{"id":1217,"date":"2018-06-27T21:12:45","date_gmt":"2018-06-27T21:12:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/transfer.writingcommons.org\/2018\/06\/27\/the-mysterious-incident-of-the-missing-title-why-did-titular-concern-vanish-from-composition-studies\/"},"modified":"2023-07-23T21:08:54","modified_gmt":"2023-07-23T20:08:54","slug":"the-mysterious-incident-of-the-missing-title-why-did-titular-concern-vanish-from-composition-studies","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/writingcommons.org\/article\/the-mysterious-incident-of-the-missing-title-why-did-titular-concern-vanish-from-composition-studies\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mysterious Incident of the Missing Title: Why Did Titular Concern Vanish from Composition Studies?"},"content":{"rendered":"
How much time, if any, do first-year writing instructors spend in class discussing the importance of titles on their students\u2019 papers? Without looking at a mountain of lesson plans or interviewing a plethora of instructors from across the country, it is impossible to know what is and what isn\u2019t commonly taught in first-year composition courses. Admittedly, introductory writing and research classes can vary greatly from institution to institution and even from instructor to instructor within the same department. However, judging by an examination of current First-Year Composition textbooks, Rhet\/Comp scholars place little importance on discussing the effect of titles on student papers. Out of the most popular rhetoric and composition textbooks in use now, only a handful give any direction, however miniscule it is, about how and why students should compose a title to their work. When they do say anything about titles, much of the instruction focuses on issues of citation or formatting (i.e., where to put the title) instead of an explanation of titles as rhetorical tool that students should carefully consider[1].<\/p>\n
[1]Successful College Writing<\/em>is one exception as it has a slightly more extensive conversation about titles, including tips on how make the title more attention grabbing. However, it does not discuss in depth the reasoning behind why titles are crucial.<\/p>\n For example, the discussion of titles in the popular First-Year Composition textbook Everything\u2019s an Argument<\/em>essentially consists of one sentence that reads, \u201cTitles, headings, subheadings, enlarged quotations, running heads, and boxes are some common visual signals\u201d (Lunsford et. al. 340). Apart from this article and its companion, \u201cHow to Win Papers and Influence Professors: Creating Positive First Impressions through Effective Titles,\u201d a search of the Writing Commons archive reveals a similar treatment of titles, primarily dealing with formatting in citations or on title pages. And these are examples that explicitly address titles in some way; many composition textbooks do not mention them at all. An interesting example is The Norton Field Guide to Writing<\/em>, which is organized in large part around the concept genre<\/em>. As I will argue, titles can be an important part of establishing genre, and yet The Norton Field Guide<\/em>does not discuss titles in any significant way.<\/p>\n If composition textbooks and resources barely mention them, we have to ask ourselves whether first-year composition instructors should pay any attention to titles. Aren\u2019t they, like the student\u2019s name, simply a placeholder? In an already crammed semester, should we take the time to discuss what many consider a mundane detail not tantamount to the rest of the argument?<\/p>\n The answer to the latter question is a resounding, \u201cYes.\u201d Titles are significant, and through this article I hope to prove they are important in two key ways:<\/p>\n In the end, my goal is to persuade rhetoric scholars and first-year composition instructors that we need to spend more time discussing the importance of titles with our students.<\/p>\n One important aspect of titles that is commonly overlooked is that students can use them to develop a tone<\/a>\u00a0for an essay. A well-crafted title can serve as the perimeter wall of the \u201cgenre function,\u201d and in so doing can be a tool for not only regulating but also constituting meaning in a text.<\/p>\n Building off the work of scholars in linguistics, education, communication, and composition (primarily Composition scholar Carolyn Miller), Anis Bawarshi coins the term \u201cgenre function,\u201d in his article of the same name, as an alternative to what Michel Foucault in \u201cWhat is an Author\u201d calls the \u201cauthor-function.\u201d To Foucault, the author function expresses \u201cthe space left empty by the author\u2019s disappearance\u201d in structuralist and poststructuralist literary theory (Bawarshi 345). The author-function doesn\u2019t refer to the literal author of a work, but instead to the regulatory function that the author serves to delimit what is and what isn\u2019t a work of value. In other words, \u201cit refers to the author\u2019s name, which in addition to being a proper name, is also a literary name, a name that exists only in relation to the work associated with it,\u201d and therefore, bestows on a work its cultural status (336). But as Bawarshi points out, Foucault\u2019s author-function only accounts for certain \u201cprivileged\u201d discourses[2].<\/p>\n [2]Here, Bawarshi sees the author-function as referring mainly to canonical texts. For instance, a literary scholar may claim to study Hemingway or Jonson, but works outside the cannon or marginalized mediums, comic books for instance, don\u2019t achieve value even when a prominent author in that genre is attached to the work. Also, author-function doesn\u2019t account for the regulatory process associated with \u201ceveryday speech\u201d that comes and goes.<\/p>\n What we need argues, Bawarshi, is \u201can overarching concept that can explain the social roles we assign to various discourses and those who enact and are enacted by them. Genre is such a concept\u201d (337).<\/p>\n As far as first-year composition courses, what we can take away from Bawarshi\u2019s argument is that high school and college students don\u2019t have the authority to take advantage of the author function. They don\u2019t have established names or inherent ethos<\/a>. However, they could make use the genre function. Since every discourse can fit into one genre or another no matter how obscure or marginalized it may be, and since even genres exist on a hierarchical schema, the genre function works as a broader regulatory device and can in fact subsume the author-function under its purview. The entrenched hierarchies perpetuated by the author-function are surmountable because genre broadens the boundaries of our inquiry, and as a result of its more encompassing nature, the genre function allows for all discourses and all writers to be heard, whether the writer is Hemmingway or a first-year writing student (337).<\/p>\n However, genre\u2019s function in a text is much more than regulating discourses within particular value categories; it gives the reader the paradigm necessary to decode the text. As Miller points out, \u201cIt is through the process of typification (genre) that we create recurrence, analogies, similarities. What recurs is not material situation but our construal of a type. Successful communication would require that the participants share common types\u201d (157). Genres inform our understanding of a text by taking the new experience or discourse and making it \u201cfamiliar through the recognition of relevant similarities\u201d to a certain genre (156-157).<\/p>\n To understand the implications of this concept, I return again to Bawarshi. He cites a useful example from Heather Dubrow in her 1984 survey of genre theory, in which she asks readers to consider the following paragraph:<\/p>\n The clock on the mantelpiece said ten thirty, but someone had suggested recently that the clock was wrong. As the figure of the dead woman lay on the bed in the front room, a no less silent figure glided rapidly from the house. The only sounds to be heard were the ticking of the clock and the loud wailing of an infant. (1)<\/p>\n Dubrow asks how we make sense of this discourse. What details should we pay attention to as significant? What state of mind should we be in as readers? According to Bawarshi, \u201cknowing that the paragraph appears in a novel with the title Murder at Marplethorpe<\/em>, readers can begin to make certain interpretive decisions as to the value and meaning of specific images, images that become symbolic when readers recognize that the novel belongs to the genre of detective fiction\u201d (340). For instance, the rapidly fleeing figure becomes a suspect in the woman\u2019s murder. If, contrarily, the paragraph is from\u00a0The Personal History of David Marplethorpe<\/em>, the specter of murder dissipates as the departing person could be seeking help while the baby, possibly Marplethorpe himself, describes his mother\u2019s costly accident. It\u2019s a useful example because \u201cnot only does the genre function in this case constitute how we read certain elements within the discourse, allowing us to assume certain subject positions as readers of the discourse, but it also constitutes the roles we assign to the actors and events within the discourse\u201d (340).<\/p>\n What Bawarshi fails to acknowledge here is that what he is calling \u201cgenre\u201d in this instance is, in fact, a title. The text itself doesn\u2019t change, just the name that he assigns to the novel, which demonstrates the inescapable connection between title and genre. This isn\u2019t to say that a title is always a clear revealer of a text\u2019s genre[3], but in many circumstances, the title is the reader\u2019s first indication of the \u201cappropriate\u201d way to read the text, as in the example of Murder at Marplethorpe<\/em>. Just as first impressions can have a long-lasting effect on interpersonal relationships, the first hint at the text\u2019s genre\u2014what we may call the first impression for the relationship between the reader and the text\u2014can impact the reader long after they have turned the cover. Genre not only provides but forces upon the reader certain expectations from the start. An inappropriate title can have a devastating affect on a text if the created expectations aren\u2019t met. For instance, if in The Johnson Conspiracy <\/em>there isn\u2019t intrigue, secrecy, and a malevolent force working in the shadows, the novel, which might otherwise be an exceptional piece of writing, will disappoint much of its initial audience<\/a>.<\/p>\n [3]I could cite any number of ambiguous titles as examples of a title\u2019s limitations as revealer, but David Sedaris\u2019s Naked<\/em>, a collection of memoirs about various, and very loosely connected, incidents in his life is a readily available text that doesn\u2019t expose its genre in the title. However, for every Naked<\/em>out there, I could cite a The Martian Chronicles <\/em>to show that titles do have an impact.<\/p>\n In our composition classes, we spend countless hours working on our students\u2019 introductions<\/a>, teaching them to grab their audience’s<\/a> attention and hook them into the argument so they will continue reading, but we ignore the fact that if the student\u2019s title confuses the issue, alienates their audience<\/a>, or simply bores them, even the most provocative and enthralling introductions will have a daunting, poor first impression to overcome. Some arguments won\u2019t be able to recover. How many times have we received student papers with titles like, \u201cDeath Penalty\u201d or \u201cPaper #2\u201d? These titles simply serve as placeholders and fail to establish an effective tone for the paper. If they establish any kind of first impression, it\u2019s one of laziness or ineptitude, regardless of whether that\u2019s a true indication of a student\u2019s work.<\/p>\n\n
Establishing first impressions through genre<\/h2>\n