what intrigues me more about these articles are their methods sections and the ways the authors frame their research. is this proof that I did learn something in Empirical last semester, maybe?

these two are similar studies. very quantitative, tons of graphs and tables. both Rickly and Wolfe point out gaps in current knowledge and propose small ways of beginning to fill those gaps. they both acknowledge some of the limitations of their approaches, and they are careful not to overgeneralize. they are small sample sizes, just single classrooms. Wolfe’s data supports some really interesting and subtle observations about how men and women converse. Rickly gets pretty fancy by including the BSRI measure as an alternative variable. because of the small sample sizes, who knows how generalizable those observations are. the value of this kind of writing research is sort of puzzling to me, for lots of reasons. the value of empirical research at all seems so arbitrary, so much of the time. dependent on ideologies and values and traditions and ethos and lots of other random stuff. I guess I can at least accept that this sort of work is as valuable as we decide it is. we do what we can with it, somehow. maybe it really does fill gaps in our understandings of the world…

less relatedly: I’m really curious after reading so many articles that mention it, what this Interchange system was like. google led me here: http://interchange.rtfm.info/index.html?id=WUbIWbGx
and then here: http://www.icdevgroup.org/i/dev/demo where apparently there is an online demo. but I’m not sure this is the same Interchange that our 1999 composition scholars have been talking about all this time. hmmm. still very curious.