Category: Writing

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It turns out texting might not be the end of language and/or the world

There’s a good piece on the guardian.co.uk web site, “2b or not 2b?” about how texting is not destroying language as we know it. Just the opposite. I’m just skimming this morning, but here’s my favorite paragraphs so far:

People think that the written language seen on mobile phone screens is new and alien, but all the popular beliefs about texting are wrong. Its graphic distinctiveness is not a new phenomenon, nor is its use restricted to the young. There is increasing evidence that it helps rather than hinders literacy. And only a very tiny part of it uses a distinctive orthography. A trillion text messages might seem a lot, but when we set these alongside the multi-trillion instances of standard orthography in everyday life, they appear as no more than a few ripples on the surface of the sea of language. Texting has added a new dimension to language use, but its long-term impact is negligible. It is not a disaster.

and…

Research has made it clear that the early media hysteria about the novelty (and thus the dangers) of text messaging was misplaced. In one American study, less than 20% of the text messages looked at showed abbreviated forms of any kind – about three per message. And in a Norwegian study, the proportion was even lower, with just 6% using abbreviations. In my own text collection, the figure is about 10%.

People seem to have swallowed whole the stories that youngsters use nothing else but abbreviations when they text, such as the reports in 2003 that a teenager had written an essay so full of textspeak that her teacher was unable to understand it. An extract was posted online, and quoted incessantly, but as no one was ever able to track down the entire essay, it was probably a hoax.

Okay, that last one was two paragraphs, but still.

This is something I might have students read in English 516. I haven’t done a unit in the past about texting– personally, it just isn’t that interesting to me and it is something I rarely do myself– but maybe I should. Or maybe I should begin the term with a whole bunch of readings for a week I could call “It Turns Out that the Internets and Other Technologies Are Not Ruining the Kids,” and include readings about the myths of pedophiles and online chat, about the dangers of Facebook/MySpace, about texting, etc., etc. Maybe I could track down some articles to include about the dangers of the phone, of television, of rock-n-roll music, the waltz, and so forth.

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Computers and Writing 2008: Krause’s Big Wrap-Up

First off, let me back-track a bit and fill in a few more details on what I’ve already mentioned about C&W and this trip:

  • The “very good session” I went to on Friday morning before Jay David Bolter’s talk featured Rik Hunter, Dan Anderson, and Alex Reid. Follow the links for more info on the presentations. Actually, in Rik’s and Dan’s case, you can literally see what they did: both of them had everything pre-recorded and just “delivered” it by cranking up the computer and pushing play. Alex did his the old fashioned way– just talking. All were very good, but it was kind of strange to see the presenter standing there while his movie plays his presentation.
  • Speaking of Alex Reid, congratulations on the John Lovas Memorial Academic Weblog Award for Digital Digs!
  • I wish Jay David Bolter’s talk was online someplace, and maybe it will be at some point– they videotaped it. I thought it would be a really interesting teaching tool because he made a bridge/connection between the hypertext experiments of the early 90’s (remember StorySpace?) with gaming experiments (newsgaming.com, for example), poetry that plays on your iPod or your cell phone when you are in certain points of the Atlanta subway, a podcast tour of a cemetery, etc. It reminds me that I need to work gaming back into English 516 the next time I teach it.

Now on to the “part 3” or concluding episode of Computers and Writing 2008 from my pov:

  • My session was at 10 AM on Saturday, and the “prime time” seemed to help us draw a pretty decent-sized crowd. Before me was Gian Pugnucci with a talk called “The WikiBib Project: Exploring the nature of Teaching Collaborative Scholarships in a Wiki.” Basically, he was talking about using a wiki as a means of facilitating collaboration on an annotated bibliography assignment in a graduate class. I’ve talked with Gian about this before and I think we’re going to try and work something out together on this for his and my grad courses next year.

    I was second, and I’ll pretty much let my presentation speak (or not) for itself:

    A slight tangent here: I actually managed to forget the do-hickey for hooking up my laptop, so I spent a few moments thinking I was screwed. But it turns out I was doubly covered. Since this was the computers and writing conference after all, someone in the audience (Carl Whithaus, actually) immediately volunteered his adapter. But besides that, the fine folks in Georgia were completely prepared for this, too. The guy doing tech support for UGa told me he had a whole bag full of the adapters I needed and was very confident that he could get the projector set-up to work. Quite a contrast to the way the projectors often work (or not) in Pray-Harrold.Anyway, I got some great feedback from folks on what to do with the whole “finished blogger” issue, and as we discussed during the session, my use of the word “failure” in my talk is probably not right. “Not finished,” “abandoned, or and as often as not, “ended at the appropriate time” are probably better terms. In any event, helpful ideas from attendees.

    The third presenter was Natalie Szymanski from Florida State with a talk titled “Wikis and Composition Pedagogy: Avoiding the Bandwagon.” Basically, she was suggesting that maybe we ought to slow down a bit on all of this stuff like wikis. While I didn’t agree with many of the things she had to say, I had to give her credit because it’s nice to see someone at this conference have the guts to point out that we’re in the “writing business” and not the “isn’t this software I just learned about cool business.”

  • And then it was time for golf. I was part of a foursome with Steve Benninghoff, Gian, and Nick Carbone out at the University of Georgia Golf Course. In hind-sight, I think we should have picked a more “accessible” course since Benninghoff and I could have used a bit of a “palate cleanser” after the challenges of that course in Kentucky, and Gian and Nick, neither of whom had swung a club in over a year, could have just used something easier. This was one bad-assed hard hard course, certainly in the top 2 or 3 in difficulty that I’ve played, and a course that made me wish for an easy one like Pierce Lake or Eagle Crest.

    But hey, it was a friendly game, and a good time was had by one and all even if the play wasn’t great. Actually, it got a lot more fun when we started the back nine and we played a cart versus cart scramble, but Nick had to leave a little early, so it just kind of degenerated into some sloppy play at the end of a long death march of a round.

  • Steve B. and Gian and I had some BBQ that I thought was pretty so-so, and then we went off to Kingpins Bowl and Brew for the ritual of the bowling night. I managed to catch up with a few folks who I didn’t get a chance to talk to much during the conference itself (including Courtney, who is doing great), had a few more Terapins, and even managed a little bowling (I scored 100– I had forgotten that real bowling isn’t as easy as Wii bowling).
  • And then Sunday was the long drive home. I managed to prod my more leisurely traveling companion onto the road by 6:30 and we were back in Ypsilanti in less than 12 hours, which, when I think about the expense and general pain in the butt of flying, makes me think that driving was a good idea, with or without the golf.

So an excellent conference/roadtrip. Well done, UGa, folks! Here are some pictures of the whole things– eventually, I’ll add some info about all these pictures.

Next year, C&W is going to be at UC-Davis and it is going to be toward the end of June. I don’t know if I’ll be going yet or not, to tell the truth. On the down-side, the CCCCs is in San Francisco this year, and I don’t think I can afford 2 trips to California just to conference. On the other hand, Annette and Will and I might want to make this part of a west coast “pilgrimage” back to Ashland. We shall see….

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Long belated post on “Videos from The English TA Experience by Iowa State Students”

I am startlingly tardy in posting about Inside Higher Ed’s article “Voltaire Wasn’t Cut Out to Be an Iowa State TA” and the videos that are the subject of this– linked on Facebook here and here. Frankly, for all the excitement over things like the Graff and Birkenstein exchange on WPA-L, I’m kind of surprised that no one in the Comp/Rhet blogosphere has commented on this.

I guess someone has to start.

On the one hand, I appreciate the experiences being noted/recorded in these two videos. I’ve been there, of course. And I don’t blame these grad assistants for making these two videos and I don’t dismiss the reaction they have to the writing program at Iowa State (if I was running that program, I’d see this video as a bit of a “warning sign,” frankly). But I do have more of an “other hand” here.

First, this is probably more of the kind of video that should have been shown at some kind of GA gathering more or less privately, giggled at, and then put away. Probably not a video to post on YouTube or, um, Facebook. Second, and I don’t mean to sound all old and WPA-ish on people, but it’s never a good idea for GA’s to make fun of students publicly, even it is in modest ways and clearly in fun (as is the case with this video). Third, the administrative folks clearly over-reacted in trying to repress this. That just goes to show you what happens when administrators freak out.

And fourth (no offense to those folks at ISU) this video is probably twice as long as it should be. A little sensible editing would have helped, honestly.

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Link/reading pile-up

It’s that time of the semester, and I’m trying to slap together a presentation for the conference I’m going to next week. So here’s a bunch of links that I had meant to write more about earlier but I’m just going to mention now. Some of this might be handy for teaching at some point:

  • “A guide to writing better emails.” Nothing earth-shattering here, but good advice nonetheless.
  • The curious and odd ProfEssays site. I’m not sure how I came across this, but I think it is interesting and odd and strange that this paper mill’s web site has as much information as it has about plagiarism.
  • A review of a book called Proust and the Squid. Sounds like a cool book. Here’s the first paragraph from the review:

    For most people, reading is a taken for granted skill. The purpose of Proust and the Squid is to reveal the magic and mystery of reading and its pathologies. This everyday activity is not natural, and is a recent development from an evolutionary perspective. There is no ‘reading center’ in the brain, but something a lot more enigmatic, an acquired way of using existing structures and connections. New imaging technology shows startling differences between dyslexics and others, differences that illuminate the journey to literacy as never before. It is only 6000 years since humans trained their brains to read, and during that time they have improved on the process to such a staggering degree that the modern child takes 2000 days to achieve a degree of literacy that took 2000 years to develop. The dark cloud on the horizon is another human invention of staggering genius: digitalization. This most economic of information systems was made possible by the very thing it now threatens: the ability to read.

  • “How to start writing quality articles for blogs and article marketing.” This is a little too much in the “get rich quick with your blog writing” category of things for me, but still some interesting advice in this little piece. Might be good for Writing for the WWW.
  • This link and this link go to popular press stories about a study some folks did about why people read blogs. I haven’t had a chance to look at all the details yet, but it looks interesting for all kinds of different reasons, and it looks like what they are arguing is that blog reading is practiced as “a habit,” and that there is a fuzzy line between blog writing and reading. All of which falls in line with my BAWS project. This might also make for good WWWW reading.
  • Finally, WEbook, which I just stumbled across. It looks like a collaborative book writing site. I dunno, maybe that’s one way to get the ol’ scholarly work done, throw it out there on this site and see if other people will do the writing for me.
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What does a Comp/Rhet person do? (or, taking the bait on two recent comp/rhet articles)

Via the wpa-l mailing list, I learned about two different and oddly related articles out there in the blogosphere: “What Is a Composition and Rhetoric Doctorate?” from Inside Higher Ed and “What is Rhet/Comp for?” from Mark Bauerlein in the CHE. The IHE article is reporting on a session from the current CCCCs about the “split” between composition and rhetoric, the future of PhD programs in the field, and the shift into more “media” and technology oriented kinds of things. The Bauerlein piece, basically, is him wondering why it is that the field of comp/rhet, when they should have the answer for solving writing problems in the workplace and everywhere else, is worrying about things like social justice, identity, inequality, etc.

Nothing new under the sun down there in NOLA, as far as I can tell.
Continue reading “What does a Comp/Rhet person do? (or, taking the bait on two recent comp/rhet articles)”

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On hypertextopia (maybe something for Writing for the WWW or even 516?)

I haven’t had time to read this yet, but it looks like it might be something pretty cool to play around with this spring in ENGL 444, or maybe even next week in ENGL 516: hypertextopia, which I came across via Grand Text Auto and if:book. I have to say that personally I agree with the if:book folks: as a reader, I am not really a fan of hypertext fiction. As a writer though, I think it’s a fun form to play with. Maybe it’s the “writerly-ness” of the form, a way of reading and writing that would have pleased Barthes to no end. Interesting and intellectually stimulating, but not exactly a page turner on the beach.

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Don’t worry Iowa MFA students, your unpublishable manuscripts are still safe

Last week, I posted about protests by grad students at the University of Iowa about putting their theses up online. Apparently, the MFA students won. And thus the title of this post.

(Deep sigh, followed by chuckle.)

For what it’s worth, my dissertation has been online for about 12 years now. Now, for a bunch of reasons I won’t go into now, I wasn’t really thinking about turning it into a book. But if I had tried to make it into a book (I think its too late at this stage), I would have had to revise to a point where I would have ended up writing a new book based on the diss, meaning that the print version would be notably different from the online version. I think this is pretty much par for the course for anyone trying to take a thesis or a dissertation to the next level, creative or not. Conversely, I can think of nothing but good things that have come from putting my diss up online. A couple of different scholarly things have come my way over the years because of this, I get emails from people who stumble across the site once in a while, and I still get around 100-150 hits a week on the site. So for me, putting my diss up online had no downsides and modest positives.

I appreciate that these MFA folks are hoping to be the next Vonnegut or ZZ Packer or something. But I dunno, this guy seems to do okay and he puts all of his fiction out there for free.

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Sweded version of Star Wars: so awesome, so many ideas

Via my friend Chris and via boing-boing comes this “Sweded” version of Star Wars:

Oh, where to begin?

First off, this is why I want to very much see the here and gone almost immediately movie, Be Kind Rewind. As the wikipedia entry suggests, the plot of the movie involves the characters remaking the videos in a rental store, and, when customers complain about the remakes, which are like the one above, the excuse offered is that the videos are from Sweden. Or something like that– I have yet to see the movie.

Second, I think this would be a fun way to spend the afternoon with Will and some of his friends. Not this particular afternoon, but I can see the film maker in me yet….

And third, I actually think this might be a kind of cool assignment for some of the writing classes I teach, particularly English 328. I am imagining something like asking students, working in small groups, to make a 2 minute or less “sweded” version of something. It could be a pop movie, or, if I wanted it to fit more in the theme of the class, maybe it could be of a style and/or grammar rule, maybe a writing “tip” of some sort. We have the cheap cameras and (I think?) things like iMovie to make this work. Then students would have to write about the experience in terms of the process, what this different kind of “writing” says about more conventional “words in a row” writing, etc.

I don’t know, I think this is just crazy enough to work.