William Rodney Herring

I'm using George Gopen's style textbook, The Sense of Structure: Writing from the Reader's Perspective, for my RHE 310 class right now, and as his subtitle indicates, Gopen is interested in the quality of writing precisely insofar as it communicates (or doesn't) with (and also communicates its intended effects to) readers. By studying how readers read, for instance, he tells us early on, we've learned that location of important concepts (in a sentence or in a paragraph) matters far more than something like word choice.

But for me, here's the kicker:

The important person is not the writer; it is the reader. Once the needs of the reader are accepted as the controlling concerns for writing, then the need for understanding how sentences are likely to function overcomes the more student-centered concern for how we can turn out sentences that will indicate we did the task assigned. (6)

In other words, this is precisely the kind of pedagogy--cultivating a fundamental attention to others--that so much focus on self-improvement and critical thinking, even critical empathy, misses. Learning to be kind or understanding of others is ultimately far more self-serving (it is, finally, about the student herself) than learning that every instantiation of praxis is constituted by service of and a foregoing relationship with the other.