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.
No comments:
Post a Comment