Kenneavy’s Modes and Week-3 Readings

Kenneavy’s division of discourses into four modes is both quite useful and equally problematic. Her division helps us to see the organization of most discourses we confront. The discourses we read are either narrative, descriptive, classificatory, or evaluative. For instance, if we read a story about Obama’s success, it is a narrative; his personality, descriptive; Obama as a democratic president, classificatory; and an editorial about his good and bad qualities, evaluative. However, the more we try to see the real writings from this perspective, the more we become baffled by the difficulty to categorize them into any of the modes.
The writings in our reading list pose us a difficult question about whether questioning Kenneavy’s modes or the modes used by actual writings. We cannot directly apply Kenneavy to the writings. The dominant mode of Hackos pieces or that of Garrett is obvious. These writings follow what Kenneavy calls the classificatory mode as they define and classify the concepts and ideas they present without evaluating any prior concepts or narrating the history of those concepts (user experience or task analysis). But again, are they not descriptive? They are descriptive as they take certain individual examples and describe the features or characteristics of them to clarify the concepts. Nevertheless, they primarily define and explain the general notion about user experience and task analysis.
However, as we try to see Miller’s and Plato’s essays from the perspective of Kenneady’s model, we are puzzled. Miller’s essay is quite straightforward; however, its mode is neither dominantly classificatory nor evaluative. It is surely not predominantly descriptive nor is it narrative. We may argue that her article is classificatory as classification is about definition and classification and her article too answers the question (requiring definition) “What is Practical?” and distinguishes low form of the “practical” from its high form. She is redefining the idea of the “practical” in technical communication. Similarly, equally dominant mode in the essay is evaluative as she evaluates the view of some technical writing scholars who define it as instrumental. Nevertheless, I don’t believe that classification and evaluation capture the dominant mode of the essay.
One problem with me is that I have not read Kenneavy’s book dealing with the division of discourses in terms of aims and audiences. Kenneavy claims that argumentation cannot be a mode as it is an aim of a discourse. Then, what about evaluation? Kenneavy her (him) self says that evaluative discourse may narrate, but we should see its “ulterior purpose,” which is “only to show how good or bad the action or performance was.” Kenneavy is bringing aim while she is discussing the modes. Therefore, I believe that the traditional category of “argumentation” is still valid and necessary to talk of the large number of writings produced in the academia. Almost all of the academic writings (research writings, from dissertations to journal articles) fall into this category. Argumentation is a mode, a way of presenting ideas or opinions; it does have certain structure or organization: a problem statement and hypothesizing, review, substantiating of the hypothesis through reasons and evidences, (addressing counterargument), and summing up.
Plato’s is another writing that challenges this division. Kenneavy says modes deal with what the discourse is about: being or becoming. What is “Phaedrus” about? Is it about change? Yes it is. Socrates changes the notion of Phaedrus about love and rhetoric. So, it is narration. But at the same time, does it have description and classification, or even evaluation? Yes, it does integrate all the modes. We can easily argue that its dominant mode is classification rather than narration: Plato is classifying and later defining love and rhetoric: bad rhetoric corresponding emotional love; neutral rhetoric corresponding non-lover; and noble rhetoric corresponding noble lover.
It seems that the dominant mode of discourse in all of the writings in the reading list is classification, either defining or classifying or comparing and contrasting or combining them. Then a question arises: among them who are successful and who are not so? This is a very complex question. What makes a mode of classification successful? Pure classification? Certainly not in all of the cases. I believe it all depends on various other factors from the audience to the context.