Writing

What I’m Working On

preterite Computers, Metadissertating, Writing

This is pretty long, and probably pretty dry. And if you read it all the way through, you might even call me a flippin communist. Isn’t that reward enough? Dammit, where’s Curtiss?

Anyway: As I think I’ve pointed out before, some first-year composition programs teach the five-paragraph theme, while others teach writing as closely connected to close reading in a cultural studies context (University of Pittsburgh; Rachael’s prized — and rightly so — Ways of Reading), and others teach the personal essay, and others (University of Minnesota) break it down according to genre (the abstract, the proposal, the research paper; other institutions use the lab report, the memorandum, and so on), and still others, according to Sharon Crowley, choose to focus on “traditional grammar, orthography, and punctuation” (229). These widely varying instances of composition instruction have their own class connotations within those wider university contexts. This offers another reason why compositionists seem unable to agree on what class is in their classrooms: the various models of composition instruction and of the university are connected to differently theorized purposes for education, which in turn lead to differing perceptions of the dynamics and movements of class. A teacher teaching a course that traffics largely in the personal essay will likely have a definition of class as it functions in the classroom that relies primarily upon personal experience and authenticity claims. On the other hand, a teacher teaching the genres of the essay would seem to be relying upon a service-oriented approach, in that those genres make up the forms students will need to do well in other courses, which would seem to incline towards a view of class largely reliant on occupational definitions.
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Commodity Fetishization in Grading

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Writing

I meet with Charlie and Donna this week, so I’ve spent the past several hours re-reading old blog posts and trying to come up with some sort of condensed version or way to encapsulate for my self the idea I’ve been working with. One thing Charlie suggested was to take all these different versions of class and attempt to apply them to a classroom study that talks about class, so maybe that’ll be one of my goals for tomorrow. Tonight, some brief insights.

First, I feel like the most exciting and useful stuff I’ve been doing has been the stuff that tries to connect directly to classroom practices. No big surprise there; composition as a field has historically been a place for people who find the day-to-day realities of practice more engaging than the abstract flights of theory. So, some classroom-type thinking.
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Olson: Who Computes?

preterite Computers, Economics, Writing

C. Paul Olson’s 1987 essay “Who Computes?” seems to gain more depth each time I read it. It’s not that the essay is changing, but more like what Samuel Clemens was talking about when he quipped, “The older I get, the smarter my Dad gets.” I’ve learned a little more since the two times I read it before taking my exams several months ago, and several months ago I’d read a little more widely in computers and composition than I had when I first encountered the essay in Charlie Moran’s “Writing and Emerging Technologies” seminar a couple years ago. The essay’s so central to what I’ve been talking about with computers and economy and education that I wish I could just reproduce the whole thing right here, but since that won’t work, I figure I’ll just talk about it a little. And, even though I’ve got all these fine things to say, that doesn’t mean I find the essay entirely non-problematic.
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Conspicuous Leisure

preterite Class (Cultural), Class (Meta), Culture, Writing

Worsley talks about “The division within the working class between the ‘rough’ and the ‘respectable'”(316) and notes that when such divisions are coupled to other identity markers — ethnicity, say, or religion — class conflict and resentment can become more intense. A city near here recently agreed to receive (not sure what the proper non-paternalistic verb is here: permanently settle?) several hundred refugees from an African nation. There’s been considerable hubbub, much of it because the community in question is poorer and historically Polish and Puerto Rican and members of those ethnic communities have pointed to the inevitable heightened competition for jobs, apartments, et cetera that will result. In other words, there’s resentment in the community into which the refugees will be attempting to assimilate. This is nothing new — recall the conflicts in Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing — but still, it points again to ways in which members of a particular class as economic category will struggle against one another for the same resources rather than engaging in struggle with members of other classes or in attempts to change the nature of the hierarchy.
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The Valuation of Web Writing

preterite Writing

I’ve seen the Blogshares logo at some of the online places I frequent, so I clicked on it today. Interesting: a self-described “fantasy stock market for weblogs” where “weblogs are valued by inbound links.” Vanity must be fed, so I checked out my value, and was delighted and a little flattered to see that Torill, bless her, owns a piece of this place. And my first thought was: how do I increase my value? Blogshares would seem to be an economy that rewards, to use an inelegant term, linkwhoring, but in looking at the messages there, it’s clear that some folks are making fantasy fortunes via speculation. There’s been a lot of interesting stuff written about economies on the Web — Jill’s post a while back comes immediately to mind, as do some of the really smart articles at First Monday — and it makes me ask, especially with some of the questions I raised in yesterday’s post and my ongoing wonderings about the production and consumption of online writing, how do things get valued on the Web?
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Misguided Attempts at Anonymity

preterite Writing

I’m realizing that my concerns about self-identifying here were pretty dumb, so they’ve basically gone out the window. First, I think that CCC’s “Guidelines for the Ethical Treatment of Students and Student Writing in Composition Studies”, specifically Paragraph G, “Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Reporting Student Statements,” are incompletely thought out in the context of students writing on the World Wide Web. Those guidelines, and the associated concerns about IRB approval, affect my research, and so I initially thought trying to shape this weblog around them would be a good idea; I’d do my best to make it so that any future representations I might make in talking about my teaching would not be obviously connected to any particular student.

Of course, given whois and DNS lookup tools, I knew it was more a matter of convenience to get the information than anything else; it just didn’t occur to me at the time that protections via inconvenience really aren’t protections. And besides which, I think the guidelines need rethinking or clarification when it comes to Web writing, and it’s kinda silly for me to adjust my practices in order to go along with something that I don’t think works.

But, for me, this obviously raises larger questions. The ethical representation of student writing is important. IRB approval of classroom studies is a good thing. And the study of writing and computers needs more rigorous classroom studies; we’re doing the theory side to death without sufficient grounding in practice. So what might be some productive ways to think about this stuff?

I’m Doing It Wrong

preterite Education, Writing

I’ve been going on a bit about writing as commodity/product, and how it circulates, and I just this afternoon got through Mankiw’s chapters on monopoly in Principles of Economics, and also read Torill Mortensen and Jill Walker’s wonderful chapter “Blogging Thoughts” (874K PDF) as helpfully recommended by teachtjm. (If it’s not already obvious from this research-dissertation-weblog project itself and the debt of inspiration it owes, I’ve been following Jill’s weblog for a long time, but hadn’t actually taken the time to check out many of her longer writings. Now I wish I’d done so earlier.) I think, taken together, Mankiw and Mortensen & Walker help me figure out some useful things, but also (argh!) add to my reading list.
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Still More on Relations of Production

preterite Computers, Culture, Writing

I used weblogs yesterday as an example to make a distinction between for-profit and for-pleasure writing. As usual, I was a little hasty. Consider what Glenn Reynolds had to say this morning:

“You can blog for the money — in which case you should be very glad that Andrew [Sullivan] is raising the bar, and generating a general sense that it’s okay to donate. Or you can blog for fun, in which case why should you care if he’s getting some bucks out of it?”

Reynolds goes on to talk about his reasons for blogging, and has some interesting points and links; his perspective helps me to see that maybe, as with the tentative answer to that question Catherine Gammon asked me, the motivations might not matter as much as the act itself. For me, this is a small step towards one way of thinking about the production of writing, within and outside of the composition classroom. At the same time, it raises other questions.
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Writing as Property

preterite Computers, Culture, Writing

The Movable Type templates (which I’ve only so far modified very slightly for this weblog) include a section for Creative Commons licenses, which I’ve thought about using here, in particular an attribution license. However, the smart points folks have made in the Creative Commons discussion at Metafilter caused me to stop and think a little; I still haven’t made up my mind.

Compositionists who do research in their classrooms, furthermore, are expected to respect students’ writing as the property of the student, and to take considerable care around issues of permissions before reproducing that writing. And student anonymity and permissions around writing and representation are why I’m being weird about self-identifying on this weblog.

What I’m trying to lead into, I guess, is my focus for this post (the thing I didn’t quite make it to yesterday) on the concerns associated with an understanding of writing as property.
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Writing Instruction as Commodity

preterite Education, Writing

An “externality,” according to Mankiw, is “the uncompensated impact of one person’s actions on the well-being of a bystander” (206). And, also according to Mankiw, “the consumption of education yields positive externalities because a more educated population leads to better government, which benefits everyone” (211). Well, that’s not the only side benefit of education, but I’ll buy it. Your education benefits not only you (because you’re a more well-rounded person, and because you can get a better job, among other reasons: again, I’m wanting to look beyond the vocational model of education), but society in general. Mankiw shows some supply and demand curves to support his contention that “Positive externalities in production or consumption lead markets to produce a smaller quantity than is socially desirable” (212), which helps me understand the scarcity of education as a commodity, although — besides looking at the pictures of the supply and demand curves — I don’t understand why it should work this way. And, also, I’ve still got some questions about this education-as-commodity thing, and about considering writing as a commodity, too. So here we go.
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