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Well, not all.

And hardly sundry, either.

Really, just a shout out to those concerned.  Ordered my copy of The Rhetoric of Cool today; it should arrive soonish.  But, mea culpa, I ordered a used copy, so I don’t think Rice will get a royalty check from my copy.  Sorry about that; but I saved $15 by buying used.  A penny saved, right?

            Overall, the products of the diagnostic in-class essay were encouraging.  Every student was able to produce at least one substantial paragraph of writing.  Although I had planned to allow students one full hour to compose the diagnostic essay, student questions about the demands of the assignment took some time and I was only able to offer students forty to forty-five minutes to complete the essay.  This information might seem of little relevance to understanding the products of the exercise, but I think it is important to keep in mind the limitations under which students were working when drafting these essays.

Not only are these limits part of the rhetorical situation behind these writing samples, but it is interesting, for my purposes, to note how substantial a piece of work a student can produce in a limited amount of time.  I had been planning on including an essay exam in the Fall 1010 course, so seeing here how students respond to a writing prompt when given limited time to compose a response is instructive.  Furthermore, I want to emphasize these time limits as a sort of overall caveat to any of the comments that follow.  While I am confident that all of our students responded to the best of their ability, the scene of writing here is neither organic nor optimal, so students who produced work of less-evident sophistication cannot and should not be dismissed as incompetent writers; given a longer period of time to draft, revise, and edit the same prompt, we can safely assume that all of the diagnostic essays would show marked improvement.

Caveats aside, the results, as mentioned are encouraging.  Of the thirteen essays collected, none exhibited major faults in use of the English language or in basic English grammar or sentence structure.  I emphasize the fact of English grammar here for multiple reasons.  First, although I had been instructed that these were not ESL students, CBS’s emphasis on the need to instruct these students in appropriate written forms of academic discourse—specifically as opposed to the blend of Spanish and English language discourses many of these students participate in at home—left me with some concerns as to the level of basic skills these students possessed; as it turned out, however, my doubts in this regard were unwarranted.  Second, one of the students spoke with me personally after the subsequent class session to voice some concerns about an upcoming assignment.  She was afraid, she said, of not being able to complete the assignment because English was not her first language; she was concerned that the difficulty of composing in English would inhibit her from completing the work.[1]  If other students share similar fears, they have not yet expressed them; I hope, of course, that between myself and the peer mentors we will be able to address this student’s concerns and find ways to address her needs.[2]

Above the grammar and sentence levels, most students again exhibited a satisfactory level of performance at the paragraph design level.  Most of the essays collected here displayed an understanding of basic concepts of paragraph composition: one main idea per paragraph, each paragraph starting with a topic sentence, and the first line of each paragraph beginning with an indentation.  At this level, we can begin to see where students might need instruction.  Although many students accurately used each paragraph to develop one main idea or connected series of thoughts or events, there were a number of essays in which parts of the essay which may more properly have been divided into separate paragraphs were instead run into one or more paragraph units.  I can conjecture some reasons for this.  As we will shortly see, this could stem from unfamiliarity with the conventions of essay form.  Alternatively, there may have been confusion over the genre appropriate to the writing prompt: the prompt was described as a “short essay about a literacy event from your own experience.”  The question, then, becomes whether students understood “short essay” here as a conventional, multiple-paragraph essay of brief length, or as a “short essay” answer typically found in examinations.  Regardless of causes, I hope to be able to offer some instruction on paragraph design with one of the exercises scheduled on the syllabus.

It is at the level of essay form that the greatest gap between levels of achievement becomes apparent.  To look more closely at this, I divided the essays into two groups: one in which the use of conventional essay techniques (multiple paragraphs, paragraph breaks clearly signaled through indentation, use of transitions between and within paragraphs) was apparent, and one in which such techniques were either absent or haphazard.  I further opted not to question the content of the essays in this step of the analysis, nor to look specifically at how students developed theses or arguments.  My main concern here was whether students exhibited an understanding of essay form—that is, whether students could produce a piece of writing that recognizably looked like an essay, setting aside (for the moment at least) whether they were using the form accurately or effectively.

Curiously, the divide was almost exactly half; of the thirteen essays collected, seven fell into the first group and six fell into the second.  Each group, of course, varied within itself as to the level of achievement evident; in the first group (recognizable essays) the main points of deviation were whether students used transitions to signal connections between ideas and how they tied their supporting details and ideas to the main point of their essays.  In the second group (those not readily recognizable as meeting essay conventions) such variation was far broader.  Among these students, some essays used complex sentences and transitions between sentences and thoughts while other students used primarily simple, declarative sentences with few transitional cues.

Finally, the content of several of these essays is worth noting, given the larger aims of CBS and the SEP.  Roughly a third (five of thirteen) of these students wrote about the acquisition of a new language and the attendant difficulties of socialization.  While in some of the essays the students do not describe what John Trimbur defines as a literacy event,[3] these essays are nonetheless an interesting window into the different discourses these students occupy.  For those students to whom English is a second language (the majority of students in this particular set), the events described in their essays were typically narratives of isolation, of being divided from larger social groups by the barrier of language.  For other students, who described learning Spanish as an act of ancestral exploration, acquiring the second language was a significant accomplishment.  Further students described the experience of growing up in a bilingual household as an advantage to their own development and a skill with which they can assist recently emigrated family and friends more effectively assimilate into American culture.

I know I’ve been the object of some fun-making regarding my devotion to a certain prof’s work, both in the classroom and out of it; of course, much of that is self-deprecating fun-making too: I admit I’ve been sort of in thrall to the prof in question.  I try not to use this space for too much self-analysis anymore, so I’ll spare my reader(s?) my third-rate psychoanalysis on why that should be the case.  In any event, while it seems fruitless to deny his or her influence on my work, this prof is soon to be leaving my institution, it seems like a valid opportunity to start crafting–or at least, looking for ways to craft–a scholastic identity apart from being this prof’s acolyte but still admitting his or influence on my research interests.

And no, dear reader, I don’t kid myself that all the efforts toward ambiguity and anonymity in the above paragraph mean you won’t figure out to whom I’m referring.  Hint: with all due respect, it’s not Cannon Schmidt.

Anyway, as I have so often in the past, I start with this prof’s work as a way to begin my own post.  Particularly, what is written here:

Those conversations, implicit and explicit, can occur in a shopping list (which is one example Trimbur provides from his textbook; a writing some students dispute and label irrelevant) or on a website or in an encounter, or in a book, and so on. This writing, however, is not, as Trimbur offers, symbolic. Its process or flow does not represent another experience or encounter. It is writing itself. The challenge is to ask: how does one generate or maintain such relations with references? How does one teach that writing within an already established network that poses references as proof or confirmation?

I was revisiting this post (from January 07) because I’ve been using Trimbur’s textbook, The Call to Write, for one of the courses I’m teaching this summer.

Granted, I’m still a new teacher, so I don’t make any claim to owning an expertise or even having the necessary body of research to draw from when framing some question and comments that follow.  My goal here, if anything, is to ask some questions about my pedagogy and (hopefully) get some helpful feedback from more experienced readers.

I’m teaching two classes this semester.  One is good ol’ 1020.  No problems there (but I am growing bored with the syllabus so might draft a new one for fall).  The situation for my other course is a bit more interesting: I’m teaching a writing workshop for my university’s Center for Chicano and Boricua Studies (CBS); the program & the workshop (there’s also a maths workshop) are designed to lay the groundwork so that students can enter collegiate level courses in these subjects and be prepared to perform at the expected level.  I’ve decided to teach the course as sort of a prelude to 1010; in fact, I’m already committed to teaching a CBS-sponsored section of 1010 in fall with these students and a handful of other CBS students.

What has been instructive for me, thus far, is the difference between expectations in teaching for CBS and for my own dep’t.  My dep’t (at present at least) allows its GTAs an extremely wide latitude in how/what they teach in their composition courses.  For example, I teach from Scholes/Comley/Ulmer’s Text Book and have a very strong emphasis on technology and hypertext (in this syllabus at least); many of my peers from this year’s crop of GTAs opted for World is a Text and took a more conventional cultural studies approach.  My dep’t, to the best of my knowledge happily accomodates both pedagogies and that has been a source of much pleasure and relief for me.

The organizer and administrator of the CBS program, a friend and colleague named Ethriam Brammer, has been very gracious about my role in the program.  While the CBS program has specific goals of its own, Ethriam has made very clear that I have pedagogical autonomy in both this workshop and in the fall 1010 course; CBS sets no expectations from me other than academic rigor and a commitment to the mission and goals of the Summer Enrichment Program.

This will be my first time teaching 1010 and in drafting the syllabus I moved away from the sort of textual research work used in Text Book to (what I assume is) a more conventional stance of writing pedagogy.  Why? 

One thing I’ve picked up from teaching two courses from Scholes et al. is that students have expectations of their own; on the recently returned student evals from last semester, one student complained that they didn’t think they’d learned anything about academic writing from my course.  (I had expected this reply, but it still stung a little.)  This could mean at least a couple of things.  First, this student didn’t understand the connection between the research and (sorry, Jeff) critical thinking I was asking of them and conventional forms of academic research.  This, in turn, would indicate a gap in my pedagogy: I failed to make clear these connections or to establish their value.  Another suggestion, one that is most problematic for my formative pedagogy, is that the value of such text work for academic use is nil.  (As Jeff might counsel, drawing on Sirc: But do we choose to teach writing simply for school or for life?)  Of course, I don’t thinkthat such theories of writing and research are without value, but having a student make that claim so emphatically gave me pause to consider the possibility.

Given, then, that students have expectations of their own, as do departments and centers of study and universities, the experience of the novice instructor (like myself) can sometimes seem a precarious one.  While I like the emphasis on textuality, mystorical work, and poststructural theory that Scholes et al. incorporate into Text Book, I didn’t really feel it was appropriate for the CBS course.  I think, in part, it had to do with my own boredom with parts of the syllabus that uses it, but also because I had some uncertainty about what level of writing development I would see in these students.  (Thus far, results have been encouraging.)  So I wanted to approach the workshop (and 1010 as well) in a somewhat more. . .eh. . .conservative fashion in order to be able to better help any students who were having particular difficulties with the assignments.  That is, I wanted to be able to focus more on improving student writing than on explaining the theories and value of and behind the work I ask students to do in my current 1020 syllabus.

But, at the same time, and after looking at some sample 1010 syllabi, I didn’t want to just push the 5P theme on these students either, and the sample syllabi that I looked at relied too hevaily on that model and texts that taught that model for my interests.  So I chose Trimbur’s The Call to Write for its emphasis on context and connectedness in writing as well a stress on the flexibility of the essay form.

The word essay is derived from the French word essai, which means to try or test out.  This derivation captures the spirit of the essay as a genre of writing in which writers invent forms to embody their purposes.  Many examples of writing in this book might be described as an essay as well as, say, a memoir, a commentary, or a proposal.  The exact meaning of the term essay has been debated by scholars in literary studies, rhetoric, and composition.  Some want to restrict it to a particular type of literary or journalistic essay that uses a personal voice and other self-revelatory features to fashion experience and observation into writing.  Others use it more broadly to refer to writing tasks where the form in open and flexible.  In this chapter, we’ll use the term essay in its broader sense, as a catch-all category that includes a range of other genres.  For our purposes, the defining feature of the essay will be the openness and the flexibility it gives writers to shape their thoughts, feelings, and experiences into written forms.

I quote Trimbur at length here because I think the explanation of the essay here reveals something important of both why I chose this text and why I’ve always like the essay personally.  Pedagogically, I like Trimbur’s emphasis on openness and flexibility and invention–that form is something that is created by the writer rather than something the writer is slavishly beholden to.  In this sense, then, I could (if I chose) teach the "Discourse" assignment as an example of the endless mutability of the essay form–or the cut-up, or, or. 

There’s a lot more I’d like to say about Trimbur and 1010 and pedagogy, but my thoughts are drifting.  Perhaps later.

Collin, as I’m sure he knows, is not unique in this.  Jeff Rice and Richard Marback have described their own conversions to me, and I hear tell that even Gwen Gorzelsky began her studies as a student of medieval lit (as did friend and colleague Mary Karcher).  This, of course, prompts the question: what is compelling about rhet/comp work to lit folk?

For Collin, it was a realization that he could pursue an interest in literary theory while doing rhet/comp work (something that rings true for myself as well).  For my own history, in addition to the interest in theory, I’ve found that rhet/comp is also a good space for someone whose interests are. . .hm. . .to be kind, voracious, though some might say I’m terminally undeclared. Rice’s 6010 was a good place to get a feel for the variety of work being done in the rhet/comp field, so in that sense I owe Jeff a debt similar to the one Collin owes to Susan Jarratt (I too, have handy access to the readers from Jeff’s course).

A point, though, that I find interesting.  Collin’s introductory and closing comments:

I was thinking the other day about the choice I made to get into the Rhetoric/Composition game, and while it was undoubtedly a gradual and only semi-conscious process, I think I can pin down the semester that would feature in my Secret Origin.

At any rate, as a theoretically minded young MA student, SJ’s course convinced me that I could follow that interest in R/C just as easily as I could in literature, and while I don’t know that this counts as "conversion," it’s the one point I recall where I "chose" R/C.

I like, I want to point out, Collin’s use of the phrase Secret Origin, a little nod to comic book lingo that reminds me, again, that there’s a pleasurable synchronicity btw my own interests and those of other scholars. 

More significantly, however, is Collin’s emphasis on the "gradual and only semi-conscious" nature of his conversion.  In part, of course, this points to an assumption we have anout conversions as being a dramatic and epochal moment–archetypically, we might look at Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, right?  Blinding light, paradigm shift, voice from above.  While I do have the benefit of having gone through something like the Pauline epiphany (which you can reread here), I again find Collin’s description of the gradual conversion to rhet-comp eerily familiar, esp. given the juxtaposition between (for Collin) Susan Jarratt’s "Theories of Reading and Writing Course" and Edward Tomarken’s "LIterary Theory" course, much as Jeff’s "Theories and Practices of Writing" practicum was the same semester as Barrett Watten’s "Intro to Graduate Literary Studies" course.

What I also find valuable, of course, is that I have had the opportunity to blog through my gradual conversion, and, in fact, careful readers could probably point out moments on the blog that suggest the swing from lit/cult studies into rhet/comp with little difficulty.  Of course, speaking about the "conversion narrative" in this way makes it seem as though I’ve finished the process . . . in fact, I admit my ignorance of much comp theory and the occasional urge to turn back to the comforting arms of literary scholarship.

But then, I think: Nah.  I want a real job.

I’m not trying to describe a sense of personal kismet between Collin and myself, but I think the points of similarity between our respective conversion narratives are striking, and I wonder how many other rhet/comp scholars would describe a similar conversion narrative.

So, in that sense, I’m suggesting to the three or four of you that read this, that if Collin’s narrative or my own sound familiar, that you take a moment on your own blog to revisit the scene(s) of your own rhet/comp conversion narratives.

1. One article per day
2. 25-30 pages of a major text per day
3. At least one, and hopefully two, substantive blog posts a week in response to my reading.

So, any "You can do it!"s from readers and friends would be encouraging.

So: Derrida.  I’ve read through Spivak’s intro, the "Exergue," "The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing," and about halfway through "Linguistics and Grammatology"–right now, I’m stuck in the middle of "The Outside Is the Inside."

My text is marked on every page, a crazy mish-mash of underlined passages and marginal notes, so rather than go through on a note-by-note basis, I’d like to just throw out some ideas that Derrida seems to be working through–playing through might be more appropriate of course.

It’s hard to know where to start, because as I try to describe one idea, I recall another, and that seems to be the proper starting point.  Which, from what I can understand, is at least part of Derrida’s goal through deconstruction: to complicate our assumptions of genesis and of telos.  This is fitting, giving Derrida’s aversion to binary epistemology: alongside in/out and presence/absence, we should include begin/end.  (Here, as throughout this post, I seem to offer an ineloquent and reductive version of Derrida’s text.  So it goes.)

Which is, at least in part it seems, crucial to the idea of the text (as opposed to that of the book).  The book begins and ends, and in this sense offers an epistemology of limited scope: limited, isolated, solitary.  What I’m not wholly sure I understand yet is the mechanism JD uses to move from book to text–I think I understand, or am beginning to understand, what each represents for JD, but the precise moment of transition seems vague.  For me, the answer rests somewhat in the use that Derrida makes of his own sources: Hegel, Saussure, Rousseau, Nietzsche.  Derrida doesn’t simply summarize and condense their respective arguments so that he can move into a stance of mere comparison and contrast; rather, he moves in and around and between and through these sources (playing with them, as it were–frolicking almost in the pleasure of the text) to demonstrate their own points of deconstruction and then–through that play–building his own claims about speech, text, and writing. 

What Derrida offers, then–or at least the offer that I see on hand–is an idea(l) of an infinite text, an unbounded text that accumulates and accomodates contradiction and conflict through its complex structure.  That is, for Derrida (and I admit I might have learned this through Spivak or another source, but it rings true after reading the text), conflict, ambiguity, and contradiction are. . .okay.  His project doesn’t seem to be finding a way to eliminate contradiction nor to (as Adorno/Horkheimer suggest about the culture industry) demonstrate its cooption and commodification, but rather maybe to ask whether texts aren’t in fact built on contradiction–that contradiction is on some level a necessity in textual production?

Of course, it’s an easy gesture to point to the Web as a prototypical "infinite text."  I think that makes sense, but it seems too easy as well–as though recognizing the scope and scale of the Web is the end of the task.  The question I would ask, then, is whether the Web (if we want to think about it as The Infinite Text and hence reify it and leave it uninterrogated) functions in the way that Derrida demonstrates texts can and do.  This is the germ of what could prove an interesting project, assuming of course noone has beat me to it.

Actually, a question about my own idea in the previous paragraph that makes me wonder whether I’ve understood the grammatology or not.  Is JD’s idea that text in infinite or rather that the boundaries we impose upon it are arbitrary and socially constructed?  By saying "the outside is the inside" or even "the outside is the inside" is Derrida necessarily offering a rejection of inside-ness or outside-ness or rather just demonstrating that the boundary is fluid and permeable?  In either case, the question of how to treat the textuality of the Web remains, but obviously the answer(s) would differ greatly depending on which reading of Derrida is right.

[I think, too, that the idea/l of the infinite text is in some ways a Romantic one, in which the text replaces nature as the inspiration and measure for humanity.  In turn, if this notion of the infinite text has any merit, it would bear an interesting comparison with the Kantian aesthetic and sublime.]

Another point of interest: deconstruction is, among other things, an invention strategy.  On two levels, too.  First, of course, deconstruction gives us something to do with texts: to deconstruct them as Derrida does to discover their  contradiction and ambiguities.  Of course, if we think of deconstruction simply as a hermeneutic in this fashion, we realize that all branches of theory are invention strategies.  The problem, of course, is that working with them merely as hermeneutics is sort of a one-trick approach, right?  I have my feminist/poststructural/modernist/postcolonial lens and that’s how I’ll view this text.  So in that sense a hermeneutics seems contrary to Derrida’s project because a hermeneutics (apart from assuming a particular value for the logos) only understands a text through its own lens rather than opening it up to show how it creates meaning.  This, however, points to deconstruction’s value as a heuristic: if we can understand how texts build meaning and construct meaning, then we can employ those strategies for our own ends: as Rice might say, we can re/appropriate them, rearrange them. remix them.

Finally–for this post at least–I’m interested in something Derrida suggests and alludes to but hasn’t (and perhaps might not) addressed directly: the connection between writing and epistemology.  Derrida is critical, of course, of the logos, presence, and phonocentrism, which I guess do constitute certain assumptions about the organization, validity, and construction of knowledge.  But given that Derrida establishes "writing" as an alternative to the tyranny of the logos, how does that effect rhetoricians and other scholars of writing?  I don’t have an answer, but another idea that’s been brewing in me little head of late is precisely this point where rhetoric and epistemology overlap–for Aristotle, (as I’ve suggested before via Heidegger), rhetoric is the task of establishing persuasively valid knowledge–which plainly points to questions of epistemology anyway.

Oh yeah–metaphor is just all over the place.  I’ll have to do a special "All Metaphor" post on JD’s comments on metaphor.

From: Mitchell, David.  Cloud Atlas.  New York: Random House, 2004.

The love-lorn, the cry-for-helpers, all mawkish tragedians who give suicide a bad name are the idiots who rush it, like amateur conductors.  A true suicide is a paced, disciplined certainty.  People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness."  Career churchmen . . . go a step further and call it a cowardly assault on the living.  Oafs argue this specious line for varying reasons: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one’s audience with moral fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize.  Cowardice is nothing to do with it–suicide takes a considerable courage.  Japanese have the right idea.  No, what’s selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.  The only selfishness lies in ruining a stranger’s days by forcing ‘em to witness a grotesqueness.