What is my job as a writing instructor?

What is my job as a writing instructor?

This is one of those questions I *really* want to answer well.
In the most basic sense, I hope that as a writing instructor I can effectively convey how to use a variety of compositional tools in a variety of situations. Of course, this hope relies entirely on context. I’ve illogically split this post into three silly sections, all of which in some degree respond to the concern of applicability beyond academe while addressing a variety of such contexts. I’ve been stressed out by questions concerning the “worth” of writing in the liberal arts for quite some time, and Kathleen Yancey catches some of my concern and recasts it into an apparently different perspective from previous composition pedagogical approaches. Research writing to me seems like a good general place to start, as it covers a variety of fields (including “real world” genres).

Research:

After first hearing that I would be teaching English 201 a while back, I thought to myself, “uh oh.” Really, I’ve worked in several research capacities over the years, and all of them academic, so theoretically the material wasn’t the problem, but rather how I was going to approach it. English 101 isn’t the same beast in many respects, despite the two courses’ similarities in structure and content. Teaching MLA formatting and research guidelines is peachy for people who will be using those guidelines—and even for beginning researchers who need something to use— but the 201 crew were a diverse lot with diverse needs. Instead of trying to cover absolutely every research base—and one can spend many hours in the government documents section going through reel after reel with no benefit to anything but perpetuating read-rage (similar to road rage—maybe even roid rage—except with text). Basically, my aim was to foster using the right research method for the right “job.” But teaching writing has to at some point transcend the natural teleology assumed by the term “job.” I try to look for things that all writers—nay humans—share in common, and apply this directly to the value of research methodology. In my experience, getting screwed over is what everyone likes the least.

The phrase “getting screwed” can mean many things, but college students mostly associate it with—yep, you guessed it—money. Sometimes I feel as if I have to, in some way, bring liberal arts education back into a banking model temporarily to illustrate a point (using terms like “value” and “worth”), no matter how Machiavellian and distasteful that feels. If money isn’t something everybody covets, it’s necessarily a concern. In the simplest sense, knowing how to conduct research in a particular context can yield immediate positive results. Okay fine—knowing that your Sound Wave action figure is worth thousands on ebay is “valuable” information, but generally doesn’t demand a research argument (unless, of course, such an argument is involved in the sale/bribe process). A simplistic research argument spawning from the Sound Wave example could be heard in court. “Mr. X broke my thousand dollar Sound Wave figure” implies at least two researchable arguments: 1) Proof that Mr. X did indeed break Sound Wave, and 2) a research argument on the worth of Sound Wave. However, such an argument is ultimately banal, and doesn’t require much critical thinking. But knowing the reason Sound Wave is worth a thousand dollars does demand a greater degree of critical thinking, and this knowledge arms the greedy researcher with not only more information on the item of value itself, but on how to speculate more items like it. Such a question will force research into cultural trends, contexts, manufacturing details, and ultimately the interrelationship of all of these factors to bring us the thousand-dollar Sound Wave. If said researcher works for an auction company, a research essay—verbal or otherwise—is called for.

Naturally, “not getting screwed” can branch off into more complex research oriented advantages, such as: “how to tell when X is lying”; “how to avoid being fired for writing angry things on Facebook”; “how to tell when a presenter has missed a crucial piece of information, especially when that information pertains to the functionality of your vehicle’s brakes”; and others in this vein.

As a literature Ph.D. student, I’m particularly sensitive to students thinking of my topics in terms of “use” and “value.” However, it’s not so hard to convey such value. Even the harshest of naysayers cannot deny the use of knowing literature and how it has been used and abused for political purposes. I try to encourage students to know why particular political leaders/institutions endorse certain books and denounce others. I imagine most literature teachers try to explain the importance of knowing when such abuse/interpretation occurs. In several serious ways—though likely not interconnected with any oppressions the students are facing immediately—knowing how and why a piece of literature (or visual culture or music or any other art form) is being exploited can greatly foster “not getting screwed” in a rather “big picture” sense.

Kathleen Yancey’s idea of interconnectivity between texts composed in an academic setting and ‘real world’ genres basically coincides with what I attempt (“Made Not Only in Words” 311). She poses that students aren’t being asked—at least not habitually—to draw “real world” connections with academic writing. However, I’ll be the first to admit that my priorities up to this point have been in fostering academic survivability for writing students. Without a certain repertoire of skills at their fingertips, progressing to even finish a bachelor’s degree can become an insurmountable challenge. While it’s not difficult to mount threats (“you will fail out of school and therefore fail to get a degree which will lead to you never being employed if you don’t pass this class”) to make our material applicable, it doesn’t really ensure its survival beyond a single classroom moment (as Yancey puts it) or moments. Which, looking to our own professional self perpetuation, doesn’t coincide with “not getting screwed”, culturally or economically.

Of course, “not getting screwed” is only the beginning of research-oriented motivation. Maybe it’s not even the beginning for some. Plenty of people can geek out and live in our world just fine. We teach others to survive in academe because it’s not somehow an unreal world—it’s a very real world to “us” (i.e. people who get paid to teach). But self-perpetuation without some kind of intellectual progeny beyond academics doesn’t really help anyone. Eww…progeny.

Subversion:

Nothing seems so universally applicable as learning subversive writing techniques. Maybe I’m extraordinarily biased in this supposition. Growing up, I at first had a very difficult time succeeding in school. Not that I was merely a loudmouthed, argumentative type—though I certainly could (can) be—but rather my interests and methods yielded the wrong results for assignments. Even when I was on the right track, I would often tweak my language in the wrong ways, leading many teachers to wonder about my mental health. Really, these are all the classical problems many writing students face. The act of writing requires a large degree of self-consciousness, and it’s difficult to commit oneself to seemingly alien methods, which can also seem counter to one’s worldview. In short, I was stubborn. I generally had a good grip on why we were learning something, but didn’t always feel as if we were going about it the right way.

Ultimately, I grew sick of fighting. It was so much easier to follow the assignment directions and to do as I was told in general. However, something inside me kept screaming bloody revolt, and that Alan Rickman type voice couldn’t be silenced. “You can still follow directions and say what you want to say, you just have to be clever”, it snapped. “Whoa,” I inwardly replied. My linguistic revenge manifested severally, though mostly in a form that was tailor-made to fit the assignment in question. That nagging parcel of my mind always ensured that I had something to contribute from my own perspective, my own critical digestion of the material. It wasn’t until much later that I learned that I wasn’t really being subversive, just an okay critical thinker at the time.

However, I’m certainly not saying that out and out subversion isn’t worth teaching and learning. A particularly salient example comes from my brother’s days as an anthropology student. He like other anthro majors had to take “Sex, Evolution, and Human Nature,” a class largely predisposed to approaches in Evolutionary Psychology and (sometimes disguised) Sociobiology. While generally able to voice his concerns with those approaches throughout the course’s run, my brother was eventually forced to write his final essay on defending them. Being a person of strong academic conviction (and mule-stubborn), he opted to instead compose a satire. While he indeed addressed the major arguments and posed an effective defense of them, he made good use of naysayers to deconstruct what he had just forwarded as viable. But simply deconstructing those arguments was not enough—he needed to make it read convincingly—so ultimately Evolutionary Psychology would seem to win over in the end. While he didn’t succeed in overtly attacking Evolutionary Psychology, he did succeed in complicating the issue by giving his counter-arguments ample face time. Even though Hannibal Lecter shares only a minority of screen time in Silence of the Lambs, he certainly steals the show, and his impact reverberates. What a creepy analogy….

And, on a more practical level, subversive writers often operate in grand literary fashion without getting killed. Chaucer survived much political upheaval and still managed to get in his barbs—so too with Shakespeare. The Roman Emperor Claudius acted like a fool in his early adult life, never becoming a target for assassination. Other examples abound—not tweaking the wrong noses often means not getting killed. Also, writers can win more arguments with honey than acid splashed in their enemies’ faces. If only more students considered this adage prior to posting “OMFG I FüKIN H8T3 MY J0B!11! and my BOSS!1!!” on Facebook.
So there: honesty via dishonesty.

Context: A part of Yancey’s argument that particularly resonated with me concerns her emphasis on context transferring. Yeah, I made that term up. Basically, she argues (in two separate points on 311) that students need to understand how to transfer what they learn “from one site to another”, and how that transfer affects their compositions. At first her argument didn’t really resonate with me, but ultimately she’s recognizing a medium’s impact on the projection of compositions. For example, if I were to purchase The Beatle’s mega stereo box-set, I’d have a significantly different listening experience than if I were to have purchased the mono set, especially if my stereo—an (hopefully) effective analogue to writing mediums—has only one speaker. The differences wouldn’t be immediately tangible in every respect, however. With text, changing methods and mediums predisposes that text to manifest in different ways. I spoke with my students a bit about this phenomenon today in class, telling the tale of how my writing style changed rather drastically from when I regularly used pen to when I first began using a computer late in High School. With a pen, my hand often cramped, and I found myself searching for more concise phrases to use. Moreover, my somewhat large script fostered the illusion that I’d written a great pile. My spelling was also superior. However, I generally didn’t have as good a handle on how a longer essay should appear (it not being in front of my face, easy to scroll to), and long compositions were a much more tedious undertaking. The computer, of course, helped me become a lazy speller, a rather fast typist, and possibly a better organizer. Ultimately, the medium changes Yancey refers to are much more complex—my writing training took place in a particular time-frame, places, and social mores which all enculturated that process.

Clearly, new mediums are called for by different pressures. I feel responsible for conveying a sense of self-awareness to my students, to help them understand what compositional tool is right for which job. I’m not saying that they’re always distinct, or that we’d even want them to be, but some writer’s tools work better in different situations. Piling on the statistics when attempting to reach a general audience, for example isn’t a very good idea. Analogously, attempting to slam down a 200-page dissertation on a single web screen may result in readers having apoplectic fits. Obviously, all of these factors apply topically as well. All writing has to be put into context, but not at one to one ratios. Meaning, knowing a particular context is fine, but a single text won’t fit every context the same, nor converse with that context in the same ways. *I’m gasping for e-air*

Bottom line: I’ve whined about academic fields not really talking to one another in meaningful ways for many years (maybe brought on by a sense of paranoia rather than any real understanding of pan academic communication), but Yancey seems to go further than academics. However, I’m apprehensive about her “real world” distinctions she draws between academic writing contexts and other contexts. I hope that her approach fosters connecting contexts, rather than denoting one as real and another as…not…real. I’d like to think that she (we) is on the right track.