This book explains how everyday figures in the discourse of writing work with – and against – each other. It may seem that we already know plenty about our everyday figures for writing, that their very familiarity is what allows them to function. Yet the workings of even our most commonplace figures – to put thoughts onto paper, to find one's voice, to write clearly or forcefully or gracefully – can be poorly understood precisely because we make sense of them so automatically.

I suspect that is one reason that current scholarship has proceeded as it has. With only a few exceptions, scholarly work on familiar metaphors for writing, which is mostly in the field of writing studies, is based solely on introspection. Writing scholars have assumed, because they have an intuitive understanding of everyday writing metaphors, that their interpretations of them – and, more troubling, their interpretations of others' interpretations – require no further confirmation.

Typically, scholars have focused on one metaphor at a time, either pointing out a particular metaphor's strengths or shortcomings (e.g., voice or the Conduit Metaphor) or proposing a novel metaphor intended to clarify a particular question (e.g., Writing As Travel or Argument As Aikido). Certainly, these critiques and suggestions are valuable. But the introspective, one-metaphor-at-a-time approach does not take into account the ways that metaphors relate to other metaphors and to other figures.

Writing studies has long recognized the essential role of metaphor in shaping what we think about writing. In that sense, what I offer here is an addendum to an uncontroversial conclusion: If we want to think more carefully about who writers are, what writing is, and how writing affects our lives, we should pay attention to our figurative language and thought.

If we hope to understand our important metaphors and metonymies for writing, we also have to understand the stories that license these figures. As I found in my earlier research on metaphors in the discourse of trade and business, metaphors are integrally associated with stories that provide rhetorical support – that make a given metaphor seem either true or false. When I asked a series of focus-group participants to discuss whether or not certain metaphors seemed true to them (e.g., Trade Is War, Trade Is A Game, Markets Are Containers, Trade Is A Journey), they persistently justified their responses by supplying stories of how trade works or how the world works.

What I have offered in the preceding chapters is not an exhaustive account of all of the figures we use to talk about and think about writing. Other figures come easily to mind. For instance, when we write arguments, we are sure to encounter Argument Is War – a metaphor brought to our attention by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their ground-breaking book, Metaphors We Live By. The metaphor of Flow is just as common, as is its corollary, Writer's Block. We often encounter metaphors of cooking, tasting, chewing, and swallowing. Metaphors of birth and nurturing abound. So do many, many more.

But my objective has not been to catalog all of the everyday figures that populate the discourse of writing. Instead, I hope to have described the conversation that shapes our ordinary figurative discourse about writing. All of the figures we use in order to think about writing operate in relation to that conversation. Once we understand the patterned way that conversation proceeds, we stand a good chance, I believe, of making sense of the countless metaphors and metonymies we use to describe writers and writing.

Each time we categorize writing at the basic level rather than above or below it, we have to ask ourselves fundamental questions about what it means to able to write: If you are a writer, does that mean you are an expert at writing everything – novels, biographies, product manuals, press releases? If you know how to write, does that mean you are equally competent to write term papers and screenplays? Or do writer and to write refer to something narrower?

We encounter the same kinds of questions when we categorize texts. Some of us think that it is not possible, really, to write a book; it is only possible to write something more specific: a novel or a crime novel or, perhaps, a police procedural. Generally speaking, the more subordinate the category, the more specific – that is, nontransferable – the knowledge and skills. I have seen best-selling author Harlan Coben described as the “master of the soft-centered suburban thriller” (Wiegand 2007). A subordinate category indeed. And a very particular sort of writing expertise.

I argued in the previous chapter that we cannot make sense of the Conduit Metaphor unless we consider the metaphors that are closely related to it, most evidently Language Is Power. But that is only the beginning. We also need to ask: What stories license the Conduit Metaphor? And – just as important – what imaginative achievements would we sacrifice if we did not have the Conduit Metaphor?

The Conduit Metaphor has been denounced by scholars, in large part, because it has been associated with a story of writing and communication that certainly deserves to be criticized. It is a story of “good writing” in its narrowest conception: writing that flows in one direction only, from writer to readership, and is associated predominantly with values such as factual and grammatical correctness, precision, detachment, and objectivity. That narrow good-writer story ignores what makes many of us value most about writing: the possibility that writing can engage a reader – intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. In short, it is a story of impersonal skill rather than of rhetorical sensitivity.

The figure of self is closely related to voice and presents many of the same problems. As we have seen already, writing–speech–self metonymies operate pervasively and complexly. The voice is contiguous with language, which is contiguous with thought. The brain is part of the body, which is contiguous with the self – the mind, the soul, the spirit, the character, the personality. But even noticing this abundance of metonymies does not give us a rich enough sense of how we ordinarily bring together voice and self.

As with voice, recent scholarship on writing and the self rests on a strong assumption that most of us hold onto the naïve concept of a unitary, stable, independent core self. Such a self, writing scholars (and others) point out, is a fiction – if a convenient one – that ignores the multiple, fluid, and permeable discourses we actually use to construct our so-called “selves.”

I believe I can say, without overstating the case, that no element of our figurative rhetoric of writing is more important than the Conduit Metaphor. It is known by various names such as “the container metaphor,” “the transmission model,” “the code model,” and in Carolyn Miller's well-known formulation the “windowpane theory of communication.” According to the Conduit Metaphor, language contains meaning; speakers and writers use linguistic containers to send meaning to audiences; and, at the end of the line, audiences remove the unaltered meaning from its container. Many language scholars, including writing specialists, have raised objections to the Conduit Metaphor, objections that vary in motivation and rationale. What is most striking to me, however, is not the variety of analysis applied to the Conduit Metaphor but the nearly unanimous condemnation the metaphor elicits.

Almost universally, current language scholars object that language is fundamentally indirect, imprecise, contingent, and unstable; thus we never transmit a perfect representation of the “external” world through a secure pipeline leading from giver to receiver (e.g., 
Miller 1979; Bizzell 1982; Slack, Miller, and Doak 1993; Axley 1996; Weiss 1997; Prior 1998; Bowden 1999; Longo 2000; Evans 2003; Cowley and Love 2006; Krzeszowski 2006). In short, most of us have said that the Conduit Metaphor is wrong because language does 
not work the way the metaphor assumes.

Turn to almost any page in any book about writing, or listen to any conversation between people who care about writing, and you are likely to come across a metaphor that is familiar or striking – or both. In a single paragraph of the time-honored The Elements of Style, we encounter words that “ignite” and “explode in the mind,” prose that is like “music … capable of stirring the listener deeply,” writing that is done “clearly,” and writers who “steer by the stars” (Strunk and White 2008: 66).