Un/selfconscious writing

 Some writers write in a very self-conscious writery way. A classic "writery" move is to write your first (nonfiction) book, or other stuff "early" in your "career" like this:

I'm a writer. I like writing. I'm doing writing right now. Woah, what's up with writing? I'm like sitting at a desk typing words, but like, you're also reading them! I got a book deal! I'm writing my first book right now! I'm a writer! I do writing! Writing is so hard, but I'm really into writing.  Check out my writing!

I for sure did this a lot in my first book, and in a lot of other places. One of my very first attempts to write "fiction" in high school was a very high-minded two page piece of metafiction which was really just me being unable to come to terms with not being able to make up characters and stories, and was a sort of passive-aggressive version of Salinger's narrator, Buddy Glass,  in Seymour: An Introduction. (To his credit, I think Salinger actually does this very well, but it's easy to do badly.) My freakin' writing textbook is written in a very wink-wink, nudge-nudge, self-conscious voice. I didn't know how else to do it.

I wish I didn't have the impulse to write like this. It's sometimes really embarrassing to go back and read. When I encounter someone else who writes this way, I cringe inwardly; not so much on their behalf, but on my own, because I realize what I must sound like to other people. Nevertheless, I often do it because I feel like I must, and I feel like the artifice with which many writers go about writing about things that really happened is pompous and unnecessary and even maybe uncharitable and untrue. 

 

Paul J. Griffiths in Intellectual Appetites makes a distinction between the way that the "curious" (which he defines as the bad kind of knowledge seeker) and the "studious" (the good kind) express their knowledge. For the studious:

A doubt is raised, an imperfection acknowledged, the beauty of a public depiction of knowledge’s creaturely intimacy shaded by an acknowledgment of the failure of exactly that intimacy. There is...a high degree of self-referential awareness in the texts, oral or written, of studious knowers: the stammer requires this. The curious, however, do not stammer. They are loquacious, which means much more than just that they speak (and write) a lot. They present their spectacular masteries in a form that shows no doubt, no stammering, and no uncertainty; and they do so because they have none. The spectacles they have constructed are wholly owned. No remnant remains unpenetrated, undominated, and so the findings can be presented loquaciously, in well-wrought words whose central purpose is to convince those who hear or read them that, yes, this is exhaustively known; and, equally (if not more) important, I, the one speaking and writing, exhaustively know it. Ideally, the reader or hearer of what the curious write and speak should be struck dumb with admiration of the perfect mastery there being displayed. Those who read what the curious write should respond as the prophet Isaiah did in the presence of God: my lips, they should think, are unclean before knowledge of this extent and profundity. All I can do is be silent before it. The curious, as always, aspire to be treated as if divine. This leads me to the final contrast between the stammering works of the studious and the loquacious works of the curious. It is that stammering is an invitation, while loquacity is no more than a declaration. 

 

So yeah, I feel like I want to stammer, I want to be self-referential. 

Yet I do think that one can have a quiet confidence in one's prose, one can jump right into the telling of something without the self-referential, without the demand that people accept your "spectacular mastery." I am reading Hua Hsu's book Stay True right now and I feel like he's doing it. A writer may have to do literally years of yeoman's work, of stammering, to be able to write hospitably, invitationally, without succumbing to the caricature Griffiths lays out here. I wonder if it is because Hsu spent years immersed in the showy loquaciousness of indie-minded pop music criticism that he is able to finally lay it all aside and write honestly and confidently in this book.

 I'm thinking about a lot of things that I want to go into my Big Book o' What Writing Is -- and one of the biggest issues I'm dealing with is that I've neglected 'literacy studies' almost entirely, for reasons I may try to get into later -- but one of the ones I keep coming back to is the reification of concepts like "Writer" and "Writing" and what these things mean to those of us who claim them as identity and/or vocation. 

 

Scattered Thoughts on a What Should Have Been a Disappointing Weekend at CCCC 2024 in Spokane (But Somehow Wasn't)

“How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire."  

Seymour Glass in J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”

 

“But yield who will to their separation,

My object in living is to unite

My avocation and my vocation

As my two eyes make one in sight.” 

Robert Frost, “Two Tramps in Mud-Time” 

Spokane’s official tourism slogan, ever since I can remember, has been “Near Nature, Near Perfect.” Having grown up here as a bookish, non-outdoorsy kid, that never really resonated with me. As the STA bus I took from the airport – certainly the first time I’d ever taken a bus and not been picked up by a family member here, and possibly the first time I’d ever even been on a city bus in Spokane – pulled off the highway and into downtown, and I saw the twin towers of the Our Lady of Lourdes cathedral looming above the city, a much more personal slogan came to me: “Spokane: Where Every Catholic Church is a Place a Girl I Loved Got Married.”

Maybe I’m exaggerating a bit. But from the beginning I knew that my time at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in downtown Spokane last April was going to be as much personal as professional. A ten-minute drive in either direction would take me to my childhood home, where I learned to love reading, or my high school, where I learned to love writing. I was staying two blocks from the church basement where I I went to punk rock concerts as a teenager. To get to the conference location from my hotel I walked past my all-time favorite bookstore, the eye doctor where I got my first contact lenses, and an intersection where I once hit a pedestrian with my parents’ car. (I never saw him till he hit the windshield; he got a ticket for running across the street against a red light and survived with minor injuries, for which I will forever be grateful.)

There were professional things I wanted to do, certainly: finally present some preliminary findings from a research project that had begun and then stalled three years ago, see some sessions about AI and writing, and maybe get some books that might be helpful for teaching.The first day I attended a business meeting of the Writing about Writing standing group, which had five members in attendance. Because it was so small, it became a sort of informal conversation, mostly about AI and writing.

I spent all of Thursday evening in a frenzied state of writing and thinking. I had been neglecting  some data my two research assistants – long since done being paid by my grant money - had collected via interviews three years ago, and faced with the first hard deadline this project had ever encountered, I buckled down and read all the transcripts, looking for interesting patterns and insights. While it wasn’t perfect, I was excited to be finally working on this project I’d been putting off for so long. Being at this conference gave me some confidence that it might work, that playing around with ideas could be valuable. Anyway, I knew I’d have a chance to bounce this stuff off people tomorrow. I actually said out loud, in a kind of insomniac moment of clarity, “what a gift!” To be able to read, write, and think? And get paid for it?

Well, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans, as they say. The exhilaration of the all-nighter wore off, and Friday morning, fifteen years into the academic conference game, I had my first ever honest-to-goodness 100% no-show. I couldn't believe it. A very kind woman from Centralia college came by to count the number of attendees at the presentation (charitably, she wrote down two: her and me) and I explained a bit about the data to her, and also attempted to diagnose the source of the problem. Some likely possibilities:  I signed up for the wrong type of session (a 90 minute panel instead of a 20-minute paper); the timing (first thing in the morning is the least coveted time slot at any conference); the subject matter (Economics professors’ beliefs about writing - boooooring).

With that out of the way, I was able to focus on what turned out to be the real reason I was in Spokane: to eat meals with friends I’d made between the ages of six and twenty-seven. Over the weekend, I had food and/or drinks (as Lloyd Dobler says in Say Anything - “that’s eating, sharing an important physical event”) with the following people:

• D, who has been my friend since my first day of kindergarten
• V, who I dated in high school
• A, who I played in a band with all through college
• R, who was in my masters program cohort and also went to the same junior high I did

I was struck by how things I’ve been thinking and talking about professionally came up, and the way my professional concerns are deeply personal, though most conversations I had were not professional in the traditional sense. R and I did talk about the vagaries of teaching writing, the stubbornness of precarious employment in our field, the arbitrariness of not being eligible for tenure, a bit about the people we went to grad school with, and a lot about her recent divorce.

D talked about how he felt difficulty communicating with most people in his life - how an artist friend of his had died recently, and he felt he’d lost one of the few people he could carry on free and easy conversation with. We talked about how much we appreciate our own friendship, how we each value having not only shared life experiences and cultural touchstones to refer to – a few words of a Simpsons reference, a mention of specific rock song from the 90’s – but that we both tend to, and allow each other to, speak in multifarious garden-path sentences, allowing for mutual interruptions, absurd digressions, and neck-breakingly fast shifts in tone and subject matter. Like in the research I’ve read about English as a Lingua Franca: coherence is less important than connection.

Whenever I talk to V, I feel like we're both taking stock of our lives – probably not actually imagining what life would've been like if we’d stayed together, but tacitly comparing where we are now to when we first met, the people we’ve grown into from the valedictorian and national merit scholar we were back in the day (read: giant nerds). I usually refer to V as “my high school girlfriend,” which is really not fair, because there are many more accurate and respectful ways to describe her; she’s an extremely accomplished person, and we’ve been good friends much longer than our brief teenage romance lasted.“Well, we’ve both ended up exactly where anybody would have expected,” she said to me over coffee. Which: fair. (I am a university professor; she is a government lawyer.) We spent a lot of time talking about our kids’ education and what it’s been like for us as people who were labelled “gifted” to navigate the school system as parents.

A is a very science-minded person, almost definitely a genius at computer programming, music, and anything else he puts his mind to. We got into a discussion about meaning, and I realized that I let the word “meaning” do a lot of heavy lifting. I’ve gotten used to using the term “symbolic meaning-making,” which I suppose is influenced by Kenneth Burke as well as the multiliteracies people, as a shorthand for a wide swath of language, literacy, music, and art that interests me.  A took issue with my notion that that meaning is inherently human. Algorithms are meaning, he said, in that they are relationships of numbers with each other. We discovered that we had different working definitions of words like meaning, information, and knowledge. I'm still recovering from this conversation and its implications, to be honest, and expect it to reverberate in my future thinking about AI and writing.

Spokane was an absolute bust for me, conference-wise, but in terms of being able to let myself think and have meaningful conversations with people I care about, and that are going to keep bouncing around in my brain, it was pretty great. I'm glad I got to go back.

Quick guide to academic hiring in Canada

Top-tier American PhD --> job at U of T

U of T PhD --> job at UBC

UBC PhD --> job at any top 20 Canadian university except maybe U of T and McGill

Canadian but non-U of T, UBC or McGill PhD --> job at any non-top 20 university in Canada

(YMMV)

Notes toward a theory of posting

• Writing is a human* symbolic** meaning-making*** process that involves mediating**** language***** with technology******.
• (Note: All words with asterisks can and should be defined with very long and tortured explanations. Maybe someday.)
• (Also: I've tried to make this definition as expansive as I can, but I realize it is fuzzy. This would include songwriting if you've got a guitar and a fourtrack but don't actually put marks on paper to preserve what you've "written." It would not include "songwriting" if a song is made up using only the human voice. I reserve the right to change my mind.)
• Posting is putting things on the internet in order to garner a reaction or cultivate a "following." Posting includes writing, but is not only writing. A person who writes things for social media platforms -- not just Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and the like, but also Medium, Substack, Blogger (zing) and really anything that has "comments" and "followers," the ability to "re"-something (post, tweet, blog, etc), is not primarily a writer, but a poster. 
• The immediacy of publication, the idea of a 'take' or a response is paramount to posting.
• The "content" of posting is more or less beside the point. Posting is about cultivating "engagement," or an audience for more posting. This is why "AI" is seen as important by people whose livelihoods involve posting, but is not welcomed by people who see their vocation as writing.
• The practice of writing itself does not require an audience other than a putatative Bakhtinian superaddressee - that is, a transcendant guarantor of meaning, even if that is only the faith the writer has in the intelligibility of his or her own writing. Posting requires "followers."
• Writing and posting can both involve things like words, sentences, paragraphs, ideas, and arguments. But posting cannot be separated from its online ecosystem, whereas writing can function in any setting.
• If "the writer's audience is always a fiction," then in posting it is urgently moreseo. A Poster tries to will their audience into being. Posting is for the audience, for the people, for the discourse. Even if there is no one reading. 
• Writing is a craft, posting is a performance.

Strategies for dealing with "lit review plagiarism"

 Here's an issue I've been encountering quite a bit lately:

1. A new-ish graduate student is assigned a traditional "grad school term paper." (I'll be honest, I have yet to find a good definition of how exactly this is defined. Quite a bit of the stuff I've read about graduate student writing is geared toward preparing students to do and write about their own empirical research; there is less that I'm aware of that focuses on coursework and course papers as such, which is currently my main concern.)

2. They have some sense that part of what they need to do involves a "literature review." (They're not totally sure what a literature review is, but they know it's important, even if their paper might ultimately have a persuasive element.)

3. They start looking for relevant literature on the thing they're writing about. (This is where things usually start to go off the rails. If the student is simply turned loose on a library database or Google Scholar, they may end up with a random assortment of dissertations, loose PDFs, non-scholarly articles, articles from low-quality or predatory open access journals, etc.)

 4. Even if they've run into some of the problems described in #3, they hopefully start to get some sense of who the important scholars are, what the important constructs are and how they're defined, what the seminal papers in the area are, etc. Often this grows out of discussions with the professor.

5. Here's the second place things go wrong: the student starts to quote or mention some of the things mentioned in #4, but they do it by plagiarizing the sources found in #3.

This is really intriguing to me. I often tell students that part of their job is to create a map of the field in their heads or for their own understanding, but it seems that in practice, two maps are in play here: the "mainstream"  one that the professor has in mind and is hoping to guide the student toward, and the "underground" one that the student constructs as a performance of "doing a literature review."

The underground map sometimes includes the 'real' map, but, crucially, whether purposefully or accidentally, the underground map itself is obscured: the literature is represented via a mish-mash of unacknowledged quotes, obscured secondary citations, uncited paraphrases, and so on.  

Why? I suspect that this happens because the student may be:

 a. unaware of the hierarchies of credibility in academic publishing.

b. not yet able understand abstract concepts in the discipline

c. not confident about their English proficiency/reading comprehension/writing skills

d. not aware of "traditional" (i.e. North American in this case) conventions of paraphrasing and citation and/or not aware of recommendations and/or conventions regarding secondary citations

e. and/or in some cases, actually engaging in deliberate cheating behavior for the above or other reasons.

I'm a softie, so usually I assume E is not the case, but even if it is, we could do a better job of helping students understand A-D. Some suggestions on how to deal with this:

A. Explicitly teach students about predatory publishing and geopolitical inequalities in academic publishing. Let students know that "bad" journals and publishers exist and try to help them avoid those, while at the same time encouraging the use of "good" regional open access journals. Sometimes this may involve delimiting the journals or types of journals the students should use, something I've started doing in recent years. (This may be easier said than done. There are many risks in navigating this problem, both in terms of ideological bias and not doing right by students.)

 B. Require students to read handbook or encyclopedia entries as part of scaffolding for papers. For example for an annotated bibliography assignment, require 1-2 entries to be handbook chapters, encyclopedia entries, or recent meta-analyses in a given area.

C. Introduce specific assignments or courses in which students are taught how to write for graduate programs.

D. Explicitly teach paraphrasing skills, citation practices (not simply limited to following the letter of, e.g., APA style, but actually teach about the function and purpose of citations - there is research on this!), attribution, etc.

E. Make discussions of academic integrity an integral part of course readings and discussions. 

 

---

 

This entire thing is me preaching to myself, because I teach a course that essentially is meant to introduce students to academic literacy practices in a specific discipline  that I am slowly (over the last 2-3 years) trying to whip into shape. It's currently for a specific discipline, but I think I can turn it into an interdisciplinary course for graduate students of any stripe if given the opportunity. 

I do not practice what I preach (yet), but I'm starting to see what it could look like.

Do not work where you did your PhD

 Here's a piece of advice for PhD students who aspire to a serious academic career: as soon as you have your degree in hand, stop working for your home department.

I'm not saying this never works out, and that you can't build a happy life and career where you did your PhD, but you need to be aware of a few things:

• You will be seen as a student before you are seen as a colleague or expert with your own ideas. This may change over time, but it will take a lot longer than it might otherwise.
• Temporary/contingent positions tend to lead to more contemporary/contingent positions, not permanent positions. Again, it's not that this never happens, but it's rarer than you'd think. I know many people who eventually found their way to something resembling semi-permanent, non-tenure-track employment this way. I know of vanishingly few, in the last ten years, who have landed anything resembling a tenure-track job in their home department.
• Being an "internal candidate" is as often a disadvantage as it is an advantage. Search committees want to see potential; being a known quantity is rarely helpful in this regard.

 

If you want to be a professor, my advice is to look anywhere but the department you did your doctorate for  3-5 years. If you get a TT job elsewhere, you will get some of the scent of the fresh and new on you, and you may be competitive for a later TT posting in that department.

The I stands for I, and the D stands for "dentification"

Identity is a huge thing in my discipline, and many educational disciplines. But there's something that feels contradictory about the way identity is discussed in our field. In the theory and research, identity is very clearly rooted in a post-structuralist paradigm.

Identity is “how people view themselves in relation to the social world, how their view is constructed over time, and from that view, how they perceive their future possibilities.”

Bonny Norton

Identity here is almost an action; it can only by definition be something that shifts and changes from time to time. It's how we think of ourselves, it's the interplay between self-conception and social positioning, it's what we're able to stake out for ourselves in a social world that has certain written and unwritten rules about how to be. 

Yet the way identity is talked about in popular discourse, even by scholars who ostensibly work within this more "fluid" paradigm, is much more fixed and rigid, and about categories: race/class/gender/sexual orientation/disability etc are treated like permanent, finite categories that have obvious major influences on people's "identities."

“... we think you're crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. What do you care? You see us as you want to see us—in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions.”

The Breakfast Club   

So on the one hand, we're told identity is an ever-changing discourse, a dynamic and shifting site at the nexus of the individual and society; on the other, it's an immutable and extremely socially pertinent set of boxes you check. Neither of these is satisfying. Most of us experience the world as coherent selves who, despite thinking about ourselves and our relationship to the world in different ways at different times in our lives, ultimately have what Christian Smith calls a "durable identity."

“By person I mean a conscious, reflexive, embodied, self-transcending center of subjective experience, durable identity, moral commitment, and social communication who -- as the efficient cause of his or her own responsible actions and interactions -- exercises complex capacities for agency and intersubjectivity in order to develop and sustain his or her own incommunicable self in loving relationships with other personal selves and with the nonpersonal world.”

 

Christian Smith

On the other hand, we also experience jarring changes in our sense of ourselves; it is very common to say "I'm not the same person I once was." We've all heard the old chestnut about all our atoms rearranging or whatever, or the ship that is rebuilt piece by piece. Even the seemingly fixed identity categories are things that can change and that we may want to resist. A Japanese person who immigrates to the US may suddenly find he "is" "Asian American." A white American may move to an Asian country and suddenly find she "is" a "foreigner." We may resist being "labelled" and essentialized because we don't like being positioned by other people in ways that feel bad to us. We contain multitudes, often to the point that we can't even really "know ourselves" because we lack the capacity to understand "who we are" outside of our own subjective sense of self at any given time.

"One of the peculiar ironies of being a human self in the Cosmos: A stranger approaching you in the street will in a second’s glance see you whole, size you up, place you in a way in which you cannot and never will, even though you have spent a lifetime with yourself, live in the Century of the Self, and therefore ought to know yourself best of all."

Walker Percy

So we cannot know ourselves, we feel that we have a stable self even though we cannot really define it, and we are subject to constantly shifting self-conceptions and social positionings by others. How can we be said to "have" an identity? What is it that makes us coherently human?

You have an identity, not because you have invented one, or because you have a little hard core of selfhood that is unchanged, but because you have a witness of who you are. What you don’t understand or see, the bits of yourself you can’t pull together in a convincing story, are all held in a single gaze of love. You don’t have to work out and finalize who you are, and have been; you don’t have to settle the absolute truth of your history or story. In the eyes of the presence that never goes away, all that you have been and are is still present and real; it is held together in that unifying gaze.

Rowan Williams