Writing: March 2008 Archive Page

Here's how I've been spending my time lately.  It's after 8pm Sunday, and I've been at work since I handed my kids off to my wife this morning right after church. 

Tomorrow morning I drop this baby off in the Provost's office.

The question is... should I add this photo to the front cover or not?

English
Program
Review
Self-Study

 

2007-08

Seton Hill University

 

A chunk of pages got caught in the hole punch, and when I pulled them out the bottom of the hole punch opened up and all these little paper dots went flying in the copy room.

As an undergraduate, I started filling a jar with paper dots, and I told myself that I'd start earning a living off my writing before I filled the jar. (I met that goal, if you can call being a starving grad student earning a living. I might even still have the half-full jar of paper dots somewhere.)

There is still work to be done on the program review, but now I get to head off to New Orleans with one less thing on my mind.

I've been making an extra effort this year to create some new worksheets designed to teach basic, stand-alone concepts in my Introduction to Literary Study class.

Here's a new worksheet to help students write a sonnet.  Below is the part they're actually supposed to submit... after that I've included the text that explains the assignment. I've already taught the basic form of the sonnet, so this is a review, but I tried to make it stand on its own.  My goal is to teach the form, rather than to encourage or reward creative expression, but I also want students to have fun.

Suggestions?  Comments?

Workbook 2-2: Write a Sonnet                                           Name ____________________________
(Bring printout to class.)

This is a poem that I wrote; Eye Contact published it a few issues ago.

 

Your retro, old-skool little song enshrines The unrelenting jackboot five-stress beat Of heel-toe thumping heel-toe bumping feet In fourteen rigid rhyming goose-step lines. What talent's there? I'll never march; I swarm! I curse your foolish rules, your chains that bind, That dare to organize my off-beat mind; For truly I don't need no steenkin' form. Why pack and prune, revise, rework, rephrase My unproof'd laundry list of angst or hate? In beatless bliss I'll blurt and bloviate And vent my emo vices in cafés. From boxy vises freed, such verse as mine Shall flow like so much screw-top Wal-Mart wine.

Scan the poem (identify the rhyme scheme and stress pattern). (Write on this page.) Note the "turning point" and identify the new idea. (Write on this page.) Identify the "main point" driven home in the final couplet. (On this page.) What can you conclude about the relationship between the imaginary speaker of the poem, and my own intentions as the author of the poem (and a teacher who asks students to write sonnets)? (Answer in a brief paragraph on the back.)

 

Part IIa:  Present your own original sonnet in the grid. You may write on a printout, or edit this file.

Part IIb:  Write a short paragraph (on the back) that explains how your poem demonstrates your knowledge of prosody (see Hamilton) and your ability to apply that knowledge in an original creative work. Explain any deliberate deviations from iambic pentameter.

From Orwell's 1984, which I'm teaching today in my History and Future of the Book class. This is an excerpt from the book-within-the-book, purportedly written by Emmanuel Goldstein.

By comparison with an existing today, all the tyrannies of the past or halfhearted and inefficient.  The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act, and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking.   Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards.  Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance.  The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further.  With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end.  Every citizen, or least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed.  The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, notice did for the first time.

I find this passage intriguing, in part because the printing press is usually seen as a tool that created an intellectual tradition (by fulfilling and extending an economic and social demand for the mass production of accurate, authoritative texts) rather than the first step in a process by which the control of the means of production shapes the thoughts of the consumers.  This passage points out the invention of the two-way telescreen as the tipping point, because in this vision the means for broadcasting over telescreens is not distributed to the masses. Even in his office, Winston Smith does not communicate by telephone, only via paper orders sent through peneumatic tubes.

If we have time, I'll introduce the students to a little bit of Michel Foucault.

So I'm sitting at Julie's place, right, having some rather delicious cherry M&Ms (which my momma could alphabetize in her belly!), when she pops up this blog by Dennis Jerz wherein I spy this quote, in response to Jeff Rice:

So students who can only remix don't get practice thinking critically about culture -- and it's certainly possible to recognize remix culture and design assignments that ask them to think critically about it, without rejecting it out of hand as plagiarism.

I hate to take up the position of the Jeopardy judge and simply say "bzzzzzz, wrong!" but... that's just wrong.

And I don't mean to hurl an insult at Dr. Jerz, but... this is a case of looking in at something from the outside (I would assume, based on the admission later in the post that Jerz knows little about music) attempting to critique something without ever getting the insider's perspective.

I would argue the exact opposite of the first portion of the quote (before the dash). But let's also be realistic; if Jerz has encountered, or thinks he will encounter, a student who can only remix, he's failed to keep track of public high schools in America.

Where to start with this one?  The "about" page says "Who am I? I'm just a guy. I've got a story like everyone."   The author claims to be "someone who spent four years teaching--and three prior to that as a TA/writing tutor--at an open admissions college" but that doesn't really help me figure out whether I am writing to a grad student who is struggling to figure out the professional landscape, a very bright undergraduate who could use some gentle instruction in tone and focus, or a professional college instructor who should know better.

Here is the comment I posted...

"that's just wrong."

Could you clarify what part of my statement you mean? Are you reacting against the part where I say "students who can only remix don't get practice thinking critically about culture," or the part where I say that it *is* possible to design remix assignments that ask them to think critically?

"And I don't mean to hurl an insult at Dr. Jerz, but..."

Let's have a conversation instead, shall we?

"he's failed to keep track of public high schools in America. Every student who makes it through that system with any success--meaning 95% of our trad students--will know how to write a five paragraph essay."

I regularly teach freshman who are fresh out of high school, and I know for a fact they can't all write a five-paragraph essay -- because if they could, they would not be in my "Basic Composition" class, they would all be in "Seminar in Thinking and Writing" (I think about a third of our students skip Basic Comp, not 95%). Perhaps the public schools where you are are much better than those where I am, or perhaps we simply disagree over what level of writing counts as acceptable. Regardless, I applaud any effort to break students out of the high-school five-paragraph-essay box, and I won't dismiss your conclusions as "wrong" simply because the experiences that inform them differ from mine.  I will, instead, ask you to clarify.

For the record, here is the thesis of my blog entry:

"It's true that one's own ideas only come after one has filtered through many other ideas. I think the problem I see in the classroom is that students find it difficult to trace details back to the source."

And here is the conclusion:

"I certainly don't feel that students should never, ever remix -- but if we graduate students who can ONLY remix, and have never been forced to trace an idea back to its source and critique its validity, but instead settle for riffing on it and referencing "www.somehomepage.com" as one of a handful of "Works Consulted," then we are doing them -- and our culture at large -- a great disservice."

Your defense of remix culture is a very good example of the thinking that makes me shake my head. I am not writing against remix; I am writing about a willingness to settle for the creative expressions of personal reactions to a text, without demonstrating the ability and willingness to explore those ideas more fully.

Before I go any farther, let me first state that I recognize that a blog entry is not the same thing as an academic paper. The rhetoric of blogs is rougher, and sometimes the invitation to rumble is what motivates us to post our ideas online.

And I also note that in the remix culture, creating and publishing that initial response can take on the role of the discovery draft, sparking conversations that help the student develop a more accurate, more thorough, more nuanced understanding of an issue.

I'm responding because "What's with the Remix Disrespect" does not merely engage with my ideas; it makes several global statements about my competence, both directly and implicitly, which I find personally distressing. This entry presumes to judge my whole career based on what I wrote in this single blog entry from 2004. It assumes a superior rhetorical stance -- first dismissing the idea of being a game-show judge, then promptly performing exactly that role; then rejecting the idea of hurling an insult, and promptly doing just that.

I find it interesting that in one passage where, instead of taking on the persona of an expert, I prefaced a statement about music by citing my source (since I can't rely on personal knowledge of what classical composers do when they quote each other), that detail surfaces in your blog as evidence of the claim that I am a cultural outsider who can't understand remix culture (which, as you know, involves far more than music).

So... my critique of the remix culture lies specifically in the convention that assumes the author's personal expression of reactions can substitute for investigating the issue.

If you would like to get a greater understanding of my attitude towards the remix culture, I invite you to search my blog for terms such as "remix," "open source," or "modding." I invite you to sample my own remix of Teletubbies and gothic poetry) or some of my found poetry exercises (poems comprised of lines taken from student blogs), or this blogger's account of a 2007 CCCC panel I co-organized, "When Student Experts Remix the Discipline: New Media in the Composition Classroom," or some of my recent articles on the blogosphere, video game history. You might also look at the websites for the courses I teach in Video Game Culture and Theory, or "The History and Future of the Book" or the 400-level studio course I teach in "New Media Projects," or the student work that you'll find via links on those sites.

While your entry refers to "a terrible fear of plagiarism," please note that my blog entry only mentions plagiarism once, in a sentence stating that remix is *not* the same thing as plagiarism -- thus, my only reference to plagiarism *agrees* with your position.

Were I writing this entry today, after four more years of watching the impact of the remix culture, I would not have written "students who can only remix don't get practice thinking critically about culture." I would have said something about how a student who remixes *well* has to understand the raw material, so a good course built around remix will have to include analysis and fact-checking.

Guardian

If generations of gloomy boys could pretend they were the next TS Eliot, then there have been plenty of gloomy girls who have their very own role model in Plath. And a very powerful role model: unlike Eliot, she succeeded in killing herself. Cue thousands of lines of self-pitying poetry without the command and talent of Plath's.

I regularly introduce poetry to freshman English majors. Some who write angsty poetry as a form of literary self-therapy are surprised to learn that there's a difference between the "I" who speaks in the poem (through a fictional character), and the identity of the poet who created the fictional character in order to achieve some artistic effect in the mind of the reader (rather than to achieve a verbal exorcism of personal demons).

They're definitely stressed. They're sleep-deprived. They may be furious (at me!).  But they're still riding the intellectual buzz that comes from finishing a research paper.

I love what happens in the classroom on the day a major assignment's due.  Students come to class after having wrestled a mess of free-write drafts and marginalia and Post-It-Notalia into some semblance of order.  In pursuit of evidence to support their thesis, they've turned to sources that aren't on the reading list, so their comments during class discussions are opportunities for them to introduce new knowledge, rather than a performance for my benefit. 

A similar thing happens in lit surveys on the day of a scheduled quiz. Because the students have spent some time re-reading and reflecting, they've noticed connections they didn't see when they were just trying to mow through the required number of pages.  The part of the class time that's not devoted to the quiz always seems a little livelier.  Yet I find reading quizzes to be confrontational and artificial. Of course, journalism students students do need practice writing under pressure, and there are courses in which the content is so voluminous and complex that regular quizzes can be an important tool for filtering and categorizing. 

So maybe quizzes are a necessary evil, in order to generate that quiz-day discussion buzz... but a quiz doesn't really teach... it doesn't really let me assess much besides quiz-taking ability... a quiz takes time away from discussion (which is what really matters in a seminar). An a quiz adds an artificial time constraint that's antithetical to everything we tell our students about how to read and write critically.  Oh... and I really hate grading quizzes... the students haven't had the time to put much soul into their work, and because they've learned the value of drafting and revising, they know they'd have been able to make their point more convincingly if they'd only had more time.  When I take the time to write prompts that will generate short answers that I'd actually be interested in reading, the short quizzes turn into "quizzams" (a word I use in order to signal to my students that they'll have to think, rather than regurgitate). 

There are other ways to check to make sure students are doing the readings... you can dictate a very general question and have them supply specific examples in a free-write for a few minutes. (The ones who didn't do the reading will spend most of the time flipping through the book -- if they brought it with them.) 

Of course, there are also the students who stay up all night to finish their paper, but are too tired to come to class.  I value the "post-paper buzz" so much that I have in the past added an explicit penalty to a major assignment grade, for students who skipped class on the day the assignment is due.  (That turned out to be more trouble than it was worth... now I just factor the student's decision into their overall class participation grade.)

By the time they've submitted their final draft, I've already seen at least the thesis paragraph and a few pages of quotes, so I can call on students who've already thought in depth about whatever sub-topic gets raised in the discussion.  More hands go up while I'm talking, and more heads nod when a peer makes a good connection. Students expecting to be quizzed come in braced for the unknown. That energy can be put to good use in a pre-quiz review session, but I don't get the idea that the effect is lasting.  On the other hand, students who come to class having just finished a research paper have a sense of accomplishment.

From Michael White, of Adaptive Complexity:

There is a particular narrative about science that science journalists love to write about, and Americans love to hear. I call it the 'oppressed underdog' narrative, and it would be great except for the fact that it's usually wrong.

The narrative goes like this:

1. The famous, brilliant scientist So-and-so hypothesized that X was true.

2. X, forever after, became dogma among scientists, simply by virtue of the brilliance and fame of Dr. So-and-so.

3. This dogmatic assent continues unchallenged until an intrepid, underdog scientist comes forward with a dramatic new theory, completely overturning X, in spite of sustained, hostile opposition by the dogmatic scientific establishment.

We love stories like this; in our culture we love the underdog, who sticks to his or her guns, in spite of heavy opposition. In this narrative, we have heroes, villains, and a famous, brilliant scientist proven wrong.

I'm sure you could pick out instances in science history where this story is true, but more often it is not.

The general public prefers to get its science, or indeed information on any advanced subject, in the form of narrative, while scientists themselves (who already know how to interpret scientific data) often find the narrative a distraction. Everyone can identify with people, so the thinking goes, so it makes sense to emphasize the narrative so that non-specialist audiences will keep reading for long enough to absorb a few facts.  The nitpicky details that are exciting to specialists are too abstract for the casual reader, just as the narrative that appeals to the intelligent general reader (a rare breed in today's culture, to be sure) bores specialists to tears.  White hits the nail on the head when he explains why our culture perpetuates these myths.

I don't mean to suggest that oversimplification is the only way to report on science, but scientists themselves can help the process along by recognizing that journalists thrive on conflict, character, and emotion. There are of course straight news stories that might present the scientific background to an timely issue, but unless there's a direct economic or political impact, or a tie-in with a movie or some other event from popular culture, chance are that a writer will have to pitch a story about a scientist as a feature or profile -- hence the focus on personality over science.

From the introduction to a great list of common errors in English (Paul Brians).

The concept of language errors is a fuzzy one. I'll leave to linguists the technical definitions. Here we're concerned only with deviations from the standard use of English as judged by sophisticated users such as professional writers, editors, teachers, and literate executives and personnel officers. The aim of this site is to help you avoid low grades, lost employment opportunities, lost business, and titters of amusement at the way you write or speak.

Some examples that make my skin crawl: being that, based around/based off of, and bias/biased.

Lindsay Waters, Inside Higher Ed:

[T]he first step to re-establishing the essay as the standard in humanistic writing is to reinvigorate the sentences we write, so that, when one reads an essay, one feels it. One feels it the way one tastes -- and here I'm going global -- a good curry. It really sets you back. Or maybe forward. Style, maniera, modo is what we readers demand. The humanists of the Renaissance knew the Romans had the ability to put sentences that had concinnitas, but that their ancestors in what we call the Middle Ages had lost that ability. When the Ancients constructed the Arch of Constantine, it stayed together for centuries, even though neglected. Concinnity -- what a splendid word!

It seems to me that when bad styling of sentences became accepted, we got used to it. We compensated for the lack of quality and impact of the sentences that people wrote as evidence of their scholarly abilities by asking them for more of them in the hopes we could get the same buzz going that we used to get from fewer sentences. Last year I ran a panel at the Modern Language Association on "Slow Reading," and today I'm advocating slow writing. Editors are in the position to make this change take place.