CCE

Review of Rewriting: How To Do Things with Texts by Joseph Harris

I finally finished Joseph Harris's book Rewriting: How To Do Things with Texts. It is the best book on academic writing I've encountered. Harris spoke at our TYCA-West conference this last fall (score for Counterintuitive and Antistrophe!). I was lucky enough to get him to sign a copy of the book. He wrote, "To Jason, Fellow Teacher and Critic of Dead Poets." Cool.

I won't try to summarize all of the wise and wonderful things Harris has to say about writing in this fine volume. Rather, let me focus on two things. First, I'm drawn to Harris's account of the intellectual work we're asking our students to do. Toward the end of the volume, Harris warns against introductions that seem to fully anticipate and therefore pin down what the essay will go on to say. He ties this proscription to a more positive account of what academic thinking and writing is about. "I have no quarrel with the need to define a clear plan of work," he says, "But you also want to develop a line of thinking in an essay, to explore its contradictions and stuck points and ambiguities, not simply to stake out a fixed position" (117). When we teach a writing course, Harris believes we're teaching "a habit of mind that resists quick closure and acknowledges the merits of competing interests and values" (125). One lesson I'll take away from this book, then, and hopefully import into my own courses is to place a greater emphasis on inquiry rather than argument.

In each of the main chapters, Harris describes the main intellectual moves in the writing process:

• Coming to Terms--describing how students actively read with purpose, how they make readings their own
• Forwarding--recirculating key ideas from a text in one's own writing
• Countering--not simply to oppose a text, but to supplement it, to view its account of a subject as "partial"
• Taking an Approach--focusing on the transformative moment in writing, where the student makes new knowledge after the work of coming to terms, forwarding, and countering

Harris's account of revision emphasizes the work of restating. He wants students to be able to answer the question, "What's your project?" He has students describe and restate their work, describe the purpose or goals of a particular piece. This seems to overlap with the work of reflection, but for me its more mechanical and, thus, actually more profound. When we ask students to reflect, we're often asking for a kind of false profundity. We want them to achieve some kind of critical distance on their own work and process in what is, perhaps, an impossible time frame. (I'm just now achieving critical distance on my twenties.) But asking students to restate in a shorter form their project is to aim for a more realistic target.

In his descriptions of his own courses, I was struck by how Harris provides a subject matter for his classes and asks his students to engage in serious intellectual work through writing: "a writing course needs a subject, to be centered on some substantive issue or question" (9).  Since I and some colleagues are in the process of tinkering with one of our writing courses, Harris's description gives me pause. In our course, we emphasize writing as a form of action in community or public contexts. In what way can we better join that vision of writing with writing as an intellectual endeavor?

Finally, this book made me think about my own academic writing process, particularly the long dark night of dissertation writing. On the one hand, Harris's book made me a little mad. Gee it would have been nice to have someone on my committee sit me down and take me through some of these steps. This book should be required reading for all humanities graduate students. Period. On the other hand, the book has given me new hope that I may yet have a worthy academic thought or two in me. Harris's book is enormously inspirational in that regard, though it doesn't come across as self-help, and I can't recall any long passages of explicit encouragement in the book. What's encouraging is that the process Harris describes is one I want to practice. I found myself last night finishing Harris's book and then immediately opening my laptop and adding a small chunk to my distinguished faculty lecture draft. Now I find myself writing this review.

x-posted

Books 2.0

Via a Boston Globe article, check out this site of 60-second videos introducing classic (and/or oft-assigned) novels. Not only do these seem like useful introductions, they also might serve as models for students to compile and film their own such recaps.Also included is a (again short) video series on steps for writing a lit crit paper, with the hopeful title "How to Write a Paper that Won't Put Your Teacher to Sleep."

Challenging assumptions

If you haven't seen it, check out Alex Reid's post Learning to Write (on Digital Digs). He raises provocative questions about to what degree one's own writing practices do (or should) influence how one teaches writing. In particular, is the writing-to-discover model that we humanists so often favor not a useful model for FYC? My first instinct is to jump to defend WTD, but then I step back to (re)consider...

And from Malcolm Gladwell's introduction to his new book What the Dog Saw: "Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. Not the kind you'll find in this book, anyway. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think." Is that a heretical position in the FYC world? Should it be? Why is it so appealing to me?

Getting students (and me!) writing

It's not that I haven't been writing; it's that I've been writing about my life rather than my teaching. But it's long-past time now to jump-start this blog...so here goes...

I've fallen into the habit of talking too much in class, I've decided, so that even I am bored with the sound of my own voice, so here's the plan for tomorrow. After the usual proofreading pep-talk last week (which amounts, at this point in the semester to homonym and sentence boundary errors), I thought we'd look at a few samples from Six Sentences and write some of our own. I figure it will accomplish a few things: some low-stakes, keep-those-muscles-warm writing; continuing opportunity to answer those questions about just what is a sentence; and, most importantly, a chance to collect up a lot of writing samples fast that we can use in trying to set some criteria for "good writing."

Questions:

• Do you have students do such in-class, low-stakes writing that does not necessarily connect to any other assignment, and if so how often?
• Do you keep it going throughout the semester?
• Any suggestions for sites like Six Sentences as student inspiration? (40 X 365 is another one I've found. Barbara Ganley gives students a word of the day and asks for 100 words; I've tried 100 words inspired by a photo from a Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo. Other options???)

Stanley Fish and the Rhetoric of Decline

Yes, it's fall again. The leaves are turning; there's a crispness to the air; the semester has begun, and yes, yes, we cannot forget the annual ritual of the rhetoric of decline. The latest example is from Stanley Fish in the New York Times.

What Should Colleges Teach?

I think Fish's argument rests on a distorted picture of what actually goes on in writing courses. Fish seems convinced that most writing courses today are doing something other than writing. Apparently we're watching re-runs of Three's Company. Fish seems bent on generalizing from the occasional bad example. Last time I checked, my students write in my writing course. And they work on revision, continually. When I look at writing program websites at other colleges and universities, I see curricula that echo the WPA outcomes which include radical suggestions such as students should

• learn common formats for different kinds of texts.
• control such surface features as syntax, grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

What's really disheartening, though, is reading the comments section. (I advise against it.)The discipline has a difficult time battling popular perceptions about the supposed decline of writing.

The Rhetoric of the "Dear Student" Letter

In academic circles there is the kind of letting-off steam essay that some write, or think about writing, that is framed as a letter to a semi-hypothetical student, but which affords the writer a place to get something off of his or her chest.  Said semi-hypothetical student is anonymous and in truth, is a concatenation of all of the other students who have struck the very same nerve in the writer. 

Sometimes the tone of the letter is one long fling of anger about something--late papers, cell phones in class for example; other times the tone can be sarcastic or  instructive (especially when the writer chooses to explain why the dear student's act was wrong on so many levels).  Occasionally, these letters can take on the tone of the lofty, condescending professor of old, talking down to a population that may or may not be paying attention anyhow.

Actually,  the real audience of these letters, all of them, doesn't seem to be written to the "dear student," but to the dear colleagues, who can respond with pity, sympathy or disagreement. When the writer moves to get away from the sarcasm and into an explanation of why an individual behavior or institutional practice is unproductive, counterproductive  just plain wrong, then there's room for this reader to sit down and chew on the topic.  Otherwise, I click away from the article and read something else. 

The above is the long way into talking about the "Dear Plagiarist" article that ran a few days ago in the IHE.  When I saw the title, "Dear Plagiarist," my first reaction was that the reader was going to be in for one of those bile-soaked outbursts in  which not much is accomplished except the venting of an understandably frustrated college professor.  Yes, the title caught my attention, but until Nels tweeted that the essay was worth reading, I was put off enough by the "j'acuse" title to skip it altogether.  The very title suggests that the student has transgressed beyond redemption, though oddly, to put that label on the student also suggests that both student and act have considerable power, which several commentors show can be the case.

Couser's "dear student" is someone who seemed to avoid reading the assignment instructions or paying attention in class, and who flunked the paper by using Spark Notes to think for her--though she did paraphrase the work.  Based on his refutations, it doesn't sound like he had simply given a terse assignment and expected the students to forage for themselves in the great forest of the humanities.  Instead, it sounds like he gave assignments and readings that would have lead anyone paying attention to be able to at least try writing a response. 

The truth is, we don't know what lead to the student's behavior, and the overall tone seems to be one of exasperation with her.  I've been there, and I'll bet you have, too.  And I'm sure I'm not the only professor to have been impressed with the energy, intelligence and creativity some students put into pleading their cases, from our offices all the up the chain.  But the questions remain--why didn't the student just write the paper?  And why was it easier not to?  And are we surprised that TurnitIn didn't catch it? And why did the student bother to paraphrase?  And what goes on institutionally that allows students to cheat on papers and get by with it because their untenured or parttime instructors rightfully fear that the poor grade will make said instructors look bad? 

Raising these questions, listening to the conversations that bring in answers from all kinds of perspectives and  readings (like Pluralizing Plagiarism,for example)seem to be the most useful response we can enact when reading any essay/letter of this genre, which seems,on the surface to be an individual cry for help, but which carries undercurrents of an ongoing professional need to critique a situation that occurs time and again.

For the adjuncts in the crowd...

...don't miss Deb Olin Unferth's short story "Wait Till You See Me Dance" in the July Harper's.

Writing for publication

Just noticed that the NYTimes has an essay contest running: How Has College Changed You? I haven't before had students submit writing for "real-world" publication (not counting blogs), but I'm thinking I might try it. What other options for possible publication have you suggested to or required of yr students?

NCTE Report "Writing in the 21st Century"

Have you read the new NCTE Report entitled Writing in the 21st Century? Here's a chunk from the intro.

"Today, in the 21st century, people write as never before—in print and online. We thus face three challenges that are also opportunities: developing new models of writing; designing a new curriculum supporting those models; and creating models for teaching that curriculum. Historically, we humans have experienced an impulse to write; we have found the materials to write; we have endured the labor of composition; we have understood that writing offers new possibility and a unique agency. Historically, we composers pursued this impulse to write in spite of—in spite of cultures that devalued writing; in spite of prohibitions against it when we were female or a person of color; in spite of the fact that we—if we were 6 or 7 or 8 or even 9—were told we should read but that we weren’t ready to compose. In spite of."

Here's Mark Baurlein's response to the report in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

"What to say about this odd opening? The first sentence is a notch above the freshman’s opening “Since the beginning of time . . .” The next sentences cast writing in heated terms of struggle and liberation (“impulse,” “labor,” “possibility,” “unique agenda”). And then we have anti-writing cultures, racist and sexist prohibitions, and age tyranny. Cap it off with that inane melodramatic phrase “In spite of” (italicized in the original).

Keep in mind that this report proposes a recommendation that teachers bring 21st-century writing habits (texting etc.) into the classroom. That is a complex and far-reaching revision, and it merits a steady and scientific approach to, among other things, social and technological trends, the relation of classrooms to society, and the intellectual value of those new literacy habits.

But when a report starts out by overloading the central concept with political overtones and identitarian dramaturgy, one wonders about the agenda. Why has NCTE come down so strongly and so enthusiastically on the side of 21st-century literacies?"

I find Baurlein's response a little mean-spirited, but I agree with his point that we need to seriously consider "the intellectual value of those new literacy habits" before endorsing them whole-hog. I've done as much as anyone in my own department to introduce blogging, wikis, and the idea of digital literacy into the writing classroom, but I'm not persuaded, for example, that texting is a valuable literacy practice.

As always, I'm in the middle. I'm not persuaded by the techno-dystopians that new writing practices like texting contribute to an overall decline in literacy. Neither am I persuaded by a techno-utopian like Yancey that they are somehow magically liberatory or that they automatically entail valuable forms of participation.

I would add, finally, that I don't think NCTE fully appreciates how many students who go to college (especially first generation students like myself) yearn for elevated forms of literacy (rhetorical or poetic). I would have felt pandered to by a course that told me texting (if texting existed when I was a wee lad) was a college-level literacy. How to acknowledge and incorporate some of these new literacies in ways that are valuable?

cross-posted to Middlebrow

Cell Phones In The Classroom: There's a Place For Them

On the first day of classes, I make sure that everyone knows that cell phone use during class is NOT going to be allowed.  Not a text, not a tune, nothing.

On day two, I backtrack just a bit and introduce them to the county's disaster alert program that residents and students can sign up for with their cell phones.

On Friday, we were using Re:Writing Plus! and logged in for the first time.  Except that not everyone was successful.  As I walked around helping out the students, one of my students pulled out his cell phone and dialed the 1-800 number for help.  At first I was amazed, but then I shrugged and thought that it was an efficient way to deal with the problem.

Today, two of my deaf students were arranging to have other students take notes for them.  Instead of relying on the interpreter, they (deaf and hearing) decided to text each other later.  During class, one of the students texts the person sitting next to him if he needs something.

I don't have any profound theory or pedagogical move to embed these situations in, except to say that the cell is becoming more and more a part of us that it seems like second nature.  And sure, there are students who would text their significant others during class if I let them.