Robert Skidelsky’s biography of Keynes notes the importance Keynes placed on socially-based “conventional expectations” (93, emphasis in original) in the face of pervasive uncertainty, and contrasts those “conventional expectations” to the perfect-information wishful thinking of the proponents of the rational expectations hypothesis. Keynes’s insight was that what makes economics work and fail is adherence to conventional expectations and expectations of the conventional, and this is as true of social-epistemic models of knowledge work in composition as it is of economics. Collaboration as a generative activity is sustained by and generative of conventional expectations in the face of uncertainty, not by the perfect-information utopia of rational expectations. Writing is social, and exists in uncertainty: both those circumstances are what make it work.

I’m reading Jaron Lanier’s 2006 cautionary anti-crowdsourcing manifesto “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism,” and it’s interesting to look at the way he understands writing. On the one hand, in looking at “most of the technical or scientific information” on Wikipedia (I think I’d qualify that to say “much” rather than “most,” unless he’s got access to statistics he’s not citing), he notes that “specific texts get cloned from original sites at universities or labs onto wiki pages,” and such information thereby “loses part of its value” when taken out of its context of production and out of relation to its author. Fair enough: yes, I’ll certainly go with that; the notion that all writing is inherently rhetorical, and that context matters, although he seems to be performing the current-traditionalist move of privileging the primary or original (I’m resisting the urge to put that word in scare quotes) context over any subsequent context or recontextualization. (The New Critics said, implicitly, “Always dehistoricize,” to which Jameson rightly retorted, “Always historize,” to which in turn digital rhetoricians, remix artists, and others aquiver in the ecstasies of influence might respond, “Always rehistoricize.”) Of course, the critique he’s making could be leveled against the decontextualized knowledge found in any encyclopedia, and in fact it often is, implicitly, in the way that composition teachers forbid students from using encyclopedias (wiki or otherwise) as sources for research papers. It’s an interesting take on the value of writing, though; the suggestion that something is somehow worth less when it’s copied into a new context: does this work with or against the ideologies associated with the social turn in writing instruction? Against, I think: it’s a romantic ideal masquerading as a rhetorical ideal. This sense of the nature of his argument is strengthened for me when Lanier asserts that on the Web (and, implicitly, in writing), “value would flow from people” and that “value always came from connecting with real humans.” (Note the familiar romantic privileging of authenticity in the use of the word “real.”) Ultimately, in fact, writing itself becomes for Lanier an asocial act: “What I think of as real writing. . . involves articulating a perspective that is not just reactive to yesterday’s moves in a conversation.” For networked writing, that’s a pretty striking concept.

On pages 9-10 of Writing Matters, Andrea Lunsford cites a number of terms Tara Shankar invents in her 2005 dissertation, including

the key term spriting. By ’sprite,’ a portmanteau combining speaking and writing, Shankar means speaking that “yields two technologically supported representations: the speech in audible form, and the speech in visual form. Spriting, therefore, equally encompasses digital speech recorders, speech editing tools, and any speech dictation recognition tools that would use speech in addition to text as an output mode” (15). The product of spriting she identifies as a spoken document, or talkument. . . Finding that students produce talkuments collaboratively with the greatest of ease, Shankar concludes that “spriting seems to admit even closer, more integral collaborations than does writing, perhaps because spriting can more easily incorporate conversation as both planning and composition material” (236).

I find this particularly interesting as I begin the Spring semester and ask my students to engage in some brief, regular low-stakes writing; in keeping a daybook. Last semester when I did this, the daybook took a variety of forms from blog to paper journal to daily text file, and as I’m increasingly syncing my composing media (phone to laptop to index cards to notebook to work and home computers), I’m realizing that I’ll be composing via the spoken word as well as the written word, and that I should give my students the same latitude.

critique of the would-be inheritors of Paulo Freire and James Berlin.

As an antidote: Shaughnessy, Smitherman, small doses of Bartholomae. Plus a pin, one prick, to puncture that balloon of pedagogical sanctimoniousness.

As the XO for our first-year composition course, I’ve been drafting the staff syllabus, which serves as something less than a template for new instructors and as something less than a guide for veteran instructors. Textbooks and due dates for the major graded assignments are shared requirements, and there are a few readings from the handbook and the rhetoric that we ask all instructors to assign, but beyond that, it’s perhaps not as regimented as one might expect at an institution like ours.

Still, in drafting a staff FYC syllabus and preparing to sell it to incoming faculty, I’ve found myself needing to articulate to myself my core assumptions about the teaching of writing. They follow, and I’d welcome additions or arguments.

1. The course starts and ends with student writing, quite literally: writing is the first thing they do upon entering the classroom for lesson 1, and the last thing they do before leaving the classroom after lesson 40.
2. Writing is first a verb and second a noun: the activity is always foregrounded before the product.
3. Three or four major writing projects, with time taken to engage the diverse components of the processes of writing (generative writing, developing, drafting, seeking and receiving feedback, revising, editing, proofreading, publishing, reflecting) feels about right for a semester. Five feels like too many; two like too few.
4. In working with the classical canons, invention and organization always come prior to style and delivery, both at the project scale and at the semester scale. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
5. The course requires both a handbook and a rhetoric. The rhetoric often best serves the earlier functions (invention and organization), while the handbook often best serves the later functions (style and delivery). This tends to set up a rhythm in assigning readings.
6. Revision always leaves portions of writing behind. Students, like all writers, will produce writing that they do not publish. That doesn’t mean that such writing should be discarded: save it, come back to it, maybe not in this class, but later. Get students used to setting aside portions of their work.
7. Difficulty is productive, and should be acknowledged as such. When a student says, “This challenges me and I don’t know what to do,” we should take this as a point of entry rather than a roadblock. Respond: “How? Why? At what point?” Then respond: “I’d like to hear more about that. Can you write about it?” The worst writing often comes from what is taken for granted; from what is easy. The best comes out of complexity.
8. Don’t mark error at all on early drafts. (No: really: don’t.) On later or final drafts, don’t mark every error. For each essay, talk to students before they turn in a later draft about the two or three or four errors they want help with. Go to the handbook for those errors at the later-draft stages.
9. One learns to write by writing. The core focus of a course on writing is writing. The direct method of instruction seems self-evident; from those who would advocate alternative methods, I would require supporting evidence. I am suspicious of any syllabus that seeks to privilege a third text — a reader — over a rhetoric and a handbook. Such privilege indicates to me both a belief that the material of a writing course is not writing, and a belief that the writing course is a proper vehicle for indoctrination.
10. Publication is essential. Writers must have the opportunity to see readers — not just the teacher — reading and reacting to their writing. Writing has value, and the value of students’ work must be acknowledged, must be celebrated. Point blank: publication makes writing better.
11. Major assignments must have links between them. A project begun in an earlier essay should lead in some way to a later essay. Students’ written reflections on their projects should foreground those links, and instructors’ written responses to student writing must acknowledge and foster those links, as well as acknowledging students’ writings as trajectories rather than as strings of individual performances.
12. Students should self-assess, repeatedly: metacognition is essential to knowledge transfer. Ask students to write reflections about their essays on the days they turn them in. They’ll like being able to call your attention to the ways they’ve improved, and what they think is best about their essays. You’ll like the guide to grading that their reflections offer. Ask them, though, to be not only evaluative but descriptive: understanding how they write, and putting it in writing, will help them as well as you. Take their reflections seriously, and show them that you do so by engaging them and responding to them.

When I wrote my dissertation, I first thought it was going to be about socioeconomic class. But everything I thought and wrote about convinced me that class was a disguise, a facade, a mask for much deeper economic concerns that writing teachers often didn’t know how to deal with, didn’t think the discipline had the authority or legitimacy to deal with, and so turned concerns of economy back into concerns of class and thereby into the much more (apparently) manageable category of identity.

That didn’t work out very well.

I thought (and think) that any identity-based approach to economy in composition has reached the limits of productivity, in composition as much as in literature. There’s only so much you can say about socioeconomic class before you start saying stuff that everyone else has already said. But if class (which I would argue composition has always only understood as identity, and would welcome examples of counterarguments to said perspective) is the point of articulation (cf. Hall, Bourdieu) between economy and culture, well, I think we’ve done a fine job as a discipline of examining culture, and a poor job of examining economy.

So the first thing I did after writing my prospectus was to look over a bunch of Econ 101 syllabi, and to work my way through their texts, and the texts they led me to. Sure, there was the Marx. But there were also the Freidrich Hayek and the Adam Smith, neither of whom gets read nearly often enough by the folks who like to invoke them the most. And that’s what I’d say the project that I’ve finally been able to start imagining as a book does: it reads closely, in Hayek and in Smith and in Marx, but takes those close readings as signposts through a series of case studies of writing and its value through the economic cycle of production, distribution, appropriation, ownership, use, and re-production.

I’m surprised by some of the things I’m re-seeing Hayek and Smith and Marx saying, just as much as I’m surprised by some of the things I’m re-seeing in the production and reproduction of writing.

More soon.

The full title of this panel was “21st-Century Writing Lives: Redefining Development, Performance, and Intellectual Property in College Writing.”

Erin Krampetz, of the nonprofit Ashoka in Washington DC, began the session by describing the Stanford Study of Writing, which followed students for the five years from 2001 to 2006, from their first year at Stanford through the year after graduation, asking those students to submit to the study every piece of writing they created in that time. Krampetz joined the writing department as an undergraduate, and was one of the initial guinea pigs for the study. The longitudinal study accumulated a total of 14,776 pieces of student writing in its database, and every piece of that data is now being coded. When we think about longitudinal studies, Krampetz observed, we think about change: in the Stanford study, what changes? It’s tempting, she suggested, for researchers to tell stories that follow a timeline. For the Stanford study, however, the story is anything but linear and chronological, with all that staggering data.

(more…)

The President came to visit campus yesterday, along with three Chinooks’ and two Sikorsky VH-3Ds’ worth of Secret Service and support staff, so classes were canceled and we dropped a lesson, making today the last class for two of my composition sections.

On the first day of the semester, I had my students do something called “the envelope exercise,” adapted from an exercise one of my grad school colleagues came up with: first, I gave an empty envelope to everyone in class. We read, out loud, two paragraphs from Peter Elbow on freewriting and how to do it. I then asked them to fill in the endings of the following sentences, in as much depth and detail as possible, on a piece of paper. I wouldn’t see what they wrote.

(more…)

If you haven’t seen it already, I hope you’ll check out Pete’s 15-Month Adventure.

That’s some good writing, and writing from a soldier-PhD that you won’t likely see anywhere else.

People in my academic discipline sometimes conflate “military” and “war.” From what I’ve seen of the broader scape of academe, that’s not uncommon. In listserv discussions, interactions at conferences, calls for proposals, and hallway conversations, there’s a common assumption that any association with the military must commit one to a monolithic and intolerant ideology supporting all war, always, in all contexts.

Two nights ago, on Monday, Eugene Jarecki showed up on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart promoting his new book. (Jarecki wrote and directed the award-winning 2005 documentary Why We Fight, which — while voluminously researched and attempting to provide the appearance of scrupulous fairness — mostly did a very good job for 99 minutes of proving that Jarecki agreed with the cautions offered in Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex” speech: to paraphrase a number of critics, the movie was an op-ed piece, not investigative reporting.) He had some good things to say about today’s links between the defense industry and American foreign policy, and with Stewart’s prompting and assistance, he made a number of solid points fully and clearly in the nine minutes or so that he had.

Stewart’s a breezy interviewer, and I think Jarecki would have fared better with a more deliberate pace, perhaps even with being asked to read a passage from the book out loud, NPR-style, though that seldom plays well on television. (Would that it did.) I say this because Jarecki was invited here to West Point to talk to people — cadets and faculty — about his movie after its release, and accounts of those conversations have traveled, some of them making their way into his new book, and some of them making their way into our Dean’s annual address to faculty — all faculty, military and civilian — where I first heard them two months ago. I quote here from Jarecki’s book, The American Way of War, published ten days ago:

Located in wooded isolation some 50 miles north of New York City, West Point is very much in its own intellectual orbit, not entirely removed from the workings of the American defense establishment, yet not entirely in sync with them either. On my first drive there, I recall the incredulity with which friends and family reacted when I called from the road to tell them where I was going. They were surprised that a military academy would even show a film like Why We Fight, let alone invite a self-acknowledged critic of U.S. defense policy, to address its best and brightest.

As it turns out, this incredulity reflects a prejudice that sweepingly and mistakenly equates bad foreign policy with those entrusted to implement it. While soldiers come in all types and no single generalization can be made, one finds inspiring abundance on West Point’s faculty of responsible thinkers who feel a responsibility not only to train their cadets in the military arts but to educate them more broadly about the strengths and weaknesses of the nation’s foreign policy system.

Jarecki’s words are a careful and instructive counter to the myopic conflation I describe above. When our Dean read those words, and conveyed them to the faculty with an argument about their importance, they helped me see something more about teaching at this place, and about why I’m teaching here and want to continue to teach here. The engagement with diverse and critical perspectives that Jarecki describes is something I’ve seen here far more than at any other college or university I’ve attended or taught at, and seen especially with a remarkable openness in the classroom.

It’s remarkable the things cadets are unafraid to say and the criticisms they’re unafraid to make, reasonably and professionally, and how calmly and precisely they’re able to disagree with one another on loaded issues, and then think nothing of it and move on to celebrate and support one another. (Mostly.) In my class, they’ve just finished a unit on multi-modal argument, with more than a few of them giving presentations on similar or identical topics in rapid succession, and the kaleidoscope of perspectives has been refreshingly more wide-ranging than some of the homogeneous arrays of ideological and rhetorical commonplaces I’ve seen elsewhere. And in many ways more liberally accepting; more embracing of what Benjamin Franklin called “all these scatter’d counsels.” That ideological diversity and tolerance strikes me as one of the most valuable assets that a democratic nation might promote in its military, and one that I wish I might see more of in academe’s broader scape.