Okay, so stupid Google won't let me respond in full (too much text) so here's the continuation of my responses for the second post.
Scott et al:
Indeed! In the case of new media, I wish I could use the cliché “Times they are a’ changing,” but I’d be a decade too late for my part. An older friend of mine told me at a conference, “the internet is the future,” meaning specifically that we academics (he being an old IBM mainstay in his seventies) should get with the program and hit the internet wave while it’s still rising. It’s funny to think about it like that (the internet as a novelty still), but for some reason what he said didn’t seem incredibly dated to me at first. I suppose my knee-jerk reaction dates me in some respects.
I started thinking about attention in regards to technology (and not just writing technology) when I was trying to (yet again) wrap my head around the full implications of new media as new media. When I think about new media, I free associate “computers.” Since computers are a kind of multi tool—maybe even an über tool—it occurred to me that our thought processes (and ludic engagement such as point and click superseding scrawl and erase) are increasingly dominated by computer time. Time certainly isn’t the only dimension at play, but it seems apt to wonder at how our work process is affected by loading programs, saving, printing, and all of the other interactive minutiae involved. The short (though incomplete) answer is that computers are flippin’ fast. That speed on one hand helps me, personally, to commit more thoughts to paper than I could even begin to eke out in pencil. On the other hand, I’m not as immediately considerate of what I type (maybe my blog posts so far are a good indication of that, hrhrhrhr). Naturally, there are tons of other components involved even in this one crappy example. What we gain and lose will partially depend on individual practice, but mediums predispose—rather than predetermine—particular sorts of products. The best way I can explain my thoughts on this are through guitar noises (*sigh*). Much easier to play blazing leads on an electric with lower gauge strings, but sometimes the rich boom of the acoustic carries a desirable resonance. Maybe it’s the same with writing mediums. Maybe I’m out of my mind. Or both?
I sort of wonder if Walter Benjamin—in regards to his ideas on authenticity and mechanical reproduction—is haunting me. I’m not even sure that I agree with him. I’m stressed at the potential “fast food” implications of mass-produced language, but I don’t think that we should clip a bird’s wings just because we perceive it flies more wildly the higher it gets. Good grief I’m full of bullcrap metaphors today.
Understanding the potential disjoint between new media writing and old media techniques is important for me (I think) as a teacher, but also as a student. However, I’m long gone from the days of handwritten essays, scrawled in my own blood and drool, and I can’t say that I’d really ever want to go back. Though, I do think it’s important to consider just how transitioning from one medium to another affects writing, since so many students come from diverse technology backgrounds. Maybe that I way I can explain the benefits of writing essays in long prose versus “IDK.” Though I guess it would be pretty lol to see something like that.
I suppose my projected ambivalence towards the idea of new media can be best explained as me being crotchety. Not so much being cranky, but rather like someone who has lost something, knows he has lost it, but can’t quite put his finger on what went missing. Gah, I’m venturing too far out into the waters of aesthetics. In any case, I don’t really believe that life without computers would be simpler: just complicated in different ways. I must admit that the idea of “going back” is simultaneously terrifying and revolting (and yes a bit whimsical too—how Janus-faced I am). There’s no going back, even if Snake Pliskin turns off all electricity in the world ala Escape from L.A.—we’d just have to learn to cope with a writing world post computers, which we would probably find as a unique challenge altogether. I seriously don’t want to go back to using those dorky pencil grippers, though some of them did have cool colors.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Relationships with Computers: Going the Distance!
I still remember, from all those years ago, my very first computer experience. Booting up the system—waiting for the system to boot—waiting more—hearing screeching noises—waiting more—growing angry—getting hungry—hearing the lunch bell—going to lunch—coming back—waiting for the system to boot—smelling ozone—rebooting the system: hours later, we had the classroom Apple up and running! Maybe the term “classroom” isn’t grandiose enough. “School” computer is probably more descriptive. Maybe even “town” would work. Despite growing up in a very small town and attending a small school, competition for use of the newfangled machine was intense. The novelty took awhile to wear off, though it did. Somewhere along the line dying on the Oregon Trail lost its glitz.
Growing up in a relatively low tech part of America, computers seemed like unattainable objects of supreme power and status. Nobody owned one—it could cost more than a thousand (!) dollars. Not only that, but they seemed utterly impractical. Sure, one could type, but that’s what typewriters were for. Being a creature of either too little imagination or too much at the worst possible moment, I could think of fewer than five tasks that one could possibly use a computer for: games, typing, number crunching—okay, fewer than four tasks. To make matters worse, it seemed to take hours to start the damn things. In short, they were toys for schools and scientists.
It wasn’t until I was in the 7th grade before I’d even heard of a PC, but already by this time the uses of computers were being made manifest to me. If necessity is the mother of invention, it’s also the mother of having to learn to type when the teacher assigns you four pages of text to copy. Matters only got worse as I grew older.
More out of fear than a sense of responsibility, I decided to take a typing class my freshman year of high school. Our instructor was most of the time disarmingly kind, but a fierce battle-hardened matron of oppression when in class. Ms. Fine was what many would term “old school,” and her singular task was to make typists out of the sorry lot of us. Armed with smelly old HPs, black on green text, and WordPerfect, we ventured forth on our first typing lessons: [Program a metronome at 70-80 BMP] “Jay jay jay space, atch atch atch…Jay jay jay, atch atch atch…Jay Jay JAY, atch atch atch, jaaaay jay jay, atch atch atch RETURRRN!” she would trill. On and on we went like this for months and months, and being on a computer lost its novelty again. Though, probably out of any “skill” I learned in high school—since I never took wood shop—Ms. Fine’s typing course was by far the most useful.
My parents eventually bought a computer so that all of us could theoretically function in the increasingly e-oriented nineties (which were waning fast by now). I began doing more and more work on the computer, typing instead of handwriting. This process enacted a slow but major change. My impeccable spelling atrophied, I grew more loquacious on paper with my thoughts, and I started seeing writing products as wholes, not just as paragraphs strung together. It seemed as if a bigger picture had been revealed to me.
Eventually, computers became a ubiquitous technology in my work and play time. They blurred the boundaries of workspace, living space, and play space. Not only that, but they seemed absolutely crucial to success—so much so, that having one break meant having to buy another to fill the gap (despite the heavy financial burden). Not even televisions shared such priority, or even vehicles. The internet—at first a novelty in its own right—became the juggernaut that dominated communication and commerce giving us the ability to be both everywhere at once and imprisoned in only one place, tied to a box.
Despite its rather sedentary requirements (one must sit or stand still in front of a computer to use it), moving faster became the medium’s obsession. Typing allowed me to write much more quickly, more voluminously in much less time with much less pain. Tasks that were once relegated to other mediums were now almost exclusively conducted through the computer, mail being the most exceptional example. Computers for me became the “do everything” technology, and it was almost all in an effort, a gasping one at that, in keeping up.
I heard somebody say (maybe in 597 actually…or was it at the 302 meeting?) that email conveys a (false) sense of urgency. As a managing editor of a relatively small regional academic journal, I can attest to having a vast reserve of this feeling. With dozens of messages arriving each day from members with a variety of demands, I feel weighed heavily by the need to get to them all at once. Of course, this lack of system breaks down, and so does “productivity,” at least in the electronic age sense. And even where I think I’m trendy, I find rapidly that I’m actually quite dated by my e-malapropisms. A Cougar Quest student of mine recommended that I use IDK for the Tolkien creative writing class I teach via MUSH (Multi-User Simulated Hallucination—think old school text-based RPG on the computer with green on black text and vague cardinal directions, such as “obvious exits are NORTH and WEST). I had never even heard the term IDK until yesterday in 597. I should feel lucky that I didn’t open my evals until right after class. I might’ve ignored its significance.
It’s sort of scary to think of it this way, but every class I teach is affected and effected by computer technology. It’s a strange system with a great proportion of feedback—effecting trends that affect itself, computer technology seems to reinvent, in some manner or another, at a very rapid pace. I try to use different technologies every semester, which on one hand keeps me on my toes and makes teaching no two classes the same, but on the other makes it difficult to find the right pedagogical tools for the right jobs.
The increased ceiling for speed and multi-tasking proportionally increases its capacity to endure change by making itself invaluable. Wow—that last passage reads like gibberish. Let me try again: Computer technology has helped free our attention by reallocating it elsewhere, so that should we find ourselves bereft of it for any reason, readjusting our attention could become a serious problem, both in terms of habits and available resources. Who has a typewriter lying around, or the time to write a 20 page seminar paper in pencil? Maybe everyone has these things, or things like these things. But standards of living are hard to change, especially when our perception indicates that change in the “wrong” or “backwards” direction. Unlike many other technologies, computers adapt to shifting needs, expanding their repertoire. Pens, for example, still do what pens have done (for the most part) for the past thousands of years. When I first saw a computer, I never imagined anything like the internet was possible, much less than Skype (it’s like a Star Trek viewing screen!).
It’s difficult to precisely quantify just what exactly I use computer technology for in a pedagogical context (or any other for that matter). Aside from my own grading, presentation, and research materials, I’ve made using computers a requirement for my courses. This requirement seems natural, especially given how widespread it is. On other hand, computer literacy isn’t necessarily as widespread. It’s obvious to state that not everyone has the same access and experience to particular technologies, but the implications of this fact are heavy. As an instructor, I often don’t feel very technology literate in some contexts, and I’m sure many of the students in my courses feel the same. I feel as if I’m asking students to use a tool that I don’t quite know how to properly wield. So when using computer technology, I often wonder if we are in effect using wrenches to nail in wall tacks.
“Right tool for the right job” adages notwithstanding, computer technology literacies are ubiquitous, and it’s my responsibility as a teacher to make them applicable. However, that applicability need not derail the work of a semester. If an integrated approach just doesn’t work, sometimes abandoning it in favor of something else is better than slogging through an entire semester. Of course, that kind of shift produces problems in its own right, such as spending more time on figuring out technology rather than teaching or writing. However, as technological changes continue to rapidly mount (in some respects more so than others) and the demands for a varied computer literacy increase, adaptability may be as valuable a composition tool as any.
Growing up in a relatively low tech part of America, computers seemed like unattainable objects of supreme power and status. Nobody owned one—it could cost more than a thousand (!) dollars. Not only that, but they seemed utterly impractical. Sure, one could type, but that’s what typewriters were for. Being a creature of either too little imagination or too much at the worst possible moment, I could think of fewer than five tasks that one could possibly use a computer for: games, typing, number crunching—okay, fewer than four tasks. To make matters worse, it seemed to take hours to start the damn things. In short, they were toys for schools and scientists.
It wasn’t until I was in the 7th grade before I’d even heard of a PC, but already by this time the uses of computers were being made manifest to me. If necessity is the mother of invention, it’s also the mother of having to learn to type when the teacher assigns you four pages of text to copy. Matters only got worse as I grew older.
More out of fear than a sense of responsibility, I decided to take a typing class my freshman year of high school. Our instructor was most of the time disarmingly kind, but a fierce battle-hardened matron of oppression when in class. Ms. Fine was what many would term “old school,” and her singular task was to make typists out of the sorry lot of us. Armed with smelly old HPs, black on green text, and WordPerfect, we ventured forth on our first typing lessons: [Program a metronome at 70-80 BMP] “Jay jay jay space, atch atch atch…Jay jay jay, atch atch atch…Jay Jay JAY, atch atch atch, jaaaay jay jay, atch atch atch RETURRRN!” she would trill. On and on we went like this for months and months, and being on a computer lost its novelty again. Though, probably out of any “skill” I learned in high school—since I never took wood shop—Ms. Fine’s typing course was by far the most useful.
My parents eventually bought a computer so that all of us could theoretically function in the increasingly e-oriented nineties (which were waning fast by now). I began doing more and more work on the computer, typing instead of handwriting. This process enacted a slow but major change. My impeccable spelling atrophied, I grew more loquacious on paper with my thoughts, and I started seeing writing products as wholes, not just as paragraphs strung together. It seemed as if a bigger picture had been revealed to me.
Eventually, computers became a ubiquitous technology in my work and play time. They blurred the boundaries of workspace, living space, and play space. Not only that, but they seemed absolutely crucial to success—so much so, that having one break meant having to buy another to fill the gap (despite the heavy financial burden). Not even televisions shared such priority, or even vehicles. The internet—at first a novelty in its own right—became the juggernaut that dominated communication and commerce giving us the ability to be both everywhere at once and imprisoned in only one place, tied to a box.
Despite its rather sedentary requirements (one must sit or stand still in front of a computer to use it), moving faster became the medium’s obsession. Typing allowed me to write much more quickly, more voluminously in much less time with much less pain. Tasks that were once relegated to other mediums were now almost exclusively conducted through the computer, mail being the most exceptional example. Computers for me became the “do everything” technology, and it was almost all in an effort, a gasping one at that, in keeping up.
I heard somebody say (maybe in 597 actually…or was it at the 302 meeting?) that email conveys a (false) sense of urgency. As a managing editor of a relatively small regional academic journal, I can attest to having a vast reserve of this feeling. With dozens of messages arriving each day from members with a variety of demands, I feel weighed heavily by the need to get to them all at once. Of course, this lack of system breaks down, and so does “productivity,” at least in the electronic age sense. And even where I think I’m trendy, I find rapidly that I’m actually quite dated by my e-malapropisms. A Cougar Quest student of mine recommended that I use IDK for the Tolkien creative writing class I teach via MUSH (Multi-User Simulated Hallucination—think old school text-based RPG on the computer with green on black text and vague cardinal directions, such as “obvious exits are NORTH and WEST). I had never even heard the term IDK until yesterday in 597. I should feel lucky that I didn’t open my evals until right after class. I might’ve ignored its significance.
It’s sort of scary to think of it this way, but every class I teach is affected and effected by computer technology. It’s a strange system with a great proportion of feedback—effecting trends that affect itself, computer technology seems to reinvent, in some manner or another, at a very rapid pace. I try to use different technologies every semester, which on one hand keeps me on my toes and makes teaching no two classes the same, but on the other makes it difficult to find the right pedagogical tools for the right jobs.
The increased ceiling for speed and multi-tasking proportionally increases its capacity to endure change by making itself invaluable. Wow—that last passage reads like gibberish. Let me try again: Computer technology has helped free our attention by reallocating it elsewhere, so that should we find ourselves bereft of it for any reason, readjusting our attention could become a serious problem, both in terms of habits and available resources. Who has a typewriter lying around, or the time to write a 20 page seminar paper in pencil? Maybe everyone has these things, or things like these things. But standards of living are hard to change, especially when our perception indicates that change in the “wrong” or “backwards” direction. Unlike many other technologies, computers adapt to shifting needs, expanding their repertoire. Pens, for example, still do what pens have done (for the most part) for the past thousands of years. When I first saw a computer, I never imagined anything like the internet was possible, much less than Skype (it’s like a Star Trek viewing screen!).
It’s difficult to precisely quantify just what exactly I use computer technology for in a pedagogical context (or any other for that matter). Aside from my own grading, presentation, and research materials, I’ve made using computers a requirement for my courses. This requirement seems natural, especially given how widespread it is. On other hand, computer literacy isn’t necessarily as widespread. It’s obvious to state that not everyone has the same access and experience to particular technologies, but the implications of this fact are heavy. As an instructor, I often don’t feel very technology literate in some contexts, and I’m sure many of the students in my courses feel the same. I feel as if I’m asking students to use a tool that I don’t quite know how to properly wield. So when using computer technology, I often wonder if we are in effect using wrenches to nail in wall tacks.
“Right tool for the right job” adages notwithstanding, computer technology literacies are ubiquitous, and it’s my responsibility as a teacher to make them applicable. However, that applicability need not derail the work of a semester. If an integrated approach just doesn’t work, sometimes abandoning it in favor of something else is better than slogging through an entire semester. Of course, that kind of shift produces problems in its own right, such as spending more time on figuring out technology rather than teaching or writing. However, as technological changes continue to rapidly mount (in some respects more so than others) and the demands for a varied computer literacy increase, adaptability may be as valuable a composition tool as any.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
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.
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.
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