Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

now have my doubts, which is what brings me here: the question
of “uncertainty.”
The semester before I wrote my graduate thesis, the last
semester of my Master’s coursework at Montclair State, I took a
course called “Rhetorical Theory and the Teaching of Writing.”
It was taught by a professor whom I had heard about many times
before from some of my fellow graduate assistants who had
already taken this same class. His name was Bob Whitney. When
they spoke of him, it was almost with reverence as well as
respect, as if he were some sort of religious personage, a yogi
or a shaman or some such thing, who had opened their eyes to
hitherto untold “truths” about writing or teaching or both. It
was not difficult to see why some responded to him as they did,
this man who appeared to me more like a hippie lumberjack than a
composition professor, as he exhibited a reserved yet roused
passion for writing, reading, and, perhaps more than anything
else, questioning. And if he did fulfill the role of graduate
school “clergyman” for some of my classmates, what we worshipped
in that small, windowless room that semester was “uncertainty.”
The words “write with uncertainty” became the veritable mantra
of the class over the span of that term. Almost everything
about the course was intended to offer us a portrait of that
“uncertainty,” not only philosophically but pedagogically as
well – what it was supposed to “do.” It was at the heart of our
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