How Writing Faculty Write: Strategies for Process, Product, and Productivity - Brossura

Tulley, Christine E.

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1607326612 ISBN 13: 9781607326618

Casa editrice: Utah State Univ Pr, 2018

Riassunto

In How Writing Faculty Write, Christine Tulley examines the composing processes of fifteen faculty leaders in the field of rhetoric and writing, revealing through in-depth interviews how each scholar develops ideas, conducts research, drafts and revises a manuscript, and pursues publication. The book shows how productive writing faculty draw on their disciplinary knowledge to adopt attitudes and strategies that not only increase their chances of successful publication but also cultivate writing habits that sustain them over the course of their academic careers. The diverse interviews present opportunities for students and teachers to extrapolate from the personal experience of established scholars to their own writing and professional lives.
 
Tulley illuminates a long-unstudied corner of the discipline: the writing habits of theorists, researchers, and teachers of writing. Her interviewees speak candidly about overcoming difficulties in their writing processes on a daily basis, using strategies for getting started and restarted, avoiding writer’s block, finding and using small moments of time, and connecting their writing processes to their teaching. How Writing Faculty Write will be of significant interest to students and scholars across the spectrum—graduate students entering the discipline, new faculty and novice scholars thinking about their writing lives, mid-level and senior faculty curious about how scholars research and write, historians of rhetoric and composition, and metadisciplinary scholars.
 

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Christine E. Tulley is professor of rhetoric and writing and founder and director of the Master of Arts in Rhetoric and Writing Program at the University of Findlay. She also serves as the Academic Career Development Coordinator for the UF Center for Teaching Excellence to support faculty scholarship productivity on campus. She is the former Praxis section editor for Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, the reviews editor for Computers and Composition, and winner of the Ellen Nold Award for Best Article in Computers and Composition for 2014.

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How Writing Faculty Write

Strategies for Process, Product, and Productivity

By Christine E. Tulley

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2018 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-661-8

Contents

Preface, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: Faculty Writing as a Research Area for Rhetoric and Composition, 
1 Cynthia Selfe, 
2 Joseph Harris, 
3 Dànielle DeVoss, 
4 Melanie Yergeau, 
5 Jessica Enoch, 
6 Jonathan Alexander, 
7 Kathleen Yancey, 
8 Chris Anson, 
9 Duane Roen, 
10 Cheryl Glenn, 
11 Malea Powell, 
12 Howard Tinberg, 
13 Thomas Rickert, 
14 Jacqueline Royster, 
15 Kristine Blair, 
16 Carving Out a Writing Life in the Discipline of Rhetoric and Composition:, 
What We Can Learn from Writing Faculty, 
Afterword, 
Appendix: Sample Interview Questions, 
References, 
About the Author, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

CYNTHIA SELFE

CYNTHIA L. SELFE is, in her words, "blissfully retired." A former humanities distinguished professor in the Department of English at The Ohio State University and founder and previous co-editor of Computers and Composition: An International Journal, Selfe has a prolific publishing record. To date she has published both print and digital form, four single authored books, a co-authored book, ten edited collections, nineteen book chapters, and sixty-five journal articles. In 2007, Selfe co-founded the Computers and Composition Digital Press.

Selfe has served as the chair of the national Conference on College Composition and Communication and the chair of the College Section of the National Council of Teachers of English and held a variety of administrative roles. In 2014, Selfe won the Conference on College Composition and Communication's Exemplar Award.

Selfe began her career at Michigan Technological University, a science and engineering focused institution of seven thousand students located in the Upper Peninsula, and worked there for twenty-four years before taking a position at Ohio State. Along the way, she taught courses in computers including Hypertext Theory and Computers and Writing, composition, scientific and technical communication, and literature, including a course titled Literature and Lore of the Upper Peninsula, among others. Over the course of her career, she has served in a variety of administrative positions including chair of the English Department and director of the writing center at Michigan Tech. Selfe's interview took place on May 19, 2013, in her office at Ohio State University.

christine: Why aren't we studying ourselves as writers? We've studied ourselves as teachers, we've studied ourselves as activists, as literate beings through the DALN [Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives], but when we're talking about our actual writing for publication, the stuff we need to do to keep our jobs, why aren't we talking about that?

cindy: I think it's a wonderful question. I think that part of the response there is that scholars of rhetoric and composition are supposed to be able to write. I think that's the expectation, that we have not only as writing our subject matter, our disciplinary subject matter and the subject matter that we teach, but that we have some facility with language itself and the writing of language and the articulation of ideas through written language as part of being a professor of rhetoric and composition.

christine: Agreed.

cindy: That said, while I believe that's an expectation, I don't think that's always a reality. In fact, I know colleagues struggle a great deal with composing and writing their scholarly work. I certainly do. I mean, I slog through my scholarly work. I only write when I get so uncomfortable with having to write, that I really have to get down to it, and once I get down to it it's not as awful as I remember it. But it is a slow, hard, slog through materials, collecting the materials, doing the research if I'm doing the research or finding the scholarly sources and then fitting them together in a way that makes sense to me, and then the way that makes sense to me is never the way that I know editors are going to like it so I have to adapt it to my audience, my editorial audience, my audience of colleagues.

christine: I see.

cindy: To complicate that, I guess I have gotten dissatisfied with alphabetic writing as a venue for that kind of articulation. I've really have gotten dissatisfied with the flatness of alphabetic writing and so now I can't even start writing until I also start thinking of how it's going to look, what is the design going to be. What's the platform in which I'm going to explore these ideas? Is it going to be a web based text or a Prezi, or is it going to be a blog or comic? Not only the medium, but the modalities of expression and the genre are dimensions I have to figure out in terms of the composing that I do. So composing is not an easy task for me.

christine: Even now.

cindy: Especially now. Especially now because there are so many more choices and expectations of course, both mine and people who read the work that I do. There are a lot of layers to consider.

christine: Can you give an example?

cindy: I was composing a presentation for the Computers and Writing conference about sound. I had to figure out not only how I was going to compose the alphabetic portion of the presentation but also how I was going to present that presentation using Keynote or PowerPoint. Then I had to identify how I was going to show some video clips. And then I had to think about how I was going to caption those video clips to make sure that they were accessible.

christine: There are multiple issues with invention here.

cindy: Then part of the talk was about an audio portion of those video clips so I had to figure out how to use a program that did a screen capture of the .wav form as it played and highlighted specific parts of that .wav form as it played so that the sound, the video, the attention to the specific points of the .wav form would be evident for the audience while I did the talking. That layering of semiotic channels for the kinds of concepts I want to convey when I write are becoming more complex. For that reason, I think that composition is both more interesting and more challenging.

christine: I was looking at some of your recent work on sound, and I did find it sort of ironic that this really cool piece ["The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing"] was out there, the one you just did in one of our flagship journals; it's such a cool piece ...

cindy: It's all in print.

christine: It's all in print. Because it was a sound piece as a reader I expected voice. Somehow you did manage to convey that audio aspect in print, but there is a challenge ...

cindy: ... The challenge was when that piece was put in our flagship journal, the three C's [College Composition and Communication] ...

christine: Three C's, let's mention it.

cindy: Right, let's mention it, three C's! That was before they had an online presence and one of the things that I told the editors was that I can write this piece about sound but readers would have to go to the sound pieces themselves in order to listen to them in order to understand what I'm saying about this piece. We had to come up with a very strange solution by writing about sound and then linking to online sources.

christine: A compromise.

cindy: It wasn't the last piece I'll write, but I think it's going to be one of the last pieces I actually publish that's flat like that, because I can't write about the things that I want to write about without including video and audio in the piece itself. The most recent piece that I've published that I'm happiest with is a digital book [Stories that Speak to Us] and that digital book has video, and audio, and links, and dimension for me that the piece in the three C's simply didn't have, and couldn't, at the time that it was written. Things have changed pretty fast.

christine: I heard that from one of your interviews [in Women's Ways of Making It in Rhetoric and Composition] that you wrote in "interstices" of your day ...

cindy: I do.

christine: Can you describe that process a little bit more? That was the coolest part of that interview for me as a time strapped writing program administrator.

cindy: I do; it's absolutely the truth. I mean, none of us anymore have long, leisurely, uninterrupted days to write ... so much of my writing is done in these small little moments of the day.

christine: How small?

cindy: Ten minutes, five minutes, you know two minutes, depending on what I'm writing. In between a student conference and a committee meeting, in between a class that I have to teach and my yoga exercise. There's all these demands in our day, so if I can't use these small times or interstices of my day, exactly as you say, then the projects don't get done.

christine: So true.

cindy: One of the habits I've developed as a writer is making my writing very modular so I always think of my thesis. I have to think of that first, and then I have four or five parts of that argument and then I start on part one, and in part one I probably will have three or four parts of that so I just do it part by part by part and then eventually I will stitch those parts together. If I make it small enough I can work on the little parts in the time I have. I figure "Oh, I have to do this video" so that is the little part that I work on in the first ten minutes, or twenty minutes, or half hour or whatever of my day. If I do all those little parts every single day, soon enough I turn around and there's a collection of parts that I can put together and that makes the whole. But I have to field the work on little pieces like that.

christine: How do you do it? I see how that process would work when starting off the day and after a meeting or an expected writing break, but once so many things that happen in a day, how do you get yourself focused again to get back to writing?

cindy: Here's one thing I do. I always try and leave writing at a point where I know what the next step is going to be so I always come back saying, "Oh, this is the point where I was going to pick up" and I always try and leave [a project] so it's like a positive thing that I want to do. You know, "Here's something I really want to do, so, oh good I get to do that!" I get to do that part now where I caption a video so it's something I know how to do and it's something I know where I'm going to go with it and I always try and stop at a point where I can go on with it pretty easily, I can jump back into it pretty easily. I also like to write while I'm doing other things. I will write a lot when I'm watching TV and I'll write, I write during faculty meetings.

christine: Don't tell anybody, I do it too! [laughs]

cindy: I love to write during faculty meetings or do sort of mindless things, like if there's indexing or something small to do that, I can pay attention and do it at the same time.

christine: How does your composing process work when you collaborate? You collaborate with a lot of people.

cindy: I've seen people that collaborate that sit down together and discuss, discuss, discuss. I'm not that kind of collaborator. The kind of collaboration I like is where I do everything that I can to do the piece and then I hand it off and I know somebody else is working on it and they're doing a great job. I totally give it over. I don't care if they change every single one of my blessed words as long as they're doing something and moving the piece forward. That's how Gail and I have developed the habit of working and I just assume she is constantly making that piece better when it's out of my hands.

christine: It's a famous writing relationship.

cindy: ... which is why I love to collaborate, because when it's off my desk I can be doing something else and trusting that she is doing the work on that one. So often we're working on two or three pieces at a time and we're trading them back and forth. But we only go back and forth maybe three or four times at the maximum because we really do write, most of the piece like whoever is writing it first will write most of the piece. We'll leave some big hunks undone that the other one will have to do, or the other person is in charge of making it richer and more dimensional, but we just hand it over. So I like working with somebody but only somebody who will take it up. The kind of people I really don't like working with will track changes and ask all these questions. I'd rather them do the work, just go ahead and do it.

christine: Commit to the writing and be sure! [laughs]

cindy: Yes, just go ahead and make the changes! Then, let's read the text and see if the text makes sense. I'm not protective of my words. I want [writing collaborators] to actually mix it [the text] up with me in there. I don't want to be able to point to something and be like "That's my paragraph" or "That's my idea." I would rather not. Right now, honestly if somebody asked me which parts of this work or that work were Gail's and which parts were mine ... I wouldn't know.

christine: So the patches are hidden and you can't see that spot where you splice your writing efforts together?

cindy: The only way I can tell is if we're writing about the students at Illinois or the students at Ohio State because I know those students, so I know who did the initial writing about that but many times the work is very close together.

christine: I don't think there's a way that we could have an interview about rhetoric and composition without talking about the teaching piece because so much of what we do in rhetoric and composition is tied to teaching. Are you able to convey your own writing habits to your students?

cindy: Well, you came in on one of the conversations [laughs] ...

christine: I did, that's what gave me the idea. [laughs]

cindy: When you came into my office I was talking to Will Kurlinkus, a graduate student who is just getting ready to do his dissertation and he was thinking about what form is this dissertation going to take. Now that we have these [technology] options we need to think rhetorically about what we're trying to accomplish, what the content demands, the genre demands, the audience demands, how we want to present ourselves as authors and as scholars, and on the job market. For him, this is his move into a scholarly arena.

christine: And you guide him toward these rhetorical choices?

cindy: All of those questions that I keep asking myself, I hope that I help students ask the same kinds of questions. I hope what I pass along to them is that they don't have to be limited only to print unless they think print is right for a particular piece, for a particular audience, for a particular journal and makes ideas accessible to the people who are doing the reading. I hope that I pass along to graduate students I work with that sense of possibility of different mediums, modalities of expression, and the demands of genre, audience, authorship, identity. Remember when we were talking about structure and writing in interstices and breaking things down into small enough things? I'm big on structure. As I think about a project I like to think in terms of, "Okay how am I going to structure this piece, what's going to be the super structuring, sub-structuring, and how are these pieces related, and am I giving my audience the cues that they need in order to see the structure that I've composed for them?"

christine: So organization is always a priority when you are teaching about writing?

cindy: Organization is huge with me and I'd like to think that I pass along to students that kind of eye for organization and structure rather than simply letting a piece happen. I don't believe in letting a piece happen. Instead I point out there's a structure that you've got in your head for your argument or your writing and to make that manifest, to build that structure for yourself and then to make it evident and manifest for a readership.

christine: Particularly with doctoral students, I'm thinking of a dissertation, for many of them, will be the longest thing they will have written up until that point so it is easy to lose the throughline.

cindy: It is.

christine: Or to just rely on chapters as the organizational structure, but that's not necessarily the best way to think about it.

cindy: Exactly, so that structuring and organization is huge for me. Also the arrangement is key because the arrangement is how you make manifest that structure and organization for an audience. I just taught a class on writing for publication, and I think I have a fairly rhetorical understanding of publication venues. We do a lot of analysis of what kinds of audiences and journals we're writing for and who reads those journals whether they're online or in print. We look at what they require and value. In teaching I ask "Are there other pieces within the journal or within the genre that you can point to that will help you structure and explore your own piece?" I use a lot of modelers.

christine: Model articles?

cindy: Absolutely. Either the article may be a model in terms of its content or in terms of its organization or in terms of its design or on any other terms. I'm huge on models. So, we did a little bit of that in the publication class. I also love style. Rhetorical style is very important to me and so I ask students a lot to look at their language and to see how they're using language to make claims, to provide evidence, to identify themselves as a researcher, to formulate an identity as a scholar.

christine: A difficult task.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from How Writing Faculty Write by Christine E. Tulley. Copyright © 2018 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Utah State Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2018
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1607326612
• ISBN 13: 9781607326618
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 178
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile