Being literate is sort of like being conversant, except in writing. Now, some people are just all around good conversationalists, good talkers; but normally we say that we are conversant about something in particular, good at discussing some particular subject. The same goes for literacy. Being able to read and write organization-theoretical texts does not guarantee you’re going to be able to read and write about quantum mechanics. But this specification of the concept of literacy has, to my mind, been misapplied in the construction of extensions of the concept of literacy like “visual literacy” or, to hit closer to home here in the Library, “information literacy.”

I agree with Gunther Kress when he argues, in Literacy and the New Media Age (Routledge 2003), that we need to find “new terms for the use of the different resources” of communication:

It may be that when we speak in popular, everyday contexts, these metaphoric uses, extending infinitely–visual literacy, gestural literacy, musical literacy, media literacy, computer-, cultural-, emotional-, sexual-, internet- and so on and so on–are fine, though I have my doubts even then. I would want to exclude another currently fashionable use of the term, which is to indicate certain kinds of production-skills associated more or less closely with aspects of communication, as in computer literacy, or (aspects of) media literary. (p. 23)

Kress puts it well when he defines literacy as the ability to make (and take) messages “using letters as the means of recording”, that is, it’s essentially about reading and writing. It will not do to say that someone is “literate” about music just because they are really good at playing music, or have really good taste in music. Likewise, being a great lover does not make you a great writer or reader of love letters. As a writing coach, of course, I will always insist that improving your ability to write about music will improve you ability to make it. Improving our ability to write about it will also improve your ability to make love. I have to promise a real-world, bottom-line pay off, right? But being “literate” about something is simply not the same thing as being competent at it.

I think these extended or metaphorical uses of literacy have distracted our attention from the specific competence of writing and reading. (Imagine if someone proposed to refocus our attention by “extending” the term again to include “reading literacy” and “writing literacy”!) But the notion of information literacy is a special case because so much of the information that we need to know how to find is recorded precisely in letters. So being a competent user of information already requires a certain measure of literacy, and, indeed, being literate involves a distinct information competence.

So what I want to do, I guess, is to get rid of the separate notion of “information literacy” and instead think of “information” simply as an important component of being literate in the information age. Kress has given me a lot think about in this regard. And I’m sure there are few more posts to come in my reading of him.

We live in an age of specialization. The advantage of this is that we are able to devote resources to finding precise solutions to narrow problems. There is something very intellectually gratifying about “honing” the finer edge of our competences. The disadvantage, of course, is that we sometimes lose sight of the broader issues, which, if we neglect them, can overwhelm our more delicate efforts.

I talked a little about this this in my last post about the under-exploited resource of student effort–which is to say, deliberate practice–in writing instruction. All the resources we devote to teaching students how to write in the classroom will come to nothing if they don’t train their abilities on their own. We might say that there is nothing there to sharpen if they aren’t also getting stronger.

Hemingway famously pointed out that the “dignity of the movement of an iceberg lies in eight ninths of it being under water.” That is, the quality of your prose depends much less on what you put on the page than what you leave off it. And in order to leave it off, of course, you have to write it out at some point. The quality of every particular piece of writing you produce comes out of all the writing you’ve done before. Just as the speed and ease with which you run today’s 5 kilometers, come from all the other running you’ve done before.

I’ve been thinking about this recently in relation to the concept of “information literacy”, which has been gaining in currency since the mid-1970s. On the face of it, information literacy constitutes a narrow problem within the broader problem of literacy. Here’s what Wikipedia says about the latter:

Literacy is traditionally understood as the ability to read and write. The term’s meaning has been expanded to include the ability to use language, numbers, images and other means to understand and use the dominant symbol systems of a culture.

You’ll notice that this does indeed leave room for something like  “the ability to know when there is a need for information, to be able to identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively use that information for the issue or problem at hand,” which is how the United States National Forum on Information Literacy defines information literacy. Part of understanding the “dominant symbol systems of a culture”, especially a culture that calls itself a “knowledge society”, must include knowing when you need more information and knowing how to get it.

So my worry here, as with my worry about the ratio of teaching to training in writing instruction, is simply that we’re spending too much time and effort on improving the information literacy of students and not enough time developing their basic ability to read and write. It’s true that they will not be able to read and write the texts they need to if they don’t know how to manage the information they have access to. But no matter how conscious they are of the information problem, they will get nowhere if they can’t read and write in the traditional senses of those words.

What happens, I think, is that once a new and exciting frontier opens up — and the Internet is certainly an information frontier — we are eager to explore it. We then assume that someone will continue to do the maintenance on the “old school” skills that still constitute the bulk of the competence in question. But what if that doesn’t happen? What if students begin to worry about their information literacy to the detriment of their general literacy? Teaching someone who doesn’t know what a paragraph is to distinguish between Google and EBSCO seems rather pointless.

The solution, I think, is to integrate “information literacy” in the overall composition curriculum. In my next post I want to begin thinking about the proper balance of content.

I was recently at a gathering of teachers and researchers interested in the state of student writing at universities. We shared the usual concerns about the writing abilities of students, namely, that, on the whole, they are not writing well enough and not improving quickly enough. We shared our experiences of teaching the craft of writing to students and were largely in agreement about what works in the classroom and what doesn’t. There’s always a difference in emphasis, of course, and everyone has their own rhetoric for getting through to the students, but the maintenance of scholarly writing has a long a tradition and most of the machinery is well understood. We are sometimes worried about its state of disrepair, but we’re confident in our abilities to fix things if we were given a chance.

It’s therefore also natural, when a group of writing instructors gets together, that talk will turn to how to persuade administrators and policymakers to devote more resources to teaching writing at university. We need more teaching hours, we say, and, especially, more time to give feedback. We argue for the need for more teaching materials and, these days, also for funding for research into rhetoric and composition. There is a sense that the problem, in so far as it exists, has been caused by a lack of resources and that it can be fixed by allocating some money in the right direction.

I’m sure there is some benefit to be derived from channeling more resources into writing instruction, hiring more teachers into the field, and supporting their development through research (more PhD’s, for example). But I think the bulk of the problem can be solved by different means. And at the gathering I mentioned I felt like a bit of a lone voice (perhaps even a lone wolf) when arguing for it. I’m going to see how it looks here in blog form. Comments are welcome.

One of the presenters was, quite effectively, using Anders Ericcson’s work on “deliberate practice” to inform his pedagogy. One of the things he suggested was that “healthy competition” among the students can be a good way of getting their attention and getting them to practice. So I raised a favorite theme of mine: maybe we should go back to grading on a curve. This was taken largely as hyperbole, even a bit of a joke. What he had intended was a sort of competitive “spirit”, not an actual competition for a predetermined amount of “prizes”, i.e., As, Bs, Cs, and Ds.

One of the reasons I’m not joking when I say this, however, is precisely that we need a way of making good writing “count”. This would make the effort of becoming the best writer you can be worthwhile. (Anyone should be able to improve their grade simply by becoming a significantly better writer.) And this is why I, and some of my colleagues, have been arguing that if there is a crisis of student writing it needs to be fixed, in large part, in the way assignments are designed and graded, not primarily in what we are teaching the students about good writing.

The assumption of the teaching-centered approach is that the students are doing the best they can. The truth, more likely, is that they are doing all that is expected of them. What we have to do is raise our expectations of their written work. And the simplest way to do that, without suddenly failing a bunch of students that would otherwise have passed, is to distribute the grades in a “normal” way, letting a clear and effective presentation of ideas outperform a muddled and tortured one. That is, let good writing give students an advantage in the competition for scarce grades and we’ll see students become better writers in order to win it, i.e., to meet our expectations.

Under this suggestion of mine there’s a deeper point about what is missing in universities today. While I’m all for more resources on the teaching side (and I can promise I would use them to maximum effect), I think the most important resource is not one we need more of but one that is available in abundance but is sadly underutilized: student time and effort. If they felt a real need to improve, specifically, their writing, they would devote the half hour a day that it would take to its deliberate practice.

I hope we can make this part of the conversation at least, before we simply fill up our teaching time going through the qualities of a good sentence and a coherent paragraph and the rules of referencing and giving endless amount of feedback to students who aren’t really paying attention. We should not think the students need more indoctrination into what to believe about their writing. They need instruction in what to do when they are writing. To sharpen this point even more: the students are not the writers they could be, not because we’re not telling them how to write, but because we’re not telling them to write.

Lately, I’ve become increasingly preoccupied by a simple but elegant thought. First, consider that a standard paragraph of scholarly prose (at least six sentences and at most two-hundred words) takes about a minute to read. Next, grant me, for the sake of argument, that a well-trained scholar can write a coherent paragraph about something they know in about half an hour. It only takes a moment. Now, let’s think about what that means.

Basically, the writer has an enormous advantage on the reader. Even within my somewhat ungenerous constraints, the writer spends 30 times longer on the paragraph than the reader does. If this is a “conversation” then it is, at first pass, a very asymmetric one. But we can recover the symmetry by realizing that the reader’s ultimate response to the text will also come in writing. That is, the reader will respond by writing a paragraph that it will again take the original writer only a minute to read. Writing that paragraph, too, can take 30 times as long.

(Like I say, these are ungenerous constraints. In fact, I am much more generous, since you are free to re-write the paragraph as many times as you like before exposing it to the reader.)

As I noticed a few years ago, this suggests a situation that resembles that famous visual effect in the Matrix film series. The writer is able to slow time down in their mind, establishing the perfect sequence of moves to deliver the message. The “moves” are of course simply the order of the 150-200 words that the paragraph is composed of. Ideally, they look like spontaneously produced speech. But to speak as coherently in real time is much, much more difficult and, in a conversation with many participants (which is what a scholarly discourse is) virtually impossible.

Everything I’ve just said of the paragraph is, of course, also true of the article. It takes at least 20 hours to write but only 40 minutes to read. That gives plenty of time to plan and deliver a rapid series of punches, parries and kicks in an almost leisurely manner (and then fly away) and even time to “dodge a bullet” or two from a familiar foe. You just have to remember that, when they come back at you, they, too, are working in bullet time!

Robert Graves said that poetry is a struggle with “the huge impossibility of language”. While scholarship is not poetry, academic writers do often find language to be at least an enormous difficulty. This is especially true of researchers for whom English is not their native language, but let’s keep in mind that even native speakers find it difficult to write well. Linguistic competence is not automatically literary mastery.

When Roland Barthes announced the “death of the author” it was as a consequence of his views on writing (a term he preferred to “literature”). He distinguished the act of writing, we might say, from the fact of language, from which “the writer literally takes nothing”. The language does not shape the content of the writing; it only establishes a horizon for it. Language, says Barthes, “is a field of action, the definition of, and a hope for, a possibility”. But writing is ultimately a Utopian gesture. Its freedom lies beyond a “frontier”; it is almost “supernatural”. In that sense, Graves was right. Language is the impossibility of poetry. The drama of a poem is precisely to exist in the face of that impossibility.

In this regard, I suppose, scholars sometimes feel a bit like poets. But we have to remember that a scholar doesn’t, properly speaking, work within a language, but within a discourse, and a discourse is not a so much a “huge impossibility” as a particular difficulty. Indeed, as I have said before, discourse is what makes it possible for us to attain a particular degree of precision on particular topics. While the language doesn’t, as Barthes rightly notes, provide the writer with a “stock of materials”, the discourse does exactly that. And more. Foucault has argued that discourse shapes the objects and the subjects, the concepts and the strategies of research, and thereby makes it possible to form statements, i.e., claims about what is going on in the world.

Now, discourses can express themselves in several languages. Here in Denmark, most scholars will speak of what they know in Danish as well as English, and sometimes also in French or German, or any other national language. In each case, the tiny possibilities of discourse are exposed to the huge impossibility language.  It is difficult sometimes, but that difficulty is worth facing. It the essential difficulty of scholarly writing.