Humanities: 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.

While walking an introductory class through a close reading of "The Defense of Fort McHenry" (better known as "The Star-Spangled Banner,") I noted that a student had wondered whether the appearance of "In God We Trust" on US currency had anything to do with the inclusion of a similar phrase, "In God is our Trust," in the poem that became the U.S. national anthem.

I confessed to the student that I didn't know the answer, and suggested that the next time a thought like that occurs to her, I'd love to have her share her findings with the class.

An hour or so later, that student showed up outside my office, with a printout from the U.S. Department of Treasury website, having found (and highlighted) the answer. 

That wasn't the only reason she wanted to see me, but I was still happy that she had taken the initiative to follow up on a class discussion, and that she wanted to share with me what she had found.

The other poem I chose for the day was Jabberwocky, which I've known by heart since high school, so it was a lot of fun to do the oral interpretation while supporting a quick-and-dirty reading of Carroll's famous nonsense poem as a version the hero's quest, and Alice's discussion with Humpty Dumpty as a spoof of the scholastic tendency to consult an authority (Humpty Dumpty, who "can explain all the poems that ever were in­ vented -- and a good many that haven't been invented just yet"), rather than encouraging Alice's instinctive reaction: "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas -- only I don't exactly know what they are!"

This message arrived in my in box today. The author gave me permission to answer it here.

It must have been fate that led me to your site which I perused with great interest. Please allow me to introduce myself. I am a 57 year old male, separated after nearly 27 years of marriage, now retired due to a chronic disability. Formerly I was a high technology executive recruiter, prior to that radio disc-jockey. Graduating from Leland Powers School of Radio, Television and Theatre as class president. 

It was my ambition to become a stage actor.  Life had other plans for me. Always being smitten with the written and spoken word I began chronicling some of my adventures and experiences. More than one of my acquaintances suggested I submit my work to publishers. Having entered a small number of contests which have not resulted in lucrative six-figure advances striking fear into the hearts of John Grisham and J.K. Rowling, I quickly realized that I don't know what in the world I am doing.

Having a desire to use language effectively is not enough to be a published author I  soon found. I was told to submit queries, get an agent, find an editor... My question to you is how do I know if I should even go to all the toil and trouble when I don't even know if anything I have to say could be appreciated by potential readers.

As an avid reader with eclectic tastes I sometimes wonder how a given work receives the Nobel Prize in literature. "How can this be?" I wonder after reading some tedious, bloated never-ending tome of drivel.

Thank you in advance for taking the time to hear me out. Any comments and suggestions will be greatly appreciated. -- Anonymous

I wrote several short stories and two novels as a young man, though I never made any serious attempt at selling them. All my recent efforts have been scholarly (where the rewards I sought were visibility and credibility, since part of my job description includes engaging in scholarly pursuits).

While I don't teach a whole class in creative writing, I do regularly advise creative writing majors to refer to a book like Writer's Market (updated with a new edition each year, listing the contact information for agents, the going rates for various publications, etc.). You can probably find a copy in a local library or you can pick up an older edition at a used book store.  Both the library and the local bookstore can help you find numerous other books that introduce the writing profession to curious newcomers.

A mid-range solution might be to look for a writer's conference in your genre (thriller, fantasy, etc.), and attend the workshops where you can hear from recently published writers.  Your local public library or a local community college might be a good place to start making local contacts.  It looks like the person who sent in this question has valuable experience in business and technology, which might be of great use to another writer who is working on a corporate thriller.  Local conferences are great opportunities to form a community of like-minded writers who can swap manuscripts and help each other develop their ideas.

You might attend a talk given by a local author (lots of bookstores or coffee houses will regularly schedule such talks), and just ask the guest speaker for their editor's contact information. (It would be polite if you also bought a copy of their book, too! Even if you don't like the genre, you can give it to someone who would.)

I would be cautious about publishers who promise to publish your work as long as you pay them a fee.  That publisher is more interested in making money off of you than in promoting and selling your book.

Nevertheless, a good editor's services are valuable, so if you are willing to pay an established editor to give you honest professional feedback, that would be a good way to determine your chances.

A long-term solution, which involves an investment of time and money, would be to go back to school and take some creative writing classes. My own school, Seton Hill University, has a master's program in writing popular fiction.  You meet in person for a week or so in January and July, but otherwise the program is online.

Sometimes the WPF program asks me to help evaluate student presentations, but I'm not otherwise involved with it. I do highly recommend it.

 

Some thoughtful development of a powerful meme in cyberculture studies, from Henry Jenkins:

Talking about digital natives and digital immigrants tends to exagerate the gaps between adults, seen as fumbling and hopelessly out of touch, and youth, seen as masterful. It invites us to see contemporary youth as feral, cut off from all adult influences, inhabiting a world where adults sound like the parents in the old Peanuts cartoons -- whah, whah, whah, whah -- rather than having anything meaningful to say to their offspring. In the process, it disempowers adults, encouraging them to feel helpless, and thus justifying their decision not to know and not to care what happens to young people as they move into the on-line world.

In reality, whether we are talking about games or fan culture or any of the other forms of expression which most often get associated with digital natives, we are talking about forms of cultural expression that involve at least as many adults as youth. Fan culture can trace its history back to the early part of the 20th century; the average gamer is in their twenties and thirties. These are spaces where adults and young people interact with each other in ways that are radically different from the fixed generational hierarchies affiliated with school, church, or the family.

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.

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.

The Double-Tongued Dictionary cited one of my blog entries as a source for the word "quizzam," which is a word I use to let students know that a scheduled quiz might be harder than they expect.

That blog entry was actually written in iambic pentameter, since I wrote it on my annual "Blog in Blank Verse Day."

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

Excellent three-part post from Lisa Spiro. People, this is the kind of thing Vannevar Bush imagined scholars would do when he dreamed up the Memex -- saving each other time by sharing annotated lists.  This blog has landed on my RSS list.  Part 1 and Part 2 are up; I'll add the link to Part 3 when it appears.  (Update: Part 3)

I love reading year-end summaries and lists. Even if the judgments can seem arbitrary, such lists let me know about things I missed and remind me of what matters. Here I offer my own impressions of significant goings-on in and around digital humanities in 2007. Since a lot happened this year, I'll divide these musings into 3 posts. Post 1 will focus specifically on digital humanities initiatives; post 2 on mass digitization, reading, and scholarly communications; and post 3 will examine databases, virtual reality, social networking, and "green" digital humanities, as well as present some simple stats on the ideas that generated the most buzz. Please see http://del.icio.us/lms4w/DH2007 for links to all of the papers and web sites mentioned here (links are also embedded in the post, of course).

Language Log quotes a recent paper:

In the spring of 2004, a number of middle and high school teachers enrolled in a graduate linguistics class for teachers noted that their students at certain city schools were using yo in place of he or she. The authors collected spontaneous occurrences of the pronoun and then designed several writing activities and sentence judgment tasks. The tasks were administered to more than 200 students in two unrelated schools in Baltimore. It was clear from the results that students in these two schools use yo as a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun, primarily in subject position.

Jay Dixit, in Psychology Today, surveys research that considers dreams to be the brain's training grounds for real-world emergencies.

The idea that dreams are a dojo for perfecting waking activities fits well with what is already known about practice. Mental rehearsal through visualization improves skills, enhances learning, and changes the brain, polishing performance in almost any domain, from sports to piano playing.

The single most pervasive theme in dreaming is that of being chased or attacked. Just as athletes in training repeat parts of their performance, we may, in our nightmares, be attacked and chased over and over again, not to solve a particular problem but to actually practice efficient escape behavior.

Saber-toothed tigers no longer stalk our villages, but Stone Age themes still rule our dreams. "Nowadays, the evolutionary footprint is clearest in the dreams of children, who often dream about being chased by monsters, much the same way we were once chased by predators," says Revonsuo. As life has evolved, so have the threats we rehearse. "You insert a modern danger into that ancestral key and get a bizarre combination," says Revonsuo. "We dream of being chased, shot, or robbed, getting into traffic accidents, a burglar in our house, or perhaps smaller mishaps such as losing our wallets--and that prepares us for our waking life."