Inference and Social Proficiency: An argument for teaching social skills as rhetorical skills in First Year Composition

Abstract

This study explores the relationship between inductive inferential reasoning, social proficiency, and audience construction in the context of First Year Composition (FYC). By centering social skills as rhetorical skills, this project presents an argument that the teaching of social proficiencies sits within the sphere of responsibility of FYC, even though composition scholars across the last four decades have repeatedly insisted otherwise. Finally, this project offers strategies for composition teachers to develop students’ social proficiencies that do not unduly disrupt other conventional composition course priorities.

Considering contemporary perspectives, I reexamine the seminal literature of the “social turn” of composition scholarship in search of unexamined and potentially problematic assumptions about social proficiency in students that have carried through decades of composition scholarship. I use evidence from the literature itself to support the argument that inductive reasoning, a form of inference in which principles, beliefs, and behaviors are derived from observations, is a socio-cognitive act of prediction that draws on social experience and social proficiency. Unlike deductive reasoning, which seeks to produce certainty, inductive reasoning produces conclusions that are probable. While probability can refer only to mathematical or statistical determinations, arguing by induction often involves convincing human audiences that something is probably true, or feels probably true enough to believe or act upon. Persuading a human audience involves predicting other people’s habits of inference in order to achieve rhetorical (persuasive) success. As such, social skills are rhetorical skills and fall within the sphere of responsibility of FYC. “Inference and Social Proficiency: An argument for teaching social skills as rhetorical skills in First Year Composition” presents a study of the relationships between social proficiency, social anxiety, and how students approach participation in collaborative practices in an FYC classroom and presents an argument that the teaching of social proficiencies sits within the sphere of responsibility of FYC, even though seminal composition scholars across the last four decades have repeatedly asserted otherwise. This project offers broad pedagogical considerations for composition teachers that foreground incoming students’ social proficiencies and ways of developing social skills as rhetorical tools without unduly disrupting other conventional composition course priorities.