"I Drank What?" -- A Look at Where We (Might) Have Gone

I just saw a really awesome analogy for what I'm about to try doing here -- Paul Andersen's description of moving from a regular classroom, which is like a schoolbus that all the students get on and the teacher drives everyone to the same place, to a class where everybody gets in their own car and heads out for a rendezvous the teacher has given them a map to. No one is terribly surprised when not everybody shows up at the rendezvous. 


So as the teacher, I'm sitting here in the last week of class wondering, where'd everyone actually go in the journey this course has presented? Most of you have shown up at the rendezvous, but what routes did you take to get here, how did your experiences vary, and how, thus, has your learning varied?  You who are reading this have all shown up: what do you actually know, now? I'm the bus driver, but since you weren't really on the bus, I dunno.  I'll find out as I read the reflective work in your final exams, but for now, me = in the dark.


I thought, then, that perhaps since I do know where the bus went, maybe it would be a fitting final-week post to say something about that. It would let you compare notes between where I would have had us all go, and where you might have gone along the way. To get straight to it, then, here is some of what I would have liked you to learn during the course -- what I hope you will believe and act in accordance with, on down the line.


Writing is rhetorical: situated, motivated, contingent, interactional, and epistemic. There are few universals in writing, and most of those are questions. (Who will use my writing? What do they need and want it to do? What is the exigence for it? What will make this writing "good"? etc.)  No modalities or genres of writing, therefore, are inherently superior to any others, and none are inherently inferior: their value varies with the rhetorical situation, which will render some genres and modalities better and others worse.


"Writing" includes both the acts of composition and of inscription: inventing and designing (together, composing) material, and inscribing that material into a text. It is crucial to understand writing as the entire development process of a text, from recognizing an exigence through the entire lifetime of development and use of a text by writers and readers.


Writing is by definition technological because it requires tools, and this reality presents two major implications for writing. First, tools are rhetorical constraints that powerfully shape the text they create by affording some designs and not others. Second, a master writer must thus by definition be a master of writing tools, in some way. Being a master or writing tools will certainly not be sufficient to guarantee the development of effective writing in any given rhetorical situation, but it will be necessary to creating the most effective possible text.


Different technologies used to write reveal different aspects of writing. Electronic, networked writing technologies demonstrate writing to be an intensely visual and intensely collaborative activity in ways that 500 years of alphabetic-paper writing technology and Enlightenment, hyper-rationalist culture masked. 


Lastly, I'd like to suggest a few basic stances of effective writers in a digital age -- those who adopt these as defaults will tend to be more able writers with current technologies.

• Effective writers in a digital age think in terms of designed documents and texts, rather than only in terms of the words in a text, understanding that the impact of a text involves not just what it says but what it looks like, because its looks are part of its use.
• Effective writers in digital technologies understand and rely on the relationship between alphabetic text and image. Digital writing demands images (unless, of course, you're me writing this blog, but then, check the links) and the farther we go into the digital age, the stranger pure alphabetic texts will seem to users, except for very specialized uses where images actually get in the way of the text's use.
• Effective writers in a digital age think in terms of audience values and implications, and for multiple audiences in time and space. They understand primary and secondary audiences, compound rhetorical situations, and especially audiences through time.
• Effective writers in a digital age think not about how their writing will be read, but how it will be used. The writing exists to allow its readers to accomplish something with it, whether that's as narrow as winning a building contract or are broad as being entertained by it. Effective writers now ask, how well can this document be used?
• Effective writers in a digital age join the network: they link actively and extensively to other writers, thinkers, and readers.
• Effective writers in a digital age are effective remixers. As a writer in digital environments, you need to develop your own personal ethic of remix: of what exists, what will you take, and how, and what are the boundaries of its use for you? The very nature of writing today is copying; what will your ethic of copying be?
• Effective writers in a digital age think ahead about how their work will be re-used and re-mixed by other writers. They think, automatically and always, about permissions and licenses. They think about the nature of copyright and how invested they are in it. They think about the balance between giving their work away in order to develop demand for it, monetizing their work through direct sales or through advertising, and about what they will consider illicit use or theft of their copyrighted material.
• Effective writers in a digital age plan primarily for a text's electronic life rather than its paper life. They think in terms of texts "born digital": you don't convert a text from paper to online; you convert it, if necessary, from online to paper. 

Values for Research, Or, How I'd Like You to Think about Researched Writing

In last week's chat, some questions about research came up that helped me realize 1) that you all aren't mind-readers and 2) that there is much about research that I would typically say in a class that I've not yet said here.


A blog post -- even a monster one like this -- can't make up for what would usually be several days of interchange that would make clear "Yes, I'm serious about this approach," but I do hope that no one can walk out of an upper-division writing course of mine thinking the same way about research that they did when they entered it. So, I'll take a shot at it. (I'm posting it, for the moment, largely unedited -- never a great idea, but I'll come back to it throughout the day and clean it up.)


If you've had a typical education, you have an at best wary and more likely tortured relationship with researched writing. That relationship hinges on two central ways of thinking that you've learned over years of schooling:

1. Research is a treasure hunt. Its point is for you to search for the perfect sources on your topic in order to learn something to say, and then transmit that information in a stack-o-facts to readers, simultaneously rewriting it to synthesize the ideas of many sources into your thesis, and to "give credit to" those sources as most of what you say in the paper you wouldn't know to say without them. Often how this actually plays out is that you write on a topic you've already made up your mind about, search for the perfect sources that say just what you already think, and then quote them in your paper so that your statements can be authoritatively "backed up."
2. Researched writing is about facts: it must be objective and therefore impersonal. *You* are not allowed to be in your writing. You may not use the word I; you may not include your own opinions; you must cite the sources of most of what you say. You must write with reserve, cool distance, and lack of passion, because anything else would expose subjectivity that doesn't work with research writing.

Here's the problem. That model describes about 95% of research done for school and about 2% of professional research both in and out of the academy. And it does so for the worst reasons: students are presumed to be empty-headed idiots, not capable of participating in adult conversation, and thus not capable of writing like the grown-ups do. So throughout school, you're taught to write like students instead of being taught to write like pro-researchers. The likelihood is that this continued even through your College Writing courses and into at least some of the courses in your major. 

Below are some contrasts, and they are the ones I favor in research done for my courses. This is gonna get a little long, but I hope you'll find it interesting.

Research is not the transmission of factual information, but the collaborative building of new knowledge

• The purpose of professional researched writing isn't to transmit factual information; it's to build new knowledge through argument. Research publications are where new ideas, findings, and arguments are tested with other expert readers. Settled facts -- ideas that are non-arguable because everyone in the conversation already agrees with them -- are taken as known information and not published as research at all. 
• Related, professional researchers don't start research projects by seeking a broad topic; rather, they start with a question no one's been able to answer satisfactorily yet, on a problem that other expert readers agree is important. If they have that kind of question, they know they'll be writing to develop new knowledge rather than to transmit existing facts. 
• Notice how in both the previous points, "other expert readers" keep coming up. The whole game pre-supposes an ongoing conversation in which many people are participating. A long time ago a super-influential rhetorical theorist, Kenneth Burke, likened these conversations to being at a party. You come late; a knot of your friends are clustered around talking. You join them, listen for a bit, add something to the discussion based on what they've just been saying and what you don't hear them saying yet that fits the conversation. This continues for some time, then you drift to another conversation, but that one continues on without you. Eventually you leave the party, which goes on without you. In this analogy, "research" broadly is that conversation; the others are "sources" and you find a thing to add to the conversation that is not what they said but relates to what they said.
• There are some harsh corollaries to this reality. In professional research, you have to talk about things others are already interested in, or you first have to argue about why others should be interested. If other people find your contribution to be in some way wrong, they're gonna say so, often brutally. (Kind of like being the loser at the party who everyone walks away from.) In other words, because research is an argument carried out in conversation, people argue back. 

Researched writing is therefore not dry, objective, factual reporting; it is rhetorical storytelling

• Understanding that research is people arguing in order to make new knowledge should already make you suspect that it lacks pure objectivity. What, after all, does rhetoric teach us about communication broadly and argument specifically? That is is opinionated, motivated, and situated. 
• Researchers choose some questions and not others: there is already opinion simply in what they choose to talk about. And researchers have passion for their subjects: they are motivated to build new knowledge in response to their research questions, because they're deeply interested those subjects. And usually, that interest and passion arise from some way that the problem they're working on hits home for them personally in their specific situation (or coming out of their life history).  
• Please don't read me as saying that research ought to be objective and that thus our subjectivity, however inevitable, is a failing. Research would not be what it is--what has brought us to the state of human knowledge we're in (which is not great but a helluva lot better than 1000 BC)--if it were not a subjective enterprise. 
• What research does have in common with 1000 BC, though, is storytelling. Like learned human communication has always been, researched writing is story. Researched articles in the sciences actually have a narrative section that describes the research that was done. But more broadly, researched writing says "Here's what I think, here's why, and here's why it's important." That's story. It's also story because, again, you're not telling us "facts" -- your argument is a series of claims that you're supporting with the best evidence you have. It is something you could preface by saying, "Let me tell you a story...."
• Because they are writing about subjects they're passionate about, and because the research is the writer's story of what they think and why, researchers are in their writing. This is why professional researched writing usually uses "I". Because we're no longer (as we were half a century ago) trying to claim that our research is objective when it isn't, there's no longer a good reason to keep the writer separate from the research. There is a risk that too much self-reference will make the reading seem to be about the writer rather than about the researched subject, and nothing does self-reference better than "I," so most writers do use it sparingly, and usually in the intro and conclusion of their work where the message is "Here's what I think." But when using "I" will clarify and simplify the writing, they do it. You should too. 
• Can you put your own opinion in your paper? Well, let's see: you're supposed to be arguing for a way of looking at things that we haven't seen before, and you're supposed to be saying what you thing. Yes, please: we would like your opinion. The reason we actively seek your opinion, are not "bothered" when you write it, is because we expect that your opinion is deeply informed by the conversation so far and by your research on the problem. When we say "opinion," we don't mean "the thing I just believe without any knowledge or reasons"--we mean, you have studied this problem for weeks or months or years; what do you now believe about it, and why? This will be an opinion, and a welcome one. 

Researchers are not using sources the way(s) you were taught to

• When you look closely at what pro researchers do with sources, they almost never use them the way you've primarily been taught to: to "back up" their arguments. It comes back to conversation: when you're standing in that group at the party and George says, "There's just no way we're ever going to Mars--we don't have the resources," you don't turn and say "We just don't have the resources to go to Mars -- George said that." 
• But what you might say is, "So George says we don't have the resources to go to Mars, and Jane figures that it would take 10 times what we can afford. I have to tell you, I don't think so either -- I think when you look at A, B, and C, you can see that even more clearly than they've said." Or you might say, "When George says we don't have the resources, he's right in many respects but he overlooks these things."  In other words, pro researchers site sources in order to establish the "platform" from which they're speaking -- to create a "jumping-off point" for themselves that lets them relate what they have to say to the conversation that's already been. 
• Another reason pro researchers cite sources is to save time and space by "bundling" ground already covered into source references.  That looks like, "We know that Mars contains plenty of oxides for developing fuel to get home (Slatter, 1972; Mickley, Harris, and Brown 1983; Sheets and Arnold 1991, 1993, 1997a, 2002; Hank and Jones, 2007.) Because they're conversing with a group of peers, they can reasonable assume that their readers either have read all these previous studies, or can easily access and read them as needed, and so they can shorthand 7 articles worth of research into one sentence. Incredible space-saver. 
• In such an example, we also see the true purpose of documentation. It's not to "avoid plagiarism" or to have a way to know whether the writing is any good or not; it's a research aid that the writer gives the reader. If the point is to say something new in relation to the existing conversation, then readers need a shorthand way of knowing what the writer considers the conversation to have been to date. The documentation gives that: who's talked before, and when, and what have they said?  Author, title, date. 
• It also means that there's nothing holy about any given documentation style. Having a standard system (you might know MLA, APA, Chicago) makes it much easier for readers to make sense of the compressed notes that point them to the sources -- but which standard system matters a bit less. Readers are more concerned with the function: Can they tell who's talking? Can they go read that person firsthand if they wish? Are you as a writer using their time well? 

So, last, thoughts on some common questions students have about sources. Different profs give different answers; here are mine:

"How many sources do I need?"  How tall is a tree? How long is a rope? IT DEPENDS. You need as many as you need to convey a sense of the conversation and to provide the context for what you're arguing. Ideally, you read everything on your subject, and you read work that connects to it. But of course, the world is not ideal, so in reality, you should read everything you can. And of that, you won't cite a lot of it, but you should be writing with a sense of connection: "What I'm saying here connects to what X has said, in these ways."  If you write in that mindframe, you'll find yourself citing much more than if you're writing in the mindframe of "what can I cite here to back me up?"

"Do I have to use in-text citation / document my sources / do a works-cited page?" Academic research, which you're doing, uses academic documentation styles, like MLA, APA, Chicago, CBE, etc. However, the genres you're writing in will treat documentation in a variety of ways. If you do a video, your sources might be "Credits." But you might also do a "Bibliography" screen. Powerpoints make doing a reference page easy as breathing. Blogs and websites tend to do more with links, but you might look at how Wikipedia handles documentation as a guide. In other words: You must document sources. How you do so is considerably flexible. Just have a clear, understandable system that you use consistently.

"What kind of sources are okay to use?" Think rhetorically: the kinds of sources you use depend on what you need them to do. Scholarly sources are necessary to help define what the conversation has been so far. But they won't help you much if what you want to know is what skateboarders are saying about your research question, because most academics aren't skateboarders. For that, you need sources in which skateboarders are talking.  Use what you need. 

Measuring Success in Inefficiency

This post started as a reply to the discussion thread on Savannah's May 29 post, but quickly got out of hand, so now it's my own post. :-)  One of the things I wanted to talk about in summing up last week's reading is education, especially given so many of your stories and comments. (I actually assigned Robinson as an example of design -- his critique of the design of our education system based on a failure to understand that an 1800s system is not designed to meet our current circumstances, and is only allowed to continue because we are so busy doing unto others what was done unto us when we were in school. My point was design, but since we're in the talk about the system being critiqued, well, I have a few opinions about that too. ;-) )  So this has turned into an opening salvo in something like Phaedrus's "Church of Reason" lecture. 


It just makes me heartsick to hear experiences like you guys are recounting here -- it's unconscionable that anyone in university employ would do their job such as to make students feel like burdens or to feel untaught. I wish I could assert with evidence that your experiences are unusual; I can't, and in my gut I don't know *what* the norm is for student experiences with faculty. 

What is doubly frustrating about it to me (a different frustration than those of you whose educations are directly affected by it) is that the university system I love is so capable of giving students who seek it superb experiences (for tons of examples just read the university's news page), and yet so often that capability seems to be untapped and wasted. We have in these places an incredible opportunity for students to work with faculty on subjects of their passion, and (frankly) for faculty to help students gain passion for subjects they're initially not engaged with. We waste so much opportunity when faculty act as you describe. I too know faculty to whom students are clearly a bother, and I want to wring their necks for their misuse of their privilege to be in this place and have you people to work with. 


With tales like yours, it's no surprise that there's so much pressure for "reform" on universities. But think with me on this -- I don't want to argue against any of you wishing for better experiences, so the following screed is not an attack on your dissatisfactions. Rather, I think if you look, you'll see that what you dislike will only get more common if we further than we already are start treating universities as businesses. I think the problems you encounter come from us acting too much like a business already, rather than not enough like one. I want to throw in an oar for, no, a university is NOT a business unless it's made to be one -- and then it's a business and not a university anymore. 


To support the last clause first, I give you University of Phoenix, the factory of higher education. Its measure of success isn't learning but efficiency. (In case you hadn't noticed yet in your life, learning isn't efficient and can't too well be made so. There's too much "no, not that way, try it again" involved.) The job taken on by Phoenix isn't what university classically handle -- the development and dissemination of thoroughly studied and tested knowledge -- but rather the pre-packaging of relatively pointless information optimized to the attainment of degrees. In a hurry. With as little human interaction as possible. Wait ... that sounds like exactly what you're complaining about here already. Difference is, at Phoenix and similar (or worse) for-profits, it's not a breach of trust -- it's the way the system is designed.


Put the profit motive in higher education and you get assembly lines for humans. Period. (The irony doesn't escape me that in lower levels of education the exact opposite is true: the assembly lines are public and the place to be treated as an individual are in privates.) And you damn sure don't get any new knowledge formed. From DeVry (perfectly good for technical education in knowledge that has long since been standardized and could be taught in a decent high school if we had any of those in this country) to Phoenix (sufficient for what it is but pretty much taking the "higher" out of "higher ed"), when education goes for profit, the teachers aren't learners and discovers anymore -- they're lecturers. Ironically enough, the adjunct model of bringing in non-teaching professionals and paying them a pittance to lecture to a class -- precisely what Kevin cites experiencing -- is *the standard business model* at for-profits, not the poor-final-option it is at MSU when the state won't fund hiring a needed full-time teacher who might have some loyalty to the institution, concern for the students, and incentive to do good work so as to be kept on in a very hard-to-get job.


(I know the obvious counterpoints that a) it's getting awfully common at MSU too, particularly in certain professional colleges, and that b) plenty of full-time, tenure/able faculty are equally guilty. I hope not as many, but I don't have stats on that.)


So, why *aren't* universities businesses? Because they cannot be made efficient or profitable given the intellectual work that they do. They depend on failure to get their work done, and failure is expensive, inefficient, and slow. It is not good for shareholders. It is not good for stock prices. They depend on vast amounts of time for innovations to be conceived, tested, modified, tested, published, repeated at other institutions across the world, modified, retested and repeated and republished, until you've got something worth knowing. Virtually every major corporate lab in the U.S. from the 20th century has been shut down or spun off because that process just cost too much for shareholders -- with their demands for instant profits -- to stomach. (Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, etc.) It takes YEARS to highly educate human beings, and it can't be assembly-lined because the damn things insist on being *individuals*.  When you rightly complain about the bureaucracy you encounter at MSU, what is actually the problem?  A one-size-fits-all inhuman process that is trying to treat you like a business. 


(My claim that higher-ed can't be profitable and still do what it does is highly arguable. Please feel free to argue back. Maybe you'll hit on a way of making it so -- we just don't have one yet. By the way, "private" does not mean "business" or for-profit -- most private college and universities in the U.S. are not-for-profit.  Especially the ones you've heard of!)


So: most of what you know and experience in your modern world is a result of university basic-research that was expensive, slow, and inefficient. It is a result of professors who are paid to sit on their asses and think (think so hard it's literally physically exhausting); and it is the result of students who haven't showed up for just "the information" but instead to grapple with ideas too big for them to understand immediately, and in doing that grappling, to in fact discover things their profs hadn't known yet. I share your criticisms of faculty who get in the way of this by failing to invest in their students, or trust them, or credit them with being smart and having something to contribute, or who give their students no time and basically say "teach thyselves!"  (To the extent online courses make me uncomfortable, it's because it feels like too much "teach theyself!" is going down.)


Students who really, truly want not to have to think, but rather to be given a dumbed-down book, not talked to, and take a quick series of tests to prove you can find information a book, just like we all learned to do in 8th grade, should want to make college a business. Or, at that point, eliminate it altogether, because we could get the same thing from wikipedia, as long as we don't ever expect to be able to actually edit it.

I think when it sounds like students want that, in most cases it's because we faculty have failed to offer them anything better, so they look at what they're getting and say, "Why aren't I signed up at University of Phoenix?"


But here, I think, is my bottom line. I don't need to imagine or treat you guys like "customers" in order to do my job well -- "my job" being to do right by you and to make your brains pop loose in wonder at the new ideas -- and I don't need to make a profit and I don't need shareholders pressing for a profit . I am not offering you a product, or a service, that you are purchasing. You and I, we are sharing an experience that, if it goes as I'm meant to ensure it does, will change the way you think and plant seeds that none of us know right now what they'll grow into. You in turn are changing the way I think, because you're noticing things I don't and calling my attention to other aspects of our experience than I'm used to seeing. Together we are investing tremendous amounts of time in something intangible and untraceable: ideas and ways of thinking. We are sojourners and wonderers in a land none of us fully understand, and our job together is to understand it more. That's what I'm here for, and that's what I wish you were here for, because frankly, you don't need me or MSU for anything else. Anything else, you could be getting somewhere else cheaper and quicker. What I'm asserting, of course, is that what I'm here for and what I wish you were here for is vastly more valuable. 


Us, getting to wonder together, that's worth the price of admission (you guys) or getting paid 50% of corporate market value for a doctoral degree (me). It is all about this experience. And it does kill me inside to hear of times when your experience is not that, but rather being walked away from by your faculty. My desire for reform would be, let's only have faculty who understand the nature of university work as more than research and more than lecturing but rather some amazing combination of both in which students are fellow travelers. That'd be worth the money, and if we can't achieve it, we might as well close our doors.

Who’s Talking? A Review of Week 2, Part II

 Not only do the problems of writer and identity and authority fit under rhetoric’s age-old question “Who’s talking?”, so do problems of maintaining individuality in collaborative writing environments, and maintaining engagement amidst a massive wash of electronic texts.

This week saw us grapple with a number of questions about how the writer remains an independent individual in a collaborative, networked world of electronic texts. Who’s talking, if texts aren’t actually individually authored? How are you going to paraphrase another writer by putting what they say “in your own words” if there aren’t any words that are your own? How can you have your own ideas when you get so many (okay, almost all) of your ideas from other people? And where the hell did they get their ideas?  I mean, who had the idea the first time—and how come they got to be so lucky and we’re stuck with “There is nothing new under the sun”? Not to mention how much writing with other people(‘s ideas) sucks, at least if you wanted to have your own ideas. (This is why I love Porter’s account of Jefferson getting edited by committee while drafting the Declaration of Independence.)

These are genuinely fair questions, and they stymie researchers too. It turns out to be incredibly difficult to tease apart culture and inspiration. But then again, if you’re not sold on the claim that the best writing is purely original (thank Shelley and Keats for that one), it kinda matters less. Except as we have to figure out the arrangement questions that Eilola-Johnson raises. From a writer’s point of view, though, here are maybe some important question: What do you think? Why do you think it? Why does it matter? If as a writer you can say those things, you’re gonna be all the original and all the individual you need to be. And hope to goodness that what you think, why, and why it matters, are informed somehow by the world and people you surround yourself with. J

Engagement. Here’s what I will say: technology reveals disengagement. It doesn’t cause it, doesn’t facilitate it, doesn’t enhance it, doesn’t teach it. It makes an already disengaged student obviously disengaged. But, so, the link to “Who’s talking” would be, for me, simply the point that our electronic world gives us a lot of voices to listen to. As rhetors encountering texts, we have to prioritize. Or, back to my point about revealing disengagement, what we’re reading reveals our priorities. 

Who’s Talking? A Review of Week 2, Part I

It’s struck me throughout this week, re-reading the assigned texts and then experiencing the flow of all your conversations on those texts (creating, inevitably, and entirely new string of texts to also talk about), that the problems which have most interested most of you come down to one of the most basic questions askable in rhetorical analysis: Who’s talking?

My list of hot topics includes trustworthiness—how do we know who to believe and who not to as writing becomes less edited and there are fewer and fewer gates to it; individuality—in a world where writing grows increasingly collaborative, how do we ensure any authorial independence, responsibility, or incentive?; and engagement—how, in electron- and technology-soaked environments, especially classrooms, do we encourage or regulate engagement with the individuals who are “present” in physical spaces? I can see all of those concerns as stemming from the ways in which writing technologies are showing us more about a writer/rhetor’s entanglements, both intertextual and collaborative. Take the trustworthiness or believability question, otherwise known as the “internet dog” effect. 

Electronic publishing can make it indeed very difficult to know the most basic authorial information, who someone is. And beyond basic identity, we stand to be fooled about authority: it’s quite easy to sound authoritative without being authoritative. So how do we know who’s talking?  And whether we should listen to them? 

Wikipedia captured the height of these anxieties: a 1900s understanding of publishing met the possibility of democratic editing, leading to a hysteria born of not understanding that entries would be continually edited, not just edited by The Bad Guys and then left in perpetuity as would happen with a print text. The Wikipedia hysteria also captured another old-school presumption: the Single Authoritative Source, or “knowledge in a vacuum.” To presume that Wikipedia would be the end of accurate information as we know it is to presume that what it says can’t be compared to other sources and that readers can’t make judgments about what to believe. 

Don’t you love being trusted so much, dear reader? Don’t you love it when the proponents of such hysteria say, in effect, “I am smart enough to recognize such deception but nobody else is.” Okay, whatever. (Like when 30 people get in a room to complain about how advertising is too persuasive, and each of them says "I would never be swayed by an ad like this, but all those boneheads out there will be." If none of us are swayed, where are all those boneheads?)

The rules of rhetorical source evaluation haven’t changed. You still ask the same three questions you should always have been asking of any text you encounter, no matter the type:

• What is the purpose and motivation of the text? Why did someone bother to write this to begin with?
• Who benefits from this text? Now that the text is written, who does it help? Who does it serve? And if you like, who does it work against or resist?
• Who has paid for this text? Even in a world of essentially free electronic publishing, most texts are still expensively produced, and even of the free ones it’s easy to ask, “If this text cost money, who would pay for it?”  This question gets at sponsorship, and sponsorship gets at supporters and networks of friends. If you know who paid, you know whose interests the text aligns with.

What’s funny is that you probably have never had these questions put to you before exactly this way, but you’ve always needed them, even before the “Who’s Talking?” concerns raised by open electronic publishing. We don’t actually need them more now, we just use them more now, which says spooky things about the past, if you ask me.

So: electronic, networked texts expose – in ways that the traditional publishing industry disguised – questions of the writer’s authority and identity, but rhetorical analysis and the same networked electronic resources (search engines, online reference works) give us just as good ways to ascertain these things as we’ve always had. Often better.

Next up: maintaining indivudality, and staying engaged.

Some reflections on writing and technology

I don’t have a way to really unify the readings of week 2 beyond “writing as technology,” and to gather up and discuss *all* the themes raised in this work would be, well, more than a blog post. So what I’ll do here instead is address a few themes raised by the work that seem particularly important to me.

The first thing I want to claim is that technology isn’t “changing” “writing.” By which I mean that “writing,” whatever it is, is the same as it has always been: the  composition and inscription of thought in symbols, which renders the thought both shareable and non-ephemeral. When we see writing differently as different technologies are brought to it, what we are seeing is light shown on different aspects of writing by the technologies that favor those aspects. So, for example, current technologies force us to consider the pastiche nature of writing more than some earlier technologies did because current technologies particularly afford pastiche. Similarly, with current technologies, revising writing comes as naturally as breathing, whereas technologies such as the typewriter tended to “lock” writing and strongly discourage revision. To no one’s surprise, then, in an age of typewriters extensive focus was devoted to planning writing, where in an age of word-processors planning gets somewhat less emphasis and revision gets a great deal more than it used to.

I think probably the most difficult of these pieces to read is Johndan E-J’s piece on “The Database and the Essay,” because it presents some of the toughest theory and some of the most complicated ideas. But also some of the deepest and most important questions to writers of our age: What is the line, if any, between “writing” and “compilation”? How much should a word be worth?  Who should make money off other people’s writing?  And -- if would I be right in reading E-J’s conclusion as being that there will be no agreement about such questions, only localized struggle -- is that condition unavoidable, “built-in” to writing technology now, or is it a human failing that could be fixed?  I would love for us to think about these things together.

I’m interested too in the apparent ironies and disjuncts and contradictions that current writing technology brings us. Consider the issue of time, which “users” experience as latency (how long it takes a thing to happen once we’ve asked it to). Latency drives us nuts: we like things to happen fast and happen now. (Think  of how you get your hands on music, or any other information, and how frustrated you get when it takes more than seconds.)  So here’s an irony: the multimodal creations that get us things instantaneously take eons longer to create than their pure alphabetic equivalents would. For every mode you add to your composition, you don’t double the time it takes to compose, you square it. And that’s if you’re highly skilled. Another irony: we work now in worlds of collaboration, yet collaboration slows us down -- you can work so much more quickly by yourself. We value speed but our work demands more than a solo performance.

I’ll return to my original claim, though: so often, what we think of as “new” in writing was always with us, and just masked. Wikipedia: fabulous example. Few people understand that every encyclopedia (and dictionary) ever has been a compilation of articles each written by an expert or a collaboration of experts and then edited toward correctness by other experts -- just like Wikipedia. Its early detractors seized on the “anyone can edit!” nature of the work as its weakness when it should have been easy enough to recognize from previous eras of writing that collaboration was always the strength of the encyclopedia, and more would thus most likely be better. (A complication for my example: much of the quality and reliability of Wikipedia now comes from how difficult it has become for “just anyone” to edit articles on it. Still, though, it remains mostly a meritocracy of informed persuasion.) Wikipedia isn’t really a change in writing; it’s the use of current technology to expose the same collaborative nature of knowledge-making in writing as was always there.

In a number of blogs I’ve read for this week so far, the futility of trying to see the future of writing technologies has been pointed out. This is one reason I like returning to rhetoric -- there are so few universals related to writing in part because writing is a technological sport and thus the tools will always be evolving and emphasizing different aspects of writing. Rhetoric has the few universals there are. So further food for thought for me is, how are technologies responsive to rhetorical principles such as contingency, situationality, and epistemology?  I can predict that tool that respond best to "it depends" and have the  most to do with knowledge construction will be most successful. (At last, I think I can.)  And whatever most enhances interaction is probably going to be very valuable.  The interesting questions are, how do we get any more specific than that?

Some thoughts on rhetoric after week 1

While the reading you did last week on rhetoric is far from comprehensive, it hit most of the central concepts of this area of study. I would stress the most important of these as situationality (versus universality) and exigence. Understanding that how to interact/communicate/persuade depends on a situation which has given rise to a perceived need for that interaction--and thus constrains it--explains much of why writing works the way it does. (If you didn't see my summary post on rhetoric, might be worth a look.)

In a full-on rhetorical theory class (such as ENGL 450) we would spend a lot more time on the deeper philosophical implications of rhetoric that we’ve touched the edges of here -- the nature of knowledge as experiential (built through interaction among people) rather than purely objective or subjective, and the inadequacy of absolutes and universals in meeting contingent situations. (Creating a kind of relativism that makes many people uncomfortable, until they’re shown that "absolutes" were always subjective and relative too, and merely claimed not to be in order to gain power.) Some of these issues will inevitably arise as we study other themes in the class, so we’ll come back to them in practical ways; in the meantime, it’s good to know they’re there.

For us as writers rather than philosophers, though, the study of rhetoric remains most fruitful in response to a writer’s two biggest, ever-present questions: What makes writing good? And, how should I write this? Out of these we can find an answer to Mandy’s question: Do writers need to really understand “the nature of writing,” or can they just write? Writers always just write, but part of writing is having those first two writerly questions. Using rhetoric to understand the nature of writing simply tends to yield more usable answers to them. Rhetoric tells us, you’re supposed to go into a writing situation asking “What will make this writing good?” and knowing that the answer will be different than the last time you asked the question. Rhetoric explains why your professors keep giving you conflicting advice, answers, and grades on writing, and why that is not broken but rather why it’s inevitable. (And it is the deeper, philosophical role of rhetoric that might then prompt us to ask, Why did you believe for so long that there was supposed to be consistency, universality, absolutes, across writing situations, instead of immediately recognizing that quality is contingent upon exigence and situation? Why would you ever have believed that two different teachers should give you the same grades on your writing if they read it in two different situations?)

In your discussion this week it’s seemed that the rhetorical theory has raised questions about some other assumptions we have about writing, too, especially originality and individual authorship. Obviously, Porter’s work challenges our traditional sense of an “Author,” that sole inspired writer who thinks up the whole story from scratch. (I didn’t, interestingly, see any of you question Porter’s motives for writing this piece -- that is, I didn’t see us treating Porter or any of the others as rhetors writing rhetoric. Hmmm.)  Earlier writing technologies (codex books, for example, as well as addresses to the Roman Senate) emphasized the individual aspects of writing, and the technologies we study in this class now emphasize how writing always was never just an individual pursuit. Present technologies expose the interaction and collaboration that have always been at the heart of writing. How might it help you to believe this about writing? Because it might change the way you go about it.

Several of you created a question for me that -- well, I’ve grappled with the question before but not quite considered it in these terms, and I think it may help me in some scholarship I’m working on right now. That’s the question of whether computers, algorithms, software, and tech tools should be considered rhetors themselves. Opinion seemed to run mostly on the side of No, which is probably a fair starting point. But as I deepen my own study of how people interact with texts that are mediated and even created by machines (we’ll look at this later in the course), it seems probably very fruitful to use a rhetorical framework that asks, in what ways are these machines, these “inanimate objects,” rhetors and in what ways are they not?  It’s just another angle on the older question of how humans, as rhetorical beings, “project” rhetoric onto non-humans. Really good stuff, and your work has given me some fresh angles of vision on it.

Lastly, it seems in classes like this I never get as much chance/time as I’d like to talk about persuasion, because there’s so much else to study. I was happy to see a lot of questions and discussions from you around this. In the shortest possible form, I have a suggestion I’d like you to look for as you study persuasion around you, based on the pisteis (logos, pathos, ethos). I want to claim that when something is persuasive to you, the ultimate root of that persuasion is identification: you see in the person trying to persuade you values, beliefs, and ideas that you already agree with. (Arguments are persuasive when they line up with ideas we already agree with.) When we see in the rhetor our own existing values, beliefs, and ideas (that they’re merely connecting their own claims to), it’s like looking in a mirror: we look at the rhetor and we see our best selves, and that is (naturally enough) attractive and persuasive to us. This post is already long so I won’t explain how each of the pisteis relate to identification, but maybe later. Just look around you to see if you could buy my claim, and if so, try to see how that identification is established. You’ll see logos, pathos, and ethos.

I’ll end this, then, by going back to the root question of rhetoric: how do you know what you know, why do you think what you think, and how do we construct knowledge and change our minds through interaction?  That may seem to many of you like a strange frame in which to put “writing,” if you’re thinking about literature and fiction, but maybe this will help: people are storytellers, “homo narrans.” We know, learn, and think, in stories. Stories, too, are rhetorical, human interaction through symbols.

Greetings and Salutations

Like the description says, this is my instructor blog for WRIT 371 Digital Rhetorics (summer 2012 at Montana State). I'll use this blog mostly just to provide my own commentary on the course readings and you guys' response to them, as well as other subjects in the course.

By way of introduction to myself, I'll just say, there are going to be some weekends during this class where I'll be hard to reach -- with apologies -- because I'm going to be out on mountainsides just a bit outside wifi coverage. However, since most of this course happens during mud season, my mountain biking, backpacking, off-roading, and hiking will be reasonably confined and most of the time you'll be able to find me online, the other place I tend to live.

I've titled this blog "Thoughts from the Summer Highland" in order to get a resonance with one of the greatest works on rhetoric ever written, Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Unfortunately, the abbreviated summer course schedule leaves us no time to read the book in this course. But I hope you'll read it sometime. In it, Pirsig uses the metaphor of hiking in high mountain country to dramatize the study of rhetoric and the human reasoning and values that underlie it. This notion of the high country of southwest Montana in summer -- the Gallatin and Beartooth and Absaroka and Crazy mountain ranges -- converges a mode of living that I value and a sense of traversing challenging intellectual spaces, and thus I like it as an emblem for the class.

A little more general background on me: This course starts my fifth year at MSU and my 16th year of college teaching. I'm a writing/rhetoric/language guy, possibly because I'm something of a gearhead -- I like figuring out how things (physical/mechanical/electronic/linguistic) work. When I'm researching, it centers on what different people imagine writing to be, and how that influences how they write. For myself, writing is a fascinating kind of problem-solving, though I much prefer *having written* to actually *writing*. I teach writing because I like having a hand in changing the way that people think about writing, and I hope this course will do so for you.