We’ve all come across a CAPTCHA, a challenge response test that web sites give viewers who are trying to register for an account, leave a comment, or perform some other task that might be vulnerable to spammers or bots.  They are useful because they can differentiate human from machine (Completely Automated Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart… don’t ask me how “turing” became a “P” in that acronym).

They look something like this:

These things are a minor nuisance, the price we pay to protect the sites we need from bombardment by unwanted traffic or use as a launching pad for spam attacks.  According to researchers at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, “about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day.”

What if the time spent solving CAPTCHAs could be harnessed for productive purposes?  Thanks to reCAPTCHA, it can.

Carnegie Mellon is currently working with two organizations (the Internet Archive and the New York Times) to employ humans to decipher scans of text that are unreadable by OCR software (Optical Character Recognition).  If your site uses reCAPTCHA, your users can contribute to a major digitization project.  For details on how the technology works, click here.

This is the latest innovative effort to maximize productivity in a focused way by taking advantage of the reach of the web to congeal a distributed knowledge network.  reCAPTCHA has tapped into existing knowledge and processes to build yet more knowledge through another process.  All of us together are smarter than we are added up.

Brilliant work.

(Nod to Mikhail for the heads up about this technology.)

I’m starting to get a little bit worried about the rash of strangely written and borderline grammatically incorrect advertising slogans in the media. This is especially true of fast food advertisements. The slogan that bothers me the most is McDonald’s “i’m lovin’ it.” I understand how dropping the g makes the slogan less impersonal and more relaxed, but the lowercase i really irks me. What’s the point?

Other celebrated and effective examples include Apple’s classic “Think different,” and their more recent description of the new iPod touch as “The funnest iPod ever.” Even the Obama campaign’s “Change we can believe in” ends in a preposition.

The worst thing about these slogans is that the television viewing public is exposed to them on a daily basis. Many of these slogans are not necessarily incorrect, but they violate several rules we try to teach our students in efforts to improve the clarity and effectiveness of their oral and written communication. I can’t help but wonder about the extent to which these slogans are negatively impacting the communication skills of the viewing public. The advertising industry seems to be on a mission to legitimize incorrectness.

Over the last two or so decades, research in composition and rhetoric has challenged a number of traditional, “common sense” ideas about writing pedagogy. The emphasis on process over product is one example. Another, quite familiar one is the shift away from the tired old structure of the academic expository essay with its requisite introduction (which contains the thesis statement), body and conclusion. The thinking here is that this form with its three rigidly defined constituent parts is 1) not necessarily conducive to original, critical thinking and is therefore counterproductive to effective arguing, and 2) scarcely found anywhere else other than introductory writing courses.

Some folks find this idea to be radical and exciting enough to claim a bit of what Michel Foucault termed the “speakers’ benefit” in advocating that we move away from the traditional intro, body, conclusion structure. If, for example, we approach the traditional essay structure in terms of how it adversely affects students’ ability to treat their subjects critically and keeps them locked into old, tired ways of thinking, then we can conceive of ourselves as writing pedagogy iconoclasts, liberating our students’ thought from the shackles of outdated, rigid and repressive structures.

Well, we’re not that radical or iconoclastic: To wit, Robert W. Neal, writing in 1912 in The English Journal:

The Deadly Grip of Tradition

Perhaps our pupils are still taught a fixed form for compositions — introduction, body, and conclusion-because, unsuspecting old Aristotle tried to illustrate what he had in mind about dramatic composition by employing the terms that we translate “beginning,” “middle,” and “end.” Or perhaps this mechanical makeshift for analysis is still given them because formal rhetoric in modern guise came to us largely from clerical teachers, used to the cut-and-dry methods of sermon composition as practiced almost universally until outside influences reacted on the pulpit and forced a more vital presentation of thought.

In either case, we have textbooks in use and teachers in service in which and by whom pupils are taught with fatal insistence that a composition- which should mean any piece of writing intended to serve a worth-while purpose-consists of “an introduction, a body, and a conclusion.”
For ease of teaching I wish it were true. But it is not. It falls so far short of being the truth that it often is an indefensible untruth. Modern writing outside of academic walls has largely dropped the introduction. It has dropped the introduction because it does not need it. For the same reason, it has largely dropped the conclusion.

Our generation is a generation of skilled writers. But it is not a generation addicted to introductions and conclusions. The teacher who hammers away on the introduction-body-conclusion method shows that he is not familiar with the writings of his own day, or else that he is not capable of learning new things. He is like the farmers, who, in this era of scientific cultivation, farm as grandpap farmed. Some of grandpap’s methods have not been improved upon yet, and some of them ruined the soil they were used on.

A study of the effective writing of our own day will show how largely the introduction-conclusion plan of structure has passed away. From news report to editorial article, from descriptive or expository article to argument, from short story to essay, modern writing-which is probably the most effective the world has known-shuns the formalities of structure except, when it needs them. And when it needs them, they are no longer formal divisions, but essential parts of the thought itself.
When it needs them: for like every other element of successful writing, they exist to serve an extremely definite purpose, and for nothing else. Often indeed they have no function in a particular piece of writing, and therefore, so far as that piece of writing is concerned, no excuse for being. Especially is this so of the introduction; and the conclusion more often than not is already present merely in the logical close of the article itself.

My protest therefore is not directed against introductions and conclusions in themselves, but to the teaching that makes them appear as necessary parts of every piece of writing. Every editor knows that he can waste-basket from one sheet to three sheets at the beginning of the “stuff” the tyro turns in, and lose nothing. Every instructor of college Freshmen knows the paper that consists of a long introduction and little else-the necessary number of words having been written, with a line or two of “body” and a formal “conclusion” tacked on. No small part of Freshman teaching consists in demonstrating to the students that they have not in the least outlined a paper when they have set down “Introduction-Body-Conclusion.” Thought is not to be analyzed in any such mechanical way, and we do pupils a wrong in making them think that it can be.

I’d put a conclusion here, but, well, you know . . .

It happens at the beginning of every semester. Tucked into my tiny mailbox are a stack of about fifty blue and white student evaluations. The scantron sections of these evaluations, where students “rate” their professors in several categories on a scale of one to seven, never seem especially helpful to me. After all, it is inevitable that some classes will go better than others from semester to semester. And even when the students are responding to a specific prompt, such as “was the course material presented clearly” it is only natural that many of them are going to respond to their overall sense of the course, which is not limited to my instruction but includes their relationship to the course material—whether or not they “like” poetry, for instance—and the experiences, good and bad, that they have had with their fellow classmates. These evaluations, more cynically, as has been shown by many studies, are also often informed by the students’ own sense of whether or not they will receive the grade they wanted or feel they deserve. Because I am a demanding instructor and a moderately tough grader I often feel like I am actively sabotaging my student evaluation scores, which regularly tend to be on the cusp of the departmental average.

As most of us would agree, however, school is not about teaching, but about learning, and I have a feeling that many a “good” teacher is not necessarily helping their students to be good learners, and often the students themselves are the last ones to realize this, especially in classes like literature where quantitative measurements are impossible. How many times, after all, have we heard our students say to each other: “you should totally take a class with professor so and so, he’s a really cool guy”? For me, the point of teaching has always been very simple: make sure that the students think and learn, and it is the open response sections of the student evaluations that I actually find most helpful when re-evaluating the methods I use to achieve this goal. Sadly, most students skip this part of the evaluation, but those who do respond often offer a constructive view of their own experiences and struggles in the class. Many students say nice things, some occasionally complain, and others less frequently express anger. I have come to realize that those expressing anger are usually unhappy about the fact that the course was too difficult, that the reading was too boring, and most often, that there was just too much writing. In fact, one of the most common laments I have heard from my literature students (who are generally required to write two 10 page essays over the semester and regular 1-2 page informal responses for each class) is that it is unfair for me to require so much writing in a class that is not writing intensive.

This argument is perplexing. Although there is a part of me that sympathizes—after all, CUNY students have incredibly busy lives outside of school—I cannot help but think that if these students really feel this way, what does that say about their expectations about college work, and what do those expectations mean for the future of higher education more broadly? Should we, after all, require less work when our students complain or should we hold our ground? Is less work going to help them learn more and is the amount of work required for a class really up for negotiation? Where do we draw the line? And how much writing is the right amount of writing?

But these student complaints also raise a question that is specific to the work that we do here at the institute, and that is: has the creation and promotion of writing and communication intensive classes actually done as much harm as good? After all, aren’t writing and communication the very means of learning, and aren’t good writing and communications skills, the hallmarks of a good education? Shouldn’t every class be writing and communication intensive?

Despite the labors of countless writing program directors overseeing vast armies of composition and Rhetoric PhDs, there are always those students who seem to have a hostile relationship to writing: they don’t like it and they want to do as little of it as possible. Perhaps this resistance is natural for some people; as Frank O’Hara says of poetry: “if they don’t need poetry bully for them, I like the movies too. And Only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the Americans are better than the movies.” To this I would add Stevens, but I digress. No one said students have to like writing, and bully for them if they would prefer to become filmmakers or beauticians, or whatever, but in a liberal university that values expression, eloquence, and clarity of thought, they should at least be asked to think write and communicate, and to do it often. How well they choose to write and with how much love and enthusiasm, is up to them. Writing and communication should not be a requirement, but a method and an expectation, like doing the assigned reading, or preparing for an exam. We should ask students to write not so we can evaluate them after all, but so that they can put their ideas into words, helping to improve their writing skills while simultaneously reinforcing the course material and making it their own. To expect students to fulfill a writing requirement or to fulfill a communication requirement only twice during their college career, only underlines the idea that the classes that emphasize these skills are just another hoop to jump through, like the general arts and science requirements: “Rocks for Jocks” geology classes or “Music Appreciation.”

I have always thought that writing intensive curricula were a good idea in principle, and still do. However, it is becoming increasingly clear to me that the way we have used writing and communication intensive classes are maybe not the best way to get students to learn. Instead of spending our time developing specific writing and communication intensive courses, which, in my experience are all too often not very intensive at all (some in-class writing and a few extra pages a semester tend to qualify as writing intensive for some courses), administrations should also be working with students and faculty to devise college-wide expectations for the kinds of writing, speaking, and interpersonal communication that should be practiced in all courses as often as possible. Courses in the humanities and social sciences, for instance, should automatically be designated as writing intensive, and professors should be encouraged to assign a minimum amount of regular written work for each. Likewise, instructors in professional programs and the sciences should be encouraged to integrate more speaking and interpersonal communication activities into their classrooms.

It seems clear to me that it has become all too easy for students to regard writing and communication as something distinct from the learning process, as a requirement to be fulfilled rather than a method of learning. Writing and communication intensive curricula, by compartmentalizing these activities, only reinforce the false dichotomy between writing and learning. If students are to learn to write, they must be required to write to learn.

My favorite hip-hop vlogger Jay Smooth has eloquently described those nagging voices that reside inside the heads of people who do creative work as  “little haters.”

He even wrote a song about his:

When I’m writing, my “little hater” tells me I need to find a fifth or a sixth corroborating piece of evidence before I can make a claim, and even after I do, the damn thing still comes out tentative.  He sometimes makes me think that the idea that I just came up with can’t be anywhere near as good as I originally thought because, well, I’m the one who came up with it.  Someone else probably wrote something similar somewhere else, and I just haven’t seen it yet.

I’ve about had enough of this bastard getting in my way.

Sometimes, when I need get a post up on this blog, I start writing about interests that I don’t get to explore when I write reports, papers, proposals, or emails.  It’s possible to tie almost anything into that topic taped up there across the header.  “Write what you know” isn’t useful just for getting our students to break through their shells.  It’s also a useful way to put your little hater on his heels, get the engine revving, and start a conversation.

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I am currently teaching a writing course, and a day after explaining compound sentences, and minutes after preparing a lecture on eliminating wordiness, I picked up Philip Roth’s A Plot Against America and came across the following mammoth and dazzling sentence.

“Elizabeth, New Jersey, when my mother was being raised there in a flat over her father’s grocery store, was an industrial port a quarter the size of Newark, dominated by the Irish working class and their politicians and the tightly knit parish life that revolved around the town’s many churches, and though I never heard her complain of having been pointedly ill-treated in Elizabeth as a girl, it was not until she married and moved to Newark’s new Jewish neighborhood that she discovered the confidence that led her to become first a PTA “grade mother,” then a PTA vice president in charge of establishing a Kindergarten Mothers’ Club, and finally the PTA president, who, after attending a conference in Trenton on infantile paralysis, proposed an annual March of Dimes dance on January 30 – President Roosevelt’s birthday – that was accepted by most schools.”

While this sentence is not a-typical for Roth, it certainly is for the most of us. It’s important to note that it does not break any grammatical rules (it isn’t even a run-on), and that even my overly-sensitive grammar check didn’t have a problem with it.

I shared it with my students to illustrate that run-on doesn’t necessarily mean long, and to point to the fact that wordiness is not simply about the amount of words, but the meaning of the words: Roth has no redundancies here.

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Editor’s note: in advance of this weekend’s U.S. Open, this is the second in a series of posts exploring the metaphorical relationship between golf and writing.

One of the enduring paradoxes of golf as played by amateurs is the huge and hugely disproportionate emphasis placed on the drive. That’s the first shot on a hole, hit off a tee instead of from the grass, with the biggest, longest club in the bag. It is a powerful feeling, and often looks great too, when you smack a ball way, way down the fairway just where you wanted it, bringing a sense of satisfaction that must somehow be tied up with the primal urge to demonstrate one’s physical prowess to other would-be alpha males. Of course, most drives, even ones that go far, do not go far in the right direction. And when the monster-drive-that-almost-was ends up in the woods or in three-inch long grass, you’ve hurt yourself far more with your strong-man indulgences than if you’d have sacrificed distance for accuracy. These indisputable facts, however, seem to have approximately zero effect on the minds of most amateur golfers. As I write there are thousands of (mostly) men wasting $200-300 on drivers whose heads (the part that hits the ball) are almost exactly the same size (at 460 cm3) as a pint glass.

In the end, golf is a game of less-than-inches. About half of the normal hacker’s shots will actually take place on or around the green (the short grass where the hole is) when the ball is probably less than twenty yards from the cup. And thus the timeless phrase, “Drive for show, putt for dough.” (A variant I think I actually prefer was suggested to me by Tom: “It’s not how you drive, it’s how you arrive.”) When you need to hit the ball just 20 yards (a chip) or roll it just 10 feet (a putt) what happens is not only more difficult, but much more important than the drive. Only dedicated practice can yield even occasional success when faced with greenside subtleties. Many times I have played golf with old men – really old, not middle aged – who just tap the ball down each fairway while my pals and I are wailing away from the tee and then trudging into the woods in search of an uncooperative ball (which we will then of course try to hit as hard as possible from under a rock, giving in again to the Siren song of the heroic). At the end of the round, we find that the eighty-year-old has shot his age while we’ve stumbled into the unsatisfactory upper-nineties. The difference is that we have cool clubs and he has a good swing. We have a giant dictionary and updated thesaurus on our desk, if you will, but he knows how to write.

The point is: do sweat the small stuff – which brings me to writing. Mark Twain addressed this point when he said something like “The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” I still (cringingly) remember writing “poems” in middle school classes and figuring that the more multi-syllabic adjectives I could shove into the description of something the better. Good poetry must mean using superficially intense, longish words right? This was not unlike equating your golf prowess with your expensive, grotesquely large driver: an attempted shortcut that usually yields really embarrassing results. To get good at using metaphor a never-ending, effort. To craft a truly clear and useful sentence can ultimately take hours. Whether at its more basic levels (making sure you have an antecedent for a pronoun, subject-verb agreement) or in the mysterious and elusive quest for a meritorious style, what matters is not the flashy phrasing but the effective communication of your worthwhile perceptions, ideally in a way that effects or informs your reader in salutary ways. A golf shot starts with envisioning exactly how and where you intend the ball to fly or roll. A piece of writing begins with envisioning what information you want to convey. The good shot and the good essay are thus both instances of successful translation, and neither comes easy, and neither can be purchased.

(Another crazy and endearing thing about golf – though not so much like writing – is that the best professionals sometimes make very stupid, very costly mistakes. Read about an infamous instance.

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Editor’s note: in advance of this weekend’s U.S. Open, this is the first in a series of posts exploring the metaphorical relationship between golf and writing.

Golf can be a bit of a mystery to those who have never played. Mainly it probably appears (a) boring and (b) much easier than it really is. Writing can also look that way to the uninitiated, and in fact golf and writing have a lot in common.

Both are solitary, addictive pursuits of an ultimately unreachable perfection. How, you ask, is golf solitary, what with all the crowds and the playing partners and the caddies in the pro game, let alone the beer-imbibing camaraderie-filled version more common to hackers like me? First because, even when you’re betting (thanks to a handy little invention called the handicap system) you’re always pretty much competing against yourself. Second, golf is intensely mental in its requirements – you have to try to remain calm and make measured decisions in the face of literally infinite small disasters and somehow shake off the feelings of deep depression and self-abuse that can accompany them: golf looks so doable and yet it’s so insanely difficult – again, like good writing (watch Tiger Woods: his menacing rage after a poor swing is always transformed in the space of half a minute into what I can only call a fierce serenity of absolutely purposeful concentration as he prepares for the next shot). For comparison, think about those blues you get when you receive back your dissertation draft all marked to hell by your advisor — it’s really hard to stop moping and continue sometimes.

The mental pressure in golf results in large part from the fact that one spends drastically more time thinking about hitting shots than actually executing them (as writing takes so much longer than reading). A swing takes about a second; it can take you ten minutes to find your wayward shot in the bushes, as cac.ophony blogmaster Luke Waltzer can tell you. And what does one ponder while walking from tee to ball or lining up a putt? Where are my feet? Is my posture right? Am I standing too close or too far from the ball? Should I try under or over those trees? Is my grip too tight or too loose? Am I keeping my left arm straight? Am I keeping my head down? (Yes, simply watching the ball proves to be very, very difficult.) Full swing? Half swing? Wind direction? Topography of the green? Location of water? (It pulls putts toward it if it’s sizable.) These are just a few questions that go into every shot.

The key of course, like with writing, which has its own army of minutia to consider in each sentence, is, through practice and patience, to make as much of this as possible automatic. If you never spend time either writing or reading, each comma and each “its” vs. “it’s” decision can be a tiresome burden. If you never spend time either writing or reading, then it can be hard to even know where you went wrong – just like in golf, merely figuring out what to work on to improve can be an extraordinarily daunting propect all its own.

This Thursday the United States Open begins at the beautiful Torrey Pines Golf Course in California, where almost every hole offers up a vista of the Pacific framed by those craggy little west coast tress that look so picturesque against an evening sunset. So we will take the opportunity this week to talk about where golf meets communication/writing. I encourage everyone to tune in to watch a bit of the action and then (consistent with public safety) to grab a club and try to hit a ball where you’re aiming – beware: it’s as easy to get hooked as it is to slice. (Also, everyone interested in pinnacles of human achievement should consider taking time just to witness Tiger – in golf he’s Bird or Jordan, he’s Gretsky, he’s Ted Williams or Dimagio, he’s Faulkner or Dickinson, he’s Rembrandt; he’s someone your grandkids will have heard about.)

Fore!

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Cacophony’s good friend Jim Groom (right) has recently coined a term that has the edublogosphere all atwitter: edupunk. It probably runs counter to the meaning behind the word to note, impressed, that The Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog, “Wired Campus,” picked up Jim’s phrase. Punks probably don’t care much what the Chronicle’s got to say.

Edupunk (here are musings and run downs by Mike Caulfield, Stephen Downes, and D’Arcy Norman) is a new name for ideas that have been bouncing around the progressive edublogosphere for some time, namely, that higher education humanity needs an alternative to proprietary course management systems and the philosophy of teaching and learning that they implicitly promote. At the core of edupunk are older pedagogical stances unrelated to technology: an ethic of self-reliance, the valuation of student-centered experiential learning, and the rejection of the “banking concept of education.” Edupunk seeks to update and adapt these ideas within the rapidly evolving realm of edutech.

I’m coming a little late to this particular conversation (last week I was DIYing the walls of my house with a wallpaper steamer and buckets of paint– domesticpunk), and hope I can add something to the celebration/elaboration. Seems to me that “edupunk” is a useful term, though, like all metaphors, it breaks down in the end. It has successfully congealed and branded the thinking that’s at the core of the unease many of us working in this field have with the way things are done at most schools. It’s good that it’s been picked up by the Chronicle, and it’s fantastic that more people are finding their way to Jim’s blog these days.

I fear, however, that the attention to the phrase may distract from the work that produced it. For instance, I’ve been been trying to square the circle of my dislike for punk music and culture with my love and appreciation for the work of the cats who’ve rallied to this term. I see a rejectionist ethos and cliquish sense of superiority behind much punk music and culture, and I’m not sure that’s an accurate description of the edutech movement that I feel a part of. I’ve always been more of a funk and soul man myself, and think that the affirmation native to those genres, the love and depth of feeling at their center, are much more pleasant (and just as useful) rhetorical and political stances. A brilliant administrator I once worked with, wise enough to know what she didn’t know and to defer to folks like Jim and Zach Davis on all things digital, once said, “we want to use technology to seduce students to our pedagogical goals.” That seems more Barry White than Johnny Rotten.

In that spirit, I present: edufunk.

photo(shop) credit: skywaltzer

Or, how about yet another metaphor: edujazz.I sense in the discourse around edupunk an appreciation for messiness, even a distaste for form. I’m not sure this lends itself to the best teaching. The pedagogy that I’ve been exposed to and have practiced as a teacher of history is much more like jazz… lay down a structure, and leave plenty of space for improvisation. This allows a variety of types of learning to happen in a classroom, acknowledges that both facts and the skills to interpret them are important areas to work on, and encourages our students to explore from within material that we’ve laid out with a set of goals in mind. I’m all for the “guide-by-the-side” approach to teaching… but the work that went into the Ph.D. I’m about to earn does qualify me, I think, to do a bit more than that at times.

This metaphor is translatable to how we, as instructional technologists, nurture critical approaches to online learning, particularly in how we can “seduce” talented teachers to experiment with new forms. Our Institute is incredibly lucky to have the autonomy to deploy and develop whatever software we deem pedagogically appropriate, so to a certain extent we are isolated from Blackboard. Baruch’s IT shop also recognizes that an institution of higher learning should offer a range of solutions to its community, even if those solutions compete with one another. BCTC blesses and supports our experimentation.

Yet Blackboard still runs wild at this university, and we are constantly engaging with faculty members and administrators who refuse to see the differences between the solutions we promote and what BB offers. BB’s appeal is in its antiseptic pre-fabrication, in the very fact that it doesn’t force faculty to take the extra steps to really consider how Web 2.0 and distributed learning open up new pedagogical possibilities. As a result, many faculty graft onto it existing modes of learning, fearful of allowing technology to “get in the way.” They get on Blackboard, get off, and move on.

Some faculty members do use Blackboard quite successfully, particularly for collaborative projects. Good teaching is good teaching, no matter where it happens or how it happens. Our job as instructional technologists, I think, is to explore the new possibilities and modes of learning that Blackboard happens to work against. If that software gives faculty members what they need to accomplish what they want, then so be it. But if faculty are interested in making full use of distributed learning, in continuing to learn themselves, and especially in truly empowering students, they need other solutions.

Edujazz, emphasizing structure and improvisation, can help reach out to faculty who are reticent to give up their control and jump into the pit with the edupunks. This argument evolves from my work in an academic service unit, where my job is to help a wide-range of faculty members experiment with this stuff. Such work requires, and benefits from, sensitive responses to their concerns. An anti-authoritarian, anarchic response will ultimately accomplish little. The DIY approach of edupunk is a great goal, but often times DIT– Do It Together–is necessary, and even preferable. Helping faculty members translate their pedagogical structures to a new environment goes a long way towards mollifying their concerns about the impact of technology on their students’ learning. The students, if the structure is sound, can handle the improvisation.

Now, behind the scenes, hell yeah, I’ll cavort with the punks. Jim’s named a movement, even if the contours of that movement still haven’t yet been fully defined. The politics of this stuff and the consideration of the logic of capital are deeply important, and should constantly be a part of the conversation. If a university is going to spend millions on a limited and problematic application, it should probably be able to explain why that solution is better than cheaper alternatives. I haven’t seen that done yet.

Until it is, there’s work to be done. So, edupunks, edufunks, eduheads, or whomever: keep doing your thing.

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  A couple of weeks ago I showed a draft of my dissertation proposal to my advisor for the first time.  I knew that the argument was not solid yet, but also felt that I needed feedback at this point of my writing process.  So, I struggled to let go of my initial plan to hand in a polished and brilliant prospectus and met with him.  After long reading and writing sessions in the library, I was happy to learn that the argument I had been building actually made sense. I also learned that I needed to create and discuss this working draft to be able to see the full complexity of the argument that is yet to emerge.  There will be other drafts, I’m sure, and what seems to be an interesting research question now will keep evolving as I write. Yes, I’m naming one of the obvious WAC notions here — (re)writing is a way of making knowledge.  All this reminded me of my mentor’s advice: show students your piece of writing in progress with all the arrows, crossings, and notes; they need to see how messy writing is for all thinkers, even those who have more authority in the classroom. 

As I am proceeding to work on my prospectus, I see a need for multiple readers and interlocutors who, I selfishly admit, will help me dig out all the threads and connect them into a coherent whole.  Another truism surely, but I think all writers including our students deserve a responsive audience.  BLSI Fellows and Writing Center Consultants are happy to be that audience, but students who come to workshops and tutoring sessions are usually those who want to raise their grades or who are simply referred by their professors.  What can we do to encourage strong writers and speakers to seek an active audience while they’re formulaing their ideas?

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