Permission

Around the time the first draft of the first essay is due I start hearing questions that all start the same way: Can I . . . . ? The student then, almost inevitably, voices a "rule" about writing that he or she is worried about breaking: Can I use I? Can I use "you"? Can I use "we"? Can I use contractions? Can I use the word "because"?

The answers are: Yes, No, Yes, Yes YES!

Actually, the answers are all YES. I only make a tiny exception for "you" because it is difficult to use well and even more difficult to use it and maintain a sufficiently formal academic style.

I really hate these kinds of rules. Yes, of course, you (breaking the "you" rule here) have to abide by the basic grammatical conventions of standard English. But otherwise, there's an awful lot of ambiguity and flexibility in how we use language. Why put up obstacles to expressing meaningful ideas with all of these little rules?

More disturbingly, students frequently ask some variation of this: "Can I actually tell my reader what I'm trying to argue?" I know that some writing instructors come up with lists of rules and "Don't use the first person" or "Don't use contractions" might be on that list. But, "Don't tell your reader what you are up to"?!

Somehow, somewhere along the line, students get the sense that writing is about a set of tricks and isn't about trying to convey meaning to a reader. One the most literal level, I think students have been told to avoid "metacommentary"--saying what the essay is doing or arguing ( I will argue that . . . This essay will then look at . . . .). I fail to understand this rule given that most PUBLISHED academic essays use metacommentary extensively. If your ideas are complicated, giving your reader these concrete handhold really helps.

I also worry that this belief that writers have to disguise their ideas under fancy terms or convoluted sentence structures and follow a bunch of arbitrary rules means that beginning writers are afraid to fully engage in the messy work of drafting BEFORE editing. All of these rules can makes a writer stop and second guess every sentence before she has even worked out the main substance.

Stopping to take a breath and write "Okay, what I'm trying to say here is . . . ." can lead to great revelations. If you been taught to avoid using the first person or to avoid using metacommentary, you've been deprived of this tool. You can always go back and take the main idea and edit out the thinking. But do the thinking first!

So, whatever it is, if it helps YOU say what YOU want to say--yes, you can do that.

Bridget

Of the various adaptations and continuations of Pride and Prejudice we are reading in class this semester, I have to confess that I like Helen Fielding's  Bridget Jones's Diary most. I don't think this is simply because I remember the 90s in way that many students, most of whom were tiny babies when the novel was written, can't--although there is a certain nostalgia in my attraction. What I really like about Bridget Jones's Diary is that it is a riff on Austen, but it stands entirely on its own. It works as a novel without slavishly following the plot of Pride and Prejudice; in fact, many readers have to be told that it was inspired by the earlier novel. This same sort of relationship exists between Emma and Clueless, and, I think, is partly why Clueless has found so many fans. It holds its own as a self-contained film and finding out that there are parallels to an Austen novel only adds depth.

And then there is Bridget herself. What a complicated character--are we meant to laugh at her? Once that voice gets into your head it is so hard not to fall in love with her.

New media and Austen

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries vlog is smart and clever in many ways--characterization, modernization, adaptation of events and issues of class and economics to a United States's context. But it also comments intelligently on new media itself. Lydia, for example, participates it the gossip mill about whether Bing Lee's "harem" of women by texting and calling her network of friends (Lizzie Bennet Diaries, episode 4). In addition to the videos of main story, there is Lydia's blog, twitter exchanges, tumbler posts, and the main webpage with the cast bios and interviews. It is an entire media world of its own--maybe a bit like the mini-worlds Austen herself creates in her novels?

There's probably a lot more to say about how LBD participates in new media, but (with my head, as usual, in the world of the eighteenth-century), I'm interested in how the series picks up Austen's own concern with new media and its influence on it users. That is, Austen herself commented on what we can call one of the new media of her own time--the novel. She does this most pointedly in her novel Northanger Abbey, as we will see. While the series is certainly interested in this, bringing it explicitly into the story with Lizzie being a Mass Comm grad student and both Darcy and Mr. Collins owning a digital media companies, I'm not sure LBD is a forceful in its examination of new media as Austen was. I'll be interested to see what everyone thinks after we've read Northanger Abbey!

Active Reading

When I assign students chapters of writing texts about the importance of reading and reading actively I always feel like there is a collective sigh: Ah, this again; haven't we been told this in one way or another thousands of times by dozens of teachers?

So here it is, one more plea. Practically speaking, reading very carefully and reading for true comprehension can save you time in the long run. You develop an understanding of concepts, historical trends, and ideas that builds up over time and allows you to read more quickly. A careful reading with notes and marginalia also will save you time when you are writing, providing you with ideas and passages. Good marginalia and notes might mean that you never really confront a blank page as you start a writing assignment.

Enough said. Go read (actively).

Lights, Music, Argument

For class this week we are reading John Wiltshire's "Why Do We Read Jane Austen?"* Wiltshire argues that film adaptations of Austen inevitably change the novels, minimize her social critique (particularly about the cult of sensibility) and re-romanticize Austen's "suspicion of the romantic" (168). As he notes, light and music make their own argument that works against Austen's skepticism. The heritage film in particular, romanticizes the past.

There is more to say about Wiltshire's specific argument, but it also seems interesting to examine a tangential line of thinking--that movies make arguments that might have little to do with the actual script or story of the movie. We all know, of course, from horror films or scary movies that is easy to create an emotional effect in the viewer. How do directors build tension? Creepy music, lingering shots of the big knife and so on. But are we aware of those effects in movies that purport to be more "realistic"? I know that I am susceptible to feeling sad or nostalgic very easily when certain kinds of music are used--I might tear up even if I'm hating the movie or know that the director is using the song ironically.

Movies--and other media of the moving image like tv and videos--are certainly the dominant form of media today. The printed word--the dominant media at the time Austen was writing--is better able to force the reader to be critical or skeptical of what is being shown. Readers proceed at their own pace , are easily able to go back and examine contradictions or connections, and--importantly--are confined to one kind of visual image (the printed word), allowing their brains more time to process. Print seems more distant from the world or the ideas it tries to convey while images seem to immerse us in that world. Of course, it took hundreds, if not thousands, of years for humans to fully develop a culture of reading and, in particular, to develop the vocabulary that accompanies critical reading.

Most people know how talk about camera angles, lighting, special effects, and soundtrack choices. That is, we've developed a way to talk about how movies are put together. But how often do we talk about the subtle emotional effects that those technical choices have on us? Do we think hard about the way movies make arguments aside from their content?


* From A Truth Universally Acknowledged. Ed. Susanna Carson. New York: Random House, 2009.

I'm Not a Hypocrite--Really

This is the time of the semester when I ask my students to begin their reading journals. Write about what you are reading. It is simple. And yet, it is the kind of assignment that students tend to see as busy work. In other words, they think, no one has to do this sort of thing except students who are only really doing it for a grade.

I try never to ask my students to do something I wouldn't do or don't do. So I pause I bit when I ask them to keep reading journals because I don't keep a reading journal that looks much like what I assign. I rarely, for example, free write about what I've been reading. I do, however, write about my reading every day--in lesson plans for class reading, in a personal journal and (rarely) on another blog for my "fun" reading.

No one ever asked me to keep a reading journal when I was an undergraduate--I so wish they had!--and it wasn't until I was a graduate student that I developed my own system of keeping track of my reading and research; this system is what I think of as my reading journal. I don't like typing while also reading in a book or from photocopies. So I take handwritten notes on a steno pad as I write. They look something like this:

Yes, I actually copy out entire passages--it makes me careful in choosing them and forces me to do the work of paraphrasing or summarizing more often. I put my own ideas, thoughts, objections, points of comparison, side notes, and so on in brackets. Here, I'm reminding myself to read a book this author alludes to: [read Levine's Realistic Imagination]. Then--and this is the part that is dialectical--I take my notes to the computer and create an entry in a word document with other entires on the same topic. As a review the original notes, I usually flesh out the notes at this point and add to my own comments and questions. Here's an example from a different reading.

When I'm ready to use these notes in an article, I usually cut and paste large chunks of these notes directly into the first draft. Most of it gets cut down eventually, but I find it helps to have more specifics at hand--this way I don't have to keep going back to the original book or journal. Some scholars use systems of notecards, others use bibliography software. I guess the key is finding a system that works for you and doesn't feel like busywork!

Reading Pride and Prejudice AGAIN

I have no idea how many times I've read Pride and Prejudice. The all caps in the title isn't meant to suggest exasperation but, perhaps, astonishment. It is just so good no matter how many times one encounters it.

But I feel so excited for anyone just reading this novel for the first time. Of course, the novel is so much a part of our culture (in the U.S. and England, particularly, but also world-wide) that I wonder if there is any reader who can truly read this for the first time. How many people reach adulthood or their late teenage years without encountering a reference to the novel? Does anyone NOT know how the story of Elizabeth and Darcy turns out?

It is a commonplace that Mr. Bennet likes Elizabeth more than his other daughters. And yet, if one were trying to read as an entirely new reader, the evidence (at least early on) is rather thin. All we get is a quick line about her relative intelligence--she "has something more of a quickness than her sisters" who are described as "silly and ignorant"--and a desire to put in a "good word" for her in the competition for husbands (Chapter 1). One can't help but wonder just how significant it is to be the favorite of such a father. How did the myth of this favoritism start and how does it color the way we now read the novel?

The passage that really gives me pause when I read the first few chapters occurs when Darcy slights Elizabeth at the dance: "Elizabeth Bennet had been obliged, by the scarcity of gentlemen, to sit down for two dances" (Chapter 3). Elizabeth, or Lizzy, has been briefly introduced as her father's favorite and, while trimming a bonnet, noted to be the Bennet's second daughter. But the last name here is jarring. Surely we ALL know Lizzy Bennet? Wondering why Austen feels that she needs to reintroduce Elizabeth as part of the Bennet family reveals that we come to this moment with a wealth of information and ideas and even images about Elizabeth. Not the least of that is that we know she is the main character in the novel. The last name signals that there were readers, once, who had to figure out if Elizabeth was a main character or if, perhaps, Lady Lucas was going to be more important. We, however, know that she likes to read, that she is witty and unconventional, that she has a "pair of fine eyes" (Chapter 6), that she refuses to marry her ridiculous cousin for financial security, and, well, we know the whole story, don't we? Wouldn't it be fun to be one of the early readers, or the rare reader who encounters this text without this previous knowledge of the novel?  Is it possible to discard everything we think we know about this character and read the story with absolutely fresh eyes?