Culture: January 2008 Archive Page

Jennifer Howard (Chronicle)

The guidelines recommend 12 methods for achieving those goals. "Extensive and diverse reading requirements" leads the list. Instructors should also make sure their students study literary terminology and critical approaches, and that they practice critical reading as well as doing their own creative and critical writing.

"Close reading of literary works and student manuscripts is the central mechanism in creative writing courses," the guidelines say, and that skill should enable students "to learn craft strategies, discern authorial intentions, and deepen the pleasure they take in the work."

A bit more surprising is the next recommendation: memorization. "For the study of poetry," the AWP says, "memorization is the ultimate close reading."

The remaining recommendations cover familiar writing-program territory and include workshopping, revising, and the importance of written feedback from instructors. Grades "should be given for most assignments," the guidelines recommend. Students also should have a chance to experiment with new-media technologies.

The guidelines will be posted on the AWP's Web site sometime in February.

I'd love to link to the full guidelines directly, but it looks like we'll need to wait until they go online.

Yesterday, I beefed up an old handout as part of my effort to introduce "Close Reading" to my "Intro to Literary Study" class.

A close professional contact who regularly takes on student interns shared this list of guidelines, which she has found necessary to include when orienting a new intern to the routine of office work.

Although the site is a non-profit educational organization, and thus the environment is more relaxed and forgiving than it might be in the typical business setting, I have seen student interns wearing sweats over a team uniform (with bags of gear piled in the corner).

Millennial students are very social creatures, and they are used to being able to choose how to channel their enthusiasm and interests. Students who are used to multi-tasking may be tempted to fill up slow spots with Facebook or Youtube, which may be acceptable in a work-study position that asks them to check out library books or just make sure people don't vandalize the computer labs. But most entry-level jobs require stretches of solitary vigilance -- by the telephone in the front office, in the hall waiting to escort a visitor to and from a meting, or simply waiting to get a word in edgewise while their immediate supervisor conducts routine business with a constant stream of customers or co-workers.

Seeing exactly what my contact felt had to be spelled out is a useful starting point for the professional development component of my "Intro to Literary Study" class.

1. The Center's daily dress code is casual business attire--no jeans or sports clothing.
2. The dress code for Center events is formal business attire, i.e. suit.
3. When you are working, friends may not visit you.
4. Cell phone use during work is strongly discouraged.
5. You are expected to focus on your work, make good use of your time, and avoid interrupting your supervisor or fellow students unnecessarily.
6. Please greet visitors, welcome them to the Center and ask how you can help.
7. When answering telephones, please use this format:  "Hello. You have reached [ORGANIZATION NAME]. [YOUR NAME] speaking. How may I help you?"
8. If you are stuck on a project or need direction, you are expected to make this known in a timely manner.
9. Remember that no task is too small. All tasks are important to the functioning of the Center. You are expected to do your best work on all assignments, and to contribute to the smooth functioning of the Center.
10. Team work is important to the success of all Center events. All interns are expected to take part in planning major events and to contribute ideas for carrying out projects effectively. When possible, you will have opportunities for decision-making and supervision.
11. Interns are expected to act professionally in representing the Center to other departments or even people from outside the University.
12. If you are unable to work during your scheduled hours, you must communicate this to your supervisor in a timely manner. Missing work or events without communicating with the supervisor is not acceptable or professional behavior.
13. You are expected to keep all work areas neat and organized. File folders are to be returned to their proper places before you leave work.
14. You are expected to document progress in planning and carrying out activities on the proper forms in the event folders.
15. You should maintain a folder under your name (Smith, Mary Spr08) on the Center computer that you use. Projects should be organized within your folder by title so that you supervisor or another student staff member can access materials in your absence. You should log in under the account provided to you, not your own account.

Great satire from The Onion.

Breaking News: Series Of Concentric Circles Emanating From Glowing Red Dot

Filed away to read on a rainy day (after I've cleared some big projects from my to do list): Jonathan Bate

The original manuscripts of Shakespeare's works do not survive: the sole extant composition in his hand is a single scene from Sir Thomas More, a multi-authored play that cannot really be described as 'his'. Shakespeare only survives because his works were printed.

The scholarly editing of Shakespeare began in the eighteenth century, when the model for such activity was the treatment of the classic literary and historical texts of ancient Greece and Rome. The recovery of those texts had been at the core of the humanist Renaissance. The classical procedure was to establish which surviving manuscript was the oldest, the aim being to get as close as possible to the lost original, weeding out the errors of transcription which had been introduced by successive scribes in the centuries before the advent of print. As Shakespeare began to be treated like a classic, the same procedure was applied to his texts. The eighteenth century also witnessed his rise to the status of national genius, icon of pure inspiration. That image required the imagining of a single perfect original for each play. Shakespeare couldn't be allowed second thoughts - that would imply some deficiency in his first thoughts. So it was that over time, there emerged a preference for early texts over later ones and a belief that the editor's job was to restore a single lost original, something approximating to the text as it came 'pure' from the hand of Shakespeare.

We are very unlikely ever to recover the manuscripts of the plays as Shakespeare originally wrote them (the ambition of the 'new bibiographers'). In the absence of surviving promptbooks, let alone dictographic or video records, we will never recover the plays as they were first performed (the ambition of the 'Oxford revisionists').

All plays change in time, metamorphosing as they go from writing to rehearsal to performance to revival. Many agencies (the playwright and his collaborators, the actors, the book-keepers and scribes, the compositors and proof-readers) were involved in the creation of what we call a Shakespearean text. Despite a hundred years of advanced bibliographic investigation, there is still a remarkable lack of scholarly consensus about the nature of the copy for many of Shakespeare's plays.... Perhaps it would be best to abandon the idea that any one text represents the 'definitive' version of a Shakespeare play. After all, the quest for a 'definitive' text, based on a 'single lost original', was premised on the principles of classical and Biblical textual criticism. It is not necessarily appropriate for more modern literary and especially dramatic texts.

Of course it's not scientific, but it's fun. Virgil Griffith:

Ever read a book (required or otherwise) and upon finishing it thought to yourself, "Wow. That was terrible. I totally feel dumber after reading that."? I know I have. Well, like any good scientist, I decided to see how well my personal experience matches reality. How might one do this?

Well, here's one idea.

1. Get a friend of yours to download, using Facebook, the ten most popular books at every college (manually -- as not to violate Facebook's ToS). These ten books are indicative of the overall intellectual milieu of that college.
2. Download the average SAT/ACT score for students attending every college.
3. Presto! We have a correlation between books and dumbitude (smartitude too)! Books <=> Colleges <=> Average SAT Scores
4. Plot the average SAT of each book, discarding books with too few samples to have a reliable average.
5. Post the results on your website, pondering what the Internet will think of it.

Interesting historical anecdote of an early attempt to make an artistic statement with photography, using visual elements that were acceptable in painting, but considered controversial in photography: Rejlander's "Two Ways of Life."  (via Metafilter). Useful, perhaps, as a point of comparison for what happens when video games cross the line, and attempt to make serious, or shocking, or deliberately provocative, treatments of issues that are, if not universally accepted, nevertheless commonplace in movies.

Shown in 1857 at an exhibition in Manchester, it provoked considerable controversy. Victorians were quite used to the portrayal of nakedness in paintings and sculptures, but photographs were so true to life that even though the posing was discreet, this was too much.

Michael Bracken offers practical tips to new writers. Later this week I'll begin teaching Seton Hill's "Intro to Literary Study" class again... it's often the first class in which the English majors get a taste of what it means to write fiction for a college-level class. That means I emphasize basic stuff such as how to punctuate quoted speech, and the difference between "correcting the mistakes your teacher has circled for you" and "improving a draft through revision."  But Bracken offers an even more basic set of gripes.

New writers often ask questions about how to format manuscripts, and established writers and editors provide a variety of opinions about the "right" way and the "wrong" way to do it. I happen to prefer the format established post-typewriter/pre-personal computer, but I realize time, technology, and training changes everything.

I'm no Luddite. I worked for a large book and periodical publisher that was accepting electronic manuscripts back in the 1980s before Macintoshes existed and when electronic manuscripts arrived on 8" Wang disks that truly were floppy! I worked with and taught GenCode, a precursor to today's generic mark-up languages (HTML, SGML, etc.)., and today I write, edit, and design printed and electronic publications using a variety of word processing and page layout programs on both Macintoshes and Windows-based PCs.

So allow me a moment to play crabby editor while I bitch about a few of the most common mistakes I see writers make when preparing electronic manuscripts, and my complaints have nothing to do with font or typesize.

I've got a pounding headache and I'm typing this while stretched out on my sickbed in the basement (where my wife banishes me every time I get ill).  I'm sure this isn't a relapse of the pneumonia that laid me low last term, but I'm not at all happy that this is hitting me on the last weekend before the spring term starts.  When I'm sick, the part of my brain that does objective evaluation shuts down, so I'm no good at grading papers or figuring out whether this assignment should be worth 5% or 10% of the course grade.  But I can philosophize and ruminate.  I suppose this will help me deal with the anxiety I feel over getting sick (again).

After students have had the chance to revise a few essays, I ask for a show of hands as I ask a series of questions...

1. "How many of you find it easy to fix all the mistakes I mark?"
2. "How many of you find it easy identify and fix errors in the passages that I haven't marked?"
3. "How many of you prefer to have someone else catch the mistakes for you?"
4. "Now imagine you are the editor of a magazine, and you have two submissions on your desk. Both are about the same quality. One has typos in almost every line, and you'll have to spend hours getting it ready for publication. The other submission has no glaring technical errors, and looks like it would be ready to go almost immediately. Which one would you publish?"

I've done that in the past, as part of my attempt to get students to pay attention to, and take advantage of the opportunity when their professor gives them the opportunity to revise a paper. I first thought I should blog Bracken's essay because I wanted my students to be able to read it, but now I'm not so sure. 

One of the biggest frustrations about being a writing teacher is that many students don't take full advantage of the opportunity to revise.  If a student's draft is patchy and full of typos, then instead of spending my time engaging with the student's ideas, I spend it circling typographical errors and noting missing words, and I never get to spend that deep time talking about a student's ideas. (Yes, I can add a few lines after the final draft comes in, but I know students are most motivated to learn from detailed comments when they are working on a final draft. If they have, in their minds, "finished" a paper, I have to shift into a much more general "Next time, try doing more of this and less of that," rather than actually carrying on a conversation with them about the ideas they have raised.

But I worry that perhaps my desire to get students to value the revision process has instead come across as an attempt to tear them down. 

Making the shift to college can be shocking.  Many who have a talent for language have coasted through high school English -- where teachers rewarded students for using fancy vocabulary words, for being able to summarize the plot of the literary works they read and for demonstrating an ability to apply the stories to their own lives.  For many students who are just starting out college, only the dumb or lazy students have to work hard to earn good grades; the ones who are "bright" and "smart" get those good grades naturally. So they can be shocked to find out that being "bright" doesn't earn you many points, and even "smart" kids have to work to earn a B.

This lesson is not a particularly pleasant one to teach. Professional editors have every right to be frustrated by newbie authors whose simple mistakes waste time.  As a teacher, it's my job to help get those newbies ready for the real world, where crabby editors don't always have time to be nice when they say "no."  One of my teaching personas is the crabby editor, though I try to reserve that for the upper-level students who should know better.

I thought initially that Bracken's blog entry would permit me to say, "See, it's not just me being crabby, here's a successful author and influential editor saying the same things I'm trying to tell you."  But instead, I think I'll try to bring this idea out of the class via a discussion, where students call out ideas and I write them on the board.

Since it's a spring class, the students will already have had a chance to notice what their first semester was like, though they may not have had the chance to reflect on what their experiences mean. It would be faster to start with a list of dos and dont's, but rather than giving them a list of orders that they are compelled to follow, it would be much better if they could think of me as a resource for how to solve a problem.  

This kind of self-criticism is particularly challenging to students who haven't yet taken a creative writing class, and therefore haven't really experienced what a solid, meaty critique can do for their writing (once they get over the initial blow to their egos). But if I try to force this lesson on them before they're ready to hear it, they might get disillusioned, and they may not give me their best work thereafter (for fear that I'll respond too harshly).

Finding the right balance between crushing realism and uncritical praise is important enough that it's worth taking the time to do it carefully. So this year I will try drawing some collective wisdom out of the students' shared experiences.

When I went to grad school, I imagined that I would teach much the same way as I was taught -- via lectures.  But students today are far more connected with each other than students were 20 years ago.  My students are skilled at interacting with each other, and they regularly draw on their group communication skills to get all sorts of personal and social tasks done.

I feel like I'm doing my best work as a teacher when I find that the knowledge is already there, in bits and pieces, distributed across the student network.  The students may have never tried to connect the dots on their own, though they may have generated some tentative conclusions based on the parts of the big picture that they can see.

And the big picture that I need to see is that I've got to face the reality that I'm sick again, and that until I get better, I won't be able to make any meaningful progress on all the obligations I've put on hold.

Okay... now for some rest.

One hundred different people hitting a drum, from age 1 to 100. A short film by Lenka Clayton and James Price.