Writing Leftovers

Usually when I’m revising, there’s a stage at which I realize I have to cut some stuff, either because it’s kind of tangential to the focus of a paper or because the draft has gotten too long. The writing I have to cut might be just a sentence or a paragraph or two; occasionally it’s multiple pages of text. It can be painful to just delete writing that I spent hours working on, that I think explores some good ideas, or that I just really like how I said it. So about halfway through my Master’s program, I quit deleting stuff I liked from my drafts. Instead, I save it for later.

I am not sure exactly how I arrived at the “freezer” metaphor. Maybe it was because I had recently been reading Plato’s Gorgias, in which Socrates compares rhetoric to “cookery,” and maybe it’s because as a grad student who liked to cook, I always ended up with a lot of leftovers. In any case, I created a folder named “FREEZER” on my cloud drive. It’s got a bunch of files with leftover writing that I’ve cut from various projects over the years. I try to label the files well enough to remember more or less what’s inside them, but some are labeled better than others.

Partial screenshot of a file folder labeled "FREEZER"
in all caps, with several MS Word files inside

My "leftover writing freezer" comes in handy in two situations: first, if I am searching for a new project to get started, I can look through the freezer for inspiration. For example, two of the files in the screenshot above have text I cut from other work because it needed to be its own project; I just haven't had the chance to get back to them yet. Second, sometimes when I am working on a project, I realize I’ve already written something related. I open up my “freezer,” pull out some of the contents, warm them up through revision, and use them. Having "leftover writing" can help me avoid writer's block. 

On the other hand, some of the stuff in my “freezer” is probably too old and stale to be usable anymore. Every once in a while, I open up that folder, check the contents, and decide whether or not to throw anything out. Since file space is cheap these days, I rarely throw stuff out, but when I do it’s because I no longer feel bad about tossing it. Putting bits of my writing in the freezer instead of deleting them is an easy way to make my writing and revision process more effective and less painful.

A Vocabulary (and History) Lesson

I teach college English--writing, mostly. Because it's college English, I almost never spend any direct instruction time on vocabulary. My students do develop their vocabulary in my classes, but mostly by doing a lot of reading and writing.

I do have one vocabulary lesson, however, which I will give if they ask and aren't satisfied with "read a lot; write a lot." It is this: learn affixes. Affixes are the bits we stick at the beginnings and ends of words to modify their meaning--in other words, prefixes and suffixes. If you learn affixes, your vocabulary increases logarithmically.

The word I most often use to illustrate affixes is "antidisestablismentarianism." Not only does it use a lot of affixes, it's also recognizable and generally regarded as a bit silly, which makes the lesson more memorable.

So I write the word on the board and ask my students to help me break it down. First, we identify the root ("establish") and note that it is a verb. Then we work our way outwards, identifying the affixes and their meanings, until they can successfully decode the word. I'll give you a moment now to try it yourself; the answer is after the break.

Image: A stack of LEGO blocks with the parts of the word
"antidisestablishmentarianism" written on them. CC0 Public Domain.

National Day on Writing

My photo of an ASU student. CC-BY 2.0

The National Council of Teachers of English created the National Day on Writing, "on the premise that writing is critical to literacy but needs greater attention and celebration." NDOW is celebrated yearly, on October 20th, and while I was serving as an assistant director of ASU Writing Programs, I had the privilege of organizing last year's celebration on the Tempe campus. Along with several colleagues, we planned to have members of our campus community share their responses to #WhyIWrite both on social media and on colorful origami squares. Over 200 people created squares for our quilts on October 20, 2015.

Photo by Bruce Matsunaga for ASU Department of English. CC-BY 2.0

The day's activities were cut short by rain, and we had to wait for the paper to dry out before our project's next phase. On October 31st, as Professors Shirley Rose and Maureen Daly Goggin chaired the annual Feminisms and Rhetorics conference on our campus, we began assembling these origami squares into "paper quilts," which we put on display near our Writing Programs offices.

My photo. CC-BY 2.0

As I sorted through these squares, selecting which ones to place in each quilt, I was profoundly moved again and again by the variety, thoughtfulness, and intimacy of responses. Many students wrote about using writing to learn, or to satisfy teacher expectations. But many more participants wrote about writing for self-expression, keeping in touch with loved ones, and preserving stories and traditions.

When I invited one university employee to share a reason why he writes, he regretfully told me that he doesn't really write--he is an accountant and only writes expense reports for his job. Well, that is writing! I told him. That kind of writing, which often doesn't get recognized as writing, is just as important as the kinds of writing we more readily recognize. I was grateful that he chose to make a square for our quilt.

Photo by Bruce Matsunaga for ASU Department of English. CC-BY 2.0

I was surprised by how many participants shared that writing helps them maintain their mental health. Sometimes, students wrote about how they use writing to create a better future for themselves and for others. A student who wrote "I write because 62 million girls don't have that chance" provided a sobering reminder that writing is a gift and a privilege not shared by everyone. That is why I am so proud to participate in the National Day on Writing. Through this celebration, we bring visibility to the importance of literacy and writing for everyone, regardless of their background, current circumstances, or plans for the future.

This cause is close to my heart. I invite you to celebrate National Day on Writing with me by sharing your responses to the theme of #WhyIWrite in the comments below and all over social media today.

Photo by Bruce Matsunaga for ASU Department of English. CC-BY 2.0 

My photo of Susan. Do not share without permission.

On Memes: A Linguistic Complaint

Yes, I'm aware of the irony. I EAT IRONY FOR BREAKFAST (it helps with my mild anemia).

I'm a linguistic descriptivist and not a prescriptivist, which means that I'm more interested in studying and describing how language is used by various groups and how it changes over time than I am in enforcing language "rules." However, there is one linguistic development that especially saddens me, and it is the narrowing of the usage of the word "meme" to almost exclusively mean "image macro." It's as if people had started using "technology" to only mean "smartphone" (please nobody point out to me that some people already do that).

According to those who coined the word and further developed the concept, a meme is, very simply put, an idea that acts like a virus, getting stuck in your head and spreading from person to person. Some ideas are more contagious than others.

Religions are memes. So are fashion trends, manners, jokes, selfies, mass shootings, genres, and linguistic innovations. An image macro is a picture with text superimposed on it. As a genre, the image macro is an extremely effective meme. It has nearly taken over Tumblr, for instance, and every six months Mormons on social media are subjected to a massive outbreak of the image macro meme, largely via the #LDSconf hashtag (hashtags are also a meme, btw).

Why does it matter that people call "image macros" simply "memes," when they are really a kind of meme? Because the concept of memes, properly understood, is so useful, and it's useful to have a word we can use to discuss it. If, when I say "meme," all you think of is a picture of a grumpy cat with the word "NO" on it in impact font, it makes it harder to have a conversation about why some ideas are stickier than others.

Alas, the idea of ideas as viruses is apparently less sticky than the idea of pictures with pithy phrases on them. I have little hope that the original meaning of "meme" can be reclaimed.

Writing Metaphors

One of my favorite teaching activities for the first day of class is to have students write a metaphor or simile for their writing, or for themselves as writers. Lately I've also had students add an image that represents their metaphor. The activity is a way to introduce some concepts and practice some technical skills right off the bat, but more importantly, it's a quick way for me to get some insight into how my students think about writing.

Here is the example that I made tonight:

Old-School Revision

Experienced writers know that the hardest part of writing isn't putting words on the page: it's revision. It's massaging and coaxing and wrestling and chiseling texts into the proper shape, the proper texture. I've been working on this article for a really, really long time. It's now in its 9th major revision, and it's 30 pages long, and last week, I realized that the bottom half of it needed some serious reorganizing. So I fell back on an old-school revision activity: the literal cut and paste.

It works like this. You take a printed copy of your paper (or in my case, thankfully, only half of it), and some scissors and glue, and you cut it into paragraphs. The glue is for pasting together the parts of paragraphs that span multiple pages. After your paper has been chopped into its component paragraphs, you mix them up and you find a large surface and you lay them out in your new order (this activity can be an interesting peer response technique too, if you let someone else rearrange them for you. Among other things, when somebody else tries to put your paper back together in the right order, you really start to get a sense of how important transitions are). Here's what my reassembled text-puzzle looked like:

Each column is a different subheading (though actually that first column contains two subheadings (one is transitional), and the remaining four are all sub-subheadings). The paragraphs with larger space between them are primarily transitional or meta-textual. The paragraphs on their sides didn't fit conceptually very well; that's my way of visually representing that they need to be heavily reworked or deleted (one of them was deleted, along with a bunch of bits of other paragraphs; the other three were reworked).

Using this method, I was able to get a birds-eye view or map of how my paper needed to be organized, which made my digital cutting & pasting much easier to manage. Of course I didn't exactly follow the map in the end. Reorganizing so many paragraphs required a lot of line-level revising too, and that in turn created alternate (and better, I think) organizational possibilities for the several paragraphs. It also gave me a better visual sense of how my sections were balanced than merely scrolling through a .doc could. And it offered me a fresh perspective on the text overall. After 9 revisions I was really having trouble seeing the trees for the forest; physically handling each paragraph individually was eye-opening.

I'm a proud tech nerd, but I have to admit that sometimes, low-tech solutions work better.

Now if only I could think of a better title, and a better conclusion for that beast.

Observe, Think, Write, Reflect, Repeat. Not Necessarily in That Order.

I finished my first round of conferences with my ENG 215 students this week. Their first project is what we might call a "demi discourse analysis" of a scholarly and a popular source on the same topic. It's time-consuming but I like giving feedback in conferences a lot more than I like just collecting drafts, writing feedback all over them, and handing them back. It was an especially fascinating, exciting, and exhausting three days for me, as it's the first time I've taught this project and I was both nervous and eager to see, in my students' drafts, what they'd learned in the past few weeks about discourse analysis and, though their analyses, about the discourses of the fields they're majoring in. As usual, when I talk with my students about what they're writing and why, I learn a lot not only about my own teaching, but about their prior writing experiences.

Here's one thing I noticed:

A lot of my students focused at least in part on "credibility markers" as a significant discourse feature. Most of them reduced "credibility markers" to "citations" and many proceeded to not only describe the type and frequency of citations, but to make evaluative claims about the trustworthiness of the sources based solely on that. What I inferred from this: we tout peer reviewed sources as the "gold standard" for academic writing in FYC, and our students have bought into it heavily, and mostly uncritically. This is a problem.

I am pleased to say, however, that some of my students did hesitantly, haltingly, apologetically push back against their own parroting of this narrow FYC-induced view of credibility, which opened up a neat learning space for us to think and talk about how we construct credibility in a more nuanced way. In the future when I assign some version of this project, I'll be sure to spend class time exploring this before drafts are due.

Another (related) thing I noticed:

It's genuinely hard for my students to describe discourse features without also passing judgment on them--regardless of how often I've pushed back against the idea that any particular discourse feature or convention is objectively, universally better or worse than another. I'm not sure if this is because of prior academic writing instruction (I suspect so, at least in part, but I think it might also be a cognitive development thing; as Andrea Lunsford said at an IHR seminar I attended last week, composition studies needs to pay more attention to neuroscience) but it seems to me that in teaching "critical thinking" we might be putting a little too much emphasis on the "critical" and not enough on the "thinking"--and definitely not enough on observing--an essential part of the process that is totally elided by the term itself. I'm reminded of Samuel Scudder's classic essay, "Learning to See." Are we so concerned with teaching our students how to write arguments (that is, to make claims and support them with reasons and data) that we're neglecting to teach them to really, really look at the data, and to think about it deeply, before deciding what to say about it?

These problems are, of course, partly the result of the absurd impossibility of having to teach "college-level writing" to a couple of dozen students in sixteen weeks or less. No curriculum is going to be able to do it all, and even if we could strike a perfect balance in a given semester, we can't necessarily control what skills and concepts and notions about writing our students carry with them once they leave us behind.

OK, two more things, really quick:

Thesis statements often have to be revised, sometimes significantly, after a draft is written. This surprises and troubles my students, until I tell them it always works that way for me, too. We don't just write to report what we think. We write to learn what we think.

Writing a conclusion is hard. Really, really hard. And no formula or procedure I've ever heard or ever given has ever actually worked at all consistently. There are as many ways to write a conclusion as there are papers. Possibly more. If you think I'm wrong--if you have a foolproof method for writing conclusions, please, please share it. I will thank you and so will my students. And so will our readers.

Image Source: ASU Writing Programs. Tag, you're it!

Guilt-free Writing Time

This update is a little late because I was in Utah over the weekend celebrating my grandmother's 90th birthday. Fortunately, I was able to use my tablet to keep to my writing schedule while riding in the car on the way there and back. Without a WiFi connection, I couldn't access many of my notes, drafts, and reference articles, because they're all stored on Dropbox and apparently it didn't all sync to my tablet because I haven't been using my tablet nearly as much since I finally got a smartphone. That made it a little harder to put my writing time to as good a use as I would have liked, but I still wrote something. This potential problem with my writing infrastructure will have to be addressed in the near future.

The other thing I had to deal with last week was guilt-induced writer's block. See, I had this pile of student papers to grade, and I should have had them finished by the end of the previous week. So on Monday morning when I was trying to write, all I could think about was those papers that I still needed to grade. After 45 minutes of non-productivity, I gave into the guilt and went back to grading. The same thing happened Tuesday afternoon. On Wednesday morning, however, although I still wasn't done grading (it was a particularly arduous grading process for various reasons), as I sat down at my computer, my internal voice was telling me "I have to write now, even though the grading isn't done."

That "I have to write now" didn't feel good at all. Then it occurred to me that no, I don't have to write during my writing time--or any time, actually. But the whole point of having writing time set aside is that it means I get to write then, totally guilt-free, no matter what else I have to do that day, or that week, because writing time is writing time. Not grading time. Not answering frantic student emails time. Not helping friends' daughters with their Language Arts homework over the phone time. All that other stuff is what the rest of my time is for.

For two hours a day, I get to work on my own writing, without worrying about anything else. Writing time is guilt-free writing time. 

That was a tremendous realization for me. It probably shouldn't have been, but I'm just thick like that sometimes. The other thing that I had to do this past week was turn off literally every notification I could find on my computer, my tablet, and my smart phone. Notifications are my enemy. They make me feel bad about the things I'm not paying attention to right now, as opposed to being fully engaged with what I am doing right now.

Anyway, I'm still well behind schedule, but I'm still making progress. I've reached a point where I need to go back and re-read some Kenneth Burke, to clarify my definition of his comic frame and figure out how it maps onto the concepts of techne and phronesis. Reading Burke is fun, in the same way that opening clamshell packaging is fun. It's ridiculously hard but the goods inside are usually worth the challenge.

In other news, my housemate Stephanie got left behind this weekend as the rest of us were traveling. Apparently, she got a little lonely, and couldn't stand to wait any longer to buy my Christmas present. But she got attached to him herself over the weekend, so we're going to have joint custody of this beautiful little guy (I can't blame her. He's so relaxing to watch). He needs a name. Right now I'm thinking about Kazran, Rory, or Jim the Fish.

Episteme, Techne, Phronesis (AcWriMo Update)

Having a schedule of specific times for writing every day is helping, though I missed Tuesday entirely, had to bump my writing time to later in the day on Monday because of a doctor's appointment, and seriously overslept on Friday. It is challenging to change from a habit of fitting my writing time around everything else in my life, to fitting everything else around my writing time. Still, other than Tuesday I did spend at least 2 hours writing, or doing writing-related reading every day this week, and as a result I have written 1300 more words for my first portfolio paper--not even remotely close to my goal, but progress nonetheless. I have also written about 3700 words of annotations for the books and articles I read this week. The balance of writing should really have been be the other way around, but at least my extensive annotations will help me when it comes time to study for my comprehensive exams.

One of the things I'm trying to do with my revision is to construct a new theoretical framework from which to make sense of my data, and in fact to make new sense of the entire project. When I say "make new sense," I mean that it already makes a kind of sense. I know what happened, and even a good deal about the chain of cause and effect that led to the point I'm at now--the point of having a mess of data that I need to write something meaningful about. I'm not exaggerating when I say mess, by the way. It's such a mess that I've spent the better part of the past five months in a cyclical pattern of anger, anxiety, and avoidance over what to do with it. This, my colleagues and advisor assure me, is not uncommon and does not mean I am a total failure as a researcher. So they say.

To make new sense of my research means to go from merely knowing what happened, to constructing particular meaning from it, meaning that will be recognized as meaningful by the community of scholars I'm trying to join. To do that, I needed a theory, grounded in the discipline, which would not only help me interpret the data but also the ultimately quite haphazard method by which it was obtained. To find it, I went all the way back to Aristotle, mainly by way of Janet Atwill and Joseph Dunne.

The ancient Greeks loved knowledge, and they loved to classify and systematize absolutely everything--including knowledge itself. They recognized, and had words for, many kinds of knowledge: nous meant first principles, which must be apprehended since they cannot be derived from observation or logic; episteme, or theoretical knowledge, is logically demonstrable truth; sophia is the power of both apprehending first principles and demonstrating theoretical knowledge; phronesis is practical knowledge, or the virtue of wise action; and techne is productive knowledge--that is, the power of rational creation, or of knowing how to intervene in specific cases in order to bring about a desired end. Whereas episteme is universal, techne and phronesis are particular, and whereas phronesis constitutes a mode of being, techne is about accomplishing specific ends. Though there is some ambiguity about the boundaries (and even the legitimacy) of some of these definitions of knowledge, the ancient Greeks as well as modern theorists generally agree that rhetoric is a type of techne. Atwill, however, gives an account of rhetoric that seems closer to phronesis. Even Dunne admits that the distinction between the two is ambiguous; his whole book is a project of teasing out the difference.

Anyway, the problem I had with my portfolio paper is that I wanted my research project to yield episteme. I wanted to be able to construct a rational account connecting my data to universal principles as unambiguously as possible. It couldn't possibly have worked--not only because I am such an amateur when it comes to designing and conducting such a study, but because the subject itself is one of particulars and not of universals. What I need--and what I ought to be seeking, is not theoretical but practical or productive knowledge, a rational but highly flexible way to deal with inherently messy and largely uncontrollable situations, ideally in order to increase the likelihood of bringing about specific ends. In order to be a techne, that way has to be teachable: it can't just work once, or only for me. As Charles Bazerman explains, "We consider theories successful when we do better with their guidance than without, when we accomplish more of what we wish when following their accounts than when following any or no other account. When considered this way, theories can be seen as heuristics for action" (103). Really though, I'm not sure that what I have--an application of Kenneth Burke's "comic frame"--amounts to a techne, or is more a type of phronesis. In any case such a heuristic would not only help me make sense of the data at hand but also make sense of the larger process of doing this research and writing project--and, I hope, future projects.

If you've actually read this far, congratulations! You're a giant nerd. Here's a cookie. 

...What's that? Aristotle ate your cookie! What a jerk. No, no, it totally wasn't me. It was Aristotle. Check out that guilty look on his face! Well, you know what they say about gifs bearing Greeks.

Source of images: Wikimedia commons.

AcWriMo Pledge

I started this blog a year ago as part of DigiWriMo, and although I failed miserably at DigiWriMo, I'm still enjoying blogging, albeit sporadically. But I'm not one to give up on a goal just because I messed it up last time. At the moment what I really need is to make some giant strides in my academic writing, so instead of doing DigiWriMo, I'm making a commitment for AcWriMo--Academic Writing Month.

As part of my PhD program, I have to create a portfolio of two "publishable," article-length research papers related to my area of primary study. I have (and have had for several months now) a beast of a draft of the first one that needs significant revision--a whole new introduction, some pretty major structural as well as content revision of the body, and a new conclusion. The other exists so far only as a somewhat nebulous web of ideas in my head, plus a few scattered notes about potential sources.

I'm giving myself eight days to revise the existing draft, then a maximum of twelve days to read and annotate sources for the second paper before I start drafting it. By the end of the month I'll have at least a first draft of that one. Since you can't write anything out of thin air, focused reading counts toward my writing goal. One of the biggest obstacles to my writing so far has been the tendency of other priorities to intrude on my writing time; if I'm going to be successful, I'm going to have to be a lot more rigid about my writing schedule--I'm blocking out the time in my calendar just like I would a class or a meeting. I'll spend at least two hours every day (excluding Sundays) working on these two papers: 9-11am Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays, and 3-5 Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturdays.

Once a week, on Saturdays, I'll post status updates on this blog. I'll talk about where I am in the writing process and anything interesting, frustrating, or cool that's come up in my reading or writing that week. Of course that won't be the only thing I'll have to blog about. I just got another round of student papers to grade, so Jock the TA Octopus might make another appearance. And the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who is coming up this month (which reminds me--I'm deciding now to take a break from my writing schedule on November 23rd because it would conflict with my Doctor Who party; I'll work an extra hour on Friday and Monday each instead).

So, that's my plan: Two papers. Two hours a day. One month of writing like there's no December. 

image source: https://society6.com/DanLebrun/Doctor-who-Geronimo_Print

Jock the TA Octopus

My friends and I have been grading a lot lately. It's that time of the semester. Reading students' papers can be very interesting and rewarding, but it also (as I think most teachers would agree) frequently tends to be a frustrating experience, when it's not simply mind-numbing. Often, we fantasize about ways to make grading easier. Tonight, an exchange about grading between fellow Comp instructors on Facebook somehow led us to imagine sea slugs writing papers, and thence (naturally) to the idea of an octopus TA. 

It's actually not that far-fetched. I recently read some articles about octopus intelligence. They use tools, play, solve puzzles, are amazing escape artists, can crawl around on land, and have awesome camouflage skills. Then Abby shared this little article about Jock, an octopus in Scotland who has taken to cleaning his own tank. Feeling that an intelligent cephalopod like Jock might be interested in switching from janitorial to clerical work, in a moment of stress-relieving silliness, I invented Jock the Octopus TA. Below, I share some of Jock's recent assessments of student writing. Also, apparently octopuses refer to themselves in the third person. They are solitary creatures who evolved at the bottom of the ocean; their brains are not like our brains. Don't question it.

"Jock says your source is invalid. Try JSTOR next time. Jock loves peer-reviewed articles almost as much as he loves rearranging his tank furniture to be more feng shui." 

"Jock wishes to use this paragraph to scrub the scum off the side of his tank." 

"Jock is not interested in how comprehensive sex education is the solution to the failure of our entire educational infrastructure. He thinks you should write a paper about cephalopods' right to privacy." 

"QUOTING ACTUAL SCHOLARS! Jock approves."

"Jock finds your mastery of academic style over substance simultaneously impressive and depressing." 

"Jock is intrigued by your thesis statement, but finds your argument's credibility hampered by poor paragraph organization and weak source attribution."

 image source: dailyvisits.co.uk

 When Jock is not grading papers or cleaning his tank, he practices playing his bagpipes. He and Paul II, a German octopus guitarist, are hoping to start an international Octopus band. Paul II's predecessor was allegedly psychic, but Paul II is an empiricist and doesn't believe in such pseudoscientific nonsense. Inspired by his high-achieving bandmate, Paul II thinks he may have a future in academia as well--perhaps as a research assistant.

Writing on writing

This is going to be longish, folks--I've got some catching up to do on my word count. And since I'm having trouble thinking of what to write about, I'm going to do what any self-respecting scholar would do: I'm going to go meta, and write about writing.

The first human writing was primarily numbers, for record keeping. Wikipedia tells me that the first writing of language occurred in at least two times and places, independently: in ancient Sumer around 3200 BCE, and Mesoamerica around 600 BCE. The Sumerians, humanity's earliest known writers, wrote using a stylus on clay tablets, and their writing was initially used for bookkeeping.

The Egyptians, who may or may not have developed their hieroglyphic writing system due to the influence of the Sumerians, used writing not only for economic but also for religious and military purposes. Semitic workers developed an alphabet in Ancient Egypt around 1800 BCE. These "Proto-Semites" wrote graffiti and "votive texts" on Mount Sinai.

The Ancient Chinese wrote divinatory texts on bones and turtle shells. And the earliest known writers in the Americas, the Maya, likewise initially tended to employ writing for sacred purposes.

Eventually people started using writing not only for economic or devotional purposes, but also to record ideas and poetry. I sometimes wonder whether those early writers ever struggled to think of what to write.

Plato's Socrates (really the only Socrates we know, since he never wrote anything himself) was suspicious of writing. He argued (quite correctly, as it turned out) that writing would destroy memory and cause people to profess knowledge they did not actually possess. Memory and knowledge meant something rather different in oral cultures than they do now, of course. It is true that, if you can write something down, you don't have to commit it to memory--and that a memory recorded externally is qualitatively different from a memory etched in the mind. Our memories are not what they were.

The problem with writing, Socrates said, was that you can't ask it questions--or at least you can, but it can't explain itself; it can only repeat the same words again and again. And that is why it doesn't count as knowledge--to know something means to be able to explain and re-explain how you know it. Writing doesn't "know", it just "is," but it enables people who can read it to pretend to knowledge they haven't "earned"--they haven't worked it out for themselves, but just gotten it from a book. So, with writing, something was lost, but something was also gained.

I wonder how often Plato struggled to find words for his ideas. I wonder how often he struggled to find ideas for his words.

The problem of what to say (or write) and how is one of the two primary concerns of rhetoric (the other is analyzing what's been said and how). Classical rhetoric broke the problem down into five canons: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. Scholars continue to argue about which of the canons deserve the most attention, but since I've started this blog, invention has been on my mind.

For ancient rhetoricians, invention was all about the topoi--the topics, or places to find things. But they weren't really talking about things to write about or places where ideas could be found--such a catalogue, being potentially infinite, could never be completed, and Aristotle, the great systematizer of ancient rhetoric, did something much more clever. His topoi represent "basic categories of relationships among ideas". And the ways we can construct relationships among ideas turn out to be rather more manageable.

Anyway. Those who know me, know that I am rarely at a loss for something to say. But having something to write seems to be quite another matter. And having something to write about every day seems positively daunting. Aristotle reminds me that it isn't so much having something to write about, but about making connections.

Audience is another problem. Not only do I have to think about who might be reading this blog, but also who might read it in the future. Like everyone, I have multiple identities: sister, daughter, friend, colleague, scholar, teacher, student, Latter-day Saint, woman, Latter-day Saint woman (yes, those are three distinct, though never separate identities), Doctor Who fan, roommate, among others. Many of those identities overlap, but they are sometimes in tension with one another (scholar and Latter-day Saint, for instance, are often perceived by others as being in tension, if not generally by me--but that perception itself generates a tension). And new identities arise over time.

When I write this blog, which "me" am I? And which of "you" am I writing to? Perhaps, in writing this, I am calling forth new identities for myself and my audience. All of these identities and the tensions between them are, of course, sites of rhetorical invention--they represent potential relationships among ideas, as well as actual relationships between people.

The stakes are not trivial. It may be that I will never have more than a handful of readers. Perhaps only family and friends, but potentially also future employers, colleagues, federal agents, and the odd web-crawling AI. I hope, at any rate, that my readers will be friendly, or at the very least, kindly disposed toward the "me" that is embodied in the words that I write.

The full title of this blog, generously supplied by my good friend Nancy, is "Rebeccaland: where everything is just like it is in my head." That title was a bit too long for Blogger to display properly, so I shortened it, but in shortening it, something was lost. Indeed, I've been meditating on this very interesting title for the last few days. Nancy loves layers of meaning--I mean, loves them even more than I do, and that's saying a lot. She's a Joyce scholar.

The title is both the product of invention, and a new site of invention. It is the product of the particular relationship among the ideas that I have of Nancy and she has of me and each of us have of what blogging is or can be--among other things. It also represents the potential range of topics this blog might contain, and suggests a certain attitude toward them (an attitude which is tied to that complex of interpersonal perceptions I just talked about).

Basically, I think that this blog isn't so much going to be like the inside of my head (which is really full of a great many things that ought best to stay inside my head; they won't stand for being shoved onto the front stage of a blog), as it is like what Nancy thinks the inside of my head is like--a bit like Disneyland, only without the commercialism, and with more books. So, like a cross between Disneyland and a library. Or, to put it another way, it will be full of random happy geeky things with a generous side of pondersomeness (and the odd neologism sprinkled in here and there).



Word Count

Friday: 221
Saturday: 1893
Running total: 3815
Day 3 target: 5001