Monkeys and Bartholomae

I think David Bartholomae's "Inventing the University" plays into some of what's going on in my class now. As I mentioned before, in my students' textual analysis papers (and more recently, their annotated bibliographies) they are reaching out for that academic voice. And Bartholomae, apparently, would be proud. But I want them to stop. If academic prose is necessary, it can come later, when they've internalized it more completely. But right now I want them to use a style of prose they are comfortable in.

I want to see their ideas, and they muddle their ideas by thinking too much about audience or discourse communities, even if they're not thinking in those words. I am trying to acclimate them to academic discourse, but I don't think they can learn how to differentiate summary from analysis and evaluation if they can't even keep their ideas clear for trying to sound scholarly. The prose style cannot come first.

I've got one student who emails me all the time with questions about the assignments, wanting to change topics, and so on. She's very self-conscious about her I-search topic: monkeys. I think it's a great topic and I have told her she can change it if she wants, but she really doesn't need to. She found good sources for her annotated bibliography and she has a personal interest--she wants a monkey for a pet, like Ross had on Friends.

This student is embarrassed of her desire itself, and more embarrassed to be writing a paper about it. The other students are tackling such topics as AIDS in Africa and alternative fuel sources. She wrote me an email an hour ago because she has writer's block and the first draft of the paper is due Friday. I'm thinking, Err...it's just a draft, and it's not due till Friday. But here's what get's me: "Its really hard to make my reasoning as to why I'm interested in monkeys sound professional."

My advice? Don't. She's working with this assumption that her paper should sound "professional," and as such, she realizes she has nothing to say. She has defeated the I-search, which is supposed to validate her experience, by turning it into an exercise in academic discourse.

See, Bartholomae? I want my students to know that they have something to contribute. I think the best way to acclimate them to the academic discourse community is by validating their style as much as possible. There is a sense in which they remain outsiders if they don't talk the talk, but only if we teach them to value "the talk" more than the ideas behind it. If we encourage them to be comfortable (within the bounds of articulate), then they don't have to feel like their failing simply because they can't make it sound "professional."

Screwing up a single draft

In “Composing Behaviors of One- and Multi-Draft Writers” Muriel Harris talks about multi- and one-draft writers. I've had a lot of thoughts about the implications of this piece. I'm trying to be more open-minded about the idea of starting with clear ideas in mind. I've tended to see these as bad. It's limiting and boring...the writing process is just like filling out a form. But I'm trying to understand that it works for some people. But certainly not everyone.

Failed writing can come from bad single drafting or bad multi-drafting. There's the kind that start with a thesis and don't get anywhere, and the kind that just start off writing and don't get anywhere.

Maybe it's just because I don't understand them, but I find it much harder to fix an essay that was constructed purely with the five-paragraph model in mind than one that starts out just writing. Starting with the thesis, for inexperienced writers, can get you off track fast. They frequently choose entirely too broad a topic, then divide it into three unmanageable subpoints which they treat very generally. These writers need to do more "invention" to fix their papers--something they don't want to do after they've finished the draft. They have to come up with more to say about a narrower topic. Revision means starting over, in a sense.

I see a lot of papers in the writing center that have the opposite problem. They start writing without a thesis and don't quite find one. This is usually easy to fix. Figure out your thesis--every paper has a point, even if you didn't explicitly state it at the end of your introduction. What are you trying to get across to your readers? Read each paragraph and figure out how it relates to your thesis. Why did you include this paragraph? Add a topic sentence to tie the paragraph explicitly to the thesis, or cut the paragraph altogether.

Now maybe this is just me. Maybe I find it easier to help students do what I already do myself. But it's not like I never start with a thesis and subpoints. Frequently I do, I'm just not tied to them. And I usually get there after a little preliminary freewriting. It just seems like it's a lot farther from done when you screw it up that way.

Textual Analysis

I graded my students' critical analysis papers this week. On the whole, they weren't as good as their memoir papers. Most of them had a good handle on the concept of "analysis." But it was the style that was really lacking.

On their memoir papers, most of my students got A's or C's. I thought the lack of B's was weird, but I understand now why. A lot of the difference between an A paper and a B paper is style. It's the way the student makes the paper compelling.

The memoir paper was an opportunity for the students to share an important experience from their own lives. They wanted to tell these stories, and they did what they could to tell them well. But they were clearly less comfortable writing a textual analysis. A couple of them were really impressive. But a significant chunk of them understood the assignment, but didn't like it. They were wordy. They would say things like, "All things considered, in my opinion Carter appears to be using his past as a former president to kind of boost his other arguments," hiding behind their words.

I am looking forward to the rest of the semester, now. I was concerned before, about all the research and stuff, but I'm not anymore. My students submitted topic proposals to me yesterday, and I read through them. Some of the topics would be hard to write a good position paper on. A couple of students wanted to talk about legalizing marijuana, another wanted to talk about video game violence, another wanted to talk about gun control. But I'm less concerned than I might otherwise be.

These are topics they want to learn about. One student said in his proposal that his "topic" was more of a question. I said, That's great. Having a question to research is a lot better than a topic. Then you're actually looking for something. But even my students who gave me "topics" probably really do have a question in mind, even if they didn't articulate it. So they might need guidance, but they're not starting their papers yet. I told a lot of them that they should just start their research with the broad topic in mind, and see if something comes up that they would want to focus on in their I-search papers.

I didn't think I was going to like the idea of an I-search paper followed by a source-supported position paper. But I do. I felt a lot more okay with my students taking on topics that have been overdone, because it forces them to take the informative approach first--to learn about the topic first. Then hopefully they'll have the background necessary to write well on a position (especially if I help them narrow it down to something manageable).

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.