digital digs

professional writing's invention curriculum

As I've written here in the past, professional writing strikes me as an odd hybrid of liberal arts and professional curricula. Clearly there are many people for whom writing is a profession and/or for whom writing is the primary activity of their professional life--particularly if we define writing broadly in terms of networked composition. And yet one does not turn to the "P" section of the job ads and look for "professional writer" jobs the way one might look for jobs as a teacher, accountant, graphic designer, computer programmer, etc. In that sense, professional writing is more of a liberal arts education that provides a broad range of intellectual and communication skills and knowledge.  In addition to encountering disciplinary knowledge from our field (as all majors do in their respective disciplines), at Cortland, professional writing majors are differentiated from their peers in the following ways:

• as a group they tend to be stronger writers, outperforming their classmates on writing assignments in a variety of classes they take;
• they have experience writing in a wide variety of genres where most students write only in academic genres;
• they have written much more in their academic career;
• and they have honed the practice of invention and creativity.

It is the last point that I want to discuss. As students enter our program, they typically arrive with a binary concept (and experience) with writing. There is "creative writing" (mostly poetry and short stories) where (they feel) essentially anything goes; it is the aesthetic version of "everyone has a right to his/her own opinion." On the other hand there is "academic writing," where there exists a very rigid set of rules for style, organization, and argument that must be obeyed. Obviously the former is preferred to the latter. Creative writing represents a kind of natural writing state, and academic writing represents the repression of natural writing by the institution. In this context, I see our curricular goal as helping students recognize invention/creativity as embodied and cultural, as something that can be practice and developed, as central to professional writing regardless of genre.

Certainly, there are a number of other qualities one might put at the center of a professional writing curriculum: e.g., rhetorical analysis and theory, knowledge and practice of specific genres, technical/computer expertise, skill with language and style. All of this (and more) takes place. Indeed, in the end, these qualities are not separable in practice. However I see professional writing as an emerging approach to writing studies where invention/creativity move to the center, where we move beyond the either/or of pop cultural notions of romantic, naturalized creativity and the mechanistic heuristics of fyc composition textbooks. We also move beyond rationally, over-determined concepts of professional genres that imagine the effective erasure of invention (as if invention/creativity was unnecessary for business proposals or technical instructions) and critical-theoretical critiques of invention as ideologically over-determined.

I could hypothesize a couple reasons for this.

1. Always with new media on my mind, the churn of networked media has meant the continual development of new communication possibilities, emerging genres, and different composition methods: various media, collaborative efforts, "real-time" writing, etc.. Invention is highlighted in these instances.
2. The putative "creative economy," which goes who-knows-where in our current economic climate, but I think there is a greater consciousness of the importance of creativity as a "job skill." Of course, I have mixed feelings about such matters (for another post), but I think the fact remains that this idea is "in the air" and part of what's going on.
3. Shifts within our discipline. If there is a turn toward writing studies, professional writing, digital/networked/new media then I think that a return to the issue of invention/creativity is necessarily a part of it. In my view, for an era of high theorization, post-process composition as a whole gave little attention to invention, unless one is satisfied with the idea of invention as a ideologically-managed process. Personally, I find that a significant but incomplete picture.

web identity project

Students in my Writing in the Digital Age professional writing course recently completed a web identity program (assignment). I don't often write about class assignments, but this one went off pretty well so I thought I'd share.

Basically the idea is that most of my students have a fairly limited experience with creating online identities. They are on Facebook or maybe MySpace. That's about it. They have some awareness of the potential danger of putting things up in Facebook that might come back to haunt them later. But at the same time social networking is an integral part of their lives. It's not something extra that they can just cut off. They should not be expected to edit their lives to meet some presumed set of standards by which they might someday be judged. At least I don't think they should.

At the same time, you don't want to make a complete public idiot out of yourself.

I think one of the ways we will balance this in the future is by developing professional web identities that complement our social web identities. The purpose of this assignment was for students to go out there and see what different types of social media they could find, try them out, and report back. They looked at two per week for four weeks and then had to pick one they thought would be a good place to develop a professional identity.

They looked at the microblogging sites, various social networks, media sharing sites, social bookmarking, and so on. Most of them locked on to sites like Ryze and LinkedIn as places to build professional identities. But we also talked about how one could build a professional identity through blogging or maintain professional relationships through twitter and so on. The students got introduced to a wide range of things about which they had no idea and really gave some thought to the notion of having a professional identity.

I'm not sure if the assignment will spark an immediate change in their behaviors, but that's not the point. The point was for students to experience some of the variety of social media out there and think about social media as a tool for managing/producing social identity.

Anyway, I'm quite certain I'm not alone in running assignments like this, so let me know what you think.

why is creativity depressing?

An article on CNN reports on a recent study of the links between creativity and mood disorders. As the article notes, "The research of Verhaeghen and colleagues shows when people are in a reflective mode, they may become more creative, depressed, or both." The article also reports that

Creative people in the arts must develop a deep sensitivity to their surroundings -- colors, sounds, and emotions, says Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, professor of psychology and management at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. Such hypersensitivity can lead people to worry about things that other people don't worry about as much, he said, and can lead to depression.

All of this sounds reasonable to me. Perhaps such connections exist. We might also consider the cultural contexts here. I would be interested in seeing if the same conditions apply in other cultures. The article doesn't report on that. In my view, in the U.S. creativity and individuality are punished, particularly in the teen years. One's family or school may not tolerate genuine creativity. After all, in our culture, individuality means "having it your way" at Burger King. Perhaps later on, one might find a community of creative types, but I would think that by then the damage would be done. Obviously it doesn't happen to everyone, but that's not the point.

On the other hand, I certainly agree that there is suffering in speculation. Perhaps if you are creative in certain ways you might have a tendency to speculate about possibilities others would not imagine or bother to imagine. The ability to imagine a different world and then to emotionally place yourself there can certainly be painful or pleasurable. But at a certain point, pleasure and pain are the same as affective overload.

However such practices are not necessary for creative expression. When we naturalize creativity, as we often do, we ignore the possibility of developing specific techniques and practices. That is, creative people can learn practices for making the most of their creativity without injuring themselves, just as dancers or athletes learn to hone their physical talents while minimizing the possibility of bodily harm.

professional writing and disciplinary identity

One of the things my colleagues and I have been discussing is how we can communicate to our students what it means to be a professional writing major. If you're in traditional English or History and so on, that identity is quite familiar. On the flipside if you're in a more distinctly professionalizing major in new media or design or business or education, then you can identify with that professional direction.

Professional writing is a little different though. There are such a wide range of professions to enter. Besides, at least with our particular curriculum, which includes creative writing, we have many students who do not have firm professional goals but rather a more general interest in creative writing. So this mixture makes it hard for our students to see what it means to be part of our curriculum, and this problem is exacerbated by the typical, sophomoric notion of creative writing as simply being yourself or speaking with your voice. Still I suppose this could work if we were a community of creative writers, but that's not what we are.

To complicate matters, in the six years since we started doing this, a number of other writing majors have cropped out, not only near us, but around the nation. That means there's an emerging sense of professional writing as a major.

the unspoken prerequisites of professional writing courses

You have to want to write. And I understand that's not easy.

This summer I did a one-day presentation at a writing institute for teachers, talking about technology and education as I often do. At one point I was talking about Twitter and microblogging a live event. One of the teachers commented on how that would make her feel uncomfortable--that she wouldn't be able to experience the event and document it at the same time.

I understood her point, but to me it doesn't meant that you aren't experiencing the event; it means that you are experiencing the event in a new way, through a new lens. The photographer often sees the world as if s/he is looking through the lens, regardles of whether a camera is available or not. There is a kind of split there. Artists see the world differently, writers included. We see the crevices of perception and thought, of subjective experience, that we can write into; the ambiguity of language that creates possibilities and knowledge through composition; the habits of practice and genre that generate ideas (like a tendency to make lists of three).

It is a difficult thing to ask of students. Of course you can get away with just writing. It happens all the time and it's easy to see in students' writing... how they push away any danger of thinking, any possibility of cracking open the world like that. They get the job done and try to think about it as little as possible. They have all the mechanical tools they've been taught over the years being taught how to write by people who are not writers. They have the prophylactics that will allow one to produce text without any danger of being affected by the process.

But you'll never write anything interesting that way. You can complete assignments. You can be a functional communicator, I guess. And those things are fine. There's no sin in not wanting to be a writer. There's nothing wrong with not want to write.

Just don't take a professional writing class.

"creative writing" and the creative economy

I'm teaching our "advanced creative writing" course this semester. It's a new course that adds another layer onto our "creative writing" curriculum. As I've noted in the past, the majority of students come to our professional writing program with a primary interest in writing fiction or poetry or screenplays. There are many reasons for this. First, besides the academic writing they are required to do, these genres are the ones they encounter as writing. That is, they obviously encounter other writing, at least in textbooks, but no one makes mention of it as writing. So when they think of writers, they think of those genres. Second, they buy into the mainstream cultural romanticism of this writing. They wish to participate affectively and ideologically in that identity and experience.

I also wanted to write stories and poems when I was an undergrad. I was in a garage band writing music. Hell, I produced a collection of poetry for my MA thesis. So, I get it.

As a program, we want to encourage our students' creativity and support their writing practice. If they wish to pursue a life as a poet or novelist, we want to support that. We want them to know what that means, but in the end we see our program as benefiting students who choose that path. At the same time, we also want to introduce our students to a broad range of professional writing careers, and we want to help them understand how to translate their creativity into these other genres and writing situations.

There are two levels of challenge in doing so though. I think there continues in the humanities generally to be antipathy toward notions of commerce and the marketplace. We typically say that English is a great degree that can prepare you for any number of professions, but we never want to be specific about how. Talking about creativity as a marketable skill remains anathema for most, and our students pick up on that. it's like they have a kind of superstition about ruining their mojo if they turn toward the marketplace. And yet it seems hopelessly naive to imagine that our challenges with globalization, the environment, education, and so on will not be confronted in the context of the market. For example, do we really believe that even our relatively parochial concerns with teaching new media composition will be resolved through abstract, intellectual debate? Or will the outcome of that matter come about through larger market forces? Come on! But I digress...

My point is that we need creativity not only to devise solutions to these problems but to communicate those solutions to other people and create supportive communities to carry out solutions. We are entering an era where a facility for creative communication on a global scale will be highly prized. The humanities, English in particular, is a good place for students to move toward this, but only if we can give out our illusion that we are floating in the clouds.

The second challenge is no easier. It has to do with figuring out exactly how you might make this translation. How do you adapt your creativity as a poet to creativity in communicating a more purposeful or rhetorical message? Let's say you want to help a group of local, organic farmers by convincing local school boards to purchase local produce for school lunches. How do you take your creative skill with metaphor and image and produce a convincing letter or brochure or presentation?

In other words what does the use of the word creative in "creative writing" and "creative economy" share?

My first impulse is to turn to Richard Gabriel's notion of an MFA in Software where software design occurs in a workshop environment. That is, there could be some shared social-cultural practices. I think there may be some possible connections in terms of practices of invention, of moving beyond rational problem-solving strategies to techniques that involve tapping into the unconscious and affective (thinking here again about Ulmer's emer-agency). But I don't really have any answers. However I'm going to try to focus on some of these questions this semester in my courses.

the obligations of curriculum

An unfortunate incident during our Writers Retreat has me thinking about the obligations of curriculum. In the wider scope of life, it wasn't perhaps the biggest deal, a policy violation, but also a demonstration of disrespect and immaturity. It is something I take seriously, but I don't really want to talk about that but rather about what that event has me thinking today: the obligations of curriculum.

I don't want to be one of those old-timer profs saying "kids today blah blah blah," though I am technically getting old enough to be the age of my students' parents. Honestly, I don't see students today as really being less mature than students when I started here in 2001. However I do think that I have changed. I know I have, and I'm starting to think differently about what I want our program to look like.

fall semester planning

As the semester starts, I've really got to start planning what I'm going to do with me time this semester. I'm on sabbatical in the spring (and there was much rejoicing). I plan on hitting some conferences, writing an article, and putting together a book proposal. I just finished writing one article over the summer and had the book come up, so I'm at the start up point of another research cycle I guess.

On campus, right now we're in the midst of several things.

• Just revised our curriculum and that's going through final approval. We reduced the number of required courses, making the program more flexible.
• Added several new courses and shifted some prerequisites. The curriculum process is ongoing, but I'm going to let someone else spearhead that this year, since I won't be around much in the spring.
• Revising our FYC program. That's going to be a major project, and I'm on that committee.
• Piloting Second Life.
• Proposing a new graduate program in Digital Media Studies with Art and Communications. Though that's just in the early stages right now, I'm hoping to jump start it and see if the proposal has legs or not.
• Writing grants for our NeoVox project.

That should be enough for this semester. I hoping to just germinate some ideas for research and then formulate some real plans in November so that I can hit the ground running once the semester ends.

Expertise, Specialization and Writing Studies

Commenter DKO and I have been chatting. about contingent faculty and role of academic specialization. I decided to post about this b/c it fits in with the discussion about uneven tuition and even the idea of writing studies as FYC that I've been writing about here.

Essentially, I think the question is "what does it mean to be in rhetoric/composition?" Now, we can get all Derridean here a la "the mark of belonging does not belong," but we'll set that aside for now.

First off, as I suggested in my earlier post on process, I believe there needs to be some separation between the teaching of writing and the academic study of writing (which again is separate from the way "writers," professional or otherwise, study writing for their own purposes). Why is that? Simply because there is a greater demand for writing teachers than there is for writing scholars. That's not to say that those writing teachers do not require expertise  (a distinction DKO makes in a comment). To me, that means they need a disciplinary knowledge of FYC. This could be accomplished through professional development and would not require an active scholarly enterprise.

On the other hand, those who conduct research and scholarship of rhetoric/composition/writing (even the term is up for grabs) do not necessarily teach FYC, nor does their research/scholarship necessarily have direct application to the teaching of FYC.

Here are some of the issues...

William Gibson's Spook Country

Here is William Gibson discussing his soon to be released novel, Spook Country, which is a somewhat tangential continuation of Pattern Recognition as one of that novel's characters, Hubertus Bigend, makes an appearance in the new novel as well. The interview is interesting in its discussion of character and writing process, particularly the participatory role readers play through Gibson's blog.

The promise of Spook Country as a kind of continutation of Pattern Recognition makes me happy as I thought his last novel was one of his best. It was a decided departure from the more speculative/futuristic content of his earlier work in that it is set in the present and, as Gibson says in the interview, explores the cultural changes in the U.S. since 9/11.

That said, it shares a common theme in exploring the intersection of technology and politics. As Gibson notes, technology is very rarely legislated into existence. That obviously shouldn't be taken to mean technology emerges in apolitical spaces. However it does mean that technological development can disrupt political order, a very Marxian observation, I would think.

Anyway, I thought Pattern Recognition did a great job of capturing the global media network, of giving us an affective experience with that network, and exploring the development of a kind of distributed cognition, so I'm hoping Spook Country will continue in this direction.