response to stanley fish September 2, 2009
Posted by KC in academia, education, teaching, writing.add a comment
The following is a comment I made on Stanley Fish’s recent New York Times blog posts, which can be found here and here. This won’t make much sense if you haven’t read both his posts first.
Okay, here’s my exercise, Dr. Fish: Neither this sentence nor the next one will be particularly meaningful, because they aren’t situated in any kind of context. See?
But seriously, I thank you for clarifying (or perhaps backpedaling on) your position. I agreed with one of the premises of the first post, which was that writing courses ought not be literature or cultural studies courses in disguise, with a thin veneer of writing instruction layered over the top. I, too, have seen too many courses like that, and I think it comes from the fact that many composition instructors are/were literature grad students who didn’t find jobs teaching literature, so they use comp. courses as a surrogate. I think this does a disservice to students. Actual writing instruction is a good thing.
However, I’m not sure I agree with you about what actual writing instruction involves. Your neither/nor exercise gets at style, but does little in terms of other canons of rhetoric, like invention or arrangement. Students cannot practice discovering the available means of persuasion if they don’t a) have some topic they are treating (we might call this “content”) or b) have some audience they are aiming to persuade. Learning how to write shouldn’t be disconnected from having something to say.
I teach freshman composition as a course in ethnographic writing, not because I think learning how to do fieldwork is all that important (although observing and interviewing are useful skills), but because it provides a definable context for learning how to describe and analyze cultural behaviors and artifacts. That is, it gives students a motive to write. Even a literature-based composition course could use a poem or a novel as an occasion to write. I think it is not a question of either/or — either content or form, literature (or cultural studies) or writing. Instead, it is a matter of foregrounding the appropriate activities, which in the case of a composition course would be the writing.
grout expectations September 25, 2008
Posted by KC in life, writing.add a comment
Ever since I moved back to California, I’ve noticed this weird form of public restroom graffiti which involves inscribing puns based on the word “grout” into the grout around tiles. It looks like this:
In case it’s hard to read, from the top clockwise they say “who let the dogs grout,” “the grout gatsby,” and “grout at the devil.” (Unfortunately, I didn’t get the full one on the left, since I wasn’t all that comfortable standing in a public bathroom trying to compose the perfect shot.) The puns depend largely on either substituting “grout” for “great,” as in “grout expectations” or “grout balls of fire,” or substituting “grout” for a rhyme word, such as “for crying grout loud” or “what you talkin’ grout, willis?”
What’s fascinating about this — and I imagine this is the whole point — is the literal inscription of a pun onto the material from which the pun derives. But I also sort of appreciate the pure goofiness of it, the implied rejection of more acerbic or vulgar forms of restroom graffiti.
I’ve seen this only in campus men’s restrooms here in California, so I wonder if this is a regional thing. Or only a men’s room thing. Or only a college campus thing. Or some combination of those. Does this happen elsewhere?
repurposing the dissertation June 29, 2008
Posted by KC in life, writing.add a comment
I sometimes have my writing students take an essay they’ve written and find some creative way to rethink it for a different audience or different context — to “re-purpose” it. I thought about that assignment on a recent camping trip as I found a useful way to repurpose my dissertation…as kindling.
Okay, so these are just printed drafts (what my son calls “sloppy copies”), but there’s something therapeutic about burning words that you’ve spent so much time working on. You know that scene at the end of Return of the Jedi, when Luke torches Darth Vader’s remains on a funeral pyre? It was almost exactly like that.
Also, if you do it right, you can get the pages to burn so that they shrink, but you can still see all the words. It’s sort of like a textual shrinky dink.
parking on a downhill slope March 4, 2008
Posted by KC in writing, writing process, writing tips.2 comments
When you’re embroiled in a long writing project (like, oh, a dissertation), you pick up little tricks for staying productive. One of those tricks is to stop writing for the day before you’ve exhausted everything you have to say, so that you’ve got something to get you started the next day. I think it was Joan Bolker who called this “parking on a downhill slope” in her book Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day (which contains much better advice than the title suggests).
This tactic works most of the time. But yesterday, I opened up my fifth chapter to find that I had finished my last writing session with this:
What is needed, I argue,
That’s it. I didn’t leave myself any indication what, in fact, was needed. As I tried to re-orient myself by looking at previous paragraphs, it struck me that “what was needed” was an end to that sentence. It didn’t help that I had written “what is needed, I argue” on a Friday, and I didn’t sit down to write again until the following Monday. I had two days to forget whatever it was I thought needed doing.
Without any breadcrumbs to follow, it took me a good five minutes to pick up the trail. Eventually, I scrapped the whole “what is needed, I argue” line and took the new paragraph in a completely different direction. In a sense, the frustration of having parked on a really awkward downhill slope made me reconsider — and improve — where I was headed.
There are limits to metaphors, so likening the act of finishing a writing session to “parking” only gets you so far. Maybe one problem with this particular analogy is that it reinforces the idea of writing as a linear activity, as if writing is like driving a car to a predetermined destination. But writing isn’t straightforward in that way. My experience yesterday reminded me that writing is full of fits and starts, messy and recursive. I ended up somewhere other than where I thought I was going.
from digital to analog November 18, 2007
Posted by KC in writing.add a comment
A friend recently asked me for tips about keeping things “organized,” like how to capture information you come across daily so that you can find it later. I suggested some things like Backpack and Google Notebook, but it got me to thinking about my own move in recent months back to pen and paper as my primary organizational tools. I’ve spent my share of time and money on stuff like PDAs and organizational software, but I’m finding that I’m just more productive with a notebook and handwritten to-do list.
In this move, I was inspired by Bill Westerman, a previous “Big Palm Fan” who moved back to paper (check out his backstory here). Among other things, he writes that he “yearned to get back to scribbles, circles, arrows, and BIG FAT underlines when things were REALLY IMPORTANT.”
Of course, any system you could come up with will enable and constrain different practices. I used to value the sense of order imposed by technological tools, but now I think I prefer the freedom a blank piece of paper provides.
