This fall semester I'm taking my degree's capstone. Today we were supposed to meet in our writing groups to discuss our current projects, but I was the only person in my group. So, I talked with my professor instead.
Our first assignment for the semester is based on revision. We picked something we've written in the past that was, at one point, deemed "finished" and then revised it. While discussing this assignment and the transition into something new, my professor half asked/half deducted I'm the kind of writer who edits as I go.
I kind of am, though I try not to be. Very much so in my non-fiction, which is all he's read from me. I explained in my fiction writing, I can at least write a chapter before I go back to edit. I do that because, as I'm editing, the plot develops and the story grows.
And he said;
"Well that's not editing, that's revision."
It's like shackles fell free. The constant mentalities of "edit as you go" vs "write it all and then edit" always felt too strict. Too lacking in nuance.
But this? This idea that story is tied to revision and revision is inventive? This is flexible. This understands that I need to dig through words to find my path, and that I can't leave whatever vein I discover along the way un-mined lest I forget. Or, what I've found most frustrating when trying to "write it all then edit," all of the writing that ends up completely discarded because the story changed so much.
I think it's easy to forget that there's a difference between this inventive discovery and truly editing as you go: aka trying to get the wording perfect the first time.
Revision is part of development. Editing is refinement. Both need to happen.
001 // Two-Year College Writing Studies: Rationale and Praxis for Just Teaching, edited by Darin Jensen and Brett Griffiths.
Hi, friends. If you're reading this, you've stumbled upon the little blog I made to keep track of my thoughts during the reading year of my PhD in English Rhetoric and Composition. The plan is for there to be one hundred posts, each one corresponding to a book on my reading list. I'm starting this in January of 2024, and I hope to take my exams in September, so in theory, this project will be done by then. There's no real end goal with this beyond recording my own reading process, but it would be neat if anyone finds this interesting enough to follow along.
One of my primary areas on my reading list is focused on writing pedagogy at access-oriented institutions, so where better to start than Darin Jensen and Brett Griffiths' new book, Two-Year College Writing Studies: Rationale and Praxis for Just Teaching (Utah State University Press, 2023)? I was really hyped for this book to come out, and after racing through it in just a few days, I can confidently say that it does not disappoint. This feels very much like a "greatest hits" compilation from some of the most influential voices in the two-year college writing studies world right now. It's got Patrick Sullivan talking about the democratic mandate of community colleges, Emily Suh talking about supporting Gen. 1 learners' identities in the first-year writing classroom, Joanne Baird Giordano and Holly Hassel talking about the precarity of two-year college writing programs in an era of institutional and legislative austerity, and so much more, including the editors' introduction and conclusion, which are absolute bangers—the book is worth the cost of admission for these sections alone.
The writing is easy to read (no overwrought academic prose here!), even if you're not well-versed in the topics at hand, and there's a nice balance of theory and practical application (or rationale and praxis, as the title puts it) in each chapter. If I had read this book before my first term teaching at a community college, I would have found my footing a lot sooner, and even now, four years into it, I found something useful in every chapter. Even if you're not a two-year college person, I think you'd find a lot of value in this compact and accessible volume.
I have a feeling I'll be missing this book in a month or two when I'm wading through some dense theoretical texts. For now, I'm sticking with the friendly faces are recent books—Shane A. Wood's Teachers Talking Writing: Perspectives on Places, Pedagogies, and Programs is up next.
My favorite article about writing was published in Bird by Bird an edited collected written by Anne Lamott. "Shitty first draft" changed my life.
I know, as an academic, I write A LOT. But I still approach most writings - this post included - as shitty first drafts. I need to write/type/think through my ideas to see where I end up. I need time to mull while I type. I need time to see what the writing looks like in the space. I need time to consider the audience as I'm developing the text - including the language, the space, the design (are you seeing discourse community, information architecture, and user experience connected to audience - but also separate in my thinking)
This also takes the pressure off. I don't need to be perfect - I need time to think. Then revision can step in and help shape, again with all the considerations for context, words, language, audience, discourse community, purpose, information architecture, user experience, culture, and text. Highly recommend writing the shitty first draft as the best way to build strong, effective revision practices
As a writing teacher, I have a lot of thoughts about Chat GPT that are still percolating, such as how Chat GPT and other automated writing systems can be used in classrooms as writing tools. But there are several theses that I feel reasonably strongly about.
At this point, submitting student work to AI detectors violates your students' intellectual property rights. This is also true for plagiarism detectors like Turnitin. Students have a right to their own intellectual property, and submitting it to AI detectors and Turnitin means they may lose intellectual property rights, their work may be reproduced without their consent, and it may be used for research purposes without their informed consent. All of this is cop behavior, in my opinion.
Making students do in-class, timed writings under pressure instead of take home essays will not make them better writers. There is tons of research in writing studies to support this (I can link to it if people are interested), and we've known this for a long time. But for literally fifty years, writing studies has almost unanimously agreed that the way to support the development of student writing is to teach writing as a process wherein drafting, seeking feedback, and revision are the priorities. This also has the added benefit of increasing accountability because students must demonstrate sustained focus on a single project.
One of the best ways to discourage AI-generated writing is to give students prompts where they have to engage with the text in a very specific, localized, and/or personal ways. Changing prompts from vague analysis disconnected from their daily lives to engaged, personal prompts will challenge your students intellectually and creatively. Instead of giving vague prompts, find ways to connect prompts to the city you're in, the communities your students are from, the local people in your world. This is possible across all disciplines; it just takes more creativity and front-end labor on the teacher's part.
When I've talked to my students about Chat GPT and whether they would use it, most of them said they wouldn't. I take this with a grain of salt because I am a teacher and there is a power dynamic there that is difficult to cross--they wouldn't want to say anything that would make me suspicious of them. But when I asked it in a more hypothetical way, like "What is a hypothetical situation in which you would use Chat GPT?" most of them said they would use it if they ran out of time, if they didn't care about the assignment, or if they were just lazy. Here's the thing--really lazy students won't put in a lot of effort anyways, so that category doesn't matter as much. But one way you can work around the idea of students running out of time is by giving them more time to do assignments and enforcing check-ins like different phases of draft work. Part of teaching writing well is giving students opportunities to learn and practice time management, which is a very difficult skill. And one way you can work around students not caring is by either giving more engaged, personal, and localized prompts or by having students create their own prompts. There is a lot of research in literacy studies that shows that giving students choices improves their engagement.
I'm still thinking about a lot of other things related to Chat GPT and automated writing systems, but this is where I'm currently at. I'm still reading the research in the field as it comes out, as well as waiting for university and programmatic policy changes. But what I've come to is that if you don't want students using Chat GPT and automated writing systems, then you can't treat students like their writing is automated and disposable. Making your class meaningful is a huge step toward supporting students as they write and make meaning in the world.
In 2009 I found myself in my late 20s, broke, and trying to get a job in the teeth of the post-financial crisis employment depression. I had applied to hundreds of positions, entry-level and low-paying and low status, and yet couldn’t get hired to save my life. I was living in my sister’s house and driving an old beat-down Jeep Wrangler I couldn’t afford to gas up. I would take odd jobs on Craigslist, scraping paint off of houses or working product demos at the convention center where liquor store owners were sold on alcohol that turns your tongue blue. My early-to-mid 20s girlfriend and I had gone through an endless series of falling apart and getting back together again, and it was finally over. I was hungry for any kind of job that could bring in, perhaps, $30,000 a year, which would have changed my life. Couldn’t get one. It seemed that a BA in English and Philosophy from an uncompetitive state university and a resume filled with lifeguarding and dog-walking wasn’t going to cut it. So I went to grad school.
In 2009 I found myself in my late 20s, broke, and trying to get a job in the teeth of the post-financial crisis employment depression. I had applied to hundreds of positions, entry-level and low-paying and low status, and yet couldn’t get hired to save my life. I was living in my sister’s house and driving an old beat-down Jeep Wrangler I couldn’t afford to gas up. I would take odd jobs on Craigslist, scraping paint off of houses or working product demos at the convention center where liquor store owners were sold on alcohol that turns your tongue blue. My early-to-mid 20s girlfriend and I had gone through an endless series of falling apart and getting back together again, and it was finally over. I was hungry for any kind of job that could bring in, perhaps, $30,000 a year, which would have changed my life. Couldn’t get one. It seemed that a BA in English and Philosophy from an uncompetitive state university and a resume filled with lifeguarding and dog-walking wasn’t going to cut it. So I went to grad school.
…
Anyway, the writing department was in Roosevelt hall, the type of moldering old liberal arts building I’ve known and loved my whole life. Writing studies also goes by another name, rhetoric & composition, and I think that’s more popular in-field. (I will use the two terms interchangeably here.) The “rhetoric” included invites a lot of derision, but then rhetoric is merely the study of persuasion, and it had been championed in an effort to develop a subject matter for the field and a methodology for teaching writing, first through reference to the ancient Greeks and later through an ever-expanding definition that drew in more and more things. I prefer the name writing studies because I like writing, but the distinction never mattered much to me. And, anyway, no matter which one I used, insults followed; people online who disliked something I wrote would always use my field to mock me, a shorthand for all of the arguments they were too dim to make. But I always thought that the value of writing and argument, and the need to study them, was self-evident.
You may find it weird that there would be writing-specific programs and departments in American colleges and universities. Isn’t that English’s job? Well, no, at least not according to a great many English professors. English profs are into the subject matter of their field, man - which is to say, Lacanian readings of the phallic imaginary, queering the Young Adult canon, and why the comma is a tool of white supremacy. Teaching college students to write papers has always been seen, by a large chunk of the world’s English professors, as a kind of academic scutwork best fobbed off on the academy’s hordes of contingent and powerless labor. In the late 20th century some tenure track professors disagreed, though. They were mostly at large state universities in the middle of the country, far from the prestige and power of elite academia. They cared about student writing, took it seriously, and wanted to receive professional credit for caring about it. But English faculty would not give it to them, fearing that rewarding writing pedagogy work would devalue their field. It was from here that rhetoric and composition was born. A small but growing movement of faculty worked to break writing away from the broader umbrella of English, whether in new departments or programs within English departments. They could evaluate each other’s scholarship for hiring and tenure decisions, form their own professional associations, and set curricula for writing programs, outside of the negative influence of English professors and their biases.
…
The split between English and writing programs and departments, at some places, is very real. When I was finishing my MA at URI, I found myself in a truly awkward bind: both the English and Writing departments were demanding that I submit my graduation materials to them and not to the other. (I mean, literally, “don’t submit this form to the grad director over there.”) I explained to each of them that I was being put in an impossible position, but could not force them to put their heads together sufficiently to give me an out. I had received my offer to go to Purdue with a tuition waiver and stipend and needed to collect my degree; the situation seemed a little Kafkaesque. It took going to the dean of the graduate school, which made me feel like a snitch, to force them to allow me to graduate. That is the level of animosity that’s present at some schools.
…
But that was the origin story. What is writing studies/rhetoric & composition, really? You can get a good sense of what a field values by asking what graduate work it rewards. Who’s getting the awards at conferences? What dissertations are resulting in TT hires? Back when I was grad school for rhetoric & composition, it was, like, the rhetoric of Dr. Who, endless arguments that “playing video games is a form of writing,” papers about how white cishet people take up too much space in academia and need to step back written by white cishet people, tired screeds about how comic books are just as deep and real and also less racist and more cool and smarterer than the canon, dissertation-length case studies of three Appalachian women’s journaling habits that somehow could render sweeping generalizations about literacy, treatises on business writing that curiously had nothing to say about corporate practices and everything to say about Andrew Pickering’s theory of “the mangle,” lots of disdain for the concern of teaching students how to arrange sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into papers, relentless insistence that any attempts to correct a student’s English is the hand of imperialism, “ethnographies of place” that entailed the author spending four total hours in the library and writing about whatever they fancied there, and sundry other topics that could function as parodies of useless academic writing.
You might wonder what unites all of these projects. The answer is nothing, nothing at all. One of the profound downsides of including rhetoric within the definition of the discipline is that rhetoric is so capacious a concept that it can encapsulate anything, and a field about anything is not a field. “Everything is rhetoric,” people would intone gravely in my classes. I quickly learned not to point out that a concept that includes everything means nothing; No one was listening. This had consequences not just for the research of grad students but for how they taught their classes. I cannot tell you how many of my peers teaching freshman writing had excised out almost all actual writing from their syllabuses, replacing it with stuff like web design and podcasts and, literally, playing board games in class. They loved that shit. And they were rewarded for it: the last thing you wanted to do was to go on a job interview with boring-ass papers on your syllabus. I had multiple conversations at conferences where fellow grad students would brag about how few pages they required in their classes, often finding every loophole in their syllabus guidelines to replace writing papers with something cooler, something that seemed more fresh to the eyes of a faculty committee looking for a hip new member of their department.
It never seemed to occur to them that abandoning the specific purview of their classes was dangerous, that antagonistic forces were always looking for excuses to slash humanities funding, and that doing podcasts and web design in your writing classes looks less like innovation to college administrators and more like redundancy. They pay people with the appropriate degrees to teach audio editing and web design, and they will never see writing instructors teaching the same subjects as fiscally responsible, in part because writing instructors simply aren’t as good at those things.
…
You can’t generate a shared commitment to creating knowledge when no one has any interest in a common set of academic concerns. I once saw a guy give a presentation about his dissertation research at a conference. He had been looking at the archives of dissertations from the field for the past several decades. Dissertations would be tagged with subject markers for indexing in databases - mine was tagged with terms like “writing assessment” and “standardized testing,” for example. What he had found was that the median number of tags that dissertations in the field shared with other dissertations was one. That is to say, at least half of the dissertations in his large dataset shared one or zero tags with any other dissertation in the database. It’s difficult to imagine this happening in almost any other field. Which academic disciplines are so varied that none of their graduate students are studying the same things?
No, there was nothing that you could say was definitively in the field, but there were things that you could definitively say were not, and that was everything that people from outside of the field would assume we cared about. That might include grammar, crafting sentences, formal elements of effective lab reports, writing effective transitions, how to research in the library more efficiently, how to write with style, how to develop a personal voice, genre conventions of writing for different majors, and more. As I’ve suggested, this stuff was considered passe, when it wasn’t actively being called racist/sexist/etc. I’m not just speaking offhand, here. Some in the field had been describing how it had changed, for the worse. Wendy Bishop lamented the demise of the writer-teacher and pedagogical focus of rhetoric & composition in 1999, Richard Haswell lamented “[National Council of Teachers of English]/[Conference on College Composition and Communication]’s Recent War on Scholarship,” meaning empirical research, in 2005, and in 2007 Susan Peck MacDonald lamented “the Erasure of Language,” that is, the focus on the actual text and language in student writing. Each of these pieces was regarded as stodgy and old-fashioned by some I knew in the field at the time, when they were engaged with at all. I wish I could share more recent articles of this type but, well, there is no one left to lament.
Here is an example of the kind of work that was done in the field that was most directly related to writing as traditionally conceived:
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This all came to a head in 2015, where at the field’s premier conference, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, a keynote address was given by Adam Banks, I believe then of the University of Kentucky. Banks’s address was a bald statement of everything I’ve been laying out here: to expect students to achieve mastery of writing as traditionally conceived - the ability to use written text as a means to communicate ideas and arguments in a variety of genres and modes - was terribly old fashioned. “The essay” was Banks’s particular target, and he saw it as an outmoded and limiting form that should be deprecated in favor of, well, all manner of wooly substitutes that were more likely to thrill the kind of people who still talked about wikis as a revolutionary new technology. This was the championing of “multimodal composition” that had dogged my every turn in grad school, the insistence that everything was writing but writing, that all forms of communication were valuable except for the form where you put words on a page. I found the speech, personally, to be bizarre in that it advocated denigrating writing itself as some bold new perspective, when that was the dominant view in the field already and had been for some time. But no matter: the speech was a hit. The crowd at the conference went wild. The field’s online spaces redoubled their dedication to dismissing writing as traditionally conceived as a bigoted anachronism. They wanted the world to know that their writing programs had no use for writing.
I couldn’t believe that all of these people with so many degrees failed to grasp the risk inherent to this attitude. I wanted to grab them all by the lapels and ask them: what do you think the neoliberal university is going to do, once you’ve convinced them that writing papers no longer has any value to students? Do you think they’re going to say “oh, well then, please continue to take our funding so you can dick around doing various other creative work that our graphic design, computer science, music, and various other departments already do better than you do”? This is why I say writing studies is the field that hates itself: its members never stop passionately advocating for the irrelevancy of what they are paid to study and teach. Their naivete and failure to understand the precarity of the modern university seem unfathomable. And yet Banks’s presentation was treated as a religious experience. The Council of Writing Program Administrators listserv, an email forum for people who run writing programs, lit up with celebration at this argument that their programs served no unique function. They were all agreed: it was time for the essay (and the essay was understood to encompass all of writing as traditionally defined) to die. Academics, as a species, are desperately afraid of appearing behind the times, and writing is 6500 years old.
A typical response to my fears has been to say, “I didn’t sign up to study how to teach students to write research papers.” To which I would say, that’s what the people who write your paychecks thought they were signing you up for.
…
Why? What happened? Why did a field that still dutifully trotted out its origin story as a place where student writing mattered have so little regard for student writing? I think, more than anything, that it’s a vestige of the culture of the American university. It’s long been lamented that our system places the value of research far and above the value of teaching. The more prestigious (and generally well-paying) a faculty position you can get, the less teaching you do; the more seniority you gain, the more teaching you can avoid, and the true academic stars barely teach at all. There are teaching colleges where pedagogy is prized, but they are universally understood to be lower status than research programs. It’s no wonder then that pedagogical research, in almost any discipline, is little valued.
More than that, though, writing studies is a product of the humanities of the past half-century. And the humanities have relentlessly advanced an ethos where research is only serious when it’s abstruse and complex. If just anyone could understand our papers, how could they be genuinely scholarly? And here again rhet/comp’s contested professional status was consequential. There was often a sense of inferiority based on writing classes being seen as “service” classes. (Lord knows we wouldn't want to perform a service for our universities, would we?) Because they had broken away from English, the discipline most dedicated to disappearing up its own ass with incomprehensible jargon and abstraction piled on top of abstraction, I think scholars in rhet/comp felt pressure to prove that their work was deep too, that it too was sophisticated and complex, that theirs was serious scholarship. Writing articles about best practices for leading students through the research paper process would be a boon to the adjuncts and grad students who actually teach our college students how to write, but they don’t get you invited to conferences where someone will deliver a ponderous recitation of your accomplishments when introducing you. And the dictates of professionalization mandate that grad students looking for a tenure track job have a dissertation on a “hot” topic, rather than on a useful one.
…
Obscure research is one thing; a failure to support teaching is another. A truly toxic dynamic for our university system is that the conferences and journals and organizations are run by the tenured, but the tenured don’t teach low-level classes. In some writing programs at research universities tenured faculty don’t teach undergraduate writing at all. (I in fact know of several professors who had to go to great lengths within their institutions to be allowed to continue teaching basic or freshman writing.) Instead, freshman writing is dominantly taught by adjuncts and, at schools with graduate programs, grad students. Again, the actual brick-and-mortar work of teaching students how to write sentences, paragraphs, and papers is essential to the finances of programs that run writing classes but disdained by many of the faculty who are funded by such classes. But the work continues, and freshman writing is sometimes cited as the single most commonly-taught class in the American university system. The people who teach such classes are typically overworked and undertrained, and they could use better insights into the process. More than once at conferences I met adjunct instructors and professors at teaching colleges who ruefully pointed out that the large conference programs contained not a single presentation that would be of use to people looking to teach actual writing. But the tenured at research universities don’t teach those classes, and the contingent labor that does lacks the voice to induce change.
You might read all of this and assume that I think poorly of the people I studied under and went to school with, but that’s not at all the case. The faculty in my programs at URI and Purdue were almost universally bright, committed, and levelheaded, and most of my grad student peers were as well. I met many intelligent and thoughtful people from other schools. That’s part of what makes this all so frustrating; it became clear to me that most of the people in an academic discipline could be sensible while the collective hurled itself off of a cliff, thanks to the bad incentives and distorted cultures of academia generally and the field specifically. But getting people even to consider these issues - how the departments and programs that made up the field were threatened by refusing to think strategically as part of larger bureaucracies, and how disdaining writing in its traditional forms hurts our students, denying them a set of skills that could be immensely useful for their lives - seems impossible. The walls are too high.
This is very random but it was just kind of inspired to write about it because I think it's something important to keep in mind, especially in school. A lot of teachers/professors won't bring up cOntroVErsiaL SubJeCTs in class discussions because they don't want to start arguments or risk their job. I get that. That's completely valid.
My writing studies prof said something that has been eating a hole through my brain, though. "Everyone has a right to their own opinion, but some opinions are more valid than others." Like yes, obviously everyone can have their own opinions and we all know this. But to hear a professor say out loud, in class, that we are not obligated to give air-time to people with dangerous, unfounded opinions - to people like antivaxxers, to name an example we talked about.
I just- this class was so interesting and stretched so far beyond the 'writing' part of writing studies. It blew my mind to have a professor say something like this to us. You can't change people's opinions, and everyone is allowed to have one. But that doesn't make harmful, baseless claims as valid as opinions that have factual backing or don't harm other people. And I think that's so important to keep in mind. I'm NOT obligated to 'hear people out' because their opinion is just not valid. I have no obligation to listen or entertain baseless claims. And a professor said this, during classtime.
Everyone has a right to their own opinion, but some opinions are more valid than others.
