How to Do Things with Incoherence

Abstract

When students write incoherent sentences, it is common—instinctive, even—for a teacher to translate those sentences, to make them conform to the expectations of readers wanting clarity, or to banish them altogether. In this article, we consider how incoherence might instead be a site of possibility, of invention, of nuance.

Notes

1 We thank RR editor Elise Hurley and RR readers T. R. Johnson and Star Medzerian Vanguri for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

2 We display sentences in this manner taking a cue from both Francis Christensen and Verlyn Klinkenborg.

3 Kirsch joins a growing cadre of writers advocating for working Gertrude Stein into writing instruction. For more, see Bartholomae (“Living”), Leonard, and Kaufman. For Stein as a composition student, see Rosalind S. Miller’s Gertrude Stein: Form and Intelligibility, which anthologizes her composition themes written at Radcliffe. Michelle Brazier’s dissertation, The Making of Gertrude Stein, is also formidable in its examination of Stein as a writing student. See, also, Winkler’s recent essay on Stein’s relevance for the first-year writing classroom.

4 See James Slevin for a reading of a piece of student writing that, like Stein and the student we quote later, “is clearly using . . . repetition . . . as the basis for his coherence” (171).

5 This scene also appears in Waite’s “The Unavailable Means of Persuasion.” We work from her dissertation because it offers a fuller account of what happened in the classroom.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Wayne Moe

Peter Wayne Moe is assistant professor of English and director of campus writing at Seattle Pacific University. His work has appeared in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, College Composition and Communication, and Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, among other places.

Kyle Winkler

Kyle Winkler is assistant professor of English at Kent State University-Tuscarawas. He teaches courses on writing, rhetoric, and style. His work has appeared in, and is forthcoming from, Composition Forum and Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal.