Read:Write

I was interested to read Paul Matsuda's recent entry, "Read Everything," because it gets at the challenge involved in scholarly niche and rhythm. He begins with this:

One of the stock pieces of advice that I give gradaute students is to "read everything." Of course it's impossible to read everything that has ever been written, but I do expect researchers to have read everything--literally everything--on subtopics within the field on which they are writing.

This paradox is the ongoing challenge, no? Read everything; to read everything is impossible. Still, one must. But cannot. Etc. The outlying factors bear down and raise related questions: write everything? How much to read before writing? While writing? How much to write while reading?

I developed a decent relationship with my FYC professor at Central Michigan (where I studied for a year before transferring) and so listened in on many of his sage asides. For him, the maxim of read it all shifted to memory and attention and "read this": "Be one on whom nothing is lost." I remember him reminding us--fervently--that to feel intellectually small you need only to go to the library, look at one shelf on one floor of the library, and consider what you must do to understand it. Phew. Were we ever glad to have a reader.

To my mind Matsuda's stock advice is good for hearing, even if it can't be fully executed. In this sense, it turns into the performance of reading all that one can possibly read and recognizing (while also not being put off by) the unavoidable limitation in such a commitment as that.

Note Systems

S uccess in qualifying exams and later with the diss depends upon a reasonably comprehensive note-taking system. It's true, it's true. Who would argue? (And so it's a truism hardly worth restating).

I took so-so notes throughout coursework, but I also experimented a little bit too much, often making do with something messy and sketchy or other times accepting as good enough a summary or some other sort of page long response to the reading. From coursework, then, I have an assortment of notes. I mean the category of notes includes all kinds and classes: stickies, composition book messes, legal pads with many-an-in-class doodle, blog entries in the reading notes category, and so on. Some are proving useful for exam preparation, but many, regrettably, must be brushed up. In the weeks ahead, I've many notes to groom. I should add, however, that much of the writing that happens beyond the edge of intelligible notes is also worthwhile. So I wouldn't say that coursework would have been sharper for me at the time had I taken more methodical notes. Yet with relatively minor effort, I could have focused my coursework notes into something that, for being more regular in form and scope, would have served me better later on (i.e., right now). So many lessons.

Of the many small bumps and ruts I passed through this summer (toward reasonably smooth progress on exams), the biggest one involved settling on a method for keeping good notes. It had to be sustainable. It had to be searchable. It had to be typed (bc my handwriting...bird-scratch illegible). It had to involve tagging and other schemes for organization. And it had to function like a robust database. Aesthetically appealing. Affordable.

Exams vary considerably from program to program, as you would expect. Ours involve a major area (two questions; a pair of three-hour sittings to answer each on a single day) and two minor areas (one, we have the question for a week, then write it on site in three hours; the other, we write at home throughout a one-week stretch). Add it up, and it comes to nine hours of writing in a whatever's available space in the department (often the grad office) and a week-long take home essay that, when said and done, ought to be "publishable quality." As of this moment, it still seems possible to me that I'll be ready to kick things in motion with the all-day major exam on Dec. 1 and follow with the two minor exams before the holidays. If a crappy semester, the alternate date is sometime in January.

But I set out to write about my notes system. I eventually settled on something systematic back in early June, and, aside from a few due and appropriate lulls, I've been posting notes fairly regularly. I'm satisfied that it's coming together, doing, I mean, what I think a notes system should do--keeping me focused, moving along, registering thinned and concentrated versions of what I've read. And I share it now, after close to fifty entries, because I wanted to be sure it was up and running before I pointed to it. And so it is.

Comments are closed, and I haven't made use of any internal trackbacks yet, although I might if I decide that such a thing would be helpful. I've been most pleased with the tagging system (tags-in-common trigger the "Related Entries" feature at the bottom of each individual entry). It's also tied in with a private (for now) del.icio.us account for other categorical clustering. The dates assigned to each entry are rough approximations of the dates I produced the notes (you'll see, for instance, that the book I'm on now is posted already for tomorrow). And the minor exams are yet underdeveloped for some of the reasons I mentioned above--many of those notes are on paper or in other places.

Vielstimmig, "Petals on a Wet Black Bough"

V ielstimmig, Myka. "Petals on a Wet Black Bough: Textuality, Collaboration, and the New Essay." Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. Eds. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1999. 89-114.

Spooner and Yancey perform a collagist convergence in "Petals on a Wet Black Bough." They are chiefly concerned with the new essayism proliferated in the associational cut/paste practices of writing the screen. They experiment with collaborative personae (hence the fused author-figure). The conventions of academic exposition, normative conceptions of coherence, and the rise of associative intelligence in the midst of hypertext are chief among their concerns. Ultimately, they ask when and how teachers will be prepared to admit new/net essayism into the schoolroom and, as well, how assessment will keep pace.

Vielstimmig (German for many voiced) mentions the Emersonian self-reliant spirit that infuses much American education.

Three maxims: Assessment has to fit pedagogy (110). Pedagogy has to fit textuality (110). Can changes in pedagogy not be far behind? (111): "If what we're going to value is the essay proper--whether it's Bartholomae's or Elbow's--then by all means, let's turn the Internet off" (110).

"The new essay seems to have its own logic: intuitive, associative, emergent, dialogic, multiple--one grounded in working together and in re/presenting that working together" (90).

"This is not an argument against The Essay or against 'print classic' or conventional logic. It is an argument toward another kind of essay: a text that accommodates narrative and exposition and pattern, all three" (91).

"Speak for yourself, pal" (92).

"Ironically, both Spellmeyer's and Prince's purpose in reminding us of the essay's history is to restore it to its prior position: as a place for exploration not governed by the scholastic" (93).

"In some critiques of 'experimental' academic works (like this one?), there's a fundamental question about what counts as coherence, cohesion, and other interpretive conventions" (99).

"It is disappointing, though, how much influence is moving the other direction: that is, too many online essays merely reproduce offline textual conventions" (102). ^Solid ties to scholastic-reductive blogging ventures.

"Associational thinking may be another, more concrete and synthesizing, intelligence altogether" (108).

Terms: essay as a confinement (92), "rhetoricity of coherence" (101), Turkle's "aesthetics of simulation" (105), Venn diagram (to establish difference and relationship) (108)

Related Sources

Kirsch, Gesa. "Multi-Vocal Texts and Interpretive Responsibility." College English 59 (1997): 191-201.

Phelps, Louise Wetherbee. "Dialectics of Coherence." College English 47 (1985): 12-30.

Wittig, Rob. Invisible Rendezvous: Connection and Collaboration in the New Landscape of Electronic Writing. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1994.

Moran, "Computers and Composition 1983-2002"

M oran, Charles. "Computers and Composition 1983-2002: What We Have Hoped For.'" Computers and Composition. 20 (2003): 343-358.

Charlie Moran, writing from the perspective of an insider, synthesizes twenty years of Computers and Composition (1983-2002) scholarship by identifying trends in what was hoped for. Addressing participant's in Barton's discourses of technology and as teachers, Moran contends that the journal reflects a particular series of hopes for the implications of computer technology on the teaching of writing. Early hopes, Moran explains, focused on the elimination of drudgery ("copy-editing, revising, and retyping" (346) to "responding to student writing" (346)) and on technology-prompted improvements in the quality of student writing (for basic writers, as well). As the journal matured, the hoped-for thing shifted to improved professional status in an effort to "become more established, more secure in our research, tenure, and promotion" (351).

More recent hopes, according to Moran, reflect a shift from looking at technologies to looking through them (Lanham's distinction). Along these lines, Moran accounts for the improved material quality of the journal (352) and also increasing consideration of egalitarian and social justice concerns--manifestations of critical pedagogy--reflected in the journal.

"Computers and Composition 1983-2002" proceeds by broad-strokes synthesis and the generalization of thematic patterns in the scholarship appearing in Computers and Composition. To some extent, the essay is bibliographic; in it, Moran reduces numerous article-length works to single sentences while accounting for overarching, persistent themes.

"So what is it that we, in the field of computers and writing, have hoped for?" (344).

"I argue in this article that in the pages of Computers and Composition, we have been critics, but we have been planners and designers too, working for change in the spaces presented to us by technological change" (344).

Terms: "cultural hybridity" (353)

Related Sources

Haas, Christina. Writing Technology. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996

Lanham, Richard. The Electronic Word. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.

Selfe, Cynthia. Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-first Century. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1999.

Brooke, "Making Room, Writing Hypertext."

B rooke, Collin Gifford. "Making Room, Writing Hypertext." JAC 19.2 (Spring 1999): 253-68.

With hypertext, the canon of arrangement risks fading into invention; this results from the presumption that audiences have greater agency when navigating through a hypertext, which, in turn, suggests that arrangement is comparatively inconsequential.  Brooke, however, seeks to correct this misnomer by registering an affront to the oversimple division that pits hypertext's liberatory and open-ended qualities opposite print's convention of linearity.  The canon of arrangement, that is, isn't doomed by the variability of multiple paths so long as we understand that arrangement, given its correlation to cycle (Bernstein) and pattern, intervenes between print and hypertext, each characterized at their structural extremes (containerism and free-form, respectively). With cycle and pattern as the hypertextual logics of arrangement, the problem of disorientation is less extreme and we need not abandon arrangement in "an electronic text-space" (261).

Also:

• Mustn't rely on hypertext's novelty;
• Readers, even with greater selective agency, are conditioned by print and related spatial expectations;
• Lefebvre's social space: conceived, perceived, and lived;
• Linearity does not equate to hierarchy.

"Although I am contending that there is a space-element intrinsic to all discourse, it is important to note that this element is shaped in significant ways by the technological specificity of a given discourse" (255).

"Insofar as arrangement remains a canon in a rhetoric of hypertext, then, its influence is subordinated to other canons rendered largely irrelevant to the writer in an electronic environment" (257).

"Bolter doesn't push his discussion of hyperbaton far enough because it leaves hypertext dependent upon the values of print texts that are violated by electronic writing" (257).

"We hesitate to embrace more technical hypertexts because to do so would be to embrace the values that those texts represent for us: mechanical efficiency, speed, functionality, and transparency" (258).

"Hypertext, however, presents us with a different relationship between discourse and space, and it does so by reintroducing the visual into the verbal field" (258).

"If we hold onto the notion that hypertext is defined according to its violation of print standards, and arrangement (via print's reliance on linearity) is the canon perhaps most responsible for those standards, then it may seem reasonable to allow that canon to atrophy in an electronic text-space" (261).

"The very presence of something called the 'disorientation problem' in hypertext studies, then, points to the possibility that hypertext may disrupt that homogeneity, that it may enable discursive spaces different from the abstract containerism implied by print" (261).

"The containerism of print technology is an example of a constructed social and discursive space where the moments have become so coherent that their coincidence seems logical and even natural" (262).

"To put it in the terms of this essay, we need to invent forms that lie somewhere in between the containers that print has encouraged and the paralyzing freedom of an infinitely open space" (263).

"One advantage of embracing such a re-orientation of arrangement [in cycle and pattern] is that is allows us to more fully explain some of the most important claims that hypertext theory has advanced" (264).

"Arrangement must instead be infused with the idea that its products need not be permanent, or closed, in order to provide the type of meaning that will orient readers" (265).

"Placing our emphasis on the patterned yet provisional qualities of arrangement might be one way that we can make room for hypertext in our disciplinary conversation" (265).

Terms: Joyce's "alternative organizational structures" (257), Bolter's "hyperbaton" (257), hypertext as Quintilian's "confused heap" (257), "disorientation problem" (258), containerism and container metaphor (260), social space (262), Bernstein on "the Cycle" (264)

Related Sources

Bernstein, Mark. "Cycle." Patterns of Hypertext. http://www.eastgate.com/patterns/Patterns3.html (1 October 1998).

Janangelo, Joseph. "Joseph Cornell and the Artistry of Composing Persuasive Hypertexts." CCC 49 (1998): 24-43.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson Smith. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1997.