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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School
2006 Program Anthologies, Classbooks, and Zines an Examination of Approaches to Publishing First-Year Students' Work Ormond Loomis
Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
PROGRAM ANTHOLOGIES, CLASSBOOKS, AND ZINES
AN EXAMINATION OF APPROACHES TO PUBLISHING FIRST-YEAR
STUDENTS’ WORK
by
ORMOND H. LOOMIS
A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2006
Copyright © 2006 Ormond H. Loomis All Rights Reserved The Members of the Committee approve the Dissertation of Ormond H. Loomis defended on 05 April 2006.
John Fenstermaker Professor Directing Dissertation
John Simmons Outside Committee Member
Bruce Bickley Committee Member
Jerrilyn McGregory Committee Member
Approved:
Hunt Hawkins, Chair, Department of English
The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.
ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This study owes a profound debt to numerous individuals and institutions who supported the project with funds, time, and wisdom as the work evolved. The project relies heavily on the interest and cooperation of many teachers and administrators in writing programs across the United States. Respondents to my initial inquiries are too numerous to name individually, nevertheless I gratefully recall their contributions. In addition, I am indebted to the people with whom I corresponded and talked at some length: Margaret Barber, University of Southern Colorado; Deborah Bruno, George Washington University; Cynthia Cox, Belmont University; Eileen Donovan-Katz, Boston College; Peter Elbow, University of Massachusetts--Amherst; Ruth Fischer, George Mason University; Alfie Guy, New York University; Gordon Harvey, Harvard University; Gary Hatch, Brigham Young University; Van Hillard, Duke University; Robert G. Howard, University of Oregon; Will Hochman, Southern Connecticut State University; Jeffrey Klausman, Whatcom Community College; Donald C. Murray; Patricia Y. Murray, California State University--Northridge; Thomas Newkirk, University of New Hampshire; Randall Popkin, Tarleton State Univeristy; Janice Radway, Clemson University; Martha Sims, Ohio State University; Ladd Tobin, Boston College; Joseph Trimmer, Ball State; Sue Willens, George Washington University; Peggy Woods, University of Massachusetts--Amherst; Kenneth R. Wright, University of Oregon; Patricia Zukowski, University of Massachusetts--Amherst; and especially Marvin Diogenes, Stetson University; Eileen Donovan-Katz, Boston College; Greg Glau, Arizona State University; and Charles Moran, University of Massachusetts who generously gave their time and shared their thoughts in extended telephone interviews as well as in correspondence. Their perspectives on pedagogy and their enthusiasm for my study greatly fueled the project. In working on the interviews, I was buoyed by the help of Marta Hagan and her assistants at Words Wizards transcription service. Archivist Ellen Swain and her assistant Kate Meehan in the University Archives at the University of Illinois deserve thanks as well for
iii providing information about and sample copies of The Green Cauldron. At Florida State, many people in the English department deserve thanks. Among the writing students who showed me the value zines had for improving their skill with composition, Kim Burke, Tanekka Cunningham, and Natalie Woodward stand out. I fondly remember the help of fellow teaching assistants, especially Jennifer Ahern, Matt Bondurant, Patricia Hendricks, and Charlie Lowe, and Paul Reifenheiser for discussions that sharpened my thinking and comments on drafts that showed me where I could to sharpen my prose. I am grateful to Carolyn Hall and other administrative assistants who kept me moving toward completion in spite of distractions. I also thank Deborah Coxwell Teague and Kathleen Yancey, faculty in the rhetoric-composition program, who offered keen insight into the relationship of pedagogy to publishing and the relationship of my project to composition studies. I owe a special debt of gratitude to former members of the English faculty Rick Straub, one of my initial committee members who led me to consider early compositionists use of publications of students' writing, and Wendy Bishop, my initial project director who championed the need for my research and first helped me shape the study. Certainly not least among the faculty, the members of my dissertation committee, Chairman John Fenstermaker, Bruce Bickely, Jerrilyn McGregory, and John Simons have my gratitude for the excellent feedback and encouragement they offered. I look forward to a continuing association with them. Last, I thank my children, Anne and Ross, and my wonderful wife, Claudia Hunter Johnson. Their encouragement, sacrifice, support, and understanding enabled me to launch the project, navigate it, and successfully bring it to a conclusion. The study would not have been possible without them.
iv TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Tables ...... vi List of Figures ...... vii Abstract ...... viii
1. JUDGING A BOOK BY ITS COMMITMENT ...... 1
2. PROFESSIONAL AND OTHER COMPOSITION PROGRAM LITERATURE . . . . . 21
3. PUBLISHING FOR SUBJECTIVE RHETORIC: TWO PROGRAMS IN THE EAST . . 43
4. PUBLISHING FOR EPISTEMIC RHETORIC: TWO PROGRAMS IN THE WEST . . . 57
5. PUBLISHING FOR MULTIPLE AUDIENCES: A SYNTHESIS
AT FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY ...... 72
6. DATES, APPLES, ORANGES, AND GUAVAS: COMPARING
STUDENTS' WRITING ...... 88
7. CONCLUSION ...... 113
APPENDICES ...... 120
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 2 21
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 243
v LIST OF TABLES
1-1. First-Year Writing Program Publications Examined ...... 10 1-2. Non-First-Year Writing Program Publications Examined ...... 12 1-3. Contacts for Anthologies and Other Publications ...... 15
5-1. Number of Pieces per Edition of Our Own Words ...... 74
6-1. Focus of Texts in Selected Essays ...... 91 6-2. Genres of Selected Essays ...... 92 6-3. Analysis of Sentence Length for All Sentences in the Selected Texts ...... 95 6-4. Analysis of Sentence Length for the Sentences in the Sample Sections ...... 106 6-5. Analysis of Sentence Types in the Sample Sections ...... 108 6-6. Analysis of Verb Forms and Sentence Openings ...... 109
vi LIST OF FIGURES
6-1. Structure of the Five-Paragraph Essay ...... 93
6-2. Structure of Johnson's Essay ...... 96
6-3. Structure of Henderson's "Writing Project #3" ...... 97
6-4. Structure of Russell's "Technology: Harmful or Helpful?" ...... 97
6-5. Structure of Connor's "Works Well with Others" ...... 98
6-6. Structure of Daniel's "The Fire" ...... 100
6-7. Structure of Modzelesky's "Thwarting the Devil" ...... 101
6-8. Structure of Doggett's "Beginning Under the Stars" ...... 102
6-9. Structure of Lundi's "Travel: Color Me Caribbean" ...... 103
F-1. Structure of Clark's "River of Dreams" ...... 218
F-2. Structure of McPhee's "Swimming with Canoes" ...... 219
vii ABSTRACT
This study examines publications of students' writing in first-year composition programs. Based on a survey of such publications in 1999, I review how program anthologies and classbooks are produced and used and analyze selected examples of the writing they contain. In addition I trace the development of the publications as the field of composition studies evolved. Research for the study indicates that, although composition instructors have recognized these publications as valuable tools in teaching writing since the mid-twentieth century, relatively few schools have them. The research shows considerable variety in the approaches that writing programs take to publishing students' writing. Moreover, it reveals a strong connection between the publications and the pedagogical orientation of the writing programs that produce them. To illustrate the relationship, I use data from questionnaires and personal interviews to sketch the evolution of approaches to publishing at five schools: two of them aligned with subjective rhetoric, two of them with epistemic rhetoric, and one bridging these rhetorical views. In chapter six of the study, I analyze eight selected students' texts from the publications. The results show surprisingly little difference in the quality of the compositions they contain. Nevertheless, the subjects the students choose and the structure of their papers suggests that the students' folk culture has a significant influence on their writing. Perhaps more important, the analysis suggests that student experiment with form and style more in their writing when they take responsibility for editing their published texts than when teachers assume that responsibility. The conclusion of the study calls for writing programs to increase their awareness of the range of possibilities for publishing students' papers in first-year composition and incorporate the publications in their curricula. Texts in program anthologies and classbooks constitute a significant resource for understanding how students write. The compositionists have not yet realized the full potential these publications have for helping students learn to write.
viii CHAPTER 1
JUDGING A BOOK BY ITS COMMITMENT
If we are to accept the definition of a writer as one who writes, we must accept the fact that writers are not a special type of person. Those who write might be of any age, shape, background or interest. They may produce a technical manual or a provocative essay or a piece of artistic prose. The one thing they hold in common is the use of language. . . . Perhaps writing, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
June, Journal Excerpt in Wendy Bishop's "When All Writing Is Creative and Student Writing Is Literature" 192
We must decide what elements of our discipline are really important to us, whether we want to share with our students the richness of all varieties of language, encourage linguistic diversity.
National Council of Teachers of English. Students' Right to their Own Language 2
In Textual Power, Robert Scholes discusses the importance of giving student writing the respect accorded to literature and print. When "teachers expand categories to include student writing as literature, encouraging writers to consider how their work functions in a universe of texts and text categories," as June's teacher Wendy Bishop encourages (195), it reasonably follows that student writing belongs in print. Publication is one measure of respect that texts receive. Composition teachers sometimes use this fact to honor their students' writing, but the act of publishing students' work has uses and implications well beyond according respect. For instance, the earliest example of the activity-- including students' pieces in a school newsletter at the Cook County Normal School in the 1880s (Kalmbach 104-105)--appears to have been to increase the number of articles and provide extra staff for what would an otherwise have been a smaller publication that it was. Today a variety of college and university writing programs publish anthologies of their students' writing for a variety
1 2 of reasons: to acknowledge and honor outstanding accomplishment, provide model texts, establish standards, motivate apathetic students. In 1998, I asked students in a first-year writing course to read selections from Our Own Words, the anthology of student writing edited and published by teachers in the First-Year Writing (FYW) Program at Florida State University. My students saw how other first-year writers used a single event, such as an unexpected pregnancy, to reflect and comment on abstractions such as love, freedom, and the responsibilities of adulthood. They also saw how well-crafted first-year papers incorporated details of character and place and wove in dialog to "show" rather than "tell" meaning. During discussions that followed the readings, my students assured me that the papers by former students helped them understand how to approach writing assignments. In fact, several of their subsequent essays reflected the influence of pieces in Our Own Words. Toward the end of the class, the students produced anthologies--homemade chapbooks or magazines, sometimes called zines--of their own words. In this classbook exercise, I asked them to address an audience they chose, include at least one essay each of them had written during the semester, and add any extra pieces of their work that they wanted. What they published differed considerably from the writing in Our Own Words. The program anthology, edited and produced by teachers, consisted almost entirely of personal essays and poetry; the zines, edited and produced by my students, contained a few essays and occasional poems, but they also included advice columns, horoscopes, media reviews, recipes, and a variety of other pieces. The discrepancy, if curious, was not surprising. Classbooks I had seen from other semesters at Florida State--produced by fellow teachers' students as well as mine--followed the same pattern. The texts in Our Own Words had a controlled homogeneity, whereas the pieces in the students' classbooks--especially their zines--seemed livelier. Although generally not as polished as the prose in the teacher-edited collections, the pieces in the student-edited zines achieved what Ken Macrorie calls good writing, "honest voices . . . [that] tell the truth" (Telling Writing 15), at least as often as, and perhaps more often than, the work in the program anthologies. Furthermore, the writing in the student-edited publications used a greater variety of 3
genres, voices, and styles than I found in the program anthology. Perhaps most important, the majority work in the student-edited collections seemed to avoid thematic conformity. Many compositionists note and chafe at a level of homogeneity in students' writing: the frequent recurrence of common subjects and themes: confrontation with bullies, parents, police, teachers, and other authority figures; earning a coach's approval or teammates' acceptance, making a winning play to vanquish a rival team, setting a new personal best-record, and other successes in sports--to name only a few. The subjects and themes appear even, or perhaps especially, when paper assignments give students freedom to choose their own topics. For example, in a 1991 analysis of "Gender and the Autobiographical Essay," Linda Peterson observes that, on one hand, "the topics that women students choose are almost always 'relational' . . . on the relationship of the writer and some other person or group"; on the other hand, "male writers more frequently choose topics that focus on the self, the self alone, the self as distinct from others" (173). She adds that "the conventional male form of experience--man against nature, or as one student writer put it, 'wild canoe trips down raging rivers . . . like those Miller beer commercials'--seems puerile to me (as the Latin root, puer, suggests: boy, boyish, immature)" (175). Likewise in a 1996 article on "Car Wrecks, Baseball Caps, and Man-to-Man Defense: The Personal Narratives of Adolescent Males," Lad Tobin discusses his reactions to such common essay topics as "getting drunk" stories, "getting into a near-fatal car crash" stories, the "time me and my friends played a great . . . prank" stories, and accounts of "success [or failure] as a shoplifter" among first-year males' overused subjects (158). Thomas Newkirk, however, regards students' common essay topics more compassionately than teachers like Peterson and Tobin. His The Performance of Self offers an alternate perspective on them: they "are out of favor in the academic culture, though they retain force in the wider culture" (xii). Acknowledging the frequency of "the 'male jock' paper," essays about "'life lessons,'" and other similar texts in first-year writing (52), Newkirk praises such papers as students' heroic efforts to affirm their values. 4
STUDENTS' WRITING AND FOLKLORE Reflecting on the work in Our Own Words and in my students' anthologies, the common themes in first-year students' papers struck me as folkloric. Their repetitive quality resembled the recurrence of stock themes and types in folk narratives. In fact, the similarity between the students' writing and oral literature seemed to go beyond subject and theme. First-year papers often used common settings and situations; appealed to local authorities and took related rhetorical turns; and employed formulaic structures, words, and phrases--characteristics of traditional songs and tales that folklorists cataloged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Aarne and Thompson, Propp, and Thompson), and which Walter Ong used to differentiate orality from literacy ("Literacy and Orality in Our Times"). More noticeable in my first-semester students' writing, the folkloric qualities appeared in second-semester and upper-level students' papers as well, although with apparently decreasing frequency. Coincidentally, Newkirk's discussion of students' papers reflects an affinity with theoretical concerns that engaged many folklorists in the last quarter of the twentieth century. He uses "performative theory . . . to talk about student autobiographical writing" (6), echoing the "performance" approach that Richard Bauman, Dan Ben-Amos, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barre Tolken, and others apply in folk studies: both Newkirk and the performance school of folklorists examine how texts function in a social context. Whether or not Newkirk's position on appreciating students' writing grows, in part, out adapting a folkloristic perspective, the fact that students address commonplace subjects and themes should not diminish compositionists' respect for their writing. The type of essay that Linda Peterson and her student called "wild canoe trips" illustrates this point. The subject serves James Dickey in Deliverance and John McPhee in The Survival of the Bark Canoe. McPhee returns to it in "Swimming with Canoes." He begins the essay with "I grew up in a summer camp--Kewaydin--whose specialty was canoes and canoe trips" (33), and he uses it to share a lesson he learned during a harrowing trip, a lesson that he says "had never occurred to me" (34). Chris Clark, a former first-year student of mine, uses similar material in "The River of Dreams," which he eventually published it in his class zine. In his piece, Clark writes that "growing up was what this trip was about for me, in more ways than one": learning 5 about "teamwork," "responsibility," and "understanding of life and the world around us" (4). The two essays have an equivalent purpose, or cultural function. A journey downstream provides both pieces a chronological and geographic structure; events encountered in the trips produce drama; and the struggles with nature build character and understanding. McPhee's and Clark's texts do, however, reflect significant differences between in structure and style, as illustrated in Appendix A and B. Newkirk takes issue with "the formalist tradition [in composition] for evaluating writing, which presumed to isolate 'qualities' of good writing" (6). Perhaps, however, parallels between the functions Newkirk sees students accomplishing in their essays and the functions narrators accomplish in folk tales reflect a similar, formulaic approach to composition. If students draw on their traditions for subjects to explore in essays, might they draw on their oral traditions for other compositional devices as well. Could the similarities of situations, rhetorical appeals, and repetitious language that I noticed in first-year students' papers come from the students' reliance-- conscious or unconscious--on their folklore? In 1997, about the time I began to wonder about the difference between papers in the program anthology and student's classbooks, The Rolling Stone carried an article by Erik Hedegaard about Bert Kreischer, an English major in his fifth year at Florida State. Kreischer was legendary for his slack behavior and lack of progress toward a degree, and the article offers an unusually revealing portrait of student life. A passage in it describes a scene in which he helps a fraternity brother with an essay: The ATO house was a run-down affair in a marginal neighborhood. Inside some brothers were talking about the movie Grumpy Old Men. A brother named Justin had to write a paper on it for his multicultural-film class. He hadn't seen the movie, so he wanted help, which Bert generously offered. Speaking with great expansiveness, Bert said, "When you look at it deeply, the whole thing is about two old men who fall in love. It's a gorgeous thing. The sex scene was my favorite." With one eyebrow lifted, Bert studied Justin. Justin's pencil wavered over his pad of paper. He was apparently intent on copying what Bert had said word for word. (70) 6
The vignette reinforced my sense that students' draw on traditions in their folk culture to compose. Kreischer offers lines that constitute a verbal formula. He opens with a general claim, one that could be considered a thesis statement: "When you [or "one"] look[s] at it [whatever the subject] deeply, the . . . thing is about" whatever the theme may be. Next he expresses a critical opinion: "It's a gorgeous [for which "difficult," "confusing," "complex," "wrong," or some other critical opinion might be substituted--either in the ATO brother's current paper or any other] thing." Then to support the claim, Kreischer gives a specific example: "the sex scene [for which any relevant example could be substituted] was my favorite." The formula is generic enough to apply whether a writer has seen Grumpy Old Men or not. How many romantic films in the last quarter of the twentieth century lack a section that might be described as a "sex scene," and would not many undergraduates find such a scene appealing, able to call it a "favorite"? More important for writing instructors, how many undergraduate writers use formulas and other devices from their oral traditions--commonplace themes to clichés--when they compose? If students draw on such methods, understanding them could benefit writing teachers. Compositions might find new strategies to help students augment their composing processes. Scholars have analyzed themes, plots, settings, characters, motifs, and language in traditional narratives since the time Bishop Percy rescued ballads and the brothers Grimm compiled kinder und hausmärchen. The work of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, who compiled exhaustive catalogs of tales and motifs that identify and classify themes and narrative units in folk literature, inspired Vladimir Propp to describe the structure of the folktales and helped Albert Lord articulate a theory of oral formulaic composition. Perhaps analysis of first-year students' texts in anthologies of their writing would yield similar insights.
THE PLAN AND METHOD OF RESEARCH This study of publishing first-year students' writing involved six phases of work: reviewing pertinent literature, finding and compiling anthologies, interviewing editors of the publications to gather information about the institutional background of each program, comparing the purpose and content of the anthologies, analyzing selected pieces of writing in the publications, and interpreting the results. I pursued the first three phases more or less concurrently: conducting 7 library and archival research, collecting publications of students' writing, and filing and annotating sources as I acquired them. As samples of anthologies accumulated, I contacted the editors and interviewed those who were available. When the data was sufficient to support an informed selection of writing samples from the anthologies, I proceeded with the analysis of texts. Tentative interpretations crept into my thinking throughout the project; the ideas articulated in the concluding chapter of this report represent my understanding of the subject at this point.
Gathering Information
Library and archival research produced reasonable results. Articles and books discussing the practice of anthologizing students' writing in first-year writing programs showed that compositionists had enthusiastically considered it around the mid-twentieth century. Over the last quarter of the century, however, accounts of such publishing decreased in number. As a result, the search for examples of anthologies became as important for understanding the scope of the activity and the pedagogy behind it as the examination of professional literature. The study rested on success at finding examples, and that success depended on the extent to which composition programs published students' writing, influencing the purpose and content of the books to be compared, limiting the texts to be analyzed, and qualifying any interpretation of the practice. To locate FYW anthologies, I appealed for help in the fall of 1999 to colleagues at four schools where I understood such publications were, or had been, used: the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Boston College, the University of New Hampshire, and Ohio State University. Peter Elbow, then Director of the Writing Program at Massachusetts, and Lad Tobin, Director of Writing at Boston, replied with encouraging notes and samples of their students' anthologies. Responses from the other two schools indicated that they no longer produced such collections because their writing programs had reallocated their resources. I broadened the hunt with an inquiry to writing program administrators across the country. In a message to the WPA-L listserv, which carries discussions among many who work or share an interest in writing programs, I asked if its subscribers could "tell me where I might locate anthologies of student writing used in college or university composition programs." Reaching 8 educators at over 400 locations,1 the request led to a flurry of correspondence during October and November 1999. The inquiry brought a variety of publications. Most respondents told of anthologies that their writing programs produced or supported and sent sample copies. They provided both annual anthologies containing papers written a year or two before and individual classbooks containing either selections of pieces from a semester of work or texts a specific assignment. A few people sent writing program handbooks, or guides, that included sample student papers. Still others offered campus magazines and journals containing first-year students' essays along with articles, poetry, and graphics from a spectrum of authors and artists--students and sometimes faculty--at the respective schools. Some respondents referred me to textbooks containing students' papers as well. As my collection of first-year writing anthologies for the study grew, I shared some volumes with one of my writing courses. My syllabus called for publishing essays, on the World Wide Web site, and I though it would help if the students could see what peers at other schools were doing. The students passed the books around I offered and thumbed through them. A young woman reached for a copy of Fresh Ink from Boston College and said "Oh, I want to make one like that! Why can't we have our papers in something like that one?" We had insufficient resources--neither funding nor time--to produce an anthology such as the handsome example she liked. Nevertheless, reactions to the samples reminded me of the impact that publication could have on students, and the young woman's enthusiasm heightened my awareness of the physical quality of different publications: if writing teachers hope to treat students' writing with the respect accorded to literature, their approach to publishing students' texts affirms their regard--and the physical quality of a publication. The number of anthologies for the study gradually increased after my inquiry to the WPA list. By the summer of 2000--the end of the phase for finding samples--the collection included over thirty publications: twenty-one titles--some in more than one edition--from first-year writing programs at fourteen schools other than Florida State (Table 1-1) and ten titles from non-first- year programs at eight schools (Table 1-2). Students' texts in the first-year samples alone provided a wonderful array of writing: essays on homelessness (Bethel), radio technology 9
(Nichols), relations with parents and peers (Dinkes, Doggett, and Perot), travel to the Caribbean (Lundi), violence in Hollywood films (Coons), the works of authors such as Carlos Fuentes (Bucan) and Edith Wharton (Plagge), and many other subjects. Ten first-year publication titles were exclusively program anthologies. One series, Arizona State's Guide to Composition, contained a program anthology, Printer's Devil. Three other volumes were first-year program guides--Ball State's Ball Point, Brigham Young's, and the earliest edition of California State-Northridge's Wings--containing students' papers. Seven titles among the samples were classbooks. These modest volumes came from three schools--Arizona State University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Southern Colorado State University. The three schools produced program anthologies as well as classbooks in the sample, in effect creating a publication ladder at the schools. The volumes illustrated a variety of approaches to printing. They ranged in binding, paper quality, and size. They used comb, perfect, stapled, and taped bindings. Some had glossy, multicolored covers, others colored paper with a single color ink, but most had heavy matte covers printed with black ink. The majority contained standard letter-size pages, measuring 8½ by 11 inches. Other printed editions were smaller--either with pages of 8½ by 11 inch paper folded in half, or cut from large sheets of paper. A few were only available online. Several were handsomely produced books containing as many essays as a collection from a major publishing house. In fact, Ball State's Ball Point, recent editions of Boston College's Fresh Ink, recent editions of California State University's Wings, Tarleton State's Tarelton Freshman Writer, and the University of Arizona's Student's Guide were custom printed by publishers such as Forbes, Pearson, and Simon and Schuster. Curiously, the publications from other schools did not include any that closely resembled the zines at Florida State University. Moreover, there were relatively few classbooks among the samples. To compensate for the lack of such anthologies in the sample, I added three first-year publications from Florida State--a choice discussed more fully in Chapter 5--bringing the total number of books considered to twenty-four, from fifteen schools. To the extent that it was possible, I logged reference information for the anthologies--the publication date, number, publisher's name and address, and pieces contained--as they arrived. 10
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When editors' comments in sections such as prefaces and introductions were available, I noted them as well. They helped establish the purpose of the publication, how pieces were selected and what principles guided the organization, or presentation, of the contents. The titles, authors, and subjects of the pieces in the books allowed for a comparison of the organizational arrangement of the publications and provided an inventory for subsequent textual analysis. Unfortunately, some books offered little or no editorial data. Editorial intentions influenced the quality of the pieces in each anthology, of course. The contexts of the publications and the pieces in them needed to be identified to the greatest possible extent in order understand differences among students' texts because the eventual aim of the research project was a comparison of the subjects, form, and style students used in their writing-- involving what compositionist Thomas Hechuan calls "context-sensitive textual analysis," which "is problem-driven, . . . tries to account for as much of the context of the situation as possible, and relies openly on plausible interpretation" (89). Prefaces, introductions, headnotes, and other editorial statements in anthologies enabled initial comparisons of pedagogical goals. They were of limited usefulness, however, and as noted above, some anthologies did not include them at all.
To expand and refine my understanding of the sample publications, I sought additional information from either the person who had sent me a sample or a program administrator to whom I was referred by the source of the sample. Inquiries went to thirty-one people representing eighteen schools (Table 1-3). I explained the research project to them in email correspondence and sent them a questionnaire asking for background on the publications (Appendix C and D).2 Sixteen people answered the questionnaire. Their comments described publications at thirteen schools,3 twelve of which produced anthologies of first-year students' writing.4 After receiving the questionnaires, I requested a telephone interview with every respondent. During Fall 2000 and Spring 2001, eight people made themselves available for the follow-up interview. Five people, those at out-of-state schools, talked with me by telephone; the three, at Florida State, talked with me in my office. (Appendices E and F present the interview outline followed and the permission form used with each respondent; Appendix G contains transcriptions of the interviews.)5 14
The questionnaires and interviews highlighted the disparity between program anthologies and classbooks. Patricia Zukowski, Assistant to the Director of the Writing Program at Amherst at the time she responded and now its Director, articulated the difference most clearly. She referred to program anthologies as her school's "Annual Freshman Year 'Best Essays' Anthologies, . . . [and she abbreviated them in her answers to the questionnaire] as FYA," and she described classbooks as "class publications (those books created by assembling texts from a set of papers submitted for each individual freshman writing class . . . [abbreviated as] CP." She explained that whereas essays for the FYAs were "drawn from both fall and spring semesters" and used throughout the full program, the "CPs . . . [were] generally used only in the class that produces them and only for a small constellation of assignments." Moreover, the editorial process for the two types of publications involved different groups of people. She wrote that For the FYA, the director and I read submissions independently, . . . and score them . . . . We then meet and discuss the relative merits of each piece, eventually settling on which pieces to publish. On occasion, when we cannot reach agreement on particular texts, we bring in a couple of other staff members as readers. . . . Students have no role in developing the anthology, except that we request submissions of artwork to be included in the text as illustrations. It is up to the teacher to select the ONE paper he or she feels most worthy of publication. . . . For CPs, many teachers form editing groups where, for each publication, a subset of students are responsible for production of the publication--in some cases everything from proofing texts to assembling the publication, writing introductions to groups of essays or particular essays, and often creating brief biographies for each author.
The reason classbooks in the sample from schools other than Florida State seemed different from the zines at Florida State clearly was not that students at the other schools were left out of editorial decisions. 15 I "0 Q)'""' ~ Q) ~ Q) :>( ~ .E .~
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Considering and Analyzing Data
The interviews illuminated a comparison of the first-year writing publishing programs in the eight schools where the respondents were based. I had initially expected to compare programs and texts from institutions in four regions, quadrants of the United States, but the data did not support that plan. It did, however, allow comparing programs and texts from two programs in the East, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Boston College, with two in the West, the University of Arizona and Arizona State University. Interestingly, the pairs of schools in the two regions were located in the same states-- Massachusetts and Arizona--and the pairs of writing programs in each region shared close intellectual foundations: the program at Amherst inspired the one at Boston; the one at the University of Arizona inspired the one at Arizona State University. Most important, the publishing programs in the pairs of schools seemed grounded in similar rhetorical theories: the anthologies from Amherst and Boston were oriented toward what compositionist and historian James Berlin calls "subjective rhetoric." The anthologies from Arizona and Arizona State were, however, oriented to support what he calls "epistemic rhetoric." Berlin discusses subjective rhetoric and epistemic rhetoric in Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1990-1985. He describes them as two of several theories that shaped writing pedagogy in the twentieth century. According to him, "subjective theories locate truth either within the individual or within a realm that is accessible only through the individual's internal apprehension, apart from the empirically verifiable world" (11). By comparison, epistemic rhetoric is a form of transactional rhetoric which "is based on an epistemology that sees truth arising out of the interaction of the elements of the rhetorical situation: . . . subject, object, audience, and language" (15). Berlin sees these two theories emerging during the last half of the century in opposition to "current-traditional rhetoric . . . the dominant form of college writing instruction in the . . . century" (36). Current-traditional pedagogy, he writes, "denied the role of the writer, reader, and language in arriving at meaning, . . . [and] instead placed truth in the external world, existing prior to the individual's perception of it." In practice, the pedagogy stressed "superficial correctness-- spelling, punctuation, usage, syntax--and on paragraph structure" (38). Neither the current- 18
traditional nor any of the other theories Berlin discusses explicitly requires an anthology of students' work. As discussed in Chapter Two, his categories of theory prove useful for understanding the influence of schools' anthologies in first-year writing instruction. Although the writing programs in Arizona and in Massachusetts shared historical and intellectual connections, they did not match up as well as hoped. The ones at the University of Arizona and at the University of Massachusetts, discussed in Chapter Three, presented an uneasy equivalence at best. Arizona published students' essays only in its Guide to First-Year Writing rather than a program anthology; Massachusetts had a tiered publication program which included classbooks as well as a program anthology. Comparing papers in these two schools' anthologies seemed inappropriate. Fortunately, the programs at Arizona State and Boston College, discussed in Chapter Four, offered some congruence. Arizona State's Our Stories and Boston College's Fresh Ink were both program anthologies. Moreover both grew from antecedents at other universities and were rooted in many years of practice--one subjective the other epistemic. Comparing papers in these schools anthologies seemed right. By adding two publications from Florida State's writing program to the sample for analysis, I hoped to round the survey. Presumably Our Own Words, the program anthology, would provide a check on insights that Our Stories and Fresh Ink might suggest. Including a randomly chosen zine, College Wave, to the sample as well would test whether the writing in zines truly differed from students' work in the three program anthologies. Thus these two publications from Florida State, discussed in Chapter Five, completed the pool of examples. The texts in the books provided a wonderful, if confusing, array of writing. Students wrote about homelessness (Bethel), radio technology (Nichols), relations with parents and peers (Dinkes, Doggett, and Perot), travel to the Caribbean, violence in Hollywood films (Coons), the works of well-known authors (Bucan and Plagge), and other subjects. In an effort to make sense of the abundance, I selected papers for comparison from the volumes according to three criteria. First, I took equal numbers of texts from the program anthologies and classbooks produced during the most recent semester available in the collection, the 1998-1999 or 1999-2000 school years. Second, to avoid exceptional papers, such as a title-essay or an award-winning piece which might be placed first in a publication, I chose the second piece in each selected anthology. 19
My analysis considered the subject, theme, genre, structure, and style of the texts. The first three measures borrowed categories noted by such compositionists as Newkirk, Peterson, and Tobin. For structure, I applied a system that folklorist David Buchan used with folk ballads (Appendix A). For style, I employed a method developed by compositionist Edward Corbett and refined by his successors Robert Connors and Cheryl Glenn in The St. Martin's Guide to Teaching Writing (237-260). Chapter Six presents the results. The analysis changed my perspectives on students' writing. Some of my observations confirmed common sense impressions of the influence of writing instruction at individual schools --proving the obvious perhaps, but nevertheless increasing my appreciation for alterative approaches to composition. Some of my hunches about the folkloric nature of students' writing were supported as well, although others proved wrong. The discoveries I reached could, I believe, only have grown out of an intensive look at students' texts, the type of examination that anthologies from different writing programs afford. 20
Endnotes for Chapter 1 1. Immediately after sending the query in September 1999, I obtained from the server that handles email at Arizona State University a report of the subscribers to the WPA list. Analysis of showed that the request went to 879 "subscribers" at over 400 locations, mostly institutions of higher education. In some cases several people at the same institution belonged to the list, and in other cases a few people received messages from the list in care of more than one email address.
2. Before emailing the questionnaire, I reached ten of the contacts in person, at the April 2000 Conference on College Composition and Communication, and most of the rest by telephone.
3. At three schools, two people in each responded. Although sometimes overlapping, their answers often addressed different facets of the publications in their institutions.
4. Cynthia Cox, Director or the Writing Program at Belmont College, said she only used anthologies in advanced writing courses--not first-year courses.
5. Documentation of the interviews was supported by a Dissertation Research Grant from Florida State University's Office of Graduate Studies. CHAPTER 2
PROFESSIONAL AND OTHER COMPOSITION PROGRAM LITERATURE
In the widely celebrated Foxfire series, . . . "research" takes on . . . [a] "real" meaning, with its large, goal-directed problems drawn from . . . outside the academic context--framed in the students' community, not library books or newspapers, and where the results are actually published and sold."
Stephen North, The Making of Knowledge in Composition, p. 43
Books, articles, and other discussions of publishing students' writing show a gradual evolution in the practice. Changing at times in response to new technologies, administrative pressures, and shifts in pedagogical ideas, writing teachers have adopted and refined publications of first-year students' work and their use of them for nearly a century. Diverse sources provide insights into the development of the activity, but relatively few studies examine in detail the actual influence that it has on the writers. Professional literature on writing instruction contains numerous arguments for using anthologies of students' work in composition courses, several accounts of developing anthologies at schools around the country, and occasional discussions of the pedagogy behind the practice. Unfortunately, coverage of the subject is uneven. A smattering of articles establishes the existence of the practice at Vassar College in the first quarter of the twentieth century. In the late 1940s, a study landmark study by Edith Wells provides an excellent survey of the practice around the middle of that century. In the years immediately after Wells's work, a rash of articles and reports enthusiastically supports the practice she documented. Following those pieces, the attention drifts from producing anthologies of first-year papers to having students publish their texts outside composition classes and writing programs. From the late 1960s and early 1970s into the 1980s, the pedagogical emphasis in articles and books moves from anthologizing students'
21 22
products to compiling and exchanging their in-progress texts as advocates of the process approach to writing shift attention to a student-centered classroom. Much of the literature suggests, however, that few compositionists have looked carefully at the range of approaches used for publishing students's writing, and the understanding of the practice, since the 1950s. Occasional sources outside the field of writing instruction augment compositionists' views. Such sources help explain the origins of significant trends in publishing students' work; some of them even suggest opportunities for improving the use writing teachers make of the practice. Although perhaps loosely related to composition studies, they merit consideration in this project because of the perspectives they offer.
STUDENT PUBLICATIONS BEFORE 1950 First-year writing teachers have taken an interest in anthologies of student writing for more than half a century. The earliest record of publishing students' work as part of college or university writing courses appears in "Classroom Study of the Contemporary Press and Undergraduate Publications," an article by Helen Lockwood. An account of the composition and journalism curriculum at Vassar College, Lockwood's piece mentions The Sampler, begun at the school in 1917 (228) to provide a forum for her students' texts.1 Other schools started such anthologies as well: in 1920, the University of Illinois published Try-Again for one year; eleven years later it launched The Green Cauldron which continued until 1972 (Birchford and Kurman); the State University of Iowa began MS in 1944 (Wells 8); and Iowa State College created Three Quarters in 1947. Articles in The English Journal indicate that a few high schools produced similar "magazines" as early as the 1930s (Davis and Way). James Berlin suggests, however, that these high school enterprises, were primarily associated with creative writing (79-80), based on "expressionistic rhetoric" of the 1920s-40s (73-81), and largely unrelated to the type of writing expected in first-year college and university courses. Front matter in early first-year writing anthologies occasionally reflects the aims of the publishers and suggests some of their concerns. For example, the "Foreword" to the second issue of The Green Cauldron explains that the collection provides "a means of bringing to the attention of freshman students freshman writings of merit." It notes that the editors did not edit the papers; 23
the texts "are printed as they appear after the regular process of revision by those who wrote them," and that the pieces "are not presented as perfect themes" (Van Doren). One issue of The Green Cauldron contains apologies for printing student pieces that plagiarize work printed elsewhere (April 1944). Except for the attention Lockwood gives The Sampler, however, the publications evidently generated little attention outside the schools that produced them for nearly three decades.
RESEARCH AND PROMOTION IN THE 1950s Appearing in 1950, Edith Wells's report on "College Publications of Freshman Writing" marks the start of significant research on publishing first-year students' texts. It constitutes the first effort to document the characteristics and extent of the practice. Its place as the first article in the inaugural issue of College Composition and Communication (CCC) suggests that the subject held considerable interest for the journal's editors and readers. Discussing a survey she conducted of 400 college and university English departments, Wells provides data on 186 schools and identifies "over twenty different methods . . . used to place freshman writing before the students in composition classes." Her work documents that the most common practice--found at 181 schools, over 97%--was to have "themes . . . read before the classes," presumably aloud, apparently continuing an approach adopted at Harvard in the 1890s.2 Wells notes an impressive variety of alternative methods as well: projecting papers on a screen; reproducing and distributing "mimeograph or hectograph" copies of them; placing copies, probably carbon imprints, on bulletin boards, library reserves, and other forms of circulation for the classes; and publishing freshman papers in undergraduate magazines, local newspapers, alumni bulletins, yearbooks, and anthologies "of themes used as a text" (3). Her results show that fifty-four, 29%, of the schools responding to her questionnaire, produced "a printed anthology of themes." Less impressed with the variety than with pedagogy, Wells expresses disappointment with the use to which the texts are put and the small number of schools with publications exclusively dedicated to first-year writing: Only four among the 186 schools . . . sponsor regularly published freshman magazines which are designed as a contribution to the teaching methods used in the freshman composition courses. Vassar College [The Sampler], Iowa State 24
College [Three Quarters], the State University of Iowa [MS], and the University of Illinois [The Green Cauldron] are the sponsors of these magazines (4). Much of Wells's article discusses the publishing programs at the four schools and the other schools she identified that have "bulletin type publications which are irregularly published" (10). Acknowledging the importance of administrative difficulties involved with compiling and choosing papers, editing them, and printing and distributing the magazines, she gives details on publication format and size, material, size, and numbers, and she quotes administrators' comments on their successes and frustrations. Her findings show that production problems--such as securing useable texts, finding staff time to produce type copy and funds to print copies, and integrating the issues in the writing curriculum--weigh heavily on composition programs. Nevertheless, she sees great benefit in the anthologies, particularly ones that are regularly published for use in first- year writing classes--like those at Vassar, Iowa State, Iowa, and Illinois. She concludes her report by saying that "the magazine of freshman writing definitely has a place in the modern composition course" (11). Wells's research caught compositionists' attention in the 1950s. During the first half of that decade, College Composition and Communication (CCC) carried roughly one piece per year that mentions publishing students' work. For example, the report of the workshop on moving "From a Student's Reading to His Writing" at the 1952 Conference on College Composition and Communication notes that members discussed "the use of . . . collections of student writing of high caliber, [and] of mimeographed student themes . . . for critical appraisal" (Elizabeth Wilson 5). Describing "The Comprehensive Freshman English Course--Reading, Speaking, and Writing-- at the University of Florida" in 1953, J. Hooper Wise observed that "as the best speakers are chosen to appear before the lecture sections, so the best papers from the laboratories are chosen for publication" (134). A year later Robert Limpus commented in an article on "The Freshman Program at Western Michigan College" that some of his best students make a "semester's job of producing, in somewhat reduced form, a complete issue of some magazine of their choice" (5). In 1956, Beryl M. Parrish suggested forty-nine projects aimed at "Providing an Audience for Freshman Compositions," among them writing "in the form of a miniature newspaper (including 25 news style, special articles, features, book reviews, editorials on some topic of mutual interest)" (93). The report from a workshop on "The Use of a Freshman Writing Periodical" at the 1955 meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication illustrates the strong commitment that writing instructors had to publishing at mid-century. It reflects the views of teachers from twelve schools, "most of [whom] . . . had some experience with freshman writing periodicals, chiefly with publication devoted exclusively to freshman writing" (123).3 They found that when a freshman writing periodical is used occasionally as a supplementary text to provide models for classroom analysis and discussion in connection with current assignments, it is likely to be a simulating and provocative change from ordinary class routine. It encourages average and superior students to consider their assignments less as class exercises and more as chances to communicate ideas to a large and critical audience. Few things do more to persuade students that they can, with effort, write prose not too far removed from the models in their text. (Schweik 123).
Harris Wilson's "Student Incentive and the Freshman Writing Magazine" presents perhaps the strongest argument in the 1950s for first-year writing anthologies. Wilson, editor of the University of Illinois' Green Cauldron, says that collections of first-year students' papers are a "sane and practical means of adding vitality and significance to the freshman composition course." He advocates using them to supplement essays by well-known authors, "providing . . . illustrative materials and models for . . . class exercises." He considers the "primary virtue" of publishing students' texts to be "the encouragement and enlightenment . . . [it] provides the student by placing before him the work of his contemporaries fulfilling the same assignments on which he is laboring" (97). Wilson maintains, however, that for the writing in a first-year anthology to be effective, it needs a "provocative" quality. To illustrate the point, he cites the example of "Chicago," an essay in The Green Cauldron that negatively described the city. The paper drew angry responses from many students at his university. Wilson says that "the Cauldron committee was subjected to a voluminous influx of retorts." According to him, "a magazine that is designed expressly for student motivation and yet presents consistently the safe and the usual, defeats its own purpose. 26
The editors must be given and must exercise the prerogative of complete freedom of selection and publication, within, of course, the bounds of good taste and university welfare" (98). On the basis of "four years' experience as a member of the editorial committee and as editor of The Green Cauldron," Wilson attributes the success of The Green Cauldron and publications like it to "three basic editorial principles": selecting materials that -- "provide illustrative, familiar models [of peers' good writing] for current classroom work," -- "provoke student reaction in controversial matters close to the student's own experience," and -- "place before the student in permanent and attractive form the outstanding writing done by his contemporaries" (99).
In the context of the current-traditional pedagogy that, according to James Berlin, characterized instruction at Illinois and most other schools in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s (65-71, especially see 68-69), publishing reinforces notions of correctness. "Models" of what teachers like Wilson considered "outstanding writing done by" students' in first-year writing anthologies may ideally "provoke student reaction," but the aim is to stimulate written responses contesting perceptions of reality rather than deepening subjective perceptions of reality as the pedagogy of subjective rhetoric would have writers do, or discover new realities through the use of language, as the pedagogy of transactional and epistemic rhetoric would have them do. Thus as initially conceived and used, publications of first-year students' writing serve to illustrate appropriate--that is to say, correct--forms of writing. The influence of this view persists in the twenty-first century.
THREE DIVERGING APPROACHES EMERGE IN THE 1960s Leading compositionists' discussions in the early 1960s take the idea of publishing students' work in new directions. Two tangents emerge that move first-year writing pedagogy away from program anthologies. One, promoted by Ken Macrorie, seeks to elevate the recognition accorded to the excellent writing students occasionally do for composition classes. The other, championed by Donald C. Murray, advocates having students write for audiences beyond the campus as well as the composition class. 27
"Printing Student Writing," a note Macrorie included in the February 1962 issue of CCC when he began as Editor for the journal, forecasts his view that students' writing can be, and at times is, worthy of respect and publication. In it he announces the aim of trying "to print at least one student paper each issue" to acknowledge students' work that is "bursting with life, humor, satire: . . . memorable, in fact--literature" (59). Three articles in the February 1963 issue support his initiative. They underscore the idea that teachers should increase the attention and respect given students' work by publishing and using papers that grow out of class work--in the school fine arts magazine (Holmes), literary journal (Berke), and newspaper (Macrorie, "Spitting"). In "A 'Real' Audience for Composition Students," which appeared in the January 1965 issue of CCC, Donald C. Stewart takes a second, but related, tack. He recommends having students write for readers outside the university. Although he does not cite Macrorie's ideas, he does note Wells's, Harris's Wilson's, and Parrish's studies,4 and his approach apparently responds to Macrorie's emphasis on printing students writing in academic, particularly campus, publications. "Salutary as the aims of campus publications are, . . . they still do not cause the student to look beyond the boundaries of the campus for his audience," says Stewart. "Require students to submit at least one essay to a magazine for publication"(36). Whatever its inspiration, Stewart's proposal to motivate students by raising the stakes for writing well advances the view that some student writing merits publication. Attitudes toward publishing students' papers continue to evolve during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Several new compositionists show a sustained interest in Stewart's ideas; Macrorie refines his thinking about how students' writing should be published; and Donald Murray takes the practice in an alternate direction. Pieces by Dean Sherman and Michael Orth in the "Staffroom Interchange" section of CCC, voice enthusiasm for assignments that require students to write for non-campus publications as Stewart recommended. According to them, such assignments increase students' awareness of their audience, motivate them to give extra attention to technical craft in their writing, and de- emphasize grades (Sherman 303 and Orth 211). Their ideas, however, relate primarily to students in advanced writing courses. 28
On the other hand, Macrorie edits, quotes, and excerpts, students' writing in his articles and books, but he generally neglects the potential that anthologizing their texts can have during this period. Actually publishing students' full texts only has a minor part in his campaign against the lifeless, detached prose he calls "Engfish." His books on the writing process movement, such as Writing to Be Read and Telling Writing, urge teachers to acknowledge students' superior work and treat it as a form of literature. But although he quotes students' writing, he intentionally avoids publishing their complete papers and adopts instead a policy of not including authors' names with their work--a policy, he explains, that is "in the interest of protecting [students] from the perils of truthtelling" (Writing to Be Read vii), and which apparently grew out of experiences such as the potentially harmful events that followed publishing one of his students papers, an expose of a nursing home, in the campus newspaper at Western Michigan (Uptaught 26). Nevertheless, in "To Be Read" which appears in the May 1968 English Journal, the same year that Writing to Be Read was published, Macrorie recommends two activities that relate to publishing: first, rearranging superior excerpts from students' papers, duplicating them for the class, and discussing them as "case histories" of editing (688) and, second, requiring students to submit papers for consideration in campus publications (690). But these modest steps are only two among thirty that are discussed in the article. The apparently modest role Macrorie gives publishing students' papers is curious, particularly since that same year--1968--he and another teacher launched a "broadsheet of . . . [their] students' writing . . . called . . . Unduressed" ("Process, Product, and Quality" 73). The first edition of Donald C. Murray's A Writer Teaches Writing, also appearing in 1968, presents a third approach to publishing composition students' work. The book contains a section on "How to Publish Papers." Murray uses the word publication broadly. For him it includes activities as basic as "having three to five students show their papers to each other" (161) Students' wrok qualifies if "the papers can be passed around . . . , or can be reproduced in some form." Murray considers text on any page a form of publication: It is quite simple to have the students reproduce copies of their own papers, either printing them by hand or typing them with a few carbons. I do not find that reading out loud is publication. . . . Eventually, publication should extend to the class. There are many copying devices which make this possible. It can be done 29
by an overhead projector, for example, but I think it is best done when the student has an individual piece of paper he can take home, mull over, read, think about, bring back, and comment upon.5
Murray emphatically distinguishes the "classroom publications" he recommends from other publications teachers might consider for their students, such as "the school newspaper, literary magazine, and yearbook," precisely the kind of publications Macrorie advocates. Murray sees the other types of publications as "motivating forces for the best students, . . . but they reach only a minority." Out-of-class publications, he asserts, "do not attract, in many cases, the best students, and certainly not those . . . who have felt that writing is remote from them because it is merely pretty words written by nice girls for prim teachers" (161). In "Finding Your Own Voice," Murray expands on the pedagogy of publishing students' work. The article outlines the responsibilities of writing students and writing teachers. It establishes the relevance of his approach to composition to the higher education at a time when student protests were shaking campuses around the country. Teachers, says Murray, "are . . . forced to design a curriculum to accept the responsibilities of free speech through the experience of writing . . . and publication" (118). Interestingly, Murray mentions his experience as "advisor to the college newspaper" as a source for his observations. According to him, "the central act of the writing course is publication . . . publication within the classroom." In his view, it is the single responsibility that teachers and students share. He calls it "the crucible where the student is tested, tried, and taught" (122). Thus as compositionists like Macrorie and Stewart de-emphasize publishing students' actual papers within the scope of first-year writing courses, Murray advocates "publication within the classroom"--sharing texts among class, editing class books, anthologizing works produced in a class, with circulation limited to the class, for use in discussions of the texts peers write. His approach employs and brings teachers back to positive pedagogical elements that were used at Vassar as early as the 1910s and which Wells admired in the programs she surveyed during the 1940s (4). For Murray, publications of students' writing serve as a means of teaching editorial skills and engaging students in groups--a feature which Berlin mentions as an important part of subjective rhetoric (152), a point to be explored further in Chapter 3. 30
PROLIFERATION--FOXFIRE, THE WRITING PROJECTS, AND THE PROSCRIPTION FOR A SPECIFIC COURSE IN THE 1970s AND 1980s Discussions of publishing students' work disappear from professional literature during the mid 1970s and early 1980s--a trend which perhaps reflects an increased emphasis on teaching the process versus product writing and a consequent decreased emphasis on model texts. Nevertheless, the decades provide ample evidence that composition teachers used and advanced the understanding of anthologizing students' papers. Significant collections of first-year work affirm its power (Sommers and McQuade, and Wigginton); indirect references to the practice in accounts of the writing process movement (Penfield; Simons; and Sims); and compositionists' reflections on designing courses suggest that with regard to publications of students' writing the period was a time of ferment (Bartholomae and Petrosky, Macrorie, "Process, Product, and Quality"; and Murray, A Writer Teaches Writing, 2nd edition.) The popular Foxfire tomes may be the most widely known anthologies of students' work to appear during the 1970s. They grow out of Foxfire Magazine, a student-written and student- edited publication begun in 1967 by Eliot Wigginton, an English teacher at the Rabun Gap School in northwestern Georgia. He saw the magazine as "something that might pull . . . [students] together" (Wigginton and His Students 2). Containing ethnographic accounts that Rabun Gap students wrote from fieldwork they conducted among long-time residents of the Southern Appalachian region in which the school is located and propelled by nostalgia for pre-industrial Americana around the time of the American bicentennial, the six editions of Foxfire published between 1972 and 1980 (Wigginton, ed.), as well as several more since then, demonstrate that students' can successfully write for a popular audience. Accounts of the National Writing Project (NWP) and its affiliated state and local projects, a program for inspiring writing teachers and introducing them to superior practices, hint at the spread of publications of students' writing. For example, an issue of the Arizona English Bulletin dedicated to the NWP contains several articles that refer to approaches such as Macrorie's and Murray's (Curtis 49, Heller 71, Rakauskas 166-167, and Sherrill 43-45). Two other articles in the issue directly mention the importance of having students publish their writing: the first describes two local projects that were encouraging students "toward publication" (Penfield 5); the second 31
cites a high school teacher's "Credo" which lists as its tenth point "Whenever possible, student writing should be published" (Sims 40). In Student Worlds, Student Words, Elizabeth Simons offers a detailed discussion of how class anthologies fit in the Writing Project approach. Based on a writing curriculum she developed from experience in the early 1980s with the Bay Area Writing Project, the forerunner of the NWP, Simons recommends publishing as an activity for every class. Her approach resembles Murray's. For her, "publishing is reading a piece aloud to a class; it is also pinning finished work on the classroom bulletin board or in the corridor, making a display of writing that ravels around the school, duplicating a book of polished student writing, placing a piece in school or local newspapers" (51). Perhaps the best account of using an anthology of students' writing appears in David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky's Facts, Artifacts and Counter Facts. It explains their "theory and method for a reading and writing course" that they developed, beginning in 1977, for basic writing students at the University of Pittsburgh. In addition to providing an extensive outline of their assignments (47-86), the book includes several instructors' accounts of teaching the course. The importance to their pedagogy of publishing students' writing figures in two of the assistants' discussions of the course as well as in the initial course description. The course involves publishing students' papers in two ways. During the first half of a semester or term, teachers use one of the basic methods of publishing Murray recommended: they distribute a selection of their students' work among the class. Bartholomae and Petrosky explain that "each week two or three student papers are reproduced (often the first and second drafts of a single paper) . . . . Class discussion generally centers around a piece of student writing" (30). Later at midterm, teachers have students write an extended paper--an autobiography--that draws and expands on thinking students do in earlier writing, and they compile the papers in a class anthology. It occupies a central place in the course syllabus. These autobiographies are sent down to central printing, reproduced, bound, and sold back to the class as the next assigned text. Students are directed to read the autobiographies as "case studies" and to report, in writing, on what they see to be the significant patterns--common or contradictory themes, for example--and to provide names and labels for these patterns. They do this in order 32
to go on, in a later assignment, to develop a theory about the way adolescents change. (36)
Work on the papers to be anthologized spans three weeks (98) and involves four writing assignments, numbers 13-16: a beginning draft, an initial revision, a subsequent revision, and closely edited version suitable for publishing (71-76). "With a suggested length of 10 handwritten pages" (98), the writing project results in pieces that "average 12-15 pages long" (36). The description of the project in the class outline emphasizes the relationship between the students' writing and that of more accomplished authors. For example, a considerable amount of the advice to students deals with the need to engage a typist who will produce legible copy. The teachers tell students that they "want everyone to . . . see what your writing looks like when it's packaged like a professional's" (73). The teachers say that writing for the anthology has a powerful impact on their students. One of Bartholomae and Petrosky's assistants, Marilyn Demario, reports that "when the final copies are printed, bound and sold to students . . . , students' interest and sense of pride are almost palpable." In particular, she notes that during the three weeks they work on the project, students often move between a sense of distance from their own writing and a new personal intensity. They may, for example, be outraged by a misplaced comma, no matter who misplaced it, when they work with the typist's copy and some White- Out. Similarly, when they see their own ideas, observations, and discussions in print, as part of a published anthology, they are often surprised, sometimes pleasantly but sometimes not, by how different those ideas and observations look. (98)
Mariolina Salvatori, another of the teaching assistants, emphasizes the abstract connections between anthologizing the students' papers and their learning. She observes that collecting, publishing, and assigning the students work as required text is, "from a pedagogical point of view, . . . a very important move." The publication goes beyond affirming that the students' "writing is worth reading and their reading is worth response," value that the teachers demonstrate by discussing samples of individual, unpublished papers with the students during classes. She finds that "from a theoretical point of view, the reading of the text of their experiences reaffirms the fundamental premise of the interconnectedness of the two activities 33
[reading and responding in writing]: in fact, it demonstrates that to understand the nature of the activities of reading and writing means to interpret and to apply that interconnectedness." (144) Salvatori's emphasis--on students' perception of language in the acts of reading and writing, in combination with seeing themselves as writers and as audience--reflects the type of instruction that Berlin associates with epistemic rhetoric. Although Facts, Artifacts and Counterfacts did not appear until 1986, the pedagogy it describes illustrates the evolving approach to publishing students' writing in the 1970s. Four elements stand out: acknowledging every student's texts as having literary value, discussing the drafts of the texts as examples of serious writing in-progress, crafting selected texts from each student into publishable pieces, and publishing every student's polished texts to affirm the worth of the writing. Notes from the Writing Project movement and the successes of the Foxfire series imply that composition teachers were increasingly aware in the 1970s of the viability and value of publishing their students' papers, but the details of this approach emerge from Bartholomae and Petrosky's course for basic writers entering their first year at a university. Chapter 4 will discuss in greater length than this section the idea that epistemic rhetoric does not, in Berlin's characterization, require the publication of students' writing, but publishing students' texts can enhance its pedagogy.
MODIFICATION AND ADAPTATION OF APPROACHES IN THE 1980s AND 1990s In the last two decades of the twentieth century, compositionists expand on the three alternative approaches to publishing students' writing. Some prominent compositionists, applying the principle that anthologized examples of good first-year papers make valuable models for new composition students, compile anthologies of national scope. Some pioneers of the writing process movement, modifying their use of class publications by and for individual sections, reassert the power of the modest student-edited publications to increase the involvement of first- year writers with their texts. A number of new writing teachers, however, apparently discover program anthologies for themselves; and some of them, exploring applications of emerging computer technology, begin to reinvent publications of students' work. 34
The Student Writers at Work series from Bedford/St. Martin's Press marks a significant, perhaps the most ambitious, step in anthologizing students' papers. Edited by Nancy Sommers and Donald C. McQuade, it contains pieces submitted for the "Bedford Prize in Student Writing," described in its introduction as a "nationwide contest for essays written for a freshman composition class" (v). In addition, it includes extensive comments on students' work by the editors and other teachers plus essays by well-known authors' on the same themes as the students'. Three editions--the first appearing in 1984, the last in 1989--reflect the appeal of the enterprise. Primarily compilations of exemplary essays, the editions of Student Writers at Work regrettably offer no new insights into how such papers should be used. Its popularity spawn imitators such as Developing Writers, Prize-Winning Essays (McKoski and Hahn), Student Voices: The Writer's Range (Guth), Students Write: A Collection of Essays (Woodman and Burch). By comparison, Ken Macrorie and Donald Murray, 1960s and 1970s early advocates for the process writing pedagogy, revise their approach to publishing their students' writing in the 1980s. On one hand, Macrorie introduces graduate writing students to the idea of class publications; on the other, Murray increases the attention he gives the activity of publishing in his influentia book on teaching writing. Inspired by the positive impact that his anthology Unduressed had on first-year writing students at Western Michigan, Macrorie starts Yeast, as part of a summer workshop at the Bread Loaf (Graduate) School. In "Process, Product, and Quality," he explains that he initially "acted as editor and publisher" for Yeast, which appeared as a series of class anthologies issued five times per class, and he "alone decided which were the best writings (70)." In 1988, however, he gives his graduate writing students responsibility for editing and publishing the issues: they worked in groups, with a different group bringing out each issue. According to him "the move for everyone from writer to editor, and back to writer again" is "at once most unsettling and educational" (71). Publishing class anthologies occupies a significant part of the second edition of A Writer Teaches Writing, which appears in 1985, qualified in its subtitle with "A Complete Revision." Murray devotes several pages of a chapter on "Workshop Teaching: The Group Response" to "Publication," covering "Methods of Publication" and "Varieties of Publication" (190-193).6 He gives more attention to the mechanics of photocopied publications for sharing in individual classes 35 than any other medium, but even with "Publication Publication," the strategy of helping students publish their pieces "outside the classroom," Murray recommends that students "should bring the original as well as the edited version to show their classmates" and "discuss what the editor has done to the text" (192). Thus in his revised approach, the student-written, student-edited collections are the focus of class discussions--much as the class publications was in the course Bartholomae and Petrosky developed at Pittsburgh. Murray's emphasis on using photocopied papers and his mention "computer publication"-- another variety of publishing he recommends, in which "students . . . call up a text from another student and read it on their own word-processing screen" (192)--reflect shifts in the technology associated with anthologizing students' writing. In fact, several articles in the late 1980s encourage teachers to involve students in publishing projects which used emerging technology. For example "Publishing Opportunities for Student (and Teacher) Writers" includes a "photocopied or mimeographed booklet of student work published by one class or small groups within a class" among the "possibilities for publishing within the school" (Dodd 85) and suggests that students can"send a photocopy that looks as good as the original" to publishers, listing thirty- eight possible magazines that accept students' work. In 1986, the year after the second edition of Murray's A Writer Teaches Writing appeared, several articles begin making a connection between the use of the computers and publications of students' writing. Two high school teachers discuss the benefits of having students work on computers to prepare "an automated school newspaper" (Haegele) and "a literary magazine" (Smith 31). Toward the end of the 1980s, Patricia Sullivan, a compositionist at Purdue, discusses the new computer software for word processing and desktop publishing ("Desktop Software," "Taking Control of the Page," and "Writers as Total Desktop Publishers"). She maintains that it "can serve as a powerful ally of advanced composition teachers." Activities using it can, she explains, "aid in the practical writing projects of newsletters, . . . and class anthologies" ("Desktop Publishing" 344).7 Her positive review of the software is notable for several reasons. Her comments move beyond proclaiming the importance of having students put their work in print and build on the assumption that students will publish their own, or schoolmates', texts. Moreover, she identifies four pedagogical benefits of desktop publishing for writing students: it "spurs 36 creative activity, . . . calls attention to the interaction between words and pictures on a page, . . . encourage[s] the social dimensions of computing and composing, . . . and provide[s] our students with a useful skill" (345-346). Conceivably the same benefits--stimulating creativity, illuminating the relationship between text and graphics, promoting collaboration, and imparting practical skills --could grow out of having students engage in any publication project, whether supported with desktop publishing software or not; and it might be wondered how much more difficult learning new software would be than sizing and arranging blocks of images and text on paper. Sullivan initially cautions that desktop publishing may be too challenging to include in first-year writing courses because "freshman composition already has a crowded agenda; it hardly seems reasonable to add teaching several software programs to the syllabus. . . . And with freshmen, computer apprehension and writing apprehension may converge to paralyze some writers" ("Desktop Publishing" 345). By the end of the decade, however, she implies that although "the empahsis in most first-year rhetoric courses will stay focused on standard word- processing packages," the students may eventually be able to manage the complexity of publishing because "standard word-processing packages are becoming increasingly complex" ("Taking Control of the Text" 52). At the end of 1980s, occasional articles by composition teachers across the country enthusiastically describe starting new anthologies. In "Birthing a Student Publication," four teachers at the University of California-Santa Barbara reaffirm the principle that such publications provide "the most concrete and dramatic evidence to our students that their writing was important and would be taken seriously" (Downing, Foley, Kryder and Segall 40). In "Publishing a Newsletter: Making Composition Classes More Meaningful," an ESL teacher at St. Joseph Seminary College in reaffirms that the projects "present writing skills to students in a relevant context" (Fluitt-Dupuy 219), citing Murray's A Writer Teaches Writing (221), Smith's "How to Put Out a Literary Magazine," and the value of several computer programs (222). And in "How to Start a Freshman Writing Magazine and Why," a teacher at Dekalb Community College in Georgia extensively documents her steps to establish The Polishing Cloth, an anthology that reaffirmed the value of The Green Cauldron which she had used as a graduate student at Illinois (Larson). Whether inspired by a growing awareness of process pedagogy, increasing availability 37
of photocopying technology, emerging computer word-processing and desktop publishing software, or other reasons, such articles suggest a renewed interest in anthologies of students' writing.
RETROSPECT AND RE-ENVISIONING IN THE 1990s AND 2000s During the last decade of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first, the proliferation of nationally distributed anthologies suggests the continuing appeal of anthologies of students' writing. St. Martin's Press modifies and extends its Student Writers at Work series-- with less commentary from teachers and without the essays by established authors, but augmenting the St. Martin's Guide to Writing series (Axelrod and Cooper)--by offering a series of editions which evolved from The Great American Bologna Festival and Other Student Essays in 1991 (Rankin) and 1994 (Sladky), to Free Falling in 1997 (Sladky) and 2000 (Axelrod), and becoming Sticks and Stones and Other Student Essays in 2001 (Barkley, Axelrod, and Cooper). Likewise, other publishers offer books including A Collection of Student Essays for Freshman English (Ratner), The Freshman Sampler (Jolly and Moore), Literature of Tomorrow; Something to Say (Murray), and Student Voices: A Collection of Model Essay (Griffith, Ambrose, and O'Neil). New guides to composition spread the recommendation to publish anthologies of students' writing, initially found in Murray's A Writer Teaches Writing. For example, Toby Fulwiler recommends producing "a class book" in The Working Writer (325-329). He considers the activity "a natural end to any writing class" (325) and discusses publishing both printed books and pages on the World Wide Web. Likewise, Lisa Ede devotes a section of Work in Progress to "Constructing Pages on the World Wide Web" (210-220), which concentrates on the rhetoric of web pages in general rather than the technical aspects of composing them. Teachers with an interest in publications of students' writing for their own schools occasionally take a reflective turn. Discussions of the approach appear in Taking Stock: The Writing Process Movement in the '90s and Narration as Knowledge: Tales of the Teaching Life. Among articles in these books several mention compositionists' experience with incorporating anthologies in writing programs such a those at Boston College (Tobin, "Reading and Writing 38
About Death, Disease, and Dysfunction"), Middlebury (Macrorie, "Process, Product, and Quality"70-72), and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (Elbow, "Inviting the Mother Tongue" 369 and Moran, "How the Writing Process Came" 144). They document the development as well as advance the understanding of the practice. More significantly, occasional articles look critically at the pedagogy upon which publishing collections of students' papers rests. For example, Randall Popken maintains in "Student Publications and the Acquisition of Research Genres" that anthologies edited to feature academic research can help students understand expectations for that type of writing. Emily J. Isaacs and Phoebe Jackson's Public Works: Student Writing as Public Text presents several discussions of the practice. Some of them raise concerns about the risks controversy, embarrassment, and harm that may result from publishing students' personal, exploratory writing, and thereby making public the espousals of minority opinions and acknowledgments of unlawful behavior that it sometimes contains (Goodburn; Lee; Moran, "Publishing Student Writing"; and Owens). Some examine the potential advantages that publishing students' work on the Internet offers (Benda, Maurello and Nicholas, and Owens). These pieces illustrate a probing inquiry that the practice needs but too seldom receives. Concern for publishing students' work is most fully explored in James Kalmbach's The Computer and the Page: Publishing, Technology, and the Classroom. It looks at the history of publishing--from a normal school in the 1880s to the present, with particular emphasis on its transformation with the advent of computers--in connection with teaching composition. He believes that Publishing pedagogies are well established throughout the curriculum and will continue to be popular because student-centered and social reconstruction pedagogies will continue to fight for a place in the literacy curriculum. The main argument for using real-life projects in the classroom will continue to be that students write better and with more interest when they have a real audience and real purpose for creating their texts. (122)
The value of Kalmbach's work lies as much in the theoretical approach he takes as in the broad scope he offers. He considers both writing and publishing as social acts. The perspective leads him to examine the roles of publisher and user--valuable concepts in the research I pursue-- 39 and the actions each individual plays in relation to a "document," the term Kalmbach prefers to "text" or "publication" (13). For example, he notes that "most of the transactions through writing that take place in a composition classroom are examples of displaying text rather than publishing. A student (when working in a group or turning in a paper) is displaying a copy of a document. He or she is inviting comments and evaluation, but no copy of the document changes hands" (11). Thus by Kalmbach's standards, some of what compositionists like Murray call publication falls short of actual publication.
ALTERNATIVE PUBLICATIONS OUTSIDE WRITING CLASSES In the 1980s and 1990s, xerox machines and computers simplified publishing students' papers and rendered carbon copies and mimeographed copies obsolete. Of course, teachers were not the only people to enjoy the benefit of such technology. In addition to those working in education, business, and government, private individuals used the machines in various ways, one of which was in making do-it-yourself magazines, or zines. Printed copies of these publications evolved during the 1970s and 1980s from science fiction fanzines of an earlier era. The advent of the World Wide Web in the 1990s created the potential for publishing them on the Internet. Several books chronicle the development of zines. They include Stephen Duncombe's Zines: Notes from the Underground, Mike Gunderloy and Carl Janice's The World of Zines, and other sources (Block and Carlip, Rowe, and Kennedy). Chip Rowe's Book of Zines offers perhaps the best source of information and examples about print and online zines.8 Duncomb, who gives more attention to zines than any other scholar, defines them as "noncommercial, nonprofessional, small-circulation magazines which . . . [the] creators produce, publish, and distribute by themselves" (6). According to him, these publications grow out of the "radical pamphleteer" tradition that dates from Thomas Paine (15 and 27). His description of zines suggests that they have an informal quality: covering "less a defined set of discrete topics . . . and more an amalgam of the diverse interests of those doing the writing"; a "form . . . [that] lies somewhere between a personal letter and a magazine" (10); and "unruly cut-and-paste layout, barely legible type, and uneven production" (11). They represent, says Duncomb, a striving for personal expression (21-43) and freedom from mainstream culture and authority (184-186). 40
These qualities can be seen in pieces surveyed in Chip Rowe's Book of Zines. The popularity of the zine impulse has, however, been adapted by a number of formally sponsored publishing concerns such as John East's The E-Zine Webring, TargetMan's eZINESearch, and WebCrimson's CrimsonZine.com. At the close of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first, several compositionists show an interest in informal zines as sites of writing outside academe (Alexander; Comstock; Cox, "Taking the Comp. Class 'Underground'"; Sinor; Williamson; and Wright). Some propose that zines can serve as a place for composition students to publish work (Alexander, Fraizer, Wan, and Williamson). Such author-edited do-it-yourself collections overlap with the collections of first-year writing--program anthologies and classbooks--that composition teachers use and, Chapter 5 will present a dynamic synthesis for students' formal and informal learning. 41
Endnotes for Chapter 2
1. Lockwood's "Classroom Study of the Contemporary Press and Undergraduate Publications" fails to note when The Sampler was started. Edith Wells gives the date (4). "Description Writing and Criticism at Vassar," an unpublished piece by Marguerite Arnold which Raymond Weaver cites in an article published shortly after The Sampler began, may suggest how the publication was used. Arnold explains that one of the first-year students' involved criticism of "the descriptive piece of a fellow-student and whose standards have been suggested by reading and class- discussion (Weaver 75).
2. Lewis E. Gates, and perhaps other teachers under the supervision of Wendell Barratt, read composition students' papers aloud in writing classes in the 1890s (Norris 3).
3. The members of the workshop came from De Paul; Marquette; Michigan State College; Purdue; the State University of Iowa; the University of Illinois, Urbana; the University of Illinois, Chicago, the Universities of Kentucky, Minnesota, and North Carolina; Western Reserve; and Wheaton College. That the Conference met in Chicago may account for the heavy representation of Mid-western states. The majority of their report addressed matters such as "costs, . . . format, number of copies printed, . . . method of distribution," and "the editing process" (123-124).
4. The references to earlier studies make Stewart's article one of the few at that time on publishing students' writing that clearly builds on preceding work.
5. In the 1968 edition of A Writer Teaches Writing, Murray mentions that he does not consider reading aloud as a form of publication, thereby distinguishing his approach at this time from the practice instituted by Barrett Wendell at Harvard and found in use at 181 of the 186 she studied.
6. Interestingly whereas in the 1972 edition of the book Murray discouraged reading papers aloud, he includes this method, calling it "Oral Publication" (191), in the second edition.
7. In 1986, Sullivan's initial review of "Desktop Publishing" and related software, she continues the call for including visual rhetoric in composition that Stephen Bernhardt made in "Seeing the Text." According to Sullivan,"because graphics and text are built together into one page, the visual aspect of the textual meaning can be seriously considered as we teach the making an interpreting of texts." Although she does not cite Berhnardt, her views relate directly to the ideas in his article which appeared in CCC 1986. A writing teacher at Southern Illinois University--Carbondale with interests in computers and composition, Bernhard argues in CCC for having "students . . . experiment with visible features of written texts . . . [to] increase their ability to understand and use hierarchical and classificatory arrangements. He asserts that "classroom practice which ignores the increasingly visual, localized qualities of information exchange can only become increasingly irrelevant. 42
Influenced especially by the growth of electronic media, strategies of rhetorical organization will move increasingly toward visual patterns presented on screens and interpreted through visual as well as verbal syntax" (77). Fortune explores the idea further in "Visual and Verbal Thinking: Drawing and Word-Processing Software in Writing Instruction" in 1989.
8. The online version contains links to exemplary zines, archives of zines, histories of the publications, advice on publishing and distributing them, discussion boards for zine enthusiasts, and other related sources. The printed version of his book has gone out of stock, but Rowe recently brought the online version up to date in January 2003. CHAPTER 3
PUBLISHING FOR SUBJECTIVE RHETORIC: TWO PROGRAMS IN THE EAST
It's almost a pedagogical tactic--to help students take their own writing seriously.
Charles Moran, Professor of English University of Massachusetts-Amherst Telephone Interview, 9 October 2000
It's been a squeaker every time to get the book in the bookstore within the week before school opens. . . . We want them on the shelves when the kids come in with their parents and their credit cards!
Eileen Donovan-Kranz, Associate Director Writing Program, Boston College Telephone Interview, 8 November 2000
The writing programs at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and at Boston College provide excellent examples of two alternatives for publishing first-year students' writing. Located in the same state, one is a public institution, the other private. One is affiliated with a graduate program and employs graduate teaching assistants, the other has no such connection and relies on regular and adjunct faculty as teachers. The university has an older, more diversified array of publications--including class publications, or classbooks, as well as program anthologies--than the college, which produces only produces a program anthology. In spite of their differences, however, both the university and the college base their writing instruction on a subjective theory of rhetoric. Explaining this approach, Berlin credits Donald Murray and Peter Elbow as major proponents of the pedagogy. As will be discussed, the curricula at both the university and the college draw on these two teachers ideas: Murray inspired a reorganization of the writing program at the school in 1982 (Moran, "How the Writing Process Came to UMass/Amherst"), and Elbow directed the program for many years; and in the early
43 44
1990s, students of Murray's and Elbow's built on their experience with publishing students' writing to develop a first-year anthology at Boston. The "editorial group" figures significantly in subjective rhetoric. According to Berlin, it is one of the distinguishing features of the pedagogy. It calls on peer editors serve "to check for the inauthentic in a writer's response" to the subject of a paper (152), rather than encouraging them to the stress the correctness of technical issues in writing such as syntax, grammar, spelling, and punctuation. As practiced and recommended by Murray, classbooks provided a natural means for circulating papers among classmates to support the group editing. None of the anthologies examined for this research articulated the pedagogical orientation of the programs, but the contents of the anthologies--predominantly personal experience essays--strongly reflect of the expressive inclination associated with subjective rhetoric.
THE UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS-AMHERST The Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst produces two types of publications: a first-year writing program anthology, the Writing Program Anthology, and class anthologies, each with its own name such as A Collection of Burrows; Persuasion: Essays, Theories, Arguments; and Wipe Your Feet: Essays.1 As current director Patricia Zukowski explained in answers to the study questionnaire and former program director Charles Moran clarified in an interview, program anthologies are produced annually, but at one time they were produced each semester. The class publications are published as often as four times a semester (Elbow, "Inviting the Mother Tongue" 369, and Moran, "How the Writing Program Came to UMass/Amherst" 144), although some teachers use them in their sections less often than other teachers (Moran, Interview, and Zukowski). This research study primarily examined the 1999 edition of the Writing Program Anthology, available online, although the research collection also included printed copies of the 1997 and 1998 editions of the publication anthology. Three class publications were available for the study. Class publications for computer-based courses are carried online and are located on password-protected section--accessible only to the students--and therefore unavailable for this research. 45
Characteristics, Contents, and History of the Writing Program Anthology and Class Publications at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Printed copies of both the program and the class publications reflect a modest investment in printing. The budget to produce them comes a laboratory fee that students pay along with their tuition. The 1997-1998 Writing Program Anthology has newsprint pages and a cover of white, twenty pound paper printed with black ink, saddle-folded and stapled. It measures 8 by 10 inches. Publicly accessible online versions of the Anthology have been published on the Web since the twenty-fourth edition, 1997-1998. By comparison, the three printed class anthologies available for this research are photocopied on 8½ by 11 inch pages stapled between black-on-white paper covers of the same weight paper as the contents. To economize, the department is making increased use of class anthologies on the World Wide Web. An "Introduction" and "Table of Contents" present the pieces in each of the three issues of the Writing Program Anthology. The 1997-1998 edition contains eighteen essays, the 1998-1999 and 1999-2000 editions each contain fifteen. Works cited sections accompany many of the papers. The contents of the class publications are much like those of the annual Anthology. One example offers fifteen essays (Wipe Your Feet!), another nineteen (A Collection of Burrows), and the third twenty-three (Persuasion)--a contribution from every student in the class. The title and cover illustration on each are unique. Each anthology includes a "Table of Contents." Persuasion follows every essay with autobiographical notes about the author, and Collection of Burrows has an "Afterword" by Peggy Woods, the teacher. None of the essays in the class publications includes formal citations, presumably because the assignments for which they were written did not require documented research. The Writing Program began producing class publications in 1982. In "How the Writing Process Came to UMASS/Amherst," Charles Moran, appointed as director of the program that year, attributed the idea for the class collections to Donald Murray and briefly described the origins of the activity (243-244). Published in each class as often as four times during a semester, these classbooks were, and remain, fundamental to the writing program. During the interview in which Moran explained the development of the publication activities at the university, he said they constitute "almost a pedagogical tactic--to help students take their own writing seriously." 46
By comparison, the Writing Program Anthology, grew out of class publications "a couple of years later because people suggested it," observed Moran. He felt its value in teaching writing was of less importance than the class publications. "The best writers will take care of themselves, you know." Nevertheless, the program-wide anthology served another need: We instituted those . . . because we wanted some [copies of sample essays] available to us as a program--the best writing that students had done--so that we could publicize that, because as a writing program what we normally get are complaints how bad student writing is. And we thought if we could assert the good writing and publish it . . . this would make our own working environment a little bit better. . . . We sent copies out to people we felt would be important people on campus--the deans, professors, department heads, academic affairs, all of the junior writing teachers-- and copies to our State Representatives, and to the Governor, and so forth. [It was intended] as "this is what our students are able to do -- it's what they're doing." . . . It was much more of a public relations venture.
Thus the initial purpose of the Anthology was to show audiences outside the first-year writing courses the good work first-year students did--thus in effect, they made use of one of the minor benefits that writing teachers articulated for magazines of students' writing in the 1940s and
1950s.
Editorial Policies and Pedagogical Uses of the Writing Program Anthology and Class Publications at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst
If the creators of the Program's Anthology intended for it primarily to reach an audience outside the writing program, its recent editors certainly include, as their predecessors surely did, undergraduates among the "people on campus" they hope to impress with "the good writing." In the "Introduction" to the 1999 Anthology, co-editors Peter Elbow and Patricia Zukowski, his assistant explain that the "collection . . . provides good student writers with an audience beyond the classroom and with the rewards of public recognition. In addition, the anthology enables instructors in the Writing Program to share the best efforts of all our students." 47
The editors of the Writing Program Anthology carefully review prospective pieces. The "Introduction" to the 1999-2000 edition mentions that "the essays [in it] were selected from over a hundred submissions and represent a variety of the forms that expository writing can take" (Elbow and Zukowski). Elaborating on the selection process in her answers to the questionnaire, Zukowski explains that a committee of senior writing program faculty ultimately choose the essays. She say that the [Writing Program] Director and I read submissions independently, write narrative comments about each submission, and score them on a scale of 1 - 4 (1 being most publishable). We then meet and discuss the relative merits of each piece, eventually settling on which pieces to publish. On occasion, when we cannot reach agreement on particular texts, we bring in a couple of other staff members as readers.
To a degree, however, writing teachers influence the selection because they screen the essays from their classes and select the pieces to be considered by the review committee. The program uses written "criteria for selection," developed by Zukowski, "which we disseminate to instructors, along with a memo reminding them to submit a paper (one from each section they teach) at the end of the semester." (For these criteria, please see Appendix E.) Zukowski says "it is up to the teacher to select the ONE paper he or she feels most worthy of publication." The faculty also proofread and edit the copy to be published "(where necessary) . . . before sending it to the printer." According to her, "students have no role in developing the anthology, except that we request submissions of artwork to be included in the text as illustrations. By contrast the process for selecting the work to include in class anthologies emphasizes student involvement. In the interview, Charles Moran said teachers' approaches range from "minimalist"--in which a teacher merely collects polished drafts, compiles them, numbers the pages, and takes them to the photocopy service--to "a full-team anthology effort." Evidently the team approach is preferred. According to Zukowski, "many teachers form editing groups where, for each publication, a subset of students is responsible for production of the publication--in some cases everything from proofing texts to assembling the publication, writing introductions to groups of essays or particular essays, and often creating brief biographies for each author." In 48 some classes, students' editorial groups even "issue a call for manuscripts" and select the papers to be published. Moran describes the activity in the classes he teaches: The team has to divide up the manuscripts. They have to decide themselves how much editing they're going to do. If they have to do anything like substantial editing, they've got to get back with the author because editors . . . can't simply rewrite someone's piece. And all of this gets the editing team into some really interesting discussions: What--how much editing is intrusive, how much is justified? Also the editing team is responsible for screening any potentially hurtful language, and that generates some interesting discussions at times.
The process of deciding what writing should be published resembles the one Macrorie described using with graduate students in summer workshops at Bread Loaf (Macrorie, "Process, Product, and Quality"). The writing program at the university encourages publishing a sequence of three to four class anthologies over the period of a semester (Elbow, "Inviting the Mother Tongue" and Moran "How the Writing Process"). Working on more than one classbook gives different groups of classmates a turn at editing and publishing. In the interview, Moran explained that "normal program policy" requires publishing a piece from each student in every edition. "The reason . . . is . . . that . . . if . . . [students] feel they are going to be read by someone other than the teachers, [they] will do more, and if we can establish publication early on, the first couple of weeks, . . . then the pressure of publication will have its greatest effect throughout the semester--improve the quality of the writing during the semester, by putting all available pressure on the students." A first publication helps students learn the procedure. Each creates an opportunity to talk about attending to technical issues in texts. Moran says he offers "oral comments" on the anthologies and he may say, as I always do at the end of the first one, "and by the way, there are something like 250--I didn't count, but I just noticed something like 250-- substantial typographical errors, spelling errors, errors in punctuation, that sort of thing in this first edition--in this first anthology. And I'm really hoping that it will get better because we can't go public like this.
Each successive issue of the class publications, says Moran, shows that students give increasing attention to the technical quality of the texts. "The next one's [after the first group's anthology] better and the next one looks better." The rationale for the activity rests on Donald 49
Murray's ideas of audience and responsibility ("Finding Your Own Voice"). According to Moran, "if students feel their writing is going to be read by an audience that is other than the teacher, . . . they go back in and revise, then copy edit--with a passion that they do not have when they believe there is a closed communication between themselves and the teacher, a communication channel through which they can kind of manipulate the teacher." The program anthologies and the class publications, which Zukowski calls the "in-house literature," fuel discussion in writing classes. Teachers receive copies of the program anthologies and individually select essays from them to copy and distribute to their students. "All . . . [the] past . . . [editions] are available to teachers . . . . However, it is . . . common that the most recent . . . is the one most heavily used by instructors in a given semester." In the case of class publications, each teacher distributes a copy of every anthology a class produces to each student in the class. The copies of classbooks, says Zukowski, "are generally used only in the class that produces them and only for a small constellation of assignments." Two peer-review assignments that Moran described during the interview show the role of the class publications. In one exercise , he says he "might ask for a flat-out review" that calls for examples from the anthologized examples that the student reviewers "would like . . . to emulate." In the other exercise, he "postulate[s] an audience for the review [of the texts in the class publication], . . . an adult . . . who believes that . . . [the reviewer is] a good person, and . . . a serious person, and so on, but who also believes that students at UMASS are drinking and partying all the time," and he ask the reviewer "to write a letter to this adult arguing, on the basis of the anthology and the issues taken up in that anthology, that students at UMASS are serious human beings, as well as people who enjoy a good time." Not all teachers in the program use the class publications as intended. Zukowski notes "problems with some instructors not publishing papers, some publishing but not making use of the texts in their classes." One particular pattern of disuse implies that some students think of the classbooks as ephemera. "Instructors publishing the last essay produced at the end of the semester, assuming students would pick them up at the end of the term and read them for pleasure" overestimate their students. "Few students availed themselves of the final issues," says Zukowski. Consequently the program, "for financial reasons," has "a shut-off date for 50
duplication." A result of the restriction, she adds, leads "to curtail what I think is a good (but expensive) idea of developing cross-class student publications." The writing program at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst makes a clear distinction between the use of its program anthologies and class publications. If both types of collections provide texts for classroom discussion, teachers evidently regard the program compilations as a source of model papers, worthy of reuse; whereas they apparently regard the class compilations as a source of practice drafts, exercises for student editing and review, suitable only for temporary reference. An indifferent attitude toward a fourth, end-of-semester edition of class publication illustrates the distinction. The difference may, however, actually undermine the view of students' writing as literature because the only audience for class publications is the students who wrote, compiled, and edited the texts.
BOSTON COLLEGE Fresh Ink, the anthology that excited students in my classes, is the only collection of students' papers that the first-year writing program at Boston College produces. Although the staff of the program have experience, as discussed below, with class publications such as the ones that come from the program at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, they channel their publishing efforts into a single, annual program anthology. The founding editors, Lad Tobin and Eileen Donovan-Kranz, explain in correspondence and interviews, they wanted a publication that would impress readers, "stand in some way for a program, but . . . have the look of a professional text" (Donovan-Kranz, Interview, 11 November 2000). The study collection for this research includes six editions of Fresh Ink, consisting of an edition for each year from the start of the beginning of the anthology in 1993-1994 until the collection phase of the research in 1999,2 but the analysis concentrates on the 1999 edition.
Characteristics, Contents, and History of Fresh Ink
Copies of Fresh Ink look like trade books, anthologies of work by established writers. Each of the six editions available for examination measures 6 by 9 inches. The series reflects the evolution of the anthology as it went from an ambitious prototype to an established journal. 51
Produced in-house at Boston College, the first edition has a heavy matte-finished paper cover, and the front matter for that edition provides no copyright information. From 1995, the subsequent editions have glossy or semi-glossy paper covers. Color graphics appear on the three most recent covers. Since 1995, the contents include a page which identifies McGraw-Hill as the copyright holder under a "Custom Publishing" imprint and which explains that the book "consists of products that are produced from camera-ready copy. Peer review, class testing, and accuracy are primarily the responsibility of the author(s)" (ii). According to the subtitle of the anthology, the texts in Fresh Ink consist of "essays from Boston College's First-Year Writing Seminar." Each of the editions from 1994 through 1998 contains twenty-five pieces; the 1999 edition has twenty-four. "Acknowledgments," "Tables of Contents," and "Introductions" precede the essays. In the first and third editions of Fresh Ink, the students' works appear alphabetically by the author's last name; but in the other editions, the pieces reflect by other organizing schemes: "by rhetorical strategies," "by Topic," or by some other grouping. Every edition after the second provides one or more "Alternative" listings under the "Table of Contents" to help readers find works that relate to their interests. For example, in the 1999 edition, headings on one listing include "Remembering," "Considering," "Satirizing," and "Synthesizing"; another has headings for "Understanding Experience," "Reflecting on Family," "Adjusting to College Life," "Examining Cultures," and "Commenting on Society" (v-vii). Lad Tobin, Director of the Writing Program, and Eileen Donovan-Kranz, Assistant Director, began the series when he "was hired to develop a new writing program for first-year students." In "Reading and Writing about Death, Disease, Dysfunction," he says he "can't remember whether it was me or Eileen" who played proposed the initiative,
but I definitely recall that the scene had the feel of an Andy Hardy movie. The only difference was we changed "I know how we'll get the money to save the school . . .: We'll put on a play!" to "I know how we'll raise the cultural capital of our writing program: We'll publish a book of student essays!" . . . We'd invite our first-year writers to submit personal narratives, textual criticism, political arguments, philosophical meditations, and researched essays; organize an editorial board; hire a first-rate art designer; find a publisher; and send out a memo announcing to the staff that the book . . . would be required the next fall in every section of the course. (72) 52
Donovan-Kranz explains:
we wanted to validate student writing with a high quality, highly polished anthology. We talked about many ways of disseminating student writing. For us, the xerox approach really seemed less than ideal, as it would visually undercut the value of the student writing. Our goal became clear through discussion and through consideration of our values for the course and for the students: we wanted quality writing from students published--and paid for in the book store--in a beautiful book. (Correspondence)
Both founding editors had experience using anthologies of students' essays before they came to Boston College. Donovan-Kranz explained during the initial interview that Tobin worked as a graduate student with Donald Murray at the University of New Hampshire and she did graduate work at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She well recalled the Writing Program Anthology and using the class anthologies (8 November 2000). Tobin's experience at New Hampshire and hers at Amherst helped shape the approach they took to publishing students' work in Boston College's Writing Program. Nevertheless, she and Tobin wanted Fresh Ink to develop a different process for publishing and give their program's publication a more formal look than the collections they had seen. They worked for "a more polished package than many of the other student anthologies--which we really wanted. We really strived for that--to have it be very attractive and very professional."
Editorial Policies and Pedagogical Use of Fresh Ink
Donovan-Kranz and Tobin have a different approach to calling for submissions from the one used at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst as well. They invite every student in a first- year writing seminar to submit papers from the course on their own. According to Donovan- Kranz, the policy is intended to be more inclusive than the one she had followed as a graduate student. At her alma mater, each teacher could select two essays from her crew [students], so they essentially nominated those students, obtained those essays, and turned them in. As a teacher, I had . . . difficulty choosing two. . . . It didn't seem quite democratic enough to me. And I wondered about the levels of decision there: What you were going for? What you were cutting out? It seemed like the philosophy of a 53
publication was being decided in each class through the decision-making process of the teacher, second guessing an editor, let's say.
From the number of essays submitted for consideration each year, it seems that students' interest in Fresh Ink has grown steadily. The editors received "150" in 1993 (Tobin, "Acknowledgments" iv), "hundreds" in 1995 (Tobin, "Acknowledgments" iii), and "nearly four hundred" from "over twenty percent of the 1,800 students enrolled in the First-Year Writing Seminar" in 1996 (Donovan-Kranz and Tobin, "Acknowledgments" xi). By 1997, they received 500 essays from students wanting to have their work included in the next edition (Tobin and Donovan-Kranz "Acknowledgments" iii). In 1998, submissions dropped to over 400 (Donovan- Kranz, "Introduction" vii); but by 1999, they increased again to more than 500, "more essays than ever before" ("Introduction" ix). In the interview on 8 November 2000, Donovan-Kranz says the volume of submissions obliges the editors and the program staff to log the essays and screen them to ensure that they are complete and have appropriate releases before staff photocopying them for the editorial review committee. Six to ten teachers--volunteers from the program, often people who have served before--comprise the committee. They read the essays then convene to "talk about them." According to Dononvan-Kranz, the teachers tend during the review to address value of an essay's content to their curriculum rather than its technical merits: It's never, "OK, let's find the 25 best essays." There's always a kind of balancing --of "don't we have that kind of essay already? And, hmmm, we need a textual analysis; is there any good textual analysis in here? Is it good enough? Do we have too many research papers?" So that some . . . shaping of the book happens when the committee meets, and we start think about how we would teach with it and how the essays work with each other. . . . All sorts of worries will come out there: "Well, what would it say if we had three of this kind of essay? And do we have too many narratives and not enough of something else?
Often after the committee makes its selection, the co-editors must deal with "loose ends." The "moral implications of publishing an essay" oblige the them "to have final control over the product." They consider issues such as how to handle writing that might be offensive or "endanger" an author's "family or friends" or whether an author should use a "pseudonym." To 54 clarify the point, Donovan-Kranz cited the example of a recent student who wrote "about what it's like to be gay at Boston College and [his essay] sort of looks over his history as a homosexual male" (Interview, 12 November 2000). Once the essays and their arrangement for an edition of Fresh Ink have been decided, the editors convey the manuscripts to the publisher. The publisher's staff handle typesetting and copy editing as well as printing and binding. Boston College is the only school encountered in this research that hires a professional copy editor. Donovan-Kranz says the series editors and the copy editor collaborate on issues such as repetition and grammar, each suggesting points for attention and change to the other. Occasionally the copy editor's changes will "be too much, . . . [go] too far away from the original text." In such instances, the series editors "stet it back." Teachers in the Writing Program find, however, that the services of such a professional support their goals for Fresh Ink. "The pull," explains Donovan-Kranz, is between going with an unedited student text--knowing that it could very likely have grammatical errors, syntactical problems, and maybe . . . be cut for greater effectiveness-- . . . and teach it that way, or . . . go all the way to . . . heavily edited. . . . We really struggle to retain the student's voice and language . . ., but it definitely is cleaned up. I would be very uncomfortable teaching from a grossly grammatically incorrect text. . . . The students . . . generally look to these essays as models, and they will actually use them like a grammar handbook or something. . . . I've heard . . . [them] say, "Well, that sentence is in Fresh Ink, so it must be good!" As writers, . . . most professionals go through editing, and I think it can be a good experience for the student. We . . . give credit to our copy editor; we talk about that issue in class; and we ask . . . [students who submit essays for Fresh Ink] to sign a provisional form that says their essay will most likely not be identical to the one they submit. . . . It's . . . documented and expected. . . . I actually think that that's a good thing for the student readers to know, but also for the student-authors to realize. (Interview 8 November 2000)
Fresh Ink is usually one of two textbooks, the only one required, for first-year writing seminars. Other than discussions of copy editing, the Writing Program has no exercises that involve specific essays in the anthology. According to Donovan-Kranz, "it's often used in tandem with a reader of professional essays--either discussing a professional essay . . . and essays from Fresh Ink. Or some instructors will split them up on different days." The Writing Program 55 emphasizes a process approach to writing. Although Donovan-Kranz and teachers like her "generally don't call . . . the essays in . . . [editions of Fresh Ink] models, students . . . call them that and call the professional essays models of sorts." "In my classroom as in most others," she explains, "we read a number of essays in the genre or category that we're writing, and then they embark on a project. So it's by way of example and garnering their interest." (Interview 12 November 2000). The handsome appearance of Fresh Ink clearly reflects a significant investment in students' texts and implies significant respect for their writing. To the editors' credit, they manage to keep the cost of the editions relatively low. "In our first year," says Donovan-Kranz, the price per copy "was probably closer to $6, and now we're around $10-11 for an issue." But other elements of Boston College's writing program approach to publishing students' writing seem equally important if less noticeable apparent. For example, its open submission policy has a more democratic quality than the policy for program anthologies elsewhere. Not as broadly inclusive as the every-student-will-be-published policy used in class anthologies systems at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, it nevertheless encourages students who would like to see their work in print by giving them rather than the teachers the choice of submitting their work for consideration. The number of papers the review committee receives each year attests to the success of the policy in terms of stimulating submissions. Although the choice to involve a professional editor in preparing manuscripts for publication seems contrary to the emphasis writing programs have conventionally put on expecting students to polish their writing, it may well increase the enthusiasm and seriousness with which students regard their work. Nothing about the policy reduces students' opportunity to polish their prose during writing classes, before papers are submitted to the Fresh Ink publication committee for review. On one hand, the policy the program follows might relieve a level of anxiety some students feel about having to produce a flawless text, since the acknowledged policy recognizes that any paper may be changed. On the other hand, the policy gives students' papers the same technical support that advanced writers often receive once their manuscripts have been accepted for publication. 56
Endnotes for Chapter 3
1. In 1997 and 1998, the English Department also sponsored another anthology, Willing Wordswork, in cooperation with other departments. It contained papers by undergraduate students from throughout the university. Peter Elbow, Writing Program Director at the time and anthology editor, said the pieces--"though written for a faculty assignment and valued by the faculty recipient--happened, somehow, to be lively and interesting for us as outside readers" ("Introduction"). Unfortunately, the department only published two editions of the anthology.
2. In the "Introduction" to the 1999 version of Fresh Ink, co-editor Eileen Donovan-Kranz refers to the volume as "our sixth edition" ("Introduction" ix). There was no 1994-1995 edition. CHAPTER 4
PUBLISHING FOR EPISTEMIC RHETORIC: TWO PROGRAMS IN THE WEST
I've always liked the idea of validating student writing in that way.
Greg Glau, Director, Writing Programs Arizona State University Telephone Interview, 9 October 2000
In an interview for this study, Greg Glau, Director of Arizona State's Writing Programs in 2000, recalled that the University of Arizona's Student's Guide to First-Year Composition inspired him to start Our Stories, an anthology of Arizona State's first-year students' essays. He had used The Student's Guide when he was a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Arizona, and he admired its inclusion of students' work. Thus when he was appointed Director of Basic Writing at Arizona State and "had the chance to implement something like that, it seemed the natural thing to do." The programs for publishing first-year students' writing at the University of Arizona and Arizona State University offer excellent examples for consideration in this research project because of their relatively long history of publishing students' essays for use in writing instruction. Moreover they provide a strong contrast to those at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Boston College. Coincidentally on the opposite side of the country from the writing programs discussed in the preceding chapter, these two schools are both state institutions, and because they are both located in one state, they operate in the same legislative climate. Their proximity to each other has given rise, perhaps inevitably, to intellectual cross-pollenation. Each program annually publishes its own student's guide, or handbook. Both guides date from the early 1980s; both explain the core approach to first-year writing at their respective institutions; and both anthologize first-year students' papers. And at Arizona State, faculty in the writing program occasionally
57 58
employ classbooks and other publications of students' in addition to the guide--an important fact for this research study. The University of Arizona's and Arizona State's program guides reflect similar pedagogical orientations as well. The "Introduction" to the 1999-2000 edition of the University of Arizona's Student's Guide to First-Year Composition tells students that writing is becoming increasingly prominent in private and public life. Although you will not encounter all these forms of writing in your First-Year Composition courses, the variety of assignments you do will teach you to evaluate writing situations and respond accordingly and prepare you for the challenges in both your university and professional careers (Prineas, Church, and Wurr 2).
Likewise, the "Mission Statement" in Arizona State's Guide to Composition describes a program whose purpose is to introduce students to the importance of writing in the work of the university and to develop their critical reading, thinking and writing skills so that they can successfully participate in that work. . . . We believe context is . . . central. Students need to see that culture in general, and texts in particular, are constructed and shaped by people and by various voices in competition and conversation. This active shaping is central to the way we understand writing and its place in the world. We consider writing to be an epistemic activity that serves to develop, focus, and refine thinking as well as allow students to communicate effectively.
The language of both schools' policies indicates an alignment with what James Berlin calls "epistemic rhetoric" (155-177), a subcategory of what he refers to as theories of "transactional rhetoric," which hold that "knowledge is . . . the result of a relationship involving the interaction of . . . elements that make up the communication process: interlocutor, audience, reality, language. . . . [and] the way they interact with each other in forming knowledge emerges . . . in acts of communication" (166). According to proponents of this view of rhetoric, writing instruction should deepen students' understanding of these "elements" and increase their ability to use them appropriately in a specific rhetorical situation. Although Berlin does not comment on the function that publishing students' work has in epistemic rhetoric, presumably it serves to heighten a student-writer's, or interlocutor's, awareness of the effect that language, in a published text, has on an audience. Examining the publication programs at the two schools illustrates 59 specifically how anthologizing students' papers fits into the curriculum in the programs and suggests some difficulties that arise from using publications of students' writing with transactional rhetoric.
UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA The University of Arizona publishes students' writing in A Student's Guide to First-Year Composition. Begun in 1980,1 it is one of the oldest continuously produced sources of printed first-year students' papers that had a 1999 edition among the publications located during the collection phase of this research study.2 Although primarily a rhetoric rather than an anthology, the Arizona Guide merits attention in this project because of the number of students' essays it contains. The papers and excerpts of papers in it fill the role that pieces in program anthologies dedicated exclusively to students' work serve in composition programs at other schools. Moreover, the history of the Guide helps illuminate the development of first-year writing publications across the country. Indeed, it offers an excellent illustration of the evolution of an anthology as a writing program moves from one theory of instruction to another.
Characteristics, Contents, and History of the Student's Guide to First-Year Composition The first-year writing program at the university offers sections of nine different courses per year--including, for example, English 100, English 102, and English 109H. The 1999-2000 Guide, the 20th and only edition available for this research, consists primarily of advice about how the University of Arizona's writing program works, how to succeed in the courses, and how to write. According to the editors, "this Guide offers useful information about First-Year Composition. It also provides sample writing assignments for each course and examples of student work in which the writers explain how they approach the assignments, consider their rhetorical situations, and analyze their writing processes" (Prineas, Church, and Wurr). Published for the writing program in 1999 by Burgess Printing and sold in the university bookstore, the 6 by 9 inch, perfect-bound Guide has a heavy, glossy, multi-color paper cover. The volume contains 597 pages--257, or forty-five percent of them, present students' work for classes. Their pieces consist of forty-four essays, four excerpted openings, and one paper 60 proposal. Comments, written by students to complement the essays, accompany eleven papers under the heading of "Advice from the Writer." The combined students' texts and comments make over half the book students' work. The students' pieces appear with the discussion of the specific courses for which they were written to illustrate successful approaches to the assignments in each course. Charles Davis started the Guide in the early 1970s, when he was Director of the Composition Program (Prineas, Church, and Wurr iii). In a telephone interview conducted in 2000 for this research, Marvin Diogenes, who co-edited the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh editions of the Guide and served as Director of the University of Arizona's Composition Board at the time of the interview, "the intent was that the Guide would literally guide both teacher and students through the program's curriculum, by providing these illuminating models." Although the book supplied a text to use in writing classes, its primary purpose was not necessarily to show students techniques for writing as much as it was to illustrate what senior faculty expected in finished papers. Diogenes observed during the interview that "there were two major reasons for the Guide to be developed": One big motive was to have a document that everyone would look to as the voicing of the program standards . . . and the other major reason was to communicate those standards outside the university. The Guide has always been sent to every high school in the state of Arizona. . . . [It] has always been an important outreach tool for the writing program and for the university as a whole.
Judging by the date of the Guide's origin, the publication was hardly developed to help undergraduate students explore the epistemic interplay of author, audience, realty, and language-- the concern of epistemic rhetorical pedagogy. Instead, its apparent aim was to illustrate approved "standards" for writing--the concern of current-traditional pedagogy. As Diogenes explained, in the 1970s, the department was relying more and more on graduate assistants to teach the required first-year courses. Anywhere from twenty-five to forty new graduate assistants would be coming in every August [and] start teaching a two-two course load in the composition program. There needed to be ways to orient these new teachers to the teaching of writing and to the local standard. . . . The first Guide was . . . a teaching tool for the graduate students . . . . [It provided a reference to say] "these are the standards of the program; these are the grading criteria; and 61
you'll communicate them to your students because all of your students are going to buy this book as one of the texts for the course. And there'll be sample essays, and there'll also be prize-winning essays from an essay contest."
Diogenes worked as a graduate student on the Guide from 1982 through 1985. Its evolution "paralleled development in the field of rhetoric and composition. . . . The first couple of editions of the Guide were primarily growing out of current traditional premises about composition," said Diogenes. Early volumes included poor essays, examples of "D" and "C" essays, as well as superior ones. "As the field started to change, . . . the Guide started to change." The editors stopped including "poor essays" and "ended up with finally only 'A' and 'B' essays." With the shift to pedagogy based on "the notion of process, . . . the Guide naturally became longer, because we started to put in multiple versions of student essays. And when that happened, it . . . exploded in size from the early editions under 100 pages to the later editions, going 200, 300 -- finally 400, 500."
Editorial Policies and Pedagogical Use of the Student's Guide to First-Year Composition The editors of the Guide have always chosen the students' texts it contains. From the establishment of the Guide in 1979, the writing program assigned two graduate students the responsibility for managing the book, giving them release time to compile and edit the manuscript through the full academic year. Selecting the essays to go in the editions was largely dependant upon their judgement and initiative. "There wasn't a [selection] committee in the formal sense, but . . . this would change from year to year, depending on who was in charge," said Diogenes. "The Comp. Director would always have some sort of say, but . . . I don't recall any cases where somebody vetoed anything that was chosen for the Guide. I think the editors were usually given a lot of discretion to make those selections." Availability of materials and pedagogy made a difference: "The more the book moved toward process, the more we had to look not only for the student essays, but also the apparatus surrounding it--the assignment sheets, the teachers' responses to drafts," said Diogenes. Recalling the shift from the years when he served as co-editor to more recent practice in the program, he observed: 62
There was--back in the 80s--a kind of an informal committee. We called them supervisors back then. These were the lecturers who worked on training the new teachers, and who had mentored them through their time. . . . I would always be trying to include that group in the process, as a kind of informal editorial group. Now those folks are called teaching advisors and they're still lecturers, and I don't know to what degree they're included in the process. The Guide editors . . ., the last five years or so, were always asking for feedback from the whole teaching staff about what the staff wanted in the Guide, so it wasn't so much an editorial board as kind of a program enterprise that people could choose to involve themselves with or not.
The years of the shift and the increasing attention to process that it involved coincided with the nationwide trend Berlin identifies as the rising influence of epistemic and other forms of transactional rhetoric in composition pedagogy. The change in the Guide was not, however, as far reaching as might be imagined. According to the editors of the 1999-2000 edition of the Guide, "for the past eighteen years," a few of the essays in the book received extra scrutiny. A portion of the Guide, Chapter 8 in the 1999-2000 edition, was dedicated to outstanding papers which come from "an essay contest for students enrolled in the first-year composition courses" that the writing program sponsors. Although the editors reviewed the essays, they did not made final decisions about the winning papers. Instead they chose more or less a dozen essays and them passed along to other seasoned writers who were well acquainted with the first-year writing courses and the goals of the program. As with the selection of essays for earlier anthologies such as The Green Cauldron at Illinois, this review carried the legacy of current-traditional pedagogy and its concern with models of correctness. The completed manuscripts for the Guide annually went from the graduate assistants and the program administrative staff to a printer. Early editions of the Guide, on deposit in the University's library, were published locally. The size of the book and its sales attracted Burgess Publishing which has printed recent editions under contract with the university. Royalties from the Guide went to the program and were "used support graduate students in different ways, for travel" for instance, a practice that in time became controversial because some of the instructors objected either to the price of the published Guide or the uses to which the royalties were put, or both. 63
Intended as the primary textbook for first-year writing courses classes at the University of Arizona, the Guide the remains a significant part of the curriculum and the training program for teaching assistants. Program policies require all first-year students to buy the book, but its role in each actual class is uncertain. It is used in the curriculum for new first-year writing teachers "both in the orientation before classes start and through the year." As Diogenes observed, in a large writing program such as the one at the University of Arizona, "forces that fragment a coherent approach to a curriculum . . . [are] all very powerful," and in practice, I think, relatively few teachers use the Guide consistently. . . . People . . . use it on a pretty wide range of consistency. At the low end, people would not use it at all--other than refer to the policy section and say, "you are responsible for knowing what the guide says about the policies." Some would use the section for criteria on grading . . . . But the greatest variation would probably be in the use of the sample essays. Some teachers would never use them, and some teachers would use them pretty heavily. . . . Some people, just as a point of honor, will refuse to have anything to do with the Comp. program's curricular decisions, because that's just part of their self-definition: "I'm not going to use the books they tell me to use, I'm not gonna teach the way they want me to teach."
One of the forces fragmenting the approach may be a divided vision of the role of publishing students' work. To the extent that sample essays in the Guide are understood as models of correct writing, thereby extending current-traditional approach instruction, they may discourage teachers from assigning them as assigned readings in their syllabi. With much to commend it, the University of Arizona's approach to anthologizing students' texts leaves room for modifications that augment epistemic pedagogy, as can be seen in a first-year writing publication program that grew out of Arizona's.
ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY In 1999, Arizona State University's Writing Program published first-year students' essays in two different collections. Research for this study considered both. One collection was The ASU Writing Programs Guide, in its seventeenth edition that year. It was available on the World Wide Web since the year before, 1998, and included "sample entries" from the program's "Printer's Devil Contest." The second collection of papers, Our Stories, only appeared in print. It 64 was compiled from essays written throughout the first-year writing program by students in a single first-year course. The two anthologies reflect the ferment that publishing students' texts can create in a composition program.
Characteristics, Contents, and History of The ASU Writing Programs Guide and Our Stories The ASU Writing Programs Guide dates from the 1983. It follows the model of the University of Arizona's Student's Guide to First-Year Composition, a fact Marvin Diogenes and Greg Glau acknowledged in separate interviews. The founders presumably established it in response to pressures such as those experienced at the University of Arizona: increasing undergraduate and graduate enrollments, changes in writing pedagogy, and the need to maintain curriculum standards. Today Arizona State's Guide is published online. According to Glau, the writing program moved it to the World Wide Web in 1998 when concerns about the use of royalties from the printed version and contract entanglements with the former publisher made publishing on the Internet a preferred alternative. The current version of The ASU . . . Guide contains sections describing the "Mission" of the first-year writing program, "Course Descriptions" of the courses in the program, course "Policies and Procedures," and "student resources" for those in the courses. Hypertext links on the "Table of Contents" page for The ASU . . . Guide connect to each of these major sections. A link on the "Student Resources" page takes readers to "The Printer's Devil Contest" section. In the Seventeenth edition, online in 1999, editors of The . . . Guide published eleven papers: "the contest winners for the past two academic years." The section for 1998-99 presents nine essays, labeled and arranged according to the awards they garnered--"First Place," "Second Place," and "Hon. Mention." The section for 1997-1998 presents only two essays without an indication of the awards they received. The relative lack of first-year students' writing in The ASU . . . Guide stands in sharp contrast to the forty-four essays and five supplementary examples of number of students' writing in the University of Arizona's Guide. Moreover the editors' language in presenting the papers suggests a strong emphasis on correctness, normally associated with current-traditional pedagogy. Although the "Mission Statement" articulates an epistemic pedagogical orientation, the editorial 65 policy for publishing students' texts in The . . . Guide reflect a current-traditional pedagogy. The result leaves a place in the Arizona State first-year writing curriculum for a publication that validates a wide range of students' papers and seeks to engage students in the potential language has for discovering meaning. Greg Glau recalled when interviewed for this study that he began the program anthology Our Stories in 1995, the year after he started teaching at Arizona State. A graduate of the University of Arizona, he had served as an editor for that school's Student's Guide, editing the section for "their English 100." The "basic idea" for Our Stories came, he said, "from the University of Arizona" which "included some sample student papers" it Student's Guide. He produced the first editions of Our Stories by himself. "I did it for one or two years," he said during the interview. In the beginning, the enterprise led to unanticipated difficulties: The first year was pretty much a disaster, . . . I made twenty-eight books . . . for twenty-eight sections. . . . If you were teaching a class and I was teaching a class, then your students would buy my students' writing, and my students would buy your students'. . . . Unfortunately we gave them all the same color, and there was total confusion at the bookstore. . . . After that . . . I got a volunteer to do it.
Our Stories carries essays by students in Arizona State's WAC 101, the first semester of the general first-year writing course, and WAC 107, an equivalent course "for International students who have English as their second language" ("100-Level Courses"). An issue may contain any number of essays, depending on the editors' judgement. According to Glau, however, the cost of printing limits the number of pages in an issue, "about fourteen dollars" for the one in 1999-2000. Glau recalls that one year an issue included "thirty essays . . . and was too expensive." The 1997 edition of the anthology, the older of the two volumes available for this research, contains eighteen essays; the 1999 edition presents nine. The issues have a modest appearance: 8½ by 11 inch pages between heavy single-color paper covers with one color print, with staple and taped biding. The offset-printed pages present double-spaced texts that have the look of a manuscript. If the style of printing was influenced by Glau's initial production, its continuation is a strategic choice. He observes that if I had done it again, I would probably have set in a smaller type face, justified the margins, and made it look more like a printed book. But none of the people who 66
did it [produced subsequent issues] wanted to do it that way. They wanted the 8½ by 11 inch size, so there's space, and double-spaced, so they [the essays] look more like student papers, which they are. So, it did give people white space to write. But it didn't look as much like a book.
In fact, the style of printing in Our Stories suggests that the texts it contains might still be works in-progress, not yet fixed in the more finished form of mass-marketed book or magazine. Issues of the anthology issues imply that the collected pieces are worthy of readers' consideration, but they lack the aura implied by publications such as national publishers' books like St. Martin's Sticks and Stones or custom printed editions like Boston College's Fresh Ink.
Editorial Policies and Pedagogical Use of The ASU Writing Programs Guide and Our Stories The ASU . . . Guide gives no official statement regarding the qualities that the contest judges consider in selecting winning essays to publish, but its editors say that "sample entries" on the site from 1998-1999 and 1997-1998 "provide an idea of what good Printer's Devil writing projects should look like." The opening pages of "The Printer's Devil" section explain the "rules" for the contest and imply the policies for including the students' papers in The . . . Guide. "All students currently enrolled in a First Year Composition class" are eligible to submit essays in the contest; their papers "must be examples of the assignments (essays) as specified in the Department recommended syllabi"; and the essays are "judged" in three categories organized according to equivalent groups of courses. As Greg Glau characterized The . . . Guide, it serves more to address administrative matters than to provide essays for reading assignments. "Our guide," he said, "is mostly . . . what to do when your teacher gives you a bad grade, or how to read comments, or . . . conferencing, or something like that." The students' work in the book may well be ignored. "I think they're probably useful," noted Glau, but "I'm not sure people really pay much attention to them, unfortunately--teachers don't; students don't." Neither of the editions of Our Stories, 1997 and 1999, available for this study contained a statement regarding editorial policy, but when interviewed, Greg Glau described the process for choosing papers he used to launch the anthology. He explained that "We sent a note around to all 67
the teachers saying, 'We're doing this, pick out the best manuscripts--or have your students pick them out--and give them to Glau.'" Students in the first-year classes were encouraged to edit their papers before submitting them to be considered for publication. In the next semester, Glau gave the students in one of his classes photocopies of the manuscripts he received, and they "read through to decide what to use . . ., what needed editing, how to organize, and that kind of thing." The transition from publishing students' essays according to the approach that had been developed in conjunction with early editions of the University of Arizona's Student's Guide and The ASU . . . Guide caused some difficulty. Moving away from that standardized book and syllabus, . . . we have a plethora of potential assignments. Instead of sending us your "best profile paper," or your "best remembered person paper," it became: "send us your best papers." You end up with a hodge-podge [of essays] in the book that doesn't have a lot of rhyme or reason to it, so it's hard to organize, hard to structure, and very hard to write an assignment for, because you're really comparing apples with oranges. . . . If you want to say "the best argumentative essay," that's one thing; but if you say "best essay," that's a different thing. If you say "best informative essay," that's different. . . . It's good from the standpoint of teachers being able to pick their own books, but bad from the standpoint of publishing student writing because there's no focus.
The 1999 edition Our Stories presents seven personal experience essays--two titled, the other five untitled. They discuss dealing with bulimarexia, stresses caused by excessive self- criticism, customizing a Volkswagen van, the consequence of using poor judgment in selecting content for a high school television production, the positive influence of a softball coach, witnessing "a hate crime" in South Africa, and resolving a dispute between a friend and a boyfriend. If the essays in the it seem to be "a hodge-podge" and lack focus, they nevertheless represent student-editors' selection of the most appropriate texts from the pool of writing submitted for consideration--a fact that cannot be claimed for The ASU . . . Guide or the University of Arizona's Student's Guide. This fact increases the possibility that students--as editors or as the audience of a student-edited collection, or perhaps as both--will engage with language to find, and make, meaning. The effect of the exercise furthers instruction in the direction of epistemic pedagogy. 68
Following the process Glau started, developing an issue of Our Stories became a class project for one or two sections of WAC 101 each year. For example, under the guidance of their teachers who volunteered to serve as a managing editor for the semester, the students in a recent class "basically did the whole process," said Glau. "They picked the essays--so they . . . read them all; structured them into some . . . organizational fashion; wrote introductions." With the students reading "outside class" and writing "drafts of introductions . . . [and] reading questions," the activity spanned "about four to five weeks." For the student-editors, the activity culminated with writing an assigned paper reflecting on "'what I learned from the project,'" and the grade for the written reflection became a student's grade for the project. Since Glau stepped out of the role of managing editor in 1997, Our Stories may have changed little in its appearance, but the elements that go into it have evolved in a revealing direction. During the interview, Glau noted that most recent edition of Our Stories published before the interview "even has reading questions . . . after each essay, which is something I never took the time . . . to do." Thus over time teachers have broadened the scope of the work. They have increased students' editorial authority as well. Glau spoke positively of the change: Last year [1999], . . . someone from Vision Graphics [the printer] came and talked to the class and brought in color samples and binding samples and all sorts of things, so they made the decision on what color the cover should be, whether they should have pictures on it, whether it should be spiral bound or perfect bound, and so forth. They made all those decisions, which is where the decisions should be made.
An anecdote Glau offered about "probably the most exciting" edition of Our Stories suggested some of the potential difficulties as well as rewards that can arise from having students' edit an anthology of peers' work. The case, he explained, was the one where we had two teachers, . . . both teaching at the same time, both teaching in computer classrooms, but one was a regular English 101 class and the other one was an international student English 107 class. . . . The teachers reported back . . . that the international students really got a lot out of that because they read essays different than the kinds their classmates were capable of writing. . . . They learned a lot about editing . . . [and] a lot about other things. So I got good reports from that one. . . . If I had to pick a model, that would be the ideal model, but unfortunately from a scheduling standpoint, you don't always have that, or two people who volunteer to do it, are teaching at the same time -- and that way they 69
could meet in one big classroom at times, if they wanted to. It was kind of chaotic, but it was really a good thing to do.
Significantly, the move to increase student involvement with the editorial process seemed to benefit the students and, by extension, the writing program. "I think the more . . . [the teachers] gave over to the students to do," said Glau, "the more successful those projects were. The more the teachers took on themselves, the more work it was for them and the less the students were involved." Apparently increasing student involvement, furthering an epistemic pedagogy, improved the instruction. According to Glau, the project is "usually the first . . . of the semester." The sequence requires students to look critically at other students' writing and discuss qualitites of the writing early in the term. The teachers who serve as managing editors have "veto power" over the contents, but essentially "the student made the selections." Students do not edit the essays "a great deal," and "they edit them more for punctuation, mechanical kinds of things, rather than style." The exercise apparently emphasizes copy editing, although it may occasionally raise considerations about an author's intended meaning. Once a class compiles the manuscript for an issue--including introductions and other supplements as well as the essays--the teacher conveys it to the printers. Our Stories is sold in the university bookstore as a textbook for "Stretch courses" which extend "a two-semester, six-credit-hour sequence of . . . English 101 or English 107 over two semesters" (Glau, "The Stretch Program").3 The writing program leaves the choice of using the anthology to the judgement of the teachers. The collection seems, however, to generate interest and may be used in other first-year courses. According to Glau, "last year, the bookstore sold more of these than the number of students in our Stretch sections!" ("Re: Student Bookstore Policies," underscoring in the original). Evidently more readers than those assigned to study students' essays in Stretch courses find the writing in Our Stories worthy of attention. Glau is unaware, however, of any direct response that the authors receive to the ideas they examine in their work. In practical terms, The ASU . . . Guide, like the University of Arizona's Student's Guide, helps teachers and administrators provide students a uniform collection of essays by first-year 70 writers to read, study, and discuss. The publishing enterprise that supports the guides offers a manageable, although time-consuming, tool for illustrating approved standards of writing. Unfortunately, such guides have reportedly limited utility. The standardized models seem to have little appeal to teachers. Producing a student-edited anthology such as Our Stories, however, gives first-year students unaccustomed responsibility for shaping language. The students at Arizona State who edit their peers' texts have a chance to see, by observing students reactions to the selected essays and through bookstore sales, the impact that their editorial decisions make. 71
Endnotes for Chapter 4
1. The first eleven editions, 1980-1990, are listed among the collections of the University of Arizona's library. The library evidently did not accession subsequent editions.
2. Of the program anthologies and guides located through this project, only Ball State University's Ball Point has a claim to being older. According to the "Acknowledgements" in the 1998-1999 edition of Ball Point, the handbook had "its inception more than twenty years ago" (iii). It grew out of a program anthology named Expositor that was begun in 1968 (Trimmer), but its recent editions include relatively few pieces by students. For example, the 1999-2000 edition of Ball Point has only ten essays, comprising thirty out of the 256 pages in the book, less than twelve percent of the handbook.
3. The Program's Web site explains that in effect, these connected Stretch Program classes (WAC 101 followed by English 101 for native speakers of English; WAC 107 followed by English 107 for international students) provide students the opportunity for extended experience at working with many and various ways of both reading and writing. Students usually have the same teacher, work with the same group of students, and often even have the same classroom for both semesters. . . . The Stretch Program is designed specifically for those university students who lack experience with the kinds of academic writing they will be asked to do at ASU. CHAPTER 5
PUBLISHING FOR MULTIPLE AUDIENCES A SYNTHESIS AT FLORIDA STATE
"I say, 'OK, you've had two semesters now of first-year writing. Show me what you can do.'"
Paul Reifenheiser, Teaching Assistant Florida State University Interview, 10 April 2001
Publishing first-year students' writing at Florida State University appears to take a direction that falls between the subjective approaches found at schools like Boston College and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the epistemic approaches used at schools like Arizona State University and the University of Arizona. Florida State's First-Year Writing Program combines elements of both approaches in its pedagogy, and it supports a program anthology, Our Own Words, as well as classbooks, many of which take the form of zines. The publications have origins in the same trends and impulses that gave rise to such collections as the University of Massachusetts-Amherst's Program Anthology and classbooks and Arizona State's Guide to Composition and OurStories. Lacking a clear institutional mandate and significant financial support to publish students' work that shaped the publications at these other schools, however, Florida State's teachers and students developed approaches based on lore from other universities and ideas borrowed from popular culture. At the start of this research project, I was reluctant to consider the books of first-year students' writing from Florida State. On one hand, my insider's perspective inclined me to regard the publications positively; on the other hand, the perspective made me skeptical about the quality of the work in the collections and sensitive to shortcomings in them that outside observers might overlook. Moreover, the primary aim of the research was to examine the array of publishing at writing programs throughout the country. I was most interested to discover how other schools published their students' papers. Comparing Florida State's approach with
72 73 publication programs at other colleges and universities was a secondary consideration. Nevertheless, when the survey of anthologies and class books from other schools provided few examples of student-edited publications, I reconsidered the lessons that collections of first-year students' writing at Florida State might hold. The data from the survey justifies discussing publications from Florida State's First-Year Writing Program for two reasons. First, the program anthology at the school represents a synthesis of the transactional and the subjective rhetorical approaches to publishing student writing. As such it illustrates how a writing program attempts to balance pedagogical and administrative aims to take advantage of the benefits that program anthologies offer. Second, the class anthologies that have evolved in the program represent a distinctive, and I believe significant, alternative for publishing student writing--an alternative that encourages the control students have over their work as well as the responsibility they have for it and that appears to synthesize the genre of students' "think pieces" that Ruth Mirtz discusses with the folk and popular lore that students share (193).
OUR OWN WORDS In a sense, Our Own Words: A Student's Guide to First-Year Writing is the only collection of first-year student writing that Florida State's first-year writing program publishes. It receives financial support from the English Department in the form of staff time, photocopying expenses, and relatively permanent disk space on an Internet server maintained by the department. These facts set Our Own Words the program anthology apart from the class publications that students develop in sections of first-year writing that the students produce largely with their own resources. Although an increasing number of students use computers in the university's computer-mediated classrooms to compose, design, edit their work and many now publish the work on temporary disk space on an English department's servers.
Characteristics, Contents, and History Produced annually by the English Department's First-Year Writing Program, Our Own Words dates from 1995. My research examined the six editions from 1996 through 2001. More 74
than 70 percent of every issue consists of students' writing. Most of the students' texts are personal-experience essays. Each edition of the anthology except the one for 1998-1999 also includes at least one research paper by a student.1 In every collection, supplementary material such as successive drafts and process memos accompany the essays. Pieces by teachers--for example, a "Preface" on program policies, an article about "What Goes on in ENC1101," and a guide to "Computer Labs on Campus"-- precede the students' text, but they never constitute more than twenty-eight percent of an edition. Over the years, the number of texts in Our Own Words gradually increases, as can be seen in Table 5-1. For example, the 1996-1997 and 1997-1998 editions include eight papers by
Table 5-1: Number of Pieces per Edition of Our Own Words (The number of pieces with successive drafts or other supporting material, or both, appears in parentheses) 1996- 1997- 1998- 1999- 2000- 2001- 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 Students' Personal Essays 7 (4) 7 (3) 7 (6)* 9 (7)* 4 (2)* 7 (4)* Research Studies 1 1 (1) * 1 (1)* 4 (2)* 3 (1) Online Texts 4 3 Poems/Mixed 2 (2)* 1 * Cartoons 5 Teachers' Articles 2 3 3 * 4 * 5 * 5 * Total Texts 10 11 12 14 17 19
______* All the pieces in these issues are available on the Internet, but except as indicated by "exclusively online texts," their authors did not write them to appear online with hypertext links.
** A complementary anthology, Readers Writing, published this year carried eight research papers, one with a supporting first draft. 75 students, the 1998-1999 edition presents nine, and the 1999-2000 edition ten. Although the printed version of this latest, 2001-2002, edition contains only eight students' essays, the online version carries those eight plus another three. The number of pieces by teachers in the anthology grows as well: from two in the 1996-1997 edition to five in the 2000-2001. The "Acknowledgments" in the second, third, and fourth editions says that "the essays included in this book represent the best of the First-Year Writing Program" from one or more of the immediately preceding years. It explains that papers are "culled from the McCrimmon Award submissions," which as the Program's Teacher's Guide explains is given annually "for an Outstanding Essay in First-Year Writing . . . to honor FYW students" (Crossley and Loomis 162), and are "chosen both for their quality and variety" ("Acknowledgments"). More recently, the editors of the last three editions comment that the "student-authored essays" are "some of the best papers from the [first-year writing] courses" ("Preface"). The physical appearance of the anthology's editions remains relatively consistent over time. Printed copies of Our Own Words measure 8½ by 11 inch and have heavy paper covers. The 1996-1997 edition uses a stapled and taped binding; the 1998-1999 edition has a hard plastic- rib binding, and the others have comb bindings. The pages are photocopied. Beginning with the 1998-1999 edition, versions of the anthology appear, and all currently remain, on the Internet (http://writing.fsu.edu/oow/)--a practice that, at the time of this research, only a few other universities followed, but which is becoming increasingly commonplace. Some essays in editions from 2000 onward are written as pages on the worldwide web and contain hypertext links to outside sources that are not available in the printed versions. First-year writing staff began work on the first edition of Our Own Words in 1994. Devan Cook and F. Grant Whittle edited it with the encouragement and guidance of Wendy Bishop, who directed the First-Year Writing Program at that time. Bishop, a poet as well as a compositionist, was familiar with a variety of modest, sometimes local, strategies for publishing poetry. Moreover, she had attended Fall conferences at the University of New Hampshire where the writing pedagogy encouraged publishing students' work. Establishing a first-year anthology at Florida State fit the process-oriented curriculum that Bishop found at the school. 76
In an effort to acknowledge and celebrate excellent student writing and provide program information, Our Own Words mixes publishing for subjectivist rhetoric with publishing for transactional rhetoric. As a result, the program anthology falls between publications like those at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Boston College and ones like those at the University of Arizona and Arizona State University. The orientation of first-year writing at Florida State to have student-authors draw on personal experience as a source of knowledge and authority in essays gives the editors of Our Own Words a high percentage of personal experience essays among the papers to publish, and the resulting collections show a subjectivist influence.2 In addition, the editors include supplementary materials with final papers to support the program's emphasis on the process of writing. At the same time, administrative pressures--the practical need to give students a consistent, core statement about the writing program's goals, methods, policies, and resources--led the founding editors to include explanatory articles, written by faculty, along with the students' texts. The McCrimmon Award winning essays usually appear first among the students' essays in the editions of Our Own Words, and subsequent papers generally relate to "strands," or thematic sequences of assignments, that the writing program uses. For example, the 1996-1997, 1997- 1998, and 1998-1999 editions do not group students' papers in categories, but they occasionally identify them with subheadings such as "Literacy Essay," "Personal Essay," "Public Discourse Essay," and "I-Search Paper" to indicate the type of assignment for which the authors had written. The 1999-2000 edition arranges students' essays according to categories of "Family and Local Discourse," "University Discourse," and "Public Discourse" -- privileging the "Discourse" strand. In 2000 and 2001, Dan Melzer, the editor for those years, established new sections for students' papers in the printed versions of the anthology. The 2000-2001 edition grouped work under "Personal Writing" and "Research Writing," each containing four essays. These two categories reappeared in the 2001-2002 edition and were joined by section for "Literacy Narratives." In addition, the development of texts written for the Worldwide Web inspired new sections in the online versions of Our Own Words--"Writing about Popular Culture" and "Hypertext Writing" in the 2000-2001 edition which were combined under "Hypertext Writing" in the 2001-2002 edition--for essays that incorporate the authors' research. 77
Editorial Policies and Pedagogical Use "We like all of these essays; there are no negative examples here," wrote Devan Cook in the 1996-1997 edition of Our Own Words. "They were chosen by teachers to be submitted to the McCrimmon Award decision process, and they all received high votes. Our concern to keep this guide short (and inexpensive . . .) is the only reason that all McCrimmon submissions were not included" (8). Although the choice of essays for Our Own Words relates directly to the James M. McCrimmon Award, the selection involves more than culling "from the McCrimmon Award submissions (Crossley and Loomis 162)." An assistant to the director of the Program has responsibility for editing Our Own Words. The editor for the anthology also chairs the McCrimmon Committee, coordinating the review of essays for the award. During the spring, the editor enlists volunteer teachers to serve on the committee and circulates announcements to teachers encouraging them to contribute work from their classes. "All FYW teachers are invited to submit students' work . . . only the work of one student per class" (Teacher's Guide 162). Award guidelines require "one clean final draft with no comments, grade, or identifying labels" for the review. In addition, the editor asks teachers for "drafts of the essay, including prewriting lists" and "a process sheet that tells about the student[- author]'s writing and thinking processes during the composition of the paper" (163). Following the deadline for submissions, the editor circulates the unmarked copies of the essays among the committee members and, after the volunteers have had time to read and rank the papers, polls the members for their initial ranking of the pieces. Finally committee members discuss the results of the voting, debate the qualities of the top papers, and vote to select the winning and the honorable mention essays for the year. An unwritten writing program policy, tradition developed from a practice adopted by the founding editors, calls for each edition of Our Own Words to include the winning McCrimmon essay and those receiving honorable mention for the year. Before the development of online versions, editions also carried the winning essay from the year before. By maintaining online versions of the anthology, however, the program makes all the preceding essays--award winning, honorable mention, and otherwise--accessible without having to reprint them in successive years. As a consequence, the editors of the edition since 2001 work exclusively with papers from the 78
preceding year. Most essays other than the McCrimmon winners in an edition come from the pool submitted for the year's award. To illustrate the work that authors put into a publishable paper, editors of Our Own Words favor submissions with early drafts and discussions of the authors' composing processes. For example, five of the eleven papers in the 2001-2002 edition include a "rough draft" as well as the "Final Draft," and four of those five are accompanied by a "Process Memo" as well. Ultimate selection of papers for an edition of Our Own Words rests with the editor for the year.3 Once the selection of essays is made, the editor copy edits the manuscripts for grammar, spelling and punctuation; compiles them; and posts them to a site on the World Wide Web.4 The writing program encourages teachers to use the students' essays in Our Own Words (OOW) in their class activities. For example, the Teacher's Guide recommends using them in several ways: • "A selection of final versions in OOW is an excellent reading assignment before a discussion of what is 'good' writing"; • "Any of the essays in OOW which are similar to the kind of writing assignment you have given, such as a literacy narrative or a position shift paper, are excellent supportive reading assignments"; • "Many of the essays in OOW include rough drafts and process memos, and can be used to model and discuss revision"; and • "Use the rough drafts and final versions of students' texts for practicing new responding techniques before workshopping each others' texts; for practicing a revising technique before moving to their own drafts; for practicing editing techniques, etc." (Melzer 12)
Encouragement to use papers in Our Own Words goes beyond written advice. A summer training program for new teaching assistants in the First-Year Writing Program includes sessions on how to use the essays, and it further familiarizes new teachers with the papers by having them to practice responding and grading the sample "rough drafts" in the anthology. In the Spring semester, a Pedagogy Workshop, required for new teaching assistants, asks the assistants to develop classroom exercises that use essays in the edition of the anthology that will be available in the following Fall and Spring. 79
CLASS ANTHOLOGIES AND ZINES The First-Year Writing Program makes dozens of class publications available in its file. Left by proud teachers, they come from students in Florida State’s standard writing courses, ENC 1101 and 1102, and in sections of courses dedicated to writing about special topics, ENC 1142, 1144, and 1145. Teachers may assign either of two types of publication: "classbooks," which resemble the class publications produced at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Arizona State, and "zines," more varied in form and eclectic in contents than the classbooks. Both types are student-edited, do-it-yourself productions: compiled, edited, and published--in large part, if not entirely--by the students who wrote the texts they contain.5 The Program keeps a selection tor teachers to show as samples of class publication projects.
Characteristics, Contents, and History Many classbooks and zines lack such information as the publication date, the editor/authors' names, and the name of the class for which they had been created. The majority of printed class publications physically resemble printed versions of Our Own Words: they measure 8½ by 11 inches and have photocopied pages between heavy paper covers with comb or stapled binding. But the files contain other formats as well. A few use a 5½ by 8½ inch size. Several others are unconventionally packaged--rolled into the tops of open beer bottles, cut and pieced together to resemble a jigsaw puzzle, folded into a toy lunch box, or some other creative presentation--to support the theme of the collected papers. The student-edited publications differ most noticeably from the teacher-edited Our Own Words in their frequent use of graphics such as photographs, drawings, unusual type fonts, and other visual elements. Other than the graphics, the only obvious difference between full-classbooks containing at least one text from every student in a section and zines produced by small groups or individual students is the number of pieces they contain. Zines, most with texts by fewer than six authors, outnumber the classbooks in the Program's files. The writing in these small-group publications ranges widely in genre. Along with personal experience essays and research reports, the collections contain arguments about issues in current events; art, book, film, and music reviews; poems; letters to real and fictional family and 80
friends; horoscopes, recipes, special interest quizzes, compilations of riddles, jokes, campus phrases and other jargon, pick-up lines; mock advertisements; and other pieces that defy easy characterization. Playdog: Entertainment for FSU Students from December 1996, one of the oldest zines on file, serves as a representative example. It seems to have been produced by five students (Helsby et al.). Their names and pictures appear on a page immediately after the "Table of Contents," but they are only identified by the epigram "4 conservatives and the liberal." It contains eleven pieces: four opinion essays, gripes about conditions at the university; four sketches of embarrassing moments or of people the authors have encountered; one fictional projection of how the author "Finally Found a Use for . . . [His] Political Science Degree"; and two anecdotal lists, the first a horoscope and the second itemizing characteristics that mark new students on campus. Three of the pieces include the authors' names, each presumably one of the five editors. Another example, College Wave, from Spring semester 1999, carries more identifying information than most of the zines in the archive (Austin et al.). On its first page, five author- editors address their audience with "Dear Readers," provide biographical notes about themselves, and explain that "this magazine was made for the average college student, written by the average college student. We have submitted papers and ads in hopes of helping students get through the rough times. As we understand the trials that may occur, . . . here is a bit of help to continue you along your prosperous college career" (i). The "Table of Contents" for the zine identifies the author of each piece, and each piece carries the name of its author. The publication contains five research essays, five book reviews, three advice columns (one of which includes a quiz), three editorials, three poems, two reviews of poetry readings, two reviews of popular music concerts, a review of an art exhibit, a review of a wrestling extravaganza, a travel column, and five parodies of conventional magazine advertisements. The topics of the pieces--the influence of calculators and computers on education and society, living conditions in dormitories, fast food in the diet of an undergraduate, and date rape suggest--that the authors have a good sense of their prospective readers' interests. Teachers at Florida State were aware of class anthologies before Bishop, Cook, and Whittle introduced Our Own Words. Bishop used them in graduate and undergraduate 81 workshops she taught, and some teaching assistants had used them at universities where they had taught before coming to Tallahassee. Melissa Standley, who began teaching in the program in the early 1990s, wrote "Creating a Classbook in First-Year Writing" for the 1995-1996 edition of the Teacher's Guide. The article offers step-by-step instructions for incorporating a publication project in a plan for a semester course. Thus, the do-it-yourself approach to publishing first-year students' writing was firmly in place by 1995. Stephanie Harrell, a teaching assistant and zine enthusiast, combined the idea of class anthologies with zines. She was interested in alternative culture and had a collection of zines that she had gathered around the country. Her innovation tapped into the youth culture of the time, adding visual interest and a sense of play to the idea of publishing class papers. Paul Reifenheiser, a former teaching assistant who entered the graduate program and began teaching at Florida State in 1996, adopted the idea from Harrell. In an interview, he recalled his internship in "her [class] one summer, and she was working [with her students] on this zine project. . . . What I did [as a teacher the following Fall] was take some of her zines–which she had incorporated, some of the ones her students had made and . . . actual zines that she had access to--and I showed them to my students as examples." Some of his students produced Playdog. Reifenheiser encouraged fellow teachers to use the assignment because of its emphasis on publishing and its appeal to undergraduates. Others tried zines in their classes. In March 1998, he and Harrell led a workshop for teachers on using the zines. That same year Reifenheiser contributed "The What the Hell Is a Zine? Assignment" to the program's Teacher's Guide, and all subsequent editions of the Guide have carried the article.
Editorial Policies and Pedagogical Uses Like the class publications at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, the classbooks from Florida State's first-year writing classes include one paper or more from each in a section that produces a book. In effect, the entire class collaborates to publish a volume. In "Creating a Classbook," Standley advises teachers to "assume four pages for each student, which allows for one essay and a one-page Contributor's Note" (112). By comparison, zines usually grow out of 82 the effort of a workshop group.6 Reifenheiser's article recommends that teachers "create or place students in already existing groups of 4-6 students" (61) to work on such a project. The work of publishing the students' collected texts is similar for classbooks and zines. Standley provides a list of thirteen "Things to Do." They include explaining the project "at the beginning of the semester," having "students come up with a title . . . [and] a cover," reviewing "mechanical and publishing conventions," and establishing "a committee of students [to] collect . . . money . . ., take the photo-ready copy to the copy shop, . . ., and get a receipt" (112). Reifenheiser parses essentially the same steps through a sample course calendar (61). In his view, it is best to avoid giving lengths or page limits. Tell . . . [students] you want a lot of effort, but let them know that the key is quality not how many pages they can pump out. I usually just say the work should reflect the amount of time they had to work on the project; that scares them pretty well. Students really should have at the minimum three weeks to work on the zine, but I would say that four weeks is the optimum time frame. (60)
In practice, teachers give students two weeks to four weeks to compile, edit, and publish their classbooks and zines, usually at the end of a semester. Students adapt papers that they have written during the semester for their collections, and in some cases, they write one or more new pieces to include as well. If teachers require additional new writing for the publications, they devote an extra week or two to the project. Although generally less formal than the compositions in classbooks, the writing in zines can be more demanding. Standley encourages having students include essays from texts they have written for class, but she refrains from suggesting which essays teachers or students should select (112). The choice for her presumably belongs either to the teacher, the student, or some combination of them. As a result, the audience for the classbook and the relationship of the pieces in it become a direct consequence of sequence of papers each teacher assigns. By comparison, Reifenheiser advocates stricter standards for zines. He recommends five guidelines:
1. targeting an audience: . . . students must choose a target audience and make sure that heir writing will be intriguing to that specific audience . . . . 2. having a theme: . . . however, I allow them to . . . write whatever they want as long as it pertains to their target audience; . . . 83
3. developing myriad types of writing: students are encouraged to allow their talents to flow; 4. integrating pictures and ads: . . . to learn the relationship between words and images; 5. [including] outside writing: . . . usually only . . . one piece per zine (by that I mean a top ten list they like or a joke but they must give credit where it is due); I want the bulk of the writing to be my students'. However, some . . . [first-year writing teachers] allow no outside writing, and others allow for any amount as long as it is augmented by a serious amount of the students' own work (60).
Thus, the standards for zines are more open in terms of subject matter and more flexible in terms of genres but often more challenging in terms of rhetorical effort than those for classbooks. If the editorial policies theoretically allow the students to include whatever they want, in application, students' choice of pieces for their zines favors the essays and other texts they have written for their first-year class almost as much as classbooks do. Nevertheless, in order to contribute the prescribed number of texts, students turn by default to the work they have done during the semester. On one hand, the resulting publications are merely a variation on the classbook that Standley recommends and that teachers at many other schools use. On the other hand, zines differ in a significant detail: they give students greater authority for the choosing the contents and greater responsibility for shaping the texts. The experience of Tenneco Cunningham reflects the difference. She and four classmates produced College Wave for a section ENC 1102 in 1999. Her teacher, Matt Bondurant, had used classbooks in his teaching at James Madison University where he earned a Master's degree in English. During an interview, he remembered that "There were just a couple of other people there--colleagues of mine--graduate students like myself that were doing it [using classbooks]. . . . I think it was passed along to me by somebody, and I know I did it my last year there." The approach at James Madison was, however, "a sort of rougher version than" the one he developed at Florida State as he combined it with the idea of class zines. He characterized his approach at Florida State as asking students to "choose an overall theme to their anthology and revise/adjust their previously written material to focus on that theme." He made them "responsible for all layout and artistic concerns as well." Although he gave "them a list of a few requirements," he said "they can (and usually do) go way beyond that." 84
Cunningham described in an interview how "we were randomly assigned group members. . . . It was kind of a mini-magazine, and we could choose to feature any types of stories that we wanted to, but it had to pertain to college life. . . . The first step was--we got each others phone numbers and called each other and arranged . . . [a] meeting . . . to get everything together." The freedom and authority that were built into the assignment engaged the group. Discussing how the group chose the texts their zine should contain, she said, "Each one of us wrote down beforehand what we thought should be included. And then when we got together, . . . we were all talking about --'Okay, well I think we should really talk about this because this is what affects college life.' And we just sort of voted on it; that was how." Work on zines involves students with finding appropriate subject matter to attract to the audience they target as well as polishing texts to appeal to the readers. Cunningham recalls that We enjoyed writing it. It was just hard to condense it because it was a magazine. We were used to going on and on in our papers, but it [the assignment] was [to publish] a magazine, so we didn't want to make really, really long, detailed discussions in there because we were trying to attract college students to this magazine. . . . We felt that that would like sway readers to think--"OK, forget it"- -[to] get halfway through and just put it [College Wave] down. So we tried to keep it short, to the point, but still interesting and covering as much information. But I feel like we did a pretty good job of that. I remember we got into like this big discussion over whether or not to put things that advocated like safe sex on campus in there. And I can't remember: I think we decided just to put something in there like a little ad, because it was between that and a little ad about services that provide like paper for students. But those two stood out because we kind of like--"Well, no, do we really want to advocate condoms, giving out condoms on campus or you know advocate a service where students can actually go and purchase like a term paper or something." . . . But we decided. I think we put both ads in there.
The zine assignment gives students responsibility for organizing the production of the publication as well as for writing and editing the text. To introduce the project, many teachers pass around copies of zines from the writing program's archive to show what students have accomplished in similar classes. Teachers occasionally assign students specific roles in the publishing process such as managing editor, graphics coordinator, and webmaster. In some 85
classes, teachers include assignments in which involve writing "a formal application for one of the zine jobs [and a] resume (Caneen 2). Other teachers have students divide tasks among themselves. Teachers may expect students to develop a written schedule of work. Most teachers, however, quickly ask students to take the initiative. For example, Cunningham says that for Bondurant and College Wave, We weren't given like a set of formal procedures to follow as far as "this has to be done by this date, that has to be done [by that date]." We were just given, "this is your assignment, and it . . . [is] due by . . . the end of the semester." . . . Within the group, we had to get together and decide how many times we would need to meet before the deadline, so that we could have everything together. I think . . . we met . . . three times--three or four times--and we based it on how far we got each time we met. The first time, of course, was to determine the topics we would include. And then . . . after that meeting, then our next step was- -"Okay, everybody, this is what topic you're doing; this is what topic I'm doing"-- and each of us got research on our topics and put it together on our own. And the next meeting, we just brought everything together that we had, and then we arranged--"Okay, how are we going to put everything, as far as like entertainment, sports, health; how are we going to align everything?" So we took care of that. And the last meeting was basically just all of us: we had everything together, and we just were looking at it to make sure, kind of like a final critique to make sure we had everything correct and everything was all typed up. And that was the final meeting. . . . I believe it was Verlanda, took it to Target Copy and got it bound.
In "Creating a Classbook," teacher Melissa Standley lists several benefits in using student- edited classbooks. The advantages she sees resemble those long identified by writing teachers familiar with program anthologies or class publications, or both: By collaboratively creating a classbook, students will learn to see their writing as writing rather than as assignments. In creating a classbook, students will: 1. Write for an audience other than the teacher. 2. Publish their writing. 3. Discuss reasons for mechanical conventions and publishing conventions in a meaningful context. 4. Discuss reasons for deadlines in a meaningful context. 5. Edit essays prior to publication. 6. Take more responsibility for the class. (Students vote on very important decisions concerning the classbook, rather than the teacher making those decisions.) 86
By doing classbooks, students tend to become more excited about the class and about writing in general. Having a classbook to take home with them also gives them a memento of the class. (112)
Teachers who use zines hope to add to these benefits by increasing students' awareness of their readers' interests and needs. The zine assignment complements and reinforces work on analyzing and writing for a specific audience. According to Reifenheiser, "targeting an audience . . . is a key" goal for zines ("The . . . Zine? Assignment" 60). The publications, he says, "allow students to delve into myriad forms of writing and apply much of what they have learned in both their 1101 and 1102 classes." Over the years, groups in sections of his first-year composition courses lived together for a week and their zine was a spin off of MTV's the real world at FSU; . . . created a gossip Zine about . . . [the] class; . . . written solely to make fun of the South . . .; created the Elderly Broadcast System and made a TV Zine devoted just to people over 65; and of course . . .written about teen issues, sex, drugs, cars, freshman guides to living at FSU (60).
Teachers' enthusiasm for the classbooks and zines does not, however, establish the value of such publications beyond that associated with learning a bit about publishing and experiencing the validation of seeing ones' work in print. To learn whether additional benefit accrues, it is necessary to compare texts from different schools' anthologies. 87
Endnotes for Chapter 5 1. The 1997-1998 edition reprints the same research paper that appears in the 1996-1997.
2. The 1998-1999 edition of Our Own Words contains no research papers because none were submitted for the McCrimmon Award in 1998. To provide samples of students' research papers for the edition, teaching assistants Dan Melzer and Pat Hendricks compiled and edited a second program anthology, Readers Writing: Student's Guide to ENC1102. It contained five formal "Research Papers," three "I-Search Papers," and three "Responses to Essays" in a textbook. The following year, program staff encouraged teachers to submit their students' research work to the Award committee, and the 1999-2000 edition of Our Own Words included a student's research paper. Every edition since that time has includes several research pieces.
3. Until recently he or she limited the choice restricted to McCrimmon submissions. To increase the diversity of writing, however, the editor for 2000-2001 and 2001-2002 included research papers and hypertext pieces that were not reviewed for the award.
4. Before 2003, the Writing Program produced printed editions of Our Own Words which required the editor to produce a master copy of the year's edition. The master went to a local photocopy shop which printed, bound, and sold the anthology to students on request, at the cost of photocopying and binding. More than 600 copies were sold in Fall 2001, the last semester for which records exist. In exchange for the right to sell the publication, the photocopy shop gave the writing program enough complimentary copies to supply teaching assistants with desk copies.
5. Zine editors occasionally publish pieces written by classmates who are not members of the editorial group.
6. Of course, teacher may, and occasionally do, have a full section collaborate on one zine. CHAPTER 6
DATES, APPLES, ORANGES, AND GUAVAS: COMPARING STUDENTS' WRITING
"Coherence is a troublesome problem for most students. . . . Cultivating the habit of thinking in an orderly, logical fashion is the best way to insure that they will express their thoughts coherently. But the practiced writers use a number of linguistic devices to assist the coherent display of their thoughts."
Edward P.J. Corbett and Robert J. Connors. "Study of Style." Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. 4th ed. 365.
Comparing the papers students write in different first-year programs may be unreasonable. The anthologies considered in this research project alone contain hundreds of diverse pieces. The subjects and themes students address in them, like those of thousands of papers written each year for other composition classes, are often fixed by the assignments teachers give. Likewise, the acceptability of different genres and styles of writing may be dictated by composition programs or teachers as well. Such variations do not account for the significant differences in students' backgrounds that school admissions and course registration bring to bear on students' writing. When teachers, as some do, give students freedom to write on any topic that first-year student authors find of interest, the resulting array of papers becomes virtually impossible to encompass and--in terms of one student's interest or insight, or both, versus another's--arguably unfair to assess, especially from one composition program to another. Nevertheless, compositionists and administrators inevitably do compare students’ papers. The writing in them becomes--reasonable or not, fair or not--a measure of ability and academic potential. In fact as this project has shown, administrators have occasionally produced anthologies of students' writing to showcase superior texts for new first-year students, prospective first-year students, first-year students' parents, and others who pay for first-year
88 89 writing instruction. That fact alone justifies some analysis of the texts in the publications, in spite of its limitations. If the analysis suggests insights for composition pedagogy, all the better. Understanding the backgrounds of the five writing programs gave useful perspective for selecting published students' texts to examine. With both program anthologies and classbooks, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst had one of the most fully developed first-year publication programs. Regrettably, papers by its students were impractical for analysis because the rights to quoting from its classbooks were not available (Moran, Interview). Essays in the University of Arizona's Student's Guide to First-Year Composition seemed inappropriate for analysis as well because programs had a similar intellectual lineage: the program administrators at each had all the student-authored texts it contained were selected to support a rhetoric rather than as pieces to feature in an anthology. The papers in Boston College's Fresh Ink (1999), Arizona State's Our Stories (1999), and Florida State's Our Own Words (1999) and College Wave (1999), however, offered intriguing possibilities. The three publications grew out of the founding editors' experiences with publishing students' writing elsewhere. Lad Tobin, at Boston College, had worked at the University of New Hampshire studying under Donald Murray; his colleague Eileen Donovan-Kranz worked at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst using anthologies that Murray inspired; Greg Glau, at Arizona State, worked at the University of Arizona using its Students Guide; and Bishop, at Florida State, had taught writing in reservation schools in Arizona and had participated in workshops with Murray and others at the University of New Hampshire. Fresh Ink, Our Stories, and Our Own Words in effect constituted second-generation approaches to publishing, informed by the founding editors' experience with first-year publishing elsewhere. The pedagogical orientation of the schools provided a potentially significant contrast. Boston College's Fresh Ink, a heavily teacher-edited compilation, developed from a subjective approach to composition; whereas Arizona State's Our Stories, a student-edited anthology, grew out of an epistemic pedagogy. If these two publications presented opposite poles, Florida State's Our Own Words and College Wave seemed to represent a synthesis and an antithesis. The teacher-edited Our Own Words evolved from subjective ideas developed in an epistemic environment, but the student-edited College Wave, and other zines produced in the Florida State 90 program, emerged as an alternative, youth-cultural publication. What might the texts show about students' writing? This project analyzed the subject, theme, genre, form, and style of eight papers. I selected four papers according to the approach formulated at the start of the research-- the second piece in each of the anthologies. Because this number of publications from which texts were taken was smaller than anticipated at the beginning of the study, I added another four--the third piece in each publication--as a check against the first four. The papers were Karin Johnson's untitled essay and Michael Henderson's "Writing Project #3" in Our Stories, Craig Modzelesky's "Thwarting the Devil" and Jennifer Connor's "Works Well with Others" in Fresh Ink, Kate Daniel's "The Fire" and Doria Doggett's "Beginning Under the Stars" Our Own Words, and Joshua Russell's "Technology: Harmful or Helpful?" and Verlanda Lundi's "Travel: Color Me Caribbean" (College Wave).
SUBJECT AND THEME The subjects and themes addressed in the papers are remarkably similar. (See Table 6-1.) Subjects such as dealing with a disability, experience with one's first car, confronting a neighborhood bully are commonplace among the papers. If a typology of students' essays subject were ever compiled, these topics would belong on it with the ones, mentioned in the "Introduction" to this study, that Newkirk, Peterson, and Tobin identified. The frequent theme of lessons learned conforms to the themes that Newkirk described in The Presentation of Self and supports his observations. Similarities in the comparison of texts according to their subject or theme probably reveal more about teachers and writing programs than about students' ability with writing. 91
Table 6-1: Focus of Selected Essays
Subject Theme Genre Our Stories Johnson dealing with disability: life's lessons learned personal experience stress, migraine essay Henderson the first car: life's lessons learned personal experience customizing a van essay Fresh Ink Modzelesky confronting a a personal triumph personal experience neighborhood bully essay Connor pranks played on friends life's lessons learned personal experience and acquaintances essay Our Own Words Daniel dealing with a traumatic life's lesson's learned personal experience natural event essay Doggett homage for and life's lessons learned personal experience differences with a essay family member: dad College Wave Russell impact of computer change is inevitable; it brings research essay technology positives and negatives Lundi Caribbean travel enjoy advice column
GENRE Comparing genres of first-year writing students' papers presents much the same difficulty as comparing subject or theme because teachers and programs limit the kinds writing students do. Nevertheless, where such comparisons have been attempted, they yield relevant results. For example, in a study of the genres students write in composition courses, Robert Brook and Dale Jacobs made three discoveries: First, when given the choice, many college students write in a wide number of genres, from fiction and poetry to argument, editorial, analysis, and reflection, from private journal to public announcements. Second, the reflective writing student complete about their 92
writing (in learning letters, author's notes . . . ) is easily as important in their experience as the "writing" itself, . . . . And third, while students in any class choose a wide number of genres and most students experiment with more than one genre each semester, in any give week a significant number of students' pieces (especially in the first-year courses) take the form of a related set of personal experience genres: the personal experience narrative, the reflective essay, the travel essay, the character essay, and the opinion essay using personal narrative as the main expository method. (219)
The genres of the eight selected pieces support Brooke and Jacobs's findings. Six, or 75%, of them--Johnson's, Henderson's, Modzelesky's, Connor's, Daniel's, and Doggett's--are personal essays. Russell's piece, a research essay, brings the total proportion for essaying in the anthologies to seven of eight, 87.5%. Only Lundi's advice column in College Wave uses a different genre. A look at the genres of all the pieces in Our Stories, Fresh Ink, Our Own Words, and College Wave shows that the eight selected texts are representative of the writing in the publications. The four anthologies contain sixty-seven texts which use five genres: personal experience essays, research essays, reviews, advice columns and poems (Table 6-2). Of the sixty- seven, thirty-nine, 58.2%, are personal experience essays--further supporting Brooks and Jacobs's observations.
Table 6-2: Genres of Selected Essays in Our Own Words Personal Experience Research Advice Essays Essays Reviews Columns Poems Totals Our Stories 7 (100.0%) 7 Fresh Ink 22 (91.7%) 2 (8.3%) 24 Our Own Words 9 (90.0%) 1 (10.0%) 10 College Wave 1 (3.8%) 4 (15.4%) 11 (42.3%) 7 (26.9%) 3 (11.5%) 26 Totals 39 (58.2%) 7 (10.4%) 11 (16.4%) 7 (10.4%) 3 (4.6%) 67
Among the three program anthologies by themselves, the proportion of personal essays is even higher than for the four publications. In Our Stories, all the pieces, 100%, are personal 93 experience essays; in Fresh Ink, twenty-two, 91.7%, are; and in Our Own Words, nine, 90%, are. Johnson's and Henderson's essays employ the same personal experience conventions as the other pieces in Our Stories. Likewise, Modzelesky's and Connor's essays fit the modal genre in Fresh Ink, as do Daniel's and Doggett's in Our Own Words. Thus apparently the editors of the program anthologies--whether teachers in the case of Fresh Ink and Our Own Words or students in the case of Our Stories--either favored personal essays or found themselves with no publishable examples of other genres because the teachers emphasized essays, or both. In comparison, the editors of College Wave included fewer personal essays than other genres. It contained only one such text. The anthology was exceptional in presenting genres other than essays. The research essay genre that Russell uses and the advice column that Lundi uses, although not as common in College Wave as reviews, are the third and second most frequently used genres in that publication. The data imply that the student-editors of College Wave preferred genres other than personal essays. Of course the sample is too small to support a firm conclusion.
STRUCTURE The arrangement of paragraphs in a text and the contribution each paragraph makes to it combine to create forms, and the forms allow for structural characterization and comparison. For example, the five-paragraph essay has a bisymmetrical, tripartite form, or structure. As illustrated in Figure 6-1, the first and fifth paragraphs create a frame around the three central, or core,
¶ No. Sample Opening Phrase Function 1 Let me begin by saying that . . . introduction and statement of a thesis 2 In the first place, . . . first example to support the thesis 3 Next, . . . second example to support the thesis 4 The last reason . . . third example to support the thesis 5 Thus it should be clear that . . . conclusion/summary Figure 6-1: Structure of the Five-Paragraph Essay 94 paragraphs. Thus, the full text exhibits bisymmetry in the balanced arrangement of the frame around the balanced core, and it exhibits a tripartite structure in its division into three units: opening, core, and closing. (See Appendix B for a discussion of the method used to analyze the structure of papers.) Most people educated in American high schools know the form. For many, it provides a reliable organizing formula; although for many first-year writing teachers in colleges and universities, it represents a clichéd anathema. Accomplished writers move beyond the five- paragraph essay and develop structures tailored to their subjects and themes. As writers gain experience, they learn to let the ideas they want to communicate shape the form, as well as other characteristics, of their texts. The eight essays selected for analysis differed from the five-paragraph form in varying measures such as total number of words, number of paragraphs, number of sentences, and sentence length. Four of them contain fewer than ten paragraphs: Johnson's essay, Henderson's "Writing Project #3," Russell's "Technology: Harmful or Helpful?" and Lundi's "Travel: Color Me Caribbean." Their brevity lends them to compact comparison. (See Table 6-3.) 95
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Johnson's, Henderson's, Russell's, and Lundi's essays all contain paragraphs that function in pairs or in threes, and all except Lundi's exhibit bisymmetry. All of them contain paragraphs that function in pairs or in threes, and all except Lundi's exhibit bisymmetry. In Johnson's essay, two paragraphs open the piece and two close it. (See Figure 6-2.) Her third paragraph makes a
¶ No. Opening Phrase Function 1 Reflecting on my childhood, I realize introduction, health condition 2 My mother and father were . . . worried further introduction, parents' perspective 3 By my senior year, my . . . behavior transition, condition during "senior year" 4 That very morning, I got up from bed key event, the change 5 Those awful migraines . . . disappeared the result of the event 6 I strongly believe reflection on the event 7 I am happy to say transition, activity after the event 8 I awoke this past Sunday conclusion, current perspective, specifically 9 We may think a change conclusion, current perspective, generally Figure 6-2: Structure of Johnson's Essay transition to the core event in the essay, whereas the third from the end makes a transition to the conclusion. And the core of the paper consists of three paragraphs that describe a moment of enlightenment in Johnson's life. The sections give the essay a ccdAAAb]] pattern. Henderson's "Writing Project #3" is a five-paragraph essay. It exhibits the standard dAAAb form: an introduction and conclusion framing three core paragraphs which discuss lessons about managing money, patience, and perseverance. (See Figure 6-3.) Like Johnson's essay, Russell's eight- paragraph piece, uses two paragraphs to open and two to close, and his third and third-from-last 97
¶ No. Opening Phrase Function 1 Over a period of time we all . . . change introduction, background on buying a car 2 Once I got over all the excitement transition, events following the purchase 3 Learning the value of money lessons: managing money, patience, etc. 4 In the process of rebuilding transition: application of lessons, in detail 5 Through my story conclusion, "how the event changed" him Figure 6-3: Structure of Henderson's "Writing Project #3"
paragraphs of provide transitions into and out of the core paragraphs. (See Figure 6-4.) Unlike Johnson's essay, however, Russell's paper uses two paragraphs rather than three to express the core ideas--effectively subtracting a paragraph from the tripartite core. Thus, the pattern of his essay is ccdAAb]], varying from a triple repetition of threes, but remaining tripartite and bisymmetrical overall.
¶ No. Opening Phrase Function 1 How many times have you used introduction, personal interest 2 Everyone says that the internet further introduction, public interest 3 As I was scanning the internet transition, of 1st authority's research 4 So now the question arises positive view of the discovery 5 Like I walk into a grocery store negative view of the discovery 6 In the essay, "Interview with" transition, 2nd authority's support for negative view 7 The net result of all the use conclusion, specific reflection 8 Technology is the wave conclusion, general reflection
Figure 6-4: Structure of Russell's "Technology: Harmful or Helpful?" 98
Although analysis at the paragraph level becomes unwieldy and impractical for long pieces, Connor's "Works Well with Others" and Daniel's "The Fire," each with seventeen paragraphs, are amenable to such treatment. Nevertheless, these two essays approach the length at which they may be analyzed productively by grouping the paragraphs according to scenes and other functional units and regarding those units as structural elements equivalent to paragraphs in shorter texts. In fact, the increase in the number of paragraphs in them results in part from the convention of starting a new paragraph each time a different speaker begins to speak. Connor's essay is nearly but not perfectly symmetrical. (See Figure 6-5.) To frame the core action, she opens the paper with two paragraphs and closes it with three--which would
¶ No. Opening Phrase Function 1 "Ba-boom, ba-boom." opening, awaiting confession 2 The line of jabbering, opening, approaching confession 3 Ten pairs of miniature feet recalls details of an event two years earlier 4 This festive hour was gym gives background for the event 5 I sat there on the stage describes plotting the trick with a friend 6 "Okay," I said. recounts playing the trick 7 "She tripped me!" recounts tricked boy's reaction 8 By now tears of guilt recounts author's response to the trick 9 I sat there tearful and ready reflection on consequences of the trick 10 Confused and a little bit recounts teacher's response to the trick 11 But if I had just gotten out reflection on the implications of the event 12 That night my mother came reflection at bedtime on feelings of guilt 13 "You are such a good girl." implies her mother's remarks amplify guilt 14 She had always told me recounts how guilt leads to revealing the trick 15 So here I am, telling conclusion, confessing the trick 16 "No," I insist. conclusion, emphasizes shameful intention 17 For a quick moment, I see conclusion, result for the author of confession Figure 6-5: Structure of Connor's "Works Well with Others" 99 core action, she opens the paper with two paragraphs and closes it with three--which would amount to two, thereby adding to the symmetry of the essay, if the short paragraph of dialog were combined with the following one--that sketch a scene at her "annual confession day in Sunday school." Further framing the action, she devotes three paragraphs to establishing the scene for a trick she plays, and she uses three to describe a scene with her mother later on the day of the trick. The paragraph at the center of the essay Connor recounts the trick itself--which she describes with two paragraphs of dialog, two on crying and other immediate consequences of the trick, and two paragraphs on feelings and questions the trick precipitated through the rest of her day at school. In effect, the structure she creates is essentially bisymmetrical and tripartite: ccdddAAAAAAbbb]]]. Daniel's essay opens with a single paragraph describing a scene immediately before the fire, a time when she was innocently fearless, and it closes with one paragraph affirming her return to fearlessness. After the opening, Daniel uses the next seven paragraphs to build the drama of the event and seven to deal with impact it had on her. The two pairs after the opening announce her initial awareness of the fire and describe its advance: the second and third signal the beginning of her fear; the fourth and fifth show her increasing sense of helplessness. The two pairs before the closing illustrate effect the trauma of the fire had on her and recount how she confronted and overcame her fear: the thirteenth and fourteenth suggest the severity of her continuing emotional disability; the fifteenth and sixteenth explain her attitude toward and eventual mastery of her block. Two more paragraphs--the sixth in which "the firemen screamed" and the twelfth in which Daniel would "wake up screaming"--provide points of transition and create an annular frame. The sixth moves the narrative into the core of the essay, and the twelfth moves out of the core. In the core, the two paragraphs that describe activities as the fire neared the author's house balance the two that describe the author's reaction as she learns the source of the fire and sees the fire die. At the center of the piece, Daniel reveals that the fire started when a neighbor "set . . . [his family's] kitchen aflame." The paper illustrates, once again, a bisymmetrical, tripartite form: cddddoAAAAAobbbb]. (See Figure 6-6.) 100
¶ No. Opening Phrase Function 1 It was a steamy . . . night opening, sets the scene before the fire 2 At 2 a.m., I awoke describes growing awareness of the fire 3 "What's going on?" reports the author's instant reaction 4 As the flames grew thicker shifts the scene down the street 5 I stood far away adds detail about the burning house 6 The firemen screamed transition to the immediate impact 7 They ordered us to stay illustrates fear in dog's behavior 8 After an hour, the fire reports growth of the fire 9 A fireman limped onto our deck. reveals the cause of the fire 10 I was shocked recalls author's reflection on the event 11 After four hours, the fire describes aftermath of the fire 12 Being afraid of people transition to lasting emotional impact 13 Six months later my fear of fires recounts an event that illustrates her fear 14 My mother and I went on a trip notes examples that show continuing fear 15 Everyone was sick of my fear illustrates social effects of author's fear 16 At the beginning of the . . . year discusses confronting her fear in an essay 17 I had always been a happy conclusion Figure 6-6: Structure of Daniel's "The Fire"
Often the midpoints of the bisymmetrical pieces selected for analysis in this research contain key information or mark significant turning points in the essays. For example, just as Daniel disclosed the cause of the fire at the center of her piece, Johnson announces at the center of hers that her migraine headaches stopped. Alternatively, Connor shifts at the middle of her essay from describing the trick she played to reflecting on consequences of the event, and Russell makes a turn in the middle of his essay from objective questioning to answering with personal experience. Structural analysis of Modzelesky's and Doggett's essays, his with 60 paragraphs and hers with 30, requires grouping sections into units, often scenes, defined by place, time, and dialog, or 101
some combination of them. In fact, the additional line breaks in Modzelesky's "Thwarting the Devil" between the fourth and fifth paragraphs and the twenty-second and twenty-third paragraphs emphasize the author's intended structuring. Framed between an opening section in which the author describes himself lying in a ravine and a closing section in which the author is back in the ravine, the core of the essay consists of four sections: a pair of scenes that describe boys playing baseball and second pair that describe the prelude to a fight and the resulting fight. (See Figure 6-7.)
¶ No. Opening Phrase Function 1 The ravine is cold opening, disorienting setting leads to events "this morning" 2 The phone woke me flashback recalls preparation for playing baseball 3 I stood in the outfield describes playing until Evan hits the ball into a neighbor's den 4 "Hey, lets look at . . . cards" shifts from game to admiring Evan's baseball cards at his home 5 Billy's ears perked up. reports the author's fight with Billy, flees, and hides 6 So now I'm here. closing, back in the ravine, the author learns he "beat . . . up" Billy. Figure 6-7: Structure of Modzelesky's "Thwarting the Devil"
The bisymmetrical, tripartite arrangement resembles cddbb]. Likewise, Doggett uses a similar form in "Beginning Under the Stars." The opening describes scenes from a camping trip she took with her father, and the closing describes a talk she had with him shortly before she left for college. Richer with detail than the closing, the opening skews the weight of the essay to the beginning. The framing sections surround sections that make transitions and scenes that illustrate the growing distance she felt toward her father during her "teenage years" (30). Four sections comprise the core of the essay. A single paragraph sets up three scenes that illustrate the troubled father-daughter relationship. In the first two scenes, the author initiates the action, and in the 102
third her father starts the action. Nevertheless, the form of the essay, ccodoaååäobo], strongly resembles the familiar bisymmetrical, tripartite pattern. (See Figure 6-8.)
¶ No. Opening Phrase Function 1 Under a winter sky, opening, sketches father-daughter camping excursion 2 In the morning, tells how the author's father taught her about trees 3 Those hiking trips were transition, summarizes the bond between the author and her father 4 My father is, by far, characterizes the author's father: "favorite uncle," his values and rules 5 As I was heading toward transition, father and the author "grow apart" 6 My sister and I had little sets up examples of how the author's behavior irritated her father 7 "Dad, can you maybe" presents dialog 1st scene showing the author's behavior and her father's reaction 8 When my dad was angry, describes 2nd scene showing the author's behavior and her father's reaction 9 "Did ya' call the auto" presents dialog scene showing the father's behavior 10 It always hurt when transition, summarizes the father-daughter relationship in her "senior year" 11 Our arguing came to a climax recalls the precipitating event: father's "rude remark" before "a big performance" 12 In all my life, I have never transition, summarizes "serious" father- daughter conversations 13 "Dodie, do you think" closing, describes father and daughter's reconciliation
Figure 6-8: Structure of Doggett's "Beginning Under the Stars" 103
The structure Lundi uses in "Travel: Color Me Caribbean" lacks the balance of bisymmetry. Her column consists of five paragraphs as Henderson's essay does, but it has a radically different, asymmetrical structure. It consists of two paragraphs, introducing the joys of travel in the Caribbean, followed by three paragraphs, each describing a different island, and lacks a conventional conclusion. (See Figure 6-9.) The result is a list. The cumulative nature of the structure might be more pronounced if the final paragraph provided a greater culminating effect than the one Lundi has written.
¶ No. Opening Phrase Function 1 Are you tired of going introduction, questions to the reader 2 The French Caribbean greets introduction, states the topic and author's authority 3 It's easy to capture characterization of Haiti 4 This tiny island nation characterization of St. Martin 5 If you want to get away characterization of Guadeloupe
Figure 6-9: Structure of Lundi's "Travel: Color Me Caribbean"
Such structural analysis may reveal little about authors' intentions as they wrote. Indeed some, perhaps all, of the authors may have been unaware of structural balance, framing, pairing, and tripling in their work. Many teachers may be largely indifferent to structural distinctions among papers as well. Nevertheless, the forms apparent in the pieces distinguish them and set Lundi's apart from the others in the sample. More important, they suggest a strong tendency for students to compose bisymmetrical, tripartite texts. That proclivity may reflect the continuing influence of the five-paragraph essay model, or it may reflect a deeper cultural pattern: the Western European folk preference for bisymmetrical, tripartite forms in traditional literature and material culture. 104
STYLE Writing styles influence readers--including, perhaps especially, composition teachers. Just as they have preferences for different subjects, topics, genres, and forms, teachers have personal preferences for certain styles of writing. Kate Ronald, a teacher of uncommon frankness, emphasizes this fact in "Style: The Hidden Agenda in Composition Classes or One Reader's Confession" and explains that such preferences may or may not be acknowledged. Program policies, an overt statement of preference, frequently call for writing in one style or another style. For example, such policies underlie the aim of writing across the curriculum approaches that "would assist students in becoming fluent members of whatever disciplinary community they wished to join" (Crowley 27-28, also see Bartholomae and Lindemann). With enough experience in writing, students develop sensitivity to readers' stylistic preferences; they learn to shape their prose style to specific audiences--as the "Outcomes Statement" advanced by the Council of Writing Program Administrators encourages students to do. The texts in the anthologies from first-year programs suggest the degrees to which their authors have mastered style. All the pieces selected for this research contain competent prose, as expected for works in a juried, edited publication. All express the authors' ideas "coherently," to use Corbett and Connors' term. Analyzed according to Corbett, Connors, and Glen's method, the pieces reflect curious areas of similarity and difference. The eight pieces selected for analysis resemble each other in general stylistic features such as the total number of words and the average length of sentences in the full texts. (See Table 6- 3.) They range in length from 2,350 words to 457. All except for Lundi's, which is unusually short, are between 2,350 and 1,500 words long, differing by less than 850 words. All except for Modzelesky's, which has an unusually large number of short sentences, contain sentences with an average of between thirteen and twenty words; five of the pieces have an average sentence length of between only sixteen and twenty words. All except for Modzelesky's and Connor's, both of which rely on unusually short sentences, use sentences with a maximum length of thirty-eight to forty-eight words. Teachers' and editors' preferences probably account for these similarities. Editors' aesthetic choices would also help explain similarities between the length of texts from the same anthology. For example, Johnson's and Henderson's essays from Our Stories and 105
Russell's, and Lundi's from College Wave tend to contain fewer words than Modzelesky's and Connor's from Fresh Ink and Daniel's and Doggett's from Our Own Words--the exception being Johnson's with only fifteen words more than Daniel's. Likewise, Johnson's, Henderson's, Russell's, and Lundi's have fewer than ten paragraphs, whereas Modzelesky's, Connor's, Daniel's, and Doggett's pieces contain more than fifteen paragraphs each. The difference suggests that students, or at least student editors, prefer shorter texts than teacher editors. The sentences in Modzelesky's and Connor's essays are notably shorter than the sentences in the other selected essays as well. The sentence longest in either of the sample texts from Fresh Ink is ten words shorter than the longest in any other sample; the shortest in them is shorter than or equal to the shortest in any other; and the average length per sentence is the lowest and third lowest among the eight pieces. An editorial preference in word and sentence length would have importance because Fresh Ink and Our Own Words are the teacher-edited publications, but Our Stories and College Wave are the student-edited. If sentence length carries any implication for the study, perhaps student editors prefer, or at least allow, more variation in style than teachers.
Looking, as Corbett, Connors, and Glen recommend (23),1 at six hundred to eight hundred word samples from "a central section" of the eight selected essays brings to light additional stylistic similarities and differences. Analysis of sentence length in the samples generally reinforces impressions drawn from analyzing sentences in the complete texts. The grammatical types of sentences and the openings of sentences in the samples show the authors predominantly relying on the same set of linguistic devices. Nevertheless, in each area of analysis, the writing from one anthology consistently stands as an exception to the writing from a majority of the others. The average number of words per sentence in the sections reflects much the same pattern in the sample as seen in six of the eight complete texts (Table 6-4). In half the cases, the maximum number of words in the longest sentence from each section and the minimum in the shortest equal those from the full texts; and in virtually every other case, they only differ by one or two words. Only the sample from Russell's "Technology" contains a notably shorter, longest sentence than in his full essay. Another similarity can be seen between the paired pieces from each 106
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publication: there is little difference in the percentage of relatively long sentences--that is, with more than 10 words over the average for sentences in the section--and relatively short--with five words or less below the average--in most of them. Only the samples from Russell's and Lundi's writing reflect more than a 10% difference between their texts in the number of sentences they contain that exceed by ten the average number of words per sentence. This fact could be a random coincidence, but it could be a result of the student editors' stylistic preferences as well. Analysis of the sections underscores the brevity of the sentences in the texts from Fresh Ink. Modzelesky's and Connor's essays contain the lowest maximum number of words in a sentence, the lowest average number of words per sentence, and the lowest percentage of sentences with more than ten words over the average for the section. Perhaps the relatively larger number of short sentences reflects the influence of copy a professional editor's craft in Fresh Ink. The types of sentences in the eight sections show relative consistency. All of the samples rely heavily on simple, compound, complex, or compound-complex sentences (Table 6-5.) The sections from Johnson's and Doggett's essays contain no other type. Five of the samples-- Johnson's, Henderson's, Modzelesky's, Daniel's, and Lundi's--use simple sentences more than any other type, and six of the samples--the five plus Doggett's--use them more than 40% of the time. Only the sections from Connor's piece and from Russell's have fewer than 40%. Two sections contain five types: Henderson's includes incomplete phrases, and Daniel's includes an interrogative sentence. One contains six types: Modzelesky's uses incomplete phrases and dialog. Three contain seven types: Connor's, Russell's, and Lundi's include questions, imperatives, and either incomplete phrases or quotations. Thus the professionally edited and the student-edited anthologies seem to show greater variety in types of sentences than the other two publications. The openings of sentences in the sections display more variation than the length and types (Table 6-6). The total range of openings across the eight samples includes expletives, verbal phrases, an absolute phrase, and a front-shift. In seven of the eight samples, however, more than half of the sentences begin with the subject or a subject cluster, a combination of articles, adjectives and adverbs modifying the subject. Lundi's piece is the exception. In five of the eight sections, subject or subject clusters start more than 60% of the sentences. Throughout the sections, the authors seem fond of starting sentences with prepositional phrases as well. Such 108
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openings exist in every sample, and in five of the eight--Johnson's, Henderson's Modzelesky's, Connor's, and Daniel's--they constitute the second highest percentage of openings. Coordinating conjunctions, adjective phrases, adverbs, and adverbial clauses seem popular with the student authors as well. Sentences with each of these openings appear in half or more of the sections. The number of sentence openings in the sections ranges from four to eight. One uses only four; another uses only five; but the rest use six or more. From anthology to anthology, there seems to be little consistency in the variety of openings between the pairs of texts. For example, in Our Stories, Johnson's text uses seven different opening formulations, whereas Henderson's uses five; and in Fresh Ink, Modzelesky's uses four different openings, whereas Connor's uses seven. The writing in College Wave, however, seems distinctive once again. Both the sections from it use eight different openings--the greatest variety of any samples. As with the variety of sentence types in Russell's and Lundi's texts, the variety of opening formulations in them seems remarkable, Russell's because the sample of his writing achieves its variety with no more than an average of number of words and sentences, Lundi's because hers achieves its variety has the fewest. Johnson's writing uses seven different openings in forty-six sentences; Daniel's uses seven in fifty-six; and Connor's uses seven in fifty-nine. Russell's uses eight in forty-five, and Lundi's uses eight in twenty-five. Analysis of sentence openings in the anthologies suggests the students writing for the zine use, or the editors selecting work for it favor, or possibly both, a greater variety of these devices than the other authors or editors. Regardless of the preferences an editor, a teacher, or a program has for one style of writing or another, a student's ability to "use a number of linguistic devices," a variety of stylistic elements--such as sentence length, grammatical type, and openings--has advantages. Such variation can stimulate readers' interest (although used to excess, it may become distracting, and thus become a disadvantage). Varied style in a text implies the range of verbal resources the author has available to adjust her or his language from one rhetorical context to another. As Corbett and Connors suggest, its presence in an essay is a mark of a "practiced writer." Johnson, Connor, Daniel, Russell, and Lundi seem to have greater stylistic range than Henderson, Modzelesky, and Doggett. It may well be that Henderson, Modzelesky, and Doggett 111 have greater range than they used in "Writing Project #3," "Taming the Devil," and "Beginning Under the Stars" and that each of them crafted his or her essay with a sensitivity to the stylistic preferences of the editors who reviewed their work. Writing program publications that encourage students to use an increased range of sentence styles, however, would seem most appropriate to curricula that seek to give students diverse rhetorical experience. The analysis of the form and style in the eight texts selected for this research imply that student-edited publications and zines in particular should receive greater attention and use than they apparently do. 112
Endnotes for Chapter 6, Comparing Students' Writing
1. Two qualifications regarding the use of Corbett's, Connors', and Glen's method deserve mention. First, all the essays except Lundi's were long enough to allow excerpting a section of equivalent length. The relatively short length of her piece, however, required the analysis of her entire piece to approach a comparable word length. Second, Connors and Glenn recommend comparing "exposition with exposition or description with description, rather than argument with narration or exposition with description." Most of the eight pieces are essays and are therefore considered equivalent, but some mix description and narration more than others, and Lundi's argument clearly deviates from the mode of the rest of the pieces more than any other. CHAPTER 7
CONCLUSIONS
Is there a disconnect between these kinds of books and the actual practice of the program, of the teachers in the program? Marvin Diogenes, Stanford University Telephone Interview, 8 November 2000
First-year writing students compose over a millions of papers every year. Marvin Diogenes estimates that students at the University of Arizona alone annually write over 40,000 (Interview). An equal number can be estimated for Florida State University and most other large schools. The data from this study indicates that few of the texts are published. Nevertheless the data also indicate that at the writing programs that do publish students' essays, administrators who direct and coordinate the publications as well as the teachers who assigns readings in the publications affirm their value. The study reveals the diverse benefits that producing such anthologies yields. Some of the educators seem to appreciate the anthologies most as an illustration, to show superiors and high schools students, of the quality of writing produce in their schools. Several compositionists interviewed for the study, like respondents to Edith Wells's survey in the mid-twentieth century, mention this advantage. The study also indicates that a major benefit is collecting texts to show incoming first-year students positive examples of the writing that students before them have produced. All the interviewees, even Marvin Diogenes, cited this feature. Perhaps the most significant value of publishing first-year students' writing lies in the effect that being read by audiences outside the classroom can have on young writers: it increases the attention they give to the craft of writing. Nevertheless, this study shows less "disconnect" between the "practice of the program" in which anthologies of students' writing are produced than between the programs and the world of readers beyond the programs. It indicates that usually program anthologies, classbooks, zines, or
113 114
other publications of students' writing--whatever form they may take and by whatever name they are known at a particular school--are read infrequently, if at all, by audiences to whom they are not assigned. This fact has implications for achieving the full effect that publishing students' texts can have on student writers. If students do not expect that their writing will be read outside their class, they lack the motivation that publishing creates. Disconnection between student writers and a broad audience amounts to an issue of distribution, but it is only one of several areas of concern illuminated by of this study. Other such issues include pedagogy, content selection, editing, production, and privacy.
Pedagogy Considering the level of concern expressed by those interviewed in this study, the answer to Diogenes's question about the "actual practice of the program" seems, in most schools, to be yes. Programs and teachers can influence the degree to which students read their peers' published texts--that is to say, increase the connection "between these . . . books and the actual practice of the program"--by requiring specific assignments and by training instructors to use those assignments. The publication assignments and the corresponding teacher training at the writing program at The University of Massachusetts-Amherst provides perhaps the best example of how such a pedagogical strategy can work. Nevertheless, even at Massachusetts administrators and teachers struggle to balance the time that publishing involves with the benefits it yields. Unfortunately, pedagogical requirements to include program anthologies and classbooks do not generally, or even necessarily, connect student writers with an audience outside their writing program. Publishing students' writing makes it accessible to an audience apart from the students' classmates and teachers, an audience not conditioned by classroom concerns and constraints that might object to the author's assertions of fact, inconsistencies in reasoning, and misplaced attention or emphasis--much less confusing grammar, syntax, spelling, and punctuation- -as well as affirm and praise the students' work. Lack of a connection between published students' papers and a readership beyond the class reduces the influence that writing for and editing such publications can have on students. Moreover, this study indicates that the more responsibility 115 students have for editorial decisions, the more they engage in the work of writing, and by extension, the more they learn about writing. Student-authored and -edited classbooks give students an opportunity to address diverse audiences and experiment with writing in unfamiliar genres, use different voices, try alternative styles than the ones they know from conventional essays. The zines at Florida State, for example, illustrate what students do with such an opportunity. These classbooks show that students gravitate to formats, genres, topics and styles of writing that they find in the popular magazines they and their peers read. Moreover when the student authors are acquainted with zines that their predecessors created, they imitate, to a great extent, the samples their predecessors produced. Such student-edited classbooks can inspire students to write, but unless they’re strategically assigned, they risk reinforcing students' existing--and sometimes unproductive--writing habits. In spite of the risk, the benefit students receive from editing and publishing their work--whether increased ownership of their texts, enhanced awareness of craft, inspiration and engagement with peers, and growth in editorial skills--seems to justify the exercise.
Selection and Editing The study shows a variety of standards for shaping the contents of publications of students' writing. Every contact interviewed confronts the issue, and--after attempting, without satisfying results, to have student authors copy-edit their own papers--every one resolves it by copy-editing, to some degree, the texts published in program anthologies. All accept that such editing is needed. The general attitude toward the solution seems to be that a higher standard cannot be expected of first-year students. Nevertheless, schools range along a continuum regarding the issue. At one end, many writing programs give teacher-editors full control over the collections they publish; at the other end, some programs give students control. The collection phase of the study provided an ample number of teacher-edited volumes but unfortunately produced few student-edited examples. Most of the programs surveyed rely heavily on teachers for editing program anthologies. For example, at Arizona State University, the University of Arizona, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Florida State University, teachers initially submit "best essays" from 116 their classes. Following the class teachers' selection, a group of teachers--acting either in the routine capacity of their jobs or as a committee of volunteers--make final selections. Sometimes the selection is a byproduct of a competition, as with Arizona State's Printer's Devil Contest and Florida State's McCrimmon Award. Eventually, teacher-editors compile and, to varying degrees, polish the texts to be published. Although the writing program at Boston College invites students to submit their own papers for Fresh Ink and thereby bypasses the step of having teachers submit papers, it, like most other schools surveyed, relies on a committee of teachers to select the papers that are to be published. Moreover, by relying on a professional copy editor to polish texts before they go to press, Fresh Ink represents an extreme in teacher control over students' work. The rationale at Boston--that relying on a professional to copyedit manuscripts as a penultimate step before the texts reach print corresponds to customary procedure among serious publications, commercial and scholarly--has validity. Donovan-Kranz and her colleagues not only embrace the practice, they make pedagogical use of it by discussing it with writing students (Interview, 8 November 2000). Schools that involve students in editing theirs and their peers' writing are rare in the survey. Arizona State University's Our Stories illustrates one pattern. It gives editorial responsibility to a selected group of students, chosen by their enrollment in a particular section of a first-year course, who work with a faculty advisor. Commendably, the student-edited anthologies are sold in the school bookstore to incoming first-year writing students. Two schools, Florida State and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, make students the editors of their classbooks. The collections of writing that these students produce show the maximum in student control--representing the opposite end of the continuum. Notably, however, as with pedagogical practices, the students' editorial work at these two schools seldom reaches audiences outside the classrooms. The standard appears to be that teachers edit program anthologies presumably to use as models and to showcase for outside audiences--such as prospective students and school administrators--and that students occasionally edit classbooks for their classmates. This practice 117 emphasizes producing an acceptable thematic and stylistic range of texts over encouraging students to grow in responsibility for their writing.
Production and Distribution Interestingly, the writing program at Boston College appears to have had the most success at reaching an outside audience with its anthology. From the evidence of program anthologies that were surveyed, Boston most clearly treats students’ texts as literature. Its issues of Fresh Ink imply that the contents belong, on readers’ shelves and in readers’ thoughts, with other contemporary writing. Shelf-appeal yields positive results for the school. It expands their audience and simultaneously confers the affirmation of having one's work included in a high quality publication on the students whose papers are selected for Fresh Ink. Presumably adopting such a highly attractive book format would have similar benefits for other composition programs that publish first-year anthologies. Limited staff time and publishing budgets constrain most schools, but allocating resources may justify the results. Edith Wells and the writing teachers who built in the 1950s on the findings of her survey occupied themselves at considerable length with discussions of production and distribution. The issues were major preoccupations for those who wanted to publish first-year students' writing. Indeed, compiling, reproducing, and marketing a collection of students' papers was a daunting task in the mid-twentieth century. To an extent, the issues continue to be of concern in the twenty-first. Fortunately for composition teachers in the latter part of the twentieth century, photocopying, desktop publishing, the Internet and Worldwide Web simplify the task of publishing and open new opportunities for presenting students' writing. If the cost of printing is the beyond the reach of a writing program, publishing on the Web is an increasingly viable alternative. With growing numbers of students writing on computers in the twenty-first century, publishing their work becomes less of an obstacle than it once was. Files containing the students' texts can be converted to print or Web pages with relative ease. Transferring the files to a server--thereby making them widely available on the Web for effectively no cost other than time--takes skill that many first-year students may lack. The prospect of publishing on the Web raises the question of whether teaching the skills to manage Web pages fits 118 the scope of first-year composition classes. Whether or not such content belongs in first-year writing, however, any student who can print the pages from his or her computer can photocopy them for inclusion in a classbook at a modest price. A more important question than printing cost relates to the validation that publishing confers on students. Do anthologies on the Web constitute as consequential a result as printed anthologies that can occupy space on a bookshelf? If they do not now, they seem destined to. As students surf the Internet for news, they read an increasing number of texts on the Web. As they seek information search engines such as Google and Yahoo, they increase the likelihood of discovering student-authored and edited papers. Privacy relates to distribution. To what extent should the writing that students do be available to audiences their classrooms? In "'Can't We Just Xerox This?': The Ethical Dilemma of Writing for the World Wide Web," Nicholas Maurello and Gian S. Pagnucci examine the issue as a serious concern for compositionists. Moran echos their concern and feels that the writing students do in first-year classes should remain protected by the relative confidentiality of the classroom ("Publishing Student Writing"). Macrorie's practice of omitting "some [students' names] . . . in the interest of protecting from the perils of truthtelling" reflects a similar position (Writing to Be Read vii). It has justification as Macrorie explains in the account of his former dean's reaction to a student's paper on conditions in a local nursing home (Uptaught 26). Perhaps the risks to students can be reduced by exploring, as a pedagogical concern, the impact that controversial and potentially inflammatory topics may have on audiences, before students publish their papers. But contrarian, minority, or radical views that students express in their texts can have virtue: they stimulate discussion, thereby encouraging additional discourse: oral and written. At least when students' papers are published for a local audience, such as readers of campus newspapers and periodicals, their controversial opinions can, as Harris Wilson observed of writing in The Green Cauldron at the University of Illinois, spark controversy which leads to more writing. Controversy continues to appear in the writing students contribute to first-year anthologies, as recounted by Donovan-Kranz (Interview, 12 November 2000) and Glau (Interview). The notable exception to accounts of controversy is the body of essays in the 119
University of Arizona's Guide, a fact that may contribute to Diogenes's impression that instructors lack interest in the Guide and neglect to use the book (Interview). Chapter 6 of the study demonstrates the potential for comparing texts from anthologies of students' writing. The subjects and structure of the students' texts hints that students may well use a sort of folk process for composing, a set of formulaic patterns learned from parents, peers, and other language users with whom they informally interact. Nevertheless, their writing process appears heavily overladen by the writing, both in genre and style, found in popular magazines targeting young adults. The extent of that influence and its relevance to teaching writing must be the subject of another study. In sum, this study shows a need for compositionists to increase their awareness of the variety of approaches to publishing students papers that are available writing programs. The comparison between schools with an epistemic rhetorical approach to teaching writing and those with a subjectivist rhetorical approach reveals the strong influence that pedagogical orientation has on the practice of publishing students' texts in both types of programs. More than affirming common sense, the observation should help writing instructors to refine student publishing activities to suit their mode of teaching. For example, a writing program that uses an epistemic rhetoric might well encourage its students to read and discuss students' texts that deviate from standard model essays. A balanced subjectivist approach should support both a program anthology and classbooks. Whatever the orientation, writing programs can benefit from publishing anthologies of students' writing and tailoring the publications to the pedagogy of the program.
APPENDIX A
STATEMENT OF PURPOSE FOR THE PROJECT
Each prospective contact received the following statement about the study as a written explanation of the work.
Summary of STUDENTS WRITING FOR TEACHERS AND FOR THEMSELVES a Study Conducted by Ormond H. Loomis Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL
“Students Writing for Teachers and for Themselves: College Students’ Aesthetics in Writing” will examine the production and use of anthologies of student writing in composition programs. Apparently in widespread use, such anthologies have received little scholarly attention. Based primarily upon the work in sample anthologies from colleges and universities throughout the United States, the study will compare the pedagogical goals of the collections as well as the quality of the writing they contain. Anthology prefaces, introductions, headnotes, and other editorial statements express the editors’ goals. The study will refine observations drawn from these published statements by supplementing them with information from questionnaires and follow-up interviews with teacher- and student-editors of the anthologies, administrators of the programs that produce them, and teachers who use them. After providing an overview of the context in which the publications occur, the study will compare, using rhetorical and literary critical theories and techniques, selected student texts from sample anthologies. The aim of the study is to learn how the writing that students include in informal anthologies of their own creation differs from the writing that educators include in more formal collections of students’ papers and, ultimately, to consider the pedagogical implications of the difference. Most of the information the study uses is publicly available through college and university writing programs. The people involved in the project will consist of anthology editors, teachers, writing program administrators in schools where the anthologies are found. They are adults from diverse ethnic backgrounds, with varying levels of higher education. There should be no need for them to contribute any personal, historical, or contextual information that would be harmful to them or the writing programs. Because the project involves routine literary criticism and contextual analysis, there should be no significant risks to these people.
120 APPENDIX B
INITIAL QUESTIONNAIRE
Each contact received the following questionnaire with the statement in Appendix A. The questionnaires that correspondents completed and returned provided baseline data for the study.
EDITOR/ADMINISTRATOR/TEACHER WRITTEN QUESTIONNAIRE for a Study by O. Loomis of Students Writing for Teachers and for Themselves Please return via e-mail to [email protected]
Name: ______Date: ______
-- What is your education, degrees and dates awarded?
-- What school, department, and program are you in?
-- What is your position at that institution?
Anthology: ______
-- How long has your program or course used an anthology of students' papers?
-- How long has the anthology your program or course uses now been used at your institution?
-- How long have you been associated with the anthology of student writing that you use or your school uses?
-- What role do you have in developing issues of the anthology? Please describe.
-- What role do students have in developing the anthology? Please describe.
-- How is the anthology disseminated and used? Please describe.
-- What, if any, administrative or pedagogical issues have arisen in the production or use of the anthologies. Please describe.
-- What other comments would you add that these questions may not have addressed?
121 APPENDIX C
EDITOR/ADMINISTRATOR/TEACHER INTERVIEW OUTLINE
Name Date:
How was the anthology begun and by whom?
How has it changed since it was begun?
How is it produced?
What are the stages in the publication of the anthology?
What is the process for submitting pieces to be considered for inclusion?
How much time is required to compile the initial manuscripts for the anthology?
Who selects the contents to be published?
How and by whom are the contents shaped: organized, annotated, edited, etc.?
How much time is required to organize, annotate, edit, and otherwise shape the
anthology?
How extensively are the pieces edited?
How is it printed?
How is it funded?
Who coordinates the physical production of the anthology?
How much time is required to produce the anthology?
How is it distributed?
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How does the anthology fit into the writing curriculum at your school?
Is it required in classes, and if so, what classes?
Are any assignments structured around pieces in the anthology? Please describe.
Is it used in any other part of the curriculum at your school, and, if it is, how is it used?
Please describe.
How well does the anthology reflect the work that students do in your writing program in
terms of
the relative quality of the pieces in the pieces in the assignments and most
students’ work?
the full variety of papers written in classes that could contribute to the anthology?
What, if any, stages in the evolution of the anthology stand out in your mind?
What, if any, essays published in the anthology stand out in your mind?
Do you enjoy the pieces that are published in the anthology?
If you find mistakes in the pieces, how do you respond to them?
What attitude do teachers in your program seem to have toward the anthology?
What areas have I neglected to ask about that I should have pursued?
May I interview you again with follow-up questions if they arise? APPENDIX D
PERMISSION FORM
Each correspondent in the study received, completed, and returned the following form to supplement the questionnaire in Appendix A. The completed forms remain on file with the author.
INFORMED CONSENT FORM
Date:______
In consideration of the research Ormond Loomis is doing on anthologies of students’ writing, I freely, voluntarily, and without any element of force or coercion consent to participate in the study. I understand that Mr. Loomis is conducting the project as a graduate student at Florida State University and that the purpose of the work is to advance the understanding of the production, content, and use of the anthologies found in colleges and universities throughout the United States. I am aware that in addition to the general status of the anthologies, the researcher is exploring the differences between the writing in collections of papers edited by teachers and that in collections edited by students. I realize that if I participate in the project I will be asked questions about my role in the production and use of anthologies of students’ writing as well as general information about myself and my work in teaching composition.
I understand that I will be asked to fill out and return an e-mail questionnaire and that I may also be asked to participate in a taped telephone interview with the researcher. The total time commitment would be about one hour. I am assured that if I participate in the interview, my questions about the project will be satisfactorily answered by the researcher or I may decline to answer.
I understand that my participation is totally voluntary, that I may stop participating at any time, and that if I request my answers to the questions will be kept confidential. I expect that the information I offer will be attributed to me according to MLA conventions for citation and that if I prefer to be identified by an alias the researcher will use the name I request.
124 125
I understand there is the possibility of a minimal risk involved. If I agree to participate in the study, I might find that the researcher interprets the data related to my work less favorably than I would like or takes a position with which I do not agree. I am assured that the researcher will assume full responsibility for his interpretation of the data and the positions he takes.
I understand there are benefits for participating in this research project. First, my own awareness about my work with anthologies of students’ writing may be increased. Second, I will be advancing the general knowledge about the production and use of such collections in composition programs. This knowledge can help educators improve the quality of teaching in such programs.
I understand that I may contact Ormond Loomis, English Department, Florida State University, William Johnston Bldg., Room 216, 850-644-4230 for answers to questions about the project. Results of the study will be sent to me upon my request.
I am assured that I may withdraw my consent at any time without prejudice, penally, or loss of benefits to which I am otherwise entitled. I have been given the right to ask and have answered any inquiry concerning the study. My questions, if any, have been answered to my satisfaction. In the future, I understand I may contact Ormond Loomis, English Department, Florida State University, William Johnston Bldg., Room 216, Tallahassee, FL 32306-3820 for answers to questions about this research or my rights. I have read and understand this consent form.
(Subject) (Date)
(Witness) APPENDIX E
Transcriptions of Telephone Interviews
E-1. Charles Moran, 9 October 2000 ...... 127
E-2. Greg Glau, 6 October 2000 ...... 142
E-3a. Eileen Donovan-Kranz, 8 November 2000 ...... 154
E-3b. Eileen Donovan-Kranz, 12 November 2000 ...... 165
E-4. Marvin Diogenes, 11 November 2000 ...... 172
E-5. Paul Reifenheiser, 10 April 2001 ...... 186
E-6. Tanekka Cunningham, 11 April 2001 ...... 199
E-7. Matt Bondurant, 13 April 2001 ...... 205
The speakers are identified by their initials in each transcription.
126 APPENDIX E-1
INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES MORAN UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS-AMHERST, 9 OCTOBER 20001
OL: You're in a wonderful position to have so much experience with all this. Now, the first question I normally ask is how the anthology was first put together. I gather you began it there at Amherst.
CM: Oh, yes, it was part of our writing program that we brought in in September 1982. And it derived, I think, from our reading of Don Murray, A Writer Teaches Writing and somewhere else I've written about how the writing program came into being.
OL: I have that.
CM: Okay, yeah [(static) Murray] and Garrison were the two texts that were sort of formative, and we've since been amending Garrison for all sorts of reasons, but Murray is still there, he says that, just flat out, that a teacher has an obligation to find all means of publication to . . .
OL: I've read that.
CM: And that comes out of his grounding in journalism, of course, the journalist is always writing to be published. And the problem, of course, would be the newsroom as the model for the first-year writing class--is there's no newspaper. Which is his biggest problem.
OL: Well, now did you begin with the end class or the single-class anthology?
CM: Yes.
OL: Every class did it's own?
1 The volume on this recording was set extremely low. Consequently, the recording quality is marred by background hissing and considerable static. Loomis's questions become completely inaudible by the end of side A.
124 125
CM: Yeah, and we did not have a system-wide anthology; we didn't have a literary magazine. That came a couple of years later, because people suggested it. It wasn't my idea, and it's not my favorite idea, ever, to have--the best writers will take care of themselves, you know--and it was my feeling, given Murray and my own experience as a teacher of writing since 1958 before that, that if students feel their writing is going to be read by an audience that is other than the teacher, that they go back in and revise, then copy edit, with a passion that they do not have when they believe there is a closed communication between themselves and the teacher, a communication channel through which they can kind of manipulate the teacher.
OL: You say that the literary anthology came a couple of years later?
CM: Yeah.
OL: Is that a semester anthology or an annual--because you had both of the more--the further stages of that . . .
CM: We had the best of semester anthology and then a couple of years later, the best of program anthology, and then when Peter came in as writing program director, about four years ago, he brought in Willing Wordswork, which was a junior year publication.
OL: When I talked to Dr. Curtis, the head of the writing program, she seemed to imply that Willing Wordswork--or Wordswork - is no longer published? Is that true?
CM: That may be true. She's the present director so she is on top of it--yeah.
OL: Have the individual class anthologies--I guess that's what you're most involved with--that's what you talk about most . . .
CM: It's all part of a piece--and it's hard to sort them out, but yeah--it's all part of the publishing initiative. And, in my own classes, I'm always looking for some way I can get a given student to publish, you know, start publishing in their first semester, or even in the second semester, because our first-year writing course is taught in--it's a one semester course, and it's taught in the fall, and again in the spring, and so we get students who are first semester students and are second semester students. And then I will try to get them to write back to their hometown newspaper, if they have one. In Boston, it's The Boston Globe, and they're not going get in that. But if it's [someone from] a Wayland, Mass, and there's a Wayland Weekly or something of the sort, you know, will the Wayland Weekly entertain the possibility of publishing their letter or column--almost a kind of--piece of--species of travel literature--I've been to U. Mass. and here's what I've seen--sort of column. So, and several years ago I tried to--in fact, I got the admissions people to use my writing class as a focus group for an admissions publication, because I figured first-year students are the consumers of what comes out of the admissions office, and they're really--they should be 126
asked--maybe they can offer some good editorial suggestions--maybe they can even re- write some things, and I did that because--I feel--because I really want students' writing read by people who are not their teachers or people in addition to me.
OL: How have the individual class anthologies change, if they've changed at all, since you've . . .
CM: They've changed very little. Just not paper publishing means there's--let me back up a little bit. When we started, we tried to make this as easy as we could for the teachers--all of whom, or most of whom are graduate students. And since the publications were simply published--since the class publications were simply taken over to the Xerox place and left, we came up with a series of possible writing program covers that they could use, and that they could modify if they wanted to, so in the writing program office, there was a wall full of possible writing program covers, or anthology covers. Now, with desktop publishing, students do their own. And they do them wonderfully. Students give me color copies that they've taken off the web, and the things are just gorgeous--and in one case, the thing was just so beautiful, that I paid for color copies out of my own pocket, so we got a color cover, and I told them I can't do that on a monthly basis! So, that piece of it has changed. I think, too, when we began it all, it was my understanding--and I'm just assuming that that understanding was fairly widespread--or that it percolated through the system-- that it was the teacher's job to collect the stuff and take it over to the--and then put page numbers on it, sort it, and take it over to the copy center. With computer technology now, desktop publishing is possible, it is much easier--it's easier to say to students, appoint one of your--break students up into teams--and this idea went along with our computer- equipped writing class which is really an improvement. Teachers can break it in, the class in, teams of four or five, and each team is responsible for an anthology. And all this is scheduled at the beginning of the semester so that nobody feels aggrieved or rushed. And I give the editors a series of responsibilities--it's they're responsibility to divide up tasks among the team, and--somebody is going to do a cover, somebody--somehow the introduction has to be done--somehow the table of contents has to be done, somehow all of the pieces have to be pulled into the same word processing file and paginated--maybe there's going to be artwork--who knows-- and the chief responsibility is to get the material camera-ready by a date certain. Increasingly, I get different calls for manuscripts, issue a call for manuscript--the team has to divide up the manuscripts, they have to decide themselves how much editing they're going to do. They have to avoid anything like substantial editing; they've got to get back with the editor--because editors--they can't simply re-write someone's piece. And all of this gets the editing team into some really interesting discussions. What--how much editing is intrusive, how much is justified. Also, the editing team is responsible for screening any potentially hurtful language, and that generates some interesting discussions at times. 127
OL: You mentioned the editing team--as I understand what you've told me, you have some four to five students for each.
CM: Anthology, yeah.
OL: And are those four or five--teams of editors, what you're talking about?
CM: Yeah, I'm sorry, yeah. If I've got a class of 20 students, which is what I have in the computer-equipped classrooms--after everything [students dropping and adding classes] shakes out--it's about 20. If we're going to do four anthologies, I'll break the class up into five--and I'll try to distribute to the "techies" among the group--so that each group has a fair shot at web images or whatever they want to do.
OL: Right, and each of these teams does a different anthology?
CM: Yeah, that's right. And . . .
CM: That's right. That's right. And some teachers judge--I guess technology works along with us--some teachers have posted the anthologies on the web--they've done web anthologies. And that means much more graphics and some really interesting stuff. So, in answer to your question, have things changed--technology has changed. But the impulse is still, I think, very much the same. And in most classes, the process is very much the same.
OL: Right. And did you start with these editing teams?
CM: No, that is the evolution--when I began myself, I thought very much that it was the teacher's job to pull all the stuff together. And the students simply gave me the pages, and I'd paginate 'em and put a cover on 'em and take 'em over to the copy center. Now, it's the students' job to paginate, do an introduction; it's the team's job to paginate, do the introduction. And I'm very much more out of the picture than I was before.
OL: And how did you get to that? About when?
CM: Partly through the technology, I think, partly because I'm teaching in a computer assisted classroom, and you've got all the tools there. And so why not let--the students are using the tools, anyway--so, why not let them continue to use the tools? So, we set up in the computer-equipped classroom, then I'll set up a folder for each anthology, and the students will submit their anthology contribution to the folder. And so, the editors are working with electronic text, before they push the print button.
OL: So, when something happens that requires students to still write papers. 128
CM: Yeah. Exactly. But I can't tell you whether--you know, [social] constructivist classrooms are simply in the air, and that drove the move from--to create editing teams, collaborative, cooperative groups--or whether technology pushed us in that direction, or whether both of them are working together. And it's really hard--it's such a over-determined system, that I can't sort out anything like a single course . . .
OL: Roughly, how much time is put into each of the anthologies?
CM: That depends on the teacher. You can put it on a continuum for minimalists, which is-- submit your papers, single-spaced, please, to save paper, and I will paginate them and take them over. In which case, there's no class time spent. The teacher just acts as paper compiler and delivers them to the Xerox place. To go back a little bit, let me separate the composition of the anthologies from the way they're used in class. Okay? As far assembling and publishing goes, assembling the anthologies, it goes from practically zero class involvement to a full-team anthology effort. As far as using them in class--I would hope that we didn't have any teachers in the program who don't use the anthology--it's described in the program text. Pat Zukowski, whom you might also want to interview, in our writing program, runs a training, a short training program, an orientation for how we may use these publications--ways of using them. And we also did a CD-ROM called "Teachers in Process" that discusses the approach, and it's not widely available now, alas. But in that, we put together a whole lot of program suggestions that chiefly came from graduate students--ways of using the anthologies in class. So there is an in-house literature out there--ways of using the anthologies in class as a text. I can tell you how I do it, but I can't tell you how other people do it. In my class, I will ask maybe two, maybe three times out of the year, for people to do reviews of the anthologies, and the review can be a full-dress review or it can be something less. It can be a response to authors, and I would set up constraints for that. And I would assign authors, so it really gets a response. Or it could be a review and typically, I would postulate an audience for the review, a student--excuse me, an adult, meaning an uncle, who believes that you are a good person, and you are a serious person, and so on, but who also believes that students at U. Mass. are drinking and partying all the time. And I want you to write--if you want--a letter to this adult: this friendly, to you, [favorably] disposed adult, but also someone maybe skeptical. I would like you to write a letter to this adult arguing, on the basis of the anthology, and the issues taken up in that anthology, that students at U. Mass. are serious human beings, as well as people who enjoy a good time. And then I might ask for a flat-out review and give them some examples of kinds of things we would like them to emulate as what we're looking for. So, that's--yeah, okay.
OL: Let me back up, to tie down this selection and the submissions in your class that I assume everyone submits paper for each of the anthologies? 129
CM: Yeah. And that's--again, I'm not draconian about it--on the first paper. If somebody comes to me and says "I don't want to publish this," they will, by that time, have written three or four other shorter [pieces of ] writing: there'll be a writer's autobiography, there'll be something else. But if they don't want, for some reason, [to publish] the first piece that they've prepared for submission to me--as essay number one (and I should back up and say that the course outline, which you can get on the Web, if you want, you can go to the U. Mass. home page, which is umass.edu, and go to academics, go to, I think you go right to writing program from there, if not, it's the English and then writing program--and you'll find on English 113 with site A, syllabus there for English 113, and that's the one I'm working with--and you'll see there, that every couple of weeks, there's a full-dress essay submission, and students are free to put that in the anthology), they're also free to put something [else] in. And it depends on the call for manuscripts. I'll do the first call for manuscripts, and it will be [something like] send me something, basically, one of the things you've written. By the time we get to the second anthology, they may have more choice, and so the call for submissions, we usually get a maybe somewhat broader . . .
OL: So, student editors do the next call?
CM: Yeah, exactly. And sometimes, they just say, give us something--and sometimes, they'll say, I'd like something on this issue. But then that runs into the syllabus, and then the students may have to write something in addition to the syllabus, and that's just a crunch I haven't resolved yet. I would like to turn response responsibility over to the editors and have them define the issue and so on and so forth, however, we've got a syllabus, and we march on the syllabus.
OL: So, the student editors, at that point in are the ones who select the content.
CM: Yeah, and everybody has to submit something, so there's that push.
OL: Let's see . . .
CM: Let me back up a little bit. The editors really aren't selecting what comes in, except in the case of when a student would submit two or three pieces, and that doesn't happen very often. So, the work is really collecting and editing.
OL: So, basically, they accept one for each of the students?
CM: That's right. And I'm wanting everybody to be published every time! Period. And that's our normal program policy that we're not doing best on--and I give you the reason. The reason for that is--I feel, we feel--that students, if they feel they are going to be read by someone other than the teachers, will do more, and if we can establish publication early on, the first couple of weeks past the norm, then the pressure of publication will have its greatest effect throughout the semester. 130
If we publish at the end of the semester, then, in my view, that's a waste. An entire waste. Because it's a separation, which is, I supposed some good, but I don't want to celebrate, I want to increase the quality of the writing--improve the quality of the writing during the semester, by putting all available pressure on the students. All available non- grading pressure on the students to publish. Because, in my section, I don't give grades--I just give a portfolio thing. Most sections do give grades. Because I'm a 63-year old, full- prof, and I think I can get away with it. And I'm not sure I should be able to get away with it--I'm not coaching--I'm not asking teachers who are brand new to the system to abandon grading.
OL: Having said all of that, I had trouble--I assume that what you're saying--I believe, or I should believe, that I had a hard time finding things like that written, and so, I'm still looking for information on different approaches. Now, you said that the amount of time it takes to organize and edit, depending on the editing tasks, and how basically teachers take responsibility once they have the camera-ready copy, they're in charge when the manuscripts are ready, that's the same in most classes?
CM: Yeah. They're [the students are] not going to take it [the complied manuscripts] over to the Xerox place because they haven't got the Xerox code.
OL: Well, but the copies Peter Elbow sent me look as if they're not--well, I guess--
CM: [Lots of static]--those are the gangbusters [program anthologies, published at the end of the semesters]--
OL: Semester?
CM: Yeah, exactly.
OL: Right, I, see. Now when you do the semester ones, is the process much different?
CM: Yeah. The semester anthology is program-wide. It's not class-wide, and they're edited by the program teachers. Pat Zukowski, who's the associate director of the writing program, is the person who issues a call to all the program teachers--and we teach about 100 sections a semester--to all of the program teachers, asking the teachers to submit one of their student's essays, with, of course, the student's permission. And then she and a couple of other people--it's fairly informal--read through them and put together the semester anthology.
OL: I've sent her the same questionnaire I sent to you, but she hasn't replied yet. When you began, did you have the same kind of funding arrangement you have now? 131
CM: Yes. No--the program that we replaced--the rhetoric program--was a two-semester, first- year writing and speaking sequence, and it had a fair number of technical requirements. Our program has no technical--students have a handbook that they're required to buy as a resource--it's not a textbook; we don't teach from it. Because we didn't have an anthology reading--kind of normal affair in these courses--we thought it was okay for us to set up a lab fee that was roughly the cost, then, of one textbook, and use that lab fee to support students writing out of it as a text within the class. And, so that's how we did it. I mean, I don't think it matters. People thought that this argument would satisfy. If anybody complains about the lab fee, we say, take a look at your chemistry or literature courses, and how much are your books costing in there?
OL: Makes perfect sense--it's unusual, but way that it's the same as lab fees. Well, how are they, the copies of the classbooks, handled?
CM: Well, the individual class anthologies are simply distributed by the teacher to the class, period. The others [the program anthologies]--I'm--Pat can tell you more about this. When we instituted the year [publications]--or semester--it's varied; I think--it goes back and forth between an academic year anthology or a semester anthology. When we instituted those, we did so because we wanted some available to us as a program--the best writing that students had done--so that we could publicize that. Because as a writing program, what we normally get are complaints how bad student writing is. And we thought if we could assert the good writing--and publish it, and push it out there--that this would make our own working environment a little bit better. And so, I forget what our initial edition was--not a press writer--this was also my xerography. Additionally, then we sent copies out to people we felt would be important people on campus--the deans, profs, department heads, academic matters--affairs--all of the junior writing teachers--and copies to our state representatives and to the Governor and so forth, as [to illustrate that] this is what our students are able to do--it's what they're doing. And so that was the reason for it. It was much more of a public relations venture than is a--I don't know what you'd call the other one--it's almost a pedagogical tactic, to help students take their own writing seriously.
OL: That's fascinating. I've heard somewhere that that reason for publishing anthologies is an intentional . . .
CM: Yeah, well--I'm not sure that--but it's intentional after the fact. And I know that, with our first yearly anthology that I did approach it traditionally, that we did put the best of it forward. Of course, it allowed us to put good writing forward. And once I saw it circulate to people whose opinions of the program helped establish the climate . . .
[Tape flips] 132
OL: You already mentioned that in your classes you have your students read and critique some of the anthologies.
CM: Yup, yup.
OL: Do you require any other readings or other assignments?
CM: No. Each anthology, when it's published, is paid attention to in its own way. And there's four of 'em. I thought the absolute minimum for me is to stand up in front of the class with the anthology open, and just give oral comments on each one, and maybe say, as I always do at the end of the first one, and by the way, there are something like 250--I didn't count, but I just noticed something like 250 substantial typographical errors, spelling errors, errors in punctuation, that sort of thing--in this first edition, in this first anthology. And I'm really hoping that it will get better. Because we can't go public like this.
OL: How do students react to that?
CM: Well, the next one's better, and the next one looks better. And I talk to them [about the implications of textual details]. It doesn't do an awful lot of good, as you know, to talk to people about it, but it really is, for me, an issue of self-representation . . . . I hate copy editing myself, personally. It's just not fun! And I know very few people who do like copy editing. And the people I know who do--that is the people who copy edit the newspaper and send it back to the newspaper editor--I don't like them much! And they're not usually, generally powerful and influential people. They tend to be sort of angry folk who tend to lash out in various angry ways, and this is one of their ways of doing it. So, copy editing is not something I like doing, and not something anybody I know whom I like likes doing either. And therefore, it's not surprising that my students don't like it. If I sent the manuscript off to a publisher and--it happened in one case--the publisher required a camera-ready copy--that means, I'm the copy editor. And I don't like that. I would much rather send them the manuscript and have their house copy editor do it. Copy editing just isn't fun. The only reason I do it is because, if I don't, I will look like a fool to my colleagues, and so the pressure is really on there to make me do it. Now if I ask my students to copy edit, what pressure is there? Zero. Unless, somehow looking that way to their own class, in the matter of typos, is an issue. But I think that's not an issue: I don't think that their classmates will ever think less of them because there are typos in their work. And so, all I can do, is kind of give them a mini- lecture on self-presentation and tell them, "We're here in Amherst, Massachusetts, and we've got splendid Mount Holyoke, and Hampshire College in the area--and Amherst-- (there's four private colleges in the area), and I can say with actual knowledge that the people in the private colleges are much more concerned than the folk in my particular class with self-representation--self-presentation. They will not present themselves as somebody in a shabby or slovenly way on paper. They may present themselves in a shabby or slovenly manner in other ways, but somehow in that culture, they don't do it on paper. 133
And then for better and worse, and mostly worse in our culture, folk do pay attention--some people do pay attention to the way you present yourself on paper. And that if you submit a resume that is full of typos and you encounter a member of the search committee who deals with it, that--this is the judge of character, call it class--that you'll be turned back. And that's an easy way, that's an easy criteria for a search committee that has to figure out some way of reducing the pile. So the ability to produce correct English is a readily available and easily usable criteria, and so it may well be invoked. And so they [my students] need to know this: that when they write something, they are presenting themselves. It doesn't really do any good, I think--that is the admissions, the admissions committee project I told you about. [I had] the students [plan to] send their report out to the admissions committee, and I said, to the admissions office, and I said, when I read it, it was full of typos, and I don't think the folk up there are going to read it, and [they] will just write you off as kind of stupid freshmen and people without authority. And they're going to under-value what you have to say. And I want you to get together and think about that, and tell me what you think. So, you think together and you talk about it. And at the end of it [the assignment], it ended up just the way it is [without significant change]. And [the students said] if the admissions office were so stupid that they would judge them on the basis of typographical errors, that that was the admissions office' fault--problem-- and that the admissions office would just have to deal with that. I said, okay, and I was just hoisted by my own pedagogy there! There was just no way out. So, anyway--I can't solve that one. I haven't solved that one.
OL: Well, it sounds like you addressed it pretty well.
CM: Oh, I addressed it, but it doesn't deal with it, you know.
OL: If the anthology gets better each time, then . . .
CM: Yeah, they do get better.
OL: Do you allow time during class hours--class periods-- for the students to do some of this arranging?
CM: Yes, I do, yeah. And I do that in the computer classroom, because that's where the tools are. If I were teaching not in the computer-equipped classroom, I would assume that the tools were in somebody's home or somebody's dormitory room, and the tools certainly are not in the conventional classroom. If I do [teach in a room without computers]--and I've got that limit, therefore, I have to back off to some piece of writing for the editing team-- that is, everybody but the editing team is going to do "x" while the editing team does the editing. 134
OL: Uh, huh. Can you quantify that? How much time at all? How much time do you allow one class?
CM: Yeah, it's sort of half the class--I teach twice a week an hour and 15 minute class, and I will back off on one--say 30 minute writing exercise, and just to give an example--even though things are even because everybody has to do it--for the editing team, things just pile up too fast.
OL: Do you know if the anthologies are used in other individual classes now, are you teaching any other classes at all?
CM: I'm sure they're not. I mean, I can't tell you absolutely that they're not, but I would be surprised if they were.
OL: Well, I can understand this.
CM: Yeah, and it's also a logistical problem. If you're doing 24 copies for 24 students, and there are--and, yeah--and one of my students go off to a Soc 101 section, there will not be, in that Soc 101 section, other students from my writing class. And so, the copies will not be available to that other class unless somebody makes another 25 copies.
OL: How representative is the work, the pieces of writing, in the anthology to all the work that is done in a class?
CM: Yeah. They are the work, is the thing.
OL: Yeah, but you said, they do write some other things--they have a choice about which papers they submit to be published in the anthology.
CM: Yeah. I--you know--I never made a distinction. The quality in the anthology is really mixed. And every anthology that goes out runs into the ESL question. That is, I try to distribute the second-language learners among the groups, so that there will not be one group that is not overwhelming second-language learners because they'll have a harder time with the editing pieces of it. But still, if you look at one of the anthologies, you'll see howlers of all kinds in the anthologies; you'll also see some really brilliant moments.
OL: So, do you feel like you're getting the full variety of papers [published in the anthologies] that are written in the classes?
CM: Yeah, yeah, I really do. We publish until March, so it's hard to distinguish from what's published to what's not. And I don't think there's really--well, I'm guessing that a student may submit her piece because she feels good about it and she wants her classmates to read 135
it. And that may not be a criteria that I would bring to bear on the writing, and certainly it wouldn't be the criteria that an outside reader would bring to bear on that writing.
OL: Do any of the anthologies that have been published in your classes, do any stand out in your mind as distinctive or bold?
CM: Not really. I can think of one instance of a process in which the anthologies collaborated, and there's a--one of my students began by writing a piece about--and I can't use particular references here, but--she'd had a work experience in another state, and she really liked it, and she described the place and the state and so on and so forth, and in that description, there was a hint that there'd been some problem with her superiors there. And when the whole class read that, people began asking her out loud, what had happened, what was the problem--and her next draft was--it was clear that the problem was one of sexual harassment. And in the next draft--I don't know--she just worked with that through a third generation, when she determined that she was, at long last, going to take legal action against her employer. The fact that this piece had been published in three different versions in three different anthologies, gave me a kind of window into ways in which the anthologies function in the class. The students are writing, in some degree, to one another. And they're writing for response from one another. One of my students wrote at the end of the semester--I' ve been interested in what's the effect of teaching an online classroom--as I was trying to elicit that from students in an online questionnaire, one of my students wrote that "this is a wonderful class; we don't know each other at all, except we know each other very well through our writing." And at the time, I attributed that to the online discussions of whatever we were having, but I think it's also a function of the anthology and the way we see anthologies come in and are read.
OL: Let's see: do you enjoy the writing that's published in the anthologies?
CM: Yeah, absolutely, I really do. And, of course, I've seen it before it gets in--given our drafting process--I've seen it maybe a couple of times. And so, yeah--but I--yeah, I--some time ago, I think I made what is I almost a seismic shift: I began to look at students' writing in the same way I looked at literature. This is really along the lines of Jimmy [...] and Nancy Martin--the people in the New London schools project . . .
OL: And Wendy Bishop.
CM: And Wendy Bishop. Yeah, it seems to me [that] we have a common ancestry there--just the idea that a piece of student writing could be taken, could be read as you read literature: not for mistakes, but for the writer. That happening was, for me, a real shift, and occurred sometime in the early 60s.
OL: Wendy said to give you her best regards. 136
CM: Oh, great--that's nice. She's a great person.
OL: She mentioned that some teachers correct their students papers for errors, and you comment on how you handle that with your class. Is there anything else . . .
CM: Nope.
OL: that you can think of on the anthologies?
CM: No, I don't. And I can't . . . You know, I guess my object is to help the students be as good as they possibly can be, which is going to be some distance from perfect. And of course, I'm some distance from perfect, also. I feel, I think, I think I feel--I've never resolved this for myself--but if I instituted, for instances, a rule--three mistakes and it flunks, I would probably get cleaner copy. What I would rather do--and I would create an atmosphere of --in which students would, I think, write less openly and honestly about what's on their minds--and so that for me is a kind of trade-off. I think I'm getting their best thinking--and what I'll try to do is push their thinking. And when you push thinking along, when someone writes a kind of stock piece on abortion, I'll likely ask, have you yourself confronted this issue, either directly or through family members? If the person says no, then I'll say, let's imagine that you're--if he's a male, that you and your present girlfriend find that you're pregnant, that she's pregnant-- what's the result? How are you going to feel about abortion? And how is she going to feel about abortion? Let's get 'em to think about this thing. What about your sister? Imagine your sister is raped and is abortion okay then, and is that different from if it were your girlfriend? Have a child or so on and so forth. And I'll just try to make the issue live for them by asking them to project it into their own lives and situations, and the writing that comes out of that is likely to be more confused and worse, because they'll be dealing with more stuff. It'll be harder to say, abortion is a sin, or everybody should have a right to an abortion--some kind of flat piece of dogma. And having complicated--I hope complicated--their thinking, the writing is probably going to be murkier than it would be otherwise, and something that I--I've never seen a really cogent research study on, but I've seen enough people to say this, so that I think it is more or less true, that an awful lot of writing problems are thinking problems. And if people are thrashing around, trying to make sense out of something that is really quite confusing, that they're writing is going to be less good, than if they're--if they've got just absolutely everything nailed down.
OL: I don't know if Terry Tempest Williams has written about it, but I believe she makes this point in workshops--that when people [writers] are resistant to a point in a response to their texts], that that's where the author needs to work most on revising. 137
CM: Right, right. And in some ways, maybe it could be worse. Maybe you're okay with a simple declarative sentence, as a stylist; but maybe the kinds of complexity I want, after a writer matured, can be dealt with that--with that sentence pattern. And maybe, we're going to have almost Samuel Johnsonian subordination to deal with this--this now extremely complex idea--and maybe, certain boundaries are going to go in this process. Anyway . . .
OL: How would you characterize the attitude that teachers in your program have toward anthologies--not just using them, I guess most of them use them.
CM: To my knowledge, we don't have resistors. But then, as senior person in the program, somebody who resisted would not come to me. So, I can't tell you that. They [classbooks and anthologies] are more work. You've got to build the things in somehow. And they're not easy, because they create not only logistical problems, but problems with what should and should not be published. And, so, by requiring them, we're not making the young teacher's job any easier.
OL: I think in your questionnaire, you said that you don't like to have publishing start late in the semester.
CM: Yeah, right. And if you don't build it in at the beginning of the semester, if you're a first- semester teacher, and you don't build it in to the semester right away, you'll put it off, because it adds complexity. And it's sort of a new thing that you've got to explain to everybody--and you might, if you're going to spend five or six semesters teaching in the program, that might just become a pattern. And so we really push to have the anthology done right away. Teachers will often say, "but the writing isn't good enough yet to be published." And we'll have to come back and say, that's the point. That's exactly the point. You've got to publish it.
OL: Well, do you think I might be to able get the handbook that explains, or talk to someone who instructs teachers in, the process?
CM: Yeah, probably--if you can't, let me know. You need a special software to read the damn thing, and . . . I think the thing may have a Word version of--I'm trying to remember the name of the word processing program that came out of Carnegie Mellon--that allowed you to set up vertical columns and do all kinds of commenting--it's called "Common Space" and the CD may have a run-time version of "Common Space" on it--but I'm not sure. And I'm also not sure it works in Windows 98--it's about six years old, and the software developer hasn't supported it. They came out with it and advertised it and then stopped supporting it, so . . . but . . .
OL: So it may not be in HTML? 138
CM: Right, I'm quite sure it's not. And you know--what I'll have to do, if you need it, is look into my CD rom--see whether there are discrete files there, and see whether the files can be picked off and shipped to you. Otherwise, you could contact the writing program, and ask them for any titles that might be in that publication's folder.
OL: Are there any areas that I've neglected to ask you about?
CM: Wow. I don't think so, Ormond. It seems to me you've--I've probably talked more than you needed, and if you have second thoughts, or follow-up questions, please ask. But I can't think of anything you haven't asked. APPENDIX E-2
INTERVIEW WITH GREG GLAU ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY, 6 NOVEMBER 2000
OL: Let me go back to what we were talking about at 4Cs [the 2000 Conference on College Composition and Communication, Minneapolis, MN] and be sure I understand how Our Stories was begun. I believe you said you began it there at Arizona [State]?
GG: Yes.
OL: And that was, according to your questionnaire, six years ago?
GG: Right.
OL: Do you recall why you started it, or where the idea came from, or were there any precipitating events, or anything like that?
GG: I think I probably stole the basic idea from the University of Arizona which published a Student's Guide, which included some sample student papers. And I've always liked the idea of validating student writing in that way. So when I had the chance to implement something like that, it seemed the natural thing to do--particularly since I could make it a part of that year-long, stretched-out curriculum, and so, I didn't know whether I had the authority or not, so I just went ahead and did it.
OL: As I recall, that's roughly what you said back in Minneapolis. Did you actually use the teacher's guide when you were at Arizona?
GG: Yeah. And I was part of, for a couple of years, making the one for their English 100, which is their basic writing program--of selecting student essays, writing part of it, editing it, so forth. I'm listed as one of the editors for the one down there.
OL: In fact, this is kind of off the normal interview outline, but I think I read in an edition of the Arizona guide, that the program spun off some dissertations on using . . .
GG: I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
139 140
OL: You don't know?
GG: I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if something like that happened. I know there was a negative part of it, and that's that, one summer two other people and I kind of put it together, and it seemed to slow down the progress toward graduation of one of those folks. I don't think she ever graduated. So, I don't want to point [to] that as the cause, but it was certainly contributing.
OL: Well, did you start it at Arizona State when you arrived there?
GG: I think so. I'd have to look back now and try to figure that out, but I don't think it was probably necessarily that first year, which was the [19]94-95 academic year. I may not have actually started--I probably didn't, in fact, because when I came here, they'd already picked out books and kind of had everything organized, so probably it wasn't until the 95- 96 school year that I started that.
OL: Okay. And then, I vaguely recall that you did it for one year.
GG: I did it for one or two years, and the first year was pretty much a disaster because I, basically, made twenty-eight books as I recall, or twenty-eight different sections. And the idea was that, if you were teaching a class and I was teaching a class, then your students would buy my students' writing, and my students would buy your student writing. So we produced twenty-eight books that way, but unfortunately, we gave them all the same color cover, and there was total confusion at the bookstore. So, after that, I thought--you're not the one to do this, man. So, I gave it off: I got a volunteer to do it. And so they've done it at least three times since then that I can think of. Let's see, that'd be 97-98, 99-2000. Maybe I did start the first year, but I know we've done it--Steve Farmer did it the first year, and then the second year, Tiffany Windham and Susan Hecht did it, and last year, Sarah [name unintelligible on the recording], so we've had three other people have their classes do it. And I think the more they gave over to the students to do, the more successful those projects were. The more the teachers took on themselves, the more work it was for them, and less the students were involved.
OL: So, it looks like--I have a copy here, but I don't see anybody's name.
GG: Some of them didn't end up with names, or they had the student's name listed and you'd have to search around to find the teachers, and . . .
OL: This is Steve Farmer.
GG: Okay, that was the first one, I think, that somebody other than me did. 141
OL: Okay. But I have another one--I didn't bring it to school [where the telephone call was initiated]. Now when you stepped out of the role of the editor, what role did you have-- did you have any association with it?
GG: Yeah, I collected them--manuscripts, and hopefully [files on] discs, and if--the first year, when Steve did it, he had to scan a lot of the stuff in--we didn't get it with discs. The second year I took on that role and ended up scanning a lot of things, and I think last year, we just didn't accept anybody unless they turned in a disc with their hard copy, because it was too much work in trying to scan them and clean them up, because I guess the students could have done that, but they don't usually have scanners, and we don't--you know, we've got a good scanner in my office, for instance, and I have one at home, but we can't tell students to do that. Even if they're in a computing classroom, that's one tool they don't have. So, I played that role, basically the collection person, and major permissions were there. [We] kept the list of entries, so that we could distribute copies to the winners, the ones that were selected because they were always promised a free copy.
OL: Okay, and so, in terms of stages of the publication process . . .
GG: Really, nothing. I'm sorry, other than just giving the manuscripts to somebody, and that was about it for me.
OL: Okay. What other stages were there? The collection of the manuscripts, and was there a call for submissions, or . . .
GG: Yeah, that was--that would have been previous to that, but yes, right. We sent a note around to all the teachers saying, we're doing this, pick put the best manuscripts, or have your class pick them out, and give them to Glau. I think a deadline, kind of thing-- probably by the end of the semester. And then, collecting them, giving them to somebody in a form that they would then--what the teachers would usually do, at least from what I could discern--was to take the hard copies and photocopy them, so that their students could read them. And that meant a lot of copying on their part. Then the students needed to kind of read through to decide what to use and what not to use, and what needed editing, how to organize, and that kind of thing. So, like in the last class, the students basically did the whole process. They picked the essays, so they had to read them all, structured them into some kind of organizational fashion, wrote introductions. The last one we had--I don't know that you've got a copy of that--you should have--I probably should have sent it to you after Minneapolis--I think it even has reading questions--you know, questions after each essay, which is something I never took the time or effort to do.
OL: And the students wrote them themselves.
GG: Yes. 142
OL: Wow. Well I'll be curious to see that, but at this point, it's probably--I'll just make a note. So, the process for submitting them was simply this call for papers and the teachers were at liberty to pick whichever one they . . .
GG: Right.
OL: They didn't come from the teachers, though?
GG: Yeah, right.
OL: And how much time do you suppose it takes to compile all the initial manuscripts when you were doing it?
GG: Well, pretty fast, if they come in with discs and the hard copy. When they didn't, then it was real problematic because then you'd have to take 'em home and scan 'em in, and clean up the text so that at least it was readable.
OL: Yeah, I've got a bit of that myself.
GG: Sometimes it works good, depending on the type quality--sometimes it doesn't work as good!
OL: Yeah, if you have all the discs say, does it amount to about two hours or an hour?
GG: Yeah, I suppose a couple of hours ought to be enough because I also tried to be sure that the stuff was in there--the permission form was in there to let people know, hey, you don't have a permission form for Joe Blow--that kind of thing. So, that was--not a great time investment at all.
OL: And then, once you turned things over to the teachers, did they or did the students make the selections? Do I understand that . . .
GG: It seems to me that the students made the selections with--the teacher had veto power. There were some instances where I had to then get back involved, for instance, if somebody submitted something, and the teacher would come to me and say, "The students don't want to use this because . . .," or "I feel uncomfortable because of these words," or whatever. Then there were a couple of times where I would have to call up the author and say, "You know, we're not going to use your paper; we really liked it, but because it's going to offend some people, we can't put it in." And for the most part, those people were okay with it. So, there would be a little more time involved from that standpoint. There was probably a little more time, too, in questions that came up, or putting the teacher in contact with the people that do the printing, probably another several hours worth of late work over the course of the semester. And then, when the books finally came in, I took it 143
on myself to make sure that the students who had an entry got a free copy. So, that means I had to look on the computer, see what class they were in, deliver them to that teacher's mailbox with a note that said, would you please give this to Joe Blow, he's got an entry in here. So, that took some time. I can see where I could have spent a couple of days over the course of the semester, now that I think about it--an hour here, two hours there: logistic stuff, giving desk copies to people who are going to use them, calling or e-mailing people and saying are you going to use this book because I need to get the book order in, and then pestering people who ignored your first e-mail. There's always that kind of logistic thing that goes with--well, right now, we're doing it for regular book orders. You know.
OL: With the questionnaire, you said, I think, that this amounted to--the editing--amounted to one assignment for the classes that were doing it. Do you assume that that was a dozen hours for the students?
GG: Well, we do--in those classes, we do three assignments over the semester, so it's about four to five weeks of time. If it took four weeks, and they're in class three hours a week, that's 12 hours of in-class time. Plus they would have done whatever--they would have probably done the reading outside of class; they would have probably written some rough drafts of introductions, maybe some rough drafts of reading questions. I never sat in on that whole process. All I did when I produced it was photocopy it, put page numbers on it. But they actually edited them. How much of that work was done in class and how much out, I don't know. And then there was a paper associated with that. The teachers usually used a reflected kind of "what I learned from this project"--which, well, we needed some way to grade it, and it's tough saying, "You didn't edit this very well; we're going to give you a 'C.'" So, we did want to have some writing associated with it, and I suspect that that paper probably went through at least a couple of drafts, maybe more with peer editing and that kind of thing, and to culminate the project.
OL: Now that wouldn't end up in the publication?
GG: No. But that's how the work that the students did would be graded for that 10 or 15% of their grade, whatever that amounted to. Usually, we did it as the first paper of the semester for that particular class or classes, so at least in my rubric, I usually build more than 20% of the grade on the first paper, because I want the grade to be weighted more as they went along.
OL: How extensively were the pieces edited? Do you have any impression of that?
GG: Depending on who did it--some of the ones I did--none, that there was no editing. Some of the ones that Steve Farmer did there was minor editing. Some of the others probably reasonably extensive, depending on need, you know: your entry might not need any 144
editing, but Joan's entry might need a lot. I wouldn't imagine a great deal. And they edit them more for punctuation, mechanical kinds of things, rather than style.
OL: Did they get back in touch with authors?
GG: No, unless there was really something they objected to or weren't going to use it. For instance, one person, one year, a student referred to someone using the famous "n" word. And the class found that offensive, so they wouldn't use the paper. I called the student and told her, and she said, "I understand, don't worry about it, no problem." Another year, we had a paper that was about young women who followed around the hockey team. And they're called "Puck." And the fu's, you know, that got edited down, so it still had the puck, and then four dashes after that. But I asked the teacher about it afterwards, because somebody who got the book was very offended by it--another teacher--and he said in class, the student had read it out loud, the whole word was there. No one said anything about it [in the class], so, in the context of that particular class, nobody was offended. But once it got out and published, it wasn't the students who were offended by it. In fact, the discussion the next day was like, "Aah, who cares? Go on." But the teacher go offended by it. So, that's one that I should have looked at and caught before it even got through, but I missed it.
OL: Interesting. Well, once the students have the text ready for printing, how is it printed?
GG: Well, we work through a company here in Phoenix called Vision Graphics, which is, I guess, a publisher of some sort. The way we've done it--we order them right through the book store. So, in other words, I send an order to the bookstore for 300 or 400 or how ever many we think we need. The bookstore then orders them from Vision Graphics, and then they're produced and sent to the bookstore, who then marks up whatever Vision Graphics charges them, and sells them. I think the last one was $12 or $14--something like that.
OL: That's the sale price?
GG: Yeah. A couple of years ago, the one Tiffany Windham and Susan Hecht did, it was bigger, it had like 30 essays in it or something, and it was too expensive. Now the last one was about $14. Anyway, you can only use so many of those--it's going to use only so many essays--so even that seemed excessive to me. But if I had done it again, I would have probably set in a smaller type face, justified the margins, and make it look more like a printed book. But none of the people who did it wanted to do it that way. They wanted the 8-1/2 x 11 size--and so there's space and double space--and so they look more like student papers, which they are. So, it did give people white space to write, but it didn't look as much like a book, and they were longer because of that. So, it cost more.
OL: Yeah. That's exactly the issue that our publication here at FSU got hung up on. 145
GG: Yeah, it can certainly happen. Now I do know this last year, at least, the guy from Vision Graphics came and talked to the class and brought in color samples and binding samples and all sorts of things, so they made the decision on what color the cover should be-- whether they should have pictures on it, whether it should be spiral bound or perfect bound, and so forth. So they made all those decisions. Which is where the decisions should be made.
OL: Interesting. I've always enjoyed talking to printers, but the idea of the printer coming and talking to the students . . .
GG: Yeah, we were lucky to have somebody who was willing to do that.
OL: So, the coordination of the physical production is done with the bookstore and Vision Graphics, mostly?
GG: Yeah, right. The only part that I played in that is once the books were delivered here, we got free copies for all the students in the class, and the students who had essays, and the teachers who were using them. So, for instance, like last fall, or really last spring, I would have gotten say 25 copies for the students in the class who did the book, another 15 copies for the students who had essays, and then another 15 or so desk copies or exam copies that all had to be distributed. And usually, what I do, is just stick things in people's mailboxes with a note saying, here's what it is, giving them a context in case they forgot. So there was some time involved in that part, but I already mentioned that.
OL: Well, about how much time does it take to do the printing?
GG: It's really fast. We've been real lucky. They can actually turn those around in about two days, and one day if we really need it. And they deliver stuff to campus, so they're here all the time--so what that did for the bookstore, though, is the bookstore fired 300 copies-- they probably ordered only 200--and then the minute they started running out, they knew the could order more and get them the next day.
OL: Oh, so they can get a re-run?
GG: Yeah, very easily, that's one advantage of doing it with somebody locally. They can do that kind of thing. Whereas if it was like with Houghton Mifflin or somebody, it probably wouldn't be able to do that. Although I don't know; I never tried.
OL: And then, the distribution is at the bookstore?
GG: Yeah, the teachers will take the book into the class and say, "Here's the book you need. Here's the title. Here's what it looks like. It's over at the bookstore. Go buy it. 146
OL; And then the free copies went to the students and teachers that were involved?
GG: Right.
OL: Now, I'm curious how the anthology actually fits into the curriculum. I read the Stretch [course] assignment number one that you sent me a link for, and I think I understand it pretty well. That, that, it refers to the projects that were written for the last semester, so the essays the students are reading are ones that students before them wrote. Is that right?
GG: Right, yes.
OL: Okay. And then, in some other assignment, do they write the essay that they assume will be used for submission?
GG: Yeah. That's been part of the problem of moving away from that standardized book and syllabus, that we have a plethora of potential assignments. So, instead of sending us your best profile paper, or your best remembered person paper, it became: send us your best papers. And then you end up with a hodge-podge in the book that doesn't have a lot of rhyme or reason to it, so it's hard to organize, hard to structure, and very hard to write an assignment for, because you're really comparing apples with oranges. If you try to write a paper that says, oh, which is the essay in the book--why? Well, if you want to say the best argumentative essay, that's one thing; but if you say best essay, that's a different thing. If you say best informative essay, that's different then, you know? That's been one of the reasons, I think, the interest in it has kind of tapered off. And, it's good from the standpoint of teachers being able to pick their own books, but bad from the standpoint of publishing student writing because there's no focus.
OL: Right. Well, I'll be fascinated to know how you resolve all that.
GG: Yeah, me too!
OL: I was charmed with the language in the assignment. It's very close to what I ask students to write--a journal--and I give them to some of the class magazines that I've culled out of earlier classes, and I ask them what they think is the most effective piece of writing in it.
GG: Yeah, you almost have to do something like that, but it's still really hard because then you're comparing all sorts of apples with all sorts of oranges.
OL: Exactly. And then, even when I've looked at some anthologies from other schools, they do have greater diversity, but as far as I know they're not asking students to respond and judge, qualitatively, the absolute best piece of writing. So, now, is this [anthology] used in any other classes than the 1101--I mean, not the 1101, I mean the WAC 101? 147
GG: No.
OL: Let's see, you have those two structured assignments. Do you know if anybody outside the English department has paid any attention to the anthologies?
GG: Not to my knowledge.
[End of Side A]
OL: How well does the writing in Our Stories reflect the relative quality that most students do in your 101? Does that . . .
GG: I don't know. Yeah, but I don't know because I don't see those other ones. So I don't really have a wide base of comparison. It's probably typical. I don't know that it's exceptionally better, exceptionally worse. But it's probably typical. And often times, even though you ask for the best essay, or you think you're giving the best essay, you may be turning in the one that you've got a disc for, or that the student had signed a permission form for--or of the six people gave you one, only one of them thought to bring a disc. So, you know, that's problematic.
OL: And the variety of papers was not great, because you were asking for the personal sketches?
GG: Yeah, right.
OL: Let's see, do any other stages in the evolution of Our Stories stand out? I mean, there's the phase where you did it yourself, and then you began turning it over to some of the TAs there [at Arizona State].
GG: Probably the most exciting one was the one where we had two teachers involved, both teaching at the same time, both teaching in computer classrooms, but one was a regular English 101 class and the other one was an international student English 107 class. And what the teachers reported back, was that the international students really got a lot out of that because they read essays different than the kinds their classmates were capable of writing. Or they read essays that they thought, oh, we can do as good as these American students. And they learned a lot about editing, learned a lot about other things, so I got good reports from that one. That would be--if I had to pick a model, that would be the ideal model. But unfortunately from a scheduling standpoint, you don't always have that, or two people who volunteer to do it, are teaching at the same time--and that way they could meet in one big classroom at times, if they wanted to. It was kind of chaotic, but it was really a good thing to do. Then you've got international students mixed with U.S. students, working on a real project. So I think both groups benefitted from it. 148
OL: Interesting.
GG: But people volunteer.
OL: Well, it [the opportunity to coordinate classes] skips a bit, but do you find that teachers were volunteering? Was there much interest among the teachers . . .
GG: There really wasn't. [We] probably [had] twenty, twenty-one teachers last year--had one volunteer. The year before, I got both of those other two teachers. Steve, I think, was the only one who did it this year, so you know, you can always pick somebody up, but it wasn't like there was this mad rush, where I had to flip a coin or something.
OL: What, if any, essays that have been published stand out in your mind?
GG: Well, certainly the hockey one, because we had a confrontation about that! I don't know that any do particularly. You know, you use those in class; you have students look at them; they read through them; they analyze them; and then the next year; it's a different batch. So it's . . .
OL: So they always change?
GG: They always have until this year. Yeah.
OL: Do you enjoy the pieces that are in the anthologies?
GG: Sure, oh yeah! And often times, they're not mine, from my classes. But it give me a chance to see what other students are doing in the program, and that's always useful.
OL: And when--I think you already answered this--when you find mistakes, the way it was set up most recently, you really didn't do much to change
GG: Well, I mean, I mean, they did the editing. That's something I didn't do, so they took it a step further than anything I did. When it came to, I guess, garbled syntax--if it wasn't understandable, they would re-write it. That would be considered editing. If something was just not explained thoroughly or maybe there wasn't an example that really needed to be there--something you might see in a peer review session--they didn't fool around with that kind of stuff. So, it was surface editing maybe.
OL: Yeah, I completely understand. I was just thinking, after you got--well, your situation is a little bit different because you channel all this or you ease it along, and the flow--and the secrets--and that's a step that I guess some schools don't have. 149
GG: You kind of need somebody to push things and get it started and keep it going, but not necessarily do the actual detailed work.
OL: Yeah, well, are there things I should have asked about that I haven't?
GG: The only thing that comes to mind is that, at one time, and this was strictly at the University of Arizona too . . ., the department got some money from the sale of these kinds of books. We've never done that here with the Our Stories book, but they did there with our Guide to Composition. And they had an agreement with Burgess Publishing, and Burgess would pay some TAs something to help produce the book, $200, $300-- whatever. They produced the book, and had all the rules, like absence policy, and how you [get] help [at] the writing center, and stuff like that. . . . And then they required five or six thousand freshmen to buy 'em and make a buck a book, or something like that--and it gave the department money for [general] purposes. The university, for instance, won't let the department spend any money on food, because other people have abused that, so the university says, sorry, we're just not buying any food. So, you need to find these slush funds to buy pizza for people or go out for lunch as a group or whatever. So, there were some useful purposes to that. We [at Arizona State] had quite a discussion a couple of years ago as to whether-- you know, I wanted to do a contest, pay people something--this [the University of Arizona model] would have been a good way to come up with some prize money. But I hesitated because you're requiring people to buy it, and they don't know that some portion of the money they pay the bookstore goes to whatever the project is you're working on. And later on, our department was so big, they were spending some of the money on graduate student entertainment at MLA. And it was like--we don't want them--people not in comp [using the funds]. So they said, that's different, but we don't want them entertaining lit. hires, so that just didn't quite work. So, we got away from that for the other book--we've never done it for Our Stories, but I wouldn't be surprised if you're running into that at some places.
OL: Yeah.
GG: And some places it may make perfect sense. We've got that guide down on the web, so the students can access it. The URL is in all the syllabi. But we're still not getting any money out of it, which is probably a good thing because we're not tempted anymore.
OL: Right. So, you had a general guide to composition, such as a good portion of the one at Arizona?
GG: Yeah, they took it a little further than we've done. They've actually made it more of a rhetoric and student papers and stuff. Our guide was mostly, like, what to do when your teacher gives you a bad grade, or how to read comments, or you know, conferencing or some things like that. 150
OL: Yeah, in fact, we have that sort of thing at FSU. That's what our In Our Own Words-- that's what we call it--has become, freshman guide. And it has mostly student papers, but it has a section about how to cope with first-year writing.
GG: Yeah. And I think they're probably useful. I'm not sure people really pay much attention to them. Unfortunately teachers don't; students don't. But that's something that has a potential to make some money on. And we, at least, had a horrible time getting out of this contract with Burgess. It was like the contract was supposed to be in perpetuity. And it took us several years to get out of it, and legally, if we go back to publishing a hard copy, they have to publish it; we have to let them publish it. That's--you wouldn't think you could sign a contract that was going to bind people forever, but that's what this seems to be. So, now it's on the web. So it's okay, but--it precludes--it was just bad business on their part, I thought, but, anyway, that's neither here nor there.
OL: Did the department outside of the writing program . . .
GG: Yeah, they got it. Yeah, they're the one's who've got the money. So we had to convince them that it was unethical to require people to contribute to something [through the sale of a textbook]. It's like taxation without representation.
OL; In fact, I talked to somebody at Carlton State in Texas, and they have an arrangement like that, but it's not with Burgess. I think Burgess is no longer in business.
GG: They may not be; they may not be. APPENDIX E-3a
INTERVIEW WITH EILEEN DONOVAN-KRANZ BOSTON COLLEGE, 8 NOVEMBER 20001
OL: Charles Moran writes [in "How the Writing Process Came to U. Mass.-Amherst"] about how the program at U. Mass. began, and he mentions starting the anthologies there.
ED-K: Right, and I was a grad student there, which is what influenced me when I went to BC [Boston College]: both Lad Tobin and I were interested in creating a student anthology. But that certainly influenced me, because I had been through that in the writing program. And had taught in the composition program with the student anthology.
OL: That's exactly one of the things I wanted to ask about. I kind of guess that that might be the case. So, I wasn't sure, so . . .
ED-K: And it was interesting, as a grad student, to see the process they went through to create their anthology, but also when I became an administrator [at Boston College], to think about importing some of that. But, of course, changing it, in our own direction. So that-- yeah, that definitely was influential. And it worked; I could see how publication in its many forms was so useful in the composition program at U. Mass. For example, while our program at BC is more conference-based--we have individual conferences just about every week with each student, and we're lucky enough to only have 15 students in a class --at U. Mass., we had 25 students in a class, and we would have regular conferences--I think probably two or three a semester; I can't be sure on that--but, there was a definite pattern: students would submit an early draft, a mid-process draft, and a final draft, and generally, I think we may have conferenced it mid-process. But the publication worked in a few ways in that program. After each assignment, I think, most instructors used a class publication, of what the students in your individual class had produced. And then we also, at the end of the year: they put out a call for papers--or--it was a writing contest. Actually, it wasn't a call for papers. That was one of the things that I had some objection to, actually, that the way they selected things for their anthology was that the teacher, each teacher, could select two essays from her crew. And so they essentially nominated those students and obtained those essays and turned them in. And as a teacher,
1 TRANSCRIPTION NOTE: Donovan-Kranz uses "you know" and "I mean" in sentences, and these phrases have frequently been omitted for readers' convenience.
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I had problems with that for a couple of reasons. You know, choosing favorites in the class or selecting--having some difficulty choosing two students. And also, that it didn't seem quite democratic enough to me. And I wondered about the levels about decision there. What you were going for. What you were cutting out. It seemed like the philosophy of a publication was being decided in each class through the decision-making process of the teacher. Second guessing an editor, let's say. So, that made me wonder about that selection process. So, one of my--the year I was teaching there, the program, one of my student's essays was selected for the anthology, and that made me feel very puffed up and proud, of course. But we like to joke, and in our program, when we have our name right below the student's, we often feel that we're the co-author, and so there's--who knows how much we are! Things we have to ask ourselves questions about. So, that--yeah, there's definitely a certain amount of recognition, particularly for a grad student, when one of your student's essays is selected for such a publication. And, so at any rate, when I came to BC and led--came to BC and started directing the [writing] program--and I became assistant director of the program, that was when we sort of sketched out some ideas and vision for a direction. That [publishing an anthology] was one thing that came up immediately was--well, let's do some kind of--let's put on a show--let's do some kind of publication.
OL: Had he [Lad Tobin] had a similar experience? He went to the University of New Hampshire, didn't he?
ED-K: Went to the University of New Hampshire, yeah. And I don't know about that. I mean, he's certainly used student publications before, [but] it was not as formalized as it is with Fresh Ink. I mean, from what we've seen, ours [Fresh Ink at Boston College] is a more polished package than many of the other student anthologies. Which we really wanted; we really strived for that. To have it be very attractive and very professional and have the same kind of--we hope the prose is good, and it can stand in some way for a program, but that it would have the--look of a professional text.
OL: As far as I know, there's only one other school that has such a handsome looking book. There are a few others that have a book, with perfect binding and heavier covers and all of that stuff. But only Tarleton State University has the same glossy-cover-effort at making it look like an anthology that you'd find in bookstore.
ED-K: Interesting.
OL: And they use a professional publisher, as well.
ED-K: Sure. Which is not that complicated to do. I think it's probably not the same amount of effort [as a more modest anthology], but not that much more effort than bringing things, getting things together, bringing it to the printer, the typesetter, and having the perfect 153
binding through the university press or something. So that there's--it's--well, maybe it is a lot more work! Now that I think of it!
OL: Well, I'll ask you some more about that in a little bit. But let's see, you actually did speak to the first question on the [prepared] interview [outline], which was how was it [the school's anthology, Fresh Ink] begun, and by whom, and what was your inspiration and what kinds of precipitating events led to its creation.
ED-K: Right. Well, Lad's metaphor for that in the article that he writes ["Reading and Writing About Death, Disease, and Dysfunction; or, How I've Spent My Summer Vacations"], the "let's put on a show" thing actually comes from him. In his article, he writes he's not sure which one was the Mickey Rooney to the Judy Garland, in how this project came about. Which is how I remember it, too. I think it was through a collaboration, that we thought, well, let's have a publication and let's have it look good. Without knowing how much that would entail! It was ambitious out of stupidity, lack of knowledge. A good ambition, but . . . . So, he--and actually, one of my concerns with an interview like this, actually, is that I can only speak for my own role, and because we're co-editors and he's the director of the program, it's not difficult, but his take might be slightly different, of course.
OL: Well, I do hope to get this article that he's written. And I've noticed in the introduction or preface to every issue of Fresh Ink, that you all traded the responsibility, and he does talk in there a little bit about the evolution of the submissions: how they grew so much, and some of the fun of all of that. But, are there any other ways that come to your mind that it's changed since you began?
ED-K: The, gosh, the popularity: the readership of the volume more or less stays the same. It's always the incoming freshmen, roughly 1800 readers who are freshmen, then another few hundred here and there. Actually, we've been surprised at where this book has ended up. Kind of through word of mouth and people passing it along or Xeroxing from it, and a lot of high school teachers and college teachers in far-flung states have ended up with a book in their hands, which has been pretty neat. But the readership usually remains pretty stable, although the book has become more popular and has a kind of--has a place in campus life. All the kids know what it means to be, oh, were you in Fresh Ink, or . . . it has weight, it has value to them--[a value] which, of course, has built over the years. This is our seventh issue. Gosh, how did that happen? I don't know! But it's a lot of years work, a lot of effort.
OL: You said, in a recent e-mail, for example, that you'd wish it [Fresh Ink] got more prestige, and the implication, or the inference I took anyway, was that you wish it got more recognition or respect from your faculty--other members of your faculty.
ED-K: Yeah. You know, it's a double-edged sword because, well, we like have total autonomy over the production of the book. BC, our university, puts no money into the project. 154
Ostensibly they don't pay for production of the book or anything like that. Of course, our time is factored in, and that's money. But, it's valued to a point among our faculty. It's not valued the way it would be if we put together a--if we edited another kind of volume of whatever, you know--a professional journal. I mean, it doesn't have that kind of weight. It wouldn't have that kind of weight in job advancement, in promotion, it would not have that same weight. And yet we realized, I think, that--not in a sour grapes kind of way--we realized that, gee, this not only entails an awful lot of work that we're pretty much happy to do, but that it's of greater value than any of the students get from it or maybe that we do. So, I think our enthusiasm some other peoples', but . . . [laughter] Yeah. On the other hand, though, we don't want other effects of either our faculty or university to kind of own it. I think I mentioned that in an e-mail that we would start basing our selection decisions on an idea of what our university's publication should look like. Then it would be more of a promotional vehicle, and we would not have the kind of rhetorical freedom or political freedom, for example, to include essays of all stripes.
OL: Making a note to come back to this point on the tape. Let me ask a few questions about how it is actually produced. What are the stages in the publication? Do you have a clear sense of [whether] there's a phase for collecting the manuscripts and there's a phase for reading them, and so forth?
ED-K: Yes. Well, you know, these things have been codified through habit and not because it's the best way to do it. I guess the process that we go through has more or less remained the same. We collect essays at the end of each semester, and while we have thought of other ways of evaluating them and selecting among them, what we've done each year is, we collect the essays--put out a call for papers--advertise it through teachers and through campus flyers, and we put those all around where freshmen might see them. And we--I-- ask for those papers to come in during study week, which is the week before finals, each semester. And we shelve the essays that come in in December, until we get the second batch of essays in May, and then we [Lad Tobin and I] read those together. So, we read them together in May. There are advantages and disadvantages to that. It might be better to read the first batch and select from the first batch a certain amount, early in the semester--in the spring, and so on. But it takes so much time to read these, and we really need to put pretty much all our effort into it. So we want until after we've graded spring semester and then we . . .
OL: Excuse me. Does spring semester in April?
ED-K: Spring semester ends first week of May. Exams are done, essentially, in that first five to ten days of May, and we're done grading mid-May. And then, we use the third week in May to read--we take home 500 essays. Now, the first year that we did Fresh Ink, we had a group of incoming teaching assistants, teaching fellows (TFs) they're called at BC, read with us, with Lad, and with me. And it was interesting: TFs kind of volunteered for this, 155
and it was a lot of fun. And it was, pedagogically, it was really interesting to see what new teachers or incoming teachers thought of these essays, the issues it raised. But it was complete chaos! We had probably ten or twelve readers reading the whole batch, and we- -it was just a wide open field about what would be selected. In a way, as co-editors, I don't think we had total control or jurisdiction over that. So, the next year, largely for logistical reasons and some philosophical reasons, we moved to a different method: which was that Lad and I would read the hundreds of essays, and then we would meet and pare down to anywhere from 60 to 100, depending on what we liked or thought was valuable and so on. And then we have a committee that probably ranges from six to ten people, usually different people, who--they volunteer--to read the culled essays. And then we have a meeting where we hash it out and choose twenty-five. So, yeah, Lad and I are the main two readers. With the exception of the one year when Lad was on sabbatical and I had a different co-editor who was Beth Dacy. And we did that process.
OL: Do you always have new essays every year?
ED-K: Oh, yeah, totally new.
OL: I hadn't done that critical checking of tables.
ED-K: Yeah. Each entering class, and when--some people have suggested, why don't you cut out a few steps, why don't you use a "best of" collection, why not skip it for a year and re- publish the same volume. But I think Lad and I share the idea that this is really kind of a campus phenomenon. We like doing it, and in some ways, it would kind of cheat the new class to have the same essays two years in a row or something, and not give them an opportunity for publication too. So, it's a nice opportunity for the freshmen, nice product.
OL: How much time is required to compile the manuscripts initially?
ED-K: You mean the . . .
OL: [Compiling] the papers as they come in, is there much work in that?
ED-K: Yeah, well, we have--one of our secretaries helps us out particularly with that, so--the submission box is in her office. And kids always needs help with--we ask for two copies, we ask for a permission form, these things should be clipped together. And it's amazing how many people have difficulty with these steps.
OL: I'm not surprised.
ED-K: So they need a lot of direction. They end up putting a big arrow at the end of the hallway saying "Fresh Ink submissions here," and kids are wandering around the hall. Sometimes I've seen great, gleeful, hopeful looks on their faces. So, we have help. We have staff that 156
helps us with collecting the submissions and then logging them in. So, we log in--we have a process of logging in every manuscript, and either--you know--somebody ends up doing that. Sometimes it's work/study staff; sometimes one of the secretaries help with that. I've done it. It's--sometimes we'll hire somebody to do it.
OL: Does it take a day--more or less?
ED-K: It takes--I wonder how many hours it takes. It takes at least--I would think about eight hours to do it. Generally, it's split out over a period of time. We always have--the first semester is easy to get logged in because we have work/study help. Second semester is more difficult because the classes have ended. And our work/study people don't work.
OL: Then, you said there's six to ten people on the committee after you and Lad go through it?
[end of tape 1]
OL: After you and Lad have done the initial screening, you said there's a committee of six to ten people.
ED-K: Right.
OL: Are they any particular people? For example, are some of them students, are some of them TAs, or . . .
ED-K: Right. We generally like to have people who teach in the program. And we want them to be volunteers, and we don't--we don't pay them anything extra to do this. It's kind of word of mouth and are you interested, rather than asking people, because we don't want to put pressure on anyone either to think that they kind of have to do it. So, often we get some of the same people most years. And it's sort of who has time. By then it's, I think, usually the first week in June. It's who's around, who has time the first week in June, how interested they are. It doesn't take that long for them because it's a meeting that will end up being a few hours long where we figure out what the book could look like. And then they read things on their own. We copy the essays and they take them home and read them and are able to talk about them. It's varied. There's no hard formula about who's on that committee; generally, it's people teaching in the program. We have a large adjunct staff, so usually, a number of people from adjunct faculty, [and] a few teaching fellows. Incoming teaching fellows will say they're particularly interested, so we like to have some newcomers to keep things alive!
OL: Let me clarify this term--incoming newcomers. Are these people who have never taught at BC? 157
ED-K: Never taught. They will be entering their second year--they finished their first year in the master's program; they've gone through a course in teaching composition that either Lad or another professor teaches, and they have been selected to teach for the following year. Yeah. So they're interested in the teaching issues, but they haven't taught--unless they have some other, usually high school, teaching experience or something--unless they have teaching experience on their own. They've been involved in study of teaching composition, but have not had a class at BC themselves.
OL: Once you've made the selection, how and by whom are the contents shaped or organized, annotated, edited?
ED-K: Well, first of all, I should say about the selection it's really, it's a fun and loaded meeting. When we have the committee together choosing things, the selection of how things-- what's selected is--I think I mentioned in e-mails--it's never "Okay, let's find the 25 best essays." There's always a kind of balancing of [genres]: reviewers will say things like] "Don't we have that kind of essay already," and, "Hmmm, we need a textual analysis--is there any good textual analysis in here? Is it good enough? Do we have too many research papers?" So that some of that shaping of the book happens when the committee meets, and we start think about how we would teach with it and how the essays work with each other. So, again, it's kind of not let's bind our 25 essays and see how they fall.
OL: So, there's some editorial decisions being made in the committee?
ED-K: Yeah, absolutely. And there's all sorts of worries will come out there: "Well, what would it say if we had three of this kind of essay," and "Do we have too many narratives and not enough of something else." By and large, the students prefer to submit narratives, even though it's one essay, let's say, of five that we generally assign. They love the narratives. And we love them too. Sometimes. But they will give those more [than other genres]. I think it's more of a sentimental value to them, and they'll submit those, by and large, as their favorite. And then we think, well, where are all the other kinds of essays that we know they've produced. And teachers will come by and say, "Did you get such and such research essay?" And we'll say, "No, we never read that." So, that often what the teachers would have picked, so they so, anecdotally, we don't get.
OL: Well, then back to this--once the selection is made, are there decisions about organizing it and annotating it?
ED-K: Yeah. Once the decision is made, it's usually kind of like the election in Florida today [laughter] it's often loose ends, it's often a little bit undecided. And so that sometimes, like we need--Lad and I will say, "Okay, this is how the book shapes up; this is how the votes tally, but we want to have final control over the product because we want to think about all sorts of issues, like whether or not a student is somehow exposing whatever." We've had cases where students are writing in a way about family or friends that's seems to 158
endanger friends and family--expose people in some way, that we want to think about the moral implications of publishing an essay like that. And, there's the issue of pseudonyms and so on, and whether or not you talked to a student. Of course, more often than not, we've tried to persuade some students who stated a preference for a pseudonym--we've asked them to think about using their actual name. If it didn't seem to be too sensitive a topic. Sometimes, they just have a sort of vague idea that a pseudonym might be cool! But at any rate--so, we [Lad Tobin and I] like to have final control at the end, especially if we want a greater balance in the book, and we might--in the 11th hour--pull one essay and put another in. Now, yeah--so that--though never one that was definitely vetoed by committee, but it might be something that sort of vied competitively. And then we might shuffle a little bit.
OL: Do you edit the texts--correct punctuation and spelling and things like that?
ED-K: Yeah, we do. We--so we get the book--we get the composition of the book, and then, we [copy edit]. The first year, I acted as editor, as copy editor, and then other years, we've hired a copy editor. And when I say that we hire or pay people, that all this is from, is actually paid by McGraw-Hill, and then McGraw-Hill is paid back through the sale of the book. So that's added to our cost for the project and entered into the selling price of the book. So, we don't--the university doesn't pay out money, for example, to our copy editor or to our editorial assistant or something like that. That's through our publisher. So, gosh--what was the question there?
OL: Well, I was asking if it was copy edited, if you changed students' [texts].
ED-K: Yeah. We want--I think about some--I guess the pull is between going with an unedited student text, knowing that it could very likely have grammatical errors, syntactical problems, and maybe that it could be cut for greater effectiveness in the essay or something--we could go with it, as is, and teach it that way. Or we could go all the way to--you remember the Great Bologna Festival or whatever--that was so heavily edited, that it seemed the student's voices were completely lost. So, that we go [part way with copy editing]. I don't know that we're exactly in the middle of those two; I don't think we are. We really struggle to retain the student's voice and language and so on, but it definitely is cleaned up--well, cleaned up and in some cases, a little more than cleaned up, depending on the needs of the writer. I would be very uncomfortable teaching from a grossly grammatically incorrect text. So, that's one reason. And the other is that the student's--well, we would ask students to look if it were unedited--we could ask them to look for that, but I think, generally, they look to these essays as models, and they will actually use them as like a grammar handbook or something. And I've had students say they saw words used that way, and so they say, well, that sentence is in Fresh Ink, so it must be good! Or they'll use the works cited page--you know, in our first years, we had 159
some errors there. Now, we're really careful about the works cited--proper MLA format, because the kids use it like a grammar handbook.
OL: That's a good point.
ED-K: Then again, the other philosophical issue behind that is, as writers--my work has certainly been edited, and I--most professionals go through editing--and I think it can be a good experience for the student. We admit--we give credit to our copy editor. We talk about that issue in class, and we ask them [the students] to sign a provisional form that says their essay will most likely not be identical to the one they submit. So that it's all, it's documented and expected. And I actually think that that's a good thing for the student readers to know, but also for the student authors to realize. Actually, we've only had about two students over seven years who've commented on the editing of their essays. I think that most see them in print and love them and don't--they think that that sentence is exactly the way they wrote it. I think they just love it! Maybe a couple of kids have.
OL: Well, it makes perfect sense to me, anyway. It is what we do with professional writers, and so that's part of the socialization that young people are acquainted with.
ED-K: I think so. I think so. And again, that to talk about--one of the issues you need to talk about in teaching the class--how do you imagine that this was edited. Or since I'm privy to a lot of those decisions, I might tell them if a line has been cut and [ask them] what do they think of it.
OL: About how much time do you and Lad put into organizing and annotating.
ED-K: I really can't even answer that question. It just seems endless. I don't know. We've never tallied it. Many hours a week all summer. Yeah. The annotating--that's not hard. That's kind of fun, putting it into--if you look at our different issues, we've had multiple rhetorical arrangements. The first year, maybe we just had alphabetical, then we tried three varied rhetorical arrangements. Sometimes, we've gone crazy with trying--I guess, maybe looking to an anthology like Writers' Presence and looking at their various methods of organizing the essays. Annotating--gosh, how do you mean?
OL: Well, I guess writing the preface and things like that. Some people seem to have more copy along with these than you all do.
ED-K: Yeah, we're pretty spare on that. I think that probably reflects the kind of text that we would choose to teach with--with less rhetorical apparatus. So, that I know Lad generally chooses, and I do--although in our program, there's freedom for people to choose-- whatever they like, even teaching fellows, to teach with. So, yeah, the only thing that we've done is to think about the way the book is broken up. The first year, again, we had it arranged alphabetically, and then we realized that it didn't present the essays in a way we 160
wanted, that we wanted to have more input in shaping the book and its progress, the whole reading experience, I guess. And so we've tried various ways of organizing it and that's a kind of implied rhetoric as opposed to an explicit one.
OL: Okay. Now, you have this arrangement with a printer always? Or at least you it seems like after the first year you went to that.
ED-K: Well, the first year, we did all the work ourselves, more or less. We had a typesetter, we found a printer, an independent printer, and we arranged everything through the bookstore. The second year, we went with a custom publisher, and there were a number over the years--want that business both because they--it's 1800 books and they can make money from it, but also because they can kind of shop it around, because it's an attractive book. They like to show it to other universities, [as if to illustrate] this is something you could do. We've stuck with McGraw-Hill thus far, so they've been helpful in taking over some aspects of the process like typesetting or--which is all, it's all computer--now the students submit hard copy. We don't ask them to submit by disc, although we've talked about it. We, the typesetter from McGraw-Hill scans all the essays. It bounces back to either one of us--Lad or me. No, actually, from the typesetter, it goes to our editor, who edits the text. That used to be done by hand; now it's done online. Then one of us or an editorial assistant looks at the edits to see if they approve of them, is it too little, is it too much--is it on target--and kind of reads through each of those essays again. And then it goes back to the typesetter after it's been approved. That takes so much time. That takes an enormous amount of time.
OL: Is that going on during the summer?
ED-K: Yeah. Largely--the middle of June toward end of July--or middle of July, I guess--it's the bulk of the work, which is often problematic because it's also when we want to be doing our own work. Our other work of our own.
OL: And the funding works, I guess the publisher basically covers all of it?
ED-K: Yeah, right.
OL: The sales of the book, how much does an issue cost?
ED-K: Gosh, our first year, it was lower cost; It was probably closer to $6, and now we're around $10-11 for an issue. Which is--we're really loathe to go over the $10 mark. But then, we kind of try to put it in context of the quality of the book, the benefit of students actually buying it at the bookstore, where they buy all their other textbooks, and how much. Unfortunately they have to pay for the textbooks. What a reader goes for now.
OL: Does the program receive any revenue or anything? 161
ED-K: Mmm, no. Sometimes with these custom publishers, there's a question whether or not you get a royalty. And we've opted to go--I think every year--we've opted to go without the royalty, but put that money--whatever savings that would come up with--we put that money into lessening the cost of the book, as opposed to adding a cost to the book. So that we could get money back, which would not go to us, but would maybe go to our program budgets, that we could have--I mean, we have thought about that, having speakers or something, having a budget that we could do that kind of thing, but we haven't. You'll notice I'm not doing that. [Daughter plays a music box in background].
OL: How long does the publisher take once you have everything ready to go with?
ED-K: I think about a month. It's been a squeaker every time to get the book in the bookstore within the week before school opens, because then we want them on the shelves, when the kids come in with their parents and their credit cards!
OL: And they are ready?
ED-K: Every year but one, that happened. One year, we didn't have them on time. And most years--and also one year we ran out--may have been the same year--we also ran out of books. But, yeah, we have to have them there on time and ready to roll.
OL: And it is distributed through the bookstore exclusively?
ED-K: It is.
[Tape ends, and with it the first interview closes.] APPENDIX E-3b
INTERVIEW WITH EILEEN DONOVAN-KRANZ BOSTON COLLEGE, 12 NOVEMBER 20001
OL: I was wanting to ask you how the anthology fits into the writing curriculum at Boston College.
ED-K: Right, right. Well, it's very much privileged in the first-year writing seminar in the course that all the freshmen, all the first-year students, must take. With a few exceptions, with AP credit and that sort of thing, all students take it, and all students buy that book, Fresh Ink, and read it, and it's put to use in that class. It's the only book that's mandated for the course. And there's a lot of freedom for each instructor, including teaching fellows, for other materials. But we all have that in common. So, it's used for--I think it's often used in tandem with the reader, Professional Essays--either discussing a professional essay or a few, and essays from Fresh Ink. Or some instructors will split them up on different days. So, students--although I generally don't call them models--students, I think I've mentioned this before--students call them that [models] and call the professional essays "models," of sorts. And in my classroom, as in most others, we read a number of essays in the genre or category that we're righting, and then they embark on a project. So, it's by way of example and garnering their interest.
OL: Let's see--so, if it's not required--well, it is required, but no particular essays are required, I guess?
ED-K: No, so there'll be--you know, there's 25 essays in the book, and probably very few people assign every one of them. You know, you would assign them as they strike you as being particularly pertinent to whatever unit you're working on.
OL: Are there any particular assignments that are structured by the program?
ED-K: No. Well, actually, I mean, I said--I should rephrase that. Everyone who teaches the course has students do--I guess what is, I think, you know, five pages a week of writing. And that, you know, some of that would be reading responses; some of it would be
1 TRANSCRIPTION NOTE: Donovan-Kranz uses "you know" and "I mean" in sentences, and these phrases have frequently been omitted for readers' convenience.
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writing activities, and then draft of the papers. And, we--there are a number of assignments that most instructors use--I mean, each students will write, of the more formal papers, each student will write at least four or five of those over the course of the semester. And the requirement is that students produce work in, varied in genre, and in purpose, and probably style and tone. So that most instructors will--I mean there'll be narratives; there'll be cultural or literary analysis, argument, essay with research, maybe satire--that kind of thing. So, there are requirements in that each student moves through those kinds of writing assignments. But we don't mandate connections to Fresh Ink as an anthology or to any other anthology.
OL: Right, right. Do you know if Fresh Ink is used in any other part of the curriculum at BC?
ED-K: You know, various departments have been interested in it. I know that it's gathered interest in the School of Education, the School of Education within Boston College. I mean they're aware of it, and use it--probably more often in graduate courses than in the undergrads. The graduate students who are taking composition rhetoric in the Master's program in English--they certainly use that text, and kind of, you know, work analyzing freshman writing, as well as an introduction to what you can expect. Other--gosh, there was a course last year. I forget which department. It's kind of a, you know, word of mouth kind of thing. I think it was a theology or philosophy professor who was using the book. And that was interesting. And also, we sent out, gosh, I don't know, 75 copies or something to a Boston school, based on that professor's interest. But I can't remember the exact details of that.
OL: When you say Boston schools, do you mean . . .
ED-K: A public school.
OL: High school?
ED-K: Yes.
OL: Neat.
ED-K: I remember the publisher sent out, gratis, 75 copies or something like that. So, it was used in one of the high schools. I mean, part of that kind of crossover interest is related to--as much to as, gee, how do college freshmen write, as to the kinds of essays that are in the book, which I do think have a kind of broad appeal for that age group, or for older adolescents. You know, social issues and personal issues, social issues, individual opinions on varieties of subjects. Sometimes, we've also, you know, a lot of students will write essays critical of institutions, including Boston College, let's say. And that is some kind of revelation to our readers. Maybe not to us, but it's a revelation for the kids. 164
OL: Revelation that you'd include that or . . .
ED-K: That we'd include it; that you can do it, you know. I mean, everything is, you know, advertising is sexist. Well, to some--we get many essays like that--we published a few. And some students will think this is revelatory or will argue with it and say, "You're reading too much into it." But, it's interesting. To us, it doesn't seem that earth shattering [an] idea, but I think it's the stance of the position, the way the position is being argued-- argued vehemently by someone in their own age group--that makes it interesting. Maybe even more than [that]; maybe the fact that you can argue something and can do that in a voice in a way that's compelling--that's as relevant to them as what they choose to write about.
OL: Absolutely. How well does Fresh Ink reflect the relative quality of pieces that students throughout BC's first-year writing.
ED-K: Gosh, that's hard, that's hard to say. I don't think that the essays that we publish differ greatly from the quality of writing that we get by and large. And, meaning that some-- well, a few essays each year will stand out as, "Oh, this is a must! This is an incredible piece. This kid is a writer." A few essays stand out that way. But other than that, everything is kind of up in the air. Again, I mentioned before, it's how the essays talk to each other, and what they do. Have we published one like it before? How would we use it in class? It's really a teaching tool rather than a literary magazine or journal. So--I think, gosh--I don't know whether to say they're representative or not. We look for pieces that are unique in some way, or that work well with--in a classroom situation. We look for a certain quality of voice, I think, and a kind of literary or intellectual accomplishment. But they're not things that we would never see elsewhere. So, they're in between representative and stellar.
OL; And that gets at the next point that I was going to ask about--the variety of papers. And it sounds like you're looking for all variety, but you do have, with each issue--is it appropriate to characterize it with each issue--you may be looking for certain themes or certain niches to fill?
ED-K: Ummmm, sort of. I think we look more than for a kind of social topic or political attitude. We look more for--under certain rubrics, so each year we'll have, oh, gosh--again, literary analysis, or cultural criticism, and look for things that fall under that--those categories. We always have narrative. We're always looking for a good research paper. So, we look for that kind of thing, and sometimes we're wary of having an issue that's too political, again, and that can become an interesting debate: "Are we representing--who are we representing? Are we representing the teachers or of the students? What kinds of students, what kinds of political biases, are they ours?" So, there's no easy answers to that. 165
One year we had a reader that was a lot of--our teachers, including students, called--the multi-cultural reader. And there were a lot of essays that particular year from students around the globe: a lot of writing about the immigrant experience or the new immigrant experience. And there was a little bit of a backlash, I think, with that. And every year, we'll have students write--or students say, "How can I compete with this; I didn't come here from x, y, z"; or "How can I compete with this? My best friend didn't die when I was twelve." They seem to take those essays either more seriously or read them differently than the other essays, which are just as abundant in each volume, about mundane moments transformed through the writing, bits of analysis that anyone could write. You don't need to have gone through a traumatic experience to analyze a particular work. So, sometimes they don't see those, and they see the thing that they are different from.
OL: Do you remember--this is precisely the next thing I was going to ask. When you mentioned the multi-cultural reader--do you remember what year that was?
ED-K: No, I don't have all those in front of me. I think it might have been--there's one that's kind of a kaleidoscope kind of cover; it's black; it's a Kandinsky painting that looks sort of like a quilt. I think it might be that one. But I'm not sure. I could e-mail you about that one, too.
OL: Okay. Do you recall any other stages in the evolution of Fresh Ink? I mean--it seems--the multi-cultural issue seems like it might stand out.
ED-K: Yeah. Well, the other thing is how much--whether a book is in the contents is prescriptive or descriptive--are we trying to make them better people through these readings? Are we trying to capture a moment in time, since it comes out every year, and captures kind of the mood of a year or of a particular student body. Is there, implicit in what we choose, an editorial motive like that? I think we're always talking about those questions. We don't have a clear answer. Usually, in committee, in selecting, we'll talk about certain kinds of essays, like the eating disorder essay [or] the car, the car wreck essay. And we see those--often there's a transforming kind of moment--by and large. Our submissions, I think I've said that before, to Fresh Ink are narrative--that's not representative of the variety of writing that they do. But it's where their hearts are, I think. So, we see a lot of literary conventions, sometimes sentimental conventions there. And then it's hard to know exactly why we'd choose one thing over another. Are we obligated to publish a piece about--with a woman writing about her recovery struggle with anorexia? And, if we're obligated to do so, where's that coming from? So, that's interesting.
OL: Do you feel some obligation to do that? To publish pieces like that? 166
ED-K: When we get so many of them, so many of--often it's related to women's issues, when students seem to be coalescing for the first-year female students in particular, you know, the move away from home, academic study, a variety of reading, and then all of a sudden, they'll write all this--personal experience--and start making connections there. So it could be about relationships; it could be about abuse; it could be about eating; it could be about drinking or sexuality. We get a lot of that kind of thing.
OL: Yeah, I can imagine you would.
ED-K: So, it's--we have questions about, gee--should we include something like this or does the writer really know what she's getting into or he's getting into if we publish this? So, we always publish essays that students are surprised at what--we're not so surprised--but students are surprised at: 'Wow, it took courage for the writer to say this, reveal this, investigate this." And so for them, they find those writers to be courageous.
OL: So you do publish some of them?
ED-K: Oh, yes! This year, in this last volume, we have a student--I wouldn't say it was a coming- out essay, but he writes about what it's like to be gay at Boston College, and sort of looks over his history as a homosexual male. And it's--and he says he doesn't publish it with a pseudonym and didn't want to. But that, that kind of thing, that kind of thing.
OL: Do any other essays stand out in your mind?
ED-K: There was--I mean, in that way?
OL: Yeah, or for any other particular reason.
ED-K: The essays that stand out in my mind are not necessarily the ones . . . . We had an essay last year, a woman writing about recovering from an abusive relationship. I mean, that stands out on social issues. But, essays that stand out to me are more literary and writerly. Those are the essays that I remember, and if we were ever to have a "collected essays," those are the ones I'd be more drawn to.
OL: Which do you--can you cite any of those in particular?
ED-K: Yeah. There's one called--I think about three years ago--"Bombardment." And it's about that game in gym, and another--a lot of these are male identity things--there's one, I think it was last year, called "Courting the Devil," male kind of brutality rituals. There's one that opens this year's book, a woman writing, it's an essay with research, but it's about fiddling and cultural identity. It's a really lovely essay. Gosh, every year, I can pick a handful like that. And sometimes, I'll Xerox them for students in other years. 167
OL: Yeah, I've talked to other people who do the same kind of thing: take their favorites and reproduce them. So, is it fair to say that you enjoy the pieces that are published in the anthology?
ED-K: Oh, yeah; oh, yeah. No, I'm very proud of it, and I like reading them. Very few things get in there that we don't like to read--that we don't like reading.
OL: That is generally the case, but it's not always articulated, so I figured I need to ask that question.
ED-K: Yeah, I mean--they're not purely instructive; they're not purely representative--"Oh, we need this kind of essay"--they have to do more than that. They can't--maybe once I had one that put me to sleep--but I'm not going to say which one it was!
OL: Fair enough.
ED-K: But, they have to move beyond just filling in a hole, a gap in the book.
OL: Right. When you find mistakes in pieces, should I assume those are handled by the copy editor?
ED-K: Yeah. Actually, it's often a collaboration between the editors and the copy editor, so that we'll have concerns about various pieces: "This piece needs a particularly needs a grammatical going-over; such and such a piece is--has repetition, could you think about condensing a few of the paragraphs." We do that kind of thing, too. So, usually, it's a bit of a collaboration, and the copy editor does that. And then it comes back to us for approval. Often the copy editor will come up with things we haven't suggested. Sometimes, and you know we've had a few different copy editors--myself, and two other people--sometimes it'll be too much. We'll say, "That goes too far away from the original text," and we'll stet it back.
OL; But it doesn't necessarily get back to the students to do much more?
ED-K: We had a case this year where we--I had one that I thought was too altered, and it went back--with the exception of a few real grammatical errors--went back to the student. It had been fundamentally shifted around. And that was too much, in my mind. It wasn't the best essay in the book by any means. But it just--I thought it strayed too far from where the student started. So, it went just about as close to--back to the original as you could get.
OL: What attitude do teachers in the program seem to have toward the anthology? 168
ED-K: It's a--I think it's a kind of beloved institution at this point. It's well used. It's well loved. It's sometimes hated. It stirs things up. We often do a neat thing where we ask the students on the permission form whether they'd be willing to talk to classes next year and share drafts and that kind of thing. Most students agree to do that. So when we publish-- we'll distribute the names and phone numbers and e-mail of those students to our instructors. So last week, for example, I had a student from this year's volume--a sophomore--came into my freshman class, and gosh, his essay was "The Lost Tree House." It was just great! The fellow students loved that. They loved having the author come in, and they asked him everything about how this project originated, what phases did it go through, and everything from that to what's it like to be a published author. It's neat.
OL: That's a great idea! Well, are there areas that I've neglected to ask about that I should have pursued?
ED-K: I don't think so. That just reminds me of the life the book has on campus. I mean, I'll hear from students--authors--that they've gotten e-mails from--now that everything, everyone e-mails everybody--they'll get "fan mail" from fellow students. Sometimes, it's-- particularly, once we had a case that the essayist, who really criticized the campus culture, and kids would call him up. I don't think they were threatening phone calls, but [they] would ask him, "Where's this coming from?" They were engaged to a dialogue. I hope it was a productive one.
OL: Wow. That reminds me of a point somebody made in an article on the advantage of these. A long time ago, in 4Cs, a guy talked about somebody who had written about Chicago and everybody attacked him because this particular author didn't like Chicago, and he said, this is a great way for students to get involved in their writing.
ED-K: That's right. [Laughter] Attack. Yeah, it creates a debate. And whether the debate happens in the class--that's a good example actually, about, gee . . . . Is it, "Are you a traitor if you write about something like that? What is betrayal; what is loyalty? What's yours to write about?" That kind of thing particularly seems to come up when we get the real human essayist come into class! So, that's kind of neat. It has a nice voice and livelihood on campus, and we'll keep doing it although it's a lot of trouble.
OL: Of course.
[End of tape] APPENDIX E-4
INTERVIEW WITH MARVIN DIOGENES STANFORD UNIVERSITY, 8 NOVEMBER 2000
OL: Do you know how the anthology was begun and by who? I think you talked [with me] a little about this at 4Cs [the 2000 Conference on College Composition and Communication, Minneapolis, MN].
MD: Yeah. Charles Davis was a Comp. Director at Arizona from roughly 1973 to 1990, and in the late 70s, he--I wasn't quite there yet. I got there when the second edition of The Guide was being put out. So, I wasn't there when the idea came to him. But, I think a big part of the impulse--I think there were two major reasons for The Guide to be developed at that particular time. One was a local in-house reason that the department was relying more and more on graduate assistants to teach the required first-year courses, so anywhere from 25 to 40 new graduate assistants would be coming in every August, start teaching a two-two course load in the composition program. And there needed to be ways to orient these new teachers to the teaching of writing, and to the local standard. So, one of the big reasons for the first guide was to have a teaching tool for the graduate students in terms of--these are the standards of the program, these are the grading criteria, and you'll communicate them to your students because all of your students are going to buy this book as one of the texts for the course. And there'll be sample essays and there'll also be prize-winning essays from an essay contest. So, that was one big motive was to have a document that everyone would look to as the voicing of the program standards, and which would help the teachers know what they were supposed to do. And the other major reason was to communicate those standards outside the university, so The Guide has always been sent to every high school in the state of Arizona, because you know, it's a public university and it's primary mission is to educate the students of Arizona, even though now, there are certainly a lot of out-of-state students, and it's a big research university. But it was, I think, more of a regional university at that time. It was just beginning to move towards its research mission with more energy. But The Guide has always been an important outreach tool for the writing program, and for the university as a whole.
OL: Now, are you being literal about every high school
169 170
MD: Yeah.
OL: You mean . . .
MD: In the state.
OL: In the state, you mean outside the area?
MD: There's something like 185 to 210 high schools in Arizona, and each one gets a copy of The Guide every year.
OL: Amazing. Well, you said you got there probably around the second year it was being published. How has it changed since it was begun?
MD: The first guide was about 67 pages, I believe, and the second one, I think, was about 120 pages. And then the third one--I don't know. I think the first one I co-edited with Clyde Moneyhun was the fourth edition, and he started, I think, on the third edition. And so, it kept getting bigger. And when Clyde and I were co-editing, it sort of exploded and became 200-220 page book, and it kept getting bigger and bigger. And the reason for the was that--one of the interesting things about Arizona's Guide--is it paralleled development in the field of ret. comp. which was going through sort of--both a growth spurt and a kind of sea change in the late [19]70s and early 80s. And the reason The Guide had to change was, the first couple of editions of The Guide were primarily growing out of current traditional premises about composition. It only had final products, you know, finished essays. And so that "D" essay or that "C" essay that was in an early edition of The Guide--there was no hope for that essay. It was a "D" and it was always going to be a "D," and it was there to document failure. And even though students' names were not on those essays, certainly, the only students' names were on the prize-winning essay. So, there was this interesting congratulatory element of The Guide: here as the best essays our students wrote, and their names are there, and here are these really horrible essays to serve as cautionary examples to all these under-prepared students who maybe don't belong in a university. And they're so shameful, we won't even put the student's names on them; we're just going to label them as this is the "D" essay; this is the "C" essay. And, that's one of the knocks on current traditionalism, that since it wasn't a process-based approach to teaching writing, only the product was evaluated. Those judgements had a kind of finality about them, and a kind of harshness about them. As the field started to change, the editing of The Guide started to change. We decided, probably about the fifth or sixth edition--I can't remember exactly when--that we would no longer put poor essays in The Guide; that--where we ended up was--finally only "A" and "B" essays were in The Guide. I think, you know, there was a transitional period where we still had a "C" essay or two in there to show sort of average performance. But the judgmental element, we tried to make softer. 171
And then, because the program was also accepting the notion of process and the notion of the teacher playing a role in the drafting process, the revision process, The Guide naturally became longer because we started to put in multiple versions of student essays. And when that happened, it certainly exploded in size from the early editions under 100 pages to the later editions, going 200, 300--finally 400, 500--and it just kept growing and growing all the way through the 80s and into the 90s, until it just got to be too much. But, you know, it was healthy in the sense that the nature of writing was being presented in a much more elaborate and hopeful way, compared to those first couple of editions, where there were the blessed contest winners and the exiles to hell [who] didn't even have names any more because their essays were so horrible. So, that's why it started to get bigger and bigger, in the sense of the cautionary examples that left the editorial perspective. We just weren't trying to do that anymore, after a couple of years.
OL: Fascinating. At one point, back at 4Cs, you mentioned something about the dean seeing it. Is that something? Do you remember that bit in the conversation? Maybe it's not something--even if you remember it--that's appropriate to talk about. But I think you said that once the dean saw it, you had to do it.
MD: Mmm--I don't remember that.
OL: Okay. Can you tell me, or maybe I should ask questions about how it's produced of other people? But do you have a sense of what the stages in the publication process are?
MD: Well, the history, for a long time, was with--do you mean the deal with the publishers or the in-house editorial process?
OL: Actually, both. I was thinking, first, of the in-house process of getting the manuscripts and figuring out which ones would be included, and all that sort of stuff, and then . . .
MD: Yeah. I'll start on the publishing end. The--Dr. Davis worked out the deal with a custom publisher, called Burgess, up in Minnesota, and I don't know exactly how he came upon them. The editors of the first edition of The Guide were two people named Dwight Yates and Nancy Karek. And I don't know if one of them found Burgess or if Charles Davis found Burgess. But Burgess--which was later called Bellwether Press, always up in Diana, Minnesota--they were the publishers of The Guide for about 17, 18 years. I don't know if they still are.
OL: It's my understanding that they've been purchased by another . . .
MD: Uh huh, uh huh, yeah, Miller would be able to tell you more about that relationship in the 90s. But all the time I was involved, I was working with people in Minnesota. And it might be interesting for you to talk to somebody at that company because they did a lot of 172
these different books. I think, if you're reviewing the actual books, you'd be seeing Burgess or Bellwether on a bunch of them from the 80s. They took it on as something they would seek out, and they would use the Arizona Guide as a selling point. They would show it to account directors at other schools and say, we can do something like this for you. So, they started to do different books in Texas and, I think, they did the original Arizona State one at some point. And other places, so . . . On the local end, Karek and Yates, I believe, were advance graduate students in Tucson, and then the editor of the second edition was a guy named James Hepworth. And then Clyde [Moneyhun] and Hepworth did the third edition, and then Clyde and I did the fourth edition. I think, generally, the editors have always been graduate students in the department of English. So, while Charles Davis was the founding force for The Guide, he never put his name on it in the sense of editing it. His name or the comp. director's name was always on the front page, along with the department head. But the editors were always graduate students teaching in the program. The process was--I think what you would expect--that every year, whoever the editors were would start collecting materials by soliciting the teachers to give us sample papers that they thought would be good for The Guides, and all of them were using The Guide as a required book in their classes. They would develop feelings and opinions about what would be appropriate. The more the book moved toward process [pedagogy], the more we had to look not only for the student essays, but also the apparatus surrounding it --the assignment sheets, the teacher's responses to drafts. We would start to solicit sort of comments reflecting on the overall process from both the teacher and the student. We started to do that about the fourth edition. So, the longer the book got, the more complicated the process became of finding the material. There was always--the easier stuff to do was always--the policy part of the book and the grading standards part. Those didn't change a whole lot. So, those materials would just be edited every year and updated if necessary. But the bulk of the work went into gathering materials from the teaching staff and building up the apparatus around those examples of student writing.
OL: Were there statements about the types of writing you were looking for? You know, guidelines that people should consider?
MD: No, it was pretty generalized. It might be--we might have a particular assignment that we were trying to bulk up in the books. We might say, "Gee, we need more rhetorical analysis essays. " We might put out a call like that. But, in general, it was any kind of essay that your students are writing that you think would work well in The Guide. One thing to remember about the Arizona program is that, at least in the last 20 years or so, it's, because of its size, it's always been a program that had standard assignments but with variations developed by the individual teachers. So, The Guide probably couldn't have developed if that hadn't been the nature of the program. So, you know, you look for particular essays to fit under the categories that were operating in the course at that time. So, in a course like 101, you'd be looking for you documented arguments; you'd be looking for your close reading essays; you'd be looking 173
for--in the old days, we were still teaching modes approach--so we might be looking for a comparison and contrast or cause and effect or something like that. And so The Guides become a way of getting teachers to understand the program's goals, but also have some freedom to develop their versions of these assignments. So I guess that would be another purpose of a guide like this is to--in the social constructionist sense--to build knowledge about the program and to keep people talking about it. In a more--in a negative sense, you know, when there have been criticisms of The Guide, they would usually be that it was an attempt to enforce standards and enforce--you know, enforce the syllabus, make people teach the standard syllabus. So there's always been a tension between the sort of happy-faced social constructionist way of thinking about what The Guide does, and the more top down [perception of] "Let's make people do things the same way. And I think that's something you can't avoid in a big comp. program. There's always going to be that tension between the individual's desire to teach their own way and the program's desire to have some coherence in the program. In some years, that was a happier tension, in some years, it was not.
OL: Well, let's see, about how much time would have been required to compile all the initial manuscripts?
MD: It was really a task that doesn't end. It's sort of like--there's a cliché about the Rose Bowl Parade, that they start the planning for the next year the morning after. I think The Guide became like that. I was already feeling it, to some degree, back in the mid-80s. I'm sure the editors later on, when the book got longer, felt it even more: that you are always in that process. You are always worrying about collecting essays; you are always soliciting them; you are always doing work on The Guide. There wasn't time to--there weren't any real lulls. It was such a big production, you just kept doing it.
OL: Did it amount to a portion of a T.A. assignment?
MD: Yeah. Generally, The Guide editors would have one course on--I think both semesters. Tom Miller would be able to tell you that. But I think that the standard load was 2/2, and I think The Guide editors do a 1/1. So that they have, that would translate to, 10 hours a week for each of the three editors to work on The Guide.
OL: That's impressive. Now, did they have the final authority on selecting essays, those editors? Or was there a committee?
MD: There wasn't a committee in the formal sense, but there was--this would change from year to year, depending on who was in charge--the comp. director [who] would always have some sort of say, but [who] usually wouldn't then review the book, I don't think, until it was pretty close to done. And I don't recall any cases where somebody vetoed anything 174
that was chosen for The Guide. I think the editors were usually given a lot of discretion to make those selections. There was kind of, back in the 80s, a kind of an informal committee. We called them supervisors back then. These were the lecturers who worked on training the new teachers, and who had mentored them through their time. So when I was co-editing, I would always be trying to include that group in the process, as a kind of informal editorial group. Now those folks are called teaching advisors, and they're still lecturers, and I don't know to what degree they're included in the process. The Guide editors, I noticed before I left the last five years or so, were always asking for feedback from the whole teaching staff about what the staff wanted in The Guide. So it wasn't so much an editorial board as kind of a program enterprise that people could choose to involve themselves with or not.
OL: I think you mentioned that there was a prize-winning essay?
MD: Yeah.
OL: Is that a committee decision or . . .
MD: Yeah, not committee, but different judges for different courses. I was always somewhat puzzled by--this is a program that teaches between 10 and 12,000 enrollments a year. So, you know, maybe 40,000 essays are written in those courses, and it used to puzzle me that some years, we would get under a hundred essays for the contest. And we put a lot of effort into letting the teachers know, and the entry form and . . . so, this is something that I would talk about delicately. And I don't know if you're seeing this in other schools as you're doing your research, but if I were in your position, one of the questions I'd be interested in is, is there a disconnect between these kinds of books and the actual practice of the program, of the teachers in the program. And the bigger the school--it seems to me--the bigger the chance that there will be this disconnect. So in a place like Tucson, I think sometimes the editors felt, over the last 20 years, that they were putting a lot of work into a very time- consuming project, but that that wasn't translating into a book that was readily used in the actual courses with those, you know, the five hundred sections or whatever.
OL: Yeah, it is definitely a question I'm trying to touch on.
[End of Tape 1]
OL: Let me be sure I understand about the editing and that sort of stuff. All of this was on the shoulders of the TAs, who had the editorship?
MD: Yeah, mostly, yeah. 175
OL: And they organized it and annotated it and that sort of thing?
MD: Yeah.
OL: Did they work with the student essays particularly, having to polish them, or . . .
MD: No, we tried not to do a lot of that. Tried to get the students, you know, to do any necessary editing before the essays were published, especially the prize-winning one, the ones that were, you know, intended as samples we might leave, especially in drafts, we might leave errors just as part of that, representing work in progress.
OL: So there was some back and forth with the students?
MD: Yeah, a little bit, back when I was doing it--I assume it continued afterwards.
OL: In other words, did you make notes, meet with the students, or how did that happen?
MD: It depended. If it were one of the prize-winning essays, we might, you know, ask them to take another look at the essay, make any corrections they needed to make. If it was a process, we, as I mentioned earlier, there was a point where we would be soliciting comments from the students about the whole process, so we would work with them on that.
OL: And the editors did that directly? You didn't go through the teachers.
MD: No.
OL: Let me come back to the association with the printers. Did all the funding work through them, so that the university had no cost as far as any of the printing, or do you know?
MD: It--the original--I think the original contracts with Burgess specified a royalty. And that would come to the composition program and would be used for different purposes. And it would support graduate students in different ways for travel. And as far as the cost of editing The Guide, I think that was borne by the department which would provide the release time for the editors, so it was in the department budget as program support. And then the royalties would become funds that would support the graduate students. That may have evolved over the years. Tom Miller would know more about that.
OL: But the students paid by buying it; is that how it works?
MD: Yeah, I think--this is another delicate area--that custom publishing depends on, to a large degree, a guaranteed number of copies being bought. So, Burgess, I think, was interested in these kinds of relationships because they knew that when they made the deal with a 176
school like Arizona they were going to sell, you know, 5,000 copies of this book. And then they would figure out what they could afford to pay as a royalty. Based on the guarantee, there was no risk at all, since it was a required book--they were going to sell 5,000 of them. So, they could pay--I don't know, let's say as an example, they could pay a $2.50 royalty on a $12 book and still be assured of their profit, and the program would be getting $12,500 because the book was required of those 5,000 students. And, this gets us into a fairly complicated set of questions about, you know, the ethics of this kind of publishing enterprise in a program with maybe 120 different teachers --some percentage of whom will not use that book. Even if they have to require their students to buy it, they're just not going to use it. So the students end up subsidizing a program publication through having to buy a book which their teacher might not ever refer to, except perfunctorily in the class. So, there's a very tangled set of questions. And I'd be curious about whether other schools face it the same way in that the book depends on being required. You couldn't do this kind of book if it weren't required. And I would think that's the case in most places.
OL: Well, actually, as far as I've been able to tell, there's a lot of variety in this. Some do as Arizona seems to, but others have a different approach. Some take no royalties, for example. And some charge a lab fee that gives the students the book. Some get grants from outside sources. So, there are, I've been impressed to discover that there is more variety.
MD: I'm interested in that, too. I would probably have been more comfortable overall if there had been some sort of subsidy or grant to provide for the production of a book like this, and the students weren't being charged. But on the other hand, if it was an integral part of the curriculum, I think it's fine to charge the students. It's just the issue of sifting out how many students are having to buy this book but not getting any pedagogical benefit out of it.
OL: By in large, the places that have the grants are the private universities, and it's easy to understand how they would be able to pursue these grants. At any rate, let me get back to how the anthology was used in the curriculum. You just mentioned some of that, that some of the teachers apparently never used it.
MD: Yeah. I mean, the idealized narrative about how it was used was that, as you work through the assignments of the course, you would be consistently integrating reading assignments in discussion of The Guide, as you worked your way through the curriculum. So that the intent was that The Guide would literally guide both teacher and students through the program's curriculum, by providing these illuminating models. In practice, because, you know, you get 120 writing teachers, you're not going to have agreement about anything in a curriculum, you know, about how you give an assignment, how you emphasize--so in practice, I think, relatively few teachers use The Guide consistently. 177
I think people would use it on a pretty wide range of consistency. At the low end, people would not use it all other than refer to the policy section and say, "You are responsible for knowing what The Guide says about the policies." Some would use the section for criteria on grading and especially some of the new teachers would rely on that heavily and say, you know, "Read this chapter on program standards for grading because these are the standards I'm going to use, so you really need to be familiar with what an "A," "B," "C," "D," and "E" represent. And then, that part of the book never changed a whole lot, because it seemed to do what it was supposed to be doing. But the greatest variation would probably be in the use of the sample essays. Some teachers would never use them, and some teachers would use them pretty heavily. So, I don't think we ever did a formal study of this. There were some informal surveys from year to year about, "Okay, what did you use; what didn't you use; what would you like to have." And just keep in mind the enormous size of that program. With those 500 sections a year, and anywhere from 100 to 150 teachers--some of whom are part-timers, some of whom are first-year grad students, some of whom are 5th-year grad students. There are just all those forces that fragment a coherent approach to a curriculum. In a place like Arizona, those factors were all very powerful. Where I am now [Stanford University], where we teach 150 sections a year with about 50 or 60 teachers, I can see those same forces at work, in terms of the variations across the section. So, imagine what it's like at the bigger schools--I'm sure Florida State has its versions of this too--something like The Guide as a curricular project. Especially if you're involved in it, you become more and more aware of just how much fragments a writing program and how hard it is to encourage even conversation about what the program's trying to do.
OL: Well, it actually gets off the prepared interview, but I am curious about this, because at FSU, we have a required summer course of all new TAs. It's a for credit, three-hour, six weeks boot camp kind of thing. And I wonder if, at Arizona, there was any training in how to use The Guide.
MD: Well, it was part of . . ., Arizona, when I started 20 years ago, had a one-week boot camp right before classes started, which eventually was expanded to something closer to two weeks. But the credits are given over the course of that year, so people get four credits: they get two of them in the fall and two of them in the spring, and they're attending weekly meetings all through that first year. And The Guide is definitely a part of that experience. Both in the orientation before classes start and through the year. But basically what that does is that it sets up the terms of the conflict, because, you know, graduate students have never been docile--I mean if there ever was a time in the history of higher education where graduate students were easy to herd towards service to the needs of the department. I think what's neat for the department is to have the bodies there. That's ultimately the bottom line. You know, the graduate students can be resistant as long as they want, as long as they're there, because graduate education depends on having the bodies there. So, writing programs have often inherited the unruliness of 178
graduate assistants, because--I'm getting into sort of questionable assertions here, which other people could disagree with, but, you know, as I'm talking, it's occurring to me that-- resistance to the comp. program is the price the department pays in order to have students to take its graduate courses.
OL: Absolutely, that's what we see plenty of here at FSU.
MD: And so, the issue doesn't come up. It comes up on the graduate education end, in issues like required courses and exams, so I know they have the unruliness of grad students on their side, too. But, I think that when you're trying to teach, you know, first-year composition requirements, that the scale of the issue, of whether people are going to decide to be a member of a program in a constructive way. It just gets compounded. And The Guide can become a locus for that conflict. And, so some people, just as a point of honor, will refuse to have anything to do with the comp. program's curricular decisions, because that's just part of their self-definition: "I'm not going to use the books they tell me to use; I'm not gonna teach the way they want me to teach." But, you know, it's enormously complicated because they can't resist to the point where their funding would be jeopardized. So, there's a whole lot going on with this kind of stuff.
OL: But at least, during this one or two week orientation, there were some exercises that introduced The Guide?
MD: Oh, yeah. Definitely, definitely.
OL; So, it's about what, how do you use it and that sort of thing?
MD: Yeah, The Guide editors would always be some, playing some role in that orientation and they'd be back during the year since all the new teachers would teach 101, and that was a substantial chunk of The Guide, the 101 material. You know, those who do not have a lot of prior experience or do they not have a whole lot of antipathy towards being told what to do, they might embrace The Guide much more easily during that initial period than people who had taught before and who saw themselves more as rebellious types, you know, wanting to do their own teaching.
OL: Was The Guide used by people in any other part of the university?
MD: No, no, just very occasionally, when we did writing across the curriculum initiatives, we might take some materials from The Guide to faculty, but there was nothing really formalized. 179
OL; How--well I think I know the answer to this, but the question is--how well does the anthology reflect the work that students in the writing program do? And I gather that you've had samples of all different ranges.
MD: Yeah, I think it tended to cluster around "B" papers, solid "B" papers. Ultimately, that there would be the prize-winning essays that would be pretty strong, but a lot of the material that was used to illustrate assignments in 101 and 102 would be in the "B" range, you know, high "Bs"--whatever.
OL: And when you were using the modes, you had all the different modes represented.
MD: Ummm, yeah, only in the first couple of editions, I think, would the modes be really noticeable. I think once you got into the fourth or fifth or sixth edition, the modes would not be evident, that the titles of the essays would have changed by then, and so the essays would be less dominated by whatever rhetorical strategies they were using.
OL: But The Guide did get kind of a variety of programs, I mean, the variety of topics coming?
MD: Yeah, I tried to--the first semester course was the expository and argumentative essay course, without literary topics. So, there'd always been some research-based essays about the standard kinds of issues and other kinds of expository assignments. And then, the second semester is writing critical essays about literature, so all those essays would have literary texts as their subject.
OL; What--well, I guess we've talked about the stages of evolution of the anthology pretty much. Do any particular essays stand out in your recollection of The Guide?
MD; Oh, yeah, I can remember different essays, but I think my reasons are idiosyncratic reasons. I mean, some of the essays some of my own students wrote. I remember those. But I remember them because I was more familiar with them. I remember some of the very poor essays from some of the very early editions with the sense of guilt--and sort of, "I can't believe we ever did that--that we would put certain bad essays in there in the way that we did. But, you know, I was a lot younger then.
OL: Well, that's how we learn. I ask this [last] question partly because I found an article where somebody was extolling the virtues of these kinds of anthologies and mentioned an essay that created a lot of controversy at his school. This was at the University of Illinois, and it was an essay about Chicago, and a lot of people and wrote, taking an opposing position to the one that the original paper contained.
MD: I don't recall a single case in 20 years there, where an essay in The Guide caused controversy. I could be wrong about that, because I wasn't always real closely involved 180
with the first-year program. But, there just weren't any. And I think that that says something about the level of use, and also the editorial process that would not perhaps have put in anything that could have been controversial. So, I don't have a story like that about The Guide at Arizona.
OL: I've got a few questions that I think we've already talked a good bit about. Let me just read them for you, or let you know what they are, in case you wanted to add anything. But did you enjoy the pieces that were published in the anthology and, as you said, you remembered some of your own students.
MD: Yeah, I had a student who wrote a rhetorical analysis of Woody Allen, and this was 15 years ago, I think, and it won--it wasn't the first prize--I think it won second or third. And I remember that one. I remember the student who wrote about the diet industry, and that one got published. There was one essay, the first prize winner in about '83 or '84, [that] was a parody of academic research--where a student posed herself as a future anthropologist, from a couple hundred years in the future, who had excavated the Arizona campus and was trying to make sense of the Greek system, excavating a fraternity. And it was a wonderful parody of academic research. So, but we couldn't publish it because a lot of it depended on these very elaborate fake documents, that we just couldn't--this was a long time ago, so these days, we probably could have done it somehow--but we couldn't find a way to reproduce the essay in The Guide. And the essay wouldn't work without those false documents. So, that was a case where our technology wasn't up to what the student had done. So that was kind of sad that we couldn't publish that one.
OL: Another couple of questions. If you found mistakes, how did you respond to them? I gather you worked with the students individually.
MD: Yeah.
OL: And the next question is what attitude do the teachers in the program have toward the anthology, and you mentioned that.
MD: Yeah.
OL: Are there other questions or areas that I should have asked about, that you think I should have pursued?
MD: I think that, what's interesting to me in talking about this stuff is the parallels between the national textbook industry and that whole apparatus of how books get written and adopted and used. And, you know, people have done scholarly work on that. And the parallels you're seeing between that process and the process of doing the custom published guide. And I think they're interesting parallels in terms of teachers' attitudes towards any kind of text for a writing course. And I think the comparative elements of, you know, 181
when a program uses the St. Martin's Guide to Writing, for instance, which Arizona adopted in '87, and how's the dynamic of how the teachers respond to that kind of program adoption, and how they respond to something like The Guide. And I think there'd be real interesting similarities in resistance and using it in minimal ways. But there might be some interesting contrasts with how the locally-produced text gets used or doesn't get used. In contrast to the national textbook that's gone through some kind of review process, you know, with respondents from all over the place.
OL: Yeah, one of the things that encouraged me to look into all this, was an article in "College English" by Lindsay Bloom--that she's examining the essay canon.
MD: Yeah, definitely.
OL: Gee, we don't--or do we--look at student papers quite the same way. And actually I'm beginning to think that many places do look at student papers in some other way.
MD: You're familiar with an offshoot of the St. Martin's Guide, where they've started to publish student essays, The American Bologna Festival?
OL: You're the second person today to mention that.
MD: Yeah, so that's interesting. And before they--there was another collection of student writing that wasn't called that--was prior to that.
OL: Well, in fact, that series is something that has continued. I think it was originally based on the Bedford Prize and had an edition that included essays by established writers with students'. It has spun off a series of editions. The most recent came out this year. I'm afraid I don't have the name of it on the tip of my tongue, but I do have a copy of it on my bookshelf. And that's the fourth or fifth edition of all this. And I think for sure, it has taken away some of the demand for doing these [program anthologies] within the universities.
MD: Yeah, that's interesting.
OL: So, it's definitely a related subject. I guess that's most of the questions. I have one more. Are you--do you think you might do something like this at Stanford? Or has that come up?
MD: What we're gonna do here is--there's something called the Booth Prize, which is an endowment from the Booth family that has been here for a long time. And it's a contest, which generates six prize winning essays from this program, and another six from the "Introduction to the Humanities" program. And we are going to publish those. But we haven't really talked about a guide here. It's a very different program, and so, we're going 182 to look at publishing student writing. But we haven't--what we're going to develop is the teaching materials and the program policies--the kinds of things that would fit into a book like this. But I just don't think we have a real strong urge to do a Stanford Guide, just because the local context is very different. APPENDIX E-5
INTERVIEW WITH PAUL REIFENHEISER FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY, 10 APRIL 2001
OL: How was the anthology, and by that I mean the zines that you use in your classes, how was it begun and by who?
PR: Well, I got it from Stephanie Harrell who--I observed her one summer and she was working on this zine project, and then what I did was take some of her zines, which she had incorporated some of the ones her students had made and ones--actual zines that she had access to, and I showed them to my students as examples, because examples are really important to set the bar. Because I don't tell students you have to have a certain page length. Like I know people who have zines where they say, you have to have a review article, you have to have an interview. And I don't do that. And I just tell them whatever- -they have the freedom to do whatever--I don't demand structure. But in showing them previous work, I could say, I've given this assignment before, and this is the kind of work that I've gotten. You can at least get here with the zine, because invariably students will say how long does it have to be. That's always a question: How much content. Whenever they ask that, I have the same answer every time. They say, "How long does it have to be," and I say, "Yes." And usually one of them asks again, and then one of them smacks the other person, and says, "No, he means there is no limit." And I just tell them, I've given you four weeks, I've given you five weeks, I want to see five weeks worth of effort. The great thing about that is it usually scares the crap out of them and they're thinking, oh my god, I have to show him that I've worked for five full weeks and I haven't had any blank issues yet.
OL: So, you saw Stephanie Harrell during the summer--was that when you were a new TA in that program, observing her class or something?
PR: Yes.
OL: OK. Has your assignment for these things changed since you began doing it and if so, in what way?
PR: Change in my approach or in what Stephanie did?
183 184
OL: Your approach--the way you started with it and the way you do it now.
PR: My approach has changed, but only in the sense of firming certain things up. The basics have not changed. Having a target audience, having a topic to go with. I have changed that in that, when I first started, I let people use outside sources whenever they wanted, just as long as they specified what they were doing. And I've changed that to now, you can only use one piece of outside writing. The "Top 10" list or something . . . I want almost all the writing to be theirs and if they do use an outside source, I want them to say where they got it. I also had to change the use of advertising, where I asked them, if they were going to use an advertisement, to change it in some way. You can't just take--the example I usually give in class--you can't just take a picture of a perfume, you have to change it. Instead of having Obsession, you can write like Bacon; and you have like an Absolut ad, underneath it you put something like "alcoholism kills." It changes the meaning. A part is the copyright thing: I don't want them to take ads from somewhere. If they're going to take images, I want them to alter them, so that's changed. Another thing that's changed is, I've actually had to impose one form of censorship, which bothers me that I had to do it, but I felt that it was necessary. And it was necessary not for me, but because I didn't want to get in trouble. I had to outlaw nudity. And people have wanted to do it, and--really pretty basic pornographic stuff--not this kind of like, oh, what is pornographic--it was pretty--way pornographic. And it's not so much that it bothered me, it just--I can get away with it--I think I can justify pedagogically why I should let them say "horseshit" or those sort of things--I've got no problem with it--it doesn't bother me. I just realized that I didn't see many pedagogical ways I could get around someone saying, you let them do this for a class, and you graded them on it - and so [unintelligible: he speaks very fast, and his voice falls off at the ends of sentences]. There's more to the language issue, but I'll . . .
OL: We'll get to that, if that, I'm sure, if you want to say more about it, we'll get back to that. But at this point, let me ask: how are the zines produced? Just the actual--you know, I want to know stages and process for submitting pieces and all of that, and . . .
PR: The main thrust . . . . I tell them at the beginning that they'll receive a group, so the grades of other people matter. I do give them some leeway in the sense of saying that if someone obviously hasn't participated, I'll take their grade down. And that comes in the process memos, and if everyone in the group says, Ormond didn't do his stuff, I can take your grade down. But I refuse to take it down more than one grade. So, if the group gets a "B" on the paper, I refuse to give anyone in the group lower than a "C," even if that person does no work whatsoever--your job is to make sure that everyone in the group does their work. And if they're not, come talk to me, and I'll see what I can do. I've very rarely had problems with that. So what I do--I very much step back out of the process and I say, especially in 1102, I say, OK, you've had two semesters now of first year writing--show me what you can do. And then I remove myself from the process. I'm there for help if they need it. I'm there for them if they want to--if they want me to go 185
over a draft or help with something, that's fine, but the most important thing for me is that we should be teaching them something in first year writing. If you're teaching them how to do the process approach, if you're teaching them skills that they can take and use in other classes, making drafts, going through the workshop and getting someone to help you with your papers --what I do in the zine projects is--I say, we've been cramming this stuff in your head: show me that you've learned it. Go through all this stuff on your own. I have some things--I have a first draft that's assigned--and the first draft is usually just have everyone show me one piece of writing--that's it. It's very minimal. And the second draft is--I want to see all of the writing complete--writing completed by the second drafts, and the only difference between the second draft and the third draft is packaging. If it's on a web page, I just want to see the difference between the second draft and the third draft is HTML. If it's a version like the ones you have over on the desk, then for the second draft, I just want to see the completed writing, and then the only thing they should be doing through the second and third draft is making whatever that stuff is that they make for the presentation. But I let the groups decide when they want a workshop. I tell the groups to impose deadlines and to meet the deadlines. But I don't get involved in it, unless they bring me in.
OL: So you don't know whether they have workshops or not?
PR: I assume that they do, and I tell them to workshop, but if they don't workshop, they know that their own grades suffer. What we've tried to show them, and what I think they've learned throughout is that workshopping invariably helps your papers. And so, I let them know that if you hand something in and it hasn't been workshopped, and it just goes into the zine and it's not very good, it hurts your grade. In fact, my opinion about this is that students workshop better during the zine process because suddenly, they really realize that this is about their grade. I mean, you can say, I'm going to take your grade off if you don't workshop, but they're--you know, in another paper, they're worried about their own grade more than anything else. Now in the process of worrying about their own grade, they have to realize--well, wait, Ormond's writing has to be as good as Ormond can write--I've got to . . .
OL: So what is the process of submitting something to the group or inclusion in the project.
PR: If they want--I usually tell 'em that it's best to follow the democratic process and if someone wants to kick something out, and then, that's a group process that they should make--I don't get involved in any of that. I leave that up to them.
OL: How much time is required to compile the initial manuscript for the anthology?
PR: Usually, there's only one class period between the second draft and the final draft. So, they have about--usually I give them about four weeks at the minimum to work on the 186
zine. And so three and a half weeks is for writing and then the packaging--the completion of the packaging comes through in the final couple of days. And I do that in the sense that--that's why I say that all the writing has to be in the second draft. Because the only thing I want them worry about say between the class on Tuesday and the class on Thursday when we do the zine--when they get the final zine--is the packaging. That's it.
OL: And who selects the contents to be published?
PR: They do. And, in fact, this is something that more often than not--I haven't found people being terribly selective. I haven't found groups saying, no, we can't include that. It doesn't really happen very much. Like most of the time, people agree, here's what we're going to work on, here's how we're going to do it, and then it goes in. I've found very few instances--the only time that people ever really have something that doesn't go in, is if on the second day, I'm sorry, on the day that the second draft is due--when I want all the writing in--usually, that's--if someone comes in that day and gives something to the group and says, oh, put this in the zine, and no one has a chance to workshop it, then I've seen some groups say, no, we can't take that. But that's very rare.
OL: So, once again--how and by whom are the content written and organized?
PR: All students--I keep myself--what I do for content is simple. When they come up with their topic and their target audience, I sit down with them and I conference with them at the beginning. At the very beginning, I--and it's usually rough--OK, who's your target audience, what are you going to do? And they talk to me, and then I'll say, Ormond, what do you plan on writing? And I make them do that step. That's probably part of the process I should have said earlier. And I'll guide them in certain ways, like if someone is like, oh, we're going to write, like a group that I'm doing right now--that they wanted to write a review of the year 2035. And I was like, OK, that's really broad--what are you going to focus on? Are you going to focus on sports, are you going to focus on just things that happen in the United States, are you going to talk about things that happen in India? These are questions they must think about. They assume the United States or even not--but then, I get them to start thinking about that focus more, and that's a little different. So I prod them in certain directions. Only to let them know that's what you've got to do--you have to keep your focus. Now, and also, just cautionary reminders to have them keep in mind their target audience. And, you know, I have done other things too. Sometimes, I have had--one of the things that I've done recently that's changed--I've done cross-workshopping. Where I've had each student--when the first draft comes in--I've had everyone take a piece from their writing and, for example, I'll have one group workshop another group. So that you get sort of that outside idea, but that's something that's recent- -that's engaging. Some groups choose randomness as their theme. In which case I'm completely out of their content, and I want to be out of their content structure--I want them to choose the content--I try to--like I said, I have some things that I prod them with, and I prod them with, but for the most part, I want to be removed from it as possible. 187
OL: Do they use things they've written before?
PR: The only time they use things in class is--I give them throughout the zine project, I give them journal assignments. Like a common journal assignment I give them is write a review of something that isn't commonly reviewed--like write a review--you can't write a review of a CD or a movie--you have to write a review of like an emotion. Or [unintelligible] or something--you know, anything--or [unintelligible] stuff like that. So, you know--and I tell them, that's not a bad idea to do--or maybe that can find its way into a zine. I tend to try to give journal assignments. Sometimes I'll even say, like a journal assignment is, write a journal that would anger your target audience. And sometimes that makes its way into the zine. But it doesn't have to. And also, the other thing for me is--I hate busy work. I abhor it. I think pre-writes are busy work. I think a lot of teachers-- you know, I've had teachers say, like, oh, I need to pre-write for 20 minutes for the first 20 minutes of class every day, and I'm like--shut up! Your students hate you and you don't really gain that much from that. Pre-writes are OK occasionally, you know, people assign journals just because they should be assigning journals, and I never do that. It's always something that can apply itself to the paper that they're currently doing, and that's really easy to do for the zine assignment. That's real easy to do.
OL: How much time is required to organized and edit and otherwise shape--I think you covered that, if I understand . . .
PR: I just give 'em the four weeks to do whatever--whatever--just get it all..
OL: But between the second draft and final--that's a week?
PR: No. It's usually a couple of days. So they need to be thinking about their stuff ahead of time, but I want them to revised the writing until the second draft and then I want them to worry about the form of the package in between the second and . . . actually, one thing that I will do sometimes, I will tell them, that for the second draft, I'd like to see all the writing, and I'd also like to see the size and shape it's going to be, but they don't have to actually, physically bind it or put it together. That's because I have groups write in HTML; they're all doing web zines right now. And the first draft, I made them put something on line. Put their drafts on line. And I told them you can change the HTML later, but I at least want something up, and I told them the same thing for the second draft. I want all the writing on line by the second draft, and then the only thing you should be changing between the second and third draft--the second draft is due on a Tuesday, the final draft is due on Thursday--the only thing you should be working on then is cleaning up the HTML and making it look better.
OL: So how extensively are pieces edited? 188
PR: I have a sense that, in general, it's minimal. Usually, early pieces are well edited and well workshopped, and invariably some groups slide things in under the wire and they're not as workshopped. I'm sure you've looked through my zines--you can tell that certain things have been well edited and certain things have been overlooked and, of course, some groups just perform better than other groups and have picked up on all the things that were taught and covered.
OL: How's it printed? I know some zines are in HTML--except for HTML, how is it printed?
PR: I usually require that they have more than one copy, because I like to leave copies around in different places. But I ask them to only, because of the expense, I only have them do one color copy because it's expensive, or maybe I have them do two or things like that. But the rest is completely up to them--how--sometimes they're just things strung together with glitter and string, and sometimes they're really well done and nicely bound. Somebody has real good experience with computers--that's one of the thing's that's changed--more and more students have experience with computers since I first started this, so that's helped improve the graphics but regular zines are out there that aren't student magazines--some are just stuff that people staple together and leave in coffee houses. And some are really elaborate things on the web, and some are just practically magazines that are fancy and I tell them that--and they know that--the packaging isn't as important as the writing.
OL: How is it funded?
PR: Through students' own spending; they're student funded. I tell them at the beginning--you know, we've all got that little thing that--sort of--we have $25 for copying. They spend it [that much] on beer anyway, but, or whatever it is they do. And, you know, I just remind them that the zine--I threw out samples of zines--takes money for copying from all who are involved.
OL: And who coordinates the physical production?
PR: Usually what'll happen is students will delegate. And sometimes groups come together and really say, OK, this is what we're all going to do. Sometimes only one or two people are really involved in the coordination or the production. I found that when you're doing each web zine, usually one person steps forward and does most of the HTML coding. And actually, what I've done is for anyone--if one person in the group does all the HTML coding, I cut them some slack on the writing. I don't expect everyone to write web pages.
OL: Do you have a sense of how much time is required to do the physical production?
PR: No, but I know students have to spend time together outside of class--there's always more time involved doing it than . . . 189
OL: And--I think you've mentioned this in the written questionnaire, but just--how is it distributed?
PR: They give copies to me and I drop them off in different places, or with the web zine--I'm assuming that--they're all be on the [English Department's] english3 server--and--I don't know--of course, your writing department can do whatever they want with the files in the future. And I've actually told them my students that--that after they go up--I'm having Charlie [Lowe, assistant to the director of the of the department's Computer Writing Center] change the password, so they can't go in and change what they've done. So, it's-- whatever--however foul, however great, however offensive, it's there and I've told them I'm not changing the zine. And if the department keeps them once it's changed, that's up to them, although I'd rather have them just not link it then, than change anything.
OL: And I know the answer to this, I believe, but what is their understanding of who's going to read it?
PR: They go in know that this is to be read by other people--and hopefully, the people who read it will be their target audience. Not always, but hopefully. I mean, the web one's different--they'll know now that other classes will have access to those zines. These groups--I've always told them that--you know, I leave them in coffee places or stuff like that--so they know that it's places around Tallahassee--although, to be honest, there are some zines I haven't had a chance to distribute. I just save them--but they all, at least, there's the idle threat that someone will read it.
OL: So they understand that it's sort of in the public domain and . . .
PR: And I also let them know that I need to know specifically what they wrote, but for their zine, they can just put "zine put together by Tom, Frank, Paul, and Joanna," without saying who wrote each specific article--I give them that option.
OL: So how does the anthology fit into their writing assignments in this program as you understand it?
PR: Well, the first thing is--well, I've never followed the public discourse stratn, but in first-year writing courses, what I tend to do is I have them focus first on something that's personal--so they're writing mostly for themselves--then I have them write an argumentative piece--that they have to deal with something--opinions of other people, and then I have a piece that's usually--I have them write a letter that's being mailed to someone--so they have to have one specific target audience in mind, one specific person, and then for the zine project, it's open to everyone. So there's a progression from yourself to me, sort of, or at least one other person, or multiple people, and then to the zine to a whole larger group. So there's a--so target audience is something that I stress in my sections--and that's 1101. In 1102 classes, the thing that I stress much more than anything 190
else is the idea of--you've had two semesters of writing--do something with it. Show me what you want.
OL: Do you ever use a completed zine in any classes?
PR; Oh, every semester I bring up examples and give them to them. That's the day that I introduce the zine and tell them what they're doing I have them look through all my former zines.
OL: Are any assignments that you have structured around reading already produced zines?
PR: No.
OL: I know producing them is required, but do you ever have people use any of the zines as a resource and . . .
PR: No.
OL: OK. Are the zines that come from your classes ever used in any other part of the curriculum?
PR: Not in other parts of the curriculum, but I know other students borrow my zines. Other TAs borrow them to show students in their classes.
OL: How well does the writing in the zines reflect the characteristic work students do and how does it reflect their skill in terms of the quality of their writing?
PR: I think it reflects it about as well as anything else. Some groups perform very well--have great stuff. And other groups have just average stuff. And, I don't know, that's really hard to--I mean, some people come up to me and say, Paul, can you read this. Can you workshop this for me? And I'll do that. And sometimes they turn out better than groups that don't. But not always. And that's a lesson that I want them to learn. That the teachers are there as resources for you. If you take it upon yourself to use that resource, invariably, you will do better than people who do not take it upon --but I don't tell them that directly. I . . .
OL: . . . and ask you to workshop--are they individual members of the class or . . .
PR: No, it's almost always individual members. But, in the end, I would say the writing--it's--it reflects it pretty well. I think sometimes people fall back into bad habits because I don't give length requirements, so they forget to do things as in depth as they could, but I try to stem that off by reminding groups that they can't do this kind of stuff; they have to have quality writing. 191
OL: How well does the writing reflect the full variety of things that you ask the students to write?
PR: If anything, it's more variety. Because when I give papers--you know, write about personal experience, well, that can only go so far. The point of the zines is for them to try writing that they've never tried before. The point is, to them, to explore new styles of writing, new modes of writing, and so the variety increases in that.
OL: What, if any, stages in the development of the zines stand out in your mind? Particular parts of the whole thing?
PR: Yeah--there's an benefit to sitting down with students and finding out what their topic and target audience is going to be--that's certainly an enjoyable thing for me--to figure out--to have students, you know, watch the gears kind of glide as they realize, wow, all these people have done these interesting ideas--what are we going to do? Or how can we play off of what other people have done. And I enjoy that. Every semester, someone does a zine that I get a kick out of.
OL: What kind of audiences do they do? When I do these--address their peers, you know. Other students.
PR: More often than not the target audience is other college students. But no, sometimes it's just people at FSU--sometimes, it's people who have written zines--their target audience was their parents. I've had zines written exclusively for the elderly. I've had zines written exclusively for men. I've had zines written for people exclusively who know nothing about music. Zines for people who like comics, comic books, zines for--I got a zine right now for computer literate cows. I've had--people come up with pretty original target audiences. I've had target audiences that are just our class. Beagles have been a target audience [for me], of course--or people who like beagles.
OL: Did any essays, pieces of writing stand out in your mind? Any particular favorites? Any really atrocious?
PR; Well, the atrocious ones--the examples of bad writing--stuff slipped in at the last minute. There's some that--the ones that really stick out in my mind that have always made me laugh. I mean, people are really--I have really fine students, and when given free reign, they just make really funny things. I had one person who wrote--I've always found this-- he wrote about a horse having sex with another horse through a fence. And he had this picture in there--and that's one of the things I stress--you know, pictures of images--and he had an image of a horse with a huge, huge, erect penis, and it was hilarious. And--it was like, you'd look at it--and what!!! You'd look at the picture, like, OK, what is this about--and it made you want to read the article. And that's the kind of thing I want them to do. I'm like, why do they have this picture of this--and you went through the article, 192
and it was really funny. And it was humorous. And it was tastefully done--it wasn't done, like--you know--and--extreme. I more remember zines that I thought were well done than just outrageous.
OL: Which particular zines, as a whole, do you recall?
PR: I've always liked--there was one called "Scooby's" which is lost--it was just six really good students that all got together and did a good job. Random stuff but it was good. One that was all about students making fun of the South, which I thought was really funny. One idea that I really liked was students who wrote a gossip column, and all of the people in the gossip column were students in the class --they did, like, a Hollywood thing, and everyone in the class agreed to let their names be used, and they made up crazy stories-- people like--two students were lovers and two people found an embarrassing situation and, like, you know, taught--perform some sort of--you know, getting caught doing some sort of stuff--different kinds of stuff like that. And, of course, they included me. I don't know--but those are some of the ones that stick out in my head. I mean, some people have had really great covers that were original, and really good ads inside--some of them-- you could just pick and choose from dozens. There have been so many good ideas. It's practically impossible for me to . . . .
End of Tape
Tape #2
OL: . . . recording again. And you've got a disclaimer?
[PR: Yeah.]
OL: . . . and leave that up so I can
[PR: I'll leave it up.]
OL: notice it.
PR: . . . the whole time, in case someone comes along and sees it on an English server and it's like--this is a zine, and I can't believe that--you know, I can't believe the teacher let them do this and that kind of stuff. I try to stem that off as soon as I can and that's why the disclaimer's there.
OL: Well, it makes sense to me. I don't encounter much of that kind of stuff.
PR: I have a line that I use--the line is explained quite clearly in the disclaimer. 193
OL: Do you enjoy the pieces that are published?
PR: I love this project for so many reasons. First of all, because the students really like it, and students always get involved in it. I very rarely find a group that's like, didn't care. They take some pride in it and the hidden value of stepping back for that pedagogical reason-- can make less work for you. I cannot stress that enough. When I was a mentor, I told all my new TAs, do a zine end of the semester--it's less work for you. And I don't think there's anything wrong with doing that. I have--I think there's absolutely good pedagogical reasons for it, if not, then you're telling your students, "You're not acceptable." You're saying, "I am acceptable. It's up to you to come to me," instead of me saying, "Draft one, draft two, draft three." And, invariably, most students have adopted the process well. And a lot of students don't want you to see their writing because they want to surprise you with it. Some don't--but then you make yourself available.
OL: You have regular classes and stuff?
PR: Oh, we have class the whole time. Sometimes, I'll cancel a class or two, but that's only because it's like--cancelled for necessary reasons like--go work together. In the computer labs this semester, I've had class more so than normal, but that's mostly just because they need the computers to be available.
OL: Right. If you find mistakes in the pieces, how do you respond to them?
PR: It's minimal. That's something they should have worked out beforehand.
OL: This is not part of the interview--I mean, the scheduled questions, but I always wonder-- because when I do zines, it comes up with me--how do you grade them? How do you decide which . . .
PR: Well, I'd be lying if I didn't say that most of 'em get pretty, very good grades. I grade largely on effort, to start, but of course the writing is important, too. I look at a lot of things. I look at whether or not the articles met the target audience. I look at whether or not the packaging is good. And I look at whether or not I think the writing is valuable-- whether or not it's witty, whether or not it addresses their topic. Those are all the kinds of things I look for. I look to make sure--I read the process memos to hear how the groups went. And you can always tell when a group didn't do well through the process memos, because there's in-fighting and there's people have problems--and the other thing, too, is I tend to have students give presentations based on their zines. Like they read passages from their zines in class. Sometimes we'll do it--and we'll go off campus somewhere to-- you know, like a coffee shop or something like that. And you can start grading them then, when you hear each people read some of their presentations. And I try to look at how well they've put in images and things of that nature. But--like I said, I've had enthusiasm, 194
I've had good experiences with groups. And most people do well. And it's a really difficult thing to grade--you just have to--it's like anything else: you have to see how well they took in mind the parameters that we gave them. Things like that.
OL: What attitude do other teachers in the program seem to have toward the anthologies?
PR: I--as far as I can tell--since--when we first started this, Stephanie and I were the only two people to do zines. And my understanding is that now they've proliferated. And they're pretty heavily done in one form or another. I mean people obviously put their own stamps on them and do them in different ways. So I would say the response has been good. I mean, of course, [unintelligible] do zines, do zines, do zines had something to do with that. But I think it's gone well. And also, I was able--you know, I wrote that thing--the teacher's guide that talks about zines.
OL: . . . my bibliography--in chapter 3 and 4..
PR: So I'm certain--I mean, almost everything I've said today is probably in there.
OL: Well, actually not. You know, it changes in your personal observations.
PR: That's right. I wrote that a long time ago.
OL: What areas have I neglected to ask about that I should have inquired on?
PR: How do I choose the groups?
OL: How do you choose the groups?
PL: Sometimes I leave it up to them. Sometimes I keep them in their standard workshop groups. That's one of those things that changes.
OL: So, you do change sometimes to have a special group--or rather a new group . . .
PR: Right. Usually I do it in--in the 1102 class, I usually give them a choice of--I tell them, arrange your groups. Arrange groups on your own. I'll do something like--I'll say, OK, there's 18 of you in here for [unintelligible] class. The most you can have in a group is six, the minimum you have to have is four paper--and if you choose three groups of six, that's fine. If you choose three groups of four and one group of six, that's fine. However--if you want to do two groups of five, two groups of four--I don't care. Go do it.
OL: Do you ever have--you know, like with a baseball team--they pick some person last--ever have people who seem to be excluded? 195
PR: No, I haven't done it too much, to tell the truth, that way. But usually, I don't get too many people excluded. Sometimes, there's one person wandering around who's not sure who they want to be with, who they don't want to be with, but that doesn't tend to happen because I sit the minimums of four or six. So, some groups--like three people have gotten together--they're usually looking for someone to come in with them, and another group's-- whatever. Sometimes I do it randomly. I put groups together randomly. In 1101 groups, I stress workshop groups more than 1102, so I usually keep the workshop groups throughout because people know what to expect from their group members--but in 1102, it's different because I let them do research papers, and that's not based on their workshop group, so I tend to let them figure out . . . and, I mean--yeah, I think that that idea of the last person picked could be a problem, and could be something that could pose difficulties, but--and I think that's something the teacher can figure out, depending on how well they know their class. Like I had an honors class, and I openly said, "Almost everybody in here writes well; almost everybody in here works hard or does really good work; now go make a group." And I didn't have--I didn't see any problems. But you're right--if you can tell there's one kid in the class who's been ostracized, then you may be really lucky to do that.
OL: Well, the final question is may I interview you again sometime if I've got follow-up questions?
PR: Sure.
End of interview APPENDIX E-6
INTERVIEW WITH TANEKKA CUNNINGHAM FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY, 11 APRIL 2001
OL: I wanted to follow up, using the same interview outline that I’ve used with all the other people who’ve produced these kinds of publications. And some of the questions may sound kind of strange, ‘cause I usually ask them to people in other schools, and some of the people are even directors of writing programs and stuff, so . . . I only expect you to tell me about your experience with the one you did in Mr. Bondurant’s class. Can you begin by telling me how the anthology you produced was begun--how did you get started on it there in your class?
TC: What we did was--it was a class assignment--I believe we were randomly assigned group members, and the first thing we did was decide when, where we would meet to get together, get everything set up as far as who was going to do what section, and what are-- because we had to do--I think it was kind of a mini-magazine, and we could choose to feature any types of stories that we wanted to, but it had to pertain to college life. So that’s what the first step was--we got each others phone numbers and called each others and arranged the meeting arrangements to get everything together.
OL: My next question--how has it changed since it was begun probably doesn’t relate to you, since you only did one.
TC: Yeah--that’s the only one I did.
OL: The next question is followed by several questions that relate to it. I’m generally looking for how the magazine was produced, but the sub-questions--the ones under this general topic--are like what the stages are, the process for coming up with the pieces, and how much time and all that kind of stuff. Do you remember any of the stages that you followed?
TC: We weren’t given like a set of formal procedures to follow as far as this has to be done by this date, that has to be done . . . we were just given, this is your assignment and it was due by a certain due date--the end of the semester. And personally, within the group, we had to get together and decide how many times we would need to meet before the deadline, so that we could have everything together. And I think we probably decided on
196 197
--I know it was more than two meetings--I think we met like three times--three or four times--we did meet, but that was something we did within the group. And we based it on how far we got each time we met. And then we knew, well, OK, next time this is what our goal will be--the first time, of course, was to determine the topics we would include. And then from there, after that meeting, then our next step was OK, everybody, this is what topic you’re doing, this is what topic I’m doing--and each of us go get research on our topics and put it together on our own. And then the next meeting, we just brought everything together that we had, and then we arranged, okay, how are we going to put everything, as far as like entertainment, sports, health--how are we going to align everything--so we took care of that. And the last meeting was basically just all of us--we had everything together, and we just were looking at it to make sure--kind of like a final critique. To make sure we had everything correct and everything was all typed up, and that was the final meeting. And what we did was, I believe it was Rolanda, took it to Target Copy and got it bound. So that was like the last step was getting everything printed out, putting it all in order, and for her to just take it to Target Copy and get it bound.
OL: Great. How did you decide what pieces to consider to include--how did you decide what to include?
TC: What we did--each one of us wrote down--it was like a group, but each one of us wrote down beforehand what we thought should be included, and then when we got together, everybody just kind of got together and we were all talking about, okay, well I think we should really talk about this because this is what affects college life, and we just sort of voted on it--that was how we did it.
OL: How much time was required to put it all together? The initial manuscript?
TC: It took us--I would say maybe between eight to ten hours to put everything--that’s just like meeting time, but as far as individual work, it probably could add like another hour and a half, two hours, just getting everything together, writing it down, so--maybe between 15 and 20 hours--15 probably would be good.
OL: And does that include the writing that you did for the things, or just once you had things written, putting it together.
TC: That would include the writing that we did.
OL: Let’s see--who actually did the arrangement? Was it a general group activity or did anybody, any one member or some group of members arrange the table of contents and the sequence that things were going to go in?
TC: It was a group. We did it as a group. 198
OL: You said you had a meeting to look at the way things appeared on the page. Did you do any editing or anything?
TC: Yes, we did. What we did, was like peer editing--where each of us took something and we read it and we passed it around and everybody made their own personal comments as to what needed to be changed, what could be elaborated on . . . that’s what we did. That was easier.
OL: Do you have any sense of how much time that part took? Was that just one meeting or two? Did you take things home?
TC: It was one meeting. I think it was one piece that we all did together, I believe it was a section that went in the front of the paper, the magazine, and it was just explaining the purpose of the magazine, things like that--I believe that one, we each got a copy and took it home and did little small critiques to it. And to put the final touches on it. But everything else we were able to get done during the meeting.
OL: How did you all pay for it?
TC: It wasn’t that expensive, actually, but Rolanda--she made the copies at Target Copy and then she just told us what the total was and we each divided it up among our group members and we each paid a dollar or two--each member. All we really had to pay for was getting it bound, because of the computer labs on campus, we were able to just go there and print out the work--everybody printed out everything, and then we just took all the printed copies, put them together with page numbers, made sure everybody used the same font and things like that so it would be uniform, and then, that was it. We had to pay for it getting bound.
OL: How was it distributed or did you present it to anybody? I know--you just said when you did the original questionnaire, that you didn’t actually see the final one?
TC: No, we didn’t see like the whole anthology put together. We really just presented it to the teacher--we gave it to him. We didn’t like have the opportunity to present it to the class and show them why we chose what we did. But that was it.
OL: Do you have a sense of how it fit into the plan for the semester or the curriculum at FSU in general?
TC: No, not at FSU in general. No idea.
OL: But it was the last activity in your class, is that correct? 199
TC: Yes, it was.
OL: So, you don’t know if it’s required in any other classes . . .
TC: No.
OL: or if anybody else has any other activities structured, any other assignments structured around it--that is, I guess, more for people in other schools. Let’s see. Do you have a sense of how the work in it compared with the quality of the other things you wrote during the semester?
TC: Well, it was--other things that we had to do in the semester were like critiques of a book that was actually a compilation of other students--in variation of our [unintelligible] that wrote on certain topics. So that was basically what a lot of things that we did--we did have to do papers, but this one was kind of like the more informal, fun type of assignment, whereas the other were formal papers and they had a purpose. This one had a purpose, but it was more for us to get to know one another and to do something more creative. I thought that that was kind of his objective was to end it like on a creative note--whereas we’re not stressed down with another paper to do or another critique to do--we now have something fun to do. And it was--I thought it was a good opportunity.
OL: Do you feel like the stuff in it was well written? Did you enjoy writing it or . . .
TC: Yeah, we enjoyed writing it. It was just hard to condense it, because it was a magazine, so we were used to going on and on in our papers, but it was a magazine, so we didn’t want to make really, really long, detailed discussions in there because we were trying to attract college students to this magazine. That was the purpose--was to get college students something that they could read and be informed about college life. So we didn’t want to make it too long and boring because we felt that that would like sway readers to think--okay, forget it--get halfway through and just put it down. So we tried to keep it short, to the point, but still interesting and covering as much information--but I feel like we did a pretty good job of that.
OL: Does anything that was written in it stand out in your mind? Do you remember any particular pieces?
TC: Oh, I think--I’m not exactly 100% sure, but I remember we got into like this big discussion over whether or not to put things that advocated like safe sex on campus in there. And I can’t remember--I think we decided just to put something in there like a little ad, because--it was between that and then, a little ad about services that provide like paper for students--but those two stood out because we kind of like--well, no, do we really want to advocate condoms, giving out condoms on campus or you know advocate a service where students can actually go and purchase like a term paper or something--or even have 200
it typed and everything--but we decided--I think we put both ads in there. And I don’t remember--I don’t know why the entertainment section is sticking out as far as like--we did talk about things to do, but . . . I don’t know--I can’t remember anything else.
OL: That’s okay--that’s great! And did you generally enjoy the pieces that were published in it?
TC: Yeah. We had fun with it. We had a good group--we had people in there that I hardly knew--I only knew like two of my group members, but after we met, immediately, we clicked with each other, we were laughing and talking. All of us had dorm experiences, so . . . it was a good experience as far as us really getting to know each other, and it made it easier to work together and to be able to come and do that little mini-magazine that we did. It was fun.
OL: Did it help with the writing?
TC: Yes. I guess it helped because--we all kind of like clicked with each other--it was easier when criticism was necessary, because it wasn’t like someone is just being so critical about it--it was okay--this was coming from your classmate. You know this person--they’re only giving you this criticism to help you, so it was easier--I think one guy in the group said he didn’t really like writing, so it was easier for us to say, well, okay, we’ll go ahead and help you out a little bit--just write what you’re thinking. We’ll fix it, so it eased a lot of tension between people feeling like, okay, well, is my writing good enough. Okay, you have all these comments and critiques about it--what’s wrong--it eased a lot of that, because we all viewed it as okay, that’s what’s necessary--we’re all friends, and that’s the approach we took.
OL: When you did find things you wanted to correct, how did you make that apparent to each other?
TC: Well, everyone--I believe it was the third meeting--everyone just basically--you were supposed to bring the disc and also bring a print-out for each group member of whatever your topic was--whatever piece you worked on. And each group member received a copy and we all just kind of--you know--made our own little comments, and then we talked about each section--OK, well, this is what I think should be done, and that’s kind of the way we did it--and if the group said it sounded better, then that’s what we did--we went with what sounded better.
OL: Do you know anything about the attitude that teachers have about projects like this?
TC: I don’t know anything--I can only assume what they would like. I know Mr. Bondurant probably likes projects like this because he was always encouraging us to get to know one another--so I could assume that he really would like this, because he always advocated-- 201
and, you know, we always, whenever we had a paper that was due, we would always like get into a small group and do peer editing. So, I feel like this was his way to say, okay, you guys know each other--you’ve been together all semester--have fun with the writing assignment and get to know each other a little bit better.
OL: Have you ever heard any other teachers talk about projects like this?
TC: No. We didn’t have--like I took a poetic technique class over the summer--we didn’t necessarily have--it wasn’t like for a magazine or anything--but we did get together and like critique in groups a lot. We got together a lot in groups and he encouraged us to get to know one another and mingle around the room, and it’s important that, when you get to know each other, ‘cause it helps out with--you can take positive criticism. You’re not so--taking it personally--you just feel like, okay, well, I can take this more objective stance and say, this is better. But that’s as far as like--working in groups, that’s probably been poetic technique with another class that really stressed that, but--not the idea of a magazine or anything like that.
OL: Well, have I forgotten to ask you anything that I should have?
TC: No. Well, I think that was it. I can’t think of anything.
OL: Well, it’s really a big help the things you’ve told me. I know I talked to Mr. Bondurant recently, and he’s still doing this kind of assignment, so he’s still happy with it and you’re right--he does for sure like it. So do a lot of the other teachers in the first-year writing program.
[wraps up interview] APPENDIX E-7
INTERVIEW WITH MATT BONDURANT FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY, 13 APRIL 2001
OL: Do you know how such anthologies were begun here?
MB: In my own particular...
OL: From your own experience.
MB: My own experience--uh, I was doing it before I got here. So I was doing it at James Madison University when I getting my master's degree.
OL: Interesting.
MD: 1995, 96, 97, and there were just a couple of other people there--colleagues of mine-- graduate students like myself that were doing it. I'm not sure. I can't simply trace the idea to how pedagogy works out in class. I don't think so. I think it was passed along to me by somebody, and I know I did it my last year there. A sort of rougher version than what I'm doing now, I think. Developed as it went along. When I came here, there was another graduate student named Adam Johnson who used to be here. He gave his sheet to my friend Jane, and we both looked at it and thought this looks like a pretty good outline. And I took some of his things and some of my things and started to adapt it from there.
OL: Fascinating. Because James Madison has some other publications--school-wide anthologies --and I actually got a sample of that, and corresponded with some people about that . . .
MB: Ron Peters there. Did you know Ron Peters? He was here. [OL: Yeah.] He was there in 95, 96. He had just left here. In fact, when I came here in 97, his mailbox was still here, and he used . . .
OL: Yeah, he was my mentor when I started here. And I was just reading some work that he did that Rick Straub published in one of his books on responding to students' writing. Do you remember . . .
202 203
MD: Ron was at James Madison. He was teaching there. He was on faculty there. He was full-time tenure track. He was--it was like a 4/4--it was all comp teaching, but that's what he was doing. I think he was happy with it. I didn't have any interplay with him at all because he wasn't on the pedagogy committee or whatever, but he had just started there, and I'm pretty sure it was--tenure track. And yeah, I remember being, I got accepted at Florida State thinking, "Well, hey. And Ron came out, and he specialized in creative writing like I did. That was cool, jobs could be had by its graduates.
OL: Do you remember who it was--have any sense of who it was who introduced you to doing these kind of class publications?
MB: I really don't. I don't think it was coming from any faculty member--I think it was the other graduate students. And I get the feeling it was another graduate student that had done it-- another guy, you know, it's one thing that kind of gets passed along because usually at the beginning of the semester you're sitting around talking about what are you guys going for your 101 or 102 classes. You say, "Well, I'm going to do this," you know, "What text are you going to use," all that kind of stuff. And [you] start batting stuff around. So, I think it just came out of that.
OL: Okay. Well, my next instruction question is how has that kind of anthology changed. Since you first encountered it there [at James Madison], can you describe how the ones, what the ones you did there were like?
MB: The ones we did there were much more simple in a lot of ways, in that, they consisted of-- I believe at the time I was doing three major papers that they used, you know, each group of four or five--they were putting all their papers in there, I mean, and that's what there was, the papers. And they were binding it in some way, but it didn't necessarily have any kind of theme or organization that way. It's, in a way, more like a compilation than a selected anthology or selected magazine. They were basically taking the best of the three drafts. And I think it was because back then we were looking at more of a way to do an extra revision: you did your three papers, and the fourth unit was, "Okay, we're going to revise these papers again." And [that was] one of the reasons for doing this thing. Since then, development writing has changed into, I think, to think more directed and more complex in certain ways. In fact, now they're selecting one of their top, one of their major papers. As a group, they select it, and they sort of help each other and decide that. And they are also contributing a variety of other smaller pieces, and bits that involve having to do a series of small assignments each semester. For example, it's like I have a required novel review in each class, and by the end they have to turn a review in. And I was like, "Maybe include that," you know. And then they also have an art event review that they have to go out and see some live performance and write a letter to the editor, you know. And then so they have all these things, and so, then I say, "Well, you have to come up with a theme." And that's probably a major change [in the development of the idea for the publications] as well. It's been the idea of centering it around [a] theme, including, you 204
know, demographic sort of study and everything. And I have them write a prospectus of their demographic, their ideal reader, how they attempt--you know, what sort of devices, including graphics, but also the intended structure, the way it looks. How they're going to track that demographic. So it's much more focused now in terms of looking more like a real magazine or making it seem more like the real publication, and a variety of things that are all pointed towards attracting a certain--I think [it's] one of the things I talked about this semester--quality. So it all kind of focuses toward that.
OL: In fact, I was thinking as you were describing it, well, about the importance of the audience.
MB: Yeah, pretty much.
OL: Okay. Do you have--this is getting off the structure thing a little bit--you say there are ten points--do you have them written out?
MB: Yeah.
OL: Could I get a copy of those?
MB: The anthology assignment?
OL: Yeah. If those are things that they select from?
MB: Well, I can give you one of these, which is the magazine project thing. And it lists, it says each editor must contribute one of the following: one of the major papers, a novel review, a short article, an advertisement, and there are optional additions--such as horoscopes--all that kind of thing. And they like to do that kind of thing. But, yeah, I've actually itemized that you've got to have these things. You know, every semester we're talking about it [the anthology assignment] in terms of that. I make it very clear from the very beginning that we're building material for the publication. It kind of gives them something, a goal, [to keep] in mind perhaps when they're doing it, so they don't think it [the writing assignment] is completely superfluous or something like that is routine.
OL: Well this is for the first semester and second semester course? Or do you do . . .
MB: I have done it. I have done it. The last two years here I've only taught 1102, because that's the course I prefer. My first year, my first semester here, I did do it as well for 1101. I can't remember--I'm not sure--how it worked in terms of how different it was. I think it was pretty similar to this. This is, what I'm talking about now, I think it's because I've adapted some of this. And so I'm assuming about what I did. I can't remember directly, you know, over the last few years. 205
OL: So what you're doing now is for . . .
MB: 1102, yeah.
OL: How is an issue produced?
MB: Well, stages and stuff? [OL: Yes.] I give, first we talk about [it] after the three major papers, for example, including the research papers for the whole semester. The last couple of weeks are reserved for producing the anthology. We spend the time looking at some articles in terms of a little bit more audience stuff, to try to figure out, "Okay, who are these directed to?" In terms of identifying audiences. Then we begin to talk about things such as marketing and advertising and how we, you know, [see] devices used to gain our attention. There's a section there about images and stuff in our textbook that's, you know, worthwhile to use in exercises about how we are attracted to things as a consumer. And we talk about these kinds of issues. And then we may get into groups. I usually let them choose their own. They always seem to want to choose their own groups, so I give them that choice, and they usually end up doing that. And then, I start off with a lot of pre-writing activities for the collaborative activities. I'll give them a particular problem, like, for example, I'll send them two interesting essays that are kind of provocative or interesting. For example, we had one that talks about nursing homes for the elderly. Then I put a series of questions before class, and in their group they have to come up with questions and answers to this to try to get them used to the idea of thinking together as a group and making decisions as a group. That works okay. As good as the class may be, there are usually a few kids who'll be unfocused. I'll walk around, and I'll sit with them for a few minutes, try to encourage them. And after that, then we start thinking about strategies in terms of, you know, audience focus and demographics and stuff like that. And, you know, the thing is they have this material already written. So when they select their papers, depending on the topics, several [subjects are possible] Two of the papers are directly related to essays in textbooks, so they are a bit more directed; the research paper is pretty wide open depending on the students' interests. For example, we were doing cultural icon topic-- pretty wide open in terms of what they're likely to do, so very often they end up using that paper because that is something that they can take and re-direct towards an audience, for example. And that's another big part of this project: that they are revising everything that's in there. For example, the novel review, they've already written it; they've already turned it in to me. When they put it in the magazine, and their magazine is designed for young males 18-35 years old who like cars and whatever, they have to direct that novel [review] towards that reader as well. So we spend time talking about how to do that. Then we spend the next couple of weeks doing a lot of proof work. I usually have them bring something in each week, in order to keep them into it and interested in it. For example, they can bring me a prospectus--each individual. They can also bring me a 206
schedule, meeting times and things like that, you know, they bring when we're going to meet out of class. They're bringing me what each person in the group is going to do, like particular job duties, what they're going to call themselves, what they're going to call the magazine--all those kinds of details. "You have them bring that in in the preceding weeks." that kind of stuff, to get them going on it, and they don't do it all at the last minute. So, in a way . . ., but it's a pretty easy time for 'em. They come in; they talk; the classes aren't too long. You know, we usually get some things done, and I say, "Okay, well, you guys can hang out and continue working in your group," or you know, "or when you have your schedule turned in to me, you can take off." [It's] a way of sort of relieving some of the pressure of the last month of the semester. I tell them from the very beginning of the first week, "We're going to work really hard here early, and you're going to do a lot of writing really early. But I promise you the last couple of weeks, you're going to have more fun. It's going to be more relaxed." So, and they seem to like that, so then they're doing it, essentially, as a group, at that point, the last two weeks of [class]. I'm seeing some of the things trickling in that I'm asking for. But for the most part, they're completing and producing something entirely on their own.
OL: So how much time overall ? You said, two weeks, but it sounded like some of these things happen before those two weeks.
MB: Right, so it's hard to say. I would say the actual magazine project itself begins two weeks, two to three weeks. The research papers [are] due like three weeks before midterm. So, as we said, they've only been writing the stuff for this all along, although the novel reviews and all those things are due in a couple of weeks preceding the end of class, preceding the magazine. They've done the papers already, so they've already done 80% of the work. That's why it's easier for them and . . . So they slide into base the last two weeks doing magazine work and talking about these other things. And I give them time to, try to give them as much time as possible to, do the grunt work: making copies, and adjusting [pages], and all that kind of thing.
OL: So, if we talk about a process for submitting pieces?
MB: I would say that the most of them do it, I had them before, I guess what I do now is more like an internal submission process: when that, as a group, as in their own editorial board, they make their own decisions about what they want to include.
OL: And they just submit it to themselves?
MB: Essentially, yeah. Essentially, you know, you have your papers. And one of the things they do, they have all the copies of the papers, and discuss them as group, and they all pass them around and say, "Well, we like this one and this one." And of course, they discuss strategies. Usually what happens is, they're thinking, "Well, I've got a paper on this, this, and this. I've got this, this, and this." And then everybody has to say, "Okay, 207
how can we put this together in terms of compiling on the computer sort of thing." Or they want, they're like, "Let's put mine in." So it's, it's an internal process.
OL: Yeah, good. And they select which ones among themselves, right? [MB: Yes, right.] Are the contents, you talked about revising things. How are the contents organized, annotated, edited, revised?
MB: They're, obviously, they're supposed to be revised in terms of these are papers they've given to me. I've graded, and turned back [all the papers], that's assuming that they're going to pay attention. They usually do because they're worried about the grades. They want to [do well]. But [for] the most part, what I stress on is the revision. The revision is where they're revising it for a particular audience. That's the main thing I'm looking for. I'm looking for their, for their effort in the creative ways they have adjusted their papers, their articles, their . . .
OL: What are some examples of things they do?
MB: Well, they, they're always confused about the novel reviews they've written because they think, you know, we're writing up a magazine for 20-year-old college students who are interested in exotic and multi-cultural attitudes, or something like that. Then you've got one of the students that has like an Updike novel or something like that. They're like, "How can I make this . . . ." And then, I sort of explain to them that the idea, you know, you can tell anything to anybody, I mean, you know, and just talk about it in those terms. You can talk about a novel in the terms of--this is not something that maybe you'd be interested in rhetorical terms or strategies that you can go it, go at it adjusting it--you make it fit. And I just want them to think about that. Because they, you know, a lot of kids are thinking that certain things are designed for certain people and not for others. And the way that we can control that--the way people perceive things--is by adjustments in writing, strategies. So it's mostly that sort of thing. It's predominantly what I'm most interested in doing. And I think it's kind of fun. I mean, I think they have some fun with it, trying to focus it towards some kind of particular audience.
OL: And that part happens in the last two weeks? [MB: Yes] And how extensive are those changes?
MB: It varies. The best ones are more transformed. Some people will do very little at all. And I tell them right up front, that's what I'm looking for in reading through these things-- seeing how well they can adapt them. Some people don't do much. I have them all. I grade them individually, these projects, and then they receive a group grade. They'll have their byline on all their articles, so I know who is doing everything in there, and I know what they have done previously, so I have copies of their previous papers. So . . . I can compare and contrast. So, yeah, it varies across the board. The good students try to do 208
all kinds of things. And the thing is, they do some wild things that aren't so successful, that's not necessarily counted in terms of their attempt to try to reach that audience.
OL: How are they printed?
MB: A variety of ways. I don't give them any kind of direction on that, in terms of, I just say, don't turn in note cards or poster size--anything in between there is fine, as long as you can put the text on it in an interesting way. I usually give them a couple of previous ones as examples, you know, a variety of things. I leave it to them. Some of them, you know, will do kinds of really professional kinds of laminated jobs, and some of them use construction paper. So they produce them and print them in a variety of ways, and so it's always pretty interesting to see what they come up with.
OL: How is it funded?
MB: Entirely by them. You know, I encourage them not to, you know, make this thing into a book: "Don't spend a fortune on this. You know, make it respectable and worthwhile, but you don't want to spend more than a couple of bucks between you guys." You know, each [contributes], or "So, don't go overboard."
OL: Who coordinates the physical production?
MB: I leave it up to them. I ask them to come up with particular positions and jobs for their group, you know. They the write a schedule and list their duties. So and so is going to handle this, so and so is going to handle that. But, it's like, don't concentrate on that too much because I don't want the bulk of something to be placed upon one individual. Because what happens is, you know, you've got one or two kids who are going to do pretty much a lot of the major decision making, a lot of the major creative decisions. And then you've got the one kid who is perhaps not the best writer, and he is doing the printing or something like that. I don't stress that too much. I like to, of course, [at] the end of this, with this, they're turning into me an open letter where they describe, hopefully in great detail, the whole process-- discussing what they take [responsibility for]. So I look at that, as well. I like to see the balance. I would prefer that they would kind of do most things together as much as possible. I encourage them to get together at each other's house and do it all there together and not say, you bring this and you bring this and this, and there it is. That's not good collaboration.
OL: How much time is required at the last event in production here?
MB: The final production of it? Well, you know, technically, they have three weeks, but it really comes down to the last weeks. They're still meeting and discussing and doing things. But, for example, they turn in their prospectus to me on Wednesday, so, they've got, you know, they have three class periods to [the final project]. They could have it 209
done today, you know. We're doing evaluations and turning it in. So that's the end of the semester.
OL: How's it distributed? What happens to it?
MB: Well, several things. The last day, you know, we sort of get together and have a meal, and discuss the magazines and everything I can do. And they'll exchange them, and read them and mess around with each other's magazines for a bit. Then usually what I do is-- I've done a couple of things. Actually, Paul R. told me one thing: he tells 'em at the beginning that he's going to take them at the end and put them over at some coffee shop, so they're stacked there with other magazines so other students will look through them. That's kind of an interesting thing to do because it inspires them a bit, you know, that they're going to be "published." Of course, most are no longer there, so I did that one semester. I think it increases the effect. Of course, [that's] after I graded them. These days because generally, I'm--well, a couple of things happen. Generally, I grade them, and during exam week, they're available for them to come and pick up. Nobody ever picks them up. I don't think anybody's ever picked them up. I mean, you know, I've given a bunch to you. I've got 'em stacked around. I think they're maybe just sick of it at that point, or--I don't know--I would like to think, and I always like to think that still try to get them to produce something they would be proud of and maybe want to just have around, and it would be an interesting thing to see. I would love to see something like that, something I produced back then. But, of course, that comes from long-range thinking that you don't expect of 20-year-old students, because I felt the same way. But they don't seem to have too much interest once they're done. I think, they seem to enjoy it. All the responses to the project seem to be positive. But I think when they get the thing done, they're done.
OL: Well, Taneika Cunningham was real positive about it. How does it . . . Before I move on to that question, is it accurate to say that their understanding is it will be read by other people who will be out there in the public?
MB: Yeah. Their peers in the class, in particular, right. And, you know, the problem is, because of the way that they're formatting for a particular audience and all that, so I'm trying to get them to believe that that's who's going to read it, you know? But that's not always the case, and the audience doesn't connect.
OL: Generally, how does an anthology like that fit in the curriculum as you understand it?
MB: Uh, my writing curriculum or the . . .
OL: Well, both, the one you use, generally, and FSU's. Although I mean more as it relates to you. 210
MB: Yeah. Well, in the 1102, in particular, I think it works really well because the writing of the class is largely made up of articles--a lot of 'em--[from] periodicals and magazines and things of that nature. So it's something they're reading all the time. And, a lot of those articles are directed towards certain topics and audience groups and things. And we talk about that as we go along when we talk about rhetorical strategies. So, I think it fits very well. And, as you know, it fits well because it's a way to garner interest in the activity of writing in some way, because it is placing it [writing] in a more real world context. And they [the students] all read magazines, and they, a lot of them, I think that, to work on a magazine is a great, cool. They love to do that. So, I think a lot of it, especially at the end of the semester when they're all tired and bored of writing of research papers and everything else and tired of drafts, it's a way to get them into one more sort of lesson, let's say, with quotation marks, with--about, you know, rhetoric and composition.
OL: Well, I have a question here, a couple of questions, that I think we've covered, but if you want to add anything to what you've already said. First question, is it required in classes, and it is, it sounds like, and are there any assignments structured around pieces in the anthology. I guess that is, once the thing is written, is there any use for it in a class? Is there any . . .
MB: I haven't done that. It's always been the final deal. That is an interesting idea. I've considered that before, but I haven't.
OL: Is it used in any other part of the curriculum at FSU that you know of?
MB: Things that are actually produced?
OL: Yeah.
MB: I don't think so, not that I'm aware of.
OL: Okay. Well, we're running towards the end of this tape.
[end of tape#1]
Tape #2
OL: Okay. Back to how it's used at FSU and that sort of thing. You did mention, though, that some of them you show to your class.
MB: Right, the next class. Yeah, as examples.
OL: Do you show other peoples' or just the ones your students have written? 211
MB: Generally just my students, the ones I have on hand.
OL: Oh, how well does the writing reflect the kinds of work that your students generally do?
MB: I think it reflects it very directly. The . . .
OL: Is the writing as good as what you get in other papers or . . .
MB: Yeah, I think it is much the same in that the students that are generally having problems, mostly due to lack of interest, lack of effort, continue the same. Sometimes it seems to spark something in them, and that's the whole idea. I would say it was pretty consistent with the way they'd been writing throughout. The good students that are getting "A"s in the papers are the ones that are really pushing this thing and trying to make it, putting a lot of effort into it. And that's generally the way it happens. But I would say, on the whole, there's a slight grade up on this in terms of everyone seems a little more interested, you know. And, I'm hoping, and one of the reasons in the early days I think I, I know I used to choose groups, because I would strategically place people, you can, when they're with a couple of students who are really gung ho and, you know, "A" students and it brings them up. So, that happens. That seems to work itself out anyway pretty much, the dynamics, you know. There'll be a couple of good writers in each . . .
OL: So, it's fair to say, is it, that the writing is no worse; it's always better?
MB: Yeah. I think. A couple of times, the students will do very little in terms of changing stuff. Aand so, in a way, it's worse because they're not really following the assignment. I think there's always a few, a small handful, that will use the current structure of the assignment to slack off and not do anything, and, but, you know, it's very obvious when that happens.
OL: Does it [the writing] reflect the variety that you usually have in classes. [MB: Yeah.] I think you said they do some other things or . . . Do they do anything different in these that they haven't done earlier in the semester?
MB: Yeah. They are contributing a few things to it that they have not constructed before. One of them is an editorial. Once they did an editorial where they talked a bit about editorial writing and that kind of, that particular kind of rhetoric and that stuff. Also, as a tool for, now, we get a chance to spout off about something. But also as a way to help that magazine gel in terms of structure and focus, you know, because if they have these papers that are kind of all over the place, but they're adjusted to fit something, you know, you have four editorials in it that are directly related to something for this demographic, whatever that kind of thing that makes it gel. 212
OL: This gets back to the way the assignment or the activity has changed. Do any particular stages in the way you shaped it over the years stand out in your mind, any particular periods where you went, oh, this is a major change that I'm trying to make from an earlier time.
MB: I think the only major change was when I got here. We were structuring it around a particular focus, audience, a theme.
OL: You get that from Adam?
MB: I think so, partly at least. And then some of my own, kind of. The more I do it, it's like every semester, things get a little bit more focused or something, just because I think it's more intriguing and more challenging for them. And they produce a more interesting work.
OL: Do you know, I should have asked this earlier, do you know where Adam learned about them? How he picked it up?
MB: No, I don't.
OL: Do any particular issues or articles in any of the issues stand out in your mind as really good or really bad or for any other reason?
MB: Yeah. There's been a few. Generally, the ones I remember most are the ones that really I think they'd made a great effort to work towards some sort of unique assignment. For example, I, sometimes I like to do a unit on science and technology. There's a great chapter in there [the textbook]. And I use it to compare and contrast. There's a lot of great opposition articles in there. And so they've got a lot of written material from pre-writing and notes and everything about those issues. And I had a group of students last year that--instead of doing what a lot of students seem to be attracted to doing, which is doing something involving sports, fashion, you know, for younger people--they actually did a serious scientific journal. You know. They actually attempted to write, not necessarily for the scientific community, but for the general community that's interested in science. And, you know, they made it very serious, and they didn't have a lot of the other sort of high jinks, the way some students like to do, which I certainly discourage. But that was impressive to me that they took it seriously and, you know, approached this material in a serious fashion. So that was a good one. Generally, those are the ones I like, . . . the more focused. . . . The narrower the focus is, [the] better. Throughout the entire course, over time, the overall theme is trying to understand generalization versus specificity. In being specific and, you're right, that relates to using details and all that kind of stuff and to keeping your arguments narrowed and sharp, and you know, stressing short papers, 4-6 page papers that have a purpose. So, I'm constantly hammering the idea of specifics and not being general and vague and all 213
that kind of thing. And so anytime, I encourage them to be as, to narrow their focus as much as possible, and to the ones writing that really narrow their focus towards a very narrow demographic or theme kind of audience group--and that may be difficult, and they may not be very successful at it, but I kind of applaud them, I think, because it's very hard for a student to write in a way that keeps them from writing just general and vague sentences and ideas.
OL: Do you enjoy the pieces that are published or how do you feel about them?
MB: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I enjoyed seeing how they attempt to adjust them. And, in general, they, you know, these kids are smart. They take their best papers, generally the ones that they feel best about, the ones they feel best about have the most fun writing. They're always the best grades anyway, so, and, of course, they're worried about that. So, "Well, I got an 'A' on the paper, so I'll use this one," and, "How can I change it, so . . . ." I'm interested to see sometimes the kinds of crazy stretches they do and . . .
OL: That's cool. They do good work on a paper that's already good. If you find mistakes in the things that get published, or are destined, how do you respond to it?
MB: Generally, don't. There isn't [time]. I have them available; they're turning them into me the last week, the last day of class, and during exam week. I say that they'll be available on my desk for them to pick up, and anybody who wants, if they want to come in and talk about them or something like that, they can. Like I said, nobody ever . . . .
OL: Right--but you give 'em a grade, though?
MB: Oh, yeah.
OL: But it's not a written out kind of comment about . . .
MB: No. You know, but if they want to talk about it, I can certainly talk about it. But, like I said, they generally, don't come.
OL: Do you have any impression about what attitude the other teachers have toward all this is? Other teachers here at FSU?
MB: I think, I think it's pretty good. Most of the people that I, my peers and the ones that I've been close with here into my third year, now [use them] Even so, a lot of the people that I came in with at this level aren't doing much first-year teaching. But among those who do, a lot of them use it: Laura Newton and Jane Hall, I know both have used it before. But they do mostly 1142 stuff now. And I'm not sure what they do with that. It certainly seems very open and receptive to it here. One of the things about this [first-year writing] program here is that it is pretty wide open in terms of doing what you want to do, which is 214
great. I think it's great for the most part. I meant there are some teachers that--there some new teachers who might need a little more directive approach--but I think a lot of the more experienced teachers for the most part of it, come up with a good, interesting idea that works toward their strength. Everybody has their particular strengths, their particular focus, and everybody has their particular way that they feel, that's kind of good students that they can inspire them be motivational, inspirational. A big part of what I'm trying to do is get them excited or get them interested in the possibility of using written language. So, this magazine project is a way to do that. You know, it's a, it's definitely large on the motivational scale, in terms of that, and I like the idea that they leave this class with a sort of nice taste in their mouth about their writing. You know, they don't end with these lousy, huge reams of paper about a topic they don't care about, but, hopefully, they're having fun with their classmates and finish the thing, and they leave, and they think back, "Wow, that wasn't so bad." You know.
OL: In fact, Benita Penny said, she hadn't done anything like this in any of her other classes and she wished she had. She really liked it.
MB: She was very good. I submitted her for the McCrimmon award -- she was an "A" writer from the first paper.
OL: Well, are there things I should have asked you that I've overlooked? I don't have any major questions, if, if I do come up with some others [questions], can I get back in touch with you and bug you some more about all this?
MB: Sure.
[End of interview] APPENDIX F
PROCEDURE FOR STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS
In this study, I regard paragraphs as the basic units of structure in students' papers. This standard follows the general approach to writing instruction used by a host of college-level handbooks such as Diana Hacker's Bedford Handbook; Maxine Hairston, John Ruskiewicz, and Friend's The Scott Foresman Handbook for Writers; and Andrea Lundsford's St. Martin's Handbook. Indeed, the widely known five paragraph essay form reflects teachers' common acceptance of the paragraph as a structural building block. In longer pieces of writing, the structural units are chapters, with paragraphs as sub-units, or scenes and acts, with beats of dialog as sub-units (Gibson 24). Studies of traditional folk literature, by comparison, have taken an alternative perspective on the structure narratives--oral texts not always lending themselves easily to division into paragraphs, chapters, scenes, and acts. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson compiled exhaustive catalogs of tales and motifs in order to identify and classify themes and narrative units in folk literature. Interest in textual comparisons led some folklorists to identify principles underlying folk expression. For example, in the early twentieth century, Axel Olrik articulated "Epic Laws of Folk Narrative" including "the Law of Opening . . . and the Law of Closing," according to which "the Sage [or folktale] does not begin with sudden action and does not end abruptly"; "the Law of Repetition," by which stories provide detail and emphasis, and "the Law of Three" by which actions, as well as the mention of "men and objects," occur in sets of three (131-135). Russian formalist Vladimir Propp developed a method for analyzing the structure of tales using narrative units like those identified by Aarne and Thompson. In Morphology of the Folktale, Propp illustrated how elements--which he explained in terms of "the functions of . . .
215 216
dramatis personae" (2)--establish setting, advance plot, and combine to produce narrative structure. He demonstrated the structural similarity among stories by reducing the elements of tales to symbols.1 Propp's work was not, however, translated into English until 1958, and the impact of his ideas did not reach many scholars in the West until the second half of the twentieth century. In the "Introduction" to the second English edition of Propp's Morphology, folklorist Alan Dundes explained that the Russian formalist's method allowed for "the structure or formal organization of a folkloristic text . . . [to be] described following the chronological order of the linear sequence of elements in the text" and that "it is a powerful technique of descriptive ethnography inasmuch as it lays bare the essential form of the . . . text." Dundes also anticipated that "there is no reason in theory why the syntagmatic structure of folktales cannot be meaningfully related to other aspects of culture" (xi and xiii). In the second half of the twentieth century, three key areas of study complemented Propp's ideas. Albert Lord articulated a theory of oral formulaic composition in 1960 that shows how singers of Yugoslavian oral epics, biliny, employ elements--such as those Aarne and Thompson cataloged--and structures--such as those Propp identified--to weave extended narratives and adapt the texts to suit the rhetorical context of the retelling. According to Lord's research the traditional structures and motifs serve as mnemonic aids that help folk raconteurs recreate narratives. In The Ballad and the Folk, published in 1972, David Buchan applied extensive structural analysis to traditional English and Scottish ballads. He showed that narrative motifs and poetic in the songs form "binary, trinary, and annular" patterns (88), and he identified in them three "major synchronic" types of structure--"the stanzaic structure, which involves the arrangement in scenes of a unified group of stanzas; the character structure, which involves the deployment of the actors; and the narrative structure which involves the arrangement of the units of action"--that help "the maker organize his material by pervasively grouping its units through balancing, tripling, and framing arrangements." His research suggested that ballad singers employ creative methods similar to those of the epic singers Lord studied.2 217
At roughly the same time that Buchan presented his analysis of ballads, Henry Glassie described how repetitious use of motifs in folk art creates patterns, or structures, that can be seen in much of Western European and American folklife. For example, he observed that "often . . . [a piece of traditional folk art] consists of the continual repetition of the same motif, d: dddd. Most folk thinking involves the possibilities of binary sets" and "might consist of pairs of the same motif, dd: dd dd dd." Extending his analysis through a variety of combinations of motifs, Glassie illustrated that many genres of material folk art frequently exhibit a bisymmetrical, tripartite structure: "most usually, the tripartite motif consists of the symmetrical pair--db--separated by a second element that is bilaterally symmetrical, so that the resulting unit still exhibits symmetrical halves: dAb: dAb dAb or dddAbbb."3 When applied to students' papers, folkloristic structural analysis suggests what may be considered traditional, in regard to students' habits of writing, patterns. For example, the five paragraph essay exhibits the bisymmetrical, tripartite structure that Glassie described. With its introduction and conclusion framing three paragraphs, the functional units of the genre consist of three units--the introduction, body, and conclusion. The first and last units form balanced pair, and third core unit further divides into three sub-units. According to the method of graphic representation that Buchan employed, such an essay would look like the one in Figure 6-1. Using the same method to analyze Clark's "River of Dreams" and McPhee's "Swimming with Canoes," these essays can be represented as in Figures F-1 and F-2. 218
¶ No. Structural Unit Function 1 “As our caravan pulled up to the Introduction: establish setting, opening scene information center,” 2 “We had decided to take a river Introduction: provide background for the trip rafting trip down the Rio Grande” 3 “The next morning we were all filled Transition: preliminary thought about the trip, with anticipation” decision to start, complications 4 “After a full day of rafting, and Development--learning teamwork: first night playing, and just enjoying on the trip--details of camping ourselves,” 5 “A very interesting even occurred the More development--cultural observation: an next morning” instructive scene, in detail 6 “For the next few days we tracked Further development: more episodes along the down the river” river, summarized 7 “Growing up was what this trip was Transition: retrospective thoughts about the all about for me,” experience 8 “But by far the most memorable of all Conclusion: personal summary, “impact on was the last two days” my life and my way of thinking” 9 “When we finally got off, I looked Conclusion: closing scene, broader summary, back one last time” “wonder, danger, and love . . . the river shared”
Figure F-1: Structure of Clark’s “River of Dreams" 219
¶ No. Structural Unit Function 1 “I grew up in a summer camp Opening: description of place, setting a --Keewaydin” scene: camp 2 “Now and again, Keewaydin Development: discussion of canoe handling let us take our canoes” in a lake--“jouncing” 3 “After three or four splats,” More development: discussion of canoe handling--special emphasis on the “spiral” 4 “And before long you found Further development: discussion of canoe the air pocket.” technique--playing under the over-turned 5 “Kneeling in a fast current. Shift to setting: description of place, setting Once in a while, we went” a scene: Battell Gorge 6 “Like horse people, we Development: discussion of canoe handling showed up” in the gorge 7 “One time, when I was about More development: on canoe handling in the twelve,” gorge, special emphasis: flipping 8 “This one could not eject Conclusion (further development): me,” discussion of canoe technique--surviving under it (an unanticipated lesson)
Figure F-2: Structure of McPhee’s “Swimming with Canoes” 220
Endnotes for Appendix F
1. According to Propp, although "a tale usually begins with some sort of initial situation . . . designate[d by] the sign "" (25-26), stories proceeded with varying combinations of narrative lines and elements, and "morphologically a tale . . . may be termed any development proceeding from villainy (A) or lack (a), through intermediary functions to marriage (W*), or to other functions employed as a denouement" (92). With other symbols including upper and lower case letters such as "dispatch (connective incident, B)," "departure on a search (C8)," "a fight or other forms of struggle with the hero (H), pursuit (Pr)," and the functions of the preparatory section ($, (-*, g-., (0-2)" (79-80), Propp's analysis produced graphic representations such as I. A W* II. A W 2 , for the combination of two tales into one (93), ABC8DEFGHIJK9PrRso LQExTUW* for "all schemes which include struggle-victory and also those instances in which we have a simple killing of the enemy without a fight" (104), :[DE1 neg. F neg.]B ($*111AC 1 ; C G 4 K 19[PrDEF=Rs 43 ] for the tale of "The Swan-Geese" (96-99). < dEF977 D
2. David Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).
3. The quotations are from Henry Glassie, "Folk Art," in Introduction to Folklore and Folklife, ed. Richard M. Dorson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 272; for further elaboration on these concepts, see Glassie's Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic Artifacts (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975) and Material Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR AN EXAMINATION OF APPROACHES TO PUBLISHING FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS’ WORK
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______. "Finding Your Own Voice: Teaching Composition in an Age of Dissent." CCC 20.2 (May 1969): 118-123.
______. Learning by Teaching: Selected Articles on Writing and Teaching. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1982.
______. A Writer Teaches Writing: A Practical Method of Teaching Composition. 1st ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968.
______. A Writer Teaches Writing. 2nd ed.: A Complete Revision. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985.
Newkirk, Thomas. Performance of Self in Student Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann-- Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1997. 227
North, Stephen M. The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1987.
Ong, Walter J. "Literacy and Orality in Our Times." ADE Bulletin 58 (September 1978), 1-7.
______. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.
Orth, Michael P. "An Advanced Composition Course Aimed at Publication." CCC 27.2 (May 1976): 210-212.
Owens, Derek. "Some People Just Want Their Stories to Die with Them." Public Works. Ed. Phoebe Jackson and Emily Isaacs. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 2001. 53- 60.
Parrish, Beryl M. "Providing an Audience for Freshman Compositions." CCC 7.2 (May 1956): 90-93.
Penfield, Elizabeth F. "The National Writing Project: What Is It and What's in It for Everyone?" Arizona English Bulletin 22.2 (February 1980): 1-7.
Phillippet, Sherry. "Objective Description." CCC 8.1 (February 1962): 28-29.
Popken, Randall. "Student Publications and the Acquisition of Research Genres." InLand: A Journal for Teachers of Language Arts 18.2 (Fall-Winter 1995): 15-20.
Peterson, Linda H. "Gender and the Autobiographical Essay: Research Perspectives, Pedagogical Practices." CCC 42.2 (May 1991): 170-183.
Rakauskas, William. "What Is Written Must Be Read." Arizona English Bulletin 22.2 (February 1980): 166-169.
Reifenheiser, Paul. "The What the Hell Is a Zine? Assignment." First-Year Writing Teacher's Guide. 2000-2001 Edition. Ed. Ormond Loomis. Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University, First-Year Writing Program, 2000. 90-92.
Ronald, Kate. "Style: The Hidden Agenda in Composition Classes or One Reader's Confession." The Subject Is Writing. 2nd ed. Ed. Wendy Bishop. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1999. 169-182.
Roskelly, Hephzibah. "The Cupped Hand and the Open Palm." The Subject Is Writing. 2nd ed. Ed. Wendy Bishop. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1999. 125-135. 228
Savas, Diana Natalie. "Orality, Literacy, and the Academic Writing of University Freshmen." Diss. University of California, Los Angeles, 1992.
Scholes, Robert. Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985.
[Schweik, Robert C., Secretary, Workshop No. 1] "The Use of a Freshman Writing Periodical, The Report of Workshop No. 1." CCC 6.3 (October 1955). 123-125.
Sherman, Dean. "Professional Writing: A New Approach to the Teaching of College Composition." CCC 23.3 (October 1972): 302-303.
Sherrill, Anne. "Publish or Perish: Educators Face a Writing Course." Arizona English Bulletin 22.2 (February 1980): 42-46.
Simons, Elizabeth Radin. Student Worlds, Student Words: Teaching Writing Through Folklore. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1990.
Sims, Eunice H. Cutting Cords and Climbing Ladders." Arizona English Bulletin 22.2 (February 1980): 38-41.
Smith, Jayne. "How to Put Out a Literary Magazine: A Survivor's Guide for Beginners." English Journal 75.1 (January 1986): 27-31.
Standley, Melissa. "Creating a Classbook in First-Year Writing." Our Own Words: Student's Guide to First-Year Writing, 1996-1997 Edition. Ed. Ruth Mirtz. 5nd ed. Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University, First-Year Writing Program, 1996. 112-114. Reprinted in 2000-2001 Edition. Ed. Ormond Loomis. 9th ed. Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University, First-Year Writing Program, 2000. 167-168.
Stark, Ryan J. "Clichés and Composition Theory." Journal of Advanced Composition 19.3 (1999): 453-464.
Stewart, Donald C. "A 'Real' Audience for Composition Students." CCC 15.1 (February 1965): 35-37.
Sullivan, Patricia. "Desktop Publishing: A Powerful Tool for Advanced Composition Courses." CCC 39. (October 1988): 344-347.
______. "Taking Control of the Page: Electronic Writing and Word Publishing." Evolving Perspectives on Computers and Composition Studies: Questions for the 1990s. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe, eds. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1991. 43-64. 229
______. "Writers as Total Desktop Publishers: Developing a Conceptual Approach to Training." Text, Context, and Hypertext. E. Barrett, ed. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1988.
Tobin, Lawrence. "Car Wrecks, Baseball Caps, and Man-to-Man Defense: The Personal Narratives of Adolescent Males." College English 58.2 (February 1996): 158-175.
______. "Reading and Writing About Death, Disease, and Dysfunction; or, How I've Spent My Summer Vacations." Narration as Knowledge: Tales of the Teaching Life. Ed. Joseph F. Trimmer. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1997. 71-83.
Van Doren, Dorothy. "Foreword." Green Cauldron 1.2 (January 1932): 3.
Vygotsky, L. S. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Edited by Michael Cole, Vera John-Steiner, Sylvia Scribner, and Ellen Souberman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978.
Way, Florence E. "The Magazine: An Incentive for Composition." The English Journal 39.2 (February 1950): 87-90.
Weaver, Raymond. "What Is Description?" English Journal 8 (1919): 30-38.
Wells, Edith. "College Publications of Freshman Writing." CCC 1:1 (1950): 3-11.
Wigginton, Eliot, ed. The Foxfire Book. Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1972.
______. Foxfire 2. Garden City, NY, Anchor Press, 1973.
______. Foxfire 3. Garden City, NY : Anchor Press, 1975.
______. Foxfire 4. Garden City, NY : Anchor Press, 1977.
______. Foxfire 5. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1979.
______. Foxfire 6. Garden City, NY : Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1980.
______and His Students, eds. Foxfire: 25 Years. New York: Doubleday, 1991.
Wise, J. Hooper. "The Comprehensive Freshman English Course--Reading, Speaking, and Writing --at the University of Florida." CCC 4.4 (December 1953): 131-35. 230
[Wilson, Elizabeth Brice, Secretary, Workshop #2.] "Selecting Texts to Meet the Needs of the Composition Course." CCC 3.4 (December 1952): 5-7.
Wilson, Harris W. "Student Incentive and the Freshman Writing Magazine." CCC 6.2 (May 1955): 96-99.
FOLKLORE
Aarne, Antti and Stith Thompson. The Types of the Folk-Tale: A Classification and Bibliography. Folklore Fellows Communications, 184. Helsinki: Academia Scientarum Fennica, 1961.
Buchan, David. The Ballad and the Folk. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972.
Dundes, Alan. "Introduction." Morphology of the Folktale, by Vladimir Propp. 2nd ed. Trans. Laurence Scott. Publications of the American Folklore Society, Bibliographical and Special Series, 9. Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics, Publication 10. Austin and London: Univeristy of Texas Press, 1968.
Glassie, Henry. "Folk Art." Introduction to Folklore and Folklife. Ed. Richard M. Dorson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. 253-280
______. Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic Artifacts. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975.
______. Material Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. Household Tales. Trans. and ed. Margaret Hunt. Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1968.
Lord, Albert B. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960.
Olrik, Axel. "Epic Laws of Folk Narrative." The Study of Folklore. Ed. Alan Dundes. Trans. Jeanne P. Steager. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965. 129-141.
Percy, Thomas. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. London: J. Dodsley, 1765.
Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. Trans. Laurence Scott. Publications of the American Folklore Society, Bibliographical and Special Series, 9. Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics, Publication 10. Austin and London: Univeristy of Texas Press, 1968. 231
Thompson, Stith, ed. Motif Index of Folk Literature. Six Volumes. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1966.
ZINE HISTORY, PRACTICE, AND THEORY
Block, Francesca Lia, and Hillary Carlip. Zine Scene: The Do It Yourself Guide to Zines. Los Angeles, CA: Girl Press, 1998.
Branwyn, Gareth. Jamming the Media. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997.
Comstock, Michelle. "Grrl Zine Networks: Re-Composing Spaces of Authority, Gender, and Culture. Journal of Advanced Composition 21.2 (Spring 2001): 383-409.
Duncombe, Stephen. Notes from the Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture. New York: Verso Books, [n.d. listed]
Fraizer, Dan. "Zines in the Composition Classroom." Teaching English in the Two-Year College. 25 (1998): 16-20.
Green, Karen and Tristan Taormino. A Girl's Guide to Taking Over the World: Writings from the Girl Zine Revolution. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1997.
Gunderloy, Mike and Carl Goldberg Janice. The World of Zines: A Guide to the Independent Magazine Revolution. New York: Penguin, 1992.
Kennedy, Pagan. Zine: How I Spent Six Years of My Life in the Underground and Finally . . . Found Myself . . . I Think. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1995.
Ouellette, Laurie. "'Zines: Notes from the Underground." The Press of Ideas: Readings for Writers on Print Culture and the Information Age. Ed. Julie Bates Dock. Boston: Bedford Books, 1996. 413-418.
Pore, Jerod. Factsheet Five. Online
Rowe, Chip. The Book of Zines: Readings from the Fringe. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997 and online 2003. 7 March 2003
Sinor, Jennifer. "Adolescent Girls' Zines: Uncommon Pages and Practices." Conference on College Composition and Communication, Session I.8/Common tools, Common Projects, and Uncommon Texts: How Familiar Literacies inform the Unfamiliar. 22 March 2002. 232
Wan, Amy J. "Not Just for Kids Anymore: Using Zines in the Classroom." Radical Teacher: A Socialist and Feminist Journal on the Theory and Practice of Teaching, Education and Consumerism Issue, 55 (n.d.): 15-19.
Williamson, Judith. "Engaging Resistant Writers Through Zines in the Classroom." RhetNet 31 (October 1994). 4 February 2001
Wright, Frederick A. From Zines to Ezines: Electronic Publishing and the Literary Underground. Diss. Kent State University, 2001. 15 May 2002
TEACHER-EDITED ANTHOLOGIES
Textbooks
Axelrod, Rise B., ed. Free Falling and Other Student Essays. Boston: St. Martins, 2000.
Axelrod, Rise B. and Charles R. Cooper, The St. Martin's Guide to Writing. 6th ed. Boston: St. Martins, 2001.
Barkely, Lawrence, Rise B. Axelrod, and Charles R. Cooper, eds. Sticks and Stones and Other Student Essays. 4th ed. Boston: St. Martin's, 2001.
Griffith, Barbara A., Martha M. Ambrose, and James F. O'Neil, comps. Student Voices: A Collection of Model Essays. 2nd ed. Needham Heights, MA: Ginn Press, 1993.
Guth, Hans P., ed. Student Voices: The Writer's Range. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Pub. Co., 1989.
Harrison, Myrna, comp. On Our Own Terms. Encino, CA: Dickenson Pub. Co., [1972].
Jolly, Peggy B. and Linda B. Moore, eds. The Freshman Sampler. 4th Edition. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co., 1994.
McKoski, Martin M. and Lynne C. Hahn, eds. Developing Writers, Prize-winning Essays. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1989.
Mlynarczyk, Rebecca and Steven B. Haber, eds. In Our Own Words: A Guide with Readings for Student Writers. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991. 233
______. In Our Own Words: A Guide with Readings for Student Writers. 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996.
Moffett, James, Miriam Baker, Charles Cooper, comps. Active Voices IV. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1986.
Murray, Donald M. The Literature of Tomorrow: An Anthology of Student Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Orlando, FL: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. 1990.
Rankin, Elizabeth. The Great American Bologna Festival and Other Student Essays: A Celebration of Writing by Students Using the St. Martin's Guide. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991.
Ratner, Robert. Something to Say: A Collection of Student Essays for Freshman English. 2nd ed. Needham Heights: Ginn Press, 1991.
Rosenbaum, Robert A., ed. Growing up in America. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969.
Sladky, Paul, ed. The Great American Bologna Festival and Other Student Essays. 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994.
______. Free Falling and Other Student Essays. 3rd ed. New York: Saint Martin's Press, 1997.
Sommers, Nancy and Donald McQuade, eds. Student Writers at Work: The Bedford Prizes. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984.
______. Student Writers at Work and in the Company of Other Writers: The Bedford Prizes. 2nd Series. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986.
______. Student Writers at Work and in the Company of Other Writers: The Bedford Prizes. 3rd Ed. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989.
Woodman, Leonora and C. Beth Burch, eds. Students Write: A Collection of Essays. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1987.
Program Anthologies and Guides
Ahern, Jennifer, ed. Our Own Words: Student's Guide to First-Year Writing, 1998-1999 Edition. 4th ed. Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University, First-Year Writing Program, 1998. Online.
Arizona State University. The ASU Writing Programs Guide. 17th ed. 1999-2000. Tempe, AZ: English Department, The Writing Programs, 2000. 9 November 2000
______. "The Printer's Devil Contest." The ASU Writing Programs Guide. 17th ed. 1999-2000. Tempe, AZ: English Department, The Writing Programs, 2000. 9 November 2000
Augusta State University, English Department. Choice Voice: Freshman Writing from English 101 at Augusta State University. Augusta, GA: Augusta State University, 1999. 11 December 1999
Bleekman, Dell, Christine Skolnik, Mary Beth Tegan, and Laura Nutten, eds. Wings: A Publication to Showcase Writing by English 155 Students. 2nd ed. Northridge, CA: California State University-Northridge, Department of English, 1994.
Brady, Kimmerly and Jennifer Rosenhaft, eds. Wings: Student Essays from the Freshman Composition Program as California State University, Northridge. 5th ed. Northridge, CA: Patricia Y. Murray, [Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co.] n.s., 1999.
Chung, Teresa Younga and Louise K Davidson-Schmich, eds. Deliberations: A Journal of First- Year Writing at Duke University. Durham, NC: Duke University, First-Year Writing Program and the Kenan Ethics Program, 2000.
Clifton Chas S., ed. Compose Yourself!: The USC Collection of Student Writing for English 101, 102, and 121. 5th ed. Pueblo, CO: USC, Writing Program, 1998.
Diogenes, Marvin, and Clyde Moneyhun, eds. Student's Guide to Freshman Composition: With Freshman Writing. 4th ed. Tucson: Dept. of English, University of Arizona, 1983.
______, Leslie Johnson, and Clyde Moneyhun, eds. Student's Guide to Freshman Composition: With Freshman Writing. 5th ed. Tucson: Dept. of English, University of Arizona, 1984.
______, Leslie Johnson, and Paul Malone, eds. Student's Guide to Freshman Composition: With Freshman Writing. 6th ed. Tucson: Dept. of English, University of Arizona, 1985.
______, Paul Scott Malone, and Stacey M. Shropshire, eds. Student's Guide to Freshman Composition: With Freshman Writing. 7th ed. Edina, MN: Burgess International Group, 1986.
Donovan, Eileen and Lad Tobin, eds. Fresh Ink, Essays from Boston College's First-Year Writing Seminar. Boston: Boston College, Writing Program, 1994. 235
Donovan-Kranz, Eileen and Beth Dacy. Fresh Ink, Essays from Boston College's First-Year Writing Seminar, 1999. New York: McGraw-Hill Inc., Primis Custom Publishing, 1999.
Donovan-Kranz, Eileen and Lad Tobin, eds. Fresh Ink, Essays from Boston College's First-Year Writing Seminar, 1996. New York: McGraw-Hill Inc., College Custom Series, 1996.
______. Fresh Ink, Essays from Boston College's First-Year Writing Seminar, 1998. New York: McGraw-Hill Inc., Primis Custom Publishing, 1998.
Elbow, Peter and Patricia Zukowski, eds. Writing Program Anthology, 1999-2000. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts, Writing Program, 2000. 26 January 2001
______. Writing Program Anthology, 1998-1999. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts, Writing Program, 1999. 26 January 2001
______. Anne Herrington, and Particia Zukowski, eds. Writing Program Anthology, 1997-1998. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts, Writing Program, 1998.
Fugate, Ethan, ed. The George Mason Review. An Anthology of Exemplary Undergraduate Writing. Vol. 7: 1998-1999. Fairfax, VA: George Mason University, [1998].
George Washington University, Department of English. Forum. Washington, DC: George Washington University, Department of English, 1999.
George Washington University Writing Program. Kaleidoscope. 2 (Spring 1999). Selected Essays of First-Year Writers in the George Wasnington University Writing Program. Washington, DC: George Washington University, Department of English, 1999.
Glau, Greg, ed. Our Stories. Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University, Stretch Program [1999].
______. OurCultures/OurStories. Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University, Stretch Program [1997].
Grady, Sara, Alice Lovejoy, Claire Iltis, and Liz Rodwell, eds. Prospect. Providence, RI: Brown University, Scholarly Technology Group, 2002. 31 January 2003.
[Guy, Alan, ed.] Mercer Street: A Collection of Essays from the Expository Writing Program. New York: New York University, 2000. 236
Hatch, Gary and Danette Paul, eds. Surviving English 115. 3rd ed. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University, English Composition, 1999.
Hochman, Will, Margaret Barber, Cynthia, Robert Burns, Charles Clifton, and Luis Torres, eds. Compose Yourself!: The USC Collection of Student Writing for English 101, 102, and 121. [1st ed.] Pueblo, CO: USC, Writing Program, 1993.
Howard, Robert Glenn, et al., eds. Harvest: A Collection of Student Essays from the University of Oregon Composition Program. Eugene, OR: University of Oregon Composition Program. 1997.
______. Harvest: A Collection of Student Essays from the University of Oregon Composition Program. Eugene, OR: University of Oregon Composition Program. 1998.
Jackson, Sandra, ed. New Voices. 7th ed. Fall 1996 - Spring 1997. Northridge, CA: Pamela Bourgeois [Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co.] 1997.
Klausman, Jefferey, ed. A Gathering of Voices: An Anthology of Student Writing at Whatcom Community College. Bellingham, WA: Whatcom Community College, 1998.
______. A Gathering of Voices: An Anthology of Student Writing at Whatcom Community College. Bellingham, WA: Whatcom Community College, 1999.
Klima, Kara and Mike Harutunian, eds. Wings: Student Essays from the Freshman Composition Program as California State University, Northridge. 3rd Ed. Northridge, CA: Patricia Y. Murray, [Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co.] n.s. 1997.
Loomis, Ormond, ed. Our Own Words: A Student's Guide to First-Year Writing, 1999-2000 Edition. 5th ed. Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University, First-Year Writing Program, 1999. 11 December 1999
Long, David, ed. Exposé: Essays from the Expository Writing Program, Harvard University, 1996-1997. Cambridge: The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1997.
Melzer, Dan and Pat Hendricks. Readers Writing: Students Guide to ENC1102. Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University, First-Year Writing Program, 1999. 26 January 2001
New York University, Expository Writing Program. Mercer Street: A Collection of Essays from the Expository Writing Program. 1998-1999. New York: New York University, 1998.
______. Mercer Street: A Collection of Essays from the Expository Writing Program. 1999- 2000. New York: New York University, 1999. 237
______. Mercer Street: A Collection of Essays from the Expository Writing Program. 2000- 2001. New York: New York University, 2000.
Papper, Carole Clark, Joel English, Jeff White, and Jamie Miles. Ball Point: Handbook of the Ball State Writing Program, 1999-2000. 18th ed. Muncie, IN: Ball State University, Department of English, 1999.
Popkin, Randall, ed. The Tarleton Freshman Writer. Vol. VIII, 1998-1999. New York, Forbes Custom Publishing, 1998.
______. The Tarleton Freshman Writer. Vol. IX, 1999-2000. New York: Forbes Custom Publishing, 1999.
Prineas, Sarah, Lori Church, and Adrian Wurr, eds. A Student's Guide to First-Year Composition. 20th ed. 1999-2000. Edina, MN: Burgess International Grou p, 1999.
Shaw, Anne, ed. The George Mason Review. An Anthology of Exemplary Undergraduate Writing. Vol. 8: 1999-2000. Fairfax, VA: George Mason University [1999].
Sommers, Nancy and Gordon Harvey, eds. Exposé: Essays from the Expository Writing Program, Harvard University, 1997-1998. Cambridge: The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1998.
______. Exposé: Essays from the Expository Writing Program, Harvard University, 1998-1999. Cambridge: The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1999.
Standley, Melissa, ed. Our Own Words: Student's Guide to First-Year Writing, 1996-1997 Edition. 2nd ed. Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University, First-Year Writing Program, 1996.
Tobin, Lad and Eileen Donovan-Katz, eds. Fresh Ink, Essays from Boston College's First-Year Writing Seminar. New York: McGraw-Hill Inc., College Custom Series, 1995.
______. Fresh Ink, Essays from Boston College's First-Year Writing Seminar, 1997. New York: McGraw-Hill Inc., Primis Custom Publishing, 1997.
Trimmer, Joseph F. Expositor: A Magazine of Freshman Composition. Vol. 3 (Fall 1970). Muncie, IN: Ball State English Department, 1970.
______. Expositor: A Magazine of Freshman Composition. Vol. 5 (Fall 1974). Muncie, IN: Ball State English Department, 1974. 238
______. and Daryl B. Adrian. Expositor: A Magazine of Freshman Composition. Vol. 4 (Fall 1971). Muncie, IN: Ball State English Department, 1971.
______. Expositor: A Magazine of Freshman Composition. Vol. 6 (Fall 1975). Muncie, IN: Ball State English Department, 1975.
______. and C. Wade Jennings. Expositor: A Magazine of Freshman Composition. Vol. 7 (Fall 1976). Muncie, IN: Ball State English Department, 1976.
University of Massachussets, Writing Program. Willing Wordswork. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts, Writing Program, 1999. October 2, 2000
University of Illinois. Green Cauldron. Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois, 1931. 1.1 (November 1931) and 38.2 (Spring 1970).
University of Southern Colorado, Writing Program. The Hungry Eye. Pueblo CO: University of Southern Colorado, English Department, Fall 1997.
______. The Hungry Eye. Pueblo CO: University of Southern Colorado, English Department, 1999.
______. Hungry Eye. Pueblo CO: University of Southern Colorado, English Department, 2000.
Walker, Janice. Student Web Pages. Statesboro, GA: Georgia Southern University, 2002. 10 May 2002
West, Genevieve, ed. Our Own Words: Student's Guide to First-Year Writing, 1997-1998 Edition. 3rd ed. Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University, First-Year Writing Program, 1997.
Class Anthologies
Austin, Sherrita, et al. eds. College Wave. Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University, First-Year Writing Program, 1999.
Berzon, Alexandra et al. City of Text. Poughkeepsie, N.Y: Vassar College, Center for Electronic Learning and Teaching (CELT), 2001. 10 May 2002
Backfisch, Jeff, ed. English Zine '98, ENC 1102-38. Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University, First-Year Writing Program, Jeff Backfisch, 1998. 239
Burk, Kim, ed. Love, Music, and Beer. Tallahassee: Florida State University, ENC 1121-02, Fall 2000.
Carden, Audrey, Chris Conger, Nicole Davis, and Cori Gershon, eds. College Daze. Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University, First-Year Writing Program, 1999.
Coatney, Megan, ed. A Catch of Flounders: USC Movie Review. [English 101 students of Margaret Barber.] Pueblo, CO: USC, Writing Program, Fall, 1997.
Cox, Cynthia, ed. A Short Stack of Stories with Syrup or Words, Words, Words. Nashville, TN: Belmont University, 1999. 28 January 2001
Florida State University, First-Year Writing Program. College View. Tallahassee: Florida State University, ENC 1101-xx, Fall 2000. 26 January 2001
______. FSU Dorm Life. Tallahassee: Florida State University, ENC 1101-xx, Fall 2000. January 26, 2001
______. Noles News. Tallahassee: Florida State University, ENC 1101-xx, Fall 2000. 26 January 2001
______. The Seminole Star. Tallahassee: Florida State University, ENC 1101-xx, Fall 2000. 26 January 2001
______. Stiffs: The Zine for the Active Dead. Tallahassee, FL: First-Year Writing Program, 1998.
______. The Unofficial Florida State University Fun Guide Web Page. Tallahassee: Florida State University, ENC 1101-xx, Fall 2000. 26 January 2001.
Group 2. R.I.P.: Read It Please. Tallahassee, FL: ENC 1102-54, Group 2, Spring 1998.
Kalmbach, James R. 2001 Hypertext Odyssey. English 351, Spring 2001, Illinois State University, 2001. 10 May 2002
Landow, George P. "Discussion Webs . . . [and] Individual Projects." Cyberspace and Critical Theory, English 111, Spring 1998, Brown University, 1998. 10 May 2002
Reynolds, Kurt. "Kurt Class Page." English 1102, College Writing. Bemidji State University, 2001. 10 May 2002
Tanner, Chris et al. A Different World. Tallahassee, FL: ENC 1101-84, Fall 1998.
University of Massachusetts--Amherst, Writing Program. A Collection of Burrows. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts--Amherst, Writing Program, October 1999.
______. Persuasion: Essays, Theories, Arguments. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts- Amherst, Writing Program, n.d. [October 1999].
______. Wipe Your Feet! Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts--Amherst, Writing Program, n.d. [October1999].
University of Southern Colorado, Writing Program. Re-Visions: Which Is Better: The Book or the Movie? A Collection of Opinion by Students in Dr. Margaret Barber's English 101 Class, Spring 1994. Pueblo, CO: USC, Writing Program, 1994.
Venezian, Cheryl and Tiffany Curtain. The Bomb. Tallahassee, FL: ENC 1101-84, Fall 1998.
Walker's Writers, eds. Chicken Soup for the Georgia Southern Soul: Survival Guide. [Statesboro, GA:] Georgia Southern University, Dr. Janice R. Walker's Spring English 1102 Class, Spring 2001.
STUDENTS' ESSAYS
Connor, Jennifer. "Works Well with Others." Fresh Ink, Essays from Boston College's First- Year Writing Seminar, 1999. Ed. Eileen Donovan-Kranz and Beth Dacy. New York: McGraw-Hill Inc., Primis Custom Publishing, 1999. 13-16.
Daniel, Kate. "The Fire." Our Own Words: A Student's Guide to First-Year Writing, 1999-2000 Edition. 5th ed. Ed. Ormond Loomis. Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University, First- Year Writing Program, 1999. 22-24. 11 December 1999
Doggett, Doria. "Beginning Under the Stars." Our Own Words: A Student's Guide to First-Year Writing, 1999-2000 Edition. 5th ed. Ed. Ormond Loomis. Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University, First-Year Writing Program, 1999. 29-32. 11 December 1999
Henderson, Michael. "Writing Project #3." Our Stories. ed. Greg Glau. Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University, Stretch Program [1999]. 14-17.
Johnson, Karin. Untitled. Our Stories. ed. Greg Glau. Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University, Stretch Program [1999]. 9-13.
Lundi, Verlanda. "Travel: Color Me Caribbean." College Wave. Ed. Austin, Sherrita, et al. Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University, First-Year Writing Program, 1999. 7-8.
Modzelsky, Craig. "Thwarting the Devil." Fresh Ink, Essays from Boston College's First-Year Writing Seminar, 1999. Ed. Eileen Donovan-Kranz and Beth Dacy. New York: McGraw-Hill Inc., Primis Custom Publishing, 1999. 7-12.
Russell, Joshua. "Technology: Harmful of Helpful?" College Wave. Ed. Austin, Sherrita, et al. Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University, First-Year Writing Program, 1999. 3-5.
PERSONAL COMMUNICATIONS
Diogenes, Marvin. Correspondence, Answers to Written Questionnaire. 1 May 2000.
Donovan-Kranz, Eileen. Correspondence, Answers to Written Questionnaire. 1 November 2000.
Ferry, Christopher J. Correspondence, "Re: Seeking Anthologies of Students' Writing." 21 September 1999.
Glau, Greg. Correspondence, Answers to Written Questionnaire. 26 April 2000.
______. "Re: Student Bookstore Policies." Email to WPA-L. 10 September 1999.
Hochman, Will. Correspondence, "Re: Seeking Anthologies of Students' Writing." 21 September 1999.
Joranko, Sara. Correspondence, "A Little Late!" 30 August 2000.
Leming-Wilson, Melody. Correspondence, "Re: Seeking Anthologies of Students' Writing." 21 September 1999.
Moran, Charles. Correspondence, Answers to Written Questionnaire. 3 October 2000.
Sims, Martha. Correspondence, "Re: Inquiry about Teaching with Zines." 18 September 2000. 242
Zukowski, Patricia. Correspondence, Answers to Written Questionnaire. 31 October 2000.
Interviews
Cox, Cynthia. Telephone Interview. April 21, 1999.
Bondurant, Matt. Personal Interview. 13 April 2001.
Cunningham, Tanekka. Personal Interview. 11 April 2001.
Diogenes, Marvin. Telephone Interview. 11 November 2000.
Donovan-Kranz, Eileen. Telephone Interview. 8 November 2000.
______. Telephone Interview. 12 November 2000.
Glau, Greg. Telephone Interview. 9 October 2000.
Harvey, Gordon. Telephone Interview. October 16, 2000.
Moran, Charles. Telephone Interview. 3 October 2000.
Reifenheiser, Pau. Personal Interview. 10 April 2001.
Trimmer, Joseph F. Telephone Interview. 16 September 1999. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Eckerd College, where I received a bachelor's degree in humanities in 1968, did not offer courses in rhetoric and composition during the mid-1960s. My interest in the subject began several years after I earned an M.S.W. at Rutgers University (1970) and a Ph.D. in folklore at Indiana University (1980) when I worked as a consultant for the Library of Congress and the National Park Service to write a federal report, Cultural Conservation: The Protection of Cultural Heritage in the United States (1983). That experience profoundly impressed me with the importance of attending to audiences, the power of revision, and the impact of well crafted language. From 1981 through 1995, I served as Chief of the Bureau of Florida Folklife. Writing and editing grant applications, magazine articles, press releases, project reports, and technical papers occupied much of my time in that position. With every document, I grew increasingly curious about people's writing habits and how people learn them. That curiosity eventually led me to enter the rhetoric and composition program at Florid State University in 1996. My research interests include composition pedagogy, especially using computers to teach writing, narratology, parallels between composition and traditional folk expression.
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