Category: Writing

Blargon (?!) in the NYT (and none of it from me…)

Loyal readers, do you remember how, a couple weeks ago now, I had a post seeking blog specific jargon? Well, I feel comfortable now revealing that the inquiry that prompted that post came from none other than William Safire and it resulted in this article in the New York Times Magaine this weekend.

Well, okay, it wasn’t from Safire directly; it was from one of his researchers. But he (the researcher, that is) did email and leave me a phone voice mail message about this back at the end of January/begining of February, and I obliged with a blog posting trolling for requesting input.

It’s an okay enough piece, but I guess I have two critiques, both of which I suppose are semi-obvious. First, a lot of the terms/jargon in this article seem, well, a bit of a stretch for me. I mean, “moonbats?” “deliciousing?” “blegging?” I dunno…

Second, Safire makes no mention of me nor any of the comments on my post about this. I feel kinda used.

Plagiary.org: this could be interesting…

No time to reflect on this now, but I noticed someone on WPA-L posted an article about Plagiary.org, a journal about “Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification.” It sounds interesting, though, according to the article I skimmed on WPA-L, one of the people involved is Denis Dutton, who works on/edits the problematic (IMO) web site Arts and Letters Daily.

Belated Blog Post: Yet more on handwriting

It’s been a super-busy week around here at EMU and it promises to be even more busy next week. Our department is hiring two positions in literature and a department head. The department head position in particular means a lot of meetings and hallway discussions. And of course other business in the department goes on. Counting things having to do with job candidates and other events I either have to attend or things I should attend (and not counting stuff like teaching and office hours), I have nine meetings and/or “events” on my calendar next week. Eek.

Anyway, Nick Carbone sent me a link to the Inside Higher Ed article “The Surprising Process of Writing” by Shari “the Nomad Scholar and not her real name” Wilson. The basic premise of the essay is Wilson thinks her students write better essays when they write them out by hand. She offers a series of explanations for this: “the process of writing in-class in a timed situation seemed to discourage the kind of overwrought, constipated writing that some students produce with a typed paper;” “handwriting encourages students to focus on the writing process;” and, most problematically, “handwriting brings writers closer to their work — which may encourage excellence with particular students.”

Most of the comments on the Inside Higher Ed site basically says “this doesn’t seem right to me,” there was some discussion on the WPA-L mailing list about why this argument doesn’t ring true, and I of course feel the same way. But quite frankly, the explanation as to why Wilson thought her students’ handwritten work was better than the typed assignments strikes me as obvious: the writing situations were different.

The handwritten assignments were in-class writings, and while Wilson doesn’t give examples of any assignments, I would assume that the in-class assignments were a great deal more specific in terms of subject and purpose than the out-of-class assignments. An in-class assignment might be something like “In her chapter in the assigned reading, Smith makes three points about ‘X;’ explain one of them and why you agree or disagree.” Or maybe “Compare these specific Smith and Jones readings.” In contrast, I would guess/bet the out-of-class assignments are quite a bit less specific– “Tell your reader about an important event” or something like that– and there may have been additional burdens, like providing some research.

So what I’m suggesting here is the handwritten assignments were “better” because students had a clearer sense of purpose (answer this question) and they had a clearer sense of audience (no one else is going to read this; this is from me to Wilson, or whatever her real name is). Simple as that.

Wilson writes that she “typed up a student’s handwritten midterm and compared it to two computer-generated essays,” but I don’t think that’s a fair test. If she really wants to make this comparison (and by the way, I think it is ultimately an idiotic comparison because the vast majority of writing tasks our students complete in school and elsewhere are done at the keyboard anyway), why not ask students to complete an out-of-class writing assignment by hand? Why not arrange for one of these in-class assignments be done in a computer lab someplace? That would be a more realistic test, seems to me.

All I know is this: I was teaching a class a few years ago where there was an in-class writing activity– an essay test, if I recall. For reasons not worth explaining, I was able to give students a choice between writing their exam out by hand or using a computer. I thought that maybe five or six out of the 20 or so students might take me up on the computer offer. To my surprise, all 20 students opted for the computer, and when I asked them why, the answer (with a shrug) was basically “this is how I write.”

It's 2006– now get back to work

Last year at about this time, I was resolving to get back to work on my textbook project. Well, that didn’t turn out so great.

My textbook project probably isn’t completely behind me because I think I still have some post-mortem work to do on that project, and also because it might yet have a life as a web site (that’s still being sorted out). Beyond that, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s an article in this experience. Who knows.

But the textbook is mostly behind me. So, what’s next?

Well, 2006 promises to be a pretty busy year for me. Starting this term, I am the writing program coordinator at EMU. Basically, I’m the “lead person” for the undergraduate majors and the graduate programs, which means that I advise students, promote the programs, etc., etc. I’m teaching an over-load this coming winter term, mostly because I need to teach another online section of English 328 to further some scholarly projects. And because I like the class and I like the extra money.

I have a CCCCs presentation to get together and potentially an article sort of about my CCCCs presentation (again, another reason why I need to teach that online class), I have a speaking gig in early April, and I have to get together a proposal for Computer and Writing (which is also probably going to be about online teaching). And I think I am going to start reading and thinking again about my writing technologies before the computer project.

Oh yeah– I think I’m going to try to write a novel, too. But that’s not until May.

I read a great book while at the gym last month (my workout routine, to the extent that I have one, includes 30 or so minutes on either the bike or the elliptical machine while I read something kind of light) called No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty. Basically, the book is a “field guide” to how to participate in the contest/dare that Baty started called “National Novel Writing Month.” The goal is to write the first draft of a novel (defined here as 50,000 words, which is really a pretty short novel– think The Great Gatsby) in 30 days. November is the designated month by the organization, but that’s never a good one for me. So I’m thinking I’m going to give this a try in May. I’ll have just enough schoolwork on my plate to keep me busy, and I’ll have just enough freetime to justify a folly like this.

ObviouslyHopefully, writing something that is largely made up is different than writing something based on research. But beyond novel writing, I think Baty’s book is one I’d recommend to anyone who is “stuck” on a large writing project– a thesis or a dissertation, for example. Baty’s emphasis is on turning off the “internal editor” that all too often stops people from writing anything in the first place. He has great advice on where to find time in a busy schedule to write, and he goes into useful detail in describing strategies for finding the right kind of place to write. Some of his tips come across as a bit goofy (having a “writing totem,” for example), but in a weird way, they have a ring of truth to them, too.

And like I said, his book is ultimately about revision because the point of writing a draft of a novel at break-neck speed is so you can take your time fixing it and polishing it later.

I think I'll just lift these ideas and post them here…

Rebecca Moore “Schenectady Synecdoche” Howard has had a couple of interesting posts on plagiarism lately– first, this one, which is about a “plagiarism” contestat the Utah Desert News Web site, which isn’t really about plagiarism at all. It’s based on a short story that was “written” by two of the paper’s reporters where they took quotes from a bunch of short stories– all of which are cited with footnotes (and thus not plagiarism)–and then put them together. The story is called “The Rearrangement” (warning– this is an MS Word file).

The second post on “blog plagiarism,” which (as far as I can tell) is what I would be doing here had I not credited Moore for these links/posts in the first place. I agree with the premise of Moore’s post about the claim maide in this “techdirt” post, that the plagiarism problem doesn’t matter much if it is a small-time blogger ripping off content from Google or Yahoo or something. However, as the first comment on the post asks, what happens if Google or Yahoo or something rips off the small-time blogger?

Turkey Post #2: More On The Value of "Academic" Blogs

There was a good discussion on Tech-Rhet and some thoughtful commentary on an article that appeared in/on Slate (in a week of articles about academia), Robert S. Boynton’s “Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs– When academics post online, do they risk their jobs?” In the nutshell, Boynton, focusing on the story of Daniel W. Drezner, who keeps a well-regarded blog (which I don’t read on a regular basis because it’s about stuff like political science and economics and stuff), was denied tenure at the University of Chicago (and Drezner writes about this experience quite a bit in his blog), and eventually offered a tenured position at Tufts.

I am sure there are many places in the blogosphere where folks are talking about this, but there’s a useful post at the if: book blog, a post that raises the issue of making blogs “count” in academic sense with peer review, so-called blog “carnivals,” and the like. This entry conveniently links to a bunch of other useful sites, and ends more or less like this:

It will be to the benefit of society if blogging can be claimed, sharpened and leveraged as a recognized scholarly practice, a way to merge the academy with the traffic of the real world. The university shouldn’t keep its talents locked up within a faltering publishing system that narrows rather than expands their scope. That’s not to say professors shouldn’t keep writing papers, books and monographs, shouldn’t continue to deepen the well of knowledge. On the contrary, blogging should be viewed only as a complement to research and teaching, not a replacement. But as such, it has the potential to breathe new life into the scholarly enterprise as a whole, just as Boynton describes.

I have a number of thoughts about all this:

  • For most of us academic bloggers, happy and otherwise, I think it is either misguided or downright delusional to compare our situation with that of Drezner’s. At least it is for me. I mean, I have around 25-50 readers day– far fewer, I suspect, than Prof. Drezner– and while there are people in my department who know I keep a blog, most seem unaware and I don’t think any of my colleagues care one way or the other about my blog. Blogging always has to be a personal decision because most blogger’s top readers are going to be me, myself, and I.
  • Drezner himself points out that he doesn’t think it was his blog that cost him tenure at U of Chicago, and he doesn’t think it was that big of a factor in terms of snagging his new job at Tufts.
  • The vast majority of academics by definition don’t dwell in the rarified air of Drezner and his colleagues. I wrote an essay about valuing self-published web sites as part of the tenure and review process a couple years ago, an essay that was published in the online version of College Composition and Communication and that was part of a special multi-journal issue of various electronic journals. My essay was “disappeared” by that site, so I set it up on my own web server space here. I make a lot of points in this essay, but to me, one of the more significant points is this one:

    I recall the horror stories of “publish or perish,” of assistant professors who had books published by good presses and were still denied tenure. The picture that was painted by my advisors made me think that tenure at most schools was a fifty-fifty proposition, at best.

    The fact of the matter is this happens almost exclusively at Carnegie Classification Research I or Research II institutions, or it happens in situations that probably have more to do with complicated politics and personalities than it does with publications. The vast majority of community colleges, colleges, and universities in this country are not research institutions and do not have the same notions about what does or doesn’t count as scholarship for the purposes of tenure, review, and promotion. Yet this reality is routinely ignored in documents that offer advice and guidelines for tenure, promotion, and review.

    Or let me put it this way: the rules for tenure vary. A lot. Since I finished my undergraduate degree, I have been a graduate student or a faculty member at four different institutions, all of which might be best described as “regional state universities” (though I think Bowling Green State is a “Research I;” they certainly have a lot of Ph.D. programs). At each of these institutions, I know that faculty have been awarded tenure and/or promotion with less than a book.

  • So should blogs “count” toward tenure? Maybe, maybe not. But as I argued in my piece about self-published web sites, I think this is a situation in which tenure/promotion seekers have to make arguments that appeal to the individuals within their own institutions. At some places, they might count; at other places, they might not.
  • Personally, I don’t really care if my blogging “counts” in that sense or not. For one thing, one of the things I like about blogging is that for the likes of small-time bloggers like me, the motivation to keep a blog is pretty much internal. In other words, I do this because I want to, not because I have to. And let’s face it: the road to hell is paved with academic presentations, articles, and books that were written solely as a chip to add to the tenure basket.

    Besides, I get a lot of indirect benefits from blogging. I’ve been able to give presentations and write articles based on my blogging and teaching with blogs, and I’ve even made a little money from the whole blog thing. So that’s worth something.

I guess I won't be writing a novel this month; get back to me in May?

Once again, National Novel Novel Month is off to an impressive start. You knew that November was National Novel Writing Month, didn’t you? As the web site puts it, NaNoWriMo:

“…is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

I have to say that as a writer (not of fiction as of late, but I will probably go back to it at some point, probably soon) and as a teacher, I very much value this approach. I think the quest for perfection or just “doing it right” stops too many writers, and I also think that there is value to writing a bad novel even if the only person who reads it is the writer.

It’s just that November is too “middle of the school year” for me to contemplate a novel. Though this might be exactly the time to write a novel. I have a copy of NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty’s book No Plot? No Problem! (and, btw, the book is a hoot), and one of the pieces of advice he offers is to write when you’re really busy. He puts it like this: “If you have a million things to do, adding item number 1,000,001 is not such a big deal. When, on the other hand, you have nothing to do, getting out of bed and washing yourself before 2:00 P.M. feels like too much work to even contemplate.”

Well, regardless, it’s too late for this year. Maybe next, and I am quite serious about trying this in May or so.

Even MORE About the Illustrated Elements of Style (and the problem of "Writing")

Talk about a little story that has legs: on NPR’s “Morning Edition” yesterday (I actually started writing this post while listening to this show yesterday morning; it’s been one thing or another the last couple of days), there was a fairly long piece about the recently published illustrated version of The Elements of Style. Besides talking about the book and its illustrations, the story also talked about the “opera” (but not really so much an opera as a song cycle) that has words based on the book. They have a web site that includes samples of two songs, the story from earlier, and a few pictures from the book.

By the way, the music, IMO, is what Laurie Anderson once referred to in a piece of hers as “Difficult Listening Music.” But I’ll let you be the judge of that.

I don’t want to make too much out of this, and I do think that the Maria Kalman illustrations are hilarious and charming. But I guess I have two problems with the way that these reports talk about The Elements of Style. First, while there is a lot of useful advice in Strunk’s and White’s little book, there’s quite a bit wrong with it, too. The book doesn’t so much offer instruction as it offers Strunk’s (and, I am sure, White’s) “pet peeves” about grammar and useage. Strunk’s and White’s advice– “Be clear,” “Omit needless words,” “Do not affect a breezy manner,” etc.– are merely affirmations. They are to writing instruction what Dr. Phil is to psychotherapy.

And beyond that, Strunk’s and White’s editions of the book are elitist and down-right sexist. I say “Strunk’s and White’s editions” because the latest edition of the book and the edition that Kalman illustrated was published in 2000, about 15 years after White’s death and at least 45 years since Strunk’s demise. This is significant because there are some interesting differences between the 2000 edition and the 1979 edition: many of the examples have been changed to make the book at least a bit more inclusive, they actually mention computers (not significantly, but more than they did in 1979, of course), and they eliminate White’s rather defensive prose on the use of “he” for the generic pronoun. In fact, one of the examples that Kalman illustrates– something like “Chlöe smells good, like a pretty baby should” (Kalman has a picture of a big and pretty baby)– was originally “Chlöe smells good, like a pretty girl should,” which obviously has different connotations. There are dozens of examples like this. I suppose we can credit Strunk’s and White’s assumptions to the fact that the book is a “product of a different time,” but we shouldn’t gloss over Strunk’s and White’s view of the world with a revision that “corrects” them.

The second issue is more significant and more difficult to do anything about, the concept “out there” about what counts as “writing.” Just about every English professor or teacher in the universe has been in the situation where they meet a stranger (on a plane, at a party, waiting in a line, whatever) and after they tell the stranger that they are an English professor or teacher, the stranger says something like “Oh, I better watch my grammar.” And when I tell people outside of English studies (and sometimes inside, too!) that I do things in my classes like make web sites, study email exchanges, examine the balance between text and graphics, etc., etc., they get a bit confused.

I was reading Kathy Yancey’s CCCC 2003 keynote essay the other day (I think it was the 2003 keynote; it was published in the December 2004 issue of the CCCs) and I think she makes a pretty good argument about where we ought to be going with writing. One quote that sort of sums it up for me:

This new composition includes rhetoric and is about literacy. New composition includes the literacy of print: it adds on to it and brings the notions of practice and activity and circulation and media and screen and networking to our conceptions of process. It will require a new expertise of us as it does of our students. And ultimately, new composition may require a new site for learning for all of us.

Right on; now, the question is how do we convince people outside of our own narrow little world that this ought to be what they think of “writing?” And how do we get a story about this new concept of writing in the New York Times or on NPR?

"The Google Print Controversy: A Bibliography"

Via what looks like a library-oriented blog called DigitalKoans comes this bibliography about Google and publishing. Nice– I always like it when someone does the work for me. In any event, as I think about Computers and Writing for the winter in the back of my mind, I am thinking more and more about how I really need to have a unit on Google or electronic publishing or maybe both or together.