There is no better reminder of the relativity of competence than the fact that the word itself is derived from the verb “to compete”. No one is ever competent in some absolute sense, just more or less qualified to carry out a particular action. Whether you choose to compete against yourself or against others, becoming good at something is always a matter of getting “better” at it. Actually, there’s something too combative about the image of struggling against: the “com-” in compete literally suggests a striving alongside, more as in a race than in a fight. The loser is not beaten but passed.

How can this sense of relative mastery be instilled in students when it comes to their writing? How can we get them to see that being a “good” writer is the result of continuous improvement over time and that their “academic literacy” is inexorably related to that of their peers?

Here’s a thought experiment that sometimes gets people to see what I mean. Suppose an ordinary liberal arts college decided to hold an annual 3 mile race around the campus. Suppose all students were required to compete in this race and suppose that they were given a grade based on their time. The top 10% would get As, the next 25% Bs, the next 30% Cs and the remainder would get Ds (for completing the race) and Fs (for not completing). This grade would count for 25% of their GPA. Now, there’s of course no particular rationale for getting students to perform a physical competence like this (nor that it should involve running rather than, say, swimming or rowing) but one thing seems reasonable to assume: with this race on the curriculum the college is likely to have a student body that is in better shape than one that doesn’t. The students would have an incentive to devote some hours every week to training for the race; and those hours would, all things being equal, improve their level of physical fitness.

Like I say, the lack of intellectual rationale for this race is likely to leave it in the category of a thought experiment. (While the idea has a certain charm, it’s unlikely that a school that made this much depend on your physical fitness would attract the most academically ambitious students.) But suppose we imagined a different kind of race. Suppose that at the end of the year all the students in the same year of the same major were assigned the same essay question. Suppose they were given 72 hours to complete it and suppose the grades were distributed as in the case of the race and the grades again contributed 25% of the overall GPA. The essays would simply be ranked from best to worst, the top 10% would get As, the next 25%, Bs, etc. My hypothesis here is that, all things being equal, such a program would produce a student body with generally better writing skills, since they would have an incentive to train, just as in the case of the footrace. Their prose would simply get stronger.

Now, let me point out something else about that three-mile race. It would be possible to publish the cut-off times that decided whether you got an A, B, C or D. Looking at those times and comparing it to your own, you’d be in a good position to decide how much effort you would need to put into getting a higher grade next year, even without knowing the names of any particular participants. Grades, that is, could remain confidential. And something similar is possible when it comes to the essay competition. All the essays could be published anonymously, but with their grades stamped on them. Students could have a look at the essays that bested them in order to get a sense of the qualities that made a difference. They could plan their training program accordingly and even ask their teachers for advice about how to produce the quality they discern in the work of their peers. Obviously, this sort of transparency would pose a challenge to the teachers and examiners, who must now grade according to an objectively justifiable set of standards. But that’s probably a good thing anyway.

Most importantly, it would require students to focus on the production of text with obvious virtues — just as participants in a race are pacing themselves to produce one optimal result (a time) at the end. The important thing to keep in mind is that people who can run 3 miles relatively quickly can’t just do that. They’ve got a much more general kind of fitness. Likewise, someone who’s able to research and write a solid 11-paragraph essay in 72 hours may not be doing anything very useful during that time (other than passing an exam). But the ability is a very real display of an array of linguistic and intellectual competences that are well worth having as such.

These days, I’m increasingly of the mind that competition among students is the only thing that will truly get their prose into shape. It would give them a reason to spend 30 minutes every other day writing better and better paragraphs. This would make the student body as a whole much more articulate than it is today, and in a better position to learn the complex ideas that their teachers are trying to impart to them.

Academia has always had a somewhat flickering public image. When they are not denounced for indoctrinating their students into a life of corporate servitude, universities are chided for failing to provide their students with “employable” “real-world” skills. While this might seem immediately unfair, I think academics themselves must take some of the blame. After all, they are prone to overselling both their emancipatory function and their practical relevance. When they underperform in their effort to foster critical thinking in their students, they are hoisted on one petard, and when they underperform in their efforts to produce competent members of the 21st-century workforce, they are hoisted on the other. In both cases, critics use the university’s own ideological language against it. Perhaps it is time that we cultivated a different idea of ourselves?

I’ve been thinking about this over the past few days, stimulated by a seminar at the University of Roskilde about “the textbook of the future” and a Twitter exchange with Julia Molinari, Lesley Gourlay, and Norm Friesen. At the seminar I was struck by the difficulty we had in agreeing on what textbooks and “teaching materials” in general actually are. This, it seems to me, can be traced to a deeper ambiguity about what such hallmarks of higher education as the classroom and the dissertation are. We seem to have lost our clarity about the purpose, not just of higher education as such, but even of the most iconic components of it. The source of confusion, it now seems clear to me, is the proliferation of “media” and their somewhat unreflective (and overenthusiastic) introduction into educational contexts. We sometimes seem more eager to acquire a shiny new technology than to understand what it can do for us.

I had a sort of epiphany during Nina Bonderup Dohn’s presentation at the seminar on the “hybrid spaces” that teaching materials are used in. She pointed out that our students are not far from their smart phones, that they coordinate their offline activities online and their online activities offline. We can’t, she suggested, ignore the media-saturated nature of their everyday experience when teaching them, since they bring it with them into their classroom. Indeed, one student at the seminar suggested that the ideal textbook would be a podcast you could listen to while doing the dishes. (She found reading exhausting at times.) She was turning the kitchen sink into a hybrid space of learning, we might say.

Related to this, I’ve also long been concerned about the slide from knowledge to “information” and truth to “competence” as educational values. In the Q&A, I pointed out that perhaps something important was lost when we began to construe learning, not as internalizing a body of known truths, but as cultivating something we call “information literacy”. It’s worth remembering that this term was coined by Information Industry Association in 1974 and quickly adopted by libraries, who now no longer see themselves as repositories of finished knowledge products but as access points for information processes and, indeed, data streams. Lesley Gourlay cites Friedrich Kittler’s work, which argues that, by embracing computers, the university succeeded in again becoming a “complete media system”. I’m inclined to agree with him on this point, though I think I look at the situation with somewhat greater concern.

Norm Friesen’s work, which I’ve only just begun to read, in any case offers an important challenge to this enthusiasm for new media. He makes us consider the possibility that lectures and textbooks (and, I would hope, libraries) are not incidental features of the modern university, soon to be eroded by the incursion of new and better media. He points out that things like classrooms and books are much more stable features of literate cultures than we’re sometimes led to believe.

In the Sumerian example, with a relatively “non-restricted literacy” and writing systems and practices indisputably sui generis (vis a vis Western models) literacy instruction began early in life, and continued through many successive steps. In this context, what can be called “school” –an isolated and artificial environment for structured activity also isolated from immediate application– does not appear as a confounding variable. Instead, it seems to constitute a necessary precondition –one that has arisen independently in civilizations across millennia (e.g.; Mayan ca,. 300 BCE; Chinese, ca 1500 BCE)– enabling a socially indispensable, multi-functional and multi- dimensional set of abilities to be reproduced over generations. (Friesen 2014)

(Gourlay is probably right to suspect our fetishism of “rupture” for missing this.) When people talk about doing away with lectures and textbooks, they’re not proposing just to get through another passing fad. They’re proposing to bring thousands of years of tradition to an end. Indeed, I would say they’re proposing to bring to and end the sense of “tradition” that T. S. Eliot talked about: the present moment of the past, in which “all ages are contemporaneous” because, before you can learn something new, you have learn what the last four or five millennia of human civilization have taught us.

That’s what schools are for. Not to open new ground (which we can leave to our scientists and our artists) but to preserve the learning of the past. So perhaps, then, being good at reading a book, writing an essay, listening to a lecture, and engaging in debate with peers, is not just an old-fashioned “brick and mortar” fantasy of the university as a structured space for learning. Perhaps it’s a durable competence — indeed, so durable that the word “competence” doesn’t quite do it justice and a word like “truth” would do better — that we should be making every effort to conserve, not erode. Perhaps there is some value in being “good at going to school” and perhaps this value is more or less the value of literacy as such — a “socially indispensable, multi-functional and multi- dimensional set of abilities,” as Friesen puts it. There are lots of other things that are perfectly valuable, many more things that you can choose to be good at if you don’t like school. But I think we have to stop asking schools to justify their value in so-called “real-world” terms. What is more real than the ability to read and and write? Why should some people in our culture not be good “merely” at knowing things?

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?