By Joseph M. Williams
Problems into PROBLEMS: A Rhetoric of Motivation provides a thoughtful analysis that offers much to both writers and teachers of writing. Joseph M. Williams situates his monograph by referring not only to existing work on problem solving in rhetoric and composition, but on our treatment of problems in our writing and teaching:
… [I]f the literature on solving such problems is thick, our understanding of how we articulate the substantive problem that occasions our efforts to solve them is quite thin. By "substantive problem" I do not mean the local and ongoing struggle toward the discovery and articulation of meaning, but the significant question whose answer justifies the effort, the problem in the world or mind whose solution repays our time spent writing and our readers’ spent reading. We criticize the writing of our students and colleagues on many grounds, but none is more common – or devastating – than the observation that they have failed not just to solve a problem, but even to pose one that we think "interesting." And as teachers, we experience no failure more common than our inability to explain what we mean by "pose" or "interesting" or "problem" and what it is about a text that elicits such criticism.
