But I Wrote It Myself

DeVoss and Rosati, providing background to the study of plagiarism, place it in the contexts of the modernist belief in individual authorship and the postmodernist understanding of authorship as collaborative (“’It wasn’t me, was it?’ Plagiarism and the Web” 194). Johnson-Eilola (“The Database and the Essay”), taking a postmodern approach, points out that writing is largely a social, not an individual act, and asks the key question, “Where does writing come from?” (200).

That question reminds me of Smagorinsky’s discussion of the experience of reading (“Toward a Cultural Theory of Reading”), in which he asserts that “[j]ust as the mind extends beyond the confines of the skin, textual signs extend beyond the cover of a book. During a reading transaction, reader and text conjoin in an experiential space.” In other words, the meaning we get from reading doesn’t arise only in our heads. It arises in the amorphous physical/mental space that includes both us and the words on the page. By analogy, we may say that if mind isn’t confined to the head, then ideas don’t arise in (or only in) our heads when we write. They arise on the page, too, as we write.

In what sense might we say that this shared mental/physical space is ours? We may say that it is ours in the sense that our cultural worldview tells us it is ours. In the modernist cultural vision, we claim that space as our own. It is private property.  In the postmodernist cultural vision, we hand over that space to some larger identity outside our heads, ceding our intellectual property rights and creativity to the common good. As Bartholomae puts it, “A writer does not write but is, himself, written by the languages available to him” (“Inventing”).

When I ask myself where my writing comes from, I usually think in terms of this polarity between the individual and society. To what extent do ideas come from me and to what extent do they come from others/the culture? And I experience this question in my own life as a tension. Part of me recognizes that the culture speaks through me and likes that, and part of me recognizes that I have an individual perspective and wants the words I speak to be mine and mine alone.

The academic obligation to think in terms of plagiarism pushes me in the direction of individual accountability, both for myself in ‘my own’ writing and for my students in ‘theirs.’ But even when students have written their essays themselves, the modernist definition of plagiarism and what is ‘mine’ and ‘not mine’ can be complicated. This term three of my students, all international, submitted papers they had written themselves. But they had originally written them in a previous class. They had borrowed from themselves. I had the hardest time explaining to them that this was (or was it?) a form of plagiarism.

“But I wrote it myself!” they each asserted. The words, they said, were theirs.

“Yes, but the definition of what constitutes your words applies only to words you have written this term. It has to be original work.”

Oh dear…

Assessing Multimodal Performances

Madeline Sorapure addresses the problem of assessing new media compositions, emphasizing the need to assess the “relations between modes in a multimodal composition” (4). The two most common problems faced by teachers assessing these relations are, she says, a) an overmatching of modes—the visuals, for example, simply repeat the text, as when the textual lyrics of a song are accompanied by the sound of the song, and b) an undermatching of modes (modes that have little or no relationship)—the visuals, for example, have no apparent connection to the text. She calls these the two problems of “pure repetition or pure arbitrariness.”

How, I wonder, does Sorapure’s own multimedia article fair in terms of the relationship between modes?

I confess I don’t feel at all qualified to assess multimedia presentations. However Sorapure, citing Yancey (who acknowledges this “discomfort”), says instructors “are indeed qualified to look at the relations between modes and to assess how effectively students have combined different resources in their compositions.” So here goes.

The three modes Sorapure uses are text, visuals, and sound. She provides three sound options: bird song, indistinguishable human vocalizations, and clock chimes, with an option to turn the sound off. The visuals move between four parts of a photograph of a building with statues in front of it (one part for each section of the text), though the details are difficult to see because either the picture is in motion or it is blocked by the text. The text itself is presented in blocks about the size of one and a half paragraphs with a scroll function combined with a button function (the latter for moving to a new block of scroll). She also provides a unimodal textual alternative–in effect, an option to turn off not just the sound but the visuals, too.

I am afraid that I cannot see any relationship between the three modes, either between the visual and the auditory or between those two modes and the text. What do birdsong, human chatter, clock chimes, and an anonymous building only half seen have to do with ways of assessing multimodal presentations? I don’t know. In addition, the limited access to the text I found limiting in terms of comprehension.

Yancey, in her famous 2004 CCC Chair address (or was it, as Chris Farris observed, more a dramatic performance?), says that she “designed a multi-genred and mediated text that would embody and illustrate the claims of the talk” and that the “images…did not simply punctuate a written text; together words and images were…the materials of composition.”

Actually, if we are talking purely about visuals, this is nothing new. Business writing textbooks have long taught students how to design documents featuring visuals—for example, how the visual must relate directly to the text and vise versa.

Actually (again), I’m not sure how well Yancey succeeds with her own visuals. Using the metaphor of tectonic shifts in higher education is one thing, but illustrating it with a map of the continental tectonic plates is another. Beyond a trite parallel, I don’t see much value in the visual.

So assessing the use of visuals is nothing new in composition. The use of audio, however, is relatively new, at least to me. And this seems a more complicated assessment challenge. While I don’t see any relevance in Sorapure’s audio, I’m not sure what I would suggest instead (in the role of the instructor who makes suggestions for revision). Simply to have an oral repetition of the text doesn’t work (according to Sorapure’s own criteria). So what would?

It’s a fair question.

As a practical assessment of Sorapure’s article, I note that I first switched off the audio because it didn’t mean anything to me–indeed, I found it distracting (not only is it unrelated to the text but it loops and repeats itself interminably). Then I switched to the unimodal textual version to actually read the text because I found the visual design got in the way of my comprehension. Thumbs down?

Writing Off Writing

In her case study of David John Damon, Cynthia Selfe contrasts his advanced digital literacy skills at college with his undeveloped conventional writing skills, asserting how the university’s overvaluation of the latter and undervaluation of the former were the cause of his eventual flunking out. Spending most of his time working as a Web design consultant and producing CDs, Damon failed two “conventional communication classes,” resulting in a GPA too low to continue at the university. Selfe concludes that Damon “failed out of the university—primarily because he couldn’t produce a traditional essay organized according to the print-based literacy standards of linear propositional logic, Standard English, argumentative development, and standard spelling” (“Students Who Teach Us” 49).

I am undecided about the value of teaching digital literacies, which Hawisher et al. (the ‘et al’ includes Selfe) define simply as “the ability to read, compose, and communicate in computer environments” (“Becoming Literate in the Information Age: Cultural Ecologies and the Literacies of Technology” 642). But I can spot a weak argument in support of digital literacies.

Selfe characterizes “conventional” writing classes in language which more or less equates them with the outdated approach of current-traditionalism, making “conventional’ seem like a dirty word. More specifically, Damon’s teachers in the English Department, Selfe writes, “were very concerned about his ability to organize and write formal essays, his inattention to standard spelling, his inability to write sentences that were grammatically correct according to conventional standards, and his problems with development and logical argument” (“Students Who Teach Us 49). Why, Selfe implies, should such old-fashioned, limited, even trivial concerns get in the way of a student whose literacy is so far ahead of his teachers?

I wonder, for a start, how Selfe knows that Damon’s teachers were so retrograde. Perhaps they were not as obsessed with spelling and grammar as she suggests. Perhaps some of them knew a thing or two about writing.

I also wonder if Damon, to put it bluntly, did his homework for those classes. As Selfe herself points out, he “continued devoting the majority of his days to online design work, spending weekends travelling to consult with his Web design fraternity clients,” and so on.

But I also wonder about the broader issue implied by Selfe’s article: the blurring of the concepts of ‘composition’ and ‘literacy,’ and the expansion of the concept ‘literacy’ to include anything, more or less, that we can say we ‘read’ or ‘compose.’ That is, not just words but images, videos, etc. Do we read architecture, dance, paintings? At what point will we say that composition does not need to include words at all? At what point will we eschew the complex things words can do for us and for others.

Hawisher et al juxtapose a visual composition and a “conventional” book report by a student, Brittney. The book report she wrote simply “to please her teachers.” (That sounds awful, doesn’t it?) The visual composition she wrote “to challenge herself and to engage in the literacy practices she knows will matter most to her when she graduates” (661). (How wonderful!) On the one hand, however, I think there is more to writing and knowing than a book report–not necessarily the best example of an exciting writing project. On the other hand, I’m wondering how I could critique Selfe and others, as I am doing now, with a visual Powerpoint text, mostly pictures with a few narrative words typed across them.

Ending with an attempt at humor, I imagine the following dialogue:

Digitally Literate Student (DL): Teacher, you know that saying, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Conventional Teacher (CT—could be mistaken for Current Traditionalist): Yes.

DL: And you know how you said our papers had to be about a thousand words?

CT: Er, yes.

DL: Well, here’s my paper.

CT: Where?

DL: In hyperspace.

CT: Oh, Ok. Hang on. (Time passes while CT looks up ‘hyperspace’ in a conventional dictionary and then takes a class on the new literacies. Finally:) Then here’s my evaluation: you wrote too many words.

Kory has asked for some discussion of the question of locating Elbow. Here are a few thoughts.

• In one of the articles Kory has collected for us, Elbow defines academic literacy as how professors write for other professors. When last week we listed on the board terms we associated with ‘academic literacy,’ there were quite a few negative-sounding phrases—rigid, rule-oriented, prescriptive, formal, etc.—which suggests that we were to some extent linking academic literacy to the deservedly maligned current-traditional approach to composition theory and pedagogy. That is, how professors write for other professors often is portrayed as old-fashioned, formal, and not creative.
• Elbow argues that in FYC we don’t have to teach students how to write exclusively like professors. Life is long and varied, and there is more to writing—at work, say, or for fun—than producing academic articles. Perhaps professors need to learn to write like students as much as students need to learn to write like professors…

Source: The New Yorker, September 10, 2012, p. 89

• We should also consider the political dimensions to the current-traditional definition of academic literacy. To borrow Brian Street’s words (which were quoted in last week’s reading, “Blinded by the Letter”), the values we place on being able to write like academics “are merely those of a small elite attempting to maintain positions of power and influence by attributing universality and neutrality to their own cultural conventions” (723).
• So if like Elbow we teach a variety of writing styles in FYC, extending ourselves and our students beyond the current-traditional definition endorsed by those in authority, and since we are teaching these styles in the academy, what is to stop us calling what we are teaching “academic literacy”? (The answer is: those who have the power to stop us.) To put it another way, if we drop the limited, hegemonic definition of academic literacy and include literacies which people can use not just in writing for professors but in writing at work, for the newspaper, to friends, and so on—real-world writing—Elbow can be welcomed back into the academy. (Did he ever really leave?)
• What about the new literacies? Does Elbow belong there? It is interesting to note that we seemed to find it difficult, if not impossible, to put Elbow in the ‘new literacies’ category on the board, also. And yet, and yet…If a key feature of the new literacies is collaboration, then why doesn’t Elbow’s pervasive inclusion of collaborative writing (in his and Belanoff’s textbook, Being a Writer, for example) count? Is it because we have already defined him exclusively as an individualist and cannot see beyond that category? Is it because he is not associated with the technical stuff of new literacies, or new genres such as blogging? What about that new literacies ethical stuff—the emphasis on texts being written, shared, read, and rewritten together? Elbow seems to be as keen on that as anyone else.
• If academic literacy isn’t just current-traditionalist literacy, if, indeed, it isn’t just how professors write to each other but, more broadly, how people write to each other within the academy in a variety of contexts and for all sorts of reasons, including readying themselves for writing to non-professors, and if the ethical stuff is at the heart of new literacies, then I would say that Elbow fits fairly into both categories: academic literacy and the new literacies. Which, it seems to me, problematizes the categories rather than Elbow’s approach to writing.