Teaching Journal #15

During the final week of class, I held half hour meetings with each of my students in order to discuss their drafts of their Reflective/Analytical essays and their Major Revisions for their Final Selected Portfolios. I also reminded them of what grade they were guaranteed to get according to the grading contract, so there would be no surprises when final grades are posted.

 

The meetings were really helpful for my students, I think. I spent ample time explaining the Reflective/Analytical essay in class to them, but for some reason it seemed to not really sink in for some of them until we talked one-on-one about their preliminary drafts of their essays. I had conferenced with some of my students about their project ones, but I think the immediacy of the looming revisions for Project 4 has given them a bit more of an impetus to pay attention during the conference and start working immediately after. Since these meetings I have received a subsequent revision a student requested I look over, and it was leaps and bounds ahead of where he was. Because he is one of the weaker writers in the class, this makes me think that conferences are worth the time and effort. I plan to incorporate more of them into my classes next semester.

 

Because of the required meetings, I cancelled class on Monday and Wednesday of week 15.

However, on Friday we did meet to recap some Project 4 necessities, as well as reflect on the class as a whole. I made them a Final Selected Portfolio Checklist, as well as a document that addressed general concerns about the portfolio that I saw come up during conferences. We went over both of those documents, both of which I posted on Blackboard. We then discussed general questions and concerns about project 4. I also made them an MLA cheat sheet that showed the formulas and examples of essentially all the types of sources they would need to include in their Works Cited Pages. We reviewed the Purdue OWL and how to navigate it. I asked them an MLA formatting question and we worked our way together through the Purdue OWL to find the answer. Finally, I showed them one of my term papers as an example of correct MLA formatting. I think showing them how to find answers to questions themselves is one of the most valuable skills I can teach them, so I hope they took something away from our activity with the Purdue OWL.

We then discussed the class as a whole, what they thought they learned, which activities worked well, which didn’t, which readings they thought they learned the most from, and which just confused them. This activity gave me some things to think about as I prepare to teach this course next semester. For example, some of the students said they were unwilling to talk because others were unwilling to talk, and that on the day when I warned them ahead of time they would be called on at random in class, they were more inclined to better prepare themselves for discussion and participate when the time came. I think I will start to call on people a little more next semester. Sometimes being put on the spot is the push students need to start engaging in the conversation.

 

I think this time next semester I might spend some more time throughout the semester doing brief workshops on grammar, style, and organization. I value these things in a student paper and it seems unfair for me to expect it in their final drafts when I have not emphasized it throughout the class. I at least need to create a series of handouts that makes clear for them my expectations in terms of grammar and style.

Teaching Journal #13/14

I knew the class before Thanksgiving break would pose a challenge, and I was right. On Monday, the 19^th of November, my class and I discussed Jonathan Alexander’s “Transgender Rhetorics: (Re)Composing Narratives of the Gendered Body.” Things started off promising; I had the students take Kate Bornstein’s Gender Aptitude Test, and the results showed that the students were fairly open to questioning the traditional gender construct. However, while the test results showed that students were willing to an alternative gendered reality, they certainly were not as willing to discuss it in class. I tried asking them some of Pat Califia’s writing prompt questions that Alexander cites in his article, but they were at a loss there as well. They kept asking if they would still have their own brains, if they would still be “them.” I asked them to what degree they think their genders define them, but they were not willing to engage for whatever reason. I was finally able to get them to talk about gender stereotypes by having them analyze the student narratives in groups. I think I need to utilize more group work as a way to foster conversation, especially this late in the term, when they seem to become less motivated daily.

After break, we discussed Cixous’ “Viewpoint: The Laugh of the Medusa.” During this particular class meeting, my students seemed inclined to undermine me at every turn. First a girl tried to argue with me on the correct pronunciation (she insisted the Americanized “knee-chee” was correct.) I did not engage with her at the time, explaining to her that I was not going to waste class time looking it up. However, I did take the liberty of playing a video of the correct pronunciation as I took attendance during the next class meeting. A couple of boys in the back also seemed particularly chatty, but it didn’t distract me, so I talked over them until the chatter subsided. The synthesis activity I made worked out pretty well. I displayed quotes on the board and asked the students to explain the quote and synthesize it with some of the other readings we have discussed. However, I had to resort to calling on people to answer in an effort to make sure everyone was paying attention. I might have been better off turning this into a group activity.

Wednesday’s class was dedicated to all things related to project 4. I spent the first third of the class giving the students an overview of the remaining elements of project 4, and then explaining them in detail. In an effort to get the students thinking about their reflective/analytical essay, I had them write individually about what they think has changes about their writing as a result of this class, and what scholars they think have had a hand in shaping or changing the way they think about writing. I then broke them up into groups of four, where they discussed what they wrote and looked for common themes. I asked them to discuss the conversation around their chosen theme. I then went around the room, wrote whatever common theme they chose to discuss on the board, and listed relevant scholars underneath. I think this activity was fairly helpful, though I had to circle the room quite often in an effort to make sure the students stayed on task.

           
Friday’s class covered Anzaldua and Lunsford. We started off the class with a discussion of mosaics and metaphors. My students were totally lost as to what the “tiny fish in the Pacific ocean” metaphor was trying to hint at, but I found out later this was probably because only a handful read the interview from which the metaphor came. In any case, I read the passage aloud and some of my students were able to identify meaning behind the metaphor. In an effort to get their creative juices flowing and shake up the class a bit, I had them individually write metaphors for their own composing processes or draw mosaics of their identities as writers. I do not think my students enjoyed this foray into creativity, though one student did share a mildly humorous comparison of writing to the act of changing a dirty diaper.

Teaching Journal #12

Wednesday we covered Flynn’s “Composing as a Woman” and “Conceptualizing Composing as a Woman.” I ended up deviating quite a bit from my lesson plan during that lecture. For instance, I scrapped my planned freewriting exercise in favor of doing an online quiz (recommended by some of my peers) as a class to explore gender differences in writing. The quiz offered a sample paragraph from an author and we had to guess the gender of the author. I was able to get a good deal of discussion out of my students on what characteristics are representative of “female” writing versus “male” writing, which was one of the goals I wanted to achieve in that class. This opened the door for discussion on gendered genres later in the class.

 

In addition, engaging the class as a whole from the very beginning (rather than splitting them up into groups) proved to be helpful in promoting whole class discussion throughout the rest of the lecture. I am not sure if this was a fluke; I feel like extenuating circumstances are more likely to determine whether my students participate or not, but in any case I was glad of the result.

 

Friday we covered Delpit’s “The Politics of Teaching Literate Discourse” and Smitherman’s “‘God Don’t Never Change’: Black English from a Black Perspective.” This discussion was one of the best I’ve had with my class in some time. I was surprised, because I confessed to them I did not have a particularly “fun” or “engaging” way in to the material, but they were fairly forthcoming with their conversation on what some could perceive to be a difficult or uncomfortable topic. I stressed the conversation Delpit has with Gee in her article, and they seemed to enjoy seeing firsthand an author finally explicitly and thoroughly demonstrate this concept that I have emphasized from the second day of class.

 

I made a point of asking the students to quote more to me from the text, and I found this to be a really useful impetus for discussion and comprehension of the article. I have steadily increased my insistence on students’ reference to their textbooks in class, and I am finally seeing the benefits manifest themselves. I am absolutely going to continue to have my students get their textbooks out at the beginning of class and ask them questions which force them to look through the text during class time for quotes that answer my questions or support the claims they make about the text.

 

More so than with the other texts about marginalized groups, my students were able to see how this article related to writing in general, to them as a non-marginalized group, and to their own writing. I finally saw them discussing composition pedagogies in relation to this article, the other articles we’ve read, and their own experiences in the writing classroom. I can’t definitively explain this new enlightenment; I didn’t really do anything differently with this piece than with the others. Overall, I have tried to recycle more of the key terms from past articles into our present discussion of a text, as well as solicit more examples of how our current article relates to the others we’ve read (and offer my own,) pushing them to address the academic conversation we are covering as a whole. 

 

Overall this week reminded me that I need to stay on my toes, be flexible with my lesson plans, and to mix things up with my students once in a while. Always relying on group work can hurt as much as it can help, and to me there is nothing more satisfying that conducting a successful whole class discussion.

Teaching Journal #11

For Monday, we read Heilker and Yergeau’s “Autism and Rhetoric” in Readings on Writing as well as the Chapter 5 Introduction in Writing About Writing. Not having assigned homework on the Chapter 5 Introduction, I correctly suspected that many of my students did not read it closely, or even at all. To combat this, I read the rather short introduction aloud to the class and discussed what we would be covering in this next unit and what they should take from the readings. I think this was important to do, because if students don’t read the introductions to the various chapters in WAW as I assign them, they could have questions about how the readings are important for the class, why they have to read them, or how the readings relate to them and their writing.

 

Monday’s lesson plan was pretty straightforward. My students were able, through group analysis of the “Peter Speaks” and “Melanie Speaks” sections, to grasp the construct that autistic behaviors can be read as rhetorical tools of that specific language or discourse community.

 

In the interest of keeping students on task for Project 3, I have been dedicating about 5-10 minutes at the end of each class to ask students about their projects. I find this to hold students a little more responsible for the process work of the paper, and helps to keep them on track. For Monday, I went around the room and asked each student to share with the class what primary research they conducted over the weekend.

 

Wednesday’s class posed an interesting teaching challenge as we covered Victor Villanueva’s “Memoria Is a Friend of Ours: On the Discourse of Color” in Readings on Writing. From the beginning of the class, my students expressed a great deal of confusion about what Villanueva was even arguing. When I questioned why they found the article so difficult, they said that he used so much of the work of other authors, they easily lost sight of Villanueva’s own words. I ended up having to start the class by lecturing on Villanueva’s argument for the importance of memory in writing, specifically for writers of color. I pointed out relevant passages in Villanueva’s own words to help my students understand.

 

I then tried to illustrate for my students how Villanueva used various genres of writing from other scholars to illustrate his points. They accepted my argument, but maintained their stance that Villanueva did not rely enough on his own material in this article. This led to a very interesting discussion of academic writing as a genre, an analysis of the style of other articles we’ve read, and a throwback discussion of writing conventions.

 

Friday was a workshop day. I scheduled us in a computer classroom so everyone could follow along with the “Athens Music Community” paper I posted on BlackBoard. I had assigned the students to read the essay beforehand, but I figured if they had the paper in front of them even those who negelected to read it could follow along and make some sort of contribution to the discussion. I made a deal with my students beforehand, that, as long as they all agreed to participate in class discussion (and even—gasp—expect to be called on) I would not assign them any written homework to turn in on Friday. A good deal of my students participated, but I did not hesitate to call on those who did not. As a result, I had to put on my stern teacher hat for a moment and call out a couple of students who were visible disengaged (not following along with where we were in the paper, chair pushed away from the computer, etc.) I haven’t really had much trouble with authority in the classroom thus far, but I am a little worried these last few weeks might be a trial. I am going to continue to hold students accountable for homework and class discussion without adopting an accusatory tone. I usually play it off with a joke, which seems to cut down on potential hostility between the students and me.

Teaching Journal #10

In starting off Monday’s class, I asked each student to share what discourse community they would like to research. In this way I was able to address any problems I could foresee arising in a quick and efficient manner.

 

We also read and discussed Devitt et. al.’s “Materiality and Genre in Discourse Communities.” This essay did a good job of making students more familiar with the terms “genre” and “ethnography,” which the understanding and performance of will be vital for them to succeed in project three.

 

As a group activity, I split the class into three groups and had each group tackle a different essay, summarizing the main points of the article, identifying the genres discussed, and identifying how each mini-article fits into the larger article as a whole. Group work always seems to work fairly well with my class in terms of getting my students to discuss the readings. Whenever we do whole class discussion, the conversation is essentially limited to me and around five students; however, when we start off with group discussion, everyone seems to be comfortable participating on the smaller scale, and I am able to go around to each group and talk to some students who I would not normally have the opportunity to engage in discussion. I think perhaps their comfort with conversation among each other stems from the fact that they know each other well from being members of the same learning community.

 

Wednesday we discussed Malinowitz’s “Queer Texts, Queer Contexts.” I started out the class by asking the student to do a freewrite answering the question “what value does this article hold for non-LGBT community members?” I was hoping the answers would foster discussion on how we can talk about how this article’s concepts of discourse communities and identity can be applied to all writers within the composition classroom. What resulted was more of a discussion on the importance of everyone being exposed to LGBT issues. While I think this was a useful discussion on why we should all be exposed to these issued, I found myself having trouble getting the students to focus on how the article applied to composition. I had my students answer questions from the apparatus in groups, and this helped point the conversation more in the direction of the implications of Malinowitz’s definitions of identity and discourse community for the composition classroom. I’ll have to work harder next week in our session on Heilker and Yergeau to define the line between the activism in a piece and the rhetoric in a piece—which is actually applicable to our class.

 

For our workshop day on Friday, I basically copied the activity we did in 5890. I printed off 5 student essays and gave them to certain assigned groups (making sure no one had to review their own paper.) I then asked them to read the essay as a group an answer a group of questions similar to those we answered in our own workshop in 5890. This worked relatively well. I was hoping they would get more out of this workshop than they had with other workshops we’ve done in the past where I read the paper aloud. This way, at least, every student was forced to read another student paper and engage (at least a the group level) with some aspect of peer review.

 

I found myself having to be rather stern for the first time in my classroom when a student brought up grades (always a hot topic in any classroom.) This quickly escalated into a whole class discussion about the grading contract. Now, in addition to explaining the grading contract in depth on the first day, I have talked about the grading contract in class more than once throughout the semester. I was therefore a little surprised when some students expressed surprise at the fact that their absences counted as minor violations. I explained yet again what constituted a minor violation and that three minor violations equaled a drop in their grades by one letter.

Teaching Journal #9

Monday started off by me having to give my students an extension on their peer reviews. A number of my students did not complete their peer reviews because they waited to email each other links to their projects (even though I warned them many times against this.) This just further convinces me to create a Blackboard folder for project 2 links and peer reviews (like we did in 5910) the next time I teach this assignment. I let them turn the peer reviews in by noon on Tuesday and everyone met that extended deadline. I think I need to spend more time ironing out the logistics of teaching this project the next time around.

 

As an introduction to the discourse community ethnography unit readings, we discussed John Swales’s “The Concept of Discourse Community” and Cathy B. Glenn’s “Constructing Consumables and Consent: A Critical Analysis of Factory Farm Industry Discourse.”

 

In an effort to get my students thinking about project 3 early on, I had them define Swales’s six criteria for discourse communities and then we evaluated their suggested sample discourse communities as a classed based on those criteria. This wasn’t as illuminative for the students as I had hoped it would be, but I think it gave them a good base for starting to think about discourse communities, because their understanding slowly grew throughout the week. Plus, they are required to use Swales’s criteria as an evaluative tool in picking out their discourse communities on which they will write their ethnographies, so I think this was still a valuable exercise, and I would do it again. However, I might preface the activity by telling my students that they have to put each criterion in their own words. Often they would just read verbatim from the text and have no idea what each criterion actually meant.

 

With the Gee reading, “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction,” I spent a little more time than usual on key terms, and I am glad I did. My students expressed serious confusion on discourse v. Discourse and the relationship between primary/secondary and dominant/nondominant. By forcing my students to attempt to define these terms, and then clarify and show examples when their ideas were a bit off, I think I was able to help them get a better basic understanding of the text. I was also able to elaborate on the relationships between these terms, which in some cases can be more confusing than the definitions themselves (i.e. a primary Discourse can be dominant or nondominant.) The rest of the class was whole class discussion, and went pretty well once the tone of the article had been set by our discussion of Gee’s pervasive key terms.

 

On Friday we discussed Wardle’s “Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces.” I used Christina’s “trick email” activity as a way in to discuss authority in writing and discourse communities. I always email my students the homework that will be due for the next class a couple of hours before class time. So Friday, I took the opportunity for a teaching moment by sending my class an email about the homework for Monday that broke many of the conventions of the accepted genre as defined by our class. The email read as follows:

 

Hey peeps,

 

4 Monday do a RR on Devit &co….n doont forget to pick out a discourse community 4 ur paper

 

love, peace, and chicken grease,

 

ur teach

 

When I asked if anyone had read my email, a few laughed and nodded their heads. I displayed my email on the board for those who hadn’t had the chance to read it, and we discussed how the email affected their view of my authority. Somewhat surprisingly, the students all responded that the email did not make them think of me any differently. Those who didn’t just write it off immediately as a joke were very firm in their assertions that this did not give me any less authority in the classroom. They said that because I adhere to formal email conventions so often, they were less inclined to take this email as an indication that I was ignorant of or unwilling to conform to genre conventions. We actually got a very good discussion about authority out of this “trick email,” even though it did not make the students question my authority directly, it got them thinking and talking about authority in writing and discourse communities.

 

Overall the week was full of productive teaching. I tried some new activities, used some old favorites, and tweaked some based on the needs of the students and the difficulty of the readings.

Teaching Journal #8

As I rounded out the workshop days for project two, I noticed some trends with my students' projects.

 

Many took the "multi-modal" aspect of this project to mean that they didn't have to actually put a lot of thought into this project. I found, with most groups, a sort of intermediary stage between their story boards and their drafts submitted for peer review. As I went around to each group, assessing their progress and making suggestions on how to expand on what they thought were finished projects, I found myself having again and again to push my students to flesh out their ideas, either via more text or more visuals.

 

The next time I teach this course I am going to steer my students away from PowerPoint. The ones I have seen are really lackluster. And, though I know PowerPoint presentations can be jazzy and engaging in the hands of experienced professionals, I think they can be equally depressing and bland in the hands of the inexperienced student. The Weebly's and Prezi's I have seen seem to be a little easier to make truly multi-modal, with images, links, and embedded videos. Although, on the other hand, it may be more beneficial for students to become fully adept at using PowerPoint masterfully, as they might be more likely to use this visual medium down the line in their college careers and beyond.

 

The next time I teach this assignment I think I will show more examples of student projects. For our workshop day on Friday, I decided to show my students not one example of project 2's from other sections, but many. I like the way this turned out. I may do it again, or I may show more examples of projects earlier on in the process, like when I introduce the assignment. I think my react best when they see examples of what I am expecting. For instance, after class on Friday, one group came up and already had ideas for revision on the visual elements of their project, and they said it was thanks to seeing examples of what others had done. I was pleased, because they were able to self identify a problem with their project before they even had their project peer reviewed, and so were able to get a jump on the revision process over the weekend.

 

In this way we were able to assess different visual approaches to the assignment, something my students had been particularly struggling with. We discussed the design elements of CRAP, the use of hyperlinks, and cohesion between theme (if they had one) and message. I have drilled my students constantly about the importance of including all the elements I ask for in project two. To my delight, they were able to pick out instances where projects were lacking certain elements, even when they were not spelled out in clearly labeled sections.

 

On Friday, I spent some time lecturing on my expectations for peer reviews and revisions. I didn’t want to see the same problems I had seen with project one (peer reviews that only focused on grammar, even when whole required elements of the paper were missing, and revisions that weren't really revisions, just edits made for grammatical errors and typos.)

 

When I teach this course next semester, I am going to incorporate blogs for IWA's. Right now, I have some students turning in paper copies and some emailing me their assignments and it's insane. Lesson learned. I also am going to utilize blackboard more for project two. Why I didn't create an assignment area like we did in 5890 I have no idea. As it is, my inbox is flooded (and I am only teaching one class this semester.)

Teaching Journal # 7

Monday we covered the Wysocki reading. It was clear from the beginning that the students were turned off by the density of the text, and I had a hard time even dragging out of them how Wysocki felt simultaneously pleased with and repulsed by the Peek  image.

 

I used Yavanna’s “gender-separation” activity as a means of starting discussion, and in that respect it was rather helpful. There wasn’t much of a dichotomy between the reactions of the sexes one might have supposed. Many students had a “non-reaction” to the Peek ad. However, those who noted that the picture could be perceived as sexist were girls and those who liked the ad tended more to be boys. In any case, I was able to work in conversation about form as well as aesthetics as I talked with each group and then with the whole class.

 

I asked students to tell me what Wysocki suggests we might need to do if we want to promote social change about how we perceive beauty. I read them some quotes, and asked them to name advertisements or people they thought of as not traditionally beautiful. I showed them some paintings by Peter Paul Reubens, and we agreed with Wysocki that showing nontraditional figures of womanhood is not going to fix the problem. I pointed out Wysocki’s term “particular beauty”.

 

We looked at the ways in which Wysocki’s article was a “visual” text, and compared the article to Bernhardt, who promoted many of the visual tools Wysocki used, but did not use any himself in his article. We also spoke of the ways in which Wysocki pushed at the boundaries of her discourse community with her numerous and inventive ways of visualizing text.

 

Wednesday Lauren was nice enough to teach my class for me, as I was ill. She followed my lesson plan, which had the students individually answering the questions on page 460-1 in WAW and then coming together as a group to discuss and find common themes.

 

The rest of the class involved students formulating their topics and arguments, with Lauren touching base with each group to ensure they were on the right track. She told them that they would have to have their arguments by next class.

 

Friday was very much a workshop day. I was jumping from group to group for most of the class, answering questions as they arose.

 

We explored Weebly and Prezi as a class. I introduced them via the overhead projector and encouraged my students to pick a medium through which they are going to present their projects. I have one PowerPoint, two Weeblys and two Prezis.

 

I wrote down all the elements they would need to include in their projects on the board. I am finding that there is no way around repeating myself in different ways when I talk about these projects if I want them to successfully include all the elements of the assignment.

I showed them writingspaces.org, from which they would read sections for homework and general help on design style and implementation.

 

Almost all my students started their storyboards in class and many got quite far in the process before we ended class. This was helpful because I was able to look at some of the story boards and nip certain problems in the bud. I overheard some groups making plans to meet over the weekend, so I am hoping to see some nice progress on Monday. If it seems like they are behind schedule on Monday I might consider requiring meetings outside of class in the future.

 

I had some problems with keeping the students on task. I think this is always going to be a problem in computer classrooms. I don’t really yell or get angry in these situations, but I do force the student to talk to me about the work at hand by asking them a ton of questions about the assignment, and thus they are forced to start working on the project.

 

 

Teaching Journal #6

Monday I started out class by splitting them up into their groups for project two. I had them exchange emails and phone numbers, and went over some ways in which they could easily communicate with each other via the internet (GoogleDocs, Blogger). I also made them groups on Blackboard, so they can easily communicate via message thread or wiki.

 

I had them do the case study group activity Talitha had us do in 5890. It worked out pretty well, but I found myself having to give a lot of guidance to the group who did the Dwayne Lowery case study. When I asked them basic questions about what happened to Dwayne throughout the course of his life, they were unable to answer and spent much time riffling through the book. This led me to believe they did not read the text all that closely.

 

While overall the conversation derived from this group activity was beneficial, the struggles of the group covering Dwayne Lowery makes me question how closely my students are reading their assigned texts. Complicating matters is the fact that I had assigned a dialectical notebook on the Brandt reading rather than the normal reading response. I had done this once before, with the Dawkins and Bryson readings, and hadn’t noticed too much of a difference in the conversation, though it was obvious that some were putting much more effort into the dialectical notebooks than others. After this class, however, I am finding myself questioning whether I will continue to use the journals, especially on the more theory-heavy reading assignments. I think they can still be useful for some of the narratives we’ve read (King, Lamott, Diaz, X, Alexie, hooks). I could consider assigning a minimum number of quotes each student must take from the text, but I don’t want to limit my students who are really going above and beyond with this assignment. I know a lot of people grumble about reading responses, but they really seem to be the great equalizer with my students; everyone is forced to try to somewhat understand the text in order to complete the assignment…even if some fall short of that understanding.

 

To end the class, I had them take 10 minutes and freewrite about their own literacy sponsors as a bridge in to the next class as well as a way to get them thinking about project two.

 

In an effort to begin class conversation on Wednesday, I had my students take five minutes to do a freewrite in which they answered the following questions: What did you learn about literacy from reading X, Alexie, and hooks? Did you connect personally to any one of the narratives we read? Which one? Why? They responded with interesting tidbits they remembered from the readings for the first question, but responded not at all to the second question. So I asked them how their literacy histories were different, and the conversation took off from there. They were all fairly eager to talk about how literacy sponsors have shaped them (either as avid readers and writers or as uneager and apathetic readers and writers). I think some of them were rather glad to talk about their aversion to reading and enjoyed tracing this dislike back through their literacy histories.

 

After discussing as a class X, Alexie, and hooks, I split them into their groups and had them do a round-robin reading of each other’s literacy histories as yet another attempt to get them thinking about project two. I also went over some of the questions they might ask each other on page 460 in WAW as a way to find a topic.

Friday we went over the Baron reading. The students were very talkative—perhaps, due to the high number of absences, their inhibitions were lowered. Whatever the case, discussion was lively throughout the entire class, and the students especially responded to the Colbert- Alexie interview as well as the texting discussion and activity.

Wysocki Reading Response

Summary

           

In her article, “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty,” Anne Frences Wysocki seeks to explain to fellow teachers and scholars how an image can both please and infuriate her. She notes the inability of current scholarship on form to explain this emotional contradiction, and explains through an analysis of Kant the separation that is inherent between object and form. This separation allows for the objectification of the woman’s body in the Peek ad, which is the source of Wysocki’s displeasure. She feels she needs to explain the reason behind her anger to other teachers so that they in turn might revise their pedagogy to endorse not an abstract view of the object used but a universalizing view.

 

Synthesis

 

Wysocki’s discussion of the universalized versus the real image reminds me of Berger’s discussion of the naked and the nude in his article “Ways of Seeing”. For Berger, the nude is a universalized, idealized image, and the naked is an individual. Likewise, Wysocki cites one of the reasons for her anger at the image of the woman in the Peek ad as the fact that the woman is universalized and so able to be objectified. She wants teachers and students of visual texts to be able to accept and appreciate the strangeness and otherness of the image in a visual text, and this embrace of reality and individuality is akin to the figure of the “naked” woman in Berger’s article.

 

Pre-reading Exercise

 

This ad is kind of cute at first glance, and pleasing to the eye because of the background. However, something about the word-man coming out of the wall, yet still attached to it creeps me out. This ad doesn’t really make me angry per se, but I definitely oscillate between pleasure and discomfort when looking at this ad.

 

Questions for Discussion and Journaling

 

1) Wysocki says that it is socially acceptable to feel pleasure about the article because the image of the woman is universalized and therefore made to be an object, whose sole existence is for our enjoyment. I agree that before I read the article I thought the ad was visually appealing and well done, but her argument has now made me guilty for feeling that way, so I am working to adjust my view.

 

2) Wysocki’s text is highly visual. It utilizes many of the visual principles Bernhardt mentions in her article, and Wysocki, unlike Bernhardt, actually utilizes these principles in her own writing.

 

Applying and Exploring Ideas

 

2) I definitely agree with Wysocki that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. While you can play the numbers game and choose an image that will appeal to the largest number of people, it is a well known fact that you can’t please anyone, and one only need to look at beauty through the ages (think Rubenesque women) or beauty across cultures (tribal tattoos and piercings) to see that beauty is absolutely something that is socially constructed.

 

Personal Thoughts

 

I thought some of the visual elements in this piece were off-putting. For example, what on earth is with the text in the wreath on page 82? Also, sometimes Wysocki would set off her own statements like block quotes, and it confused me as to whether she was citing something or not at first. I am not sure if the visual confusion if from this article being reprinted into ROW, or if the original was also a little confusing.

Baron Dialectical Notebook

“My contention in this essay is a modest one: the computer is simply the latest step in a long line of writing technologies” (425).

            Baron is going to spend this essay talking about the steps various writing technologies take from inception to acceptance.

 

“I asked myself, if humanists aren’t harmful, then what’s the point of being one?” (425).

            One of the many humorous asides by Baron and an instance of his particular, entertaining voice.

 

“Pencil-making processes were from the outset proprietary secrets as closely guarded as any Mackintosh code” (426).

            This is a very apt parallel between two writing technologies that helps the reader to accept the pencil as being, at one time, a cutting edge writing technology.

           

“Plato was one thinker who spoke out strongly against writing, fearing that it would weaken our memories” (426-7).

            It’s hard to imagine that such a learned man could be against writing, especially considering the fact that we are only able to study his teachings through writing. I think a current corollary would be the ill effects texting is having on spelling and grammar.

 

“Both the supporters and the critics of the new communication technologies like to compare them to the good, or bad, old days” (427).

            This reminds me of the “golden age” syndrome, where everyone thinks the generation before them was the best time in which to live.

 

“Surely they walked around all day with a bunch of sharp styluses sticking out of their pocket protectors, and talked of nothing but new ways of making marks on stones” (427).

            I love Baron’s style. Tech geeks get no love.

 

“Doubters could question witnesses, watch their eyes, see whether witnesses sank when thrown bound into a lake” (429).

            Baron brings up one of the reasons people were first resistant to the written word: the difficulty of authenticating a document.

 

“Only when Mackintosh and Windows operating systems allowed users to create on-screen documents that looked and felt like the old, familiar documents they were used to creating on electric typewriters did word processing really become popular” (436).

            Here Baron illustrates how new technologies become accepted—by emulating already accepted forms of writing technologies.

 

“As the old technologies become more automatic and invisible, we find ourselves more concerned with fighting or embracing what’s new” (438).

            Herein lies the fear of new technologies. Something that is so simple as copying and pasting on a word processor seems indispensable to some and frightening to others.

“Literacy has always functioned to divide the haves from have nots, and the problem of access to computers will not be easy to solve” (439).

            This correlates with Brandt’s pattern of social stratification in literacy acquisition. It reminds me of the case study of Dora, whose parents had to save up for a second hand personal computer.

 

“ We have a way of getting so used to writing technologies that we come to think of them as natural rather than technological. We assume that pencils are a natural way to write because they are old—or at least because we have come to think of them as being old” (440).

            “Time heals all” comes to mind here. With age and prolonged exposure comes acceptance.

bell hooks Reading Response

Summary

In her essay “Writing Autobiography,” bell hooks describes to fellow writers and those interested in writing the process of writing her autobiography and the process of remembering that such a project requires. She talks about the fiction of memory as well as the delight and closure remembering can bring.

 

Synthesis

This essay reminds me of Donald Murray’s “All Writing Is Autobiography,” particularly the sections in which he questions the “truth” of autobiography. When hooks describes the scene with her father’s car on the train tracks, and questions whether is was real or a vivid nightmare, she reminds me of Murray when he says that a fiction can become truth in the telling. Murray would say that though the scene with her father on the train tracks might not have actually happened, the emotions fueling the fiction were real, and in writing the scene down she has given the emotions tangible permanence and validity.

 

Pre-reading Question

3) George Elliot was a woman. This is one particular pen name that sticks out to me. In the time she was writing, if she wanted her work to be taken seriously, it would have behooved her to write as a man, and therefore rid herself of any gender bias. Some authors use pen names when they want to cross over into a different genre, so readers won’t come to their work with pre-conceived notions of what the new novel will be like.

 

Questions for Discussion and Journaling

1) hooks wanted release from her past. She hoped that by writing about her childhood her past self would no longer haunt her. As if, by putting her experiences on the page, she would wipe the experience from her soul.

 

4) hooks goes from wanting to “kill” the Gloria of her childhood to being happy with the rediscovery of her. She accepts Gloria for what she was and can now look to the future.

 

Applying and Exploring Ideas

4) I can’t think of a time when I personally needed to change my identity to write something. However, I had a friend who was asked to make her writing more masculine. She was writing a technical guide, and her professor said that she needed to write like a man to succeed on the project. My friend definitely had to put on a mask so that others would perceive and accept her work in the way that she wanted.

 

Personal Thoughts

I thought this was a very interesting reading. How does it relate to the Malcom X and Sherman Alexie pieces though? We don’t really learn much about hooks’ literacy sponsors in this piece.

Sherman Alexie-Like Literacy Narrative: I've Been Duped!

Balanced on my father’s hip, I was subject to constant chatter from the time I could open my eyes. The man talked to me, early and often (dare I say incessantly). Part of our daily interactions included the reading of books. Though I cannot remember much of such an early part of my life, I have been assured by my mother that my demands to be read to were often and emphatic.

 

I am not sure how or when I first started comprehending the written words. I do remember one afternoon at some craft shop with my mother where I read her the various witty sayings hand-painted onto wooden signs. She was astounded that I could read them, but it felt to me as natural as those early conversations with my father.

 

I think it had something to do with the fact that I was an only child, but it seems like I filled every waking hour with reading. I preferred novels, but I also remember checking out every volume of Charlie Brown’s Encyclopedia from my elementary school library. In the world of books I could escape my loneliness. There whole worlds existed merely for the purpose of entertaining me and keeping me occupied. Books kept me thoroughly engrossed in a way that cartoons never did.

 

My poor parents would often come home from a long day at work only to be asked for a ride to the local library or book store. Yet they were very good sports about the whole thing, so supportive of my obsession. Enablers to my addiction.

 

Because it was, in reality, an obsession, an addiction. In my adolescent years and early teens I was basically a shut in. Sure, I went to school and was involved in various clubs, but where other girls were talking on the phone about the latest NSYNC album, I was on the couch reading the latest novel I managed to acquire.

 

Reading did something to me. It wasn’t just about interaction with other people (or characters,) though I did enjoy that. It was the fact that the people in these books were so passionate about various issues that it led them to take action. They knew what they had to do in those books, because their hearts and their passions led them to do it. The only thing I had ever felt passionate about was reading. I envied their certainty and their subsequent ability to take action.

 

I am still searching for that passion. I am an adult now, why am I not experiencing the level of conviction and agency that the characters in the novels of my youth experienced? Now that I am supposed to be the heroine of my own life, all I want to do is escape back into the stories of others. I don’t have the free time that I did as an adolescent, and though I am still an avid reader, my ability to completely lose myself in a novel is becoming more and more difficult as my duties in the “real world” increase. So I am stuck in limbo, unable to act as the heroines of my childhood, yet unable to completely return to the warm, identity-stealing cocoon of adolescent fantasy.

 

What is a pseudo-adult to do? I feel robbed of both my potential for agency as well as my ability to totally delight in the stories of others. My literacy has trapped me into an uncomfortable compromise that I never thought I would have to make. I cannot go back, yet I cannot see how to go forward. My love has betrayed me. The fanciful narratives I read as a child have done nothing to prepare me for a life of mediocrity: no one writes novels about the truly average.

Malcom X Reading Response

Summary

Malcom X’s “Learning to Read,” as dictated to Alex Haley, is a narrative of X’s literacy history. X tells interested followers and readers how he came to be the well spoken, well written, well read individual many knew him as through his informal self education at the Norfolk Prison Colony.

 

Synthesis

Malcom X’s literacy narrative shows us examples of the literary sponsors that Deborah Brandt introduces us to in her article “Sponsors of Literacy”.

 

Questions for Discussion and Journaling

1) Malcom X’s audience seems to be those who follow his political ideaologies, with no assumptions of a particular knowledge of composition theory on the part of the reader; that is, this article is meant for a non-academic reading audience. I know this because he does not use jargon words as Brandt does when talking of a similar subject. Furthermore, his smooth narrative style makes the piece accessible to most literate persons.

 

3) Bimbi, Norfolk Prison Colony, Mr. Elijah Muhammad, and Parkhurst. The most influential literacy sponsors were the Norfolk Prison Colony and Parkhurst, the former because it gave him the time to study so intensely and the latter because it was much of his personal collection that populated the Norfolk Prison Colony’s library.

 

4) Malcom X definitely misappropriated the intentions of the Norfolk Prison Colony. He took the time and opportunity that prison afforded him to become an intensely literate individual. This is definitely outside the normal hoped of prison literacy programs. Furthermore, he used the literacy he gained from prison as a means to validate his notions of violence against the white man.

 

Personal Thoughts

I love the pairing of this piece with the Brandt piece. I wish WAW did this more; using a more engaging piece of writing like a narrative as an example of what a theory heavy article is talking about seems to me a great way to get student to understand both pieces.

Teaching Journal #5

This was a week full of grammar, punctuation, peer reviews, and workshopping. I think I’ve gotten the hang of managing class discussion time when it comes to going over the readings, but, as I will illustrate, I could use some polishing of my workshopping skills.

 

Monday we covered Dawkins and Bernhardt. We went over Dawkins’s hierarchy of punctuation as well as his system of raising and lowering. I then adapted the group activity Javen showed us in ENG 5890. Basically I wrote my own paragraph with no punctuation in it, and had the class (split in to four groups) punctuate it and explain their choices according to the raising/lowering system. I think this helped them understand Dawkins’s method of punctuation more than if I had just lectured on the subject. However, the activity took more class time than I would have liked. In the future, I think I will split the paragraph into smaller chunks and have each group punctuate a different section. We talked about Bryson as a class. I passed out the “Responding to Peer Writing” handout and we talked about how to do a peer review.

 

Wednesday we went over questions about the impending draft of project 1, basic MLA format, how to upload their assignments to SafeAssign, and finally spent time workshopping the sample peer review. Answering questions and showing them how to do things they know they will need to do went smoothly, and they were very interested and vocal in that part of the lesson. However, when I switched to the lion’s share of that day’s lesson, the worskshop of the sample peer review, I quickly lost them. It was so hard to get them to participate that unfortunately I spent most of my time trying to wheedle out some conversation rather than showing them my comments and the overall elements of a peer review.

 

Friday we workshopped a student paper. I tried to force them to pay attention by randomly calling on students to read the paper aloud, as John suggested, but I ended up just getting a lot of confused looks as I jarred them out of their daydreaming to read a paragraph on the overhead projector. I think next time I will have them read a paper ahead of class time so we can spend more time in discussion and less time with them dozing off. Maybe I could also try incorporating group work in the future, with each group being responsible to comment on one section of the paper, and then come together as a class to discuss the paper’s effectiveness as a whole. I think this would work especially well in conjunction with having them read the paper the night before. Alternatively, I could schedule my workshop days in a computer classroom and have them each read the paper to themselves on their individual computer screens. This would save them from the boredom of having the paper read aloud to them; it would force them to pay more attention to the paper.

 

Overall I think I most need to work on running an efficient workshop, because I know this is a problem that is not going to just go away. Luckily I will have more time this semester to hone my skills in that department. I feel like a big part of learning how to teach is trial and error. I wonder if my students know they are my guinea pigs? Overall they are pretty good sports about the workload, so if I can just foster more participation in discussion things would be delightful. I use group work often as a springboard in to whole class discussion, and I think my lack of group work as a “warm-up” is part of the reason my workshops are not the most successful class periods. I am trying to get them to participate as a class without the group work as a bridge, but so far I have been unsuccessful. Maybe I should just stick with the group work if it leads to decent whole class discussion, but I feel like we could delve deeper into the text if we didn’t spend as much time doing group work.

Brandt Dialectical Notebook

“Usually richer, more knowledgeable, and more entrenched than the sponsored, sponsors nevertheless enter a reciprocal relationship with those they underwrite” (335).

            Brant brings up an interesting point that can easily be forgotten when one thinks about sponsors: the fact that they too gain something from their sponsored.

 

“Like Little Leaguers who wear the logo of a local insurance agency on their uniforms, not out of a concern for enhancing the agency’s image but as a means for getting to play ball, people throughout history have acquired literacy pragmatically under the banner of others’ causes” (335).

            I love this metaphor. It clearly illustrates and foreshadows Brandt’s point of misappropriation.

 

“…obligations toward one’s sponsors run deep, affecting what, why, and how people write and read” (335).

            Brant tells us to what extent sponsors exert power over the literacy of their subjects.

 

“The competition to harness literacy, to manage, measure, teach, and exploit it, has intensified throughout the century. It is vital to pay attention to this development because it largely sets the terms for individuals’ encounters with literacy” (336).

            The competition between sponsors in an ever-changing world is an important idea to comprehend if one is going to fully understand Brandt’s narrative of Lowery.

 

“Recession, relocation, immigration, technological change, government retreat all can—and do—condition the course by which literate potential develops” (339).

            Brant enumerates the reasons why literacy or the value of a particular literacy can change for an individual.

 

“A consummate debater and deal maker, Lowery saw his value to the union bureaucracy subside, as power shifted to younger, university-trained staffers whose literacy credentials better matched the specialized forms of escalating pressure coming from the other side” (342).

            This illustrates the competition between sponsors that Brandt discussed earlier. Also, it touches on the “escalating pressure” being put on literacy, as each sponsor essentially tries to one-up the previous (oral deals to basic legal document drafting to wholly text driven interactions in union deals).

 

“…strong loyalties outside the workplace prompted these two secretaries to lift these literate resources for use in other spheres” (345).

            Brandt shows how two secretaries used the literacies they acquired from their male bosses/literary sponsors to help them in their personal endeavors of faith and family.

 

“Mary Christine Anderson estimated that secretaries might encounter up to 97 different genres in the course of doing dictation or transcription” (345).

            Talk about a thorough education! It seems like secretaries should rule the world with all of the literacies they were potentially exposed to.

 

“Interestingly, these roles, deeply sanctioned within the history of women’s literacy—and operating beneath the newer permissible feminine activity of clerical work—become grounds for covert, innovative appropriation even as they reinforce traditional female identities” (347).

            I love the secretary narratives. I agree with Brandt on the irony of women being agents of their own literacies all within the accepted feminine framework of the workplace and home life.

 

“Sarah Steele’s act of appropriation  in some sense explains how dominant forms of literacy migrate and penetrate into private spheres, including private consciousness” (348).

            This sounds a little like big brother is watching us, but I think this is one of Brandt’s more important asides. She also mentions earlier how the plethora of college graduates within our society has pervaded and changes our literacies.

 

“What I have tried to suggest is that as we assist and study individuals in pursuit of literacy, we also recognize how literacy is in pursuit of them” (348).

            Brandt’s cleverly worded sentence makes us very aware of the various sponsorships of literacies.

Teaching Journal #4

This week we covered Porter, Bernhardt, and the workshop on their intros and syntheses. Overall, the week got better over its course. The students were more vocal and concerned about project one than the readings, probably because they know that they will, at the end, potentially be evaluated on the writing they do for this project.

 

Monday we went through the vocabulary I had them define at the beginning of class, and cleared up any questions about the terms Porter uses (intertextuality, iterability, presupposition, and discourse community). I need to streamline this process, as it is currently taking too long. I don’t want to get rid of it though, because I think understanding the terminology is a necessary step in understanding the piece as a whole. I showed them a Family Guy clip and had them point out instances of iteration and presupposition. From the responses I received, it seemed like they understood both concepts. We talked about plagiarism, the autonomous writer, originality, freedom, and the discourse community as a class. In an effort to get them to make better connections in their syntheses, I did the group activity Albert suggested, which asked them to find “fruitful connections” between this article and the others we’ve read. The connections I received were much better than what I had been reading in their reading responses, so I think I would do this activity again. When asked, they expressed concern over the intro and synthesis that was due Friday, so I said I would spend time talking about it on Wednesday.

 

Wednesday I spent the first half of the class answering questions about project 1. This seemed to quell their fears somewhat, so I am glad I spent the time to do it. However, as a result, the Bernhardt discussion felt a little rushed. We went over the four laws of gestalt a little more quickly that I usually do with terminology, but I think this is for the best. The students still get a reminder about the main ideas of the article, and I don’t waste as much time just talking about the building blocks of the essay.  We discussed the rest of the article as a class, and they were more vocal than they had been on Monday (maybe because at that point they had asked so many questions about the project their vocal chords were primed for discussion).

 

Friday we watched the video “Beyond the Red Ink” and discussed. They agreed overall with what the students in the video said about teacher comments. I used the discussion as a springboard to talk about my own feedback. I asked them to be brutally honest (but of course they probably still don’t want to bash the teacher in front of her) about my comments, and they said that I exhibit many of the traits promoted in the video. I also used the opportunity to tell them how I will respond to their project one papers. I told them that I would focus on the most important concerns I could find in their papers, leaving lesser concerns like grammar for another revision. Afterwards,we workshopped two student papers. This was a very interesting exercise. In many instances, the students were tougher on each other than I would have been. I found myself mediating the conversation a great deal in order to make sure that feelings were not hurt. (I took the names off of the papers, but still, students in the class had written them). The workshop definitely fostered student involvement in the discussion.

 

Overall, I think I am getting more comfortable in my teaching style. I am quicker on my feet when something isn’t working, quicker to rephrase a question or dial it back if it is clear the students don’t understand. Mostly, I would say I am getting better at gauging student need (i.e. their need to go over project one, their need to discuss key terms before we discuss key ideas).

Bryson Reading Response

Summary

Bill Bryson, in his article “Good English and Bad,” attempts to expose to other academics many of the grammatical rules we have come to accept over the years as foundationless. He cites the initial impracticality of basing English grammar on that of Latin, a dead romance language, and goes on to show that many academics who came up with certain grammatical rules had no good reason to make them in the first place. He proposes caution, because although English is by its nature always changing, it is good to question those changes somewhat, in order that they may be tested for their validity. Bryson sees how grammar is being taught as right or wrong, and wants to introduce us to the ample middle ground between the two.

 

Synthesis

 

Bryson’s solution at the end of his article, to embrace change and yet question it at the same time, reminds me of Peter Elbow’s “both/and” way of thinking. Though the two write on different subjects, the “both/and” spirit remains the same in the two pieces.

 

Like Dawkins, Bryson questions the model of prescriptive grammar that nearly all of us our taught from infancy. Whereas Bryson is more intent on exposing some of these grammar rules as foundationless, Dawkins proposes a real model for sensible grammar usage. Both address the problem, but only Dawkins proposes a method with which to change it. However, Dawkins just covers punctuation, which is admittedly easier to address a solution to than the many and varied rules that Bryson covers.

 

Pre-reading Exercise

 

3) I think technology (specifically texting and tweeting) has made brevity desirable in our communications with each other. I also think it has lowered the level of formality we sometimes eschew in other forms of communication. Correct grammar, full sentences, even the complete spellings of words have gone out the window. “Totes” has become shorthand for “totally,” “cray” for “crazy”.

 

Questions For Discussion and Journaling

 

1) Bryson challenges the notion of many of the grammatical rules we think we have to follow in order to speak and write “good English”. He does this by citing the fact that there is no logical reason we follow these rules (some of them are even counter-intuitive) and that the learned men who put them into place admitted that they had no real grammatical reasons for doing so. He often cited Robert Lowth as the originator of some of these arbitrary rules. For example: “Why should you take a plural verb when the sense is clearly singular? The answer—surprise, surprise—is that Robert Lowth didn’t like it” (65-6).

 

2) Bryson says that English has such a complex grammar structure because we base it on Latin. This wouldn’t be so bad, except English is not very closely related to Latin. Early scholars’ insistence on modeling English grammar after Latin is how we got many quirky little rules (like not splitting infinitives). Furthermore, we have never had a supreme council that governs over our language, so essentially any scholar with access to a printing press could make his claim for a specific grammatical rule.

 

3) Prescriptive grammar tells you the correct way to write. Descriptive grammar explains different ways to approach grammar without making any value judgments (or at least not very forcefully). Before this class, I have mostly encountered prescriptive grammar. After reading these articles, however, I have come to know a thing or two about descriptive grammar.

 

Meta Moment

Noun, verb, adjective, adverb, proper noun, direct object, indirect object, preposition, and conjunction. I learned all of these through school, whether through English classes or foreign language classes, I can’t remember (probably a combination of both). I think knowing the terminology of grammar has been helpful to me in my writing because it gives me a specific vocabulary with which to discuss my writing with teachers, tutors, peers, etc.

 

Personal Thoughts

 

I think this article gave an interesting historical look at where we got many of our more confusing grammatical rules. Though it does not propose an immediate solution (other than to have a questioning attitude, which can be an effective solution) it does allow us to see the power an individual can have over an entire language. If Robert Lowth can create language change, what is stopping us today?

Dawkins Reading Response

Summary

In his article “Teaching Punctuation as a Rhetorical Tool,” John Dawkins asks teachers to abandon teaching the grammar rules given in handbooks and to adopt a simpler method of teaching grammar. He says that grammar should not be taught so that students might avoid error, but so that students might better their writing. To do this, he says that teachers must teach their students that grammar is a rhetorical tool used to indicate relationships between clauses. Students can raise the punctuation (on the hierarchical scale given by Dawkins) in order to emphasize separation, or lower the punctuation in order to indicate a connection. Dawkins hopes that viewing grammar in such a way will allow students to think more closely about what they want to say with their writing.

 

Synthesis

The attention Dawkins gives to the importance of the rhetorical situation in the punctuation of a sentence reminds me of Kantz. In her article “Helping Students Use Textual Sources Persuasively,” she brings up the importance of always knowing the rhetorical situation of an article, as a reader. Dawkins takes this a step further and tries to make one aware of the rhetorical situation as a writer. 

 

Pre-reading Exercise

For me, grammar is the mechanics of writing; the sort of mortar with which we cement the bricks of our words into a stable structure. It includes capitalization, punctuation, syntax, inflected verb forms, participles, subject verb agreement, case agreement, number agreement, pronoun agreement… the list goes on.

 

Questions For Discussion and Journaling

 

1) Dawkins challenges the notion of grammar as taught by handbooks. He argues that grammar can be used rhetorically to communicate effectively to an audience, and that it should not be used as a rigid set of rules for the sake of being grammatically correct.

 

3) Raising refers to bumping up the expected punctuation to something above it on the grammatical hierarchy. Raising is a tool used to indicate separation. Lowering refers to, well, lowering the expected punctuation down to something below it on the grammatical hierarchy; lowering is a tool used to indicate connection.

 

6) I mostly ignore grammar as I write, unless I come across a particularly long sentence in which I am concerned my meaning might not be clear; then I take some time to consider how best to convey my meaning to the reader. I think Dawkins’ model of grammar is useful to someone like me who does not think about grammar overmuch. His hierarchy is a simple way of looking at grammar that will help me to determine the relationships I want to convey between my clauses.

 

Meta Moment

I think my teacher wanted me to read this article because abandoning the notion that grammar is a rigid, fixed set of rules is hard to do. The construct of grammar is one that has been very well ingrained in most students by the time they reach college, so reading an essay that gives good reasons why that notion should be dispelled is more effective than just having one college instructor say it. By reading this article, I realize that grammar is just another rhetorical tool, one I can employ to make effective choices in my writing. It gives me another weapon in my arsenal with which to get my message across to the reader.

 

Personal Thoughts

The Dawkins reading was really enlightening for me. I knew grammar could be used as a rhetorical tool (passive voice, fragments as sentences, etc.) but I never knew to what extent it could be used, what relationships you could convey through mere punctuation. Not to mention, his system of raising and lowering on the hierarchical scale of punctuation is easy to use and helpful to think about when writing.

Lanham Dialectical Notebook

“So books are not going to die, and neither is the literature contained in them. That is not the question the future market place will debate” (16).

           

Considering this article was published in 2001, I wonder what Lanham would make of e-readers? Today, I am not so positive that print books won’t become a thing of the past, I wonder if Lanham would be.

“No bad decision to make—it still includes the vast majority of writers (including me, right here—but unmistakably antiquarian and, as the modes of textual display improve and proliferate, increasingly so” (17).

I like that Lanham acknowledges the fact that he isn’t using digital means to convey his message. And, if he is trying to reach out to other scholars who wish to continue working within the comfortable confines of print text, then the best way to reach them is through their chosen medium.

“Sure, she will probably repeat the arguments of her book, but just seeing and hearing her gives us a sense of how to read the book, tells us what kind of person wrote it” (20).

Lanham explains the effect of having the author interact with her text. She gives new meaning, new depth to the text. We hear her voice

            “But, in an electronic text ‘printout,’ the oral world stands there in the margin talking to the literate world. Two different worlds slide uneasily against each other like two tectonic plates” (20).

            I like the way Lanham describes the interaction between the literate and the oral versions of text. Their coexistence is uneasy, but the result can be quite extraordinary.

            “The whole weight of these alternative display modes receptures this history instead of, as the media prophets of doom argue, repudiating it. We have always craved mixed, rich, competitive, antiphonal signs” (21).

            Lanham argues that the literate tradition stems from the oral tradition, and that we have always been striving for multi-modal forms of communication. Seen in this light, digital displays are not seeking to supplant text, but to coexist with them.

“We want to be able to read in layers, for main argument, secondary ones, detailed evidence, in ways not linear but, as now we must call them, hypertextual” (25).

This reminds me of Bernhardt’s article, in which he says that the localization of text allows for different readers to get exactly what they need from the text.

“We want the shape of words to look like the structure of thought express, if only because we evolved to live in a world of shapes” (28).

Lanham says that we yearn for three dimensionality so much that we want words to physically resemble the meaning they represent. 

“Concepts came embodied. You did not discuss courage. You observed Achilles. Animated letters rush into the breach between the two. They seek to heal the breach between orality and literacy” (30).

Lanham explains the propensity of modern advertisers to use animated letters in their commercials. He discusses Homeric epic, saying that concepts were not talked about, they were performed. Animated letters are essentially  a compromise. They are both the physical embodiment of the word as well as the concept.

“This stuff isn’t repudiating the past. It is redeeming it. Galvanizing it. Showing us, for the first time, what this whole suppressed agenda was all about” (33).

Lanham helps to further reject the claim that digital technologies aren’t cannibalizing the print texts. They are achieving a multi-modal for of expression that mankind has strived for since the time of oral storytelling.

“Happily, all these folks are part of the current disciplinary scene. Less happily, they dwell in separate capsules, which, if not hermetically sealed, seldom breathe the same air” (33).

To make this multi-modal world of informational display, Lanham says that we will need to enlist the expertise of all the disciplines. This may prove to be a challenge, as they are somewhat secluded from one another as a rule.

“We cannot exist, after all, only by breathing out abstraction, alphabets which do not think; nor only by breathing in animation, alphabets which do; but only by respiration, the life-giving oscillation of the two. That oscillation is what’s next for text” (34).

Lanham proposes a “both/and” solution (to borrow a phrase from Elbow) to the evolution of text. He says we should embrace words as abstract ideas, but also words as animate concepts, and go back and forth between the two often.