Writing

$16, Well Spent

preterite Asides, Writing

I just picked up The Best American Poetry 2007, and I’ve had mixed feelings. There’s an interesting mix of really, really good stuff and stuff that seems to me silly, gimmicky, and simply self-indulgently bad. Stuff by prominent folks we all know (Louise Glück, Robert Pinsky); stuff by less prominent folks doing increasingly interesting work (Brian Turner, Joe Wenderoth); and stuff by former teachers and classmates, none of whom remember me, I’m certain, which is a good thing, because I’m disappointed by some of it, and genuinely amused by one comically pretentious and awful instance, but as it comes from someone who takes himself Very Very Seriously as a Poet and Artist and wanted to make sure all around him knew what a superior Poet and Artist he was, I can’t say I’m surprised.

But the primary reason I picked it up is the fact that former West Point Cadet (class of 2007) Marya Rosenberg has a cycle of haikus included that she wrote as an undergrad here. While some of them aren’t as strong as the rest (I got kind of an Andy Rooney in seventeen syllables feeling from a couple, if that makes any sense), there are also some that are as wonderful and brilliant as any haiku you’ve ever read, and perhaps even moreso in the ways they play with and press at the boundaries of the conventions of the genre. Among various fine examples, my favorite:

Springtime at West Point
boys in combat boots, slipping
on cherry blossoms

Overall, the book is an interesting and diverse collection. And I’m happy to see a Cadet’s poetry receiving public recognition as being at the level of our poet laureates. For me, that recognition of excellent writing — and those fine haiku — are sixteen bucks well spent.

I say check it out. Or write a haiku that nobody else but you could write. Or both.

The Section Marcher

You call attention,
report, breeze, windows wide, and
write — your fingers fly.

That dashed-off attempt isn’t very good, and not even close to being anywhere as good as any of Marya’s, of course. But there’s the breeze, windows, fly thing, and it’s what my section marchers do: they’re in charge of the class. They open windows strategically to make sure the air flows through the old classroom; they take attendance, call the section to attention, offer their reports — and then they do the written work of the class, as well. So: seeing the writing of a student from my school has got me doing more writing and thinking. That’s a good thing, and I look forward, hopefully, to meeting more students like the now-Lieutenant Rosenberg.

The Writing Muscle

preterite Writing

For the past two days, I’ve been at the University of New Hampshire 11th Biennial Composition Conference, where I was part of a panel presenting on “Shame, Shame, Shame: Literacy and the Public Regulation of Affect” that explored the implications of Elspeth Probyn’s book Blush: Faces of Shame for the teaching of writing. It was a good conference in many ways, and as is my habit, I’ll blog my notes on a few of the sessions here in the next few days. One of the enjoyable aspects of the conference was getting to re-connect with Peter Elbow, and he and my friends Lauren Rosenberg and Collie Fulford and I shared a pleasant lunch on the lawn today, talking about matters scholarly and personal.

And for me, the funniest thing was seeing, yet again, how canny a negotiator of the rhetorical situation Peter can be. I recounted some of the challenges and difficulties and complexities of being a professor at a military academy, and Peter — who helped conscientious objectors draft personal essays during the Vietnam war — expressed interest in the way we sell the project of writing at West Point. I told Peter and Lauren and Collie about the ways in which West Point sometimes frames or praises academic achievement in the terminology of athletic achievement, almost as if a highly competitive baccalaureate degree-granting institution doesn’t quite know how to talk about or reward being intelligent in ways that recognize the deeply necessary virtues of smartness for our soldiers and officers-to-be.

I really liked Peter’s response. Put it in physical terms, he suggested. Encourage cadets to do interval training with freewriting: start them at five minutes, and get them to go longer. Ten, fifteen, twenty: who can freewrite like push-ups? If the physicality of freewriting is important, if that act of keeping the hands moving is what brings out ideas, why not treat it like PT, like physical training? If you can freewrite at five minutes and freewrite at thirty minutes, and if you do that three or four days a week for a year, you’re sufficiently trained and honed as an intellectual that you can squeeze out a smart and eloquent paragraph in ten minutes. It’s the habit that does it.

Writing is a muscle, Peter said. Welcome to my gym.

(Addendum: Collie recently clarified to me that the writing/muscle/gym metaphor is indirectly from Keene State tutor emeritus Josh Bond.)

Scarcity Versus Growth

preterite Economics, Writing

Yochai Benkler describes “three primary categories of inputs” for the production of information and culture that I think bear considerable relevance for composition:

  1. “existing information and culture,”
  2. “the mechanical means of sensing our environment, processing it, and communicating new information goods,” or in other words, information technology, and
  3. “human communicative capacity — the creativity, experience, and cultural awareness necessary to take from the universe of existing information and cultural resources and turn them into new insights, symbols, or representations meaningful to others with whom we converse” (52).

“Inputs” are here meant in the economic sense, in the same way that neoclassical economists looking at industrial capitalism talked about the “inputs” of labor, land, and capital being the most important factors of production. Writing and its teaching, of course, are deeply concerned with the production of information and culture. Benkler then goes on to point out that “given the zero [marginal] cost of existing information and the declining cost of communication and processing, human capacity becomes the primary scarce resource in the networked information economy” (52). In this statement, he seems to agree with the strong position Richard Lanham takes in The Economics of Attention about the contrast between a glut of information and a scarcity of attention — and that attention, that human communicative capacity, is composition’s chief disciplinary concern. At a fundamental level, it’s what compositionists teach.

But Benkler cautions that “human communicative capacity, however, is an input with radically different characteristics than those of, say, printing presses or satellites” in its individuated and non-aggregate nature (52) — and this is where I think Benkler’s analysis is more careful and useful than Lanham’s. Lanham seeks to apply economy as metaphor to the production, circulation, and use of information, and his economic metaphor is a capitalist one. Benkler’s analysis, on the other hand, deals with economy not as metaphor for something other than itself, but as actuality, and so illustrates with much more suasive force the ways in which “we live life and exchange ideas in many more diverse relations than those mediated by the market” (53). While Adam Smith powerfully illustrates how markets benefit from the individual’s self-interested actions, there are other spheres of economic activity wherein individuals acting on their own in diverse relations and for diverse motivations produce surplus value. As Benkler argues, “the economics of production in a digital environment should lead us to expect an increase in the relative salience of nonmarket production models in the overall mix of our information production system, and it is efficient for this to happen — more information will be produced, and much of it will be available for its users at its marginal cost” (56). I’m a little confused by that last bit, in two ways: first, what exactly is that marginal cost and how is it calculated? (This is why I was going on a while back about Piero Sraffa and the Cambridge capital controversy.) Second, I understand that there are costs (opportunity and otherwise, and Lanham’s focus on attention seems to me to deal chiefly with opportunity costs) accounted for in many forms of nonmarket and alternative market transactions, but I’m not sure what Benkler’s getting at here unless he’s being witty and expecting us to fill in the caveat that he’s already shown in pages previous that said marginal cost is zero.

Doubts aside, though, the question remains: what does this mean for the composition classroom? What happens when we consider how human communicative capacity, the diverse individuation of production, and the production of value in a diverse array of market and nonmarket transactions for diverse motivations? What does it mean in an economic sense when we understand that freewriting, peer response, drafting, revision, and reflection are deeply inefficient processes? There’s a fairly simple answer, I think. I’ve had students here who come to me, frustrated with their writing, frustrated with their drafts, and ask: “Sir, what’s the approved solution for this essay?” That approach gets me frustrated, as well, because it’s the Army ideology, the idea that there’s a single right answer that everyone can get to by using the same sets of steps, the substitution of the idea that there is a single unitary writing process for the understanding that writing is a messy, complicated, recursive multi-step process that differs from individual to individual; a process that needs to be learned on the diverse terms of those individuals. In that learning and understanding, nonmarket transactions and transactions that take place at economic locations other than the margin — the sloppy, inefficient transactions — are products and indicators of surplus. Going beyond the ideology of scarcity — beyond Lanham’s implications that we have only so much attention to give and must therefore ration it with maximal efficiency — is what produces and sustains growth.

Adam Smith and Discipula Scribens

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Economics, Writing

Or, literally, “the writing student,” as an attempt to play on homo economicus. On Monday, Becky responded to my thoughts about the link between composition’s expressivism (which I do not in any way use as a term of condemnation: too frequently, folks who try to dismiss Peter Elbow’s work have failed to read him carefully) and Benkler’s re-thinking of political economy in the information age, and suggested some concerns with Benkler’s individualism. I’d meant to reply in the comments, but the stuff I was thinking about kept getting bigger and messier and more out-of-hand until I figured it merited its own post. Basically, my response is this: I read Benkler, especially given his title, as trying to re-imagine the evolution of classical economics into neoclassical economics in the steps of Adam Smith, who so carefully initiates his analysis from the figure of the individual in both The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments. From Smith’s moves, we see how today’s microeconomics begets macroeconomics — and so, too, even in Marx, the architecture of base and superstructure always emerges from acts of production and appropriation performed by and upon the individual. I’m not seeking to deny that “the social” doesn’t exist as a concern in our disciplinary discourse, but I think that describing and accounting for and characterizing various things as components of “the social” is a homogenizing move that glosses over the heterogeneity of economic work, relations, transactions, enterprises at the individual level as undertaken in the composition classroom. Individualism — for Smith, for Marx, for Benkler — is a good and demanding thing, I think, because it asks us to pay attention to the way works and enterprises are transacted at the closest scale and lets us see the limit cases, the moves of production and appropriation that disrupt conventional macroeconomic expectations, and so doing complicate those expectations.

Consider Benkler’s assertion that

Because welfare economics defines a market as producing a good efficiently only when it is pricing the good at its marginal cost, a good like information (and culture and knowledge are, for purposes of economics, forms of information), which can never be sold both at a positive (greater than zero) price and at its marginal cost, is fundamentally a candidate for substantial nonmarket production. (36)

If writing teachers understand that marginal cost is the increase in total cost incurred per extra unit of production, the language becomes a little less scary: it’s costly to write that paper or that dissertation. It’s not so costly to (digitally) reproduce an extra copy. (Let’s not talk about Sraffa, counting inputs, and sunk costs right now, k thx?) Academic writing, by students and professors, is more likely to be produced and exchanged in nonmarket ways because of the nature of information goods, and as Benkler demonstrates, even the orthodoxy of neoclassical economics supports this. There is, as well, the flip side: as Benkler acknowledges (37), regulation of information goods — such as, for example, via copyright — is inherently economically inefficient. We maintain the institution of limited-term copyright not for the inefficiencies it creates, but for its incentive effects; the way it draws other creators into the production of an intellectual commons. As we’ve lately seen, though, copyright’s inefficiencies are not the only incentive (economic or otherwise) acting upon the individual composer. As Benkler points out, individuals produce information goods for a variety of motivations — for reasons of pleasure, politics, belonging, and gain, among others — and we understand beyond Benkler that such production requires work, and the value of that work is appropriated, whether by the individual producer or another or others, and that such appropriation leads into concerns of ownership and then into the use by the owner, and often back into the work of production by other individual writers and other individual composers.

The critique of expressivism as overly focused on the individual is a useful one, I think. But such a critique makes it also very easy to dismiss anything that might happen at the closest level, the individual’s personal and conscious choices and disruptions in composing, and instead scan for the homogeneities of the grand trends — economic, social, or otherwise.

Why I Teach Here

preterite Writing

There’s an excellent piece in New York Magazine about the kinds of students I see in my classes. The reporter, Chris Smith, simultaneously acknowledges and respects the tensions that these students face, in ways far more respectful and mature than the account offered of the behavior of some members of the Hunter faculty.

I’m a far-left liberal. I’ve seen such accounts and such milbashing on WPA and in the discourse of certain subgroups of various professional organizations. And there’s a tension there: after all, I served four years as an enlisted soldier and NCO in the Army’s 24th Infantry Division, and in Marya’s words, “I have a lot of respect for the retired generals who have spoken out against things that are clearly wrong.”

It makes me wonder what friends like Bill DeGenaro might think of my students. I wonder what you might think, reader, after reading that piece: about my reasons for teaching writing, and about why I so admire the students I teach.

Essay Exams

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Writing

I’m wishing I was at Computers & Writing right now, but yesterday was final exams for the junior-year writing courses I teach. Three and a half hours to answer a broad writing question that offered the opportunity to cover very nearly all of the readings in the course, with essays written and submitted on laptops. Big chunk of the final grade, which I don’t like, but the ideology of the need for a final exam in all subjects is something that will not go away easily here.

I coached the process as much as I could beforehand:

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CCCC07 F30: Self in Online Environments

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Computers, Conference Notes, Writing

Quinn Warnick and James Donelan’s panel, “The Construction of Self in Online Environments: Helping Students Create and Understand the Virtual Realm,” was small but well-attended, and what was perhaps most interesting was the way that discussion afterwards worked to bridge the apparent gulfs in philosophies and approaches. I don’t think Warnick and Donelan ever explicitly disagreed with one another, but they were clearly approaching a common theme from divergent perspectives.

Warnick’s presentation, “Would Aristotle Link to Wikipedia? The Role of Ethos in a Hypertext Age,” began by noting that to speak about Wikipedia is to speak about a moving target, and that Wikipedia’s evolving rhetorical ethos led him to continue to revise his presentation and conclusions until the day before he presented. Which sounds like a much better apologia than the unfortunate (and unfortunately common) CCCC confession that one wrote it on the plane — but in Warnick’s case, it certainly wasn’t an apologia: his analyses and conclusions were sharp and spot-on. Warnick framed his examination of Wikipedia’s ethos and its apparent sourcelessness, its lack of attribution, in the context of the familiar question from Foucault and Beckett: “What does it matter who is speaking?”

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CCCC07 I14: Our Uses of

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers, Conference Notes, Writing

The full title of this panel was “Our Uses of Student Writing: Thinking Critically About Composition Scholarship.” Mariolina Salvatori presented first, giving a general overview of the panel as a whole — she would focus on scholarship, Jennifer Whatley would focus on research, and Richard Parent would focus on student writing in the context of the internet. Salvatori then moved into her portion on scholarship, offering as an introductory condition the assertion that a student text is to composition scholars as a literary text is to literature scholars. The difficulty, however, lies in that literature as a discipline has developed clear (albeit evolving: note the widely ranging reactions to Moretti’s work) rules of engagement for literary texts, whereas composition’s rules for engagement with student texts are still emerging, ad hoc, in process, to be determined. Furthermore, some of our conventions of engaging student texts are not in line with our theory, and this may indicate our ambivalence about the status writing about students may not grant us.

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CCCC07 C.26: Textual Transgressions

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Conference Notes, Writing

Collin Brooke acknowledged at the outset of this panel that there were technological difficulties coordinating this panel’s presentations, and the start of the presentations was delayed by six minutes as Collin (the chair) and others worked to overcome those difficulties. The panel’s full title was “Textual Transgressions Online: Plagiarism and Fraud in Weblogs and Wikis,” and the presenters offered a useful body of insight into the various ways that textual appropriation functions online, and how those various functions of appropriation serve to illuminate our practices and preconceptions surrounding the teaching of writing.

Clancy Ratliff’s presentation, “Negotiating and Regulating Plagiarism in Everyday Blogging Practices,” began from a personal example: her weblog, CultureCat, has been repeatedly plagiarized, in various and interesting ways. Ratliff has posted a brief recap with slides of her presentation, but I think she’s being too modest in the account she gives: as is typical of her work, her presentation was insightful, witty, and focused. The first example of weblog plagiarism she offered came to her via an email that read: “You hv posted a very kewl blog. I have stolen a few things from It just to start with my own blog.”

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CCCC07 B.30: My Presentation

preterite Composition Theory, Conference Notes, Economics, Writing

I think I’m beginning to learn how to give a good conference presentation.

Or maybe at least the kind of conference presentation from which I tend to learn the most. I know I don’t learn well when people read papers, no matter how eloquently they’re written: written prose, when performed, has a fundamentally different quality. We see things in drama that the page does not show, and vice versa. But the model of the talk guided by slides doesn’t work well for me either: it feels too paratactic, too off-the-cuff, a series of impressions. Lawrence Lessig’s CCCC presentation seemed to me an ideal middle ground, and I’ve lately seen Collin and Clancy taking similar approaches, and so I tried this year to do something similar. I think the resulting presentation was the best I’ve so far done.

I first wrote a long paper, maybe 20 pages double-spaced, that worked through my argument. It’s something that I’m going to be trying to expand into a journal article over the next few months. I then went through and cut, cut, cut it down to somewhere near conference length: nine pages, double-spaced. After that, I put together a slide show to go with key terms and phrases and concepts in the paper, in imitation of Lessig, and also following the excellent format that I’ve seen Clancy and Collin start to turn toward. After some coaching and feedback from friends and colleagues, I cut it down further, and turned my writerly prose into bullet points from which to read, so as to avoid the deep hypotaxis that becomes so difficult to follow when listening to someone read a written paper: basically, I index-carded it.

I was happy with the result. I got out from behind the speakers’ table, walked around, used my wireless clicker to advance the slides, and talked it. I’d be curious to hear what the audience thought, because for me, it was the most energetic and engaged presentation I’ve done: it was fun, impassioned, and — to me — far more lucid and to-the-point than other presentations I’ve given.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the technology to record as I presented, so what I’ve got to share here is the presentation’s static counterpart: my written talk; the extended prose that I cooked down to bullet points.

If you’re interested, though, you’re also welcome to take a look at the slide show and the bullet point script that I used to talk through that slide show.

slide show (1.1 MB, .ppt file)

bullet point script (55 KB, .doc file)

I’m especially grateful to my colleague Karen Peirce for her feedback and suggestions for revision.

Presentation prose follows.

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