Last week, I wrote about women’s attempts to get into the act where speaking was concerned, and about how colleges tried to prevent that from happening. As odd as it seems from our perspective today, those efforts tied in to the growing prominence of writing and the decline in power of speaking. (This is definitely the longest post I have subjected readers to, but I hope some will bear with me.) While oral discourse practices certainly continued into the 19th century, writing grew in power and prestige. In the ancient world, the “artistic proofs”—i.e., those created by the rhetor and delivered orally—were considered most persuasive, but by the 19th century, the “inartistic proofs”—written laws, testimonies, and so on—claimed superiority: “put it in writing” became the byword. Aided by new technologies such as improved typewriters, better printing presses, inexpensive writing equipment, newspapers, magazines, and books proliferated at a great rate, and the reading public expanded exponentially. Colleges, whose enrollments soared in the last half of the century, began to focus much more on writing than speaking. After all, colleges no longer prepared white men just for the bar, the statehouse, or the pulpit, but for careers in business and industry, where writing was increasingly the major mode of communication. And burgeoning enrollments meant that it was harder and harder to have students give speeches of all kinds: writing increasingly became the means of showing that you were worthy of progressing through the college years—and of success in the business world. Much has been written of Harvard’s Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory, and of the traditional Harvard curriculum that featured four years of rhetorical education. That curriculum began to change not only with growing enrollments but with the appointment of Francis James Child to the Chair in 1851. A folklorist by training and trade, Child turned away from rhetoric and its commitment to speaking in favor of reading and writing: students increasingly spent their time in the analysis and interpretation of written literary texts and wrote their “themes” in response. By the beginning of the 20th century, John Clapp—writing in the English Journal, summed up the situation by noting that “for the purposes of the intellectual life, which college graduates are to lead, talking is of little importance, and writing of very great importance” (23). University Museum at Harvard University Strongly influenced by Harvard’s entry exam, which focused exclusively on print literary texts, and by the Modern Language Association, founded in 1883 to “promote the study of literature and language,” departments of English in the U.S. dropped “rhetoric” or an emphasis on speaking in favor of reading and writing about literature. The MLA, however, fractured in the early twentieth century as scholars interested in the teaching of composition and rhetoric split off in 1911 to form the National Council of Teachers of English in response to what they called the “changing needs and values regarding education, particularly English language education” of an “increasingly diverse student population” who were being failed by the very narrow curriculum offered in schools and colleges. In 1914, teachers of speech and linguists also left the MLA, forming the National Communication Association; this group will hold its 105th convention this fall with a theme of “Rhetoric for Survival.”  Some attention to elocution lingered in pre-college US classes (my grandmother remembered weekly recitations in her Tennessee Quaker school—telling me more than once about the boy in her class who recited the very same poem every week for an entire year without the teacher noticing it!). But by the mid-twentieth century, the shift from the ear and mouth (for speaking) to the eye and hand (for writing) seemed complete. In the United States, first-year writing programs and graduate programs in composition became ubiquitous, and few thought to question the status of writing “properly” as a key to success.  When Walter Ong and Eric Havelock began publishing works about the rise of literacy in the ancient world, they seemed to reify the centrality of writing not just to academic and professional success but to thought itself. In Orality and Literacy Ong describes the revolution in technology that was writing, a revolution he viewed as rippling throughout society, transforming the way people think as they move from the immediate and concrete ways of knowing in an oral culture to the more abstract ways of knowing in a literate culture. In his words: Writing, commitment of the word to space, enlarges the potentiality of language almost beyond measure, [and] restructures thought (7-8). In much of his work, then, Ong posits a tension between the “old oral, mnemonic world of imitation, aggregative, redundant, copious, traditionalist, warmly human, participatory,” and the “analytic, sparse, exact, abstract, visualist, immobile world of [Platonic] ideas” (164) and writing. Many scholars (such as Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, Brian Street and Beth Daniells) pushed back against a “great divide” or “great leap” theory of literacy, rejecting what they saw as a totalizing view of writing as a technology that transforms thought. Indeed, in his later work, Ong is more judicious in the claims he makes for writing, perhaps recognizing that Eric Havelock and others might have gone too far in arguing for a direct causal link between literacy and abstract or ”philosophical” thought. Janet Emig, another scholar who compares speech and writing, earned a Ph.D. in Education at Harvard, where she studied cognitive theories and student learning. Her study of the composing processes of 12th graders was a groundbreaking book that took the relatively new field of “rhetoric and composition” in the U.S. by storm. But her 1977 essay, “Writing as Mode of Learning” also worked to underscore the primary importance of writing. Emig opens this seminal article by saying that “Writing represents a unique mode of learning—not merely valuable, not merely special, but unique . . . writing possesses a cluster of attributes that correspond uniquely to certain powerful learning strategies” (122). Emig makes clear that she is not denigrating the importance of talking to learning, but she goes on to focus on the differences between the two and to argue that if talk is important to learning, writing is absolutely vital. She warns against blurring or ignoring these differences, which she spends the rest of the article enumerating. Arguing that “writing involves the fullest possible functioning of the brain, which entails the active participation in the process of both the left and right hemispheres Writing is markedly bispheral,” Emig goes on to describe writing as learned behavior (speaking is natural, she says); as a technology (speaking is organic); as slower than most talking and thus better at enabling learning. Writing results in a visible graphic product, and is a stark and barren medium (in contrast to the rich luxuriance of talk). She concludes that writing has always had an “aura” or “mystique” surrounding it (while speaking has been seen as mundane and ephemeral) and that “because writing is often our representation of the world made visible, embodying both process and product, writing is more readily a form and source of learning than talking” (124). I remember reading this essay—and then rereading it—as an awe-struck graduate student who not only studied writing and rhetoric in my PhD program but worked hard to legitimate writing studies as of equal significance and importance to the reading of literature. So by the time Emig and Ong were publishing their work on literacy, I was a passionate advocate of writing and of its importance to research, to theories of communication, and to teaching. I am still an advocate of writing, but as I said earlier, now I see it differently than I did then; I see the complexities and the destructive hold that an obsession with “proper” writing has had on generations of writers. And as I came to interrogate my own advocacy of writing and writing itself, I began asking “and what about speaking?” Indeed, it was hard not to ask such questions as the seismic shift in technologies of communication became impossible to ignore. Walter Ong had written about “secondary orality,” that is orality that is singularly marked by writing; I began to think about “secondary literacy,” that is writing that is singularly marked by speaking.  Cindy Selfe answered my question—“what about speaking?”—in a brilliant 2009 essay, “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimedia Composing.” In this essay, Selfe traces the history of the aural composing modalities of speech, music, and sound and shows how they have been systematically eclipsed by the written word. This is a state of affairs Selfe finds understandable but regrettable: The contemporary adherence to alphabetic-only composition constrains the semiotic efforts of individuals and groups who value multiple modalities of expression. (616) In short, the view of writing as the desirable literacy has severely limited the communicative capabilities of writers everywhere. But Selfe too wants to resist a dichotomous binary between speaking and writing, and she tries to do this by adopting the term “aurality”: In using the term ”aurality” rather than the more common orality, I hope to resist models of an oral/literate divide and simplistic characterizations of cultures or groups as either oral or literate in their communicative practices. Humans make and communicate meaning through a combination of modalities—sound, still and moving images, words among them—and using a variety of media. As Selfe points out, during this period the growing status of vision “gradually undermined the position still occupied by other forms of sensory experience.” Seeing is believing. Put it in writing. So the spoken word, with its “soulful’ knowledge, turned inward to the largely silent practices exemplified by St. Jerome’s suspiciously silent reading. Great Shakespearean works were now not heard but rather read and subjected to written analysis: classrooms were quiet spaces where students read and wrote and observed.  Some white women along with African Americans and Hispanics in the U.S. and Indigenous people across North America often retained an attachment to what Selfe terms the network of aurality. Despite often being denied higher education, members of this group still managed to learn writing skills—and to deploy them with passion and precision—while rejecting the violence of literacy and also holding on to oral traditions: storytelling, embodied performances and presentations, church-related activities, verbal games, and other parts of what Peter Elbow terms “vernacular eloquence” in his book-length discussion of “what speech can bring to writing." And indeed, orality/aurality persisted as a kind of steady undertow to writing: teachers and scholars continued to refer to “voice,” to “tone,” to “rhythm," to the flow and musicality of prose. Still, as Selfe notes, “By the end of the twentieth century, the ideological privileging of writing was so firmly established that it had become almost fully naturalized.” During the period of the late 90s and early 2000s, as I continued to explore the history of writing (I taught a course on the history of writing at Ohio State and the Bread Loaf School of English for well over a decade), including its powers and its problems, I began to teach another course that I called “The Language Wars.” This course traced the struggle for the vernacular and the rise of vernacular languages across Europe, then shifted to the United States and the obsession with error-free prose as “good” writing—and the inevitable backlash against this obsession coming from all directions, and especially from women and people of color. We read and interrogated the Students’ Right to their Own Language documents and examined the AAVE debate in detail. We read the work of Michelle Cliff, who said after finishing her Ph.D. in, I think, Victorian literature, that she never wanted to read, or write, again; of fiery women orators such as Sojourner Truth, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Anna Julia Cooper—and many others Shirley Logan has introduced us to. We read Gloria Anzaldua and studied the ways she mixed Spanish, English, Tex-Mex. We read Anishinaabe cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor’s Lost Voices and Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance, a term he defines as “an active sense of presence.” I remember the excitement in our classroom as we explored these challenges to traditional print literacy and the even greater excitement as we began to compose pieces ourselves, pieces that mixed modes, languages, dialects, and soundscapes. Gloria Anzaldua When I offered this course, it was always over-enrolled, and perhaps this should have warned me that a new course I called “Writing 2.0: the Art of the Digital Essay” might not be as successful. I arrived at the first class to find only eight students in it. Taken aback, I asked them, as I always do, to introduce themselves and to tell us why they had chosen this course. The first three students said essentially the same thing: “Well, I almost did not choose this class, but I heard you were an OK teacher so I took a chance.” And why did they “almost” not choose it. Again, they were unanimous: the word “essay.” One said “that word makes me think of old people bossing me around—like “don’t get outside the lines in your coloring book.” And of course, what they had in mind was the kind of five-paragraph themes they’d written in high school and what they considered the “long boring” essays featured in many English classes. I had a hard time convincing them that the very word “essay’ carries a connotation of experimentation, of trying something out. They weren’t having it. So, when Adam Banks rose to deliver—and to perform—his CCCC chair’s address in 2015, I was ready for “Funk, Flight, and Freedom.” Adam’s talk mixed rhythms from jazz and hip hop with echoes of the African American sermonic tradition, mixed theorizing with personal anecdote, mixed high-falutin’ academic language with oral vernacular. In one particularly memorable moment, Banks paused to address “the essay,” saying that on this day, he declared it officially “retired” (long and loud applause). Speaking directly to the retiree, Adam said “don’t worry, Professor Essay; you can keep your office campus" and we will even “continue to give awards in your honor.” This is the tradition of resistance, of challenge, of counterpoint that Cindy Selfe explores and celebrates in her essay on aurality and multimodal composing. As she points out, and as Adam Banks demonstrated, discourse practices today are multimodal, multilingual, multimedia rich; they mix genres and styles across multiple semiotic channels. This shift to aurality has been enabled by digital technologies that are changing so quickly we can hardly stay abreast of them, as the possibilities for digital literacies seem almost endless. Print has not and will not disappear, but it is now accompanied by myriad blogs, vlogs, audio and video and imagistic compositions as well, full of illustrations and sounds and animations. Acknowledging the irony of a print text about aurality, Selfe includes four student examples of aural composing, with links so that readers can hear the spoken words. I was thinking of these aural compositions when I listened to friend and colleague Alice Wingwall, a noted photographer who lost her sight in 2000 but continues to work, talk to those attending an exhibit of hers about what she called “my soundscape world.” Increasingly in the U.S., universities are turning to writing programs to provide instruction in oral and multimodal forms of composing. We began this practice at Stanford in 2002, piloting a second required course that focuses on oral/multimodal presentations. In the same spirit, Stanford renamed its writing center the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking, and is expanding its support for multimodal compositions as well. Such moves underscore the point that no single mode of expression is able to convey all the meanings within a text. And what texts students are producing! Digital storytelling is going on everywhere I turn. Stanford’s Storytelling Project, which started as a second-year writing course well over a decade ago, is now a permanent fixture on campus. Just a week ago I was on campus for the Lunsford Oral Presentation of Research Awards, given to a second year student every term. We’ve been giving this award for about a decade now and I get to go every year to hear the winners make their presentation. Today, it seems, writing and speaking are thoroughly intertwined. Selfe concludes her article by reiterating that while she wants us to understand the historical dimensions of the rise of writing and the decline of orality as a general shift, she is not arguing against writing or the value we place on it. Moreover, teachers of writing and speaking must remember that while students today are “intuitively aware” of these changes and shifts, they still require help in understanding them fully—and utilizing them, and we must do so “in ways that are rhetorically effective, critically aware, morally responsible, and personally satisfying” (624). That’s quite a challenge to all of us. And while I have perhaps belabored Selfe’s points a bit too much, I do think it is critically important that we see the big picture of literacy changes across the millennia, that we know where we have been as well as where we are now. And where we are now – well, there’s the rub. After all, Selfe was writing a decade ago. Just think of what we have seen in terms of literacies and technologies in the last ten years. I want to move toward a conclusion, then, by considering some of these changes and innovations, in terms of their promise as well as their problematics. Yes, the relationship between writing and speaking has shifted, but as I’ve just noted, the relationship is still there, as it has been throughout history, though perhaps more intertwined and intense than ever. In fact, MIT researcher Tara Shankar has even offered a new word to capture that relationship: “spriting.” Thank you for your patience. Next week I will offer concluding thoughts and list the sources I have been relying on. Onward!   Images via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

Kim Haimes-Korn is a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. She also trains graduate student teachers in composition theory and pedagogy. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning and critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She is a regular contributor to this Multimodal Monday academic blog since 2014. She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy, and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website: Acts of Composition Overview Content curation is a “systematic process that involves discerning, selecting, interpreting, and delivering the most relevant and high-quality original content that already exists on a given subject . . . (15 Great Content Curation Examples, Chieruzzi, 2021).” As digital writers, we can curate content in various ways through researched articles, images, and shared content – among others.  For the purpose of this multimodal assignment, I view curation as the art of collecting, selecting, interpreting, creating, sharing. Everyone loves a good playlist. This digital technology has replaced the old “mixtape” and makes it super easy to categorize our favorite songs. A family member recently sent me a themed playlist (Thanks, Melissa) and I was intrigued by the amount of thought and creativity that defines the playlist genre. In order to be effective, you have to consider the rhetorical situation – purpose, audience, subject, and context – lenses that define our ideas about engaging writing. We create playlists to reflect moods, express themes, and to shape particular subjects, keywords, or concepts. Playlists can inform, tell stories, and communicate ideas.  We tend to think about playlists existing outside of the classroom, but they can engage students in a range of important curation and interpretive skills. Types of Playlists:  I have my favorite songs playlist, a beach playlist, genre playlists, throwback playlist, among others. I started to think about some of the categories that define the genre. Here are a few categories that can be shaped into a range of curation assignments: Moods and emotions – chill, high energy, get pumped, lift you up, sad, celebrate Place based – songs about (or that mention) a particular place or location. Subject/Theme Time periods – childhood tunes, decades   Activities and events – road trip, wedding, summer vacation, Stories or ballads Cultural critique   Collaborative – participants come together to contribute to an aggregated, shared playlist.     The Soundtrack of Your Life Photo by Mohammad Metri on UnsplashThere are endless possibilities for assignments using playlists. This assignment, The Soundtrack of Your Life challenges students to reflect on meaningful events and influences that might be cued, defined, or contextualized through music. I am certainly not the first to share this type of work and found that there are other communities and educators who promote this idea as well. Music allows us to remember potent events from our lives.  An assemblage of songs - a so-called "soundtrack to your life" - is like a roadmap looking backward on the major milestone that got you to where you are today.  By looking backward, they can serve to help you see the path you are on going forward. (What is the Soundtrack to Your Life?, Wilms 2013) Through using music as a lens, we can come to understand our connections to events, emotions, ideas, and cultural influences.  Steps to the Assignment Note: I encourage students to choose their own technology based on what they like rather than prescribing particular platforms. I stand by my pedagogical philosophy that rather than “teaching tools,” it is important for students to develop digital intuition. When students choose their own platforms, the assignment has the potential to move out of the classroom and into their lives. Furthermore, when students embed their curated playlist into their own libraries, they can share it with their communities and listen to it on their own long after the class is over. Collect - Collection starts with exploring and brainstorming.  Ask students to reflect on and list times in their lives that they associate with particular music. They can also do this in reverse and conduct background research on specific time periods and music that cues their memories. They can also frame their collection through defining moments, chronological time, tone, or mood, to name a few. Select - Next, students thoughtfully select songs to include on their playlists. You can determine how many songs you want them to curate. I usually go with between 10-20.  They will go through the processes of sorting, arranging, and organization. Here is where they pull together their selected songs and create a collection that they will then give context through interpreting their meaning and expanding their resources.  Interpret - Students create annotations for each song where they cite the artist, song title, release date, and link to videos or lyrics. They create an interpretative description where they discuss their connections to and meaning of the song -- how it is autobiographical and what they learned. I have them include a cited passage from the lyrics as part of this interpretative annotation. This Annotated Playlist is captured on a blog post* or Google doc so they can link it in their final description. Include a reflective overview that acts as a draft for their online description. This is an adjacent document that supports their curation choices. *The playlist can be extended to include an inspired essay or blog post where students narrate the impact of the songs or tell a story from a particular time in their lives and embed links from the songs into an interactive essay. Create - This step has students moving from the annotated version to uploading it to a supported playlist provider such as Spotify or Apple Music.  They design the list through adding context, imagery, and description: Title: Name the playlist with a title that speaks to its nature and engages listeners.  Go beyond generic titles such as “My Playlist” or “Songs from the 90’s” and encourage students to make it an individual reflection of the intention of the curation. Image - Include a representative image – original or copyright free – that will accompany and introduce the playlist – a lesson in visual rhetoric. There are many forums and instructional videos to help students learn how to create and upload images to their playlist platforms. Description - Add a description to the overall playlist. This usually shows up on the opening page and can include clickable links to videos or other related content. The description should talk about the purpose, mood, and meaning of the playlist.  Here is where they can link to the Google doc or blog post to include their expanded insights. Share - Time to share.  I encourage students to share their playlists with their families, friends, and communities. I also curate a full class playlist where students submit their finished versions towards an aggregated selection so they can enjoy their classmates' work and upload to their own libraries. Reflections on the Activity This project emphasizes multiple skills of digital and multimodal composers. Writers generate ideas towards invention, substantiate ideas, draft strong descriptions, and learn citation practices. Like any rhetorical task, we need to define the purpose, subject, audience, and context. It also reinforces citation practices, visual rhetoric, and interpretive skills. Music is an important multimodal form that offers opportunities for insight and critical thinking. I invite you to like, respond, and share in the comments!  😊 ... View more

This is a post about considering histories of spaces and places where teaching and learning unfold, and how work with students might more fully engage those spaces. The post ends with a video of a field trip and a brief photo essay that includes the photos highlighted in the video. I am thinking about the impact and interactions in the many histories that have occupied a single space. How much does space impact teaching and learning? Put another way, how can space be used in teaching and learning to gain knowledge from the surrounding world. This semester, I have tried to offer more opportunities for students to take part in research as an embodied experience. Ideas percolated in my head about how we might do a second on-campus field trip after our initial trip to the college art museum. I had asked the students in anonymous exit slips if they wanted another field trip before the end of the term, and they were unequivocally in agreement.  I considered what spaces on our campus might best support the third and final writing project of the course. The point of Writing Project 3, the research/revision essay, was to find connection to a major concept in James Baldwin’s “The Artist’’s Struggle for Integrity,” a source we had been reading and returning to all semester. Then I remembered the on-campus memorials to Freedom Summer, and I watched documentaries and news reports documenting Freedom Summer’s significance to the Civil Rights Movement. The information that follows is from the two sources that we viewed before the field trip, Freedom Summer: Chapter 1 by Stanley Nelson (2014 PBS American Experience) and Remembering the “Mississippi Burning” Murders (2014 CBS News). In the summer of 1964, college students from across the country took part in Freedom Summer, a voter registration drive in Mississippi, where Jim Crow laws, white citizens councils, and the Klan fought a continuous battle with full force against registering Black voters. 3 of the young civil rights workers were murdered at the start of Freedom Summer, but it took 6 more weeks to find their bodies.   James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were their names. Chaney was Black and Goodman and Schwerner were white. It had been remarked that the catastrophe was made worse by the national hyper focus on the two young white men at the expense of the countless number of unsolved murders and disappearances of Black Mississippians. Indeed, when the bodies of the 3 civil rights workers were found in a dam, at the same time 8 Black bodies were recovered.  One of the white civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, had just finished his junior year at the college where I teach. 25 years after the fact, in 1989, the clock tower at the library was named after the 3 young people, and a memorial plaque with a brief history of Freedom Summer was placed at the inside foyer of the library. The clock tower can be seen all across campus and is one of the campus’s most noticeable features.  Nevertheless, with the passage of time and the presence of other catastrophes involving people from this campus, Freedom Summer was not as well known by my students. There are newer memorials for 9/11/2001 and for Covid-19. I found all of these memorials on early morning walks through campus, and felt overwhelmed by the enormity of what Walter Benjamin in Theses of the Philosophy of History calls “the wreckage upon wreckage of history … Where we perceive a chain of events, he [the Angel of History] sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”  Any of the memorial markers bearing witness to “the wreckage upon wreckage of history “ would connect to one of Baldwin’s major concepts in “Artist’s Struggle”: all safety is an illusion.  But then I considered another major concept presented by Baldwin in “Artist’s Struggle”: how artists create light from darkness. I remembered that another classroom building on campus, one of the older ones, displayed a number of inspirational quotes by prominent writers/educators on its inside and outside walls, which had been constructed as part of a building renovation two decades ago.  One of the quotes was from James Baldwin‘s essay “In Search of a Majority” reads, “The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in” (Collected Essays, p. 221). This quote captures a major concept from Artist’s Struggle and Freedom Summer: of not accepting things as they are, of working to make the world a better place, of creating light from the darkness of the wreckage of history.  Perhaps in the 2020s this concept remains hopelessly problematic, or perhaps even impossibly idealistic. After all, what unearned privileges might one possess to have the peace of mind to consider the question of making the world a better place? How can anyone processing ongoing trauma begin to consider a better world?   When I arrived on campus the day of the field trip I was greeted by a chalk art installation in front of the classroom building. One chalking posed a question that seemed related to the project of engaging with space and place: “History repeats…What follows?” This inquiry reminded me of the in-class writing prompt I had prepared as an introduction to the field trip: When we visit these sites, write down everything you notice. What does each memorial/marker look like? What is the scenery around it? What are your responses to what you see around you? What connections do you find to Baldwin’s “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity”? There are no easy answers to these questions, or answers for which words are sufficient. Instead, I offer my short video of the field trip, and the various photos of sites that comprise the video.   All photos taken by Susan Bernstein in October and November 2023.    A view from the edge of campus under a blue sky with clouds. Autumn trees in the foreground, Manhattan skyline in the background.   Chalk art on a campus sidewalk. Blue chalk on pavement: reads History Repeats…What follows?   In the summer of 1964, Queens College student Andrew Goodman joined the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. He was assigned to work on voter registration with James Earl Chaney and Michael Schwerner. Returning from a visit to a rural church, they were kidnapped and murdered. Their deaths inspired countless others to continue the struggle for equality and justice for all Americans. Dedicated on May 10, 1989.   Cheney-Goodman-Schwerner Clock Tower under a bright blue autumn sky with trees and college buildings in the background.   James Baldwin quote from “In Search of a Majority” in steel letters placed on the outside wall of a campus building: “The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.”     ... View more

  Elizabeth Catanese is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Community College of Philadelphia. Trained in mindfulness-based stress reduction, Elizabeth has enjoyed incorporating mindfulness activities into her college classroom for over ten years. Elizabeth works to deepen her mindful awareness through writing children's books, cartooning and parenting her energetic twin toddlers, Dylan and Escher.   For me, and many of my students, this is a hard part of the semester. There is a kind of liminality to it, a neither here nor there. Midterms are over, but finals are not quite in view. It’s almost Thanksgiving, but not quite. Assignments are in full force and fall viruses are too. To keep it real, at this moment, some students may not be seeing much of a distinction between an assignment and a virus. At this time more than ever, I am thinking about how to keep students engaged in the classroom, which means it’s the time of year for some fully in-class, credit-bearing activities that take the place of take-home assignments. This semester, I stumbled upon an assignment that fits this bill: A fun activity to help students apply the concepts in Lao Tsu’s The Tao Te Ching and The Analects of Confucius. I printed out a Dear Abby advice column (later students told me that no one reads Dear Abby and I should go to Reddit instead…noted!) and we read through a letter that a woman had sent in about her new husband taking his adult child off of his insurance and asking him to pay his own way. I picked this particular advice column topic based on content from a previous class conversation about the role of parents in adult children’s lives. In groups, I had students write advice for this woman using a quotation from The Tao or The Analects. They then read the advice that was actually given to her by the advice columnist. The class discussed if their advice was different or similar to the “professional” advice and analyzed whether her response seemed to come from a more collectivist or individualist model. Students gained many insights about The Analects and The Tao and also about the information missing in the column and how we may shape our stories to try to get the advice we want. I wasn’t anticipating these additional insights, and I will say that it’s the additional insights that keep me going as a professor! I believe that the advice column assignment could be applied to a variety of content and skills-based courses. Students can be asked to give advice as characters from stories, nurses-in-training, even as numbers (would a fraction want a different outcome than a negative number?); don’t be afraid to get creative. I’ve found this to be an activity that is quite equalizing. A student may have very little knowledge of the texts we are studying, but they may have had an experience similar to one being written in the advice column—their skills and energy pair nicely with those who have deeper insights into the course texts. This particular assignment also has a quality to it that is helpful right now—it takes very little energy on the part of the professor. Students can even be the ones to search for the advice columns in class on their smart phones if pre-selecting them is too challenging given other demands this time of year. One of the mantras that keeps me going at the end of November is “Keep it simple. Keep it interesting. Make space.” Write some of the in-class activities you have used to enliven your November classrooms in the comments below! ... View more

Writing in Counter Arts and recently reprinted in Medium, journalist and digital media expert Jeff Hayward stumbled on an AI “test” offered by the Globe and Mail. Fourteen questions in all, asking a test taker to distinguish between images, voice/video clips, and texts created by humans and generative AI. Hayward was relieved, and just a little surprised, that he got all the questions in the first two sets correct: the AI generated images were somehow “just too perfect,” he said, and the voice/video cliffs felt somehow “off” to him—and his hunches paid off.  What really did surprise him, however, was the fact that he got all three of the questions about written passages wrong, thinking that the AI-generated texts sounded “more human” than those generated by humans. So an experienced working journalist, who spends time every day writing and studying writing by others, was taken in by AI. Yikes! The Globe and Mail quiz is behind a paywall, but I was able to take a look at it without being able to take it. My guess is that I would have been very lucky to get a third of the answers right—and be relatively unable to distinguish material generated by humans from those generated by generative AI. Double yikes! I’m wondering how our students fare at such tasks. And while the Globe and Mail quiz is available only to subscribers, here are a couple of other similar online quizzes that are accessible, the first from Buzzfeed and the second from the Statistics and Tech Data Library. You might want to try then out with your students. I, meanwhile, am trying to learn to get better at this kind of detection!     ... View more

This is a post about discovery drafts and WHY discovery drafts matter. When writing is viewed as a product and not a process, the benefits of discovery might easily be lost. Instead, writing becomes a matter of filling in blanks for the 5 W's + H: basic questions for fulfilling the writing prompt.  Who is the audience?  What is the prompt?  Where can information be found for correct citation style?  When is the writing due?  How long must it be?   WHY must I do this writing? The first found W’s do not include pronouns and the responses are generally straightforward. WHY is the existential question that leads to other questions: Because I said so? Because the course syllabus requires this writing? Because the department or program or school requires this writing? Because the workforce requires this writing? But WHY is this writing required–here and now?  Because writing is a means of discovering what is on my mind. As a writer with ADHD, WHY causes fireworks to explode in my brain, and the fireworks explode so fast that my prefrontal cortex can’t keep up, try as I might. I might try and try and try, but the sound of explosions fill  my ears, the fast-moving colors flood the tear ducts of my eyes. My mind is overloaded with anxiety about the polluted air that follows the fireworks, and I remember the orange sky choked with Canadian wildfire smoke a month earlier and that caused another air pollution alert. I lose focus. I don’t know where to begin. Fireworks exploding over apartment buildings near the East River with the NYC skyline in the background. Photo by Susan Bernstein, July 4, 2023   Orange sky over apartment buildings near the East River in NYC at 1:58 pm, June 7, 2023. Photo by Susan Bernstein   But those events happened months ago. Isn’t it time to move on? Isn’t time for normal, or at least a new normal, and maybe even the status quo? But must climate change be accepted as the status quo? WHY?  Enter the Discovery Draft–also called a Zero Draft or a Brain Dump–where the writer writes down whatever is in their head. In grad school, I remember being told that discovery drafts meant “just putting down anything to get started.” But, as an ADHD writer teaching students actively questioning WHY, I have since learned that focus remains crucial for getting started.  These revelations came at Halloween, a day of tricks and treats. On public transit, my co-commuters were in costume and so was I. My hair was green. I wore a witch button and a #FundCUNYnow rubber bracelet. I had candy and pretzels in my backpack for sustenance to nourish the writing process. I stopped at the campus gate to take a selfie and later noticed in the photo that the wall) holding up the gate was missing a brick. Below the missing brick was a “Do Not Enter” sign.  The purpose of the sign was to keep vehicular traffic from using an exit on campus that looked like a campus entrance. There were other entrances across the Boulevard and, since the end of random testing requirements for students, staff, and faculty, we no longer needed to show our IDs at the entrance.  Nevertheless, I began deconstructing the implications of that sign for people in the neighborhood, or those riding by in cars and buses along the busy boulevard. What was the impact of seeing “Do Not Enter” posted on a college gate? My brain felt feverish.  It was time to start writing–and it was time to share the Halloween Extra Credit Assignment. Halloween selfie by the campus gate in front of a Do Not Enter sign posted on a white brick wall. One of the bricks above the sign has noticeably deteriorated. Photo by Susan Bernstein, October 31, 2023 Halloween Extra Credit Assignment projected on a classroom smart board. The last line is whited out to protect instructor's email address and submission platform information. The assignment follows. Photo by Susan Bernstein October 31, 2023     🎃📝🎃 Halloween Extra Credit Assignment 🎃📝🎃 Write a discovery draft for WP 2. This is a preliminary rough draft that is separate from the more formal rough draft due later this week, and can be written in class. You can use the Discovery Draft for your WP 2 rough draft and for your WP 2 final copy. Your discovery draft should: Respond to the following prompt: Where do you find your inspiration for writing in English 110?: the Baldwin readings? Everyday life? The museum field trip? Another artist or artistic creation (including music)? All, some, one, or none of the above? Something else?Provide evidence from analysis of texts and artwork, everyday life, Use your intellect and imagination. Take risks with what you say and how you say it, which can include (optional and as appropriate):  Examples from personal experience. This is NOT required. You can make up fictional experiences if you would like. Figurative Language and/or Creative Genres (fan fiction,science fiction, metaphors, similes, and other poetic, spoken word, and other lyrical language).   Write at least 500 words in 2 hours– but try for 800-1000 words. Don’t worry about grammar, punctuation or spelling! Submit your discovery draft to your e-journal.   While they chose not to compose in experimental genres, students wrote about a variety of inspirations, in school and out of school: reading James Baldwin, the museum tour and workshop, social justice concerns, mental health considerations, and more that could be revised for their second writing project of the term. As is my aspirational practice, I wrote in-class with the students. I wrote to shift ADHD executive function overload to hyper focus on the present: the intersections of Halloween and pedagogical theory and practice.   My writing turned out to be the discovery draft for this Bits post about discovery drafts and why they matter. Discovery drafts matter because process matters, and process allows writers to find focus. I’m not talking about lockstep drafting of intro, body, conclusion. In a discovery draft, a potential introduction might be written at the very end. Potential body paragraphs might appear out of sequence. What I mean instead is writing out of order to discover and disentangle ideas, and taking what is found to create something new.    In other words, I still want to read and create writing that goes beyond 5 W’s+H, writing that focuses on recognizing the world not only as it is, but as it could be, writing that doesn’t sit in a writing that spurs me to action, and lifts me from despair–writing that attempts to discover a conclusion, but cannot find one, and reaches out for hope instead.   “The Possible’s slow fuse is lit By the imagination.” –Emily Dickinson. Photo by Susan Bernstein, October 3, 2023.     ... View more

In my third post on the work being done by two-year college teacher-scholars who contributed to Teaching Accelerated and Corequisite Composition (Utah State UP, 2023), I spoke with Jill Darley-Vanis and Melissa Favara of Clark College in Vancouver, Washington. Jill Darley-Vanis has been teaching at Clark College since 2000. Her research, conference presentations, and published works focus on assignment design, transfer theory, and more equitable classroom practices. She has been published in Teaching English in the Two-Year College and in the book Transparent Design in Higher Education Teaching and Leadership. Jill has also presented at College Composition and Communication (CCC), First-Year Experience (FYE), Two-Year College English Association (TYCA), and the State of Washington’s Assessment in Teaching and Learning (ATL) conferences. Melissa Favara began teaching at Clark College in 2007. For the past decade, her teaching has focused on accelerated composition, both in the Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training (I-BEST) and Accelerated Learning (ALP) programs. She has presented on learning communities at the National Learning Communities Conference (NLCC) and on creating vulnerability spaces in the ALP classroom at the Modern Language Association conference. Melissa writes creative nonfiction that has been published in street roots, Metro Parent, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and elsewhere. Jill and Melissa’s chapter, “Reflective Practices in Teaching for Transfer,” argues for writing instruction that encourages “composition students’ awareness of writing as a portable skill,” one they can carry with them as they transfer from their first-year composition class to other writing-based courses. In Jill and Melissa’s practice, “a typical assignment sequence moves the student from analysis and writing about writing in different genres to producing work in new genres, those better suited for the given message and of interest to the student.” Jill and Melissa “put [their] heads together” for answers to my questions, so their responses are in a single voice. When I asked which elements of their chapter they felt were especially relevant for instructors of accelerated and corequisite composition, they replied that “reflection is central and center, particularly as it is the vehicle to change students’ perceptions of their own stories and their own potential.” They add that “in a moment of shrinking student populations and readily available work that pays well but may not provide avenues for further personal and intellectual development over time, the ability to reflect as a vehicle for change is all the more pressing.” Ultimately, they wanted their chapter to “provide faculty with not only theory, but also take-it-to-class plans for a learning sequence.”    As they looked back on “Reflective Practices in Teaching for Transfer” from the perspective of more than a year since its completion, they noted, “As we learn more and more about critical language awareness (CLA) and its intersection with Writing for Transfer (WfT), we see more and more pathways for change as well as challenges and layers for the shift that urgently needs to happen in the classroom.” Specifically, they believe: [T]here is an opportunity to think about positionality as a tie to WfT: genres are situated within various discourse communities in the same ways individuals and policies are situated within systems of power. We continue to see a need for further understanding and developments in what equitable opportunities for learning/educational justice look like in the classroom,” including “questions of Standard Language Ideology (SLI). They add: “Even what we understood five years ago now seems antiquated and simple. People of color are ‘taking back their narrative,’ as Toni Morrison says, so what does this look like in this moment, and how can we change the larger system to serve?” Jill and Melissa are both enthusiastic and worried about issues that preoccupy many of the other instructors I spoke with. They “are excited about the change that comes about in corequisite instruction, the way that students in the coreq group go from passive to active or from follower to leader.” However, they “are concerned about AI and what it wants to take from the individual: the process of writing allows the individual to experience and appreciate organizing thought and training the self as a thinker, so the temptation [of using AI] and its ubiquitous nature are real.”   ... View more

I’ve been following the journalism of Clive Thompson ever since I encountered his writing in the early days of Wired, and over the years I’ve learned not only from his Wired columns but from books like Smarter Than You Think: How How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better (2013) and Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World (2019), and most recently from is columns in Medium, where he sometimes posts about his own writing process. In one post, for example, he wrote about his ongoing battles with procrastination and said that one way he helps avoid the worst bouts of it is by “parking downhill.” By that he means that when he is writing a draft, he always stops work “downhill,” that is at an “easy” place where he knows what is coming next. That helps the next day when he sits down to take up the task at hand again. This is a good tip, one I have often shared with students, many of whom are master procrastinators. In another post titled “One Weird Trick for Writing a First Draft,” Thompson says that once he has done his research and needs to begin writing, he will begin doing almost anything but that: “rearranging my desk, tackling old email, going down Wikipedia rat holes.” (Do you know the feeling? In fact, in drafting this blog post I am avoiding work on a foreword I have promised to write!) Thompson argues that procrastination is ultimately about fear—fear of getting stuck, that words won’t come, that the project is above and beyond his capabilities, and so on. My students share some of these fears, as well as others; and that fear stands in the way of their progress. But Thompson to the rescue. He says he has developed “four rules for writing first-draft prose,” and they are pretty interesting: Begin each paragraph with a hyphen Lower-case the first letter of every sentence Don’t put a period at the end of a sentence (though question marks and exclamation points are OK) Instead, end each sentence with two forward slashes// These “rules” help, Thompson argues, because they make his writing look provisional, unfinished, not really “official,” and therefore not so threatening of failure. As he says, he can “regard the sentences and paragraphs as a form of clay that I’m still just sort of generally shifting around . . . [it is] still under construction.” This kind of “under construction” writing doesn’t look “finished,” and so he is less tempted to spend time obsessing on revising a phrase, choosing perfect punctuation, etc. Instead, he can just keep on going. His provisional writing seems like “Lego bricks I’m combining and recombining to see what shape they might make.” He is also less attached to such provisional writing, so he finds it easier to toss it if it just isn’t going anywhere.  Thompson says he leaves his drafts in their “provisional” format until the day before they are due. “This frees me up,” he says, “on this final day to become an obsessive about word choice on a sentence-by-sentence level” and on tempo, rhythm, pacing. I think students will like the way Thompson thinks as well as his self-deprecating and witty openness about his own processes of composing. And they may even decide to try out some of his “tricks.”    Photo by Nick Morrison ... View more

Ann Charters edits The Story and its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. The new Compact Tenth Edition is now available.   Are authors of new short stories capable of showing us today’s reality? Or do we now live in such endangered times that only ordinary people – not gifted young fiction writers such as Saïd Sayrafiezadeh and Lauren Groff – can testify to our predicament? In Sigrid Nunez’s short novel The Friend (2018), she presents both sides of the proposition that the existential reality of contemporary life can no longer be expressed through fiction. Since today’s world is full of victims, “we need documentary fiction, stories cut from ordinary, individual life. No invention. No authorial point of view” (p. 191). As Nunez understands, fiction as autobiography, or autobiography as fiction, has been with us for a long time in the work of international novelists such as Proust, Isherwood, Duras, and Knausgaard (p. 188). In the United States, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) is a ground-breaking example of what he called the “true-story novel,” or a narrative based on his own adventures. Kerouac (1922-1969) was an American experimental writer. His short story “October in the Railroad Earth,” in the tenth edition of The Story and Its Writer, is a description of how he worked a job on the railroad in San Francisco in October 1952. Kerouac’s story is true to the facts of his experience, embellished as fiction with his exuberant wordplay as he experimented with the writing method he called spontaneous prose. His “true-story” approach was taken up by many young journalists and fiction writers. It is now known as “autofiction.” “Autofiction,” a mixture of autobiography and fiction, is the approach taken frequently by college students enrolled in workshop classes in fiction writing. The danger is that young writers sometimes appropriate into their stories the experiences of other people, invading their privacy and crossing a moral line. An example would be the story “Cat People” by Kristen Roupenian, first published in the December 2017 issue of The New Yorker. You can read more about this controversial story in the revised chapter on the history of the short story in the new Compact edition. As Toni Morrison understood, “A person owns his life. It’s not for another to use it for fiction” (Nunez, 57). In my opinion, the form of the short story is flexible enough to continue to engage the imagination of young writers today. As Lydia Davis recognized, we live in an ever-expanding world of narrative possibilities, not only on film but also on the printed page. These include flash fictions like Davis’s story “The Caterpillar”; meditations like George Saunders’ “Stix”; and logic games like Margaret Atwood’s “Happy Endings.” Gifted young storytellers like Lauren Groff continue to take the traditional approach when they create a work of short fiction out of their sense of being victimized in our challenging moment of history. In her story “The Midnight Zone,” Groff dramatizes the struggle of many women to achieve their own high expectations of “doing it all” – fulfilling the conflicting roles expected of them. Did the accident befalling the mother alone with two small children in a Florida “hunting camp shipwrecked in twenty miles of scrub” actually happen to Groff? Read her story and decide for yourself. ... View more

I am pleased to announce that I am currently working on the 11th edition of Signs of Life in the USA, and for this reason will be taking a sabbatical from my Bedford Bits blog posts this year.    The new edition will be paying particular attention to the ever-worsening political and cultural divisions in this country and the ways in which our popular culture both reflects and contributes to them. I am choosing this focus because of the urgency, especially in the light of the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, of the topic, and the necessity for careful critical thinking at a time national crisis. You can find a number of indications of the kind of topics the book will address in my posts over the last couple of years.   This will be the first edition of Signs of Life without the direct co-authorship of Sonia Maasik, but her presence will remain throughout the text, most profoundly in the way her spirit is guiding me on every step of this publication journey. The book will be part of Sonia's legacy and is dedicated to her. ... View more

by Jenn Fishman and Darci Thoune This is the first post in an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a 2-day annual event hosted online and in Milwaukee, WI, by a group that includes Darci and Jenn. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “symposium.”  Five years is and isn’t a long time, especially in higher education. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, nearly 60% of college students finish their undergrad degrees in 5 years, while the Survey of Earned Doctorates reports the median time to PhD isn't much longer: just 5.8 years. For all of us involved in the annual Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), 5 years turned out to be just enough time for us to realize that we were really on to something—and to start putting it into words.  Since its founding in 2018, the WIS has been a regional event with national reach. Annually, in the dead of winter, the WIS lures writers and writing educators from all over North America to Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI, for two days of writing activity. As co-founder and Chief Capacitator, Jenn leads the cross-institutional steering committee that brings each symposium to life. In 2022-2023, that group was helmed by Darci, Jennifer Kontny, and Patrick Thomas; it also included Grant Gosizk, Jackielee Derks, Jenna Green, Kayla Urban Fettig, Kelsey Otero, Lilly Campbell, Maxwell Gray, Sara Heaser, Shevaun Watson, and Tara Baillargeon.    Marquette University hosts the Writing Innovation Symposium   When we look back and try to put a finger on what, exactly, makes the WIS the WIS, a few concrete details come immediately to mind, starting with our modest size. Usually, the WIS registers about 100. Participants come mainly from across academic ranks, roles, and disciplines, though non-ac colleagues tell us they feel right at home. The weather is also a contributing factor. Together, we have braved both ice and snowstorms as well as a polar vortex, which dropped the temperature to -23! Yet, it’s always warm and cozy in the University Libraries, where on-site we hunker down, while off-site attendees click in and out of Zoom sessions and Slack channels to join us. In so many ways, the WIS is Brigadoon, and for the 48 hours we gather each year, we form something that feels like community. In many ways, COVID-19 amplified this sense. The 2020 WIS was the last professional event many of us attended before the global pandemic was declared. Likewise, the 2022 WIS was the first in-person conference for a lot of us—and not just because it fit our budgets and schedules. Just as magnetic objects create force fields that attract particular elements (i.e., iron, nickel), the WIS draws writers and writing educators in a powerful way. By inviting everyone to base their contributions on work they have done—writing, writing pedagogy, research, writing administration—the WIS affirms the expertise that each participant brings with them. The WIS also primes attendees to learn from one another, and in doing so it affirms that everyone, from plenary presenters to the newest graduate teachers, has something to learn.  Symposium themes help focus our collective energy. We have worked to “Connect!” (2019), and we’ve explored some of the many connotations of “Just Writing” (2020). We’ve also come together to “Write It Out” (2022) and to fill in the blank: “Writing as _____” (2023). However, we direct our word play along with our most serious efforts, our plenaries are interactive, and our programs always include workshops as well as a session that features posters and creative, digital and analogue displays. Last year, we introduced flash talks into the mix, inviting presenters to distill their WISdom into five-minute presentations accompanied by a single artifact (e.g., handout, bookmark, cookie). Inaugural examples prompted rich exchanges about everything from “Writing in Times of Hopelessness” and “Writing as Empathic Design” to “Composing in the Pool,” “Reinventing the Writer’s Workshop,” “Writing as Resistance,” and “Writing as Power,” and “Writing as Weapon/Antidote.”  The story of WIS continues to be written. Recently, twenty-nine of us talked about an article that appears in Community Literacy Journal 17.2, and we’re glad to be contributing to Bedford Bits. Macmillan has been a vital supporter of the WIS, hosting meals and sponsoring opportunities like the workshop on Tiny Teaching Stories that Chris Anson led one year. In 2022, working in collaboration with Laura Davidson, we launched the Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellows Program. It provides WIS registration, travel monies, and mentorship opportunities to early career colleagues. To date, B/SM WIS Fellows include:  Abigayle Farrier (2023) Amy Patterson (2022) Holly Burgess (2023) Shiva Mainaly (2023) Ulisa Blakely (2022) Look for more from us as well as them in weeks to come—and consider joining us in Milwaukee at WIS 2024! Read our Call for Papers here.    Image via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

Last week I wrote about the gap between the expectations we have for students and the expectations they have for our classes and their participation in them. Since then, I had an opportunity to join in on a Program in Writing and Rhetoric pre-term staff meeting at Stanford, led by my inimitable colleague Marvin Diogenes. During this session, Marvin asked all of us to turn the dial back to the first day of our first year in college, to our arrival at whatever school we attended. For him, that was fifty years ago this week, his first day as a first-year student at Stanford.  Marvin asked us to make notes about what that day was like: what did we remember about the place and our place in it? What was happening on campus at the time? What was happening in the larger world that week or month? What favorite movie or song or band do we remember from that year? What activities were we signed up for and why? How did we allocate our time between school work and “other” things? He had about twenty of these prompts, all designed to take us back in time to our 17- or 18-year-old selves, to get our heads back into that space, if only briefly. He described leaving his home in Michigan pretty much for the first time, getting ready to head west to California. He remembered packing two suitcases and two boxes, which his brother-in-law helped load into the car—when Marvin, being his ever-cautious self, remembered he had not packed his winter coat. No room in the suitcases now, so he wore it instead, onto the airplane headed to SFO. In those days, current Stanford students turned up at the airport to welcome new frosh and usher them onto waiting buses for the ride south to campus. Marvin found himself on one of those buses, the only person wearing anything even vaguely resembling a winter coat. Feeling awkward and out of it, a “nerd” from small town Michigan, he imagined everyone on the bus looking at him with derision or contempt. Or worse. It was a moment when he felt a complete outsider, ostracized and very much alone. He asked us to look over our notes and to think about when and where we might have experienced such a “winter coat” moment, and just how that had felt. View of Wallenberg Hall on the Stanford University Main Quad Then, more to the point, he asked us to remember such a moment when we looked out at the faces in our first classes this term. The students, he said, might look unengaged. They might look distant and even suspicious. Or just silent. Those appearances, though, don’t reveal the whole student, not by a long shot. We can be sure, Marvin reminded us, that each of them has had or will have a “winter coat” moment that will affect them deeply, though we won’t be able to see that at all. I’ll remember this story for a long time. Especially when I am greeting new students. And I will try very hard not to make snap judgments and to question my own assumptions about the students I see. I had more than one winter coat moments in my first year, from the time I badly mispronounced a word that I had only seen written to . . . well, you get the idea. And the movie of my first year? Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, after which I did not feel comfortable in the shower for almost a decade. What was your first week of college like? And do you recall a winter coat moment?   ... View more

Ever since George Lucas mashed up Gene Roddenberry and J.R.R. Tolkien to create one of the most profitable movie franchises in cinematic history, fantasy has come to dominate the American box office—whether involving sci-fi space operas, sword-and-sorcery medievalism, extraterrestrials, superheroes, vampires, or zombies (just to name some of the most popular examples over the years).  So dominant has fantasy become that the question today isn’t whether any competing genre has emerged to challenge it but, rather, which sorts of fantasy are currently the most popular.  In the 1990s, for example, extraterrestrials seemed to be everywhere (The X-Files, Roswell), but they were eventually overtaken by vampires, who for quite some time looked like they would never be dethroned… until zombies came along, and then it looked like it was going to be all zombies, all the time, for all time.  But now superheroes rule the roost, with such one-time leaders of the cinematic super-pack as Batman and Spider-Man being currently eclipsed by Black Panther, Thor, Loki, Ant-Man, Shazam!, assorted Avengers, and a gang of Guardians that includes a highly precocious raccoon… just to name a few. The semiotic question accordingly becomes: what does the currently unstoppable hegemony of the superhero tell us? As is always the case in a semiotic analysis, we can begin to answer this question with the construction of a system of associations and differences. In the case of superheroes, that system begins with the invention of Superman in the 1930s, and extends forwards to every current star in the superverse (if I may coin a term).  What all these heroes have in common—and which is something that they share with such mythological heroes as Gilgamesh, Hercules, and Beowulf—is that they defend their societies from external threats and dangers.  The superhero, in short, offers the comforting reassurance that a fearsome world can be brought under control—that all, in the end, will be well, thanks to the superhero’s prowess and vigilance. But there is a significant difference between the dangers presented in the early Superman and Batman sagas—threats to American society that were generally posed by such masterminds of organized crime as the Joker and the Penguin—and the fundamentally cosmic threats that haunt the superverse today.  For today the danger is existential: the entire universe is at stake, and without a band of Guardians or Avengers standing between humanity and the super villains who threaten to destroy us all, we would be doomed to extinction. I think that the most likely (or abductive) explanation for the current preeminence of the existential superhero is to be found in the fact that we are not having a very good century.  From the events of 9/11 to the ever-increasing threat of environmental collapse posed by global warming (not to mention the after effects of the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic), things are not going well, and for the first time in their history Americans seem to be losing their traditional, and heretofore unshakable, optimism.  The current crop of superheroes accordingly reflects a growing uneasiness, a sense of implacable doom. But popular culture mediates, as well as reflects, social distress, offering for the price of theater admission a comforting reassurance that all, in the end, will be well.  An Avengers: Infinity War, in which half the universe is destroyed, is followed by a sequel, Avengers: Endgame, in which the dead are brought back to life.  When necessary, the hypothetical existence of multi-verses can be trotted out, along with time travel and other sci-fi expedients, to revive the dead and restore normality.  Thus, in spite of how terrible everything looks in reality, today’s superheroes offer not only entertainment but a kind of existential salvation.  Which, of course, is why such tales are called fantasies.   Photo by Craig McLachlan (2019), used under the Unsplash License. ... View more

In 2018, increasingly alarmed at the polarization and the vitriol characterizing too much of our national discourse, Tim Shriver (Chair of the Special Olympics) and some colleagues founded UNITE “to find ways to help ease divisions in our country.” The group soon began to focus on language as one major means of creating and exacerbating divisions, and by 2021 they were developing what they came to call the Dignity Index, a set of measures for determining the degree of contempt (or its opposite, which they call dignity) in political discourse, especially between or among people who disagree. Convinced that contempt causes division and that dignity eases it, they hypothesized that putting a spotlight on language that conveys contempt or dignity might reduce contempt and help ease the tension and division so evident in public discourse.  UNITE put their Index to work during the 2022 midterm elections in Utah, training scorers to rank political speeches. They found that “voters from opposite ends of the spectrum were able to agree on scores” and came up with three key findings: first, the Index attracted a lot of attention from people who wanted to learn about it and become trained in using it; second, while people tend to come to the Index thinking of it as a way to judge the speech of others, they soon begin applying it to themselves and their own speech; and finally, when people spent time with the Index, they came to recognize contempt as a major problem, and one that they have some agency in helping to solve.   The group went on to launch “Students for Dignity” at the University of Utah and other universities and to develop additional training materials and courses for others who want to learn how to use the Index to bring about change in communication and ultimately to “embrace a dignity culture.” You can read their 2023 report, "The Dignity Index: Utah Pilot Project Technical Summary," here. One passage from the report seems worth quoting in full: During Dignity Index development, UNITE team members reported something unanticipated: as the expression of dignity rises in conversation, so did curiosity, humility, vulnerability, and the ability to see the good in others and the flaws in oneself. Observations such as these underscore the premise that treating others with dignity and easing divisions and solving problems are the same set of skills. This suggests the Dignity Index could be a helpful tool in easing political division and supporting productive public dialogue. I was especially interested in the report’s description of what some students had to say about using the Index. One student said: “We started to apply the guide in our own lives. We were reflecting on it, we understood it, and we trained on it and talked about it." This comment that suggests that we teachers of writing might use the Dignity Index in our classes, preparing students to use it and then working with them as they apply it to discursive exchanges they are studying in class, to political speeches, and to their own language use. As I’ve studied the report and tried to learn more about the development of the Index, I have wondered about the choice of “dignity” as the best term to encompass the kind of open, respectful, care-full language they are advocating. I expect that for many students, “dignity” and “dignified” connote a kind of distanced stuffiness that resists the definition the UNITE team implies. I wonder if they considered and debated other possible terms, such as “respect” (which comes with its own set of connotational problems as well) or “good regard.” I think “respect” might serve as a better antonym for “contempt” for students today. But in the meantime, whatever terms are chosen, an index that has been tested as thoroughly as this one has and that allows us to take a close look at how our own speech and/or writing veers toward contempt or toward dignity warrants our attention. Check out the eight levels on the contempt-dignity continuum here.   ... View more

    The most recent politician to declare their candidacy for president in 2024 is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., one of America’s best-known anti-vaccine activists. Earlier in his career Kennedy established a reputation for himself as a prominent and respected environmentalist. When he shifted his focus in 2005 from toxicity in the environment to the alleged toxicity of childhood vaccines, however, he caught the attention of parents who distrusted vaccinations and believed that they were linked to autism in children or other medical problems. This case is an intriguing example of how Kennedy’s notoriety persuaded parents to accept his claims and refuse the substantial body of research that proved vaccines are safe. Rolling Stone published his article “Deadly Immunity” in 2005 where Kennedy warned that children were being harmed by the preservative thimerosal in childhood vaccines. The truth was that by 2001, thimerosal had been removed from all childhood vaccines. Kennedy went beyond using fraudulent data to misrepresent his sources. An article published in Scientific American, which analyzed his misuse of sources, details how he took quotations from authorities out of context to misrepresent what those authorities said and ignored basic rules for documenting research. Even Kennedy’s family eventually went public in an attempt to distance themselves from his faulty scholarship and extreme views. Their open letter is reprinted in the most recent edition of Elements of Argument. His niece and two of his siblings state, “We stand behind him in his ongoing fight to protect our environment. However, on vaccines he is wrong. . . . He is part of this campaign to attack the institutions committed to reducing the tragedy of preventable infectious diseases. He has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines.” Kennedy’s famous name seems to lend him authority and therefore, people who distrust vaccines rely on him to defend their beliefs. Those who are not familiar with his earlier writing about childhood vaccines may remember his recent opposition to the COVID-19 vaccines. An AP article in the Chicago Sun-Times summed up his extremism: “Kennedy has repeatedly invoked Nazis and the Holocaust when talking about measures aimed at mitigating the spread of COVID-19, such as mask requirements and vaccine mandates. He has apologized for some of those comments, including when he suggested that people in 2022 were worse off than Anne Frank, the teenager who died in a Nazi concentration camp after hiding with her family in a secret annex in an Amsterdam house for two years.” Michael T. Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, also stated in an article by the New York Times: “His conduct ‘undercuts 50 years of public health vaccine practice, and he’s done it in a way I’ve never see anyone else do it. He is among the most dangerous because of the credibility of who he is and what his family name has brought to this issue.’” Will the fact that Kennedy continues to spread misinformation about vaccines in the face of indisputable scientific facts affect his presidential bid? Only time will tell, but in order to move past the violent division that the country has experienced over the past few years, America needs a president that leads with integrity. "39 RFK Jr"  by Felton Davis is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more