The Objective Collate-ative

Posted by Glenn Jackson at Sunday, September 25, 2011 11:28:10 PM EDT

Formal Properties of Writing
Christensen, Francis. "A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence." Teaching Composition: Background Readings, Third Ed. T.R. Johnson, Ed. Boston, MA: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2008. Print. 276-291.

Trimbur, John. "Delivering the Message." Teaching Composition: Background Readings, Third Ed. T.R. Johnson, Ed. Boston, MA: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2008. Print. 363-375.

Witte and Faigley, “Coherence, Cohesion, and Writing Quality.” College Composition and Communication 32.2, Language Studies and Composing (May 1981) 189-204. PDF.
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As I see it, Witte and Faigley’s “Coherence, Cohesion, and Writing Quality” offers three useful tropes, one of which we have seen before. T-units are the smallest indivisible measure of meaning in a sentence, and they may comprise a noun phrase or verb phrase, for instance, but also a single word which conveys meaning according to the intention of the sentence rather than as defined in the dictionary. The second useful term is text-span, which gauges the distance a referring term lies from its antecedent in a text. Russian texts, I have noticed, use a great span between pronouns and their antecedents, and the order is often reversed from that of conversational English.

The term here which interests me most is collation. According to my printer, which I consult regularly on such issues, to collate is to make sure that the recto and the verso are printed sequentially. It also makes sure, when I print our .pdfs, that I can get folio pages from single-page scans. This only becomes a problem when printing two-sided documents on a single-side printer, which I have noticed is God’s cue to cause a paper jam.
These problems jive with text collation in that a reader should not have to root around and scratch out a concordance in order to decide which referent is meant by each use of a pronoun, lest one inadvertently (and with less reward) produce Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom or Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Properly collated antecedents and precedents maintain continuity for the reader, which in turn can yield coherence, which with luck shall produce retention.

The repetition of key terms, according to Witte and Faigley’s sources, provably improves the reader’s retention. More surprisingly, increased collation is directly proportional to the quality of the text as perceived by the reader. I view all this as a reasonable justification for Standard American Composition. I hate the formalism of that rigid high-school request, but it is apt for students heading for APA studies, for those with a journalistic bent, and—as this research would lead me to believe—for speech and communications students.