Starting with this one, the next few posts are going to be specifically addressed towards my first-year writing students of spring semester of 2020. If you’re one of those students, go ahead and skip down to where it says “MY STUDENTS: SKIP DOWN TO HERE.” (1)
For anyone else—perhaps you are one of the thousands of people who will be flocking to this blog years from now after I’ve become famous—a bit of context for this change in audience might be useful.
Again, it’s the spring of 2020, which means we’re in the midst of the Coronavirus outbreak. The University of Virginia (the school where I teach and study) has moved all its classes online. In a definitely not self-promotional move, I have decided to take all the things I would have wanted to say to my students in lecture-ish format in the classroom and start putting them on this blog. I figure it gives my students a way to access my ramblings (or quietly ignore them), and it gives me a way to actually keep thinking about this stuff as we move through the semester.
Really, the only thing this changes is the topics I’ll be discussing for the next few posts, which I’ll use to focus on the things my students and I will be working on each week. I still plan to write these posts in much the same way as I’ve been doing. Probably, I could have not mentioned anything and no one would have noticed. If you were smart, you probably skipped down to where I told my students to go, even if you weren’t one. But if you’re reading this, I guess you didn’t.
MY STUDENTS: SKIP DOWN TO HERE
Anyway, I figured the first post in the midst of this Coronavirus brouhaha would be about a problem—but, conversely, an opportunity—that I see as we’re moving a discussion-based class online. I’ll frame the problem first, and then move into why I think it’s an interesting opportunity.
The problem, as I see it, has to do with the difficulty in remembering that there’s a human mind on the other side of everything that you read. Put it this way: I refuse to believe that textbooks are actually written by anyone. Their language is far too dry, far too robotic for any human mind to have produced. Although I don’t have a good countertheory about where textbooks come from, I believe it’s far more likely that they fall out of the sky, fully formed and done up, like strange natural artifacts. (2) Then the teachers go around, picking them up and handing them to students to decipher, as if they were reading rings on the inside of a tree trunk to determine its age. It’s information, but not communication.
By contrast, when I text my friends on my phone, I can feel that they’re actually there on the other side of the language they’re sending me. It’s not even something I have to concentrate on. It’s difficult not to feel their presence. The text is clearly—viscerally, even—an act of communication from another human mind.
So, there’s a weird difference between readings textbooks and texts, and it’s a difference in how you feel when you’re reading them: do you feel like you’re deciphering an impersonal, almost natural object (i.e., not something man-made), or does it feel like you’re listening to what another human mind is telling you?
The truth, of course, is that all language that you read—from textbooks to traffic signs to the really small print on the back of your credit card—all of it came from another human mind to give you information. But depending on how it feels while you’re reading it, on what you imagine you’re doing while reading it, you’re probably going to process that information differently. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I find it much easier to process even very complex information when I feel that I’m listening to someone as opposed to trying to dig information out of an uncommunicating block that happens to have word-shaped scribbles on it.
Okay, but why am I telling you this? What does this have to do with first-year writing and moving it online?
Exactly this: my concern as my course moves online is that most of the academic writing that students read in college—even writing that comes directly from their classmates or professors—feels more like the textbook than the text, more like an impersonal object to be studied than an act of communication to be listened to. (4)
Most of this writing probably doesn’t feel as uncommunicative as a textbook, but if any of you have ever had to write a weekly post or something for class, and then had to read one of your classmate’s posts and be prepared to comment on it (or something like that), do you know what I’m talking about? Or if you’re reading something by someone long dead, like the source by the Confucian philosopher Mencius I gave my students in the first part of the semester, does it ever really feel like you’re listening to someone as they talk to you? (5) Or does it feel more like you’ve been given a stone that was found at the bottom of a river, and you’re supposed to determine from the markings in the rock which way the water was flowing, or how long the rock was there, or what the sediment composition of the rest of the riverbed was? (6) In other words, does it feel like you’re prying information out of what you’re reading, rather than being given that information by person who wrote it?
Well, if I’m right about this being a tendency in reading (and I think I am right), then that presents a problem for online communication in a discussion-based course: it might be harder for students—now that they’re not actually in the same room as each other and must communicate largely via writing—to remember, at a gut level, that the comments they read from their fellow students on the material being discussed are, in fact, thoughts being communicated by another human mind.
I mean, this is hard enough to remember in person. (7) I don’t think this is something my students would ever be confused about, in a conscious sense. But it’s like when you watch a movie; it’s not that you really believe that all the magic or whatever is real. You just forget in your gut for a while that it isn’t real. Same with this: you obviously know that your classmate wrote down that thought about this topic…but when you’re reading information writing in an academic style, it can be hard to remember that in your gut. It can be easy, by contrast, to slip into analyzing what you’re reading instead of listening to it.
To be sure, analyzing what your classmate writes is great, but not if you’re removing it from your classmate’s mouth in doing so. Your classmate probably had other thoughts, or may not have worded things properly, or whatever other problems often crop up in the course of human communication. None of that nuance of human communication enters your thinking if you’re not thinking about it as communication.
I think this is especially difficult to work around when you disagree with the information being communicated. If you think of it as just information, then you receive it on its own, just as it is, without any understanding that it probably has a lot of connections to other things that the writer thought but didn’t end up saying. A statement tends to be simpler than the thoughts of person who said it. You’ve got to remember that the person who said it probably has things going on in his head that you’re not seeing. Maybe he’s not even seeing them fully, himself—but then you’ve got those sorts of thoughts, too, the ones you don’t have quite pinned down. Turns out other people are just as complicated as you. But if the information just seems to be information in a vacuum, you probably won’t feel all of this.
As an aside, I wonder what the textbook writers decided not to put in the textbooks?
Alright, so there’s the problem. Where’s the opportunity? What am I trying to tell my class (and, I suppose, people more broadly)?
Well, this whole thing about forgetting that what you’re reading comes from another human mind—don’t do that.
Forget, I mean. Don’t forget. Don’t forget that you—oh, whatever. Look, I’m pretty sure the opportunity part of this is more or less clear, right? This is a problem that we (and here I’m talking directly to my students of spring 2020) have to deal with as we move to online discussions. In dealing with it, you have an opportunity, an opportunity I don’t know you’d have in the classroom. You’ll have the chance to learn how to really read—or rather, how to listen, how to look through the words on the page and hear the person on the other side.
(1) Or don’t. Up to you.
(2) I expect this probably happens somewhere in North Dakota, where no one is around to see it and spill the secret. (3)
(3) For that matter, are we sure that North Dakota exists? Has anyone really ever seen it? Can we send someone to go check?
(4) I talk about some of this in my post on “Writing to Perform versus Writing to Communicate.”
(5) I give this source to my students when we work on summarizing. Their objective is to summarize what Mencius says in a way that he would agree with. The point of the assignment is partly to make it clear that it does not matter that the guy is two-and-a-half millennia dead. Indeed, he wrote stuff down to circumvent the inconvenience of death. You’d better believe his mind is on the other side of that writing, speaking to you right now. And you’d better believe that you’ve got a responsibility to him, one person to another, to get his ideas right before you talk about whether you agree with him or not. That’s not just a useful way of thinking about this to make summarizing dead guys easier. It’s true.
(6) Geologists, I assume you can do this sort of thing. If not, get on it. I don’t want to look like a fool.
(7) Especially when it’s that one really stupid classmate talking. You know? That one? Ugh.
Thoughts on Essay Writing 