Mutually Exclusive

I'm going to riff off a passage I identified with from the Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked this time.  The passage reads:

Another weakness in research done by those who envision audence as address suggests an oversimplified view of language.  As Paul Kameen observes in "Rewording the Rhetoric of Composition," "discourse is not grounded in forms or experience or audience; it engages all of these elements simultaneously."  Ann Berthoff has persistently criticized our obsession with one or another of the elements of discourse, insisting that meaning arises out of their synthesis.... Without such a unifying, balanced understanding of language use, it is easy to overemphasize one aspect of discourse, such as audience.  It is also easy to forget, as Anthony Petrosky cautions us, that "reading, responding, and composing are aspects of understanding, and theories that attempt to account for them outside of their interaction with each other run the serious risk of building reductive models of human understanding."

Before I got to this part of article, something about it was eating at me and I didn't know why.  This passage revealed it to me.  An attempt was being made to dissect a natural, flowing process into various categories to be treated as separate entities.  Once these proposed parts of a whole are given a name and singular purpose, they lose a connection with each other.  When the connection is lost, the sum of parts is no longer the whole, but a crapshoot of ideas all screaming to be heard.  They lost the coherent unity that allowed for a much deeper understanding of the process. 

It is mutually exclusive to divide the act of writing or discourse into components of varying function and importance.  They cannot stand alone and still have meaning; they must overlap to give meaning to each other where thought can flow freely among them.  This principle can be applied to virtually any subject.

From my engineering point of view, it would be like trying to gain a deep, unified understanding of thermodynamics by memorizing how to work certain problems with certain equations.  Sure, I can blindly replicate the procedure, but give me a problem that pulls from multiple principles and I will get nowhere.  My mind sees them as separate entities unrelated to each other.  A fundamental grasp on the relationship between energy and matter is needed to unify those various principles into a coherent network that can be applied to solve any problem.