Spoiler alert (via). (w/ statements about plan-free, collaborative writing).
Tag: writing
Carnival: Trimbur and Writing Studies
Following Donna’s
renewed call for the late February Trimbur carnival, here are a couple of
floats in response to
"Changing the Question: Should Writing Be Studied?" from Composition
Studies 31.1 (2003).
For now I’ll try to keep it to just two or three ideas. I’ve heard
passing mention of "writing studies" as an alternative name for the knot (bow?)
where rhetoric and composition are tied together. When I used it myself
once, I think someone suggested that the "writing studies" designation is
typically claimed by discourse analysts–those whose encounters with texts are
measured for pattern and (ir)regular features. Perhaps that’s only of value
inasmuch as it sheds light on my own baggage with the phrase: a moment of
correction, definition, and re-association. And whether this is right or not is
less the point, I think, than the contemplation of writing studies’ orientation
to particular methods and research agendas. As I read Trimbur’s article, I also
thought about another passing conversation with a colleague who described
someone else’s work in film this way: "[S.h]e does film studies, not production.
Students who take film classes want production rather than all of the history,
theory, and methodology that go along with film studies. They’re impatient
and even bored with film studies." That was the gist of it, anyhow.
Out of this half-remembered conversation comes one question about a shift from
workshop to seminar room and toward writing studies: at the cost of what?
If the answer is that we study writing (n.) at the expense of writing (p.v.),
the proposition becomes considerably messier. Of course, nobody is saying
this explicitly, but to what degree is a quiet displacement of something else
implied by the asking?
Certainties
B. Franklin left it at death and taxes, right? As I teach SU’s research-based
second semester writing course to seniors (and only seniors), I’m feeling the
weight of the death-n-taxes counterpart in academic writing: length limits and
deadlines. Two unavoidable encumbrances. Give either of them a liberatory shrug–whatever–and what happens? So we need, instead, to
declare two-thousand words by Friday, and so on, arbitrary though it might seem. What, besides length
limits and deadlines, structures the writing activity one does for academic credit?
Sure, there are sentences and paragraphs (utterances, gestures, etc.), but I’m not talking
about language forms. Length limits and deadlines certify the institutionality of
the writing. Institution-free, the writing need not adhere to either
staple, right? With blogging, for instance, what of deadlines? What
of length limits? But figure blogs into a course, what will happen if matters of
length limits and deadlines or frequency, even if left to such vagarisms as
"flexible" or "open," are not otherwise determined? Just a few
thoughts…
Databasic Writing
Our program requires that we attend two mini-seminars every semester.
Several different mini-seminars are available, from three-hour sessions on a
single day concerned with the discipline (the
Reese’s PB Cup variety
of rhetoric in my composition and vice versa), world Englishes, WAC, or some
other topic, to sessions broken across a couple of weeks on stuff like teaching
online, service learning, and information literacy. The mini-seminars are
meant to foster professional development. Everyone in the writing
program–besides first-year TAs and full-time staff and graduate faculty (who
oftentimes lead the sessions)–are made to attend.
X-timing Parataxis
I first thought I would call this entry "Two-timing Parataxis" so I could get
at the different relationships parataxis enjoys–simultaneously!–with
syntaxis, on the one hand (cheek?), and hypotaxis, on the other.
But as I try to get a better handle on parataxis in anticipation of Thursday’s
defense, I’m starting to think parataxis is more than two-timing. Patsy Cline: "Your
cheating heart will make you weep." Heh, weep. Only I’m the one in
a fix because of parataxis’s scandal and infidelity.
Thus far, I’m finding a couple of more or less common distinctions, one
grammatical, in which parataxis is positioned as a dance partner with
syntaxis, and one rhetorical, in which parataxis is paired with
hypotaxis. The tabloids will be all over this.
Cloudifying Exams
Because I have a hearing/defense coming up Thursday morning for my qualifying exams, I figured why not run the answers for the most frequent nouns and noun phrases? And then I figured, why not post each answer as a tagcloud?
I’ve re-read my exam answers to prepare for each of the meetings with members of my committee over the past few days. Re-connecting with the answers has been unsurprising; I mean that the answers were what I remembered them to be. Their arguments, for better and worse, are still fresh with me. Still, the tagcloud gives me another perspective. A different bi-product.
I don’t have a whole lot more to say about the questions I anticipate or the steps I’m taking to defend myself my answers. Just saying that because I have the CSS built to handle it, I’m enamored of posting more vaporous gatherings, beginning with these.
An Account
Latour, in ch. 5 of Reassembling, writes this of "slowciological"
accounts:
What is an account? It is typically a text, a small ream of paper a few
millimeters thick that is darkened by a laser beam. It may contain 10,000
words and be read by very few people, often only a dozen or a few hundred if
we are really fortunate. A 50,000 word thesis might be read by a half a
dozen people (if you are lucky, even your PhD advisor would have read parts
of it!) and when I say ‘read’, it does not mean ‘understood’, ‘put to use’,
‘quoted’, ‘shelved somewhere in a pile’. At best we add an account to all
those which are simultaneously launched in the domain we have been studying.
Of course, this study is never complete. We start in the middle of things,
in medias res, pressed by our colleagues, pushed by fellowships,
starved for money, strangled by deadlines. And most of the things we have
been studying, we have ignored or misunderstood. (122)
Even if I don’t choose this as the epigraph to the preface to the rough draft
of my dissertation prospectus, I find it to be an encouraging and humorous
characterization of the phase that lies ahead. And this is to say nothing of
Reassembling seeming one of the more important (read smart, even riveting)
books I’ve picked up in recent months. Well, right, I am being sort of pokey in
crawling through it, the way an aspiring slowciologist of associations should.
That Question
So-so: that’s how it’s gone preparing for writing an answer Thursday morning
to the exam question I’ve had since this past Thursday. Just so-so.
Throughout most of the day on Saturday, I was thinking about matching select
chapters from Heskett’s Toothpicks & Logos (which is built into the
question) with a few of the ecology pieces on my reading list. I’d match
the chapter on communications with Cooper’s "Ecology of Writing" and the chapter
on systems with Spinuzzi’s stuff on tracing genres and the evolution of ALAS.
But what about the chapter on objects?
*crumple*
Sentence-coaster Rides, Screaming Prose
I jogged out the major qualifying exam yesterday, writing one answer in a
three-hour morning session and a second answer in a three-hour afternoon
session. I’m still a little bit groggy-headed about the whole of the
performance. I’m fairly sure that I did a better job of answering the first
question than the second. By the afternoon stint what was a heap of kicky
ideas in the A.M. was reduced to a wash of once-kicky ideas wanting for a nap.
I’m encouraged, still: I’m not embarrassed about the answers I wrote (okay, so
maybe I’d take back a couple of sentences, if I could), and I feel fairly
confident that I can defend my choices, explain why I did what I did, and
convince my calmmittee that I executed the two major exams well enough that I
deserve, more or less, to move on to what’s next. I was thinking about
including a note here about how much I wrote, about word and page counts,
since I’ve been prone to a fascination with such trivia throughout the duress
of preparation. But no, for now I will withhold those factoids. Today I’m
leaving out those details in protest (a protest of relief, to be sure) of word
and page counts. Let’s just say I wrote all that I possibly could in three
hours, twice.
Sprints
I went ahead and tried the exam-writing sprints Krista
recommended. The questions I’ll be answering on Thursday, during a pair of
three-hour sittings, are only approximations. The exist in partially
remembered shreds from recent conversations rather than definitely, I mean,
in writing. I’ve selected and assembled and condensed notes
accordingly, committing to probable answers and probable
organizations while figuring that I can bend the questions just enough to match
with the answers I’m best prepared to write.