Textual Ownership

What I really wanted to talk about concerning Andrea Abernethy Lunsford's “Feminism, Rhetoric, and the Politics of Textual Ownership” was Wikipedia. I spent my free time this summer editing Wikipedia. Obviously I no longer have such time, so that’s firmly in the past. Of course, the word “editor” sounds authoritative to some people, but Wikipedia is, after all, “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.”

My contributions to Wikipedia put me in a position to actually think about copyright, fair use, and ownership of my words and ideas.

On Wikipedia, by editing, you license your contributions to be used in any way that falls under the GNU Free Documentation License. Whoever uses the content is required to give credit to the contributors, but the contributors don’t have a say in how the content is used, except that it has to stay under the same license.

I like this arrangement. The information is free, but attributed.

I contributed substantially to the article on Christina Hoff Sommers and was involved in working out some issues regarding certain classifications of her stance. We worked out a way to express the fact that CHS is not usually considered a mainstream feminist, but reappropriates the term for herself.

Then I visited the German Wikipedia. Quotations that I had supplied and sentences I had constructed had been carried over and translated. That’s great, that’s what Wikipedia is about, sharing information. But the person who did this gave no attribution to those of us who had worked on it at the English Wikipedia. Conventionally, this is covered by a simple edit summary that says information is being merged from another article, so a person can go back and look at the attribution page for the other article. But no such edit summary was given. As such, it appeared as if this person had written the paragraphs without help.

That’s what I care about. I want information to be free. I want fair use to be simple. But I want attribution to be maintained. If it’s not your words, not your ideas, I want to know whose they are. I don’t think Lunsford is as strict on this as I am. She views every work as collaborative, every idea as a reflection of culture as much as individual. But as an individualist, I’m taking my stand.

Teacher as Audience

After reading Dr. Cadle's blog entry, I started to think about the role my students may have cast me in as a reader of their papers. I've tried to give them a lot of cues. I explicitly downplay technical concerns. It's true that they are going to need to pay attention to formatting and grammar issues to do well in other classes. But those aren't really too hard to master. They really don't need too much of my help with that.

I tell them I want them to make a point, to tell me something in their papers, no matter what kind of paper it is. Any piece of writing has to have a point (whether or not it has a thesis statement at the end of the first paragraph), or else the reader will simply say, "So what?" Everything else is simply a matter of how well they make their point. Does the paper lack focus? Then it can't make its point. Is the language too general or loaded with private meanings? Then the reader can't figure out where the paper is trying to take them.

I don't worry about plagiarism. I just don't. I'm not the kind of person who burdens myself with other people's ethical choices. When a student emails me to let me know they have a migraine and won't be coming to class, my skeptical side realizes that "migraine" could be code for "hangover". When they have to miss for a "family emergency", I know that it could be totally made up. But so what? They're only hurting themselves if they're lying. I'm not qualified to judge anything but the effectiveness of my students' writing. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who gives me advance notice about missing class has the opportunity to do make-up work. It's not like many people actually ask about make-up work, and it's usually easier just to come to class anyway.

When it comes to plagiarism, yeah, it has to be addressed. We worked on quotation integration Wednesday, and several worksheets they turned in had "paraphrases" which used the original authors actual words, just in a slightly different order. So we talked about what it means to use your own words. But I'm of the opinion that labelling every form of academic dishonesty as "plagiarism" is counter-productive. Hiding differences where they exist isn't a great idea. There's a difference between having trouble putting something in your own words and ripping off paragraphs out of laziness or desparation.

I simply want to make sure they're not desparate. I want them to feel like I want to hear what they have to say. There's got to be a benefit to having a discussion-oriented class, where the instructor shows interest in each student's opinion. There's got to be a benefit to working with students, not trying to scare them into writing good papers. I know some of my fellow TA's take that strategy. We want to make the students know they can't pull one over on us. Sure, I remind them that I can plainly see what font they're using, and biggerizing it won't magically develop their argument more fully. But I don't try to give them the impression that college writing is going to be a painful transition--they have a whole semester to learn. I don't try to make them feel like they have to pull off something really impressive just to get my approval. I don't want my students to feel like I think they're inadequate. I just want them to show me some good work, and we'll work a little harder when they aren't succeeding.

The Existence of an Audience Matters...

"Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked" by Lunsford and Ede is one of the more intuitive perspectives I've seen on audience. Speaking only for my own intuition, of course. Usually when people talk about audience, they talk about teaching students to consider whom they're addressing--"Audience Addressed". Assignment sheets (such as those we got from the 2nd years) specify an audience.

Ede and Lunsford (they like to switch their names around, so I oblige) refer to Russell Long, who doubts how effective such methods are. I probably side with Long. It depends on the assignment. If I ask my students to write a textual analysis, what kind of audience should I propose? Ethically, I find it's best to consider myself their audience. Because I'm grading their paper, and no matter how I construct the assignment, in the end, they have to write to me. I might question their argument's effectiveness on people of varying ideologies, but I will not pretend to stand in as a reader other than myself. I can only offer suggestions about how it might be read by others.

Yes, audience matters. I think Linda Flower makes that point best in "Writer-Based Prose." It's important to recognize that we have an audience. In the Writing Center, I frequently tell clients to remember, "Readers are stupid." Actually, it's not that readers are stupid--it's that they're ignorant. They are ignorant of the processes going on in the writer's mind. What looks clear to the writer is not so clear to someone else. So remembering that you have an audience matters.

But I wouldn't overemphasize analyzing one's audience. Like Long says, I wouldn't get bogged down in trying to pin down their socioeconomic status or race. It depends on the piece's purpose. If it's a persuasive piece, then crap yeah. You have to know who you're trying to persuade. And even an informative piece has to decide what the readers already know. These are the audience addressed. But Walter Ong is right in that we always have to fictionalize/invoke an audience. He's simply wrong in thinking that it's a peculiarly written phenomenon. For one thing, we have to pick an audience. Our audience addressed by a persuasive piece might be very large, but we know we can't persuade everyone, and so we invoke a particular segment of that audience. We also give our audience cues to know how we expect them to be listening. Particularly in creative pieces, we write what we want for whom we want, and who cares who we're actually addressing?

Questioning the Oppressive Regime

Paulo Friere says that "[no] oppressive order could permit the oppressed to begin to question: Why?" (Pedagogy of the Oppressed 86). That is, a problem-posing method will always be liberating.

I'm not sure this is true. I'm not sure that we can't encourage students to question according to a particular philosophy. I mean, doesn't it matter a whole lot what questions you ask? Couldn't you pose leading questions?

And, really, is problem-posing universal? Couldn't we be imposing this method on students? Friere dismisses this idea easily. I think he's naive here. I'm just not convinced that this process can't be inauthentic, can't be forcing students into a particular way of thinking.

If I smell that my teacher is trying to liberate me, I resist them. Is it fair of them to be working from the mindset that I need to be liberated? Sure, Friere doesn't want them to force me. But I'm not talking about forcing me, I'm talking about being preoccupied with me supposedly being blind to the culture that oppresses me. Acting like I can't take responsibility for myself.

Here's what I don't like about this philsophy. It assumes that what the teacher has to offer is an enlightened perspective. That I, a grad student, owe to my students not my knowledge of how to construct an effective essay, not my knowledge even of MLA formatting. What I owe to them is the fact that I can help them break free of the culture bonds that hold them back.

Sure, Friere. That's better than thinking I actually know more about writing than they do.

Immunity Preserves the Self

Charles Paine calls this book "The Resistant Writer" because he sees writing courses being taught to build students' immunity against bad arguments. When we teach argumentation, we often teach it from the Aristotelian view, explaining the concepts of logos, ethos, and pathos. This angle "demystifies" rhetoric. We can analyze it and deprive it of its power--show the students what an emotional appeal looks like so they won't fall for it.

Paine contrasts this with a Ciceronian model. The Ciceronian model is a positive model of rhetoric, which concentrates on how to persuade through language. It encourages social involvement.

This is the key to Paine's argument. Aristotle's model teaches us to distance ourselves, while Cicero's asks us to join in. This distance is intended to protect our selves from outside influence. We want to preserve ourselves exactly as we are. This is likened to a modern (opposed to post-modern) view of immunity. A modern view of immunity has the physical self being protected by the immune system, keeping out invaders.

But this view of the immune system doesn't work--that's not what defines a healthy immune system. To be healthy, we don't need an immune system to fight off all invaders, we need an immune system that responds appropriately to threats and non-threats. An overactive immune system is just as dangerous as an underactive immune system.

Correspondingly, too strong a defense against bad rhetoric may be just as bad as too weak a defense. We do our students harm if we make them too ready to reject ideas--too firm in keeping their identities untroubled by outside influences.

Thinking back to taking the Self and Free Will as an undergrad, these aren't unfamiliar concepts, though their application to composition theory is new to me. In Free Will, there was a bit of controversy about what the "self" was--am I some kind of mystical agent/mind/soul who is above causation, simply acting out my will on the physical world (see Roderick Chisholm)? Am I constituted of my actions (see Robert Kane)? Is my self the parts of my personality that I endorse (see Harry Frankfurt)?

I really always felt that these models, all of them, made my self less than I was. I feel myself to be everything--all my actions, all my beliefs, all my desires. Even the little things, like being in the mood for a Dr Pepper. It takes everything to be me.

This conception of the self (which is not so much common) means that my self is constantly changing. I'm not the me I was yesterday, or even five minutes ago. This forces me to believe in degrees of identity. Some of my beliefs, for instance, are not fundamental to my sense of self. When I found out my orange strawberry banana juice was mostly actually apple juice, there was a sense in which I changed, but not in a major way. I still interact with the world mostly the same as I did before, except where juice cocktails are concerned.

But some beliefs and desires are more basic. An Amy who wore makeup, for instance, though it seems like a small thing, would probably require a pretty different foundation...a different way of thinking about myself or human beauty.

If we think of the self as fluid, if we think of parts of ourselves as more important than others, then we don't have to be so scared of influence. We shouldn't be scared of change, because we change all the time. The parts of us that are easily influenced aren't the important parts anyway.

So I think it may be as much about our approach to the "self" as it is our approach to rhetoric. And I think maybe Paine is saying this, but I lost him when he got into the practical problems of building up resistance by exposing the students to new ideas.

Bow to the Power Structures

Because if James Britton can quote himself, so can I.

It's hard for me to believe that no one else finds it problematic that the existent power structures should simply be accepted, and we should play by their rules simply because they are in a position to make the rules.

It's also hard for me to believe this argument flies with eighteen year olds.

For Wednesday, my class read Lunsford's excerpt from Mike Rose's Lives on the Boundary. We talked about the idea of a canon of literature, "Great Books." The class was split on the concept, but many people thought a canon was stupid. That reading was inherently educational, and there was no need to read specific books.

I asked what they thought about the argument addressed in the piece that if we don't teach the underprivileged Shakespeare, we're withholding from them a key to power in our culture.

The class was unmoved. Even the supporters of canonical literature didn't jump on the "key to power" bandwagon.

I'm not sure what Murray or expressivists would say about grading on format...they might use Dr. Cadle's model and ask for a revision. But I have trouble seeing a hardcore expressivist requiring a specific format for papers, and I wonder how they explain to their students that they want most of all to hear their voice--just as long as they put their name in the right place on the page. I owe it to my students to make sure they are familiar with MLA format and where to find formatting guidelines, so they can use them in the future. When someone else tells them they need to use it because it's the power structure already in place.

Certainly students can express themselves within the bounds of MLA format. Just as Shakespeare could express himself within the much more restrictive bounds of a sonnet. I don't question that. I question why we ask them to.