Richmond Writing

This is a completely bipartisan lament.  When did the word “rhetoric” become synonymous with “empty speech”?

Perhaps it’s as old a smear as the attacks by Athenian philosophers on the Rhetoricians of their day.  I’d contend that Rhetoric (with an R) is a noble art, but the term can hardly be used anymore.

By the way,  both President-Elect Obama and Senator McCain made very powerful speeches on election night. McCain was noble and magnanimous, and he used a rhetoric of inclusion that nicely matched Obama’s approach a little while later.

I was pleased to join several Core 101-102 faculty members for a recent workshop.  We shared excellent WAC-style pedagogy and I can take no credit for this; the Core faculty developed and led this event.

The most important lesson for this observer is that faculty are concerned about commentary.  I’ve long known that faculty work hard when designing assignments, but I’ve had an impression–probably mistaken–that most faculty are writing the sort of vague and counterproductive commentary I once saw as a Writing Center tutor.

Ray Hilliard moderated our meeting; Ray returned to his former position of coordinator while David Leary is on leave. Ray has always had a strong investment in improving students’ academic-writing skills, and we covered a lot of ground with our colleagues.  We discussed the follow topics, and participants used actual student papers to consider appropriate pedagogy:

• Eric Yellin (History) had a very useful yardstick for measuring student understanding of an assignment.  He said that one mark of  a strong writer would be someone who was “thinking beyond the question” and doing original work as compared to a writer who might be “struggling with what the question was.”
• Ray finds himself spending less time writing commentary now that he employs MS Word’s embedded commentary feature.  Several participants either use that tool or plan to do so.
• We all noted that in our sample papers, the instructors began with positive reinforcement for something a writer had done well, then maintained a friendly tone all along. This is a pedagogical approach all Writing Fellows learn in Eng. 383.
• We all agreed to “put grammar in its place” as an important, but not primary, concern when writing commentary. In Core, crafting one’s focus, analysis, and support are first-order concerns.  Grammar must be addressed, but faculty, again in the same way Fellows learn, agreed that finding patterns of error rather than isolated incidents would best serve writers.
• Several faculty did lament that students were not being careful enough with word-choice. This lack of care and nuance can lead to prose that does the job but not in an eloquent manner.

Particularly during a heated campaign season, I’ve often wondered how to broach the subject of political speech/political rhetoric (verbal/visual) in the classroom without creating a partisan-feeling discussion.  (This seems especially hard with the wide contrasts in rhetorical strategies employed by the 2008 Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates.)

I’ve just been reading through the posts (articles, really) on a site called Wordwatchers, which, “explores how we can learn about the candidates’ personalities, motives, emotions, and inner selves through their everyday words.”  This website seems like a nearly perfect backdrop of academic objectivity to frame discussions of current (almost daily updates) political rhetorical strategies.   This might be of particular interest to 103 faculty or Political Science.

I am using a wiki this semester without a spell-checker and I’m not the best proofreader on earth.

In addition to that issue, I often forget to READ MY WORK ALOUD before I submit it.  Thus I find small errors cropping up. How do I keep myself honest and students engaged?  I give them extra credit on work if they spot an error in my own online posts and assignments. If I violate one of my own Pet Peeves, they get more credit still.

One of my class mentors said the wiki (and the work in Second Life) provide a great example of “immersive learning” for students.  I suppose they have at least learned that all writers must take care and be mindful of an audience’s watchful eyes.

 Score so far: 3 errors by me, no Pet-Peeve violations. Stay tuned.

Changed my handle here.

Now, as program director, allow me to welcome all of you to this blog. I also want to post something cheerful and not as gloomy as the response to Carr’s article.

We will work with writing in some form, no matter the trajectory of human evolution. I have long advocated a richer use of those online spaces and new forms of media. We can, I feel, tame the machine and put it to its best uses.

But then I’m a digital immigrant. It’s the “natives” who will decide this issue.

This is Joe Essid, for now using the user name “writing” (uggh), as if I were some Socratic essence.

In a recent issue of Atlantic Monthly, Nicolas Carr published “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

He posits that our minds are changing neurologically from using technology so much.  Sounds far-fetched, but neuroscientists have observed changes in our brains for some time, especially among children. Note this response to Carr from the letters to the editor in the current issue  of Atlantic:

Nicholas Carr correctly notes that technology is changing our lives and our brains. The average young person spends more than eight hours each day using technology (computers, PDAs, TV, videos), and much less time engaging in direct social contact. Our UCLA brain-scanning studies are showing that such repeated exposure to technology alters brain circuitry, and young developing brains (which usually have the greatest exposure) are the most vulnerable. Instead of the traditional generation gap, we are witnessing the beginning of a brain gap that separates digital natives, born into 24/7 technology, and digital immigrants, who came to computers and other digital technology as adults.

This perpetual exposure to technology is leading to the next major milestone in brain evolution. More than 300,000 years ago, our Neanderthal ancestors discovered handheld tools, which led to the co-evolution of language, goal-directed behavior, social networking, and accelerated development of the frontal lobe, which controls these functions. Today, video-game brain, Internet addiction, and other technology side effects appear to be suppressing frontal-lobe executive skills and our ability to communicate face-to-face. Instead, our brains are developing circuitry for online social networking and are adapting to a new multitasking technology culture.

Gary Small, M.D.
Director, UCLA Memory & Aging Research Center
Los Angeles, Calif.