Journal of Advanced Composition, Volume 4, 1983 Page: 78
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Journal of Advanced Composition
trast certain lines of inquiry. Rosenblatt claims that her field has
traditionally viewed the reader as a passive, invisible recipient,
often "referred to under such collective rubrics as 'the audience'
or 'the reading public' ":
Thus, readers are viewed mainly en masse, as in studies of Shake-
speare's audience, or accounts of the emergence of the middle-class
reading public in the eighteenth century, or analyses of categories
of fiction and their respective types of readers in the twentieth cen-
tury. The individual reader has seldom been acknowledged as
carrying on his own special and peculiar activities.25
Viewing Rosenblatt's method according to the continuum pre-
sented in this essay, we might say that she attempts to shift a
research paradigm that has been dominated by either collective
or ideal type approaches toward a new concentration on the
study of individual readers and their responses to literature.
Studying and practicing the three lines of inquiry pre-
sented here may help beginning researchers to identify the
methods central to their own investigation and to explore alter-
nate ways of inquiring. Beginning researchers should be en-
couraged to learn various lines of inquiry, since it is largely by
comparing one with another that they will discover the
strengths and weaknesses of each. They may see that it is not
necessary to restrict inquiry to one method alone just because it
happens to be the only one they know, or the one they conven-
tionally use in a given discipline. Applying the continuum to
the field of composition research, one might choose to investi-
gate the individual writer through case studies or by using
personal testimony about the composing process; or one might
construct an ideal-typical model of the "average" writer's
composing process; or one might conduct a study surveying
writers in an organization to examine the influence of hierarchi-
cal structure in the group on the stylistic choices made by
writers. This continuum, then, may be used by researchers to
formulate lines of inquiry or to analyze the perspectives of other
researchers and scholars.
The continuum also serves as a heuristic to aid writers
and speakers in invention. If the topic of study in a course is, for
example, political language as reflected in speeches of the twen-
tieth century, one can use the continuum as a guideline to sug-
gest three different approaches: (1) What does an individual
speaker or speech tell us about the use of political language? (2)
What sort of "ideal type" speech might one construct that shows78
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Lally, Tim D. P. Journal of Advanced Composition, Volume 4, 1983, periodical, 1987; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28596/m1/84/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .