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What I have learned this semester in my blog is that it is more important than ever that my students enter into dialogue in their academic writing and also in the classroom. In order to get them to enter into the writing dialogue, they must enter it in the classroom as well. I know this partly by the looks on their faces. I have learned that those individuals who are not comfortable speaking in class are probably still thinking. Furthermore, they are worried about not speaking in class—they are waiting for me to fill up that airspace so that they don’t have to. I have learned that they may be deathly afraid of being called on. That even the students who are eager to speak would probably rather hear other students speak more of the time, so that they can learn from other students as they are expected to learn from me.

I learned that it is no accident that composition has moved from the sole focus of university studies to a basic knowledge students are expected to have attained somewhere between the end of high school and the end of English 101. With the help of all the members of our class, I’ve thought a great deal about the kinds of assignments that can get all of us, teachers included, to wrap our minds around visual rhetoric, from design and execution to interpretation. I’ve used versions of several of our activities in class this semester, with degrees of success that indicate both the success of our 609 classmates’ strategies and also the high level of involvement that a graduate class encourages.

My own focus this semester has been in grading strategies through fairer rubrics and in more effective peer editing sessions for students. This week’s much-commented post in the KY Kernel Opinion section. It’s linked here:
http://kykernel.com/2011/11/30/uk%E2%80%99s-writing-center-could-be-more-helpful/

An employee of one writing center attacked the other writing center’s aloof tutors and short sessions. The author, Amanda Powell, claimed that the writing center didn’t have enough time to edit her essay. The most recent post was today, from screen name “SurrealWorld,” and I’ll excerpt it here:
“Also, the term editing has different connotations for undergrads than it does for those in the writing field. Thirty minutes is not enough time to delve into deeper writing issues. Heck, it probably isn’t enough time to simply edit, even editing as writers understand the term.”

This is one of the better responses yet, because it addresses the most glaring issue the comments raised: The comments said largely that writing centers cannot edit, because uncredited editing is plagiarism.

I believe that rebuttal needs some serious work. In the university environment, ideational editing, whether credited or not, should happen every day. It should keep us up at night, and I believe it does. Students should be both daunted and provoked by good ideas from editors. If the problem is distinguishing peer review from line-editing from proofing, then who cares—who would want credit for proofing or line-editing without reference to ideas? We could do away with all the editors in NYC and also fire half of the authors for academic dishonesty, while simultaneously abolishing all peer editing in classes. In my own classes, I’ve often wondered if that wouldn’t be the very best reinforcement of the need for peer editing. If we can’t edit each other’s essays, we oughtn’t be calling it a writing center or a writing class—but instead a brainstorming session.

Regarding: David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University” and Joel Haefner’s “Democracy, Pedagogy, and the Personal Essay.”

I like Bartholomae’s idea of involving all composition students in the discourse community. That would contrast neatly with involving all students in the “real world,” which requires a discourse community to function—or perhaps just for progress. DB claims that writing has been billed as a tool to be used by the educated mind instead of a tool for learning. I really like his description of learning to play music through chords and patterns of composition. If I wrote a description like that, it would turn into a term paper.

Haefner’s discussion of the essay as a genre is pretty provocative. Does the progenitor of a genre epitomize it, or does it develop into a better, more complex, evolved form?

Regarding Haefner, I want to ask what portion of knowledge is based on the individual human experience (rather than collective experience.) I would refer this not to the individual knowledge but collective knowledge (cf. Carl Jung).

What genre is not democratic, not open to everyone, or anyone? It is not my experience that the essay is individualistic, democratic, or egalitarian. Yes, it’s a genre like any other, but it’s easier for the writer to access. Haefner makes the case that it’s just easier for the reader to get involved with.

I had to go over this several times:

Jameson: Genre and form function as ideograms encoding versions of ideology.

Adorno, Jameson: the essay juggernaut as the embodiment of mimesis.

Bourgeois capitalism is embodied by the essay genre.

This is a ridiculous case about Montaigne and the essay as an antiquated form that causes the “originary fallacy.” The extant version of the genre doesn’t describe the origin of the genre. Alice Walker and Fredric Jameson were not writing to each other. I do not find that the personal essay is alien to my students. Why must we define what democratic means? I find it fairly clear in this context and other contexts. Personal essays are too interesting, so Haefner banishes them. I’m impressed with the honesty of these essays he offers (and the pieces for this week).

Eve & Lunsford say that the death of the author helps us to create new forms and new concepts for authors, too. Why does it have to be clearly defined in limited roles for the speaker? I don’t like recapitulating the demands of all these advent groups he mentions—new historicists, feminists, you make up one, et al. Wouldn’t most self-respecting advocates of such groups consider this pandering?

Haefner suggests that we present the context of a cultural essay to students through first-person contemporaneous sources. Why don’t we all do that with Montaigne then? (Not to be bitter: I’m sure that would actually make a great (history) course.)

I am edified to note that I already am teaching my students how we situate ourselves in reference to a text rather than teaching the text itself (or rather its sentiments). I wouldn’t be too sorry if I was teaching the essay itself.

A video from start to finish

I had a pretty fine time making my video, “Writing: Out the Window.” This year has brought me the usual privileges of teaching, which is a new game every day, and really every class every day. In the two composition classes I’ve taken this year, I’ve had several new experiences. First, I had never before written a proper weblog. Second, I had never made a PowerPoint presentation (though I have use live document editing with classes for many years, and I had made Harvard Graphics presentations many years ago). Third, I had never summarized a book with a visual presentation. Fourth, this year I created my first visual essay. Thanks to Dr. Adam Banks for these last chances. In our present class, where I learned more about writing a blog for a closed audience, I also had my fifth chance, making my own video, and this one was a broad assignment yet quite topical. We were turned loose on a video creation process, and thanks to Dr. Bill Endres for this chance. I have recorded and edited a great deal of audio—half my life, really—and usually songs, but I had never made and edited a video on my own.

I had good reason to think I would have someone to man the camera for me (woman the camera), but she did not come home in time for the project. The greatest technical challenge was getting the camera to stand up without jiggling and face in my general direction. Wes informed me of the rule of thirds, which I had barely heard before and never understood before. At close quarters, I placed myself in many of the shots by holding the camera with less than half my face visible. Holding the camera steady like a pistol, the shaking was eliminated from at least the focus of my filming. My last video camera weighed about eight pounds, and the one I borrowed from the University of Kentucky’s English department was only a few ounces. I found no occasion to use a tripod, though to my surprise I filmed one shot at ninety degrees to compensate for the wind. I couldn’t find an editor that would rotate the frame, so that shot didn’t make the cut.

My main argument deals with writing spaces, including the one-person audience of oneself, the privacy and time required to write, and the importance of an organic environment for a humane writing process. To come up with a reason for each shot, I thought over a concept I believed related to my main argument. Then I decided what scene would be appropriate for that shot, and I went to that place. The three settings were Lake Cumberland, on the Wayne County side, Lake Reba in Madison County, and my house (woodstove, deck, and driveway). I took about twice as many complete scenes as ended up in the final draft. I made about ninety minutes of video to produce nine minutes of final footage. Most of the shots were between thirty seconds and one minute, though there were exceptions to each extreme.

About half of the footage I omitted was comprised of technology, including recording my computer’s desktop with Camtasia, discussing the devices and software I obtained for free this semester, and integrating that technology into a grading system for my students’ essays. There were two reasons that I cut all those scenes. First, because it seemed I should be talking about my own writing process, not my students’ writing process or the process of grading; second, because it just wasn’t that interesting. It seemed that it would make a good video to circulate for the next few months, but it didn’t have enough theory or sustainability to remain interesting in five years.

The outlining process helped me significantly. I had slated about forty scenes of ten seconds each, which would describe the process by which I taught myself to write songs better and with more streamlined technology. It was to have a sparse soundtrack, including some speech but no narration. Dr. Endres approved of my initial outline but requested more theory in the film. Since my class with Dr. Banks dealt more with aspects of technology, while our present class deal more with the teaching of writing, I decided that conveying theory without dialogue was impracticable with my bare knowledge of film and film composition. Therefore I decided to talk.

While there was no script, I began talking and forming an idea while on camera. Since each shot required several takes, by about the seventh take of each shot the narration became clearer to me. For the next seven or so takes of each shot, I changed the emphasis from one line or one concept to another, moving the camera around to capture the scene I wanted to approximately match the dialogue. Some moments of narration were stilted and stertorous, and a studio would have cut the silences or retaken the scene. By the time I realized this, I had usually left the scene. There was a great deal of running up and down hills, whither and whence on dams, to and fro on concrete pilons. It seemed very important where I started and ended each scene. At Lake Reba, the sun was going down, and I was concerned that it would be either too dark or too much like time lapse photography when I spliced the scenes together. Most importantly, though, my experience with recording audio has obsessed me with one-take scenes. If I messed up a line of dialogue, I ran back to the camera and tried again. If I panned the wrong direction on a vista, I punched out, rewound, and tried again. There are no added transitions between any frames—I thought them all too silly. When editing audio, I have always limited transitions to full stops and occasional fades, except when eliminating noise.

Many takes and scenes went out the window. Camtasia, though it ran slowly on my laptop, made the process fairly easy. After about an hour of acquainting myself with the program, adding to the library, rearranging, shortening, splicing, and cutting scenes became intuitive. I did think a faster system was in order. Had I tried to make a unified soundtrack, the entire process of making the video would have taken over twice as long. Now that I have seen the product several times, I would not add any of my missing footage. I would, however, make several of the cuts differently, cutting pops in sound in the beginning and cutting occasional dead air. As other students have since mentioned in class, the creation and editing process would make an engaging hobby. I believe this was a promising project. I felt empowered early on, and the open assignment and simple camera caused a feeling of natural flow for the whole process. It became a coherent and rewarding process quite quickly.

(Majority) Status for (Minority) Literature

Posted by Glenn Jackson at Friday, November 11, 2011 8:58:33 PM EST

Kennedy, “Re-membering White Privilege” (http://cccc-blog.blogspot.com/2010_07_01_archive.html

I think that the reason the Kennedy's discussion of /Forrest Gump/ stalled after twenty or thirty minutes is that the questions weren’t very good. I mean, they weren’t all that deep… it’s been an awfully long time since I saw that movie once, but there is much more there than those questions. I don’t think we can dignify racist and anti-racist considerations in this film. It was better than that. I do think that when discussing rhetoric and memory, though, /Forrest Gump/ is a pretty good choice. It shows the way one fictitious character, in a sort of magical realist style, can intervene in and influence all history for his lifetime. In a similar discussion, I might use Rebecca West’s Return of the Soldier, which would take less time to read than watching FG.
Now what do we do with a classroom full of students who could watch that film and think it is a documentary? (It’s a stretch, but I’m hoping they meant it was a documentary of the 20th century, pulling together many significant American events with a single fictional protagonist.) I have an equally mortifying statistic I heard this week: Pregnancy rates went down nationally when the computer game Call of Duty 2 was released. Is it really rhetorical memory if people think FG and JFK are documentaries?

Regarding Royster, "When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own":
I think African Americans are usually a cultural group rather than an ethnic group. She’s talking about the double-consciousness in Du Bois, and she talks about it in terms of voice. Du Bois’ voice was carefully considered, but he talks more about mode of address and style. She also talks about Langston Hughes. She is interested in his work, “Not just as simple stories to delight and entertain but as vital players in a transformative process.” I personally like Langston Hughes best in a story like “Salvation,” where he writes like Mark Twain. Shall I think of them both as ethnic voices? Royster wants to “Listen and learn to speak without clenching my teeth.” When she writes in a different and less formal tone, her friend tells her that she has never heard her talk like that, ‘like in your real voice.’ It sounds to me like that person who complimented the author was already speaking very carefully about Royster speaking. I do very much like her last rhetorical question, “What would we say if we valued someone other than ourselves having a turn to speak”? she asks. I would assert that in writing, there is seldom a dialogue. The rule is not “‘you talk, I talk,’” it’s --I, the author, talk.—

I have thought very much in the last few years about non-minorities teaching minority literature. The first trope which bothers me is filing great works full of great words in a minority file. Great literature is great—it’s not merely confessional, it’s not just identity politics. I believe that if the genre we call the “blues novel” was not marginalized as African American literature (or even Kentucky literature, in the case of Gayle Jones) or 20-21st century post-PoMo, it might be taken at face value. Its face value is worth considering. I have always chewed over the situation of a friend of mine here at UK, a dedicated Ph.D. candidate, a white male, who both studies and teaches African American literature every semester. He is most knowledgeable, attentive, and enthusiastic about his work. I can’t help but think he lacks “street cred” when he walks in on the first day—white, male, suburban, and adhering to the words of black consciousness through the eyes of The Man. I can’t forget, though, that he’s not non-black. First he’s a scholar, and second he is a member of the majority. That gives him a certain objectivity on the matter. (Perhaps it would be better if he was a transgender Latino.) As it stands, though, when he walks in to convey his enthusiasm on the first and last days of class, he has a chance to speak as an audience member. He can tell the students that he likes this literature because it’s great, not because it holds some prestige status compared to other works in the minority canon. Maybe it matters that he’s also teaching to a class that’s less than half black. He’s speaking to some of his people about the finest writing from another people. He’s teaching to part of the audience of Hughes and Du Bois and Ralph Ellison, and he’s doing it with a real, arbitrary knowledge that speaks to his identity, not his racial makeup.

Individual Authors with Collaborative Teachers

Posted by Glenn Jackson at Wednesday, November 2, 2011 7:05:57 PM EDT

Regarding Ede, Lisa and Andrea A. Lunsford. “Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship.” PMLA 116.2 (Mar 2001) 354-369.
and
Bruffee, Kenneth A. “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind.’” College English 46.7 (Nov 1984) 635-52.


Ede and Lunsford cite Barthes' "The Death of the Author" as a pivotal moment in writing history. I certainly think that we have experienced the rebirth of the author, after Barthes, after postmodernism, and as one of the culminating features of the personal narrative essays, calls to action, and speech format. In visual essays, it’s more difficult to say that the author is alive. Not that one cannot write a personal visual essay, but it generally increases the distance between author/speech and author/text. Ede and Lunsford quote Joseph Harris regarding the professional life for which professors prepare students, noting their roles as “subaltern dissident and intellectual entrepreneur” (356). These joint positions both as subjugated beings and as upwardly mobile academics constitute an ambivalence in writing, and that tension strung out between the two roles keeps writing assignments challenging.

This piece asserts that the institution takes the ideologies of the individual author and the audience for granted, and I would like to know how it does that. It has not been my experience, except where a general lack of time and interest prevents a body of readers, including instructors, from dedicating the necessary time to each student.

We have to socialize the author as producing, according to Ede and Lunsford. I keep hearing people say that people are standing at a crossroads, one where we need to at least re-engineer, and maybe figure out creatively, who we are and what we do. It is the repetition of this assertion that makes it matter, because standing alone it reads as a platitude or a pep talk. What is different today, I wonder, that gives this mantra currency. Why are we at a crossroads, and why do we need to be more creative than pragmatic? Regarding the position of our economy and our national politics, I would like to think that we could be creative and earn a chance to get out of our mess—but is “creative engineering” not at all to blame for the creation of our predicament? As Berlin pointed out in the beginning of the semester, we have based our university system after the German model. The resulting hyper-specification, along with growing college attendance, interferes with the direct interaction of disciplines. Public media has gained a more general appeal, lost some of its flair for propaganda, yet seems less likely than ever to make a difference in public opinion or national action.

According to Bruffee, we assume that thought is somehow a given, but instead language is created by social interaction (639). To write by oneself requires talking to oneself, he says, and talking to oneself requires discussion with others. Bruffee mentions that tutors can be personally disinterested. How can they remain organized, engaged, and collaborative while maintaining not just objectivity but also personal disinterest? If the tutors are to bring culture and sensitivity about culture to their work, how can personal disinterest be a virtue?

In this essay, the idea of “normal discourse” sounds rich and loaded—research in the years since its publication in 1984 have made composition teachers resistant to the form of straight or normal discourse. Our discussion in class over the features of academic writing speaks to this point: academic writing can be normalized, but it is hardly normal. From a social viewpoint, it might not be discourse, either.

Bruffee’s criteria for his own writing address those characteristics, and I want to reproduce them in list form here. These are the standards he says he readers will use as well. He says, “I judge my essay finished when I think it conforms to that set of conventions and values” (643):
What counts as a relevant contribution;
What counts as a question;
What counts as having 1) a good argument for that answer or
2) a good criticism of it.

Bruffee makes some rough (though maybe well-founded) accusations about teachers who lead discussions so actively that the discussions turn quickly back into lectures. I don’t think that the reason I talk too much when teaching is that I’m mistrust collaborative learning (645). My training, all after the year 2000, did not teach a distrust of “collaboration and community activity” (645). I feel I ending up leading the discussion by the nose, rather than leading it gently as a moderator, and when it happens, I worry that I am using that worst of teacher tricks: asking a question so that students can fill the other half of my sentences, rather than their own ideas. I intervene because I’m interested in collaborative learning—and when it doesn’t seem to be working, I try to revise my questions, my answers, and recast others answers. When it doesn’t work, I use all of those revisions to change the format. If the result is just me talking, those intentions are moot.

Regarding Graham D. Bodie, “A Racing Heart, Rattling Knees, and Ruminative Thoughts: Defining, Explaining, and Treating Public Speaking Anxiety.”

Posted by Glenn Jackson at Thursday, October 27, 2011 7:11:56 AM EDT

I have a new fear, and it is that I don’t know anything—I was terribly surprised to hear that people hold a fear of public speaking over any other fear; I was just as surprised that people fear death more than anything else. If that is not even rational—it is a testimony, I think, to ease of living in this country. What do people fear for nightmares, for instance, if this is how they feel about performance and death?

I’m interested that PSA has been called speech anxiety and it’s been called audience anxiety.

Bodie asserts that Public Speaking Axiety is in some instances “self-focused” and makes that just one characteristic of the condition. How would PSA _not_ be self-focused? The most interesting moments in this article this division of categories which includes the last speaking minute. Especially when it is referring to anticipation. I don’t understand if one fears the last speaking minute, or if it is the fear that occurs in the last met before speaking (which is not what it sounds like). I learned from childhood tell it shows some recitals and playing piano on demand, that it is best to do well practiced, if that is much better to be nervous that cocky. I wonder if it is worse to be extremely nervous or extremely cocky, however. I seldom had either problem. I do know which one will elicit more audience sympathy.

Arousability is Bodie’s next interesting concept. I wonder how much this has to do with performers’ and musicians’ addiction to public performance—or with the mild high associated with successful teaching. This is a well-thought-out (though cruel) test where the balloon is popped. I’m interested in the parallels between sitting quietly in this test and the typical pre-performance meditation in the green room or dressing room for performers and actors. I know that vocalists use that time to stretch, and I have heard that public speakers do also. How does a subordinate status relate to what Bodie calls confidence.
While I do not understand all of these measurement variables, I think that a good deal of this information would require one to read the original studies—for instance, /how/ would a researcher measure “affect”—or induce it for that matter? I do believe that the “intensity” of affect could be measured, once the variable is isolated. I imagine that Linda Flower, for example, might believe that most of this affect is dependent on the type of audience. Very few of the dependent and independent variables in Bodie deal with the type of audience or the size of the audience; type is the more significant, relative to the power position of the speaker. The study on what is called “high and low impact speech,” which relies in part on the weight of a speech for a grade, seems the most important of those listed. To what physiological extent can “physical arousal” extend? It seems possible that public speaking anxiety and its associated high could be a borderline psychosis.

These studies surrounding Porter indicate that men and women have the same patterns of PSA, but it’s a surprise to me that women experience /more/ performance anxiety. One of the reasons that surprises me is that the pressures on men for public rhetorical performance have been much greater. For the making of public appearances in general, though, I think the pressures on women have been higher. For instance, Bodie categorizes by “anticipation and/of confrontation,” which I would think should run much higher and with a greater volatility in men: a shorter temper and with more catharsis for men.

Systematic desensitization must factor heavily in what students are doing in WRD classes, whether the students know the theory or not. When I taught music, we spent a good deal of time teaching students to play together, including during private lessons, in small groups. They used varied instruments. We’re a range students for a different little bands in each lesson. It seems that public speaking could also benefit from the addition of a consistent audience. The classroom environment is perfect for training, in a way that it would never work for music. Music has a higher degree of participation; it relates to a move from performance orientation to communication orientation, but our idea for music lessons was closer to the “target,” that is, communication orientation, than most public speaking classes, which are “performance orientation.” Musicians are making the art together if they play together, while speakers are making the art individually when making speeches. Experienced public speakers will disagree, knowing that they must feed from the audience with its fairly constant chain of feedback. The audience has a hand in creating the speech, but the audience does not take that role on an individual basis.

I have noticed that motivational speakers tend not to vary their speeches of from day to day. It is worth Youtubing “No arms, no legs, no problems” for a great example. I have noticed that public speakers can exacerbate their own PSA if they are shown a “great speaker” immediately before speaking, and I wonder what the effect would be of showing a terrible public speaker right before a performance. I do know that TEFL Corp and TEFL International show a terrible L2 lesson as the /very/ first component of their course.

Especially since we tried this, I’m curious what the class thinks about the effect of videotaping anything, especially speeches. How does this relate to memorized speeches, notes for speeches, and off-the-cuff speeches. It’s a surprise that positive criticism is not received as as measurably helpful as negative criticism.

This study with the placebo of “subliminal messages” is ridiculous. I love the panacaea and the trickery in these examples.

Week 9 Part Deux

Posted by Glenn Jackson at Wednesday, October 12, 2011 8:46:39 PM EDT

My audience becomes angry because I have addressed last week’s reading. The masses throng against me, shouting encore, reprise, remixest thou a more appropriate entry. My audience prefers a shower to a bath, and a hot tub to the both. My audience drives only Audis. My audience is getting sleepy.
Peter Elbow argues in “Closing My Eyes as I Speak[…]” that considering always the audience may not fix a writer’s writers’ block, nor incept better writing, nor enable a truer voice. I’d say that’s good news, since teaching audience so often spurs an interlanguage which proves worse than a writer’s already-always-tentative style. Considering audience supposedly improves the connection between audience and author, but Elbow knows that it often results in ignoring the speaker. Starting on the first day of a composition course, the instructor figures out a way to break into that “stilted,k overly careful style or voice” (174) that a power structure and mandatory writing produce in all writers, particularly freshmen.

I want to say that I like Linda Flower’s “steps in the writing process” that Elbow outlines (175): when the sense of audience is oppressive, ignore the audience while figuring out how to think, then head back to the audience. This step, I think, is when more motivated scholars send notes to professors. Someone shot me a note last night: how does proclamation get in the way of Emerson’s ideas? I’ll dig on Elbow for a second and say that this process of Flower’s probably works better than writing in invisible ink, and I’ll bet it “produces better writing,” too, which phrase I’ve seen in Elbow several times. It does not account for final drafts often including “passages of freewriting” that are strong. In addition to the great phrases Elbow uses, such as “swamp work” and “desert island discourse,” several moments protrude from this piece. He compares a writer to a “salesman trained to look the customer in the eye and to think at all times about the characteristics of the ‘target audience.’” Walking around outside the POT on Monday, I saw a well-dressed and handsome fellow whom I immediately identified as a U.S. recruiter conferencing with a student by the classroom building. The recruiter said,

“So, do you think this is something you might be interested in doing? I mean, I’m not pushing you, you don’t have to sign up, but—”

And the other young man responded quietly.

The recruiter put his back back in the back of the chair.

“What are you doing Wednesday night?”

I considered the sales technique. It ran from reasonable deference to a nosy affrontery in one exchange. I didn’t stay long enough to hear whether the student bought into it. Buddy of Buddy’s Carpet Barn on Route 4 outside of Cincinnati used to say on his commercials, “I don’t care about making money, I just love to sell carpet.”

The succinct summary and dialectic Elbow uses to oppose two psychological models is fantastic.
Piagetians: “’The egocentric little critters, we’ve got to /socialize/ ‘em! Ergo, make them think about audience when they write!’”
Vygotskians: “’No wonder they’re having trouble writing. They’ve been bamboozled by the Piagetian heresy. They think they’re solitary individuals with private selves when really they’re just congeries of voices that derive from their discourse community.’” (180)
Not to ruin it, I just really wanted to see how that would look as a Ciceronian dialogue.

Elbow believes we should not effectively agree that budding writers are either dumb (but not stupid) or retarded (but not dumb). Why not just call them “poor writers,” he asks (182). My answer is simple. I can’t call them poor writers because sometimes they are not. Sometimes I write a good song, and other times I write a bad song, and most times I don’t have time to write. My students sometimes write well, given good assignments, and sometimes they write well, given topics that pique their interest, and sometimes they write well, given many chances to make their own connections and choose their own topics. What Elbow is really good at, according to me, is the following:

1) Comparing new students to professional academics, as he does in “Closing My Eyes…” and “Comparing Academic Discourse.
2) Breaking down that shy and probing and tentative and quelled tone from all writers.
3) Turning on the tap. Making writing better because he encourages students (and us) and professors (and readers) to write more.

In an earlier class and the last time I wrote here, I thought-out-loud that there is always more than just one audience—we write directly for a varied audience, plus someone who is surveying our communication, plus the web administrator who sees our emails for our protection, plus Google whose Checkout will soon own my credit, plus the Panopticon, plus our own edification/mortification. Elbow argues here against the /audience of self/ and, he paraphrases, “standing outside and reading our own utterance as audience…” (187). He believes that we write not “to the self” but “for the sake of self.” I concur. The creative writing teacher, or worse yet, the composition teacher, is the hobo-guru-sherpa who stands partly obstructing this process, not between the writer and the audience but between the Writing To self and Writing For self. Is it possible to teach not writing but “getting out of the way”? By popular demand, I begin assigning writing by telling not just the intended audience, but the clear-and-present-danger-audience: whether I will be asking students to share or edit This later, whether I will see it (ever), and the amount of time allotted for constructing the audience / producing the text / locating the writer.

Unrelated note: I would really like to know how to make peer editing work better for inexperienced writers, either in theory or in practice, since I know this is not a pedagogy but a theory course. If I have the theory, I can work out some “classroom” from it. The last good article I read about that was Flower’s and Hayes’.

Glenn is Whiney About Course Structure

Posted by Glenn Jackson at Wednesday, October 12, 2011 8:00:37 PM EDT

George mentions that the “snapshot of the page” is the go-to text in any style manual. This is justified by usual fodder for the composition program’s orientation meetings—those I’ve attended for UK, for EKU, and for the KCTCS network. Every year, they devise a way to lure us teachers onto campus for a day for KCTCS, three days for EKU, and a week for UK. At UK, they make it a condition of the graduate assistantship and pay for the week. At EKU, they make it a mandatory yet excusable program, with one day mandatory yet excusable and two days optional, but they will pay us and feed us for each day. With KCTCS, it’s about four hours long and mandatory, with no repercussions for missing, and they feed us. In each instance, we are informed of the course structure and the grading structure. Guest speakers come and look surprised; they deliver truisms from their fields. Then to the meat: we are expected to use the prescribed style manual in class. We are told how to get students involved with the style manual. While exercises in grammar should not be stipulated for all students, if we were to notice patterns of error within a given class, that class could “fill out” exercises from the book. The front of each style manual contains information about the particular university which has deigned [been induced] to buy into that particular publication for the year. I fondly remember Randall Roorda glibly sporting his canvas “tote” that the publisher had brought him, full of books, so that he would be better equipped to discuss the style manual. We instructors are pointed toward the two chapters in the book which discuss visual formatting of essays. In the case of Eastern, we must add those two chapters to the syllabus—Marshall Myers shows us how students can select different typesets and formatting choices from magazines, so that the students can consider reformatting their essays or _pieces_.

In the end, most of the instructors will point out the MLA format, and perhaps the CMS and APA format, in the sections of the style manuals, which sections have different colored tips on the edges of the pages, and we will duly ignore those style manuals for the two subsequent semesters. When students have questions about (nonexistent) title pages, or when our cryptic versions of the Works Cited page and in-text citations cause problems during the semester, we will resourcefully point each student to the _sample paper_ in the style manual, which includes all necessary essays headers (typed) and page headers (header/footer), with a few citations, an illustration, a table, a graph, and a Works Cited page with all the web pages and multiple-author books they can stomach (plus two journal articles, so as not to appear a token). The students will then consult the Purdue Online Writing Lab for all their questions, while waiting to file the scanned copies of that style manual section in the email’s trash until one of the following occurs:

1) they never see it;
2) it never arrives, since I am already relegated to the “spam” folder for emailing students who have just dropped the class;
3) the server-based email mailbox is full [two weeks];
4) it becomes outdated, in which case they will assert it as _the correct format_ in their next composition class.

George calls this sample essay section and its “snapshot of a page” the “only time formatting and text size is mentioned” in a given style manual. Above, without too much bitterness, I hope, and with a nod toward practicality, I have outlined a different kind of format. It’s the format of publishers’ money, a bookstore’s buyback policy, a fifty- to eighty-dollar book, and the unlikely event where a composition class with many pieces about ethics, interdisciplinary studies, and a country store’s miscellany of other essays (“Beer Can,” “Shooting an Elephant,” and “The Death of a Moth”) will still have time to break out the style manual and discuss the 2009-2011 permutations of college writing procedure (“Guidelines for peer review: 1. Overall thoughts – 11. Sentences”; “FOR MULTILINGUAL WRITERS: “Asking an experienced writer to review your draft”; “Research and Documentation / Preparing for a Research Project: 12g: Setting up a research log”; and the “Oral and Multimedia Presentations chapter’s 25a ‘Class discussions’: If you think you might lose track of your ideas while speaking, jot down key words to keep you on track.’” Please see the St. Martin’s Handbook, whence these come, which is one of the more successful style manuals I have taught from, for further travesties. I am reminded, thanks to our class, of the two possible reactions to a postulate, both courtesy of Arthur Conan Doyle. 1) Elementary, my dear Watson. 2) No shot, Sherlock.

I have some positive reinforcement to offer, I promise. But first, let me tell you what bothers me about George’s argument, all of which negativity becomes inverse in the face of Wysocki’s excellent, convincing, creative set of criticisms.

George rightly points out that “the model” paper is the only demonstrably consulted source in a university’s style manual. That’s because it’s about the only gestalt example of a paper in the style manual. Even when the student argument sample essay, with the figurehead of a real student, Teal Pfeifer, Student Writer, “argues that images in the media affect how women see themselves, and she offers a solution to the problem she has identified” (SMH 2009, 204). Instead of just modeling sentences and paragraphs, these should be made easier to read. At the risk of retrogression, how about students have a chance to see Francis Bacon’s “Of Marriage and Single Life” taken apart—given line breaks and 5-8 sentence paragraphs, with commas modernized and even some statistics, so that they will have some reading that is not so stinkingly obvious and redundant?

I am worried that the reason George has to delineate students who are “verbally sensitive” from those who are either _not_ verbally sensitive or who are, for example, visually-trained visual learners, musically-trained auditory learners, or sports-trained kinetic learners, is that composition instructors methodically shy away from training students verbally. Coupling Bacon’s essay above with Debra Dickerson’s “Who Shot Johnny,” where a black female narrator complains about a modern black social epidemic and uses the F-word repeatedly, sounds modern enough, engaging enough, and rather productive.

Jacob Bronowski, in “The Nature of Scientific Reasoning,” sets up a discrepancy between the literary mind and the scientific mind. He asks, just like Isaac Asimov asks in “The Eureka Phenomenon,” how sorts of insight the scientist and the humanist can find in nature. Bronowski wants to know whether the humanities study human creation, presumably edifying us all, and whether scientists merely catalog “the appearance of nature.” “To the literary man the question may seem merely silly. He has been taught that science is a large collection of facts; and if this is true, then the only seeing which scientists need to do is, he supposes, seeing the facts.” Bronowski goes on to imagine the scientist as a “colorless professional,” as literary men supposedly imagine scientists to be. I am worried about Bronowski. Surely little kids don’t want to become scientists for these reasons. They want to blow stuff up, to play with lizards, to become mad scientists, to innovate inventions that change the world, and probably to do something non-conformist that Grandma will still approve. Literary persons did not imagine scientists as passionless, mindless cataloguers and Stuffers of Stuff into Categories. This kind of essay, of which there are three in my 101 text, essentially pats scientists on their heads: you are good thinkers (too), and pats the humanists on the back: we do science, (too). I am worried that dividing students into the culturally literate and the literature-trained makes exactly this sort of meaningless division, one children are not liable to make when they are taught how to read. Kids read to learn and learn for fun, if we let them. Adults subdivide their fields in order to specialize, not in order to over-specialize.

Maybe students won’t get to read the /Odyssey/ anymore, and they will ignore the Iliad and the Aeneid, even if students five years their senior can explain why they liked the Iliad so much better. It has, after all, been fourteen years since I had it in college, and we can’t be expected to teach outdated works which were considered literature in 1997. In my view, cultural familiarity runs hand-in-hand with literacy, and one is required for the other. It’s not that I don’t want to teach Team America: World Police as interventionist commentary, or that I don’t think South Park is astute social criticism—or even that I want to leave that to film or communications scholars. It’s that I think literacy requires literature, and if we want to educate people half a generation older than we are, we are probably going to have to start more than a generation back with our engagement of historical literacy. Here’s my call to action—like the student writer Teal Pfeifer from the St. Martin’s Handbook above, I will “offer a solution to the problem [I have] identified”: —If I am not the one who gets to show students why modernist literature matters through Ulysses, and I’m not the one who gets to show them Derek Walcott’s Omeros and Homer’s Odyssey and Dante and Sartre and epistles and Epicurus and ethos and ethics and Durkheim and Freud and an earlier time-spirit, then who is? That’s my rhetorical question to end my student essay.