March 29, 2006
I'm moved
After having threatened to move this blog for a while and then taking a break after which I actually did move, it occurred to me that I didn't adopt the best strategy for getting dear readers to follow. So this will be the THE FINAL POST at my old blog address. My new address is http://collinvsblog.net, which is where I've been posting lately. And for those of you following along via RSS, let me encourage you to update your subscription as well, since otherwise, you're thinking that I've been a lot more quiet than I actually have.
That's all.
Posted by cgbrooke at 03:02 PM | Comments (0)
February 23, 2006
Shouldafreude
That'd be my variation on schadenfreude, designating the (only slightly) jealous pang I feel when someone else says or does something that I wish I'd thought of first.
That was my thought as I caught Ben V's latest over at if:book. In particular, check out the description of the subtitling for the American release of the Russian movie Night Watch:
What they've done is played with the subtitles themselves, making them more active and responsive to the action in the film [snip]:"...[the words] change color and position on the screen, simulate dripping blood, stutter in emulation of a fearful query, or dissolve into red vapor to emulate a character's gasping breaths."
Very cool. The idea of spicing up the traditional white text at the bottom of the screen is something that should have occurred to someone (me!) long before now.
Also, mainly bc I want to save it for future reference:
The problem with contemporary discussions about the future of the book is that they are mired -- for cultural and economic reasons -- in a highly inflexible conception of what a book can be. People who grew up with print tend to assume that going digital is simply a matter of switching containers (with a few enhancements thrown in the mix), failing to consider how the actual content of books might change, or how the act of reading -- which increasingly takes place in a dyanamic visual context -- may eventually demand a more dynamic kind of text.
Posted by cgbrooke at 02:35 AM | Comments (0)
February 15, 2006
Avast, ye windmill!
I want to both acknowledge and thank Scott Jaschik of IHE for being willing to brave the storm and ire of those of us who feel strongly about the whole Facebook situation. That's no small thing. In light of his visit, I thought I might lay out, without swearing, as clear a statement of my position as possible. I don't know that he will find it persuasive, but perhaps it will offer some context for the anger that many of us feel over this.
Let me start with a snippet from Katherine Hayles's new book My Mother Was a Computer (a book I hope to review once I've (a) turned back into Dr. Banner, and (b) gotten much more of my workload under control). Hayles attempts to make the case that we need to consider "code" at the same conceptual level as "speech" and "writing," sort of a parallel to Ulmer's (among others) orality, literacy, and electracy. Hayles writes
Code that runs on a machine is performative in a much stronger sense than that attributed to language. When language is said to be performative, the kinds of actions it "performs" happen in the minds of humans...[examples]...code running in a digital computer causes changes in machine behavior and, though networked ports and other interfaces, may initiate other changes, all implemented through transmission and execution of code (50).
Now, I'm taking liberties here a bit with Hayles's work, but my broader argument the past few days is that the difference among dorm room conversations, passing notes in class, and posting comments on Facebook are the differences among speech, writing, and code. The three aren't separate, of course, and Hayles says as much. But the issue I have with Scott and IHE's coverage of this event is that they have failed to appreciate the degree to which they are not simply "writing" about Facebook. They are also coding the event by creating resources that are more visible, accessible, and available, and for a longer period of time, than any of these other analogs.
Clay Spinuzzi puts it this way, rather nicely:
Collin's point is that defamation becomes a de facto part of a person's online record - the "portfolio" (my term) that Google and Yahoo are constantly assembling for everyone with an online presence:
When you write about this situation, and then code it, you are effectively contributing material to the online portfolio of each of the people involved. This is particularly relevant to those sites that have exploited the naivete of the students in that course--an irony I pointed out yesterday in reference to the fact that the Internet is far more a "permanent record" than a student's file at a university. The latter is protected by FERPA among other things, while IHE and other sites endure no such limitation.
Today's newspaper may be tomorrow's bird cage liner, but today's Internet story can be future employers' search results, even as far as several years down the line. You can still, with relative ease, locate things that I said and did in graduate school back in the mid-90s. That's one of the ways I would interpret Hayles's notion of "strong performativity"--by publishing names, by reprinting the page itself, by reproducing the comments, you are, literally, performing and participating in the event in a way that the "shield" of journalistic objectivity and coverage does not fully account for.
In this case, and let me put this as bluntly as possible, if you are willing to cede the possibility that this page constituted harassment (a possibility fully in line with determinations made both by SU and by Facebook), then it is not enough to simply put quotes around the page, or remove it from the "front" with a link. It is not enough to absolve you of the responsibility of considering that you, in consciously reproducing this document, have actively participated in the harassment that you are "reporting."
To assert that you are not responsible is to deny the very real, material effect that certain kinds of language have on the people around us. And it is to deny the very real, material differences among media. To post something hurtful, and to do so with the alibi that the material did not originate with you, is still to post something hurtful. And it is to implicitly reinforce that pain.
All the way throughout this discussion, I have not said anything about restricting Facebook, and I won't, because I don't hold them responsible for what was said. Once they learned about the abuse of their site, however, they had a choice to make. They could either leave the page in place, or remove it. There was no choice that they could make that was neutral. I believe that they made the proper decision.
Similarly, IHE and other sites posting screen grabs are making choices that themselves influence the perception of the story. By allowing these words and images to persist (without, as Spencer suggested, blurring anything), they are weighing in on the side of those who would permit this kind of behavior, because they themselves are reproducing the behavior for a wider audience. In the interests of "coverage," they are, inadvertently or not, affecting the lives of the people whose names they've "covered."
They are, of course, free to do so.
They are, however, also accountable for doing so.
And that's all I have for right now. I persist in the hope that more of us will do the right thing here.
Posted by cgbrooke at 02:46 PM | Comments (1)
A colleague weighs in (Yet more...)
[Note: I've changed the title of this entry, in response to my colleague's objection that his wasn't really an attack. Fair enough. My original title ("when colleagues attack!") was less an accusation than a parallel to the prior day's entry and an allusion to the hyperbolic sensationalism of those old FOX tv shows.]
I was going to settle back down into my routine today, work some more on my manuscript, and keep an occasional eye peeled to see what IHE planned to do. That was before I did a little light Googling to see how much of this had seeped into search engines thus far. That was before I came across this blog entry at moralhealth.com, a site maintained by a colleague of mine here at SU in the Philosophy Department. Perhaps my colleague will revise his opinions in light of the information that has come out since last Friday.
For the moment, though, you have the opportunity to see one of the consequences of the misleading information published in our school paper. Based on that information, said colleague offers the following opinion:
Were the remarks absolutely unpleasant? Absolutely. Were the remarks threatening or harassing? Well, not if the remarks were rather likeI would rather eat the hair out of the drain than go to class
We do know because the University is rather silent about the matter. But I can only assume that we have been given an example of the kind comments that were indicative of the remarks that were made against the instructor. And if that is so, then what we have is an institution that is over-stepping the proper boundaries.
Let me save you the suspense of discovering that the payoff of this over-stepping in this entry is the single, hyperbolic sentence with which the entry ends: "Syracuse University is not supposed to be the Taliban."
Ummm....what the...?!?!?!
But really, that's just the cherry on top of the sundae. The flawed analogies begin much earlier. To wit:
I am at a loss as to the difference between this and two other things: (a) These students going on endlessly about [name deleted] to other students on campus and (b) these students filling out anonymous teaching evaluations about [name deleted] in which they say many of the same things.
First of all, by repeated using the instructor's name, and thus further cementing the associations that will turn up routinely in Google searches, my colleague has already demonstrated that he is indeed "at a loss."
Unlike campus conversations, and unlike anonymous course evaluations, Facebook is searchable. That in and of itself is a simple difference that Every. Single. Person. who has used these people's names in their coverage needs to understand. Every time you use one of their names, you are reinforcing an association that has consequences far beyond the immediate circumstances of your usage. Perhaps it's a generational thing, but I do Google searches on job candidates, on graduate program applicants, on people I meet/see at conferences. I do them all the time. These sites are not private. Really.
Oh, but wait. There's more.
There are in fact many black students on campus who are utterly persuaded that I am an Uncle Tom. They are persuaded that I care more about white students than blacks students and that my opposition to affirmative action reflects a deep inferiority complex or some form of self-hatred. Needless to say, there is nothing flattering here, either. But it would not occur to me to think that the University should somehow prohibit them from holding these opinions of me, or that students who posted such opinions of me on a public website should be punished.
I just want to be clear here. The analogy being drawn is between the writer on the one hand--a tenured, male professor who's written several books and had ample opportunity to lay out a position with which his students might disagree--and the instructor he's writing about--a female graduate student about whom students are making public, obscene comments.
If this honestly seems like a fair comparison to anyone, then I don't know what to say.
What I will say is that much of this argument is based upon information that was essentially a lie by omission. As the argument makes pretty clear, the local coverage of this event implied that the comments on Facebook were much milder than they actually were. The odd thing about this, though, even in the absence of revision on the part of my colleague, is that in his very next post he bemoans the work of the ACLU as an organization that can't "wrap its mind around," among other things that,
When the founding fathers advocated free speech, a fundamental part of their thinking was that people could be held accountable for what they said. Indeed, that very idea finds itself in the jury system itself: a person has a right to face her or his accusers. The very idea that a person could say anything he or she damned well please without being answerable to others for her or his remarks was simply unthinkable to the founding fathers.
I don't really have much else to say--it's rare that I read an entry where the author unwittingly publishes a rebuttal to the very things I disagree with.
So let me simply close with the sincere hope that, now that more information has come to light, my colleague sees fit to act on the principle he espouses. In other words, I honestly hope that he reconsiders his hyperbole and his own overreaction to the situation. While he was not responsible for the factual error his entry duplicates, he is responsible for each day that his entry remains unrevised or uncorrected now that the information is available.
That is all.
Posted by cgbrooke at 12:01 AM | Comments (3)
February 14, 2006
When Journalists Attack! (more on Facebook)
I've been telling various people privately that the DO coverage of the Facebook incident here at SU committed at least a couple of serious misrepresentations. One of these was that the comments reported by the story were far less objectionable than others they could have noted. Rather than get into the issue of "how objectionable is too objectionable" or repeat the comments themselves, I made the choice to let that mistake stand.
Unfortunately, other publications don't feel a similar sort of restraint. I won't link to it here, but you can visit Inside Higher Ed and see what the story looks like when journalism works without any consideration for the people involved. As I talked about in the last entry, for me, this is a question less of freedom than it is of consequences. I would never suggest that IHE (or any other outlet) is not "free" to cover the story in any way that they choose. I would suggest, though, that by choosing to include the names of the students and the instructor, and by choosing to include a graphic of the original Facebook page, IHE has effectively piled on.
And it's not in the interests of journalism. It's entirely possible to lay out this argument, to report on this situation, without naming the people involved, without publishing pictures. It's voyeurism, pure and simple, and it's a shitty thing.
Among other things, the story reports on the worries of one of the students:
“I will have a reprimand on my permanent record for seven years,” she added, “so if a grad school inquires into any interactions with judicial affairs or asks on an application if I had any violations that required punishment, this would apply.”
Setting aside the whole "permanent for seven years" thing, what this young woman doesn't seem to realize is that, long after the reprimand vanishes, guess what? she appears in a story accessible in a Google search on her name, one that makes certain, with graphic clarity, that what she did and said will be available to anyone interested.
By publishing their names, IHE has played their part in ensuring that this incident will survive long after all of the people involved have left Syracuse. And in the case of the instructor, who did not volunteer to be treated like this, publicly and offensively, IHE has repeated, and effectively extended, the harassment represented by the original site.
IHE knows this. The unfortunate thing about this is that they will hide behind the shield of saying that they're just covering the story in as much detail as they can. They won't endure the consequences of their choices the way that the people whose names appear in their article will. And I'm not sure what's worse: the idea that they understand the consequences of reposting harassing materials but choose to do so anyway, or the idea that they didn't think it through. Neither option provides me with much comfort.
It provides me with one certainty, though: it's a fucking shameful thing that Inside Higher Ed has done. Fucking shameful. I expect better from them. Here's what you can do: email info@insidehighered.com and ask them to remove the instructor's and students' names from their story and to take down the graphic of the Facebook page. Hell, copy and paste this entry into that email if you want. That's my plan.
I'll update this entry if and when IHE decides to do the right thing.
That's all.
Posted by cgbrooke at 01:13 PM | Comments (9)
January 25, 2006
Didn't...um...leave it
Derek and I were chatting in my office today, and in reference to something or other, he said "One down, one to go." And my response was "Another town, one more show." It didn't take long, thanks to the internets, to discover that I was quoting a song from Yes--you remember "Leave It," right? No? Maybe it's because it was popular 22 years ago. At some point in the past couple of days, I must have either heard the song (or something a lot like it) that triggered this lyrical couplet in my head today. But it did so completely without my knowledge. And were it not for those internets, I couldn't for the life of me have told you what song it was from
My first thought was that it was that song from the musical Chess--you know, "One Night in Bangkok" or something like that?
One more note with respect to Yes. The first song on that album you may remember as well: "Owner of a Lonely Heart." I remember the song primarily because you can switch the openings of the two words and it makes almost as much sense: loaner of an only heart. I do this all the time, switching the opening sounds of pairs of words, particularly with people's names and two-word phrases. I'm pretty sure, though, that this is not the fault of Yes.
Anyhow, that was all I'd planned on sharing with you today, but in the process of nosing about, I discovered today that the project begun in last spring's graduate course, continued at CCCC, and composed for C&W Online has recently come out: Weblogs as Deictic Systems: Centripetal, Centrifugal, and Small-World Blogging was just published in the Theory into Practice section of Computers and Composition Online.
So I've got that going for me, too.
Posted by cgbrooke at 07:59 PM | Comments (10)
June 25, 2005
You think you got problems?!
Last week, the students in my genre theory course read another of those sine qua non essays about academic publishing, Richard McNabb's "Making the gesture: Graduate student submissions and the expectation of journal referees" [via FindArticles], and as I was cruising the web looking for a nice handout-sized thumbnail of John Swales's description of creating a research space, I came across Joe Williams's monograph Problems into PROBLEMS: A Rhetoric of Motivation, which was announced at Kairosnews back in February.
I can't do much more than gush about Williams at this point--I'll definitely be teaching Williams and Swales alongside McNabb in the fall. Williams's monograph is a careful exploration, supported by some pretty broad, multimodal research, of how to write introductions, and more to the point, how to pose a PROBLEM in the academic sense. Among a number of smart things in this document:
Our students find this kind of thinking bizarre. But it’s what we do -- a kind of Zen locksmithing: we have made a key that fits a lock before we have made the lock that fits the key.
Students may find it bizarre, but I still think that there are plenty of us who find it opaque, or who learn how to do it without necessarily articulating what it is that we're doing. And Williams does, in painstaking detail. Not only will my graduate students in the fall be reading this, but I'm going to require it of all my dissertators as well. Believe me when I say that it's worth a couple of hours of your time, if you're writing for an academic audience.
That is all.
Posted by cgbrooke at 11:18 PM | Comments (7)
June 07, 2005
Deictic Systems?
One of the projects that I've been slowly working on has reached a stage where it's ready to receive some critical attention. Those of you who were at my CCCC presentation will have heard some of this before--I took part of my talk and expanded it quite a bit, and it's scheduled to go "live" at Computers and Writing Online next week. However, it's been tough for me to make time to read the presentations daily, much less respond to them, so I thought I'd make mine available over a slightly longer stretch.
It's called "Weblogs as Deictic Systems," which may be the most direct title I've ever placed on a piece of writing of mine. It's still kind of drafty, but you're welcome to take a look. I went ahead and published it via MT, so that you could comment on individual sections, so please do. My ultimate goal is to work it up into something publishable, so any feedback (positive or negative) is welcome in that regard...
That's all.
Posted by cgbrooke at 08:15 PM | Comments (2)
June 01, 2005
Fish in a Barrel, Take 2
Okay, Exhibit B. While I found several links to the Fish piece as I scanned my feeds this morning, over at the Blogora, Jim links to an article by Jethro Leiberman, an Associate Dean at the New York Law School, called "Bad Writing: Some Thoughts on the Abuse of Scholarly Rhetoric, available through that school's Law Review. A more appropriate exhibit, given my title, as Leiberman takes careful aim at the dead horse (or the barrel-bound fish) we know and love as the "difficulty" of academic writing.
From the abstract for this paper, we are given a glimpse of what is to come: "Bloated, foggy, and enigmatic prose masquerades as profundity that escapes conventional mental grooves. In fact it is useless, unethical, and taken far enough, evil." Well, it's a glimpse only if you count the appearance of the word "evil" in the final sentence of the article, and treat this melodramatic hyperbole as a serious claim, which you might be able to do as long as you're willing to ignore the absolute lack of evidence offered in its support. Oh wait, there's logic: understanding is good, I can't understand what they're saying, so they must be evil. Ahh yes.
Leiberman's article is more sophisticated than this when he tones down the enigmatic prose and sticks to the question of difficulty. He's right, I think, to question the defense of difficulty that's taken place in recent years, although I'd argue that you only earn the right to question it by taking it seriously in the first place. More on that soon.
The article begins with a Sokal-esque parody of difficult writing (and what critique of academic writing would be complete without a nod to the patron saint of academic schadenfreude?), containing such gems as:
This familiar defamiliarization of the conventional Ordinary problematizes much of the turn to the ornate Interpretive. In this sense, the enactment comes, if at all, with foudroyant force, an irresistible tsunami of hypercathexis toward concretized Law.
No, it's not meant to make any sort of sense, although it makes a fair amount of smugness in the first couple of pages. And apparently, this smugness (is it too late, almost 10 years later now, to coin the term Sokality to refer to anti-academic performative smirking?) is called for nowadays:
In fact, I think, something else is new: of late certain academic scholars have sought to justify bad writing. It is necessary, the claim runs, to write mysterious, impenetrable, foggy prose, to embed words in a style inaccessible not merely to the lay reader but to most academic readers as well.
Well, in fact, the claim doesn't quite run thusly, but Leiberman isn't really interested in understanding the claim so much as he is in rounding up the usual tropes to array against some Platonic ideal of clarity. Sokal is one, and of course, the Philosophy and Literature Bad Writing contest is another. Lacan appears in a footnote as particularly inscrutable, of course, and Orwell is trotted out so that Leiberman can write, in sufficiently dramatic fashion, that "Euphemism allows us to gloss over the repugnant thought and avoid the evil deed that it masks." Yeah, that's not an Orwell quote. Evil deeds, indeed.
Leiberman is a dean at a law school, and the essay appears in a law review, so while you and I might think it appropriate that more than one example appear from legal writing, Leiberman satisfies himself with a single passage from a 1952 decision rendered by Justice Felix Frankfurter:
The faculties of the Due Process Clause may be indefinite and vague, but the mode of their ascertainment is not self-willed. In each case “due process of law” requires an evaluation based on a disinterested inquiry pursued in the spirit of science, on a balanced order of facts exactly and fairly stated, on the detached consideration of conflicting claims, on a judgment not ad hoc and episodic but duly mindful of reconciling the needs both of continuity and of change in a progressive society.
Oh. My. God. Impenetrable, right? Well, no. I don't know what the Due Process Clause is, although I can certainly guess. Leiberman asks "How can such language be defended?" in all apparent seriousness. I don't know the Clause or the case, but it seems pretty obvious to me that Frankfurter is suggesting that interpretation of the clause is not an individual decision, but one that should be weighed against the competing forces of the stable precedents of the law and the changing nature of social circumstance. In the footnote to the passage, Leiberman explains, "This passage is not necessarily difficult writing, but it is bad writing nonetheless; it purports to describe a method of ascertaining due process, but its oracular quality denudes it of meaning."
Its oracular quality denudes it of meaning? Oh my pots and kettles. It's hard for me to imagine that anyone reading that decision has a right to expect that a single sentence is going to "describe a method of ascertaining due process," but hey, that's just me. On the other hand, I can easily imagine this sentence appearing either at the beginning or the end of a decision that goes into far greater detail attempting to perform the method alluded to in the passage. And my point, if I may make it without overly denuding it of meaning, is that we can't really know whether or not this is "bad writing" without seeing the context for it. Leiberman describes this as "ennobled, pretty language," but I just don't see it. Perhaps it is indeed vacuous, but not on its own, and certainly not because someone says it is.
Let me say it more bluntly. There is no such thing as "bad writing" or "difficult writing," independent of a particular context. There is writing that I find bad or difficult, but that speaks to my own taste and preference and background, not to some intrinsic quality of the text itself. And that's the largest problem with this article, and indeed, this whole genre of academic anti-academicism. It's also the problem with collections that defend difficult writing, mostly because they've already given away the most obvious point: difficulty is not a textual feature, but rather a ratio that involves a host of factors, including vocabulary, register, sentence length, reader background, and textual context. A text is not difficult; it is difficult for somebody: me, you, us, them, whoever.
So to insist that writing should be difficult is to exclude most of humankind from understanding whatever it is that the difficult writers think the difficult writing purports to be saying. It is to build walls around the purveyors of such prose, not to goad outsiders into thinking anew. It dampens the spirit of inquiry for all except the initiate, and the more difficult the writing the smaller the inner circle. It mocks humanity’s hard-fought battle to think its way out of the jungle, to articulate a life worth living, to aspire through language, thought made manifest, to a richer, warmer, fairer life. Writing that is opaque, obscure, tortured — difficult writing — is humbug. Its purveyors condescend toward their audiences and are contemptuous of their readers.
By the end of this essay, it's just too easy to poke at. So let me close with a couple of final thoughts. First, there's a weird sort of entitlement operating here: I don't understand your writing, therefore you must be writing it in such a way so as to keep from understanding it. This is humbug. I don't defend difficult prose, but I defend our right to write to our audience. Yes, "the smaller the inner circle," but to think that this is a result of complicated prose, and has nothing to do with the downsizing of the humanities, is precisely the kind of euphemistic thinking that this article appears to condemn. To attribute these qualities (opacity, obscurity, torture) to a given text is to decontextualize it in a way that ignores the conditions of its production and its circulation.
And it's striking to me, and this is perhaps my second closing point, that in his swirl of metaphors for bad writing, Leiberman never once pauses to ask whether or not he's examining cause or effect. He marches forward, as any number of similar critics do, and accuses so-called difficult writers, by implication at least, of evil, never once stopping to think about why scholars might write in such a fashion. And the fact of the matter is that for most of us who toil away in the humanities, our audience will never be more than a couple of hundred readers, and guess what? That's not the result of "difficult" writing, but one of the preconditions. Most academic writing is produced for a fairly select audience, an audience that shares vocabularies and references that are going to appear opaque to the person who doesn't share them. Difficult writing is as much the result of the absence of a broader audience for academic work as it is a cause.
But then, testing that claim would require one to take even "difficult" writing seriously, rather than presenting decontextualized examples of it for our collective derision. Ah well. If nothing else, this essay provides ample evidence for the claim that writing that is clear, transparent, and obvious — easy writing — is no less capable of humbug.
That is all. Happy June.
Posted by cgbrooke at 01:10 AM | Comments (1)
May 31, 2005
Fish in a Barrel
Must be something in the water. It's bad enough that I have to listen to the lame defenses offered by the College Board for its new writing exam, which appears to evaluate little more than a student's ability to generate context-free verbiage. But today, for whatever reason, I was treated to a couple of additional essays that cloud any sort of dialogue that we might have about writing.
Exhibit A is Stanley Fish's offering in today's NYT, "Devoid of Content." Fish offers us his definitive answer to the crisis, oft-repeated and rarely proven, of the clear sentence. "Most" of the millions of students graduating from high school and college, Fish explains, are "utterly unable to write a clear and coherent English sentence." Okay, that's a load of crap, but probably not worth the effort that would be required to falsify the claim.
This crisis is exacerbated, according to Fish, because
Most composition courses that American students take today emphasize content rather than form, on the theory that if you chew over big ideas long enough, the ability to write about them will (mysteriously) follow.
This is an astoundingly craptacular claim. Even if Fish were much more of a micromanager than he claimed to be in his various tenures at Chicago, Duke, and Hopkins, I doubt that he could speak with any veracity about (a) what "most composition courses" at his own institution did, or (b) the "theory" behind what they did. As an assistant professor in a writing program who spent 2 years chairing the committee that directly supervised the first-year writing curriculum, I would never presume to characterize "most" of the composition courses in my own department, much less those serving "millions" of students, at institutions far more diverse than those for which Fish has done the majority of his teaching. And the "theory" that Fish cites should sound familiar, because it is the idea against which the contemporary development of composition and rhetoric has emerged. Substitute "literature" for "big ideas" (or don't), and you have the "theory" of composition that "developed" in English departments (i.e., literature professors) for much of the 20th century, at least until composition and rhetoric began to define itself in opposition to literature. Are there such courses, where a focus on content supercedes the teaching of writing? Undoubtedly so. But it's easier to slop them all together and dismiss them (without any sort of evidence, of course), because this is an article meant to enlighten all of us poor souls who have actually studied, thought about, practiced, theorized, and care about the teaching of writing.
Fish's solution is formal: "over the semester the students come to understand a single proposition: A sentence is a structure of logical relationships."
On the first day of my freshman writing class I give the students this assignment: You will be divided into groups and by the end of the semester each group will be expected to have created its own language, complete with a syntax, a lexicon, a text, rules for translating the text and strategies for teaching your language to fellow students.
I will admit that I would have loved to take this course, and I can imagine plenty of other students who might have the same reaction. It's an intriguing idea, and one that undoubtedly challenges and educates. And most of the rest of the article is engaged in explicating it, punctuated with subtle self-praise. Fish closes with an implied claim about what his course accomplishes:
{In a content-focused course,] They will certainly not be learning anything about how language works; and without a knowledge of how language works they will be unable either to spot the formal breakdown of someone else's language or to prevent the formal breakdown of their own.
The only model for a writing course with content that Fish seems capable of imagining is one where "once ideas or themes are allowed in, the focus is shifted from the forms that make the organization of content possible to this or that piece of content," but last time I checked, the "focus" is one of the things that we might label a pedagogical responsibility. Again, are there classes where content does become the focus? Of course there are. But it's colossally insulting to every one of us who teaches writing to imply that we're incapable of teaching form in the context of actual writing. And it's absurd to imagine that Fish's is the only way to learn about form.
I'll close my little hissy fit here by noting that I don't doubt that Fish's students leave his class fully capable of crafting logically coherent sentences. And I don't doubt that some of them, and perhaps all of them, are capable of combining those sentences into paragraphs and/or essays that effectively communicate ideas and target particular audiences. But I can tell you that they don't learn the latter in his class. Writing is necessarily the blending of form and content in a particular context. It is certainly possible to examine language in the absence of particular content or context; such an examination has little to do with the skills and abilities that a writing course should be encouraging, however.
Fish's own clear and coherent sentences serve, among other purposes, a couple of "straw" arguments and at least one false binary. Hey, they're good sentences, though.
Exhibit A wasn't supposed to take so long. Let me get some other work done, and Exhibit B will follow...
Posted by cgbrooke at 08:44 PM | Comments (1)
May 15, 2005
Redemption
Derek made the eminently reasonable suggestion that I give myself one or two "hiatus coupons," redeemable for those moments when I can't not blog. I've come close to redeeming them over the past week, but managed to restrain myself.
Anyhow, one of my aims in taking the hiatus was to put in some serious writing time (and I mean serious time for writing rather than time for serious writing. Heh.). Among my goals for this time was a draft of an essay that I'd like to send out to CCC sometime in the near future, and that draft is now complete-ish, awaiting feedback from eyes more critical than mine are at the moment. The piece is called "A Book of Stars: Slicing, Scaling, and Data Mining Our Discipline," and for the moment, I've posted a pdf version of it for anyone who'd like to feed me back on it.
I post it here mostly because it takes up issues, about the CCCC specifically, that I've raised in this space on occasion. It also partakes of a 2002 CCCC presentation I did on the way that we use the program as a map of the field (and mistakenly so, imho). There's some social software goodness in there as well, and a quick read of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink lined up with Kenneth Burke's famous reflection/selection/deflection. Coincidentally, that's the presentation I'll be giving at Penn State in a couple of months.
Okay, now I'm just babbling. I'd have to check, but I'm pretty sure that the coupon doesn't include that as one of the permissible activities.
Update: There are some parallels in my argument and the stuff that Clay Shirky's talking about in "Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags". It may be worth my time to make that parallel a little more explicit.
Posted by cgbrooke at 05:02 AM | Comments (1)
May 02, 2005
Why does he get to be Mr. Pink?!
I'm sure that someone's already thought of this, but I'm feeling too dead lazy to google it, so instead, allow me to take credit for my new word: treyincidence. A treyincidence is basically a coincidence of three things instead of two. Although, really, "co" just means together, so technically you could have a coincidence of three things as easily as two. Anyways.
I was at Borders this weekend, the proud owner of a highly date-specific 30%-off coupon, and so I went over to the Psychology section to see if Steven Johnson's new book was out (it wasn't--May 5). I'm a sucker like that: instead of taking the 30% off of something that I would have bought anyway, I'll look around for something expensive, so that my coupon brings it down just to the place where I'll feel okay about buying it. I'm exactly the right person to give this coupon to, in other words.
Anyhow, I came across Daniel Pink's Whole New Mind, and was sorely tempted until I remembered that this is the kind of sucker I'm not: I do try to be realistic about buying hardcover books when I know that I'm only somewhat likely to read them before the softcover comes out at less than half the price.
Okay, that was a lie. I still do that sometimes.
I've seen Pink's book mentioned in spots lately, and he's also the guy who wrote the NYT article to which Jon Udell referred briefly in his piece on screencasting (although that didn't occur to me at the time). That was one incident.
The second was reading Alex's smart, smart post in reply to the screencasting discussion. In part, Alex suggests a writing curriculum that mixes composition, professional writing, creative writing, and new media. The result?
The result, ideally, of such a curriculum is a student who is a confident, practiced writer; who understands his/her creative process; who has developed a productive writing practice for him/herself; who has composed and performed work in multiple "creative writing" genres; who has internalized some sense of rhetorical and poetic theory (to really get into it would require further graduate study); who has experience writing in workplace genres and bringing a more creative, "right brain" attitude to them; and has a strong foundation in working with new media.
I'd planned on linking to this originally, but as I was frittering away my time yesterday, I came across my third incident/encounter with Mr. Pink, over at Kathy Sierra's site, in an entry where she contrasts the US and Japan in terms of their design (in)sensibilities. Her read on what Pink has to say?
Really, we're all designers -- at least with a lowercase "d". We're all trying to create solutions. But we should all--ALL OF US--be adding design to the list of "must learn" topics for this year.(snip)
We should all start thinking like designers.
The last time I taught our Professional Writing course here at Syracuse, I focused it around design, but it was a pretty modest course for all that. As I went back and re-read Alex's post, though, my ideas got wide. I'm thinking that, instead of trying to figure out how to negotiate a writing program amongst the traditional units in an English department, why not turn to design programs for our models?
That's the move that Stuart Moulthrop, Nancy Kaplan, and others made some time ago at the University of Baltimore, where the English dept falls under the umbrella of a School of Communications Design. And I think of the productive thinking that, for me, has been spurred by work like Kaufer and Butler's Rhetoric and the Arts of Design or Herbert Simon's Sciences of the Artificial. Honestly, what's to keep us from drawing on the curricula in graphic design, architecture, and/or art for a Bachelor of Design Arts in Writing? Or splitting the difference between an MBA and an MFA with an MDA?
I was going to end the post there, but that'd make it too easy for my first comment to be: "What's to keep us? Duh, Collin. You teach at a university, remember?" Yeah yeah. But I'm keeping the word treyincidence, and using it in a sentence daily. So there.
Posted by cgbrooke at 06:16 PM | Comments (7)
March 01, 2005
Alert ETS
I am no friend of standardized testing, although, ironically enough, it's been a pretty good friend to me. Nevertheless, I believe that I have found a test that I can support wholeheartedly. I present to you the Reading-Too-Much-Into-Things Comprehension exam, courtesy of the fine folk at McSweeneys.
Posted by cgbrooke at 01:09 AM | Comments (0)
November 23, 2004
Warning!
[Via MetaFilter] A page of alternative "warning stickers" for your local schools' textbooks...
This page should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.
[Update: It makes a lot more sense when I actually include the link to the page itself, doesn't it?]
Posted by cgbrooke at 09:43 AM | Comments (0)
November 21, 2004
"Something Borrowed," Someone Blue
This entry would be a lot better than it probably will be, if only I had the expertise of Becky and the scathe of Jeff to bring to bear upon it. We'll see if we can't muddle through, though.
A few people (most notably Anil Dash) have picked up on Malcolm Gladwell's "Something Borrowed," an essay appearing in the most recent issue of The New Yorker. I mention Becky because the essay in question carries the subtitle "Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life?" and is about Bryony Lavery's plagiarism of Gladwell for her Tony-nominated play "Frozen." Gladwell complicates things quite a bit, though, because plagiarism is a far more complicated issue than most people are willing to acknowledge. The ability to rip, mix, and burn is a crucial element of culture, so crucial that Lawrence Lessig (who's quoted by Gladwell at length) locates it in the birth of nearly every major form of mass media available to us today. In certain ways, culture is about "pirates" becoming "property owners," a cycle repeating itself over and over.
It was only a matter of time before this nuanced take on the relationship between intellectual or creative property and creativity was taken up in various academic discussions on plagiarism, most of which tend to abandon nuance in favor of a neoPuritanism, or what Gladwell calls "property fundamentalism." The discussion has begun on one of our field's lists, and will presumably begin over at Kairosnews, where Spencer Schaffner tries to think through Gladwell's article (without abandoning nuance) in conjunction with a recent encounter with a plagiarism/cheating "expert."
I mentioned Jeff above because the "solution" to the problem of plagiarism is a painfully conservative one--conservative in the sense of resistant to change. The argument runs that we must "educate" the "savages" through honor codes and increased surveillance, to rehabilitate those poor souls who, left to their own devices, can't help but turn to the dark side. The approved solution, one that administrators are willing to pay millions of dollars to support, is to fall back on conservative assumptions about education, to treat students like incipient criminals, and to police them vigorously. There are still plenty of people in my field who are like the professor Schaffner describes:
The other afternoon, at this panel I keep referring to, after we panelists had paneled, a professor in the audience stood up and asked a question. "How can I get my Computer Science students to stop plagiarizing? How can I get them to see that it is wrong to copy another person's work and turn it in as your own? They just don't see it as unethical!"This guy is looking, it seems, for a way to teach the ethic of original composition ... but how can such ethics be articulated without also being critiqued as fetishizing the solitary writer and the marketplace of (TM) textual products? And even moreso, I am concerned, how can we advocate for this aspect of academic integrity when so many other aspects of our academico-socio-cultural fabric is so lacking in integrity?
The problem with those first two questions is that the professor who's asking them believes them to be synonymous, when in fact they're not. We all plagiarize, which of course is the opposite of what one list denizen accuses us trendy folks of believing: "It may be interesting, even fashionable, to argue there's really no such thing as plagiarism..." Yeah, ummm, no. We all plagiarize, in the sense that we learn language by copying each other, from picking up on words that we like, all the way down to learning which grammatical structures are acceptable and which are less so. Reading is ripping. We are what we read, from our heads down to our feet--check out Don Foster's Author Unknown if you don't believe me. The problem comes with the mixing, with how much we mix (or how little, in the case of copy-paste plagiarism). Academics are taught to mix well, and to use quote marks when we choose not to. But there is no zero degree of mixing--putting one's name on someone else's work is pretty damn close to zero, but it's not. What we think of as "original composition" is in fact a case where the mixing is done so well that the composing, the putting-together, produces the effect of originality. Even Gladwell, knowing that his words had been lifted verbatim and placed in Lavery's manuscript, testifies to this effect:
Then I got a copy of the script for “Frozen.” I found it breathtaking. I realize that this isn’t supposed to be a relevant consideration. And yet it was: instead of feeling that my words had been taken from me, I felt that they had become part of some grander cause.
Problem is, many of us in academia have come to believe, or perhaps simply assumed, that what we ask of students is itself a "grander cause," even if it's a mandated requirement in a mandated course that may have no immediate connection to a given student's interests or education. This is not the absolute answer here, but not every student sees an essay fulfilled for an assignment in one of my classes as "their own work." The grade is theirs, perhaps, but the work (in their eyes) is mine--it matters to me, but not to them. The question that the professor above should ask is whether or not there's a better way to teach the material, design the assignment, or build the course, a way that encourages the student to see the benefits of mixing. There are ways, you know. Ways to design assignments that don't lend themselves to what Jenny's described as the general equivalency of paper mill assignments.
None of this means that there is no such thing as plagiarism or cheating, nor does it mean that there aren't students who won't willfully attempt to achieve the best results for the least amount of work, even if there are honor codes prohibiting their behavior. But there are also professors who assign mind-numbingly bad assignments, ones that are eminently plagiarizable because they are so predictable. Instead of only asking why students plagiarize (and concluding that they're simply evil or stupid), we might also be asking why they're able to plagiarize, why our assignments are so meaningless that they don't see the virtues of actually completing them on their own. The problem is undoubtedly broader than bad assignments or indifferent professors, but neither of those factors is entirely blameless.
And discussions like these would progress much more briskly if the issue of blame weren't such a huge part of them. That is all.
Posted by cgbrooke at 03:17 AM | Comments (3)
November 10, 2004
To that same old place that you laughed about
Nothing dramatic today. Just wanted to welcome Dave Rieder back to blogspace after a 7-month hiatus. He's back on the 'roll to the right.
Also recently added are a couple more SU bloggers. My colleague, Becky Howard, has finally taken the plunge, and has assured me that her site is unintentionally pseudonymous (and only then if you ignore the URL). Also, one of our ABD's, Jon Benda, who's currently teaching in Taiwan, has started "Notes of a Former Native Speaker."
I've got a couple more additions to make, but I'll get to them in a bit.
Posted by cgbrooke at 07:22 PM | Comments (0)
October 24, 2004
we being Brand
-new; and you
know consequently a
little stiff
Couple of weeks ago, Clancy posted an inquiry about Cluetrain, whether anyone in the field was picking it up or not, and that question has been bouncing around in my head ever since. It came at a time where I was thinking about excerpting it for my class next semester, and at a time when I've been adding people like Hugh MacLeod to my aggregator (having already aggregated the Cluetrain principals).
This morning, I came across an entry at Doc Searls's site, on the issue of branding, and that set me to thinking even more. (good set of followables there, that I won't simply repeat here)
The gist of Doc's remarks is that there is an inverse relationship between company-sponsored or -encouraged blogging and the strength of that company's brand. In other words, companies that have a high-intensity brand (like Apple, e.g.) need to exercise a great deal of control over the information that leaves the company. Hence, they're not likely to be as blog-friendly, which would require a certain amount of relaxation of control over information flow.
Normally, I'm not a huge fan of the corporate metaphor for education--I think it was Anne Balsamo who said once that education needs no metaphor--but in this case, I've been thinking about how compatible blogging will prove to be in composition classes. Actually, that's sounding a lot more philosophical than I mean it to--maybe I'm just responding belatedly to this thread from Kairosnews.
Anyhow, the connection for me among all of these things is whether or not we've basically treated the type of writing we profess as a brand--Academic Discourse®, perhaps--one that we find ourselves engaged in what Hugh calls egofriction, or as GaryM notes in the comments to that post, "a subconscious desire to have their side win." In other words, we hold on very tightly to what we do in our courses, particularly when it comes under fire from people in other disciplines, the general public, New Yorker columnists, whoever. And I'm as guilty of this as anyone--there are plenty of times where my interaction with these constituencies is more about "winning" than about anything particularly educational.
I'm not suggesting that we start reducing what we do to corporate-speak, but rather that we ask ourselves honestly if that isn't already what we do. If so, if we're involved in protecting our brand of writing, then it's hard for me to see how blogging is going to find a comfortable home in our departments, and I say that fully aware of the colossal overgeneralization I'm offering here. I'm not sure, however, that it's any worse of an overgeneralization than the ones we take for granted in the establishment and protection of our brand.
No grand conclusions or answers here--that's just what I've been thinking about this morning. That is all.
Posted by cgbrooke at 11:16 AM | Comments (1)
October 09, 2004
The final deconstruction
Jacques Derrida passed away last night, according to the BBC, succumbing to cancer at the age of 74.
News coverage will describe his obscurity, the controversies over his work, the difficulty of understanding deconstruction, etc. For me, though, JD was one of those once-in-a-generation thinkers whose work has become so diffuse across disciplines that there are literally hordes of writers who owe a great deal to his work without even realizing it. As I was working on my book this summer, I was amazed at how many times his work peeked through my own, and I don't really consider myself especially Derridean in my approach to things.
Two years ago, I taught Of Grammatology in my 20th Century Rhetoric course, and I remain convinced that Derrida, who is identified primarily as a philosopher, is one of the most important rhetoricians of the past century. He will never be recognized as such, I suspect, because his work is so difficult to encapsulate into keywords or simplistic patterns. Language is difficult, and Derrida's writing both attempts to understand and to perform that difficulty. But to see him simply as "difficult" underestimates one of the most important thinkers of our lifetime.
Posted by cgbrooke at 02:32 PM | Comments (2)
October 07, 2004
more on shortcuts
I wanted to write a little more about the idea of "shortcuts," because I shouldn't assume the self-evidence of the way that I'm using it. I'm working from an idea that Ball talks about in Critical Mass, and specifically from an article that I downloaded, from Joshua Epstein, who's at the Brookings Institution.
Epstein, Joshua M. "Learning to be Thoughtless: Social Norms and Individual Computation." Computational Economics 18 (2001): 9-24.
According to Epstein,
The point here is that many social conventions have two features of interest. First, they are self-enforcing behavioral regularities. But second, once entrenched, we conform without thinking about it. Indeed, this is one reason why social norms are useful; they obviate the need for a lot of indiviual computing (9).It seems to me that the literature on the evolution of norms and conventions has focused almost exclusively on the first feature of norms--that they are self-enforcing behavioral regularities... (9)
My aim here is to extend this literature with a simple agent-based model capturing the second feature noted above, that individual thought--or computing--is inversely related to the strength of a social norm. In this model, then, agents learn how to behave (what norm to adopt), but they also learn how much to think about how to behave. How much they are thinking affects how they behave, which--given how others behave--affects how much they think. In short, there is feedback between the social (inter-agent) and internal (intra-agent) dynamics (10).
Epstein runs this model through several iterations, with different variables (sample radius, tolerance, noise, etc.), but the quotes above are probably enough for what I want to write about here.
As a communicative system, language necessarily operates by social conventions, which is why I think Epstein is relevant. If we didn't share linguistic conventions, we'd be unable to communicate. But each of us also has an individual stake in minimizing the amount of energy we devote to communication--if we had to define every word as we used it, it would take the better part of a day just to write a sentence or two. And so that second feature, which describes the degree to which a convention is thoughtless (i.e., not requiring conscious thought), is crucial to language use.
Hence the attraction of jargon. It is to my advantage as an academic to use specialized terms, even if they are mystifying to a large percentage of the population. Jargon does more conceptual work than so -called "plain language," but it only does so in a much smaller context. To put it another way, I can shrink my sample radius by using specialized language, but at the cost of the overall force of the conventions I employ.
Or to put it in another context, there are frequently calls for those of us who teach writing to do a better job of teaching grammar. Frequently, though, these calls mistake the role that grammar plays in writing. They do so because grammatical errors is very easy to spot (see?) and can be judged right or wrong. The problem is that a proficient writer takes grammar for granted; she no more devotes active thought (computing) to grammatical correctness than she looks up every single word in the dictionary before using it.
So the trick with grammar is that we must teach writers not to think about it, in the sense of making it thoughtless, or taking it for granted. And the trouble here is that direct grammatical instruction doesn't help students make grammar thoughtless--if anything, it diverts their attention and energy from other writing tasks. This doesn't mean that grammar isn't important--far from it. Epstein's examples of thoughtless action are some of our strongest and least ambiguous social norms.
Epstein suggests that we are interested in minimizing our sample radii as much as possible. In other words, we don't want to have to check with hundreds of other people before we do something. But when it comes to grammar, we might argue that our sample radius takes the form of the things we read. I read a great deal, and so my language use is undoubtedly influenced by an ongoing, subconscious negotiation between my own beliefs, attitudes, and structures and those of the texts I read. Students who don't read outside of their classes, though, have no sample with which to operate. And those whose main goal in reading is the extraction of information are similarly unlikely to internalize much about language use. The other piece of the puzzle here is also sometimes absent, and that's writing. If one is simply reading, but not putting those conventions to work by writing, then it's going to be hard to move to the point of thoughtlessness as well.
In other words, you learn to become a better writer by reading and writing, something that sounds tremendously obvious, I know, and something that most of the people in my field take for granted. But we've done a poor job of explaining (to ourselves and others) that grammar instruction isn't simply a yes/no question.
And the point of the last post? That network studies and/or statistical analysis may provide us with a way to interrogate not only the conscious decisions writers/speakers make, but also their subsconscious assumptions...
Posted by cgbrooke at 05:27 PM | Comments (0)
September 15, 2004
Where I realize I spoke a day too soon
Some of you already know this, but I finally decided today that the returns on my writing have declined to the point where I need to take a break, a winding, two-month, hop-in-the-car-and-go kind of break. And so while it's not exactly "done," my manuscript is now over at Kinko's, getting copied and bound in the next day or so. It still needs work, in some places more than others, to be sure, but it's complete enough (I hope) to benefit from some constructive outside review.
I like to think that Rilo Kiley is at least partly responsible for my decision. I bought their new album about a week or so ago, but have been overdosing on it lately. It's a much different and much more varied album than The Execution of All Things and I wasn't sure I was going to like it. A couple of the songs hooked me though, and brought me round, and so I'll probably lead off my trip with it.
And as I got back from Kinko's, I went through my apartment and gathered a bunch of the books that I'll be taking with me as I travel and as I move on to book project #2, the one I've been chomping at the bit to work on for the past 6 months or so. Since I'm teaching a course on the topic in the spring, I'll probably end up being far more productive than my road trip would seem to indicate. I've realized tonight that psychologically, I've been preparing to leave for about 3-4 weeks, and now that I can, I'm not going to waste any time. Tomorrow, I'll figure out exactly how I want to set things up here for maximum blogging convenience from the road. Well, that and pack.
Posted by cgbrooke at 11:47 PM | Comments (3)
August 23, 2004
Museflowance
Every once in a while, it's worth an entry just to bring together a few ideas that click in my head. A couple of days ago, Jeff put together a couple of posts on "Theories I Believe In" and "Theories I Don't Believe In" (the link is to the positive post). In some ways, this reminds me of the "values listing" that Carol Bly advocates (I wrote about it right before my brithday last year). And the more I thought about it, the more I was thinking how it might make for a good exercise for graduate students--I should mention that I'm already planning on doing it myself one of these days when I'm not up to my elbows in manuscript.
Carol's exercise clicked with me, in part, I think, because it reminds me of doing Tarot or I Ching readings, and even heuretics to a degree--using different structures of thought to take snapshots of your life, mental or otherwise. And as I'm thinking this, Adrian posts about using Bruce Mau's "An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth" as a means of getting his students "to move to being knowledge producers"--"museflowance" is his result from trying #28: Make New Words. And this after, a few days earlier, having futzed around a bit with Robert Kendall's Soothcircuit.
No grand conclusion, except to observe that my mind's clearly been clicking on invention lately...
Posted by cgbrooke at 05:17 AM | Comments (1)
August 21, 2004
Doing "the math"
Before you add a comment and tell me that I take this stuff waaaay too seriously, let me admit up front that, yes, yes I do.
For whatever reason, I've been hearing the phrase "you do the math" with a lot more frequency lately. It's kind of a discursive shortcut--if you're talking numbers, rather than laying out an entire calculation (especially if it's fairly obvious), you might just suggest that your listener/audience "do the math." The implication is that the point you're making is so obvious that there's no real persuasion to be gained by explicitly completing the calculation.
Lately, though, I'm hearing the phrase in commercials--most recently for some back-to-school jeans sale. It's not so much that it's being used to describe situations that aren't really mathematical as much as it's become another one of those insufferably smug, self-consciously psuedo-ironic placeholders. What it really means, now, is "we don't really have anything to say, so we're going to pretend as though we've thought it through." For me, it's a lot like one of my all-time pet peeves: the apparently irresistible slapstick cliché, when someone runs into something or falls from a height or whatever, of saying "That's gotta hurt!" or "That's gonna leave a mark!" Hardy har har. It was mildly clever the first couple of times, but since then, it's become a piece of empty dialogue to be used in place of actually having to react to violence/pain/damage. There are all sorts of other "lines" like this, I'm sure, attempts to disguise one's lack of cleverness by adopting a clever pose...
Believe me when I say that I'm not a language purist or anything--much as I'd like to declare a moratorium on crap like that, language is going to change in all sorts of ways whether I like it or not. All the same, if language is the food of thought, "you do the math" is rapidly approaching the status of circus peanuts for me.
Posted by cgbrooke at 03:44 AM | Comments (1)
August 20, 2004
qu'est-ce qu'on dit?
Brian Weatherson started a conversation over at Crooked Timber about whether or not he can ever be used generically. Brian notes, "English has a perfectly adequate gender-neutral pronoun - they - and it should be used instead of he in these contexts." There's a little backstory as well about the Canadian Supreme Court having once (back in 1927) ruled that women didn't count as "persons." And yes, they were quickly overruled.
One of the commenters makes reference to an essay that I myself had forgotten about, Douglas Hofstadter's A Person Paper on Purity in Language, a satirical essay that imagines making the "he is gender-neutral" argument in a world where pronouns were based on race rather than gender:
Most of the clamor, as you certainly know by now, revolves around the age-old usage of the noun "white" and words built from it, such as chairwhite, mailwhite, repairwhite, clergywhite, middlewhite, Frenchwhite, forewhite, whitepower, whiteslaughter, oneupuwhiteship, strawwhite, whitehandle, and so on. The negrists claim that using the word "white," either on its own or as a component, to talk about all the members of the human species is somehow degrading to blacks and reinforces racism.
Hofstadter is a fave of mine from way back, and PPPL is a tour-de-force, not only reproducing/parodying all of the bad arguments on behalf of the generic he, but also bringing to our attention all of the little ways that gendered pronouns and language usage function near-invisibly. It's hard for me to imagine anyone being able to use the generic he after reading H's essay. The solution that most people seem on board with is the occasional use of they as singular, although this tactic has its detractors as well. Me? I'm growing increasing fond of hir, although I've yet to try getting it past an editorial board. Most of the time, I find that it takes very little to adjust a sentence and remove the problem altogether. I suspect that, after a while, most people just internalize it and move on. Still, it was cool to go back and read a little Hofstadter, which I haven't done (I don't think) since I was working on my dissertation...
Posted by cgbrooke at 02:27 AM | Comments (1)
August 10, 2004
Staying out of the kitchen
A couple of quick thoughts, before I turn in, on the flurry of posts that have been happening over at Steven's blog (and elsewhere), that connect back to the discussion that was going on a few days back, re anonymous/pseudonymous blogging.
I don't claim to have the last word, certainly, but it seems to me that at least a couple of the comments raise what for me is an important distinction, one that I first started thinking about in response to AlexH's talk at MEA: the distinction between academic blogging and blogging by academics.
I should be clear that I don't find one necessarily better than the other, nor do I see them as mutually exclusive. I think I do a little of both, although I think of myself primarily as someone who does academic blogging. In part, that's because technology is my primary area, and that means I should be doing, not just studying. But I've also got a stake in building a rep and attaching it to my name, the same name that'll be the byline for an article or two (on blogging and/or networks) in the next couple of years. I also believe strongly that, eventually, blogging will come to be seen as a legitimate form of academic activity; but just like electronic publication, part of the momentum for this must come from recognizable scholars offering either explicit or implicit endorsement. Unlike profgrrrrl, I probably will offer selected portions of my blog for my tenure case in a few years, both as an example of technoscholarly innovation and as a way of pushing at the kinds of evidence allowed. I won't use it instead of more traditional evidence, but I currently plan to use it. (maybe not the ass-grabbing story, though.)
However, and this is a big however, not only is academic blogging a tiny, tiny subset of blogs in general (as AlexH has also noted), it's a subset of the number of academics who blog. And I think it's important to recognize that occupying that subset means that our (academic bloggers') goals are pretty narrowly defined. By no means does this mean that we've got all the answers, esp to the big life questions, but it does offer us the freedom of setting those issues aside. And it does so at the cost of the freedom of confronting those issues in one place where we can build a community to help us with them. My point is stupidly simple, I suppose. Different isn't worse, once you accept that the relationship between the terms "blogging" and "academic" can be configured in a range of ways.
Okay. One more. Steven asks: "When did the tables turn on this idea of 'not my real name' equals credibility and authenticity?" I've actually got a half-baked essay on this. Credibility isn't just one thing. We're used to seeing it work top-down: I know this writer is good, therefore I will read her article. But it works the other way, too: This article is good, therefore I will remember her name the next time I see it. It's not so much that pseudonyms themselves grant instant credibility, so much as it is that, when a body invests time and energy and care into developing a pseudonym, it functions with no less credibility and authenticity than does a "real" name. (Which is the point that Rana makes.)
To be fair, though, I should note that pseudonyms are basically anonymous, if an audience isn't party to that investment. The distinction there is not as hard and fast as I think some are assuming. The first time I read a blog, whether the person blogs under their "real" name or not, for me it's anonymous. I think that the problem comes when someone has invested in their anonym to turn it into a pseudonym, only to have it treated like an anonym (decontextualized, generalized, etc.), if that makes any sense. But I don't really think that the process of developing a pseudonym is markedly different from developing a nym. In both cases, credibility is something that ends up emerging over time.
And no, I don't really think I'm saying anything here that isn't raised in one form or another in the comments to the posts listed above. I'm just thinking through them for myself....
Posted by cgbrooke at 02:32 AM | Comments (2)
July 24, 2004
I must confess my curiosity
Will notes that Microsoft has set up an RSS feed for topics of interest to educators. I admit it, I'm curious and, as of a few minutes ago, subscribed.
The first entry I looked at connects to a white paper at the MS site: Learning in a Connected World. Even downloaded it. But let me make one thing clear to the person from Microsoft who comes here as a result of the obligatory corporate egosurf. When the page told me that the paper explores, and I quote:
A solution architecture to help educators map a technology infrastructure to the challenges faced by institutions today.
I can't tell you how close I came to unsubscribing right there. Laugh all you like at the tortured prose of academic writers, poststructural theorists, etc., but this is abominable stuff. An architecture, and a solution architecture no less, to help me map an infrastructure to challenges? OMG.
At least, the page doesn't use "leverage" as a verb--oh wait, that's in the subtitle.
I know that it's basically an extended advertisement for MS products, and I know that every network generates its own jargon which is more or less opaque, but still. Look at it this way: if academic prose is so bad as to function almost like a second language, why in the world would we want to learn a third language in order to be advertisted at? Hire a couple more Discursive Efficacy Engineers, would you?
(I'm available on a consultant basis)
Posted by cgbrooke at 05:18 AM | Comments (3)
April 08, 2004
/stall
I'm chairing a thesis defense at 10 am tomorrow for a student over in the Communication and Rhetorical Studies department, and rather than reading back over the thesis itself, I've spent the last hour or so over at Timothy Burke's site. He's one of those academic bloggers whose name I've seen around, and I've even read a couple of entries of his here and there, but this is the first sustained read I've done of his site.
Won't be the last, either. One of the first posts I looked at was his discussion of student writing "Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay," a nice collection of some of the persistent, "perennial" problems that occur in the writing students do for him. Over the past couple of years, I've grown more and more interested in analysis as a genre/strategy, and most of what he describes are issues that I've taken up in my own classrooms as well, although perhaps not as crisply as he does here. I'll probably start linking to this entry in my online syllabi, and not just the first-year courses, either.
Okay. Back to that thesis...
Posted by cgbrooke at 11:19 PM | Comments (0)
April 06, 2004
Nobody cares but me
Trolling on ESPN to find that the Cubs don't play again until tomorrow, I come across the following headline:
"Navratilova loses first singles match in decade"
I know that this is nitpicky and anal and simply identifies me as one of those geeks who falls square into the worst stereotypes of English teachers, but I can't help but observe that this headline could mean two different things: Martina played in her first singles match in a decade, and lost (this is what it actually means); or, that she's been playing tennis and hasn't lost for at least ten years. It's either a headline about a comeback or one about total dominance.
I'm completely aware that I'm opening myself up to all sorts of ridicule by admitting this, but it's an unfortunate fact that I notice bad writing, almost by reflex, and I care more about it than is probably healthy for my own publishing aspirations.
You may commence mockery.....now.
Posted by cgbrooke at 08:39 PM | Comments (3)
March 03, 2004
Presentation styles
From a couple of days ago, Steve mentions an article that came across the NCTE Inbox, about the relationship between evaluation of computer-printed and handwritten texts. Among the conclusions:
Researchers examining how evaluators approach student writing on tests have found that computer-printed essays are frequently scored more harshly than handwritten essays.
Steve raises a good point, which is that this question assumes that pen and paper is a common starting point for all writers (and hence that computer processed text has gone through a second draft or revision and should be more polished). My build on that is to turn back to Chrstina Hass's work in Writing Technology, another of those should-be-read-far-more-often-than-it-actually-is books. I wonder if what's being noticed by evaluators isn't some of the weakness that Hass hypothesizes in that book, namely that writers who work exclusively by screen have a less developed text sense than those who work "by hand."
It's an interesting question to me because, a couple of weeks ago, I shared with a group of students the results of an experiment that I participated in, as part of one of my TA training courses, way back when. The group was split into two groups, and each was given a couple of paragraphs, one handwritten and the other typed (or word-processed), and each group was to suggest a grade for their writing sample. And yes, they were the same text, and yes, the handwritten one received a grade a full letter grade lower than the typed one.
So it makes me curious. I wonder too if the critical response to printed text doesn't have something to do with the fact that handwritten text is more difficult to look through (yeah, I'm talking Lanham here). I sometimes have difficulty spelling certain words (gauge and guard are two of my nemeses), but that difficulty is heightened when I'm handwriting them. I can often tell a word is misspelled simply because the word itself is shaped oddly, but obviously that's only true when it's printed out. As I write this, that sounds like I'm "looking at," but actually I'm only peripherally aware of the word itself when I sense a misspelling. In other words, the uniformity of text makes it easier for me to sense "errors."
And I've deadened that sense considerably over the past few years. I find now that I have to read a second time for language to catch stuff that I would have noticed easily once upon a time.
On a completely unrelated note, I'd love to see a smaller, more specialized version of the Inbox. I often gloss over it simply bc I get it so often, and bc so little of it holds any real interest for me. As a result, I sometimes miss stuff I shouldn't. Inbox is effectively an email-based syndication feed, and it may be the single smartest thing NCTE has done with technology--now we just need to learn from it...
Posted by cgbrooke at 08:28 PM | Comments (0)