Logic and writing templates

The little writing book _They say, I say_ is a very pleasant surprise. A colleague recommended I use it in the senior capstone seminar I'm teaching this semester, and so I adopted it sight unseen. I just got it today, and I can tell I'll like it very much.

A few thoughts, prompted as I read the introduction.

[1] Writing templates---strings such as "some object that... though I concede that... I still maintain that..."---serve an obvious practical goal, which I applaud. But they also raise an interesting side question about how logic and rhetoric are intertwined.

The "..." in the templates are obviously meant to be replaced by some content; hence they are extra-logical. But that means that logical bits are needed to create the desired relationships among those contents expressed in the total information. But the templates include rhetorical bits that do some of that work. "Though I concede that" has both a _logical form_, when combined with the informational content suppressed as "...", as well as a _capacity to help persuade the hearer_ to agree to some view (or at least---presumably---to be sympathetic to that view). 

What feature of "though I concede that..." carries the logical information, and what feature carries the rhetorical information? Classic pragmatic-semantic interface issues. I wonder how students "feel" that issue play out as they write.

[2] The authors stress heavily that writing is dialectical---a push-pull between writer as reader (capturing what "they say") and writer as writer (putting forth what "I say"). It occurs to me that there are several ways to flesh this out. The dialectic can be _adversarial_, _synthetic_, _analytic_, or maybe some other way altogether.

The adversarial dialectic pits opposing views against one another. The (hopeful) result is a "push upward"---that is, a resultant force responding to the force due to the feeder forces. The "new truth" is widely seen by its advocates as correcting certain excesses in the philosophy of logic and knowledge---the sort of thing we might suppose Socrates to have gotten right, and many of the rest of us to have gotten wrong. The synthetic dialectic is similar, but the emphasis is on the co-making of that resultant force. The analytic dialectic, unlike the other two, can be thought of as a synthetic dialectic with a downward arrow, if you'll allow me to continue the slightly opaque metaphor. That is, the push is really a pull down toward that which is fundamental.

The abstract inference that occurs to me: Push in this context can be thought of as encryption, pull as extraction. Writing then is a back-and-forth between encrypting processes applied to information, and extracting processes likewise applied to information.

The less abstract punch line: a writer aims at the spot where a bit of information shows more than anyone has a right to expect.