Even academics have fallen into the habit of using the word “academic” as a pejorative. It can be found in the slogan “I love learning but I hate school” (see Susan Blum’s detailed study of this sentiment) and in the view that school assignments don’t have a “real” or “authentic” audience. Both of these ideas have become central to the reception of John Warner’s new book about how we teach writing, the second most recently in a review by Cate Denial. She puts the point in a familiar way:

As I read the section on grading and learning, something Jesse Stommel once said about providing “real” or authentic audiences for student work make greater sense to me.  Students, John argues, need intrinsic – rather than external – motivation to do well, and one way to do that is to make the stakes real; to have a real audience in mind for an essay, for example, rather than an artificially convened audience of ‘the professor.’  Jesse’s said this before, too, and it finally clicked for me that I can have my students write for a friend, or a newspaper, or . . . anything, really, that constitutes an actual audience and not the artificial one that’s me.

This idea that students are doing something more “real” when they are writing for a friend or for a newspaper than they are when they are writing for a class is worth thinking seriously about. It’s not always wrong, but I think it needlessly underestimates the “reality”, if you will, that is available in the traditional classroom. As Denial points out, the problem is easily solved even within the classroom, so in a sense it is surprising that the issue persists, but I actually think her solution is a bit too easy. After all, does asking a student to imagine a friend or a newspaper reader make that reader “real”? Doesn’t the fact that this remains a school assignment take the authenticity out of it? Would her students be writing to their friends or for the local newspapers about this subject if she hadn’t asked them to?

Those are of course mainly rhetorical questions. It’s possible that an assignment could be designed to make the letter to the friend more authentic, but I don’t think most students would do anything other than dutifully try to imagine it — often along lines they imagine the teacher is proposing.  Indeed, the utility of the exercise would depend greatly on the caliber of the student’s friends, and some might go ahead and imagine friends with greater interest in the subject, perhaps even friends with greater intelligence, in order to earn the grade they desire. In other words, I would question the assumption that this sort of task would make the audience more real. Nor is it entirely clear how this might render “the stakes” more real. Are we seriously going to ask students to stake their friendships and future careers in journalism on a college assignment? Something seems off about this.

But the deeper problem is the presumption that the classroom doesn’t provide the students with an authentic writing environment. After all, it very definitely provides them with a room full of peers, and what is academic writing other than writing for one’s peers? The classroom, I want to argue, is an authentically academic environment and this can be used to situate writing assignments rhetorically.

Denial is right to eschew herself as the ideal audience for student writing. Students who are writing for their teachers and examiners are imagining readers who are much smarter than they are, and not, at least not usually, and not really, interested in their ideas. (Students who do imagine that their teachers might be moved by their words are often — though of course not always — kidding themselves.) But the classroom is full of nearly ideal readers of their texts; all the students have to do is imagine explaining what they have learned in class to each other. They should do so in the spirit of exposing their thinking to the criticism of their peers, of revealing their ideas to people who are qualified to tell them they are wrong. These are people who have read the same readings, attended the same lectures and participated in the same class discussions. They are comrades in the struggle to learn the same material. Academic writing, as I never grow tired of emphasizing, is the art of writing down what you know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people. The students are themselves the knowledgeable people they are trying talk to. They are (roughly) as knowledgeable about the subjects they are studying as each other.

In his interviews about his book, and in my discussions with him on Twitter, Warner often invokes “the rhetorical situation” (consisting of purpose, audience, and message) as a kind of deconstruction of the standard “school” essay. He’s especially interested in the infamous “five-paragraph essay”, which he thinks we need to “kill”. When I do finally read it, this is one of the arguments I will be looking very closely at. In my view, the academic situation is rich in opportunities to develop the students’ rhetorical sensibilities. That is, addressing oneself to an audience of knowledgeable peers leaves ample room for experimentation (What do they know? What questions might they have? Do they necessarily agree with me?); the classroom can occasion many purposes and a variety of messages. But it does, in most cases, suggest a particular form — namely, essays composed of paragraphs. Not necessarily exactly five every time, but certainly a definite number of claims to be supported, elaborated or defended. I know there are other situations, but this distinctly academic one seems to me, at least at university, to be worth defending. For people engaged in learning, it is altogether real.

One of the key moves in Norm Friesen’s The Textbook and the Lecture (which I’ve written about before) is to approach his eponymous forms as media. He follows the OED in defining media as “an intermediate agency, an instrument or channel; a means, especially a means or channel of communication or expression” (p. 13). Of relevance to the issues of my last post, he points out that “a textbook, a Twitter tweet, a click of a mouse or a tap on a screen, even a whisper at the back of the classroom can all be seen as instances of ‘mediation’.” That is, we can use the concept of “media” to compare essays and tweets as forms of communication. Indeed, Friesen traces the lecture and the textbook back to the technology of writing, construing them an essential part of the historical development of literacy, the “long moment” of humanity’s ability to read and write. I guess what I was arguing last week is that the tweet, and often even the blog post, doesn’t actually participate in this moment.

A great deal depends on what we mean by “writing”. Indeed, much confusion, and some conflict between writing instructors, stems from the referential opacity of this word. I want to suggest that it can be used to name either a skill or a medium. When someone says, “Writing is hard,” they are using it in the first sense; but when they say, “Put it in writing,” they are using it in the second sense. Brian Street’s (1984) distinction between the “autonomous” and the “ideological” model of literacy also seems to play on these two senses of the word, where the first model sees writing as a skill that lets individuals and communities accomplish particular goals, while the second model sees it as a set of values and conventions that do more to define the goals of the community than to reach them. James Gee (1990) goes so far as to call the first model a “myth” and hopes to draw attention to our “moral complicity” in promulgating it.

I suppose he’s talking about me. I generally approach writing as a skill, and I try to teach people how to become better at it, to better express their thoughts. But there are others, people like John Warner, who see it more like a medium, i.e., something that both carries and shapes their thinking. That may help explain why I’m a supporter of the five-paragraph essay, and Warner is strongly opposed to it. Since I see writing as a skill, I see the paragraph and the essay as “tools” — as means to various ends. But since Warner sees writing as a medium, he sees these forms as ends in themselves, or at least he worries that that is the impression we’re leaving on our students through our teaching. I assume that the writer is getting more powerful through mastery; Warner is worried that the very same forms are disempowering the students, perhaps even oppressing them. Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right, as the saying goes. Every building, by a similar token, can serve as a prison.

Recall Friesen’s definition. The difference between a tool and medium, let’s say, is that a tool doesn’t have any agency, while a medium does. A tool is really only a lever to amplify a person’s agency, while a medium gets between the actor and the act with its own, if you will, agenda. Warner approaches the five-paragraph essay from the point of view of this “intermediate agency”, the power it exerts on the writer, especially the relatively powerless student writer. He is concerned about its formative influence. I approach the very same form as a way of extending the agency of the writer by more efficiently transferring the force of their argument.

In the end, these distinctions are not hard and fast, but differences of emphasis, matters of degree. Media are themselves tools, if you hold them right. It depends on whether you see them as things you use or things that use you, as equipment you deploy or situations* you are immersed in.** But I do think this difference between construing writing as a skill and as a medium and, more specifically, construing particular forms of writing as tools or channels, can go a long way towards explaining the confusion among both students and teachers about why, to use Warner’s title, “they can’t write”. Hopefully we can also use it to resolve some of these differences and then begin to pull in the same direction towards reforming the institution that conserves our cognitive faculties, i.e., the university. The common cause, after all, is to figure out how to help them to write better.

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*Warner emphasizes that writing should be approached through “the rhetorical situation”. My response to this has been to say that, at university, this situation is relatively well-defined, allowing for particular efficiencies students should be taught to exploit. I should think more about this for a later post.

**In trying to come up with a good tweet-sized summary of this post I hit on the contrast between “equipment” and “predicament”. Also worth exploring. (With a nod to Heidegger, we can think of Zeugzusammenhang and Zwangslage — more basically, Zeug and Lage.)

Late last year, I discovered the work of John Warner, who has a written a book that I’ll need to address soon. The discovery has a led to a series of long and illuminating Twitter exchanges that have clarified my views on a number of important topics. One of them is the blurring of the boundary between literacy and orality in the age of new media. When I retired my previous blog, I was thinking seriously about what sort of activity blogging actually is. I wrote two posts vaguely inspired by Barthes and Foucault about the nature of blogging and then — defeated, I suppose, by the irony of the project — gave up. In my discussions with John, however, I found myself returning to it, insisting that tweeting is not really writing, at least not in the sense of something I’m trying to help students and scholars do well. Indeed, I don’t even think blogging should be counted as proper “writing”. I don’t blame John for balking at the idea, but I want to explore it nonetheless.

As I understand his argument, it’s not quite as simple as pointing out that in order to tweet and blog (and produce similar social media “content”) you have to, literally, write. I don’t deny this of course. But you also have to write in order to make a shopping list or leave a note on the fridge to your wife telling her you’ve eaten the plums. Doing so doesn’t make you a “writer” (though if you are already a writer these notes may famously have some literary merit). John took it a step further by suggesting that tweeting is writing as a matter of neuroscientific fact. The same parts of the brain, he said, are involved in writing a tweet as are involved in penning an essay. I’m not impressed enough with neuroscience to let this change my view. It may be true that at the present stage of science we can’t distinguish the two, but I will insist that my intellectual and emotional posture (and even my bodily comportment) is entirely different when I write tweets and when I write essays. This first hand knowledge trumps any insight a brain scan might provide into my process.

Now, you may say I have shifted the goal posts. I started with “literacy vs. orality” and I’m now talking about literature vs. everyday communication. But let’s keep in mind that I coach writers at a university, which is to say, I work at a relatively high level. I think it’s fair to say that “the ability to read and write”, at least here, always aspires to “literature”, either in the proper sense (poems and novels) or the scholarly sense (“the academic literature”). It marks a higher competence, a greater difficulty than reading signage or even newspapers. You get a university degree in order to learn not merely how get around in a world of written signs, but to make use of what Kenneth Burke called the “equipment for living” that the world of “letters” makes available to us. When Barthes asks “What is writing?” and Foucault asks “What is an author?” they are thinking of something quite specific, even rather specialized, and not something that everyone is capable of or interested in. When I say a tweet is not “written”, I’m trying to be specific in a similar way. When I say that even this blog post is not a case of “writing”, I am, of course, first and foremost trying to be provocative. But that’s not all.

The distinction I want to draw turns on the distance that is established between the “writer” and the “reader”. The scare quotes are there to indicate that this actually works both ways: a writer may very well dictate a book and be no less a writer for that, a speaker may establish a literary distance to the audience. Think of the root meaning of “lecturer”, i.e., a “reader”, as they are still often called in the UK. That is, this has nothing to do with what our hands are doing; it is about the nature of the relationship between the sender and receiver of the utterance. Though I’m sure it is a gross simplification, I think this is why the concept of différance (meaning both to differ and to defer) is at the heart of Derrida’s “science of writing”, his grammatology. Literature, i.e., writing “proper”, is about the spacing and timing of the utterance, about the amount room that is allowed for interpretation, for reading between the lines, if you will.

In conversation an utterance succeeds or fails immediately. A joke, for example, will work or not at the time it is told. It is impossible to fix it by way of interpretation (unless that was part of the original joke), except by making a new joke, which now includes the recovery of the failed communication. Literature does not expect such immediacy; it is asking to be interpreted before it is understood.

Perhaps you can see where I’m going with this now? When we write a tweet we are looking for an immediate reaction from our followers and expect it to otherwise be forgotten. Indeed, much of the tweet-mining scandal-mongering that we’ve been seeing lately seems to completely misunderstand the ephemeral (and highly contextual) intentions behind most tweets. A few years ago, I will add, my blogging degenerated into almost constant live-action engagements with controversial issues. I wasn’t writing, I was thinking out loud. Since I hadn’t made this clear to myself (I saw myself as a writer, not a “mere” blogger), it was an unsustainable position to be in, and these days I don’t think of my blogging here as actually blogging. I don’t have a very big audience (as far as I tell from my traffic) and I don’t seem to engage them on issues of the day. I get very few comments and I don’t interfere with anyone’s mood. I’m basically just drafting things that (I hope) will one day be published in a more permanent, more accessible form. I’m not really blogging, then. I’m writing.

(Update: actually, this post, which was published on the same day it was written and then immediately tweeted, is way too “immediate” to be considered writing on my definition. It’s sort of a hybrid I guess.)

Reading is an experience. As a writer, you are deciding what your readers will experience while they read what you have written. At one level, you determine exactly what they will experience, you decide exactly what will happen to them: one word after another will pass through their consciousness in the exact order you have arranged them. At another level, a great deal hinges on your ability as a writer and their competence as readers. Ideally, you will make them think something or feel something, or perhaps merely imagine something, but it will, in any case, be something you wanted them to think, feel or imagine. If they picture a white cat on a red rug, it’s because that was your intention. It was what you meant. Good writing makes the reader experience your meaning.

Now, experience takes time. It takes about five minutes to read a thousand words or about three words per second. In academic writing, a paragraph is normally at least six sentences long and should therefore occupy a minute of the reader’s attention, so about 10 seconds per sentence. That’s about 30 words. Of course, you won’t write an entire essay of 180-word paragraphs consisting of 30-word sentences, nor will your reader spend exactly one minute reading them at 3 words per second. But these measures give us a fair approximation of your problem as a writer and, therefore, the general sketch of a solution. Writing a paragraph means arranging a sequence of words that conveys your meaning (a thought, a feeling, or an image) in about one minute. At the end of that time, it should be clear to the reader what you are trying to say.

In academic writing, meanwhile, it should also be clear how you know. That is, after about a minute, the reader should understand the claim you are making and the basis on which you think it is true. This may mean that you cite your sources, whether they be scholarly papers or newspaper articles, or invoke your own data, whether qualitative or quantitative. Or it may just mean that you provide an argument, reasoning from premises the reader presumably shares. The reader may agree with your claim or not, and may find your basis solid or otherwise. (Note that the reader may agree with you and yet find your reasons wanting.) But before the reader moves on to the next paragraph it should be clear what you think and why you think so.

“A writer’s problem does not change,” said Hemingway. “It is always how to write truly and, having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.” You are not, or at least not usually, going to be communicating the full experience that produced your conclusions. You are not sharing your experience as a researcher with the reader. Rather, you are sharing your knowledge, the result of your experience. You are not telling them what happened to you in every detail but what it is like to be where you are. You’re telling them what the world looks like from your point of view and, by sharing your methods, how they, too, can see the world from the same vantage if they want to put in the time. First and foremost, however, you’re sparing them the trouble. If you write truly enough, many months of your effort can be represented in a single minute of the reader’s attention, a single well-written paragraph. That’s a marvelous thing in itself.

Remember Kuhn’s Two Dozen. A “paradigm shift” is, first of all, a change in the minds of a small group of people, precipitated by a variety of pressures, both social and material, emotional and intellectual. And since interdisciplinarity works “between disciplines” it is natural think it works between paradigms, even that the point of interdisciplinary research is to bring about a “revolution” or at least a shift out of an established discipline’s way of thinking. One imagines that the interdiscipline is defined by the disciplines it brings together, but also therefore by its difference from these disciplines. One imagines the “interdiscipline” is simply the interstice, the space between, the disciplines.

But this is of course not true. Most interdisciplinary work happens where the concerns of two or more disciplines overlap. It is not the free exercise of thought in an empty space but the no-less-disciplined attempt to hold our observations accountable to multiple areas of expertise. What this means is that interdisciplinary work is also guided by a “paradigm”, which includes a set of exemplars of the kind of work, perhaps originally carried out within the existing disciplines, that the interdisciplinary collaboration would put on a more explicit formal grounding. This implies submitting to the same variety of pressures I started by mentioning:  both social and material, emotional and intellectual. In other words, you’re looking for another two dozen people whose minds you want to change, only this time working in different disciplines.

You also want them to be able to change your mind. You’re looking for peers who are qualified to engage seriously with your work. You want them to understand, or at least be capable of understanding, both your theories and your methods. You don’t want them to have to trust you on anything of great importance.

Interdisciplinarity, then, does not imply an intellectual vacuum. Don’t let your attempt to bring theories together isolate you from the theorists you want to talk to. Think of the inter-discipline as a community made up of members of various “home disciplines” and try to think of these people as peers in a meaningful sense. They should understand (or be able to understand with relative ease) each other’s theories; they should be able to understand (and, when they do understand, respect) each other’s methods. Being interdisciplinary does not let you deflect all criticism; it obligates you to deal with the criticism of particular people who are working in the same space that you are.

If there really is no one else working in the space you want to explore, I strongly caution you against going that way with your research. You are likely to suffer great intellectual loneliness and, worse, you are likely to make mistakes that no one will be able to help you see. You won’t be able to ask for help, and you won’t be able to listen to advice. So please, as you would under entirely “normal” (in Kuhn’s sense) conditions, find one or two dozen people whose work interests you and who you think might be interested in yours. Learn their names and what they are up to. Then build your own discipline in an attempt to earn their respect.