Passing_Through raises some interesting issues. First, one might wish that Passing_Through had followed one of Friday’s links, or maybe visited Wikipedia, or even at least attempted to read the rest of the post more closely: the definition Passing_Through offers is simultaneously too slim to be useful, inappropriate to the context, and rather idiosyncratic. Unfortunately, Passing_Through also seems to have a rather impoverished view of writing, in which collaboration does indeed occur as a way for writers to use their experience and skills to assist one another, and which indeed often seeks to solve common problems. (Passing_Through might find Andrea Lunsford’s contention that “Everything’s an Argument” instructive on this topic.) One does indeed doubt that anyone will add another three chapters to Gone With the Wind, just as much as one doubts that anyone will add another thousand lines of code to VisiCalc anytime soon.
Both texts are closed, private, and single-authored: they are owned. And that’s where I think there might be room for change, or for expanded possibilities, in writing instruction. Donald Murray, in “Teach Writing as Process Not Product” (reprinted in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, edited by Victor Villanueva: NCTE, 1997), writes of the student who “finds his own subject”, who “uses his own language”, in a writing course that focuses on “the student’s own writing” (5, emphasis mine). This is Passing_Through’s model of the unitary and isolate writer, whose writing and subjectivity are both hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world. Consider as an alternative the practices described by Wayne Peck, Linda Flower, and Lorraine Higgins in their May 1995 CCC article, “Community Literacy” (available via JSTOR at many libraries, although Linda Flower covers some of the same ground in another, later essay), wherein African-American high school students, school administrators, teachers, and literacy workers collaboratively crafted a document that opened the vexed topic of school suspensions of community discussion, and indeed in the collaborative writing itself established and revised social relationships and produced a positive change. This is the sort of project I’m thinking of, but it doesn’t make all the concerns Passing_Through raised go away. For example, if we think about the different functions that the academic essay serves, particularly in terms of James Britton’s limiting but still useful modes of expressive (close to the self), transactional (words doing the work of the world), and poetic (self-explanatory, I hope) discourse, it might seem that open-source practices would lend themselves much more easily to the transactional than to the expressive or poetic. I’m not sure what to think about this.
Once again, there are more things, Horatio.
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