Of the articles we were assigned for this evening, I found Witte and Faigley's to be the most interesting (while simultaneously managing to be extraordinarily boring).
I was first interested in it because of an element of my high school's English department writing rubric which asks the reader to evaluate the writer's use of "transitional words and phrases." To be perfectly honest, this portion of the rubric has always stumped me a little. I guess I know intellectually what a transition word is (however, therefore, first, next) and in practice I can transition from one sentence or one paragraph to another, but I don't really know how I learned to do this, I don't know how to teach it to anyone else, and I'm not sure how to evaluate it. I tend to give all the kids a 4 out of 6 on that particular element, just because they need a score. Reading Witte and Faigley's article helped me to grasp that what the rubric is asking about is coherence. Does the writer flow from one thought to the next in a smooth and logical fashion or does s/he jump from sentence to sentence or paragraph to paragraph? I don't know why I didn't get that this is what I was supposed to be looking at to begin with, but I'm glad I do, now.
On that note, I was disappointed that the article did not suggest any practical applications as a result of the authors' study on coherence and cohesion. It says, "if cohesion is better understood it can be better taught," but it doesn't say HOW that teaching should occur (201). It hints at sentence combining, but never having used that technique before, I don't really understand how a lesson in sentence combining for cohesion would look. This is what most turns me off of academia: tons and tons of dry information that ends up being completely useless because the researcher has not given me tools for applying his or her findings to my actual life and work.
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