight jackets that restrict writers from discovering what they really have to say that they are often portrayed to be. Kinneavy sees genres as Carolyn R. Miller does when she argues that genres are an index to social purposes, maps to 'recurrent rhetorical situations.' When we learn a genre, Miller argues, 'we learn not just a pattern of forms or even a method of achieving our own ends. We learn, more importantly, what ends we may have...' This approach to 'purpose' links Kinneavy's textbook to the tradition that views rhetoric as the primary medium of culture." (127)

"Within this tradition, the ultimate answer to the question, "Why write' is 'to join the human conversation.'" (127)

"The differences in the meanings of 'purpose' should serve to remind us not merely that we disagree on the definition of a key term but that we see writing in radically different ways. The ambiguity about 'purpose' teaches us that generic writing courses or composing processes are a fiction and that to teach writing is to teach a philosophy. We need to be mindful that when we take as our task to teach students to write we are not merely inviting students to try a technology that might be helpful to them but to adopt, at least for the duration of the course, our vision of the purposes of education and perhaps even our vision of the ends of life." (128)