Andrea Lunsford and happy days
I feel good today. The english department hosted our annual Peck Composition Series, an excuse for rhetoricians to sit around talking about writing. Andrea Lunsford -- THE Andrea Lunsford of Easy Writer fame! -- was our guest speaker. Her comments were illuminating, and even though such affairs of always somewhat dull, I feel that it was good for me. I grew somewhat reconciled to the switch to the "New Literacies" from the "Old Literacy," ie., the new emphasis of multimodal "writing" from the old essay-based formats most familiar to old-school Freshman English teachers. Previously, my critiques of the newer rhetorics were manifold. First, utilizing technology seems faddish, never mind that it's the wave of the future. (Did Voltaire need multimodal projects?) Second, such new emphases reek of beautocracy, of doing something new just to prove we're doing something. Third, actual *writing* tends to get de-emphasized. I still remember fondly reading William Strunk's unfashionably proscriptive The Elements of Style when I was 18 years old; his simple injunction that words of importance should either begin or end sentences made me think about style in a way I never thought about before.
Yet Lunsford talked up her subject well. Making a "brochure," for example, isn't THAT much different (conceptually) than writing an organized essay; while I still deem it a lesser skill, it's probably useful enough to a mass audience that will never really need to write formal essays in their post-collegiate lives.
What charmed me most, however, was how excited all my colleagues (fellow students and teachers) were about the colloquium. They were generally excited; it made me think how, sometimes, I really like people. The colloquium reminded me of something else: I really do love talking about writing. My goal in life is not "limited" to TEACHING writing, but I love talking about the writing process. For example: students make exactly the same number of errors per 100 words today as they did fifty years ago. Intriguing? Yes. Or: legitimate (and quantifiable) differences pertain to the editing process depending on whether the original writing is hand-written or typed on a computer. I also understood more fully how "non-language"-based rhetoric can function--spoken word performance, for example, or student documentaries. These are all real things, and while I remained concerned that composition courses may someday become "non-logocentric," the dedication and love teachers of writing possess toward their calling is a joyful thing.
Yet Lunsford talked up her subject well. Making a "brochure," for example, isn't THAT much different (conceptually) than writing an organized essay; while I still deem it a lesser skill, it's probably useful enough to a mass audience that will never really need to write formal essays in their post-collegiate lives.
What charmed me most, however, was how excited all my colleagues (fellow students and teachers) were about the colloquium. They were generally excited; it made me think how, sometimes, I really like people. The colloquium reminded me of something else: I really do love talking about writing. My goal in life is not "limited" to TEACHING writing, but I love talking about the writing process. For example: students make exactly the same number of errors per 100 words today as they did fifty years ago. Intriguing? Yes. Or: legitimate (and quantifiable) differences pertain to the editing process depending on whether the original writing is hand-written or typed on a computer. I also understood more fully how "non-language"-based rhetoric can function--spoken word performance, for example, or student documentaries. These are all real things, and while I remained concerned that composition courses may someday become "non-logocentric," the dedication and love teachers of writing possess toward their calling is a joyful thing.