Week of 4/14

Sullivan: “Taking Control of the Page”

I think that Sullivan was a little optimistic about how much control writers would have over the appearance of their pages. What’s happened, in my experience, is that some academic publishers now expect authors to format books and articles according to publishers’ very rigid guidelines. Thus, they’ve been able to cut expenses by cutting staff and shifting responsibility for what was formerly done by layout technicians to authors. Sullivan is prescient in this regard: “more and more frequently a company envisions word publishing equipment as a way to make the writers take on the job of designers and publication producers” (50). For instance, I copy edited a book that was published by Cambridge Scholars Press last year. It was the third book I had copy edited for an academic press (the first was for Humanities and the second for Pearson). It was the first time that my duties included layout. I had to insert page and chapter headings, the title page, the table of contents, the index, and the bibliography. The publisher specified which fonts were to be used for different parts of the book, margin size, spacing after punctuation, where images could be placed and how they were to be captioned. The author had no input into how these things. He was just given a list of formatting requirements that had to be met and a deadline.

I also think that Sullivan’s assertion that writers didn’t have to “think carefully about how the look of the page will affect the meaning of the text” (43) is only true on a limited basis because attending to the effect on meaning of white space and shape of text is a large part of what poets do, isn’t it? And it has been for a very long time. Moreover, Sullivan is not quite correct in saying that textbooks haven’t “embraced the computer and woven it into their conceptions of writing and its teaching” (45), but this article was published so long ago. I sat on the 101 Textbook Committee at CSN for a couple of years, and a lot of the books we considered did address the issue of computers in the classroom, but it’s usually limited to ways of using the computer for revision. Perhaps this is another example of what we’ve been calling the “generational divide” when it comes to technology. Because we older folks haven’t grown up with computers, we seem more comfortable finding ways to use computers to make what we’re already doing easier, less messy, and less time-consuming. But it seems to me that you younger folks are using computers in ways that never occur to me, but that I’m grateful to you for sharing. Last week we read that writing as a technology structures thinking—I think the same is true of computers as well.

Harris and Wambeam: “The Internet-Based Composition Classroom: A Study in Pedagogy”

Every time I sign up for a class, I hope my world view will be shaken up and my way of thinking about some issue will be transformed. It happened as I read this article. You all may recall that at the beginning of the semester, I was really pretty resistant to computer-mediated communication. But Harris and Wambeam’s description of the ways they’ve used computer-mediated communication to get students to develop ideas through writing is pretty exciting, as is the prospect of being able to expand the opportunities for “participating in dialogic situations that had not been possible previously” (354).

One thing that occurred to me as I read their list of objectives on page 355 was how inaccurate and misleading it is to talk about the writing process. I don’t find that I use the same process for every paper I write, and I’m not just talking about techniques. The fact is that not everyone engages the same process, and individuals don’t even always engage the same processes. Maybe it’s time we stopped speaking and writing of “the” writing process and began speaking and writing about writing processes.

Their idea of “play” is intriguing as well, but I do have a couple of questions. First, is there evidence that play performs the same functions for adults as it does for children? Second, I’m not sure that all play is social. But, be that all as it may, the idea of bringing a sense of fun and playfulness into the classroom has always been one of my aims, not just because I hope my students will enjoy our time together, but also because I think people are more likely to take advantage of learning opportunities if they aren’t anxious to escape! Perhaps only then can they begin to see all of the ways that writing can be relevant to them their goals for themselves.

A couple of other technical questions: I don’t know that I’ve ever been in a MOO situation. Could someone point me towards one so that I could explore it? I LOVE the idea of having guests come in and giving students the opportunity to interact with people with whom they otherwise would not.

Do we have access to MOO environments and a LISTSERV for our comp classes? If UNLV doesn’t provide them, are there commercial sites that do? Given the delays the authors say were consequent upon the way the listserv email worked, is there another option available through which we can carry on these kinds of conversations without requiring that our students all be online at the same time? Do the email or discussion boards in WebCampus work so that threads can be traced and replied to as the authors indicate their students were able to do? I really like the idea of written back-and-forth, and I suspect that they are correct in suspecting that if students were made explicitly aware of the fact that their online interactions really do involve idea development, they might more clearly see the connection between writing and thinking.

Really good stuff.

McGee and Ericsson: “The Politics of the Program: MS Word as the Invisible Grammarian”

Well. I was unaware that one could go in and turn the grammar check off. I usually turn off my screen if I can in order to escape the tyranny of the (usually incorrect) wavy lines. I used to tell the students at the Writing Center to turn their screens off for their drafts. I had this standard speech that I’d go around to classes and give at the beginning of each semester. In the spiel, as we called it, I’d tell the students that their first free tip from the Writing Center was to ignore their grammar check, that it was written by computer geeks and if they had questions about grammar, they should come to me, the grammar geek. They’d laugh, but they did come to us at the Writing Center. They came to my grammar workshops, too.

Even though I’d considered how badly MSGC worked, I hadn’t seriously considered the politics behind and embedded into its functioning. I’m not unaware of the ways standardized grammar and usage function politically in American culture. Another part of my standard spiel is about how the rules of grammar were designed by a group of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ruling class white guys who wanted to make the rest of us think that they were smarter and better than we are. I also talk to them about how the ways we use language can make people think we are what we’re not or that we are not what we are. In other words, I talk to students about how usage marks us as certain sorts of people. I also talk to them about tone (level of informality/formality) and how stuff we say isn’t always acceptable when we write. Still, I hadn’t extended my analysis of the political uses and functions of grammar to the technologies that are reshaping grammar, usage, and style. Well, DUH! This article has changed the way I will approach and use technology in the future.

And since we’re talking about the political ramifications of technology, I have to go off on my anti-Google, anti-Yahoo rant. Google and Yahoo have designed search engines for use in China at the behest of the oppressive Chinese government. If a person runs a search and the search turns up pages that contain the phrases “human rights,” “freedom,” or “democracy,” those sites do not show up in the search results. In other words, websites that contain those phrases do not enter China thanks to Google and Yahoo. Please join me (and thousands of people around the world) in boycotting those search engines. AltaVista is a good search engine to use instead.

Slattery: “Undistributing Work through Writing: How Technical Writers Manage Texts in Complex Environments”

Okay, this article was really difficult to slog through. The idea that “informational technology is not a driver of organizational change per se, but part of a complex shift in the social division of labor” (313) seems to be only half the picture, though. As I mentioned in my comments about Sullivan’s article, it seems to me that IT has driven some changes within the context of capital’s need to increase profits by cutting labor costs. The “hierarchies and divisions” (315) these writers negotiate provide an institutional framework that carries with it particular goals, ideologies, and modes of authority and authorization—they are Foucauldian disciplinary discourses, in other words.

What was most striking to me about this article is how much the writers’ practices mirror my own when writing a complex or lengthy argument. I move between many different texts, some of which I’ve written in the past, some of which have been written by others, and some of which are assemblages of texts I’ve written and others have written. Sometimes I’m moving between 4 or 5 texts. I have negotiated up to 10 or 15 different documents during one writing session for a particular paper. As I begin working on my dissertation and assembling it out of papers I’ve already written, primary theoretical texts, secondary critical texts, and primary literary texts, the processes I engage get more and more complex, and I rely more and more on my ability to “shift . . . attention from one artifact to the next” (317). I “reuse” texts, “move . . . information across IT environments, and manage “near-simultaneous viewing of multiple texts” (318).

As I think about this article and last week’s article about assemblage together, I’ve come to realize that it’s really kind of weird that we’re not allowed to use parts of papers we’ve written for one class for papers we write for another class without asking permission from the instructors. I’m not sure what the point of that refusal is; I do know that because of it, I’ve had to scrap projects because I started working on them in one class and wanted to continue pursuing them in another. Weird way for an emphasis on orginiality to play out, considering that the work is my own original work…

Peace to all.