Tag: writing

I Am Not the Best Writer

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments

I’m on a twenty-minute break before my final consulting appointment this Writing Center Friday No. 5. So far, five one-hour appointments and one half-hour appointment. Many of them have been in the early stages of drafting for papers due next week. Twice today I have heard the entry’s title–and not only from students I worked with directly. Much apologizing is trafficked in the Writing Center for some reason or other: I’m sorry I was late. I’m sorry my draft is partial/messy/unfinished/gibberish/hackneyed/confusing/stained with coffee. I’m sorry I didn’t bring my sources. I’m sorry I had a garlic bagel for lunch. I’m sorry my handwriting is illegible. And so on. Maybe this is cause enough for a gigantic vinyl banner at the front door that settles it from the outset: “All apologies accepted.”

I don’t begrudge anyone that felt need to level things up and make explicit one’s own sense of the text (or situation) before sharing it with others. I am prone to it myself (Oh, here’s a crude draft. Forgive me.) It’s just a pattern that has started to stand out after five weeks of longish Fridays in the WC–a pattern I probably could have anticipated had I thought about it long enough, since it turns up in classes and other venues where writing is circulated–a graceful gesture of recovery from the mustard-stain quality of so much in-progress writing.

Second, Subsequent Streams

/ Derek Mueller

Revisions have been challenging. Having resolved myself to more
drafting before squaring with revisions, the commented drafts of my
dissertation’s introduction and first two chapters tend to taunt me. I haven’t
figured out how to fit it in, how to make room for it given the other regular
paces. I’d been meaning (for a couple of weeks) to get through some of the
first-stage directorial comments to those early chapters, mostly because I want
them to be ready for the rest of my committee sometime in Marchpril and also
because I have at least one other reader who I’m trying to get them ready for.
So I took a leap head-long into the "When will I revise?" problem on Saturday,
and spent most of the day with it.

The introduction was fairly easy. It’s elastic: short, overviewy, and
without glaring needs. It was manageable to get through all of the
comments, and make appropriate adjustments, leaving aside the summaries of the
last two chapters (5, 6) because are yet unwritten. But working through
Chapter One was somewhat more daunting; I expected this since it is much thicker
than the introduction. I got through all of the superficial stuff, and ended up
with a list, indexed by page, of what is left: two placeholder notes (no work
required), four easy changes (citation adding, a one-sentence gloss on this or
that), seven moderately difficult changes (almost all of which require some
re-reading of sources), and one major change (a section that I will probably
re-write from scratch with a slightly different–simpler–focus). It is
helpful to have the index; but I don’t know when I will get to it. Perhaps
in Marchpril. Or Mayune. (Ay, clearly, we need a better vocabulary for two-month
units).

I am not in panic mode about the demands of revision, the frequency or scope
of the changes due (I know because I have not been tempted to add exclamatory
emphasis to any of this.). But I still don’t know how to work those
revisions into what has been, out of necessity, a fairly compacted daily
schedule. In this room-for-revision conundrum there lingers a problem of
rhythm-breaking, and it’s difficult to embrace that challenge when it’s been so
challenging just to establish a more or less even writing rhythm (the dailiness
of dissertating, call it). Perhaps as much as anything, blogging has prepared me
for the dailiness, but I still feel somewhat spun-around (i.e., vertigahh!) by
the prospect of taking revision very seriously while drafting. To say
nothing of other projects needing attention. So maybe if I stack all of it
in a tidy pile on the deepest corner of my desk, it will still be there when I
get to it in a couple of weeks.

Regan, “Type Normal Like the Rest of Us”

/ Derek Mueller

Regan, Alison. "’Type Normal Like the Rest of Us’: Writing, Power, and Homophobia in the Networked Composition Classroom." Computers and Composition 9.4
(Nov 1993): 11-23. <http://computersandcomposition.osu.edu/archives/v10/10_4_html/10_4_2_Regan.html>

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Feed Reader Live

/ Derek Mueller / 3 Comments

Back to back to back to back to back to back to back to back to back consulting appointments in the Writing Center today. Nine of them; every time slot filled between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., although my third appointment (slotted for a half hour) was a no-show. Just now I had to check my “tutor utilization” report in Tutortrac to make sure I had the count right. By about 3 p.m., I was beginning to feel a little over-utilized. Simple fatigue more than disappointment or dissatisfaction. I singed up for this, and longish Fridays keep a couple of other days of the week free (free-ish) for pure, uninterrupted work on the blissertation.

The conversations went as follows:

  1. WRT205 inquiry essay on the constraints on graffiti as it is co-opted by corporations trying to appeal to a market niche while it also faces scorn as a vulgar form relative to more traditional and legitimized art forms.
  2. WRT205 cultural memory essay on the iconic force of MLK Jr.’s photograph in front of Lincoln Memorial. The claims and propositions have been a struggle in the essays about popular photos and American cultural memory; they risk tumbling into the abyss of grand sweeping declarations about what most Americans think.
  3. No show.
  4. First regular meeting with a student enrolled in WRT220: Writing Enrichment. This one-credit course pairs a student (who opts in) for weekly meetings with a consultant throughout the term. It is taken for pass-fail credit, and in the meetings we are concerned with writing across the student’s full set of courses (the focus is not exclusive to WRT courses, in other words).
  5. Break. But for the first half hour of it, I joined a conversation with an SU alum (recently finished undergrad) who set an appointment in the WC to talk with her former WRT instructor about how best to approach admissions to an MA in a comp-rhet program that would allow her to explore interests in creative nonfiction, TESOL, and professional/technical communication. I don’t know whether I helped matters any by carrying on about stuff to consider. Any thoughts?
  6. A SOC101 paper on the “sociological imagination.” Lots of references to “society”, which is, I take it, a major issue in today’s introductory sociology curriculum.
  7. A GEO paper on push-pull theories of migration.
  8. A follow-up (returner from last Friday) with an essay for WRT205 on food politics: the burst in organic goods.
  9. The rough half-draft of a 1000-word personal statement for a McNair Scholarship application.
  10. Another WRT205 inquiry essay: explain how specific examples of humor deepen and complicate a pressing social issue. Here the focus was on Moore’s Sicko and private health care.

I was warned that Fridays might be light and breezy, with few students checking in because it’s the spring semester and, well, it’s Friday. Need more reason than that to steer clear of the Writing Center? The packed Friday doesn’t leave any room at the end of my week for double-dipping (working while at work), but it definitely has its advantages. The conversations are focused and time-bound. Today someone suggested that my Friday hours were freakishly demanding, but I tend to think of it more along the lines of seven hours with an RSS reader, only the feeds are embodied differently; the writers of the works are sitting down with me and having a conversation: Writing Center work as a nine-scene Google Reader Live skit with a clearly defined “Mark all as read” at the end of the day.

Doubling Back

/ Derek Mueller / 3 Comments

I emerged from Netheruary break on Monday still in a bit of a haze from the
weekend. Did you see that the Giants won the Superbowl? Enjoyed
every minute of it.

But this is an entry about the diss. I expected that I would bound back
into my daily paces on Monday, resume the 9-noon sessions, aiming for roughly
two pages each day so as to have a draft of Chapter Four by the end of February.
But I fell into a slump. I couldn’t see the chapter. I knew vaguely what I
wanted to do. I had an outliney plan, a few notes, a bottle of Vitamin Water. I had the graphs I
painstakingly built day by day throughout January. And I remain fond of the
graphs. I think they’re quite good for getting at what I take to be the aim of
the chapter. But! I couldn’t grasp the chapter; couldn’t sense it,
couldn’t begin it in a smart-enough place. And, therefore, piling them up 2 p.
by 2 p. by 2 p., I typed nearly seven pages of rubbish between Monday and
Wednesday. I would excerpt some of it to win my point; then again, I would
never subject you to such inhospitable treatment.

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Kremers, “Sharing Authority on a Synchronous Network”

/ Derek Mueller

Kremers, Marshall. "Sharing Authority on a Synchronous
Network: The Case for Riding the Beast." Computers and Composition 7
(April 1990; Special issue): 33-44. <http://computersandcomposition.osu.edu/archives/v7/7_spec_html/7_spec_2_Kremers.html>

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Writing Feverlets*

/ Derek Mueller

Curious about her critique of Derrida’s Archive Fever, I picked up a
copy of Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History from
Bird Library, recalling it from another patron who had checked it out (v. sorry
about that). I deal briefly with AF in Chapter Three. Steedman
makes the point that AF is less about archives than about Derrida’s
concern for the slippage of origins (a theme in his other work) and the
inseparability of psychoanalysis from Freud (and also Judaism). She
writes, "The Foreword [to AF] carried the main argument, about Freud’s
Jewish-ness, and the contribution of Jewish thought to the idea of the archive,
via psycho-analysis" (7). Basically, Steedman is suspicious of Derrida’s
characterization of the fever (as a frenzied pursuit of origins which do not
properly exist). She complains that the concept of the fever is degraded in
translation from Mal d’Archive, and then she enthusiastically claims the
sickness Derrida mocks: "Archive fever, indeed? I can tell you all about
Archive Fever!" (17). Dust undertakes this "all about-ness" at fever’s pitch;
Steedman, all the while, works to correct (or tune, at the very least) Derrida’s
glancing consideration of the archive left behind in his treatment of other
concerns (psychoanalysis, Freud, and so on).

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Like So Many Mushrooms

/ Derek Mueller

To prepare for an orientation meeting in the Writing Center tomorrow, today I
leafed back through North’s "The Idea of a Writing Center," which is on the
short list of recommended readings that will be used to prime the conversation
in the meeting. I suppose this just proves what I’d already suspected: I
haven’t been reading nearly enough lately, but I find North’s 1984 CE
essay both funny and edgy in a drop-the-gauntlets sort of way. His intensity
shows; he is not bored with what he is writing. Consider this passage:

People make similar remarks [about error] all of the time, stopping me or
members of my [Writing Center] staff in the halls or calling us into
offices, to discuss–in hushed tones, frequently–their current "impossible"
or difficult students. There was a time, I will confess, when I let my
frustration get the better of me. I would be more or less combative,
confrontational, challenging the instructor’s often well-intentioned but not
very useful "diagnosis." We no longer bother with such confrontations; they
never worked out very well, and they risk undermining the genuine compassion
our teachers have for the students they single out. Nevertheless,
their behavior makes it clear that for them, a writing center is to
illiteracy what a cross between Lourdes and a hospice would be to serious
illness: one goes there hoping for miracles, but ready to face the
inevitable. In their minds, clearly, writers fall into three fairly distinct
groups: the talented, the average, and the others; and the Writing Center’s
only logical raison d’etre must be to handle those others–those, as
the flyer proclaims, with "special problems." (435)

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Ways of Working

/ Derek Mueller

Saturday morning I was lounging around the living room, looking after Is.,
and flipping channels on the television for a few minutes, when I stopped on
C-SPAN2’s Book TV. They were running a three-hour

interview with Nell Irvin Painter, the historian who wrote, among other
things, Standing At Armageddon, a book I read a few years ago during
coursework.

I don’t watch much Book TV, it turns out, so I don’t know whether it is
typical for them to break from the interviews to give quick little documentary
segments on the processual nuances for the featured writer. But they did
so for Painter, and it happened to come at the very moment when I was checking
out the program. The up-close look at the way Painter works comes between
1:01:18 and 1:15:16 if you are inclined to check it out via the Real Media file
provided by CSPAN.

Painter talks about the way her meandering process picks up late in the day.
She talks about how she creates, names, and saves her computer files (a new one
for each day, recently), how kayaking "helps" as part of her methodology, how
she writes in books she owns, and how she senses that her home in the
Adirondacks affords greater concentration. There is more: on her
dissertation, on cut and paste, on her use of a thesaurus, on working with
editors through revisions, on Row ("Roe"?), the friendly cat who crashes the
interview, and on how she keeps her library. It is a fifteen-minute
segment with a long list of writerly insights; Painter begins by saying, "I
would not recommend my way of working to others." Who would?

I was also interested in the moment when she talks about how she reads books,
how she develops personal indexes on a separate sheet of paper.
Productive, indexical thinking is something I have tried to make more tangible for
students in recent semesters. I like to hear people talk about it, and, in
fact, even though Painter’s way of working seems like what you would expect of a
historian academic (i.e., there is nothing shocking here), I wish we had more
documentary segments like this. Fifteen minutes on how I work (most of the
time): I’d love to see these for a long list of people. Maybe I am alone in this
fascination.

Whether or not I am, it suggests to me an alternative the longer,
multi-voiced documentaries of composition we have seen recently in Take 20
(emph. pedagogy) and Remembering Composition (emph. digitality). And I
understand the slim chance of seeing documentary film (or video) shorts become a
more regular feature of any journal (whether online or distributed as DVD with
the paper copy)–low odds because its dissymmetry with ten(ur)able scholarship
at many institutions. Without loosening the lid on that argument, this is
just to say that I’d like to see more of it–more writerly documentaries, that
is.