I’m working on a cheat sheet for my definition of academic knowledge. In its current form it probably only makes sense to people who have attended my standard lecture on academic writing. (Fortunately it is available on YouTube.) I sometimes imagine that I have completely solved the so-called “problem of knowledge”, but I do understand that my solution will not satisfy everyone. In an important sense, I’m suggesting that we can’t solve the problem unless we work together across disciplines and by this I mean specifically that knowledge cannot be completely understood within the confines of philosophy, rhetoric or literature. If philosophers, rhetoricians, and literary theorists work together, however, I think some real progress can be made. My cheat sheet is a sort of schema of the solution that might emerge.

Recently, I’ve been presenting it more humbly as a mnemonic aid for people who are listening to my lectures. I don’t like using slides–but I’m not always sure my hour-long monologue is as tidy and coherent as it feels to me when I’m speaking. So now I tell my listeners that I want to tell them three things that each have three parts, and that the last three of them each have a further three. Depending your level of attention (or abstraction), you’ll learn three, nine or fifteen things about the nature of academic knowledge. Rewatching the video I notice that I give each item about 3 minutes on average, leaving about 10 minutes for introductory remarks and a concluding parable. It seems pretty tidy. (Maybe I’ll animate my cheat sheet at some point and edit it into the lecture. Maybe one day I’ll trust technology enough to project it above me as a I speak. We’ll see.

In this post, I just wanted to summarize the three main competences that, in my view, most usefully characterize what it means to be “knowledgeable”. By this I don’t just mean knowing particular things, of course, but having the ability to know such things. Being knowledgeable, then, also puts one in a good position to learn things. So this is a competence that a student has a particular interest in acquiring.

Philosophers have long pursued the idea that knowledge is “justified, true belief”. They’ve never really been satisfied with this definition, but it seems intuitively plausible that in order to know something you have to form a belief, that this belief should not be false, and that you should have a good reason to believe it. Knowledgeable people don’t just happen to believe true things, they do so deliberately, they understand why they believe as they do. Being knowledgeable, then, means being good at making up your mind. When faced with a situation or a set of materials, knowledgeable people are able to come to decision about what is going on. They are able to do this more efficiently and more accurately than ignorant people. While they are not infallible, of course, they have trained themselves to arrive at justified, true beliefs within a particular subject area more reliably than people who have not studied their discipline. This is a valuable cognitive competence.

But we should not be satisfied with thinking of knowledge as an exalted mental state. It is necessary but not sufficient to hold justified, true beliefs if we want say we are knowledgeable. We also need to be able to hold our own in conversation with other knowledgeable people. Being “conversant” implies a package of abilities and sensibilities, of which three strike me as emblematic. The first is the ability to articulate and recognize a good question. Among knowledgeable people there are, in fact, good and bad questions; bad questions are precisely those that come out of our ignorance — an ignorance that the relevantly knowledgeable person has already conquered. Related to this, good conversation depends on a shared sense of humor; knowledgeable people are capable of seeing the humor in things that go over the heads of people who are not “in the know”. Finally, if you are knowledgeable about a subject you know what can cause offense or provoke debate. You can then produce these effects on purpose rather than cause rhetorical accidents. These are all valuable communicative competences and are part of what I call “knowing” something.

Lastly, to know something is to have the ability to write a coherent prose paragraph of at least six sentences and at most 200 words that support, elaborate or defend it. This ability is rooted in your understanding of the difficulty the reader faces with the key point: will the reader find it hard to believe, to understand, or agree with. Sometimes the reader will need evidence before accepting your point; sometimes the reader needs you to define your terms or clarify your concepts; and sometimes the reader needs you to address their objections on a matter about which they have already made up their mind. It’s important to appreciate your finitude when thinking about this competence. Anyone can write a paragraph given unlimited resources. If you know something today, I suggest, you can write the paragraph tomorrow in under 30 minutes. If you can’t do this, it’s best just to admit to you don’t know it. The important thing is to count your textual competence–your facility with the written word–as part of your ability to know things. It’s not just for show.

Academic writing is the art of writing down what you know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people. Scholarship, broadly speaking, is the ongoing conversation in our culture that is carried out by its most knowledgeable people. So to know something is to be able to open your beliefs to the criticism of your peers, testing their truth, strengthening their justifications. This conversation happens in the head (perhaps also in the heart), in the talk, and on the page. It takes the combined efforts of philosophers, rhetoricians and literary types — or our combined philosophical, rhetorical and literary talents — to make sense of it all.

Update March 14: This series of posts is dedicated to the memory of Stephen Hawking.

All grief, once made known to the mind, can be cured by the mind, the manuscript proclaimed; the human brain, once it is fully functioning, as in the making of a poem, is outside time and place and immune from sorrow. (Cyril Connolly)

In “Writing Against Normal”, Jay Dolmage presents his own writing pedagogy as an extension of the “post-process” trend in composition instruction. This trend, I note, intersects with Brian Street’s proposal to replace the “autonomous model” of literacy with an “ideological” one. Following Lennard Davis, however, Jay also believes that the writing process is subject to “a regime of bodily normalcy”. Bringing all this together, he seeks a

pedagogy that represents literacy as an ideological and embodied arena, and composing as a cultural

and material activity by which writers position and reposition themselves in relation to their own and others’ subjectivities, discourses, practices, institutions, and bodies.

To this end, he proposes to use wikis to track the revision process, rendering it visible. This includes both the archiving of past versions of papers and the documentation of the feedback students have given each other. He does this to foreground the messiness of the revision process and what Patricia Dunn has called “the drama about power” that editing performs.

Indeed, Jay participates in this drama himself, engaging with the drafts that students produce as they produce them, spurring them on and suggesting changes. The idea is to get students to appreciate the process of writing and editing without focusing on the final product. Jay believes that this also brings the students’ bodies into play, though I’m not exactly clear how this is the case. It seems obvious, however, that it intensifies their social embeddedness, their political situation, if you will, since every move they make in the text, no matter how experimental it is, will now be subject to scrutiny. Both by their fellow students and their teacher.

I am not sure that this explicit dramatization of the power dynamic of writers and readers, students and teachers, is advisable. Tracking (and ultimately grading) the messiness of the revision is likely to lead to them to think that there is some right way to struggle with their texts, and even that finding writing easy is somehow “wrong”. While this approach may well move the student’s focus (and anxieties) away from the errors of the final product, it will also bring the rightness or wrongness of their intuitions, their impulses, to the fore.

In an important sense, it involves an invasion of privacy, and one that is only made possible by the latest in technology. The next logical step, it seems to me, suggests a dyspotian nightmare. Here, students are asked to screen capture all their work with texts, even to film themselves sitting in front their machines working. The technology exists to track their eye movements and, indeed, their vital signs. All this could be justified in the name of “embodiment”, they will now be held responsible for the mere attempt to do things with words, and for their rate of perspiration as they do so. No longer will our pedagogies favor the straight, white, male “normate subject”, no longer will writing instruction “privilege those who can most easily ignore their bodies.” With the process this tightly under surveillance, the body will become mandatory. It will become as legitimate to demand that students show their teachers how their bodies write as it is to ask hockey players to show their coach how their bodies skate. After all, “writing is a physical activity.”

If ever there was a risk of constituting “a regime of bodily normalcy” surely this is it. Except, in Jay’s classroom, students might might feel pressure to appear abnormal. They will feel a pressure, not to conform to some set of norms and standards, but to deviate from them in some “unique” way, expressive of their individual embodiment. That’s the tricky thing with norms; you almost can’t help but enforce some, even as you suspend others. In any case, surely it would force students to establish some other space of privacy, someplace off-camera, off-line and off-the-record, a place to live out their freedom to think, even for a moment, anything they like. This is the freedom they enjoy inside their own skulls.

I use that image advisedly. It is how George Orwell described the only sense in which the party members in 1984 were free. Technology had put every outward act (even of reading and writing) under surveillance. Every “draft” of their thoughts in principle expressed their loyalty or disloyalty to the party. Even the act of picking up a pen and putting it to paper was suspect.

It is my view that teaching students to write means teaching them to make use of a particular kind of freedom. Indeed, the craft of writing has the power to liberate them from the limitations of their bodies. I try to show them how they can coordinate a “here and now” for their knowledge, a moment that is liberated from time and space. It is where the process and the product meet. It is where their material embodiment and their social embeddedness intersect, so that they can be played off against each other, transcending both. In the moment of writing, they are no longer black or white, blind or sighted, male or female. They are, indeed, not even students subject to the “policing” of their teachers. They are free to do anything they like to the end of producing a paragraph of prose that opens something they know to the criticism of their peers.

Jay ends his essay by anticipating my objections:

It might seem that the goal of such an embodied consciousness is counter-productive: that the teacher would reward progressively more “error”-filled work, and that the student would learn skills that would only “Other” them from the world of standard discourse. But the goal I am focused on here is not just better writing—whether this is measured through cleaner products, or through more smoothly incorporated practices. The goal of such pedagogy is a critical and reflexive thinking, the sort of thinking that perhaps writing can best allow when it is neither clean nor smooth.

I have tried to express my uneasiness with this program. (I suspect I’ve only been partly successful.) By insistently implicating the thought in the product, the product in the process, and the process in the body, I worry that we risk destroying the private interiority of the student’s mind. Indeed, Susan Blum has suggested that today’s students already think of themselves (and each other) more in terms of performance than authenticity. (I suspect that performance is to ideology as authenticity is to autonomy.) Do we not risk driving this attitude to an extreme if we never let the students make up their minds in private, never let them finish a thought before speaking it? Indeed, how can they make up their minds at all if the “criticality” of their thinking must always be expressed through the rough and dirty bodies they inhabit, the messiness of their lives.

The “drama of revision” in Jay’s classroom is (explicitly) a revision of the solitude of the student. Indeed, since he will not allow his students to ignore their bodies–neither their own nor each other’s–it is almost an elision of solitude. But how would this have worked for Jean-Dominique Bauby (see also part 2), who spent a week carefully working out the prose of each chapter of his memoir “locked” inside his own skull, and blinking it out in its finished form, one letter at a time? To extend his metaphor, I fear we will touch the wings of the mind’s butterfly in the diving bell of the body.

So far, my critique of Jay Dolmage’s “Writing Against Normal” has been mainly theoretical. I have tried to question the idea that the “normate subject [of writing] is white, male, straight, [and] upper-middle class,” that his (!) body is “profoundly and impossibly unmarked and ‘able'” and that his prose, therefore, must be “error-free, straight, [and] logical.” In part 3, I want to address the practical implications of this theory. But I have been finding it difficult–which is to say, challenging and rewarding–to decide what I think of the pedagogy that Jay derives from his critique of our academic norms. It’s going to take me a few more days to sort it out well enough to write about it. (Being a “normal” guy, I like to arrive at something reasonably “straight” and logical before I publish.) In lieu of a discussion of pedagogy, then, let me suggest an analogy to prime your own thinking. Perhaps you’ll arrive at my conclusions before I do this weekend.

Jay and I agree on an important point: writing is a physical activity. Where we disagree, I think, is over the purpose of this activity. We might say that I believe writing is the activity of quite literally disembodying our thoughts, while Jay seems to think that the meaning of our texts depends on keeping them connected to our bodies. Needless to say, this has profound practical implications for our pedagogies.

Consider the statement, “Hockey is a physical activity.” It seems somehow more trivial to say this than to insist that writing is one, doesn’t it? But from the point of view of pedagogy, it helps us to see something very important: learning to play hockey is matter of training the body to do something. But the hockey coach does not teach the players to play hockey in its entirety at all times. Hockey practice does not consist only of playing the game. The ability to play hockey is a composite of competences, each of which the individual can excel at or not, and different players have different natural endowments and develop them in different directions. As they train, they grow in strength, speed, agility, and precision, but not all players grow in the same way or at the same rate. Some are hard to catch some are hard to push around. Some players you can’t get anything past, some players can skate circles around you. Whatever their skills, they develop them through practice, through physical activity.

Crucially, the coach breaks down the various competences that make up the ability to play hockey into simpler activities that can be studied and drilled. Moreover, this drilling is done in full view of the other players. They learn from each other and compare themselves to each other. There’s even a “drama of power” as the players compete for the coach’s recognition and a place in the starting lineup for the next game. There’s not much in the way of privacy for hockey players, even though many very good ones of course have to spend many solitary hours working on their skating skills and shooting pucks into goals. (I grew up with the romantic image of a young boy standing in the early morning on a frozen lake on the prairie dreaming of the “big league”.) Once you show up for practice you do as you’re told and you get told whether or not you are doing it right.

Like Jay, I hold to the idea that good writing emerges from the writer’s attempt to say what they mean. I try to create a space and time (a moment) in which they can carry out the activity of writing down what they know. I want to help them to become better at this activity. I’m sure a good hockey coach is also trying to help the players to become better at the game–indeed, the best hockey players they can be. Like writers, the players will become good each in their own way. Indeed, they will develop recognizably different styles, not just different levels of competence. And yet, we feel there is some important difference here, don’t we? Suppose someone said, “Hockey is an intellectual activity.” Well, that’s true too, isn’t it?

(See part 1 here.)

…every time you meet a new man, the battle is on: the latest guest has to decide if you are

a) stronger than he, and
b) smarter than he, and
c) less queer.

And if you pass on all three counts, if you win the arm-wrestle, culture derby, and short-hair count, well then if he is a decent sort he usually feels you should run for President.

Norman Mailer (1959)

The 1950s are often described as the “age of conformity”, sometimes as a reference to the title of Irving Howe’s famous essay, in which he criticized his fellow intellectuals for failing to think independently about the Cold War. But it was certainly not just the mind of America that was shaped by the reigning ideology; the very body of the time, we might say, was under strong pressure to conform to what Jay Dolmage calls “normate culture”. If ever there was a time in recent history when the “normate subject” was ” white, male, straight, upper middle class,” and the normal body “profoundly and impossibly unmarked and ‘able’,” surely the 1950s was it. Indeed, the civil rights struggles of the following decade were often explicitly waged against the “reactionary” forces that pushed back towards what had come before. What was sought — what was sorely needed, many would argue — was a liberation from the  norms (racism, sexism, homophobia and elitism) that the age enforced.

Let us grant, then, at least for the sake of argument, that, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the cultural subject, the “normal American”, was a middle-class, straight, white man. And let us also grant that this norm (or package of norms) was being enforced, pushing the experiences of lower class, gay, black and female Americans to the margins, “marking” them as in some way unfit for cultural life, culturally dis-abled, we might say. As Norman Mailer put it, you wouldn’t vote for a President you didn’t think was stronger, smarter and less queer than you were. Those were the  terms of battle on the field of culture. We can even grant that the upheavals of the 1960s didn’t fully put these battles behind us. Many people today will argue that straight, white males continue to enjoy vast cultural “privileges” that are withheld from their “others”. The normalizing pressures of culture continue to operate, perhaps as they always have and always will.

All this may be granted. (It’s not an argument we need to have today.)

It is the next step in Jay’s argument that I want to challenge. He believes that writing, and in particular student writing, is one of the practices through which the normate subject is constructed and maintained. That is, emancipation from normalcy requires emancipation (let’s say) from what the Chicago Manual of Style calls “polished American prose”. At a general level, drawing on the work of Lennard Davis, he suggests that language “enforces normalcy”; he agrees with Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and James Wilson that “language becomes an ‘address interpellating the body’; linguistic conditions, in part, shape the body normatively.” And he applies this directly to the conventions of both usage and layout, noting that even the ideal of “clarity” distinguishes normal subjects from the great (if you will) “unwashed” masses.

We currently see this trend played out on the page through grammar and usage rules—which Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee suggest “are the conventions of written language that allow [people] to discriminate against one another”. But we also see normalcy imposed multitudinously through “surface features” like page layout and sentence length. We see normalcy interpellated through nebulous ideas like “clarity,” which Trinh T. Minh Ha suggests “is a means of subjection” and “conformity to the norms of well-behaved writing”. “To write ‘clearly,’” she argues, we are forced to “incessantly prune, eliminate, forbid, purge, purify; in other words, practice what may be called an ‘ablution of language’”.

Needless to say, the composition classroom is a traditional site of this ritual purification of our language. For Jay, then, it becomes another field of struggle against the conformist pressures of his age, another place, where we can “check our privilege,” to put it in the now-familiar language of our own age.

The ways that we police (or “coach”) student writing shapes student bodily possibilities. Another way to say this is to assert that dominant pedagogies privilege those who can most easily ignore their bodies.

There are three claims here that I want to resist. The first is that teaching or coaching (I often consider myself more the latter than the former) is tantamount to “policing” students. The second is that this impinges on the bodies of the students, that it shapes their possibilities for physical action and, presumably, limits their avenues of development. The third is that approaches to writing instruction that “focus on texts and thoughts, words and ideas” privilege people whose bodies are somehow unproblematic. I would argue that conventional prose (and the associated traditional pedagogies) are a boon precisely for those most in need of ignoring their bodies, and those most dependent on the respectful distance of their fellows.

Recall that the “normate subject” of 1950s culture was “white, male, straight, upper middle class”. And now consider some of the strongest voices in the early 1960s. Think of Jimmy Breslin, a working class journalist who never earned a university degree but won a Pulitzer in 1986  “for columns which consistently champion ordinary citizens”. Or think of Gore Vidal, whose homosexuality did not prevent him from being one of the most celebrated and respected writers of his generation. Or consider Harper Lee, the woman who wrote what must still be the single most taught novel in the American canon,  To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). It has in many ways become the very paradigm of American prose writing. Finally, think of James Baldwin, a poor, gay, black man who wrote the defining essay of the civil rights struggle, The Fire Next Time (1963). All of these writers escaped, not from the normalcy of prose convention, but into it. Writing was not another site of their subjugation, but a respite from what Baldwin called “the not-at-all-metaphorical teeth of the world’s determination to destroy you”. In their writing, they were able to turn the tables on the most degrading forces of their time and assert themselves without having to apologize for the color of their skin, the configuration of their chromosomes, or the bent of their desires.

This can be seen even more starkly if we go beyond cultural marginalization and look at physical disability. In his book Disability Rhetoric, Jay passes, in my opinion, a bit too quickly over the cases of Helen Keller and Jean-Dominique Bauby, whose literary productions he takes as a sign that “nobody should be assumed incapable of communication” (p. 143). Keller, most famously, managed to learn language despite being both blind and deaf. Learning that the signs that were being traced on the palm of one of her hands represented the cold water running over the skin of the other was the beginning of what would become a recognized literary talent. Bauby, who was already fully literate (indeed, he was a magazine editor) at the time that a stroke rendered him completely immobilized (“locked-in”), learned to communicate the contents of his autobiography by blinking one eye. He composed the entire book “in his head”, holding a chapter at a time in his memory and then “dictating” it one letter at a time.

For Jay, these accomplishments show that “the least dangerous assumption” is one of competence, that Bauby and Keller were, despite appearances, capable of communicating. To me, they reveal the extreme charity of the prose form, embodied in the patience of their instructors and stenographers and rendered permanent in the conventional form of the written page, where the author’s ideas are now as independent of the reader’s patience as the ideas in any other book, where the speed of reading renders the speed of writing irrelevant, i.e., where the reader is able to ignore the body of the writer to the indisputable advantage of the latter. I sometimes describe the act of composing a paragraph as working in “bullet time”. Because writers have much more time to compose themselves than the reader will (conventionally) take to read them, the writer faces the reader in, as it were, slow motion. Like Keanu Reeves in the Matrix, writers are able to dodge bullets, even stop them in mid-air. In the text, being able to write is like knowing a virtual kind of kung fu.

In his famous essay on the 1971 Ali-Frazier fight, Norman Mailer described “ego” simply as the “state of our psyche that gives us the authority to tell us we are sure of ourselves when we are not.” Achieving this state, perhaps, requires us to be able to, as Jay puts it, ignore our bodies. The authority of the ego transcends our all-too-familiar bodily limitations, however socially or materially constructed they may be. Freed from the limitations of a particular time and a particular space, the text gives us confidence we may not have in the here and the now of our embodiment. Indeed, Mailer suggested that boxers find their ego in the ring, which separates them from the complexities of social life and puts them face to face with a problem they understand how to deal with. Ironically, it becomes the “least dangerous” place. I believe that writers likewise find their authority (there’s a reason we call them “authors”) in the text where they, too, are able to transcend the particularities of their embodiment. As writing instructors, we teach them how to control this space. We show them how to handle themselves. We train them to be themselves in prose.

“I could pretend that I had no body.”
(René Descartes)

In 1973, Uri Geller made an appearance on the Tonight Show. At the time, he was already famous for being able to bend spoons with the power of his mind, divine the contents of sealed containers, and see what other people were thinking. He had been drawing large audiences to his public appearances and had even convinced a number of highly accredited scientists that his psychic abilities were real. Suspicious of his guest’s purported mental talents, however, Johnny Carson had consulted with the magician and skeptic James Randi to arrange stage conditions that would thwart any trickery; and that night, sure enough, Geller felt “tired” and was unable to demonstrate his powers. “I don’t know how he does it,” Randi has said, “but if he’s using his mind to bend those spoons, he’s doing it the hard way.”

I tell this story to my writing students as part of an effort to dispel an illusion that many of them suffer under. They think that writing is primarily a mental activity and that “the trick,” therefore, is to get into the right frame of mind. (Sometimes they call it “knowing”; more often, they call it “being inspired”.) This illusion is fostered by every piece of well-composed prose they encounter, which seems to effortlessly transfer ideas from the writer’s mind to their own as they read. It’s not for nothing that Stephen King has described writing as a kind of “telepathy”; a good writer makes it look easy to get someone to imagine what you are thinking. To get them to appreciate the real nature of the difficulty, I try to convince my students that writing, like playing the piano or drawing a picture, is not something we do first and foremost with our brains. It’s something we do with our hands. Indeed, it depends much more on sleight of hand than on telepathy. A writer brings about the distinctly “literary” effect of the text by concealing, like Geller, the most important parts of the process that produces it.

So one might think that I would be in agreement with Jay Dolmage, a composition and disability scholar at the University of Waterloo in Canada. “I’ve tried to work against the assumption,” he tells us, “that writing is not a physical act,” which, like I say, is also exactly what I do. But while I attribute this assumption to my students, Jay believes it underpins “the dominant discourse surrounding the teaching of writing.” While I try to disabuse my students of a common misconception about writing, Jay leverages the actual practices of his students against the “ideology” of literacy, especially as it manifests in conventional academic norms, which, he believes, have emerged from an “ableist” history that favors “normal” bodies over those of the disabled and otherwise marginalized. Fittingly, he titled his contribution to Kristin Arola and Anne Wysocki’s 2012 collection (Composing Media Composing Embodiment ) “Writing Against Normal”.

It’s an interesting argument and I want to engage with it over a few posts in some detail. Indeed, Jay concludes his piece with an invitation to such an engagement and a statement of his aims, which I also share. “This is a critical turning-away from traditional body-meanings. This is a turn towards recognizing and enabling all bodies,” he says, adding that “this is a turn that asks you to revisit what I have argued for here, and perhaps to resist each of my conclusions, instead locating your own beginnings.” This is precisely what I’m going to do. While I, too, think that writing instruction should en-able every-body, I’m going to resist, or at least take issue, with each of the conclusions he draws from his assumption that writing is a physical activity, a materially embodied and socially embedded process. It’s not the premise I disagree with but the conclusion. It’s not the goal he seeks, but the route he proposes to reach it, that I will challenge.

I want to argue that conventional prose writing has always involved “a critical turning away from traditional body-meanings”. Indeed, there is an absolutely critical tension already on the first page of Jay’s essay, which begins by asserting that “as a discipline, broadly speaking, we in composition and rhetoric have not acknowledged that we have a body, bodies.” Like I say, I certainly acknowledge this (i.e, that we have bodies, not that we fail to acknowledge them), both in theory and in practice, but what Jay means is perhaps better captured in his opening sentence: “The dominant discourse surrounding the teaching of writing focuses on texts and thoughts, words and ideas,” he writes, “as though these entities existed apart from the bodies of teachers, writers, audiences, communities.” This is of course entirely true, but what exactly is there to take issue with here? Is it not the whole point of writing to let us risk our ideas without risk to our bodies? That is, is it not the very aim and purpose of writing to give ideas an existence, as it were, “apart from” our bodies? And does this not mean that, far from failing to acknowledge our embodiment, the discourse on writing takes this predicament of ours very seriously indeed. In fact, if you’ll pardon it, it takes it literally.

We get a clue to the larger argument (and my response to it) in the next paragraph, where Jay introduces his disability perspective and his conception of norms and normalcy:

normalcy is used to control bodies; our normate culture continuously re-inscribes the centrality, naturality, neutrality and unquestionability of the normate position; our culture also marks out and marginalizes those bodies and minds that do not conform. Norms cir- culate, have cultural ubiquity and ensure their own systemic enforcement. The normate subject is white, male, straight, upper middle class; the normal body is his, profoundly and impossibly unmarked and “able.” On the page, this subject and his body translate as error-free, straight and logical prose; as a writing process that is a portfolio of progression towards perfection and away from all evidence of struggle and labor. (Pp. 115-116)

Jay is proposing to “write against” this normalcy and to teach his students to do the same. I want to argue that conventional prose writing has always afforded marginalized bodies such criticality and has never been taught as “a portfolio of progression towards perfection”. I will argue this through a series of famous cases, major writers who relied heavily on the particular affordances (and even imperfections) of conventional prose precisely to break with the conventions of normate culture, to overcome the forces that marginalized them and others. I want show that we are always writing against normal — that it is, in a sense, the normal mode of writing.

But let me end this post on lighter note. While I am an utterly middle class, straight, white male, I take exception to the suggestion that my subject position in the culture is “profoundly and impossibly unmarked and ‘able’.” Indeed, when I propose that students approach their problem as one of getting their prose “into shape”, I often steal a line from Don Knotts, from back when he was playing Ralph Furley on the sitcom Three’s Company. After describing my own modest jogging regimen as a model for training their ability to compose a paragraph, I take a beat and gesture proudly down the length of my very “normal” figure. “A body like this,” I tell them, “doesn’t just happen, you know.” It almost always gets a laugh.