Excepting the creepy racist poem

Of the articles we’ve read this semesters, Performing Writing, Performing Literacy, was the most useful to me.

The idea of writing as performance is one that I have employed both as a teacher and as a writer for nearly twenty years.

For large chunks of my creative work, my method of composition is based in the aural. I imagine a story being told to a listener. The way in which I tell the story shifts based on who the listener is. Sometimes if I’m dissatisfied with the story’s language or plot I’ll attempt to re-envision the tale by giving it a different initial audience

This is also why I like to incorporate speaking exercises in first year writing. If students are speaking to an audience of classmates— who I have occasionally asked to role play as well, one day, the are loyal readers of Daily Kos, the next staunch members of the NRA—the student realizes the importance of both style and arrangement in composition.

I have also set up exercises in which students watch political speech and try to figure out which audience is being targeted —supporters, swing voters or likely voters for the candidate.

I'm planning to send this article to a friend of mine who's teaching a pedagogy of composition course in the fall.

Insert Catchy Title Here

I’m probably not the first person one would expect to complain about liberal bias in the classroom and I’m not that sure that’s what I’m planning to do here. Don’t believe me? Then by all means accept my invite to join a protest of Rudi Giuliani as the commence speaker at the University of Southern Mississippi May 15graduation in Hattiesburg.
What I do want to discus here in Scorczewski’s tone deafness to the politics of what she’s teaching. It strikes me that for all her talk of empowering the students and overthrowing the dominant culture (ok maybe not overthrowing, but you get my drift— AH! CLICHÉ! CLICHÉ! RUN FOR THE HILLLS) she stills seems on some level wedded to the receptacle model of education. I’ve got the good ideas and you students—when you’re smart enough to see what’s up—will get them. And I don’t just mean the language of the academy here. It’s political beliefs. Now, that said she does speak to this on p233. (She regained a bit of ethos for me here after she lost it utterly by referring to Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” as an essay. It’s not an essay. It’s an excerpt from the NOVEL Lucy.) “”My relief revealed my entrenchment in another ideology, an institutional ideology so prevalent I perceived it as common sense.”

While not about cliché per se: I remember in an early class you suggested that we look for where the writing breaks down in student papers. This is what they’re trying to say. I’m still doing this and the jury still feels out. My own instinct in teaching creative writing is to tell students to look for where the language soars. This is their best material. This is what they want to try to develop.

Multi-Modal, My Aunt Fanny

(or Why I Think This is the Worst Idea Since Sliced Poison)

While I spent a meaningful amount of time as a technology executive as well as executive editor for a trade publication covering technology in finance, I’m still a bit of a Luddite when it comes to writing pedagogy. Now, don’t get me wrong. I love having computers in every classroom and having access to classrooms where each student can use a computer. I even use the MS Word comment feature to grade papers. But when it comes to the work being generate by the students themselves. I’m OLD SKOOL! I want to see 12 Times New Roman on 8.5 by 11 with 1 inch margins and a running head. Unless the essay is about a photo, or a chart or graph are truly helpful to communicate, no thank you, please.

So maybe I’m not the audience Takayoshi and Selfe had in mind for Chapter One Of Thinking About Multimodiality. I am a resistant audience. I’m twisting the rhetorical triangle into a parallelogram waiting until page nine when they finally speak to my primary concern: When you add a focus on multimodiality to a composition class, what do you give up?

Yeah. See that’s the nagging question that kept me from engaging with their argument. And what do they have to say on this: “We believe that teaching students to make rhetorically-based use of video, still images….can actually help them better understand the affordances of written language.” Well, pardon me for calling BS, but I wasn’t aware the composition studies was so close to theology that an “I believe” statement could be employed in place of evidence. Where are their rigorous studies performed with various groups/types of students performed over long periods of time tracking how well students learned in a composition class?

I applauded when Larry Ellison banned PowerPoint from Oracle as a colossal time waster. ( I had done the same at the PR firm where I was managing director the same month.) The joint chiefs of staff also saw an issue with people using all their time and bandwidth fooling with bells and whistles instead of communicating facts.