Comments on: The Personal

By: mike

mike — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 01:59:58 +0000

Tutor, Michelle, Joanna — yeah, the density of the language is tough. And for me, and others who are dissertating or moving towards dissertating, it’s a natural consequence, as the Tutor notes; it’s the way I’m getting closer and closer to the issues that concern me, inhabiting their vocabulary, requiring finer distinctions and nuances and a more specialized lexicon, and the deeper in I get, the harder it is to see a way out. Which is why I need to read your writing and comments, to remind myself that there’s an immense plain of discourse beyond the narrow chasm I’ve dug myself into. A professor described to me what she called the “first book” problem: after a PhD candidate has completed her dissertation, it’s incredibly difficult to lose that habit of thought that requires her to support every assertion (no matter how tiny) and lose that hyper-specialized vocabulary that allowed her to come to her conclusions, and to back-translate those conclusions into the broader language required for a first book with a more generalized audience.

I’m hoping that the focus on audience that keeping a weblog requires might make the first book problem a little easier for me.

And so, indeed, audiences and auditors. Of course, the discourse flows in multiple directions, as I’ve tried to acknowledge in recent posts re what I’ve learned from you — Tutor, Michelle, Joanna, and others — and how it’s informed my thinking. One observation that might be of interest: in my posts, I’m often trying to draw together multiple perspectives, to make connections between multiple ideas, which I think makes for a more complex language (almost like factoring for a lowest common denominator when adding fractions) than the straightforward expression of a single idea. Which (as I hint at in this recent post) connects in interesting ways to what the Tutor’s had to say about language and power in this post and its follow-ups. In some ways, Tutor, it seems like it’s carnival season again, with the teacher seated in the front row and the student behind the lectern.

By: michelle

michelle — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 00:36:28 +0000

Joanna, thanks! Encouraging to know that even people in their field are confused by some of the posts! (I can sometimes recognize a kernel of something I may have understood at one time but the “work” posts are just too far over my head for any level of comprehension.)

Blogs do evolve and readership inevitably will change. However, I find that even though topics (at times or eventually) become more esoteric as they’re making such headway in their work, I continue to read people I blogged with early on.

I’ve considered multiple blogs for different formats before but ultimately, I blog the personal more than the professional because while Mike’s struggling with the personal writing aspect, for me it’s an outlet and is as natural as drinking water. It’s probably a sign of my priorities and the purpose for blogging in my life that I’ve failed to build up a network of readers and bloggers I hit regularly who really are in my field (such as it is, fledgling that I am).

By: joanna

joanna — Sun, 03 Apr 2005 16:45:10 +0000

Michelle, I’m a teacher and I feel clueless sometimes! I read Mike, Clancy and a few others knowing that I will feel clueless and confused, but I also feel like I’m getting a free course in theories that have been growing since I was in grad school in 1990. Since I’m planning to do doctoral work in a few years, I read (and reread slowly, while misunderstanding half of it)their writing to get back into the swing, so to speak.
But your point made me wonder about audiences and blog focus. As Mike and Clancy get further into their dissertations, maybe some of their readership will change. In terms of blog focus, I’ve noticed that some bloggers have different blogs for the different parts of their lives, which has made me appreciate the sorting function that blogs facilitate, something I knew but which didn’t hit me until a few days ago. So whether I’m saying that Clancy and Mike need to have personal blogs (yup, Mike. personal)so that we can all stay in touch, or whether I’m asking if blogging doesn’t encourage a specific intellectual function, well, I dunno. I need to chew on it for awhile.
And Happy Tutor, your comments about being an auditor interest me as well, and I’ll be chewing on that for a while, too. Regarding the change in voice and commenters, all I can say is that blogging has made it more possible for someone like Mike (or me or you) to communicate ideas at all levels of academe whenever we want. And yes, I sometimes wish I had a crib sheet of theorists alongside the computer when I read the posts!
So, what I think I’m saying here is that all of this discussion has pushed me towards thinking more directly about blog audience than I have.

By: michelle

michelle — Sun, 03 Apr 2005 15:12:24 +0000

Uh, yeah– what the Tutor said. I don’t know how it happened but two years ago when I first began blogging, I gradually built a base of blogs I read no matter what and although some come and go, the base itself wound up comprising rhetoric students or teachers and the further we go, the more clueless I am as to what everyone is talking about. (Guess I’m thinking specifically about you, Krista, Clancy.)

By: The Happy Tutor

The Happy Tutor — Sun, 03 Apr 2005 14:38:53 +0000

Feel like an aged graduate, who has seen better days, slipping somehow past the security guards at the front gate of the university, and now sitting hunched down in my chair at your lectures on writing, and following you into the teacher’s lounge afterwards to listen in on the conversation. I am learning a great deal and am grateful that the doors are open.

What has changed on this site in the last 3 years is the “conversational density,” or disciplinary density. Now it not just Mike, but many others in the “same field,” who have read the same bibliography, speak at the same conferences, aim for the same jobs, read the same journals, and know one another face to face, within a disciplinary hierarchy of publications and status.

The selves are now professional selves, as well as personal, situated in a shared “university life world,” and on the verge of being inducted into the profession. Given the shared density of readings, vocbulary, prior conversations, the writing becomes thicker, weightier, and more imposing, even in it is informality.

So the system is producing those who reproduce it, again. As a nonacademic friend, I somehow feel lonesome, seeing the people many of whose blogs I have followed, taking on the professional stamp, absorbed in their common enterprise, talking to one another.

Two audiences, as you said in an earlier post, Mike. You also have auditors. Hope you keep us in mind too, and remember the world into which your students will graduate, a world in which almost no one has read James Britten, Cicero, Quintillian, Peter Elbow. Can we get the voices to carry, the selves created, the selves peformed to do it with the props available outside the school? Can you prepare kids to do what is so hard, to carry forward the critical readings of popular culture even as they are hired to produce and consume that culture?

By: michelle

michelle — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 23:46:10 +0000

I was certainly surprised to find my name in this post! As usual, I cannot follow your work. I have decided to be complimented that you enjoy my writing, uncomfortably or not. All this time, I thought it was my clever titles.

By: Sharon

Sharon — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 02:41:44 +0000

I agree with Nels! My first reaction was “only a person writing a dissertation would have time to think about this in so much detail.”

You’ve brought up some interesting points. As soon as I have time to follow your links and mull them over a little, I’ll get back to you on them.

I will say, though, that I don’t think any writing is above reproach. Even the most emotional of the personal memory narratives are ultimately crafted through words, and words can always be critiqued even when the life they describe cannot.

By: Lanette

Lanette — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 01:20:37 +0000

Mike, I just finished a chapter in my dissertation that began with the heading, “Just Personal.” I’m probably too close to it right now to say more, but there’s a reason my web space is called techsophist. If students are unable to situate their thoughts in some kind of context that connects to them personally, to their lives, then there should be no surprise when the resulting texts seem vacant and interchangeable. Of course they do. No one’s home.

By: mike

mike — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 00:24:50 +0000

Thanks, Nels!

By: Nels

Nels — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 21:51:27 +0000

Ah, yes, you’re certainly right about situatedness, which was not clear in my rushed comment. I guess I was making a distinction between the starting point of situatedness, whether it’s the self or audience or context or whatever, a point we actually covered today in my writing-across-the-curriculum course.

I have to say, I’m really jealous of you and Clancy and others at the dissertation stage. I remember a prof telling us that we would never have the time to think and reflect that we do when we’re dissertating, and though I was working fulltime then, he was so right.

Okay, I’m not that jealous. It’s good to be done! But keep all this writing because you will use it again. In the rush of the tenure track, the writing you have like this will sometimes save you. I certainly love reading it.