Saturday, December 28, 2002
Fred Kemp's CCCC94 Presentation
Fred's "The Limits of Proof in Writing Instruction".
In my mind this could have been the last word on the subject, though I know that the demand for verifiability will never go away.
In short, we want to discover the universal efficacy in a process, lay it out before the community untainted by the debilitating quirkiness of special enthusiasms, pure in some clinical way that asserts, unequivocally, that this thing works here, uninfluenced by special conditions, and it will work anywhere with anybody. Guaranteed.
We can do that with many of the things and processes we value in society. We can do that with air conditioning systems, vaccines, rockets, voting procedures, military training, and automobile repair.
But we haven't been able to isolate universally effective procedures for reforming criminals, rearing-children, making marriages last, rehabilitating drug users, and educating our children. This last is what we in this room are most professionally concerned with. We come to meetings like this in order to determine with as much certainty as we can what will work and what won't in our classrooms. And for this we want proof, or the closest thing to proof possible.
But I suggest that in writing instruction, and in any kind of instruction, actually, it is infuriatingly difficult to prove anything worth proving. All too often the evidence put forth in order to assemble the trappings of empirical proof are rhetorical devices that convince the already 80 percent convinced and are ignored by those already convinced otherwise.
posted by joe grohens 12:17 PM
