USF Writing Community Server

My new 1102 students, welcome to my blog!  I hope you've had a wonderful winter break and are ready to write, read, and eat.  We will be blogging on this site, but connect your blogs to our writingwiki page.  Just follow my example, and we'll discuss it in class.

--SW

Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams

No, this is not a subversive, middle-class "how to catch a husband with your poise and soft, downtrodden voice," but it is a book on how to write gooder.  All kidding aside, I really like the lessons I skimmed through, especially the first one.  I judge books not by their covers but by their first chapter: sometimes, if I'm feeling saucy, by their first page.  What can't I not say?  I'm an elitist, and a tangential one at that.  To the meat of my blog....

I actually wish that my ENC 1101 students could have had access to this book or any other style manual (a la Strunk and White, or even Spunk and Bite).  I think a balance between style and substance is needed in The Penguin Handbook.  Not to say anything against that work, but it cannot contain everything a student needs.  In Section 7 of the Faigley, for example, most of the style issues center around grammar.  The Style piece, on the other hoof, discusses the difference between style and correct grammar.  I like that.  Perhaps some students might like a more narrative-esque, paradoxically abstract/personal work like the Style; well, I guess they wouldn't like it, but they might find it more readable and helpful.  Simplicity is key, especially early in college.  I tell my students (as I try to subtlely prevent Engfish), do not write big pompous sentences.  Give me little pompous ones.  I like them.  The best writing is simple and clear, be it Jane Austen's or Mark Twain's.  If you are a good writer, sometimes you can get a little funky: many people consider James Fenimore Cooper and Charles Dickens good writers--not me, mind--but they get down and funky with their writing.  I compare writing with funk to this:

My mother always corrected my southern tongue's desire to say "ain't."  She told me that I sounded ignorant and trashy whenever I said it.  After getting a degree or so, I started incorporating it back into my vernacular.  I think it gives me a dash of color and a dab of cuteness, G.R.I.T.S style.  Once you learn how to do it right, you can play with the boundary between right and wrong.  After all, if you combine "right" and "wrong" you get "write."  Kinda.

--SW

When I read the introduction to Elbow and Belanoff's piece Sharing and Responding, I got this image in my head.  I realize that writing by ourselves may get us "off track" or make us forget our audience, but to what extent is that a bad thing?  Emily Dickinson wrote by herself, for herself, and look how that turned out.  If someone told me that for the rest of my career I had to write collaboratively, I would quit.  I enjoy writing, reading, and grading by myself, but I acknowledge Elbow and Belanoff's view that collaborative writing and sharing has its points also.  I am going to tie this to the "Feminist Pedagogy."  If we want to do collaboration in class with our Comp students, I don't think it would be successful.  I say this because some students, like a few of my boys, would dominate their groups, not to mention, some students (non-gender specific) would sit back and do nothing.  Collaborating online, like our "Writing Process" article, would probably be more successful in my class.  But how public is collaborating online?  I think it's paradoxically public and private, but I like that.  Similarly, my students peer review through Blackboard.  All attempts at group work and collaboration have been unsuccessful in my class; I have too many students, and they don't have moveable desks. 

I think this article sets forth a wonderful theory; I just don't know how I would apply most of it to a class.  I could explain nonjudgmental feedback to my students, but is feedback ever not judgmental?  The Movies of the mind idea is lovely, but again, I don't see how I could get my students to do it.  I was wondering if I would be able to do it. 

For this piece, it would probably go like this:

Peter Elbow, does the man ever sleep?  He does have a great name.  The Preface is short; I like that, and Pete and Pat are trying to help teachers.  The Introduction gives different, important viewpoints, and it reminds me of Barton Fink.  The rest of the article is arranged concisely and coherently, which is helpful since I get bored....It's so hard to feel and express it in writing as you are reading.

SW

The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women.  It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.-Pat Robertson

Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society.-Rush Limbaugh, who also coined the word "feminazi." 

Although these quotes are from two extremists, the implications they put forth are deeply entrenched in our society's discourse.  The term "feminazi" is pervasive and used to describe any woman who is in control of her life, who has power, who has a voice.  We live in within the feminist backlash, and as a feminist, I am trying to get my students to recognize the underlying rhetorical devices and ISAs that construct these negative stereotypes.  It is difficult, it is a "struggle" as bell hooks mentions (119).  My classroom, which really is a microcosm of society, is a perfect example of this "struggle."  I love all of my students, but some of the boys test me.  They occasionally talk back or roll their eyes.  Keep in mind that I don't try to push my agendas on them; I know that the more aggressive I am, the more they will shut down.  But I always wonder "what if I were a man?"  Would they roll their eyes at me? 
The boys will speak up more in class, and they usually dominate the conversations; this is not intentional, I know, but a part of our gender conditioning.  One of my boys, who is sweet as he can be, has a nasty habit of interrupting girls, finishing their sentences.  Occasionally, he'll try to finish my sentences.  I told him nicely that I don't like it when a student interrupts another person or me . 
Teaching as a young feminist is a struggle, but one that I am willing to take up.  I hope to change some minds throughout the rest of the semester.  We have already discussed stereotypes in language, but it will take several years, if it does ever happen, before my students will realize that there are power systems operating in language, that they are constructed through language.
--SW

I didn't really care for Bizzell's piece "'Contact Zones' and English Studies"  because she is reducing Literature and Composition to a shiny postcolonial-esque rhetorical theory of “contact zones.”  Cute, but I don’t think it a very effective way to redesign the English department.

What is the problem theorists have with literature courses?  From what I gather in all of the compositional rhetoric theory I have read in the past year, English Literature courses don’t stress writing.  Is that it?  Seriously, I would like to know because I would have thought that the English Department’s acceptance of different “texts” would make Composition (as a program) null and void.  If Literature courses just focused a wee bit more on writing, would that make everyone happy? 

I suppose it’s more complicated than that.

I hated her little example on Puritans, Europeans, and Native Americans.  I detested it, really.  And just the fact that she picked “New England” instead of a marginalized region in the United States/colonies undercut her whole argument for me, but then she suggests studying “other” types of people’s works in relation to the main, canonical Puritans.  This is a better way of studying literature than just representing “the lives of the diverse European immigrant and Native American groups.”  Wow, I’ve never taken a literature course that focused solely on the history of a people.  I’ve never even taken a history class that focused solely on the history of a people. 

Is this work from 1892 or something?  Because then it would be really groundbreaking.

--SW

In TM’s annotated bibliography entry on Steve Westbrook’s "Visual Rhetoric in a culture of Fear: Impediments to Multimedia Production," writing is a constantly evolving process that interacts with media and discourse.  This article supports my love of analyzing visual texts, be they people, billboards, paintings, or advertisements, and I look forward to Project Three.  One sentence really stood out of  T’s annotation: “While Westbrook proves that there are many textbooks and new theories devoted to the use of visual rhetoric, the majority of these tools do not put the student in a producing role, only a consumer role.”  This again relates to one of my earlier posts on Cultural Studies. 

While I think an instructor should be careful not to cross the patronizing line, showing students that everything has a deeper meaning and message is an important part of the writing classroom.  Just as our students are connected through blogs, so too are we connected to media and modern discourse.

I think this acknowledgement of visual texts is especially vital for our female students; mass media is extremely masculine right now, and women comprise the largest set of consumers in this country.  Also, we reflect and are reflected by what we see.  Unfortunately, with the negative body images and sexist portrayals of women that exist in almost every commercial I see, many women are falling prey, hence the dramatic rise in eating disorders, plastic surgery procedures, and the billion dollar cosmetic industries.  Noting the underlying discourse of an ad that features an emaciated, corpse-like woman hocking cell phones, for example, might make a few students go “hmmm.”  I think that “hmmm” would inspire a wonderful paper or blog entry.

 

--SW

My people,

Have any of you come from other universities that had an English program that successfully integrated cultural studies?  I was just wondering because I tend to believe that cultural studies in the English department is actually a pretty, happy ruse that is supposed to make us feel self-satisfied.  We mentioned in our last Practicum that some people have issues with professors, who are stereotyped as bloated, leftist, elitist windbags. Perhaps they/we are.  But are we slumming when we attempt to look at "common" (73) culture?  (That word really bothers me yet gives me a soapbox to stand on.)

I think cultural studies is wonderful...in theory.  I just think that there are a lot of self-satisfied "cultural studies pretenders" as Radway says (87).  I think I have moments of elitist windbagisms, like this blog perhaps.  Why is it, for example, that we have a women's studies department?  Originally, WST, Africana Studies, Chicano/a Studies, *** Studies, Jewish Studies, and many other departments were supposed to cohesively enter others, like English, like History.  A good idea, but I don't think it really happened.  We are eating and marginalizing the other, and we are assuming that we know the "right" way to analyze, say, romance novels a la Radway.  What if a woman just wants to read them for the soft pornographic scenes and not because she needs a moment of peace, eh?  I'm a little scared that I've set myself up as a pillar (the Tower's little cousin) of condescension and affected righteousness in my comp class.  I told my students that they are being manipulated daily by media and language.  I don't disagree with the statement or my right to tell them that, but where is the line between being informative and being a jack***?  How dare I assume that they cannot find their own "meaning."  We have actually analzyed a couple of ads and pictures in my class already, and my students are very sparkly smart when it comes to finding meanings.  Next time, I think I'm going to tell them to analyze a certain ad, for example, without prompting them in any way.  I want to see what happens...

Here's my problem, I suppose: I rarely leave school; when I go out, it's with school people.  I tend to look down on people who can't see Freudian imagery in Batman movies.  This scares me.  I don't mind being a bloated windbag, but I always want to immerse myself in variety and diversity.  I don't want to become one of those scholars who becomes callous and unfeeling because she can no longer connect to humanity. 

***I was looking at Diana George and John Trimbur's article "Cultural Studies and Composition" in Tate's Comp Manual.

--SW

In Mike Rose’s article “The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University,” he says:

“Freshman composition originated in 1874 as a Harvard response to poor writing of upperclassmen, spread rapidly, and became and remained the most consistently required course in the American curriculum.” (548)

That is the crux of the Composition program: making effective writers who will, in turn, perform successfully in their careers.  I feel like comp instructors are a sort of parent who gets blamed for their child’s bad habits.  Bad habits being poor writing skills.  I know it is our job to produce decent, capable, if not good, writers, and that fact scares me.  I don't think students give enough of themselves sometimes...

Rose also mentions on the previous page that “writing is a skill or a tool rather than a discipline” (547).  This sentence is a relatively simple idea, but I’m having a difficult time imparting the sentiment to a couple of my students.  Writing is knowing and knowing is power.  We all know this, but our students do not.  On the first day of class, one of the students stayed afterwards to chat with my co-teacher and me.  I asked her about her major and her goals as a professional, and she told me that she was going into one of the sciences (I can’t remember which one off the top of my head).  She then told me that writing wasn’t important to her future goals; she asked me what I did with writing and language in a tone that suggested capitalism rather than enthusiasm.  Since telling is not working, does anyone have an effective way to “show” students that Rose quote from above?  You would think that their poor grades would be “show” enough.

--SW