Coming Clean

It’s ethical, in most fields, to reveal conflicts of interest.  So I should reveal my investment in reading since you are all writing about reading in this unit.  As wacky as it might seem (and it continues to seem wacky to me), my scholarly work is in the history of reading and literary history.  Like most academics, I know WAY too much about one little thing.  The thing I know too much about is, admittedly, not that little since it is the longest novel written in English (Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, 1748-9); but really only a few hundred people in the world care deeply about this novel.

My work, while quite specific in some ways, speaks to larger issues as well.  Many of these larger issues are those we are exploring in this unit:  How has reading been important in the past?  Is reading an important part of developing free or democratic societies? Can we continue to be individuals, with strong individual thoughts, if we consume vast amounts of streaming, electronic media?

One part of me (this is the disclosure of the horse I have in this race) wants to argue that, indeed, free societies will collapse if more and more people stop reading. We’ll generally know less; we’ll become less critical and rational; we’ll be unable to engage in careful, complex, deep thought and simplistic, polarized positions will dominate. More sadly, many cultural forms (the novel? plays? poetry?) will disappear, reducing and bleaching out our experience of our own humanity. We might stop caring about each other as much.

But this is where things get complicated: Some of my research suggests that many of the readers of the past were perfectly happy to just read and, didn’t want to, say, overturn gender inequalities or execute kings. Increasing literacy rates and enlarged habits of reading--in spite of exceptions--suggest progress toward more modern, free societies. But clearly reading is not the only factor in all historical situations. All of these contradictions only emphasize the complexity of historical change when it come to media ecology--a complexity we should probably take into consideration when we contemplate the future.  Or, as McLuhan suggests “those who panic now about the threat of the newer media” should remember to “dissociate[e] . . . action from feeling and emotion.”  We should not simply react to loss (is he talking to me?), but think clearly about how to act and move forward.

So. I want to look back, but I know that it is necessary to look forward.  What do I want you to take from this? I hope that you take a sense that arguments look forward will be as carefully considered as those that look backward.

Pet Peeves: Page Numbers

Where have page numbers gone?! They are so useful--printing snafus, for commenting.  They provide a great sense of accomplishment:  3 pages written! 10 pages! 100 pages!

Web pages sort of seem like scrolls--did scrolls have/need page numbers? Does scrolling, clicking, and linking through the internet make us less aware of the need for page numbers on paper copies of texts? Does it change our sense of how long a piece of writing is?

Pet Peeves: Number v. Amount

The word number seems to be disappearing and seems to be increasingly replaced--erroneously--with amount.
           Amount: quantities or entities that cannot be counted or divided up; use with abstractions
           Number: usually countable things--even if there are too many to really count!

This can be complicated since  it is possible to describe the same thing using either abstraction, which can't be counted
          There is a small amount of water in the glass.
or specific measurements, which can:
          There are 2 ounces of water in the glass. I can measure the number of ounces with this beaker.

uncountable: I have an enormous amount of grading to do.
countable: I have an enormous number of papers left to grade.

"Grading" in the first sentence is an abstract noun that cannot be broken down--it might include commenting, thinking, sorting papers, procrastinating, making decisions, and so on. It's a mental operation (at least for writing instructors who can't use scantrons).  While I can count the exact number of papers left to grade, the intellectual work of grading itself is indivisible. 

Ask yourself:  is it possible to count this, or break this into discrete, individual items?  If so, use "number."

A number of additional examples; a possibly unnecessary amount of advice.

Wrong: I have a large amount of friends.  Are all of your friends one, indivisible entity? They'd probably like to think that you consider them as individuals, therefore:  I have a large number of friends.

Ok, so maybe the number is so large that it seems abstract.
 The amount of people in the world is enormous. 
Still wrong.  I'm certainly not going to count them, but, theoretically, I could and they exist as individuals, so it really should be: There are an enormous number of people in the world.

A number of ideas; a small amount of knowledge?

And, if what you really want to know is the difference between affect and effect, here's the grammar girl.

More McLuhan

McLuhan is a difficult writer in many ways—his allusions to so many different figures from the past, for instance, can be confusing.  But if McLuhan is not necessarily laying out his ideas in a straightforward way, he is giving us a lot to think about and work out. 

In fact, the more I read McLuhan, the more I’m convinced that the difficulty of his writing actually makes it more useful for readers of different times; his theory is quite flexible.  Although written before computers were common, and certainly long before anything like the internet as we know it, it is easy to make connections between his ideas and the newest media of 2011—because he uses more general terms. For example, he writes that “[e]lectric writing and speed pour upon [modern people], instantaneously and continuously, the concerns of all other men [or people]” (234). In 1964, “electric writing” must surely mean tv, radio, even the telegraph.  But is it useful for a theory to say “TV pours the concerns of everyone on everyone else all the time”?  Today, as the internet takes over tv and the tv format changes to accommodate online viewing, such a statement wouldn't be as helpful.  We can understand this statement now because McLuhan’s thinking comprehends media that he hasn’t actually seen. But to talk about what you haven’t seen necessitates a certain vagueness, even ambiguity.

Likewise McLuhan often contrasts time periods in a way that is difficult for readers to follow. He moves with dizzying speed between the world before print, the rise of print-oriented thinking, and a future? present? of electronic communication. But this movement between times, and the absence of concrete dates, allows us to think about the truth of these cycles; we can look at different examples from different points in history. Indeed, his theory, broadly construed, proposes that media “explode[es] [us] into an agglomeration of individuals” while also—at the same time, perhaps—brings us together and makes us “one tribe once again” (234). In other words, we can be both pulled apart (exploded) and pushed together (imploded) simultaneously. That’s flexibility!

You know nothing of my work

Marshall McLuhan was an important public intellectual of the mid twentieth century.   Here is an ad celebrating the generation of one of his key ideas. He showed up in movies, like this one (mature content).  And here's the wikipedia page for an overview with links to deeper analysis of his ideas (wikipedia is quite useful at times--just don't use it in your essay).

More on McLuhan coming up later in the week . . .

In the meantime, do we still have public intellectuals?  Is there anyone alive whose ideas might be discussed or alluded to in a popular movie? Or celebrated in a commercial?

Revising tips and strategies

Often, revising is difficult because the more you think about your essay’s argument, the more ideas you have, the more ideas you have the more the argument gets complicated, and as you bring in new ideas, you end up with more details and quotations.  It can start to be a mess.

Here is a writer talking about how she organized her book:
Grammar Girl organizes

You have to scroll down a bit to get to the video.

And here is is site that allows you to work with stickies.  This might be quite helpful in organizing your work.  You could put key quotations all on one color, or use a specific color for sentences that work out one particular claim or key term idea. As we start to use more sources, it might help you organize those as well.  You can move things around on your project board and SEE the relationships between ideas.

Stickies

Why they call it the Revision “Process”

A bit of free time in my schedule (thanks, snow and ice!) over the past two weeks allowed me to finalize and send off an article.  It will be published in Winter 2012. I started it in 2005.  7 years--SEVEN YEARS-- from inception to print for a 25-page essay.

The process that an academic article goes through is similar, intentionally, to the process of drafting and revising your essays in this class will go through.  Here are the steps:

1. Submit draft for PEER REVIEW and COMMENTS:

I picked the right journal for my essay, so my essay wasn’t immediately rejected, but was sent to outside readers for evaluation.  This is called peer review, or scholarly review.  The people who read, and commented on, my work are scholars in the same field that I work in (peers).  They recommended one of three options: publish, don’t publish or, more commonly, “revise and resubmit.”  That’s what I got.

You should see the similarities for this class:  You submit your conference draft.  I read and comment (no option for rejecting them!). You also participate in a peer workshop.  Your classmates are your peers and, like in scholarly review, they are readers who are qualified to evaluate your work because you are all working on similar lines of thinking.

2. Receive and evaluate comments.  Begin REVISING and RETHINKING.

I initially received two set of comments; on other essays, I’ve received three.  The two sets of comments suggested that I do two literally opposing things to revise the essay. So, as I set out to revise I had to take the comments into consideration, but I also had to make some real decisions about what I WANTED the essay to do.  The comments didn’t give me a template to follow for producing an excellent essay--they gave me feedback about what I was already saying and suggested new lines of thinking.

For you:  You’ll get my comments and some feedback from your peers. How do you sort it out? Is my feedback necessarily better than your peers’? What if you get conflicting advice? What if the advice you get doesn’t line up with what you’re trying to say? Yep, YOU have to decide what advice to take, what to reject, and ultimately what you want your essay to be.

3. Dither and work on revising the essay for 2 or 3 years. Move across the country and pack up all of your research so it’s hard to get back to the essay.  Completely change directions and force yourself to write entire new sections.

Lucky you:  Deadline is coming right up. Skip to step 4.

4. Finalize the essay. PROOFREAD and EDIT.

Once the editor accepted the revised version (this often takes more than one round of revisions), it was time to prepare the manuscript for publication and that means EDITING.  Editing is different from revising.

 

Revising: new thinking, new research and reading, new paragraphs, changing the thesis. 

Editing: proofreading, putting in citations, checking and rechecking the exact wording of each quotation, considering your word usage and tone.

I’ve worked, happily, with journals that do some of the editing for me. But in this case, unhappily because I’m not a good proof reader, I was on my own.  Hello ruler, red pens, style manual, dictionary, and several days of headache.

For you:  The stakes aren’t quite as high here--you won’t be publicly shamed if something is misquoted. But you do need to proof read for typos, spelling errors, and make sure your citations are correct.  One reason professional writers like help at this stage is that it’s hard to proofread and copy edit your own essay.  But you can have a friend or peer help you.  You can also get some help with this kind of work at the writing center although you shouldn’t expect the writing tutors to simply copy edit your whole essay--and it is you who is still responsible for the final product! 

5. Turn it in:  Sure, there’s stress in making the deadline, but don’t you feel relieved that you have to finish and that the class doesn’t last 7 years?