“Alas, Not Yours to Have”: Problems with Audience in High-Stakes Writing Tests and the Promise of Felt Sense

Abstract

T essay offers a conceptual basis and strategy for teaching an expanded application of felt-sense theory to avoid a standardized approach to written argumentation. Such an approach adopts a limited notion of audience and fails to acknowledge important aspects of the rhetorical situation. In particular, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) now influence argumentation in primary and secondary school curricula and may thereby shape students’ composing habits, consequently determining how they are placed in college (Smith). My complaint about CCSS-aligned high-stakes testing is that it risks training students over many years to adopt a reductive and potentially unethical attitude toward audiences by privileging a monologic, agonistic brand of argumentation.1 My essay encourages teachers to take counteractive measures, especially postsecondary first-year writing instructors whose students have been brought up on CCSS tests. While I highlight the application of felt sense theory, to help explain my views, I also offer an heuristic example in the myth of Orpheus. I contend Orpheus could have avoided the failure of his one-tracked argumentative mode by means of a rhetorical/ethical application of felt sense. My strategy is not presented as an outright solution to the deeply embedded problems of over-testing and the removal of curriculum and assessment from teachers’ hands in American public education. Rather, I am offering just one counteractive pedagogical measure among others that teachers can implement.2 After examining problems of audience in the treatment of argument by the Common Core’s writing standards, this essay engages theories of audience from rhetoric and composition scholarship, reviews the concept of felt sense, introduces my proposal for its rhetorical applications, and offers a pedagogical model for reconceiving audience more ethically in written argumentation.