Re-Working (a Metaphor)

We're talking about the difference between revising and editing in my "grammar for language arts teachers" class today, and that has got me thinking about writing teachers' penchant for literalizing the term revision as re-vision, re-seeing.

I've accepted and even used that literalized sense myself, but there's always been something about it that didn't feel quite right. As I was preparing for class today, though, what had been a vague, gut-level dissonance emerged into the light of consciousness: To me, re-seeing implies wholesale change--a total do-over. Of course, it is possible to re-see as a way to solve a problem with an existing argument and, so, to not completely scrap what's already there. But the term definitely tends toward the global: To truly revise, you have to re-see your writing, to understand it in a wholly new sense.

But sometimes revision doesn't require re-seeing. Sometimes it just takes a lot of brain-wrenching labor to get your writing where you've always wanted it to go in the first place. When that's the case, one is less re-seeing one's writing than re-working it.

Why bother with the distinction? For one, I think re-working gets closer than re-seeing to the heart of why so many of our students seem not to be able, or not to want, to engage in deep, meaningful revision of their writing. While it's true that students who fail to engage in deep revision often do so because they can't "see" what needs to happen in their writing, the nature of that blindness stems not from lack of knowledge but from lack of having powered through three, five, ten hours of cross-eyed attempts to figure out what, exactly, it is that they're not seeing. Or, more precisely, the lack of knowledge itself is a lack of work, and vice versa.

For their writing to be good, most people have to be willing to put in what amounts to more work on the revision than they did on the first (or second, or seventh) draft. "Re-working" may not have the benefit of cleverness that the vision/seeing wordplay did at one time, but it more than makes up for lack of wit in its simple, if somewhat brutish, precision.

No(u)n Rhetorics

On the syllabus for my intro to comp studies class is a set of readings called "Bodies, Spaces, and Places." The readings include such varied essays as Nedra Reynolds' "Composition's Imagined Geographies," Debbie Hawhee's "Bodily Pedagogies," and Peter Mortensen's "Reading Material." The thread that ties them all together, of course is that, in different ways, they all approach rhetoric, composition, or literacy through material frameworks.

I made a conscious choice to lump embodied and spatial rhetorics together when I designed the course, and, given the course's necessarily wide-ranging content, I can live with it. But seeing my students work to forge connections, to synthesize them into something like a material rhetoric, makes me want to do a whole seminar. If I did, I might expand it to "bodies, spaces, tools, and schemata" (where "schemata" are a person's, or any complex system's, constantly-evolving internal representations of her/his/its environment that inform decision-making within that environment--they are the software to the body's or other physical system's hardware). I would then place all of the terms under a heading like "ecologies of writing." But the shorthand title might just as easily be "noun rhetorics:" rhetorics of people, places, things, and ideas.

Or, since in this framwork language is no longer the privileged term, maybe it ought to be "No(u)n Rhetorics?"

Activity Theory Bibliography

As promised, here's the activity theory bibliography (.xml file) Jeremy Schnieder and I put together. It's a work-in-progress, so if you have any suggestions of sources to add, we'd appreciate hearing from you.

A few caveats:

• Jeremy and I did not set out to create a document for public consumption; rather, we are simply compiling a list of sources for a project we're working on. As a result, we didn't worry at this stage about things like consistent or proper formatting, and there are a few entries that have incomplete data or that are "meta" entries meant to hold the place of more specific sources.
  


• So, while you're welcome to use this bibliography however you see fit (within the guidelines of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License), please note that it's not a presentation quality document.
  
  
• Some of the sources are pretty far afield to be called "writing studies," even broadly defined, but we're leaving them on for now.

We'll update the document as the project progresses. I'm especially looking foward to having it annotated, which (we hope) will happen sometime early in the new year.

E-mail Trouble

I'm not the only one. I couldn't be.

I'm talking about send-anxiety. I could be writing the most innocuous e-mail imaginable. You know: "Hello. Dear Mary,. Whazzup? Hi Mary. I was wondering am writing to see if whether you're still interested in joining our the writing group . . . .

But if it's addressed to somebody who is:

a. in the profession (esp. with more experience or authority than I have), and

b. not somebody I already know well

then I am liable to reread the text so many times to make sure it doesn't contain a silly mistake or a carelessly worded phrase that its seems to lose all meaning and becomes mere inscription.

Of course, send-anxiety doesn't happen every time, even when conditions are favorable. But when it does, it's like being sucked into a psychological pothole that could swallow a Mini Cooper. The longer this goes on, the harder it is to send the damn thing. Pretty soon, the entire recursive revise/reread/revise process--itself anathema to most e-mail correspondence--collapses in on itself, becoming instead a blank, affectless staring at a pixelated screen.

Ah, composition.

Diablogism

It's summer.

I'm at the office less and at home more. I'm mowing, sanding furniture, fixing up the guest room, grilling pineapple-ginger pork chops. What I'm not doing is reading other blogs. At least, not much, and certainly not with the frequency or breadth I maintain during the school year.

No surprise there. What is a surprise, though, is how much my blog writing appears to depend on my blog reading. While last summer was my first full summer as a blogger, I spent it moving twice (once to Chicago for an interim home base, and then a second time to Ohio) and house-hunting, so blogging was virtually predestined to be very light. But now, with no such ado in my life, I still find myself posting relatively sporadically. It occurs to me that one reason, and likely the main one, is that I am not nearly as regular an inhabitant of the blogosphere as I would be normally. I don't mean to suggest that I only blog when I am directly reacting to a post by somebody else, though that is sometimes the case. Rather, I mean to say that, whether you believe in such a thing as thinking like a blogger or not, for me I have to be immersed in a thing--or, at least, this thing--to feel it (in the pop-metaphysical sense). That is, I have to read others' blogs to be able to truly inhabit my own.

I suspect the same is true for many, and probably most, bloggers. But I wonder how true it is. That is, I know my blogging is usuallty dependent on this pretty straightforward dialogism, but I wonder what other kinds and degrees of dialogism there may be and how they may inform different blogging practices (dare I say different blog-writing processes?).

Any thoughts?

R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut

I'm sad to say that Kurt Vonnegut died.

Like many others, I could tell the story of how I discovered Vonnegut and how his writing has delighted and influenced me. But I'll leave the elegies for the more elegiacally-inclined, and simply note:

"Oh, well--he wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway."

Let's Make Some More Knowledge

You may have seen the following CFP in comp/rhet/English journals recently, but in case you haven't, I'm posting it here:

We invite proposals for essays for a collection that draws on the upcoming 25th anniversary of Stephen North’s The Making of Knowledge in Composition (MKC) as an occasion to assess the discipline of composition and its future. Because MKC remains one of composition’s monumental works, we invite retrospective accounts (rhetorical and critical analyses, reception histories, reflective narratives, and other scholarly treatments) of North’s unreservedly sweeping, undoubtedly important, and undeniably controversial book.

Rather than being merely retrospective, this collection seeks works that critically re-assess such things as MKC’s influence/impact, rhetoric, aims, and values--with an eye toward using such re-assessments to comment on the present and future of composition studies. By May 2007, please attach 500 word proposals to the editors, Lance Massey (lmassey@bgnet.bgsu.edu) and Richard Gebhardt (richgeb@bgnet.bgsu.edu).

We envision the collection containing a mix of established, up-and-coming, and brand new voices, and we welcome questions about proposals-in-process as well. We hope you'll consider submitting something.

4C's, NY Style; And My Two Cents on Reading vs. Speaking

Think you know what CCCC stood for this year? Think again.

1. Collateral. As in, what you need to put up to get a room service hamburger at the Hilton NY.
2. Cash. And a lot of it.
3. Credit. For when the cash runs out.
4. Chapter 11. The only option left for most people after a conference in New York.

Those things aside, I enjoyed the conference. I was especially impressed by the U of Wisconsin-Madison grad student presenations I saw; they seem to be doing some really smart, interesting things. (Others are too, I'm sure, but I just happened to find myslef at a disproportinately high number of their talks.)

I had a great time catching up with old friends and mentors at the U of Illinois party and elsewhere (at the same time I was able to catch up on my sadly lagging Guinness quota). I also really enjoyed meeting Jeff, Lanette, and Scot. I hope to meet still more of you soon. It was also nice to catch up with Andy.

Finally, let me just say a few words about the read vs. talk debate (which rages, predictably, every year just after C's ends). In a nutshell: people just need to relax. We rightly hope for generous presenters--presenters who keep our needs and wants as audience members in mind. But that generosity needs to flow both ways. I wouldn't presume to know why somebody chooses to read a dense paper quickly or why somebody else chooses to give an unscripted narrative-based talk. So I get what I can from a talk [edited to add: I try to contribute during discussion when I can, too] and move on--sometimes disappointed, but always trying not to be judgmental.

For example, this year I heard two papers on Žižek that were almost unintelligible for their density and speed of delivery, and at first I was kind of pissed (the panel gave no indication that he would be a central focus). But then I forced myself to be a generous hearer: maybe these guys were nervous and needed the security of the text. Maybe they were still learning the presentation ropes. Maybe they felt so utterly compelled by their material that they could conceive of nothing to cut, no way to slow down. Maybe they really didn't give a shit whether I could follow or not. Maybe a hundered other things I can't think of right now. We can't know, and we shouldn't presume we can. Our only recourse, then, is to give the speaker/readers the benefit of the doubt.

For me, it boils down to these simple truths: You're going to be dazzled by a presentation or two. You're going to at least be engaged by some. And, inevitably, you're going to be disappointed by a few. But you're in a cool city. You're eating good food. You're with friends. Relax.

Satire May be Dangeral to Your Health

For those of you who read (past tense) Michael Bérubé's blog more than once or twice, you know he was (and no doubt still is in his non-blog life) very fond of satire. You also know that sometimes you had to be well into a post to be certain that what you were reading even was satire. Michael rarely winked, and when he did, it was often as easy to miss as a swallowed article in his mani(a)cally fast speech.

But I'm still surprised that, lately, my blog is getting a fair number of hits from people Googling "dangeral" or "dangeral studies" (I mentioned the term in a previous post)--the area of expertise Michael listed on his blog after Horowitz's dangerous professors book came out.

Now, it might be possible that people are out there trying to find Bérubé and, having associated him with the term "dangeral," type it into Google to track him down. But, given that those people are either a) likely to already know how to find Bérubé on the web or b) simply going to use his name as the search term, I have to believe that there are people out there trying to find out more about the scholarly area of "dangeral studies."

If you're one of those people, let me settle this once and for all . . . .

On second thought, I'll never tell.

Yeah? Well, the jerk store called, and they're running out of you.

Being interested in the dynamics of disciplinary conflict, I'm always on the lookout for oppositional or even confrontational rhetoric in my readings in rhet/comp/writing studies. There's an exchange between Russel Durst and Bill Thelin in the September 2006 CCC that pushes right up to the edge of nastiness but doesn't quite go over. But, for history's sake, I thought I'd pull out my all time favorite confrontational rhet/comp moment:

David Bartholomae gave Stephen North's The Making of Knowledge in Composition a blisteringly negative review. In a subsequent exchange in Pre/Text (Vol. 11, 1990), North says that “Dave makes some pretty derogatory comments about my work, my professional ethos, maybe—depending on how you feel about the connections among such things—me” (108). Then North goes on to agonize about how to “handle” Bartholomae’s criticisms “fairly,” admitting that:

certainly a more genuinely expressive (response), as I understand people to use the term—would be a loud, dismissive ‘Shit’ (drawn out and descending almost into voicelessness, as we do it where I grew up); or maybe an infinitely disgusted, derisive, ‘Fuck you.’ (108)

Now that's something you don't read in an academic journal everyday.

(Carnival.) To Trimbur: Yes.

I don't have a lot of extra time right now, but I need to at least get in a cent's worth or two on the Trimbur article, "Changing the Question: Should Writing Be Studied."

I'll start by saying that I belong to a very small minority of people who travel in rhet/comp circles whose degree is actually in writing studies--not rhetoric, not composition, not rhetoric and composition (or vice versa). My academic training lies precisely in work oriented to the activity theory-inspired questions of “what writing does and how it does it” (Bazerman and Prior).

So, given my history, it's easy for me to just answer the question of whether writing should be studied with a simple "yes." Of course it should. The trickier questions Trimbur hints at are: what kinds of writing should be studied, how, and why? It's interesting that Trimbur, in offering a framework for how we might begin answering these questions, and despite his admission to identifying with the Olson camp in the new theory wars, never ceases to frame the question in terms of the teaching of writing.

I’ll explain: Trimbur spends the bulk of his essay not answering the question of whether writing should be studied but, rather, trying to frame how we might go about answering it. Even more to the point, he tries to frame the question in such a way as to bridge the apparent divide between the pro-theory and the pro-teaching factions of the new theory wars (I’m oversimplifying here, obviously, but this is the general dynamic Trimbur addresses). Or, at least, he tries to alleviate the fears of those invested in the teaching of writing, and especially FYC, that a shift to “writing studies” would spell the end for them and the subject about which they care so much.

His final sentence captures this conciliatory spirit:

in many respects the work of theorizing and enacting the study of writing is to make transparent and teachable the social relations and bodies of knowledge that now silently underwrite the first-year course-to organize the study of writing as an intellectual resource for undergraduates.

This claim makes an interesting move, though. Trimbur wants to assuage the fears of those invested in the teaching of writing/composition that a move to “writing studies” is not exclusive of their interests, offering the assurance that the study of writing will enrich, rather than deprive, an undergraduate writing curriculum. But a writing studies orientation opens up avenues for inquiry that go way, way beyond the illumination of the “bodies of knowledge that now silently underwrite” FYC. As Trimbur himself observes, writing scholars study grocery lists. They also study baseball cards, requisition forms, funding request forms, instruction manuals, facebook pages, notes found lying on the ground, and all other manner of inscription. (This is not to say that these things cannot inform FYC, though often they show little or no interest in doing so: writing studies does not feel the pedagogical imperative with anything like the intensity composition does.)

This fact masks another slippage, one not identified by Trimbur in his article. His defense of writing studies as beneficial to undergraduate education, particularly in the final sentence, elides the difference between courses explicitly designed to develop or enhance literacies—either general or specific, depending on what side of that disciplinary fence you’re standing on—and courses designed to explore the nature of such phenomena as the acquisition of literacy, disciplinary enculturation, or the roles that writing plays in the production and maintenance of complex social systems and networks of relations. (I'm aware that the two can and usually do inform each other, but I suspect as guiding orientations they are, more often than not, distinct.)

Such lines of inquiry could no doubt lead to wonderfully rich, fascinating undergraduate educational experiences (and they have, and do). But for most defenders of the traditional FYC model, such a curriculum still threatens their very reason for being, which is to either:

a) preserve the FYC class “as a pedagogical site with the potential to influence very large numbers of students, and for its importance as a site of struggle and change within the institutional hierarchy of academia” (Roemer, Schulz, and Durst 1999: 378), or
b) maintain a devotion to what Joseph Petraglia calls “general writing skills instruction,” or
c) both.

For the record: I agree with Trimbur. I also admire his other work and consider him an influence in my own intellectual development; I just don’t necessarily think his argument in this case is as transparent is it could be.

That said, my answer to whether writing should be studied is still “yes.” We have a lot to learn from studying writing, and what we have to learn exceeds what I would consider the relatively narrow—though extremely important—bounds of figuring out how best to teach writing. Writing (both noun and participle) is one of the most fundamental and powerful productive (and destructive) forces of modern human social life: it allows us to present, represent, organize, communicate, preserve, disseminate, and transform the information (understood in its most complex sense) and decisions that are vital to the maintenance of both our most basic and our most complex social, cultural, and political organizations and institutions. It moves us, it infuriates us, it bores us, it stirs us to action. Trying to figure out the ways it does all these things is among the most important tasks institutions of higher learning can undertake.

But saying that reveals a still deeper rift in our so-called theory wars: whereas composition is, and always has been, a deeply (and primarily) ethical enterprise, writing studies is, first and foremost, a project of discovery: it’s about “understanding how texts and textual practices in some social arena reflect and create certain social relations” (Bazerman and Prior 4). That’s not to say I don’t attend to ethics in my work, or that others in writing studies don’t either (my work is in many ways all about ethics). That’s also not to say that I’m not aware of the complex problems of representation and authority that attend all projects of discovery, from the controlled experiment to the most situated ethnographic study of literate practices. What it is to say, however, is that writing studies does not take as its point of departure the edification, liberation, spiritual awakening, or (fill-in-the-blank) of first-year (or any) college students (orientations that both Susan Miller, in “Writing Studies as a Mode of Inquiry,” and Kurt Spellmeyer, in “Education for Irrelevance,” critique).

I’m ok with that. In fact, that’s how I approach my work. (Though, without getting into the whole complex problem of whether writing skills transfer from one situation to the next, I do think literacy instruction is an important part of a student’s educational experience. I also attend extensively to literacy instruction in my classes) But, in the end, I think the distinction is something that is present in but needs to be teased out of Trimbur’s text.

Other carnival (and sort-of-pre-carnival) posts (so far): here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Works Cited

Bazerman, Charles, and Paul Prior, eds. What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2004.

Miller, Susan. "Writing Studies as a Mode of Inquiry." Rhetoric and Composition as Intellectual Work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2002.

Roemer, Marjorie, Lucille M. Schulz, and Russel K. Durst. 1999. “Reframing the Great Debate on First-Year Writing.” College Composition and Communication 50: 377-92.

Spellmeyer, Kurt. “Education for Irrelevance? Or, Joining our Colleagues in Lit Crit on the Sidelines of the Information Age." Composition Studies in the New Millenium: Rereading the Past, Rewriting the Future. Ed. Lynn Bloom, Donald Daiker, Ed White. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2003.

Big Ups, Doc

For those of you who may not know, I'm still in my first year at Bowling Green, and when I got here I was assigned the office space just vacated by Andrew Mara when he and Sport made the big move to NDSU. When they moved, though, Andrew kindly left a very nice white board hanging in the office (complete with cleaning agent!), which I have until now used mainly to illustrate grammatical concepts to confused students from my "teaching grammar in context" language arts class.

That just changed. Tonight, there was something about the large scale and the vertical on-the-wallness of that board that helped me finally work through a sticking point in my current research. I've scribbled. I've outlined. I've used MS Word in just about every conceivable way, from freewriting to making bulleted lists to slogging page by page through my argument. But it was the big white board next to my desk that finally helped me see the writing on the wall.

Thanks, Andrew.

Experience and Disciplinary Donnybrooks

I've been thinking a lot lately about experience as a nexus of debate and inquiry in rhetoric and composition: who tends to write about experience, from it, or both? How do they tend to define experience? Who tends not to write about it, and--if it's possible to surmise an answer short of launching a situated qualitative study, which I won't be doing in the extremely near future--why not?

What I'm finding is that it's nearly impossible in rhet/comp to talk about experience without immediately, even automatically, equating it to personal experience. Is there any other kind?, you may be asking yourself. Well, in one sense, obviously, no: all experience is personal to the extent that it presupposes a subject doing the experiencing. But it seems to me that the yoking of the terms personal and experience in composition carries with it more epistemological baggage than would seem to be suggested by the simple and relatively uncontroversial observation that all experience is subjective.

To wit: writing from and/or about experience in rhet/comp tends to be oriented around either expressivist or liberatory-critical theories of teaching, researching, and composing, or sometimes a hybrid of the two. In the case of expressivism, experience is troped as a repository of potential insights--as a way to write (about) the events of one's life to help one make sense of the world and, perhaps, communicate that sense to others. In the case of liberatory-critical work, experience tends to be theorized from within an identity politics that sees it as an effect of, or at the very least in tension with, broadly social forces--class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, age, and other categories we use to both read and make our worlds--as they intersect in unique ways in different individuals.

Naturally, I'm oversimplifying things a bit here. But what strikes me as important is that automatically coupling experience and the personal--even if your point is that even utterly unique personal experience can nevertheless be understood and rendered in social and political terms (a common and, I might add, convincing argument)--leaves out a realm of experience that was never truly personal, at least in a conventional sense, in the first place. I mean, generally, it's up to the individual author to explicate or reflect on her experience for us so we can appreciate whatever point about self or society she wants to make. But what of disciplinary and metadisciplinary arguments whose participants may have many experiences in common--experiences that are central to one's attitudes and intellectual commitments toward the subject in question?

For example, Marjorie Roemer, Lucille Schultz, and Russel Durst claim that new abolitionists basically characterize everything related to FYC in "evisceratingly negative" terms (see "Reframing the Great Debate," in CCC 50:3)--a claim that cannot be reasonably supported by reading published arguments against the universal FYC requirement. But how much of their sense that new abolitionists are the barbarians at the gate has come from conference sessions like the ones in '93 and '94, when the latest abolitionist debate was really building a head of steam? How much of it comes from comments made on Megabyte University or the WPA-L in the mid- and late-1990's? How much of it comes from encountering colleagues who were dismissive of "dumb" FYC students, naive FYC defenders, and evil WPAs?

These kinds of experiences seem to be off limits or, at least, are not made very visible, in rhet/comp scholarship. And, yet, I'd argue that they are precisely the kinds of experiences that can really be productive fonts of knowledge and vigorous academic debate: What really did happen at C's in San Diego in 1993? Is there really such a disconnect between the rational, relatively even-keeled published arguments for abolishing the universal FYC requirement and what encounters with my colleagues would seem to indicate is not only an intellectual but also a deeply emotional aversion to FYC?

You can't argue with an author when you read that as a child he used to run around the playground making up words for common objects or when another author recalls the details of a childhood conversation with her mother. And who would want to? But you can argue with somebody who writes that a specific new abolitionist acts as if pro-FYC folk are either simpletons or comp-bosses, even if that doesn't come through in the person's writing writing.

Imagine, then, what sorts of conversations, in print and otherwise, we might have if more of us did draw on experiences that are not uniquely ours but, rather, that belong, either in type or actual instance, to many others as well, and others who are stakeholders in the disciplinary conversations we participate in. To get there, though, would seem to call for rethinking experience in rhetoric and composition.

You Did Not Just Say That!

I'm working on a project about the ethics of experience in composition research and scholarship, and in my reading I came across this little gem of a recollection by the author of a widely-used textbook on teaching writing:

Most college writing programs differ in numerous ways, but they have many goals in common. These goals were described by the Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA) . . . and published as an outcomes statement in 1999. At the time of this writing, the president of the WPA . . . was such an important person that she was far too busy to write a one-page permission letter allowing us to reproduce the outcomes statement here (usually deemed a simple matter of professional courtesy), so instead of reproducing the statement, I have summarized its key features . . . . (281)

Are you kidding me? The first time I read this passage, my immediate thought was, somebody at [publisher] lost their job over this one. To make matters worse, the author actually uses the president's name, which I chose to elide for this post. I know academic discourse can get contentious, but jeez.