Kathryn WellerAL878 Composition Studies Common Book

My common book is focusing on the issue of “style”. I hope that in compiling this common book I will come to a better understanding of what that issue encompasses and how that issue plays out in the field of composition studies and wider.Style:

It’s not unusual when something I hear reminds me of a quote or part of To Kill a Mockingbird. I have some chunks of it memorized. While reading Class Politics I was thinking about the African American students who wanted to learn EAE, like Vernon: Kuester makes sure he knows that the usage of “ask” instead of “asked” when indicating the past tense is more a dialect issue than it is incorrect, but Vernon responds, “I know that…But I want to know it. Then I can choose.” (Kuester, quoted in Parks 85) This made me think about how difficult it would be for students who have learned EAE and who want to “choose”, to then worry every time they opened their mouth, if they are “choosing” correctly. If a student (I’m not sure if this situation was more likely in the past or if it still likely today) has come to master EAE and manages to use it successfully in a professional environment, he may be accepted without a second glance by his colleagues. But at home with his friends, he generally uses the dialect he grew up with. How straining this would have to be, to be conscious of the way every word escapes your mouth. If he were to get angry or upset while in the company of his colleagues and express his thoughts in his own dialect, his colleagues’ views of him have just changed. Even if the colleagues’ attitudes may not necessarily be demeaning, our speaker had taken pains to keep that part of his personality out of his professional life, and that has been broken. This reminds me of the “double life” that Calpurnia admits to living, although for somewhat different reasons:

“That Calpurnia led a modest double life never dawned on me. The idea that she had a separate existence outside our household was a novel one, to say nothing of her having command of two languages.

‘Cal,’ I asked, ‘why do you talk nigger –talk to the—to your folks when you know it’s not right?’‘Well, in the first place I’m black--’‘That doesn’t mean you hafta talk that way when you know better,’ said Jem.Calpurnia tilted her hat and scratched her head, then pressed her hat down carefully over her ears.

‘It’s right hard to say,’ she said. ‘Suppose you and Scout talked colored-folks’ talk at home it’d be out of place, wouldn’t it? Now what if I talked white-folks’ talk at church, and with my neighbors? They’s think I was puttin’ on airs to beat Moses.’

‘But Cal, you know better,’ I said.‘It’s not necessary to tell all you know. It’s not ladylike—in the second place, folks don’t like to have

somebody around knowin’ more than they do. It aggravates ‘em. You’re not gonna change any of them by talkin’ right, they’ve got to want to learn themselves, and when they don’t want to learn there’s nothing you can do but keep your mouth shut or talk their language.’ “ (Lee 125-126)

This might also speak to what would happen in the opposite circumstance, if the speaker accidentally used his acquired EAE dialect around other users of his home dialect. He could easily find himself ostracized as “puttin’ on airs”.

The section of Parks that shows the evolution over time of a small portion of the SRTOL (165-167) indicates how important word choice was to the members of CCCC when drafting the resolution. They were concerned about appearing too far to the left, too “aligned with these more radical forces concerned with rights and language politics” (Parks 165). They then moved away from the “student’s right” language and instead used the idea of “cultural pluralism” to indicate their goals. However, they then felt that this language “went too far in the other direction”. They end up changing “cultural pluralism” to “goal of diversity” and re-include the “right of the student to his own language” (Parks 166). I feel that this is of evidence of the committee’s over-attention to semantics while drafting this document. I definitely understand that in order to get it approved by their constituents, they needed to include language that everyone could agree upon, and that no one would feel was outside their comfort zone. But one wonders if they had spent a little less time haggling over every single word in these parts of the statements and what a number of different people could construe every word as meaning, they might have been able to spend more time outlining actual classroom practices and strategies, or convincing those who were still unsure of the validity of the SRTOL how impactful it could be. In essence, they spent their efforts trying to make their document agree with the prevalent feeling, instead of using the document to *change* the prevalent feeling.

Reading about these “candid” remarks that Mitt Romney made at the fundraiser has raised some interesting ideas to me about style. Not just word choice, although that will be most of my issue, but also about the issue of style as presentation, especially when it comes to campaigns and how we see our elected officials, or those who are campaigning to become so. How they carry themselves, how they appear on television, what they wear. Much less of what they say and maybe too much of how they say it. Is being a captivating public speaker really as much of a qualification for leading a country as we seem to think it is? What about intelligence, rational thinking, compassion, courage, and humility? I suppose inspiring one’s followers is vital to being a leader, but: I think that a candidate’s public speaking abilities have come to play such an important role in who we vote for because that is one of the most obvious things we can decide for ourselves about the candidates: we don’t need talking heads on tv to tell us that Candidate Z is a powerful public speaker (yet they’re somehow still out there): we can tell from our own reactions and feelings if we believe that is true. This is a subjective feeling, to be sure, but it is also accessible and tangible. The nuances of foreign policy or economics are obscured from us, partially because they are so abstract, and partially because they just don’t sell.

But to return to my original thought seed: An article I read about Romney’s recorded remarks (a piece from the New York Times’ politics and government blog, The Caucus) (http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/romney-faults-those-dependent-on-government/?hp) repeatedly mentions that the content, the sentiment of what he was recorded saying is not substantially different from what his public statements are saying. What is getting everyone into a tizzy are the “stark” and “blunt” manner in which the sentiment was delivered to his audience. If that’s true, are we really just accusing Romney of being rude? Why weren’t we disgusted with these views the first time they were expressed? It seems that we’ve been conditioned just to listen for insulting language and easily swallow the insulting ideas as long as they are elegantly, and politely, expressed. (Side note: Reading Plato and Aristotle’s views on political leadership and wondering if either of our candidates have read this stuff. It’s not all perfect but it generally gives you something to aim for.)

My students told me that they appreciated my “casual” and “laid-back” teaching style. I hope that that indicates more than just “I don’t work them too hard.” I hope it indicates that I’m able to talk to them in a way that relates to them, and that makes the information I’m trying to impart clear and accessible to them. But I think there’s a spectrum to this idea: If I taught in a style that was too casual, what would that look/sound like? Patronizing, maybe? Would I begin to sacrifice clarity, both in regards to what I am asking them to learn and my expectations of what I want from them, and how I want it presented? Writing in a high style is surely not necessary in all situations but it might be difficult to establish ethos with certain styles, particularly if the essay is dealing with an academic topic. While a lower style might be able to impart the same information, the reader might be less inclined to believe the author based on the way the author is presenting the information. Conversely, speaking or teaching in a style that is too elevated for the audience or the situation can be damaging as well. Questions of expectations arise again: am I asking my students to create writing in the same style that I am speaking in? Am I using a high style in an attempt to intimidate or shame my students? And if this style is used in a situation where it is not appropriate, my meaning will very likely be obscured. It really is vital to be aware of the style one uses when speaking at all, but especially in issues of teaching. Where is the line among the issues of making the information accessible to the students, inspiring the students to improve through showing them their goals, and patronizing or intimidating them?

Throughout the book, Parks quotes educators who did not agree with the ideas behind the SRTOL. One of these, John R. Hendrickson, presents his objections to SRTOL’s goals in a mocking and derivative way, likening the home and community dialects of students to an almost incomprehensible paragraph of gibberish: “This is muy dilect and I’god its gonna be perservd even if itmeens the deth of the bestest anglo-imperialist

fashistrtriting that was ever rote” (qtd in Parks 175) I cannot believe that he honestly thought that the creators of the SRTOL were envisioning writing of this kind as what they had to protect in the composition classroom. The difference between a student using “gonna” versus “going to” and “olny” vs “only” is one of understanding: there is no one fluent in reading or speaking English who would not instantly and without trouble understand that “gonna” has the same meaning as “going to”, but that could not be said of this man’s paragraph. The creators of SRTOL were challenging the idea that a person’s home dialect, one that was useful to them in their everyday lives of communicating with their community, could not have a place in the writing classroom. They were not trying to indicate that any jumble of letters and words was untouchable. The author of this paragraph shows that in his mind, the difference between standard white middle-class English and anyone else’s dialect is the same as the difference between any effective communication and his unreadable text. To his additional detriment, he presents this argument in a way that he might see as vivid and clear, but that to any person who has an understanding or respect for any other dialect is offensive and narrow-minded. Good luck getting anyone to agree, or even to debate, with you, after you have done your best insult them or the ideas they stand for.

Process This: I found the “writing goals” that the students submitted in their placement exams to be intriguing, but also not too surprising. The focus that the students had on the style of their writing to the detriment of the content seems directly related to some more general issues in education such as “teaching to the test”. It was indicative of these issues that the most common specific response in the “writing goals” section was “improve mechanics”. Many students saw the improvement of “surface” level issues as the primary goal of their writing course, not creating effective writing or much less “applying or challenging” (37) the ideas they may encounter. The idea of “style over substance” is prevalent here, but I don’t think it’s an issue of students deliberately trying to shroud their lack of comprehension with florid prose as much as they are mistaking style for substance, or responding to a grader who makes the same mistakes or has the wrong priority. But if these habits in students aren’t investigated and their roots uncovered, they could develop into more deceitful practices designed to obscure meaning. The disparity between the number of ideas students had about what they could contribute as writers and what they hoped to could gain is connected to the issue of style vs substance: many students have many ideas that they would like to contribute to a conversation, but as they don’t feel that those ideas are as valued as the correctness of their expression, they don’t volunteer those ideas as something they can contribute. Conversely, the proper style (and grammar/mechanics) is both what they feel is most important and what they are lacking, which accounts for the hundreds of responses the “writing gains” question received.

Discussed in the “Research, Representations, and Social Responsibilities” chapter of Speed Bumps is the “tension between representing historically oppressed groups as ‘victimized’ and ‘damaged’ or as ‘resilient’ and ‘strong’” (61). Weis and Fine are concerned with these labels (or similar labels, I would imagine) that are presented as opposing, and as mutually exclusive. They wish to avoid contrasting and absolute labels of this sort to prevent the people being labeled from being thought of as only one of these things, and therefore not the other. “That these women and men are strong is not evidence that they have suffered no oppression” (61, emphasis in text). At first glance, this might seem like a superficial issue, that no one would assume that simply describing a person with a term like “strong” would preclude us from also seeing them as a member of an oppressed group. We might know consciously that there might be a range of people who could fit under the umbrella term of “victim”, some “strong”er than others. But that stance takes a diluted view of the power of language. Especially in research of this type, where both specific individuals and large demographic groups are at issue, we might be more inclined to think of the subjects as one-dimensional, one-sided, single-story (see below) people. We can be more swayed by language than I think we are willing to admit, which is I think what Weis and Fine are trying to prevent. (I spent some time in my WRA150 class discussing Chimamanda Adichie’s “The Danger of a Single Story”, and I think that Ms. Adichie would sympathize with Weis and Fine’s concerns.)

The final chapter of Speed Bumps, which gives the reader more detailed stories of specific speed bumps that researchers have encountered, was for me one of the most interesting things I’d read so far this semester. Within the subsection titled “In Whose Voice Shall I Write?”, Jennifer Ayala’s piece “Across Dialects” speaks directly to issues of style and effectiveness. She says, “These three [interpretations] reveal very different genres but also allegiances and commitments” (102). The first interpretation is presented in “Academy-Speak”, and is entirely detached from the identity of the author. The reader would not be able to tell if the author(s) is/are male or female, from within the Latino/a culture or without. Is this typical separation from the author an attempt to distance the results from how and by whom the data was collected, as there might be construed to be a bias if the researcher is an insider, or a misunderstanding of the material collected if the researcher is an outsider? On a related note, there is no mention in this of the methods used to collect the information, regardless of the researcher’s identity. As Ayala explains, the second interpretation “speaks through standpoint theory, where I position myself as a Latino researcher whose interpretations stem from theory and biography” (102). From this piece we are able to see how Ayala’s position as both an insider and outsider affected the answers she expected to receive and her interpretation of the answers she did receive. She weaves together several stories in this piece, as allowed by her change of voice: while the first interpretation tells of the results of the research conducted, the second interpretation tells the results (the concept of respeto) while also telling how the research was conducted,

how her position within and without the community informs her research, and how she is able to apply the lessons she learned while researching this project to the larger ideas of being able to “draw upon our own personal funds of knowledge and be creative” and her fears about that capability. Her use of a few Spanish words in this second interpretation is a stylistic choice that gives the piece and her voice authenticity. Her third interpretation, a poem that moves “between mothers’ and daughters’ voice” (102), also tells the story of the role of respeto within the relationships among Latina mothers and daughters, this time with more Spanish words and phrases and more emotion. I doubt Ayala would submit this third interpretation to the same people she might submit the first two, but it is undeniably effective in its way, and shows her deep connection to and understanding of the research she has devoted time to.

One of the most interesting chapters to me in Selfe’s Technology and Literacy was the chapter that dealt with the role of parents in the technological literacy movement, and especially her examination of the “popular publications about home computer use aimed at parents” that “instructed parents about their responsibilities as literacy educators” (Selfe 99-100). But as Selfe shows through a number of examples, “instructing” was frequently veiled “advertising”. The rhetoric employed in these examples influenced parents to participate in the culturally dominant concept of technological literacy through somewhat underhanded methods: by strongly implying that the only way for your children to succeed is to provide them with a home computer and the accessories to go with it, that “if good parents sacrifice to provide their children with a digital advantage, then those individuals who fail to do so become bad parents” (105), and by capitalizing on parents’ desires to do the responsible thing for their children’s futures by spending their money, “appealing to them not as unthinking consumers but rather as the careful guardians of their children’s technological literacy” (109). The styles of these examples that Selfe provides are the crux of her point: several of them are stylized as news pieces, just giving the parents the information to make a decision, but their true intent is that of influencing well-meaning parents to part with their money. Many of them are playing on the parents’ insecurities as parents and potential guilt if their children aren’t successful, but are successfully hiding that from their target audience.

Selfe presents statistics in what I found to be a weird way: “Exports…increased from approximately $15 billion in 1992 to $35 billion in 1995, while imports increased from approximately $15 billion to $40 billion” (Moris, qtd in Selfe 94). This is just the first example I could find, but she presents a number of statistics presented in almost identical style. Is it always better to just give us the numbers and the years? What about just telling us that x increased 75% over 2 years? Is not doing the math for us done on purpose? I’m not sure if she thinks that showing us the raw data lends credibility to the statistic or gives the statistic more impact. I found it to be distracting and unnecessary, especially in its

repetition, but perhaps that’s the accepted style for presenting that information. I suppose knowing the actual numbers might help in some instances, but it seems to me that “$15 billion” is too abstract an amount for an individual to imagine and place in context, and that simply telling us that “imports increased X percent between 1992 and 1995” is more likely to be something that the reader can understand and appreciate. I think presenting the information as a percentage increase is less awkward stylistically as well as more meaningful, and so I really wonder what reasons Selfe or her editors had for continually presenting the raw data for the reader to grapple with.

I saw a flier on campus advertising for the Vagina Monologues auditions that said, “You must live as a woman to audition”. I don’t claim to know much about queer rhetorics or gender theory, but I instantly thought that there was something worth talking about in terms of style here. First of all, it’s succinct and efficient writing that alludes to a very complex issue but has a job to do, and does it well. I think it’s interesting while thinking about style to realize the depth of the meaning of just those few words, how whoever wrote this must have an understanding of the community for which this sentiment is intended. Similarly, someone who doesn’t understand what this sentence means is not the intended audience. It kind of acts as a code or password: if you understand this message it could be intended for you. If you don’t, then you likely aren’t part of that community. But, if you’re reading the flier at all, if you’ve gotten past “vagina” and are still interested, it’s possible that you may not understand this phrase but might now be interested in understanding what that refers to, and the daily difficulties that people around us might be dealing with that some of us have no conception of. Truthfully, I’m not sure where I might fit into these ideas: I understand on a very superficial level what this sentence is referring to, but obviously I could learn more. Additionally, in trying to think my way through this entry I feel like there’s maybe something that’s not being said on this flier/in this sentence, but what that might be is eluding me.

Walter Mignolo in his The Darker Side of the Renaissance uses as his primary sources a number of texts originally written in Spanish. What’s interesting is that he frequently (almost always) includes the original Spanish texts as well as their English translations. His analysis centers on what the authors are saying, not on how they are saying it, and he gives us the English translations, so what is his purpose in including the original Spanish? The authors of the Spanish texts are in his work playing the role of the colonizers, so it doesn’t seem likely to be an issue of giving voice to the oppressed in their native language (like when he presents some key terms and expressions in Nahuatl, one of the languages of the natives who were conquered by the Spanish, etc.). I do believe Spanish is Mignolo’s first language, so he might be including it in the text as a result of seeing Spanish as a neglected language in scholarship, especially in post-colonial scholarship, but then it would make more sense if he provided his analysis in Spanish, not just the texts that he is analyzing. I’m

honestly not sure, but maybe he sees intrinsic value in including the original language of the texts, no matter how the speakers of that language are presented in his text or his analysis or how his audience may or may not get much out of seeing that text in Spanish alongside the text in English.

Style plays such a large role in Julie Jung’s idea of multimodality that it’s almost difficult for me to break it down. The multigenre texts seem on the surface to be all about a different style, as that’s what you would see first when looking at an example of a multigenre text. If we see that some of the text is in standard prose paragraphs and some of the text is in verse form, or that there is visual art interspersed with text, we might assume that what we’re looking at is multigenre, and it probably is. But looking deeper we might see that the apparent style differences are byproducts of more substantive multigenre decisions, and that multigenreness must be naturally connected to the purpose of the author and the writing situation. In other words, the multigenreness needs to come from an organic place of expression, not just a wish to be multigenre. For instance, if a poem appeared in a piece wholly devoid of personal voice, the reader might be a little thrown and would wonder what the author was trying to accomplish. But in a piece where the personal voice is prominent, and the author is trying to make connections between the personal and the political, or between the personal and the pedagogical, a poem might be just what the reader needs to really feel that connection. When we wrote our responses to Jung’s book in class, we were instructed to write them as multigenre pieces, which kind of goes against this idea, but that was an exercise designed to help us see how powerful the multigenre composition can be.

My individual multigenre response to our reading of Jung was an important moment for me at that point in the semester, both in a personal and academic way. I still stuck with writing prose in a Word document, which incorporated a less visible, less obvious move to multigenreness. It didn’t really occur to me attempt to operate in a medium that I was less comfortable in, such as powerpoint or freehand art: not because comfort equals ease, but because I wanted my feelings and ideas to be freely expressed, and if I attempted something like powerpoint, my ideas would be saddled and restricted by my inexperience with the medium. So maybe in this case, comfort allows for authenticity? Writing the response was a liberating moment for me: for several months I had been writing only pieces meant for a specific audience and within a narrow style: assignment sheets, comments for students, and critical responses to historical texts. For each of these, I was modeling previous examples that I had seen, sticking carefully to the guidelines I had in my head of what was acceptable in terms of style and content. While I know that Stuart would (and does) happily accept critical responses written in less standard styles, I find that I am either scared of trying something *too* new, or that I am struggling to react at all to the texts we are studying, and that the strain struggle stands between me and any creativity.

But in writing this piece, I was able to, with the express permission and encouragement given to me by the idea of multigenreness, rediscover my own voice in my writing. I said out loud, “I forgot I could write like this!” I remembered why I liked writing in the first place, and that I could actually be proud of texts that I created, both for what they said and how they said it. The content of the piece was pretty personal, and I realize that within the contexts of the writing I produce for my critical responses and my classroom, this content would rarely be appropriate, but I would do well to remember that having my own voice in any/all of my writing is intrinsic and crucial to my psychic well-being as a writer and as a teacher. I hadn’t realized it until I wrote this piece and started to feel better, that I had sort of started to dread writing, or “producing text”.

The rest of the class’s individual responses to the Jung text and the ideas of multigenreness writing were also really fascinating to see and experience, especially now that we know each other in the class a little better. They were such interesting pieces, all telling different stories through different styles or genres, depending on the person, but connected by that fact that they were all multigenre, and thus had more in common than you might see at first glance. Jess’s and mine seemed the most similar, but hers brought the current-personal to the forefront, where mine brought the past-personal forward. Hers felt much more like she was speaking to herself, in a diary-journal way, where the style of mine indicated an external audience. Casey’s powerpoint presentation not only spoke to her skill set and where she feels comfortable creating, but also to the visual ways she interprets texts. If forced to write her response to Jung I feel like she may not have felt as connected to that product as to what she did visualize and produce. Ana’s visual and textual combination was not only impressive just as a skill (as was Casey’s, for that matter), but also in seeing how naturally and comfortably she was able to present her ideas in this medium was inspiring, and only a teensy-bit envy-inducing. Being able to express yourself artistically like that must be generative, but might also be frustrating when presented with a situation in which your instinct is to create visual art to express your ideas but the constraints of the assignment/situation prevent it. I should maybe be grateful that the way I’m most comfortable expressing myself (written text) is so frequently the accepted mode of response. This brings me back (rather circuitously) to the SRTOL idea: not only is the written word where I am both comfortable and expected to reside, but the educated middle-class white vernacular in which I am comfortable is also expected of me in life and more specifically, in academia. Not knowing how to express myself in a way deemed acceptable or important would make life difficult in a way that I can’t even fathom.

In starting to teach the remix project, I’m worried that I’m not going to be able to impart the idea, or grade the execution of the idea, that the remix isn’t just about changing the delivery and style of the project, that there’s actually some revision of already present ideas and invention of new ideas involved. This might just be a projection of my own

(mis)understanding of the project: I think it’s fair to say that with any remix of the style of the piece, the content/ideas will likely be changed in some way, but I’m not sure how I’ll know when it’s enough. I’m wondering how the students see their projects, if they are starting with changing the style of delivery, and then working backwards to try to see what changes to their ideas have been produced? Or if they are really starting with the idea of changing/remixing their ideas, and then seeing how those changes would best be presented? In writing this, I feel like this depends on how well I’m able to articulate my expectations and goals for the project, but I’m also unsure as to how best to show them how style and revision are connected and also separated. I’ve given them the example that if they were to film themselves reading their original cultural artifact analysis paper, it would be hard to deny that they are delivering the content in a different medium, but it would also be hard to claim that they are revising their ideas/content in any way. They seem to understand that, but they might also see that as just a judgment on how much effort was put into the remix—if they dress it up so much that it’s hard to tell that they’re really just rereading their paper, will that get the job done?

My teaching experience before starting to teach WRA150 was entirely in a one-on-one format. I tutored at my undergraduate writing center, and in the interim I tutored an ELL student. In having individual conferences with my students, I notice two things: that I might be quite unclear when speaking to my class as a whole, and that I am much better at helping the student understand a concept in a one-on-one scenario. I get the feeling that I am unclear when teaching to the whole class based on the responses I get from my students, and when we do interact with each other in a conference we sometimes seem to be starting from scratch. (I realize that it might not be that I am unclear but rather that they are not paying attention, but I think that still creates an issue that deserves my attention.) When we do have our conferences, however, I feel that I’m fairly good at getting the students to understand what I’m asking them to do, but frequently I feel that I’m saying the same things I said to the whole class. So there might be something about my delivery to the group versus the individual that improves. I know I sometimes ramble at the front of the classroom, but I do that on an individual basis too. Thinking about it, I think it might be the individual student’s ability to ask questions and to respond directly to what I’m saying. This makes sense but leads to another question. How can I get my students to ask more questions in the classroom, and why don’t they now? If they’re scared to embarrass themselves, then I need to work harder to make our classroom feel like a more welcoming space. I think they might feel that their individual questions are a waste of time for the other students to listen to, so I would need to find ways to show that all questions and answers might be valuable to anyone in the class, regardless of their specificity. Overall, it seems that I need to make sure that my teaching style in the classroom approaches the same accessibility and clarity as my one-on-one conferences. I’m spending too much time

in my conferences going over what’s already been covered in class, instead of dealing with student writing, which I feel might be a misuse of conference time.

I’m also wondering about how the style of the teaching materials that I create for my students, primarily assignment sheets and powerpoints/lectures might affect the students and their receptiveness to the materials: I feel like I’m having trouble hitting the sweet spot between “too much” and “too little”. By too much I mean I tend to ramble, to say the same thing in a few different ways, hoping that at least one of my thoughts or examples will really speak to a student. By too little I mean being really specific and concise. In general I usually give too much in class lecture and too little in assignment sheets, as might be expected of the different media of (mostly) extemporaneous speaking and carefully constructed written prose. In speaking in the classroom, I hope that by giving several different ways to look at the project I am giving my students room to play with the assignment or the topic, to see how and where their own ideas can accomplish what they are being asked to do. But I know that that frustrates some students, who may feel that I’m contradicting myself or being inconsistent by offering several approaches to the ideas. When composing assignment sheets, however, I spend (probably too much) time trying to find the best, the one perfect way to describe what I am hoping the project will do. I’m afraid of giving them room to interpret in this concrete document, because I hope that they will be relying primarily on this document when it comes time to start their projects in earnest, or perhaps as they check their progress through the process. But, they might then see this as negating the more general ideas presented verbally. I need to find, or at least look for, the middle ground between these two extremes that both makes my students as comfortable as possible and that doesn’t betray my hopes for their projects.

A few of my students, despite my attempts* to change this, are still sending me emails either without subjects, without a salutation, and/or without a closing or signature. My first instinct upon reading these emails is that they’re impolite, and I don’t think I’m the only person who would feel that way. But knowing these students personally, I don’t think they are intending to treat me with disrespect. I know this is mostly an issue of inexperience, and I need to make it clear to them that other/future professors are not going to react well to emails written this way and might not respond as a result. But why do I respond? Why do I see myself as different from the “other professors”? Why do (or do they?) my students see me as different from the “other professors”? I’m wondering if this is one of the effects of my casual teaching style and more direct relationships I have with my students. When we were sending emails to the professors they hoped to interview for their disciplinary literacies projects, we spent some time discussing how to properly write the email, but it didn’t occur to me to use that moment to remind them that email etiquette in general is important.

*And why haven’t my attempts gotten through, and why haven’t I either tried again, or started not answering emails I don’t consider correctly written? I think partially because I just can’t see myself not answering a legitimate student concern because they didn’t address me in their email, but I think a larger part is scared to inhabit the role of “other professors”. I don’t know if this is because I’m young and inexperienced, or because I see my friendly relationships with my students as the best way to get through to them.

I have noticed in my classes (both readings and class discussions) and my first year TA experience that there is definitely a vocabulary of the field that I am assumed to be familiar with. The specific terms/concepts that I notice the most often are variations on epistemology, heuristics, hermeneutics, and I also find that I am less than familiar with any number of philosophical and theoretical frameworks, such as Marxism or Enlightenment thought in my history class and feminist theory in comp studies. When these ideas are employed in class, they are used mostly as support to the issue we are dealing with, and it’s clear that I should already have a conversational understanding of these things. We aren’t learning about them, we’re using them as tools or contexts to discuss or learn about new things. I’m certainly not blaming my professors for using these terms without explaining them, I can tell that while I am not the only one who might be struggling with these terms, those of us who are are in the minority. I realize that it wouldn’t be possible to teach the content of these courses without having that common vocabulary, that that is part of the admissions process for a graduate program, is your ability to be a part of the conversations going on around you without having someone explain everything to you.

My main point with this is that in first-year writing, there also needs to be a shared vocabulary, but that those students are not expected to have that vocabulary at the beginning of the course. I have to be careful not to rely too heavily on vocabulary or language or terms that my students don’t have unless I am going to take the time to explain that language to them*. I think this is another element of the teacher’s style vs. students’ style question that I’m seeing—that is it necessarily the writing teacher’s responsibility to impart some of our vocabulary of writing and thinking to our students? Should I be very judicious in deciding what vocabulary they need to have for me to teach what I would like to teach? Would I just muddy the waters if I went too far? Is it my job not only to teach them how to do writing, but also how to talk about writing?

*In discussing an example of a remix that I found online, I used the word “trope” to my students, and realized that I probably needed to explain that word. I was able to come up with a definition that I thought worked in the context (movie tropes) on the fly, but I realized that this might not always be the case. This leads me to a connected idea: do I have, or should I have, ready definitions for all of these terms/vocabulary that I would need to explain to my students? Am I using them without having a sufficient grasp of what they mean? Does not having a definition mean that I don’t truly understand what the word

means, or could it mean that the vocabulary of our field is starting to become such second nature that I use these terms to explain other things, and not as terms that need to be explained? This might be true, but I think it’s important to my role as a teacher to still be able to break down these more advanced vocabulary (whether it’s vocabulary that I’ve learned in my studies, or just my vocabulary being above that of my students’ in general) into ideas/examples that my students will understand. Not only will it help my students understand what the hell I’m talking about, it probably is good for me as a student and teacher to consistently be aware of how I’m using my vocabulary, so that I don’t unconsciously start using words without thinking about their meanings, which leads to speaking/writing without meaning, which is something that concerned scholars, philosophers, authors, etc., have linked to “style” for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

Perfect place for: There’s a preoccupation (obsession?) with style in the lectures on rhetoric by the 19th century Scots and Americans, Blair, Campbell, and Whately. One part that I noticed as been particularly relevant to our current pedagogies was something that Whately discusses: that asking students to write about topics that they do not understand or that do not interest them leads to “stiff, artificial, and frigid” prose (Whately 25). In our writing curriculum today we do feel an obligation to allow the students to select their own topics, still within a designed framework. I see the benefit of this in my students’ writing, for sure, but also I see occurrences of the “stiff, artificial” prose in my students’ writing, most prevalent in the disciplinary literacies assignment, which, not coincidently, is the assignment least consistent with the students’ experiences and writing practices. But I don’t feel like this indicates anything about the value of the assignment—I think it’s a worthy experience to move the students out of their comfort zone in their composition, research, and analysis skills. I’m concerned with how to help students avoid this correlation (?) between an unfamiliar and possibly uninteresting subject and uncomfortable prose. One way to do this might also be found in Whately’s discussion of audience: he says that by writing to “communicate his thoughts, to convince, or persuade” someone they know, and not to “fill up a sheet, a book or an hour”, the student’s writing will improve both in terms of content and style. For today’s students, the consideration of their audience (in this case, other freshmen interested in the same discipline) might help them to compose in a more understandable and comfortable style, rather than speaking to their teacher or a mystery figure, who they might think expects the overly complex vocabulary and sentence structure that leads them to “stiff, artificial, and frigid” or just incomprehensible, language.

My students use the terms “formal” and “informal” and are concerned with whether they’re writing appropriately in regards to these terms, but they seem to have connected this solely with whether or not “I” is included in the writing. “How formal does this paper have to be? Can it include ‘I’?” I need to help them see that a formal or informal tone goes

beyond the use of the first person, and that the first person can be included (although not too often) in “formal” writing, and that the most informal of writing might not include the first person. What other examples/signposts can I give them about what makes writing formal or informal? We talked in class a little about how “conversational” writing would be more informal. “He was like, ‘Woah!’” would have an informal tone, and “He then told me that he was surprised by this” would be more formal. This last sentence could be straight out of the Disciplinary Literacies, which is undoubtedly a formal piece of writing, even it is telling a story. So is it about the word choice? Choosing “angry” over “pissed”? Is it writing-like-writing and not writing-like-speaking that makes for formal writing? Or writing for a particular audience? That seems like asking too much of the students—if they knew how to write for particular audiences then they wouldn’t be having this problem. Maybe presenting the audiences as people they really know? Is it the difference between writing for your best friend and writing to your grandmother? Discounting the whining you might do to your grandmother? I’m trying but this is sooooo haaaaardddd. I want to make sure that I’m not conflating “formal tone” with “sophisticated writing” because while I can reasonably expect my students to master the first (or at least become proficient at the first), the second seems like too lofty a goal, and also, not necessarily what our primary goal as first year writing instructors should be. If we’re paying attention to/looking for sophisticated language we might be missing more vital issues. But is trying to improve style in writing really about sophisticated writing?

Kate Ronald’s piece in The Subject is Writing, “Style: The Hidden Agenda in Composition Classes; or, One Reader’s Confession,” seems like a piece that should be easy for me to respond to. Style is right there! In the title!! But there’s so much to deal with in this piece, she covers a lot of ground and seems to be unsure exactly what she’s trying to do with this piece. I actually had to break her essay down paragraph by paragraph to be able to see what all she’s saying.

Starts with a narrative of the emergence of the process model. Her confession.What she does and doesn’t mean by style.Two student writing excerpts, and why she’s more interested in Amy’s than Corey’s.Removing your voice, “risky” to include personality.Separating form and content, split grades.Modeling.Student-selected topics, interesting or not for teacher-readers, back to style as what

makes her interested.Peer review? Inclusion of personal voice, risky.Agendas, English, metaphors. Different audiences, standing out or not. Impersonal, academic video game essay.

Feminist writing, valuing the personal.Personal (at least in the beginning) essay about Deanna’s grandmother.Suggestions for writing that improve style:

In school or out, write as if you’re actually writing for someone or something.Write outside of school.Read in-progress work out loud, preferably to an actual person.Practice cutting all the words you can from your draft and starting from

there.Write about your own writing style.

Uses a metaphor of the cricket bat to get writing to “travel.”

I definitely sympathize with her feelings of guilt about how she regards her students’ writing: “I worry that I’m responding to something in my students’ writing that I’m not telling them about—their style, the sound of their voices on paper” (95). But I’m not sure that I can agree with (what I think is) her viewpoint that good style requires a personal voice. Most of her examples of writing with good style include a personal narrative, not just a personal voice, but I feel that she’s envisioning writing assignments that are asking students to tell a story about themselves. These writing assignments certainly exist, and are valuable, but are a small percentage of the writing assignments a student will be asked to do in college, even in writing courses. By tying the development of good style to a personal voice too closely, I fear that when faced with a writing assignment that demands an impersonal voice (whether or not this is would be a fair assignment), the student will not be able to produce a well-composed piece, as they no longer have the support (or crutch?) of their personal voice. It seems that most students would be better able to tell a story about themselves than about something distant from them. I would think that the more difficult, and possibly more worthwhile, task would be to develop a compelling, vivid, and clear style that can be applied to the driest and most abstract of topics as well as the most personal. Not just in the context of college writing, but in whatever future careers our students are hoping to enter. For instance, in her critique of the essay about the video game culture in our country that she excerpts, she asks, “Why wouldn’t Jeff just say ‘Video games are popular again’ instead of saying that ‘they have renewed their popularity’ or ‘Kids are getting fat and lazy’ rather than ‘This is affecting their minds and their bodies’?” (99) While I agree with her that this paragraph needs a lot of work (and that it’s very similar to the kind of writing I’m seeing in my FYW course), I don’t think that “Kids are getting fat and lazy” is very good writing. It lacks sensitivity and caution; just because it’s more like some people might actually talk doesn’t (I don’t think) mean it has good style. That’s one of the reasons that quality writing is so important to so many people, that you’re able to improve on what you would just say out loud. Also, I think that “This is affecting their minds and their bodies” is perfectly good style—it doesn’t sound like the student is overreaching, using words they don’t understand, or creating an

inauthentic voice. It sounds to me like the student is clearly and concisely leading into his point.

All this being said, I did find her suggestions for practicing writing to improve style to be really interesting and helpful not just for first-year writing students, but for all writers. I also found them to be similar to the practices I’ve been suggesting to my students to improve their style (101-105).

“In school or out, write as if you’re actually writing for someone or something.” The idea of writing for an audience is being emphasized currently as one of the best ways to create a more impactful, realistic piece of writing. Instead of just thinking of a writing assignment as something for the professor (to read and) to grade, and therefore as more of a performance than an act of communication, writing for a specific audience helps writers make smart rhetorical decisions. As this is what they will need to do when they take what they have learned outside the writing classroom, it makes sense to practice this while inside the classroom. However, it can be difficult to persuade students that the audience is anyone other than the instructor as grader, and students might still be inclined to perform as they see necessary for that audience.

“Write outside of school.” Understanding how writing can be used outside of academic contexts will help students see the value of improving their writing skills. They might also see how the practices of non-academic writing (writing with clarity, writing for a purpose) can then be better understood and applied within academic contexts.

“Read in-progress work out loud, preferably to an actual person.” This is one practice I practically beg my students to try. I also suggest asking someone to read their paper out loud back to them. It’s so much easier to hear how your style can be improved, by making apparent patterns or habits in your work that you’d like to change. It can also vastly improve the clarity of your writing—hearing your words rather than reading them on the paper will allow you to experience them in a different way and will make clearer when you are leaving gaps of understanding in your writing. Sometimes we are so deeply involved in each individual word or phrase that you lose track of the sentences or ideas, and taking a step back, by hearing your writing, will help you see the bigger picture.

“Practice cutting all the words you can from your draft and starting from there.” This exercise would help both with clarity of style and with arrangement of main points. Sometimes my students are so distracted by the words that they have to put together into sentences that they lose track of the actual points they are trying to make, and boiling a paragraph down to a sentence (as Ronald shows in her examples) would not only help writers climb out from under Ronald’s “awkward word piles”, but also to see if they’ve tried to put too many ideas into one place.

“Write about your own writing style.” This is the one that I haven’t yet tried to get my students to do. The closest we’ve gotten is the writer’s memo, but that tends to be more about invention and arrangement than style. I like Ronald’s idea here, to “keep a record of

your reactions to what you write, a list of your favorite sentences, and a reaction to the reactions you get from readers” (104). If I said to my students “Write about your writing style” they would stare blankly at me, but giving them specifics to “react” to would make it easier for them get into the writing. I would hope to accomplish some of these goals in the writing journal project I plan to develop for my class next semester.

Reasoning With Vampires is a tumblr created by a young woman named Dana who really, really dislikes the Twilight novels, both for the story being told and the way that story is told: “The content lived down to my expectations, but I was unprepared for how poorly crafted the saga is.” (RWV) Many of her comments are spot-on take-downs of the unhealthy and borderline abusive relationship and dangerous behavior the characters

enact and the author romanticizes: Other comments focus on the storytelling problems like “cheating at narration”, the passage of time, and inconsistent characterizations, and many others are on basic grammar errors, like comma splices, the correct use of semicolons, and “neither/nor vs either/or”. But the most interesting entries to me, and the reasons that I’m including this in my common book, are those that indict the style of the writing as the major problem. Dana doesn’t hold that these sentences are grammatically incorrect, but she does hold that they are terribly written. She stresses the importance of clear and concise sentences, not train wrecks of ideas thrown together and crumbling under the weight of too many asides. She covers the importance of word choice: that just because two words are strictly speaking synonyms, one word will work better in this context and another will have unwanted connotations, that using big words does not always improve the sentence, and that repetition of certain words or sentence structures leads to tedious writing. The many foci of this website I think parallels many of the separate but related issues we face in the FYW classroom. First, that what you’re writing about is important, that your writing should have an audience and a purpose, and that you can change people’s minds for the better through your writing (or that you should be careful not to influence people for the worse through your writing). Also, I think it says something important that student writers should understand, that correct or proper grammar and effective style go hand-in-hand to create quality writing, but are not inherent in each other. That you can have good style while not understanding semicolons, and that you can have impeccable grammar and still have an uninteresting or ineffective writing style. There are parts of this website that I might look into integrating into my teaching, especially to make lessons about grammar and style more accessible and more vital to the students.

In his chapter “Rhetoric and Writing in the Renaissance” from A Short History of Writing Instruction, Don Paul Abbott writes about the copie book, or commonplace book,

that serves as the precedent to our common book. The first step is largely the same, to “let every one take one of those books forementioned, and see what he can finde in it for his purpose, and write it down under one of those heads in his Commonplace book” (Hoole, qtd in Abbott, 161) For those students, the commonplace book’s main purpose was to stockpile the authors and their methods that the students wanted to imitate when they began to compose for themselves. In our version, we started by identifying our threads of interest (our “purposes”), but then it was our job to respond, react, think about, write about what we quoted into our books, a step that students of earlier times rarely if ever got the chance to take.

Over this semester I’ve wished that I was keeping a teaching journal, to better keep track of how my first semester is going and to improve my second semester. This, combined with the idea of the commonbook from our class, has gotten me thinking about having the students keep a journal for me over the course of their next semester. How is style a part of that discussion? Simply practicing writing (the more you write) the cleaner and more natural the style will become, which is what I see in my current students they need practice in, especially if they don’t have to worry about someone immediately grading the writing. I can hopefully present the journal as a model of the process they’re going to make over the course of the semester: that as the semester progresses, the writing in their journals will naturally improve. Right now, I’m envisioning the content of the journal in thirds: one third responses to class readings, but I’ll present really wide-open questions as the “prompts”: more like “How do you feel about [the main idea] after reading it?” and less like “What do you think the main idea of this piece is?” Another third will be asking for stories about their families and personal lives—helping them get comfortable writing clearly and naturally about something that interests them; and the final third will be reactions/responses either to something we’ve covered in our class or something they’ve covered in another class. Using the journal to include the reading responses will free them from having to write separate reading responses while also giving me a way to check that they’re doing the readings. The issue that everyone mentions about how student-selected topics lead to better writing is kind covered here, letting their voice come through when they tell stories, share their opinions, etc. I’m also planning on splitting them up into teams for every unit, and they’re going to share their journals with their teams, so that should help with the imagined audience. Not just “your classmates” but “these four actual classmates who are on your team, and whose journals you are going to be reading as well”. I really hope that with some more thought about what exactly I hope to gain from these journals, what I hope the students gain from these journals, and what the best prompts/topics are for the students, I can make this a useful assignment for my students that brings their whole semester together. (And I’m excited about how I can then use these journals to adjust the Revising Literacies assignment.)

carmen kynard’s piece in Alt Dis, “New Life in this Dormant Creature,” got me thinking about some really complex and pregnant issues for me since I am hoping to return to Chicago to teach writing and will likely (hopefully?) teach students more like Carmen’s than my current students. Where the issue starts is that I am more like my current students than I am like the students I hope to teach. I feel that Carmen is writing this piece for everyone, not just for students or instructors of color, but I worry that my privilege and background will manifest as a wall between my students’ experiences and mine. I worry that my interest in teaching these students will be seen as “white, liberal, middle-class guilt”. Carmen’s own experiences and connections to her students are a large part of her relationships with her students and her point of view in her piece: “I am not interested in proving my and my students’ literacy and intelligence but in examining the political dynamics that deny it” (33, emphasis mine). She is able to tell April that “i know what it/means to have to pull a man offa your momma./a different kinda lesson in our womanhood and motherhood, huh?” (40) I would not be able to honestly connect with a student in this way—my emotional reaction would be restricted to sympathy and stop short of empathy. The most honest reaction I could give to my student would be to say, “I can’t know what it means to have to pull a man off your mom, but…” (I have no idea right now what comes after the “but”. But I’m sorry that you do? But I’m grateful to you for discussing something so personal in class? But let’s discuss why these things happen and how we can try to fix them?) As evidenced by my hypothetical response to April, I also do not honestly have the dialect to respond to her in the same style as Carmen did. Off/offa, mom/momma. Speaking with my students in an affected dialect, at worst an impression, of their dialect would to my mind be as insulting as insisting they speak in my dialect. But I realize that much of Carmen’s ethos as an instructor of color comes from her communicating with her students in a style they recognize as close to their own, certainly closer than most of their other college instructors, or people they see in positions of power. I realize that since I cannot deny my privilege and I cannot create the same connection that Carmen does, I need to do my best to know, even if I can’t understand (Richardson/Jackson), their lives and their experiences, and the histories that have led to where we are today. I can do this both by reading and learning everything that I can (Carmen includes a list of authors who deal with skin color politics in their writing, and I had only heard of two, let alone read them) and also by listening to my students. Really listening to their stories in an attempt to know who they are, not just to learn how to teach/help them.

I get the feeling that within our field, Peter Elbow’s work is becoming old hat, or at least something that everyone is familiar with, so it isn’t worth discussing much. I think I heard a faculty member early in the semester say “Well, who hasn’t read Elbow?” I also feel that while some of his ideas might be admired today, they’re thought of as what was once radical, as someone who’s willing to give too much back to the establishment. As someone

who is brand new to the field, everyone’s ideas and theories are new to me, and I’m almost afraid to admit that I agree with some (many?) of his ideas. (I suppose by including his essay in Alt Dis the editors are indicating that his ideas are not as outdated as I think they are, but still.) In “Vernacular Englishes in the Writing Classroom?” Elbow sees a long-term trend, based on the history of languages, that non-standard dialects will eventually find their places. For the short term, though, he is willing to accept that in our current culture those who naturally use a non-standard dialect may have to assume the standard dialect of power: “So, the short-range goal is clear: help students in our classrooms today whose comfortable dialect is not ‘Standard’ American English (SAE) to meet the demands of most teachers and employers. We can’t wait for a new culture of literacy” (129). Other theorists might say that this point of view is giving in, but I find myself more on Elbow’s side, of dealing with the practical problems at hand with concrete pedagogical strategies. I hope that in doing so for the rest of my career I am able to take what I have learned “on the ground”, so to speak, to think more broadly and more radically about the long-term issues in the field.

I do see value in Elbow’s practice of separating the writing process into two distinct moments: initially attending to strengthening “the ideas, reasoning, and evidence” and then, in a “final final” or “copy-edited” draft, “give all their attention to matters of grammar and syntax” (132, emphasis in original). As he also allows, it would be a “daunting” task to edit an entire paper into SAE, but I also think it would be difficult to convince the student writers to ignore those issues as they write. I know that I have difficult composing without paying attention to grammar and syntax, and that’s as someone whose natural voice is pretty close to SAE. I do like, and plan to implement, his practice of “mini-workshops of only ten to twenty minutes to treat the most frequently troublesome matters in grammar and syntax” (132). I might be able to make the students feel better about what they are composing by threading these lessons throughout the semester. By giving them some tools to tackle what they might feel are their grammatical shortcomings, one at a time, I might be able to give them confidence to write with a mixture of their natural voice and the “correct” syntax that some will require of them.

In Feminist Rhetorical Practices, Royster and Kirsch use several words and phrases repeatedly, as these words and phrases form the basis of their field and their research. Some of these are phrases that they have coined/repurposed for their research philosophies, such as “critical imagination”, “strategic contemplation”, “social circulation”, and “globalization”. There are other words/phrases that they employ repeatedly that they are not repurposing or creating but that seem to be an important part of their vocabulary when discussing their work. One of these is “springboard,” but another one that interests me is “interrogate”. They use this term over and over throughout the book. I think that it’s very weird that within a field which holds “hope and care” and “humility” and “working with and not on”, they use a word filled with as much antagonism as “interrogate”. It seems

much too superior and violent and “we know you have the truth in there so just spit it out”. It doesn’t seem to be connected to the rest of their ideas. They do use it at times as interrogating their own work, and not interrogating the subjects or texts that they are studying, but it still seems like such a 180 degree turn from all the other terms they use. I really expected a digression on why interrogate is the word of choice for them, more so than maybe “inquire” or “uncover”/”discover” or “look deeper”. It seems to be a rhetorical choice that is so different from all the other rhetorical choices that they are making and espousing that I’m sure there must be some reasoning behind it, and I really want to know what it is.

Sitting in the cafeteria in the library the other day, I noticed a student sitting way on the other side. This person was tall, close to six feet, and very skinny. This person was wearing brown Ugg-style boots, fairly skinny jeans, a green sweater with a red infinity scarf, had pixie-cut copper colored hair, and was wearing a ring on one hand. As can be inferred from my lack of pronouns, I am still not sure as to the biological sex of this person: physically (and from a distance), this person looked male, but nearly all the gendered presentations said female. I know that as a culture we are confused and made uncomfortable by any kind of ambiguity, but sex/gender ambiguity especially. I started thinking about how I wanted to know if this person was biologically male, but then I really started thinking about “Why do I care?” Not just because this person was a stranger who I was not in contact with, but let’s say this person was one of my students. In that case, why would I care if this person were biologically male? As near as I can tell, we as a culture base so much of how we treat/interact with/understand/think we know about each other on the other party’s gender (at least at first?). That is sometimes the very first detail that we (unconsciously) collect about people as we meet them, or even as we just encounter them (as my encounter with this student in the cafeteria). This then got me thinking about Jung and Royster and Kirsch’s ideas of delaying understand, of delaying consensus. (Note: I am not AT ALL speculating about the act of gender expression on the part of the person, I understand that I do not understand that issue enough. I am speaking only of another person’s experience in meeting or seeing that person.) Maybe the ambiguity and discomfort that we feel by not knowing immediately the other person’s sex, and therefore feeling like we don’t know how to interact with them, is an example of that delayed understanding. If we don’t know by just looking at the person what sex they are and therefore how we are expected to interact with them, we will then be forced to interact with them without that information, to get to know that person as an individual and not as a standard member of one of a binary group, and then decide with more reliable, relevant, and personal information, how we are best going to interact with this person. That ambiguity and the moments of discomfort it creates, can lead us to really knowing the person better, and eliminating knee-jerk, sexism-based judgments. **bonus** some links to a blog I read, by a woman who’s grade-school age daughter occasionally gets flak from

other students at school for not presenting in “feminine” ways. The blog itself is fantastic overall, but especially Mimi (mom) and Nora’s (daughter) conversations about the issue.

Update on the remix projects: Yes, largely, the projects/products were in many ways restatements of the original projects. I don’t think that this was a symptom of a lack of effort on my students’ parts. I’m not sure now if that’s really the issue that needs to be attended to in the understanding of the remix project, now. Is expressing your ideas through a new medium, for a new audience, for a new purpose, really the main point? In my examples of remixes that my students and I studied in class, I’m not sure if there was a changing of the ideas presented in the originals. But, in the remixes that my students found on the internet, such as various Batman take-downs, the idea of “your Batman voice is ridiculous” is a new idea that was not present in the original. So is it a matter of making this explicit: the purpose of the video is to make fun of the Batman voice, and by doing that, you include a new idea? Some of my students moved their ideas to a different place: one student did his original P2 on the cultural phenomenon that is the Super Bowl, and one of his points was that way more people watched the Super Bowl than voted in the 2008 presidential election. He took this idea and ran with it, by presenting in his remix videos of people who claim to support a politician/official and his policies but also admit or shown to not have any knowledge of those policies. So he took one of his supporting points and made it into the main idea of his piece. So is that “remixing” his original ideas? I guess I’m seeing a divide between remix and change? If you’re adding something new in any way, are you even remixing, or just creating something new? And if you’re truly remixing, is there room for new ideas? Or just new ideas in a new medium/style/genre/context? Or is a matter of combining your ideas with other ideas/contexts and creating a new third thing? This might also connect to the ideas of multigenreness: does adding/including another genre necessarily and by default improve or change or add anything to your original text/product? What decisions regarding multigenreness have to be considered in order to create something new/better, and not just different?

Reading Jackie Rhodes’ “Writing Feminist/Queer Lives” in class really helped me as an example of the kind of work that Julie Jung asked us to imagine and practice. Firstly, its multigenreness is used to great effect. The piece includes discussions of the theory and history of feminism and queer rhetoric as well as Jackie’s personal history as a feminist, a queer, and a rhetor. She also includes personal poetry in her piece, which I feel connects the personal and the academic, as well as connecting the author to her readers. As our class articulated during our discussion of the piece, “The multigenre, metaphorical, style supports the purpose of the piece as well as the individual focus of each section.” There were also some moves made in the piece that felt like they might be tracking the idea of “delayed understanding” that Jung presents: the distinction between “tracing” and “mapping” is referred to early in the piece as part of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, but

the nature of that distinction is not explained to the reader right away, perhaps giving the reader time to wrestle with the idea and think about what the distinction might mean to them.

Our class felt that the style of this piece was one of its major strengths, and that style was grounded in the personal voice Jackie was able to include. So now I’m rethinking my earlier entry about the connection Kate Ronald makes between the personal voice and good style, or as she puts it, “writing like somebody’s home”. I don’t think that the personal voice is the only way to achieve good style, but in reading Jackie’s piece I realize how including the personal may be one of the best ways to learn to write with great style, and that the personal can draw your reader in, which is such an important element of good writing. Jackie’s personal stories of her family and their histories and of her struggles made me feel like I was talking to a friend, and not just reading an article in a journal. The personal voice then helped the poetry to be more impactful and meaningful, because I had some idea of the emotions and histories that were producing these verses.

Linda Adler-Kassner’s The Activist WPA is subtitled Changing Stories about Writing and Writers. In thinking about how this book can relate to my own teaching and students, I started thinking about the “stories” that circulate about first year writing, not among the public, but among students themselves. What stories or assumptions about first year writing do first year writers perpetuate among themselves? I imagine that some of these stories are about how first year writing is all about grammar and MLA guidelines, and that it doesn’t matter what you write or write about as long as your verb tenses agree and your works cited page is correctly formatted. Maybe some stories are about how first year writing is more like a therapy session, and how you just have to reveal something personal in your papers to guarantee a good grade. And how can first year writing instructors or administrators change those stories? It’s difficult because we can’t categorically deny most of these stories: our courses do in fact cover MLA formatting, and we do value personal content in writing in different ways. More so than just changing the story from negative (or neutral, at best?) to positive, it seems that we need to make a change from the single story to the plural story. Just “positive” stories will get us “that class was so much fun and I learned so much!” but a plural story might get us “I enjoyed the class discussions and the peer reviews but I never understood what the professor was saying about when to use citations and I really hate doing in-class writing”. Early on in the semester I asked my students what they thought they were going to learn in our course and I’m ashamed to admit that I don’t remember much of what they said. This might indicate that it was what I expected to hear, that I wasn’t surprised by their expectations. Someone asked about thesis statements, I think. I think in the future I’ll ask them not only what they expect to learn, but where they got these expectations from. That might help us understand how to help the prevailing stories become more plural. I also think that keeping these responses and then

bringing them back at the end of the semester would be an interesting exercise, and possibly a way to introduce the Revising Literacies project.

“Sometimes journalists ask questions designed to elicit particular responses or perpetuate particular frames—questions like, ‘How do you work with remedial students…?’ If you think that the label ‘remedial students’ is inaccurate…, you need to think—fast, and on your feet—about how you can reframe that question” (Adler-Kassner 150). This situation has a parallel in any classroom, but particularly in the first-year writing classroom, where the students are likely required to take the course and might be doing their best to put in as little effort as possible to pass the course, or as discussed above, are coming into the course with a number of preconceived ideas. A question like “How many revisions do I need to make in order to get a higher grade on this paper?” would require some quick thinking on the instructor’s part: you certainly can’t provide an actual number, which might be what the student is hoping for, so you have to reframe the question. “It’s not about the number of revisions; it’s about the overall improvement of the piece and the quality of the revisions you make.” By doing this, the professor is trying to reframe the concept of revision from a task that the student has to perform in order to earn a better grade (“thirty-eight revisions…thirty-nine…forty revisions! Done! Turning it in!”) to a process where the student engages with what they’ve written, their professor’s input, and their own desire to improve their writing. Adler-Kassner paraphrases Robert Bray, who “stresses responding to questions, not necessarily answering them” (emphasis in original) and quotes Norman Solomon: “it was…said that the best answer is [to] destroy the question” (150). Both these interpretations of this issue rang really true to me while reading this section. Just today, I had several students ask me if I wanted them to highlight the revisions they’ve made when they turn in their disciplinary literacies revisions, which led to a discussion of the whole paper as a revision, and not just the same paper with some changes made. Although the word choice is harsh, I’m hoping not to just “destroy” the question, but to “destroy” the assumptions or habits that lead to these questions.

My brother and I have very good understandings of each other’s senses of humor, so I was telling him that I use a very self-deprecating sense of humor in my classroom. I find that I do this for a few reasons: I feel that including some attempt at humor goes a long way in making the students comfortable, but I’m not really funny enough to go about it any other way. I also realize that my self-deprecation comes from a place of self-consciousness and self-doubt, so I think I use it to lower their expectations of me. In this particular instance that I was relating to my brother, I was explaining to my students how I won’t see their SIRS evaluations until well after I submit their final grades: “Even if every single one of you fills out your comment section with ‘Screw you, lady,’ I won’t know it until after your grades are out of my control.” I consciously did this to stress the importance of their honest evaluations of me, and less consciously (I realized it as it was happening) also to get a little

evaluation right then: if they laughed a little, then they think that would be a ridiculous thing to put on their evaluation. If they looked uncomfortable or guilty, then they might actually be thinking about writing “screw you” on their evaluations. Thankfully, any reactions I got at all were smiles or chuckles. I’ve used this kind of humor throughout the semester both as a check to see if they’re listening to me at all, to shake things up if I feel like I’ve been boring them, and also as a checkpoint of if they’re relaxed or connected with me enough to laugh. I had a band director in college who always always would say when passing out course evaluations, “Remember, Knight is spelled with a K, and ‘sucks’ is not spelled ‘sux’.” This director was immensely popular and always got a laugh with this, but I remember appreciating this remark as opening up the channels of honesty. I will probably want to investigate further into the idea of humor in the classroom (where’s Ana when you need her?) and see what benefits and drawbacks it offers me. Does this humor undermine my authority in any way? Is that maybe part of why I stick with a more sarcastic sense of humor?

There’s also an issue of the language I use in the classroom, and I mean that in the way your mother might use “language”. I made it clear in the syllabus that offensive or intolerant language or behavior would not be appropriate for our discussions, but I also speak to my students more like I do with my friends than with my mother. “Ass” and its variations are fair game, I use “shit” instead of “stuff” or as an exclamation (like when I almost dropped my laptop), I use phrases like “what the hell am I talking about”, and have been known on occasion to drop the f-bomb (“I know that this assignment can feel like a bit of a mindfuck”). I take care to never use these words in anger or direct them at a student. If anything, they’re either used humorously or directed at myself. On one level, I feel that this signals to my students that I see us as equals on certain levels, and that I am treating them as adults rather than schoolchildren. (Also, it’s really just natural for me to speak like that, especially when I’m nervous, which I almost always am when I’m teaching. And I want my speech with my students to feel natural to me and to them, not forced or fake.) But I’m also concerned about the slippery slope or precedence that this creates: If I use “fuck” in what I think is a harmless or humorous context, but one of my students uses “bitch”, a word that I feel has much more potential to be harmful, do I have the ethical/ethos ground to help/make them see the difference? It would create a space to discuss how we need to think about the words that we use and how they can offend even when that isn’t the intention, but is that discussion coming too late, if the word’s already been used? Simply writing this makes me think that I have erred in letting my language become that explicit, but that I should think more about these implications. I might use this opportunity to discuss with my class how they feel about this kind of language use. Instead of just assuming that they’ll have the same understanding as me of where the line is between “adult” language and “offensive” language, we can draw that line as a class, together. We can discuss how language can be harmful and how it can be vivid, how we can express our

thoughts in our natural language while also being aware of everyone’s feelings. By doing this, hopefully I will be able to set a foundation for any future discussions that may need to take place while still keeping communication open and natural in the classroom.

In a concluding move, I would like to try to frame my common book on style with Royster and Kirsch’s four terms of engagement. These are all complex concepts with many dimensions, but I hope to begin to grasp some of their uses and nuances here.

Critical Imagination: Looking over what I have learned and written about over the course of the semester, I see myself drawing connections between my students and me as people, between the language I use in the classroom and my students’ expectations of me, and between the authors and texts I have read and my own teaching. I have been able to see in some texts ideas that I didn’t realize I was interested in but spoke to me, such as Kate Ronald’s “Style: The Hidden Agenda in Composition Classrooms.” Her “confession” led me to wonder if I am careful enough when grading and providing feedback that I am evaluating students on what I have tried to teach them. This directly led me to one of the questions on my survey, “Do you feel that your instructor bases your grades on what she says she will?” I’m also seeing that the “form/content” issue, whether it is a divide, two sides of the same coin, or inextricably connected, is still something that we are wrestling with. In ways of writing, researching, teaching, and thinking, there is still a great deal of uncertainty in how we are connecting and emphasizing form and content. Peter Elbow’s “Vernacular Englishes in the Writing Classroom?” seems to imply a separation between form and content, suggesting that one can be addressed while keeping the other on hold. This exercise has made me think more carefully about the fragile and complicated relationship between me as a teacher and my students as a class, but also as me and my individual students and people, and how and when to move between these two identities/relationships.

Strategic Contemplation: If I weren’t convinced before, I’m now really excited about the possibility of seeing real students’ answers to the questions I’m putting forth in my survey, and also to expand the project to get teachers’ ideas about these issues. I hope that by continuing to examine these issues and to see or find more patterns, connections, correlations, I can get a better understanding of a few of the ways that teaching writing can be improved, or at least that I can improve my teaching. I would try to not speak for the students by using their responses, but rather to let their responses speak for them and really effect changes in how we view our students and our relationships with them.

Social Circulation: There is a great deal of “me” and “I” in my common book, and as much of these responses are based in what I am thinking about, realizing, and understanding, this makes sense. But I realize that not enough of these thoughts have the student writer as their centers. I need to think about how these connections can be grounded in the context

of helping any students, not just mine. I also need to be careful with what Royster and Kirsch see as a potential pitfall: “Are affection and admiration possible without sentimentality?” (23) It’s important that while having great respect for teachers and students that I don’t over-romanticize the relationships and habits, and keep in mind that as all teaching, learning, and writing operate within some practical limitations, not everything I learn will be ideal or even good, and how to deal with that realistically without losing faith in the project as a whole.

Globalization: Globalization is important in the idea of finding value in undervalued or underrepresented dialects, texts, and authors, certainly. Helping students see their potential to affect something (wherever their interests lie) on a larger or global scale is at the heart of writing instruction. I also realize that a number of the issues I am tracking would be easily applied to teaching in general. It would certainly help in course where writing is a large part of the deliverables of the classroom, even if the subject is not necessarily writing itself. Some of the issues could even be applied to classrooms where writing is rarely, if ever, mentioned. The relationships between the teacher and the student are vital to learning in any classroom, and I hope to find clearer and more engaging ideas of these.