Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

him, writing that does indeed nurture thought is writing that
not simply welcomes Uncertainty but seeks for it, declaring,
“What writers must maintain is thoughtful uncertainty, the
attitude that necessarily informs full exploration and motivates
wonder” (131). On how to actually engender this “thoughtful
uncertainty” of his in writing, Covino explains:
I am suggesting that [students] should trade
certainty for ambiguity, trade preservative writing
for investigative writing, trade conclusions for
“counterinduction.” The climate is right for writing
teachers to point out that the world is a drama of
people and ideas and that writing is how we
consistently locate and relocate ourselves in the
play. (130)
This notion of writing, and thinking, being nurtured upon the
Uncertainty that is invoked by the tumult of the confrontation
of different “people and ideas” - “ourselves” thus born and
reborn over and over and over again amidst such a disquieting
and disturbing “drama” – is reiterated by James Berlin in
Rhetoric and Reality. To Berlin, writing is the nexus of
“reality” and “truth” itself and a writer who would have a
greater understanding of them has to understand that they emerge
from out of the Uncertainty of the innumerable exchange of “all
elements of the rhetorical situation: interlocutor, audience,
material reality, and language” (16). Furthermore, a writer who
would have this greater understanding of them has to understand
that they are only as certain as the certainty of the sum of
those boundless “transaction[s].” Of this, he explains:
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