Teaching Composition Blog

My advertisement is a trailer for a film version of the television show Gilmore Girls, which ran from 2000 to 2007 on the WB and the CW. The show follows a single mother’s struggle to pay for her daughter’s private high school and Yale college tuition. As of now, there are no official plans to produce a film version of the show, though online fans have been asking for one since the show ended last year. My primary audience consists of white, educated, middle-class women in their early twenties, who watched the show at some point in their teens or early twenties. My secondary audience is middle-aged women, who have heard of the show if not seen it; more specifically, many of these women are the mothers of the daughters in the primary audience. The primary and secondary audiences correspond with the two main characters of the show, Rory and Lorelai Gilmore, and the appeal of the trailer resides largely in the concept of mothers and daughters reuniting.

The title screen with the first half of the tagline (“They’re back…”) works on three levels: the Gilmore girls are back on screen, they are back together, and they are the “authentic” characters originally written by the creator Amy Sherman-Palladino. I emphasize these all of these returns throughout the trailer. I chose the content of the trailer with the assumption that viewers would know the main characters and premise of the show. The first title screen (“Rory and Lorelai Gilmore”) mentions the characters’ names and hints at the name of the show and film. People who watched the show or have seen commercials for it would be able to recognize the characters’ faces and/or names almost immediately. The next title screen (“went their separate ways”) sets up the brief summary of the show’s end, which reminds viewers that the mother and daughter have been separated after Rory got a job covering the Barack Obama presidential campaign. For the trailer’s title screens, I downloaded “Solid Antique Roman,” the Gilmore Girls font that appears in the opening and end credits of the show and on the DVDs. The font is perky, elegant, and young without being childish, which would likely attract young women, as well as encourage anyone familiar with the show to recognize it. Continuing with this effort to reproduce the look and mood of the show for viewers who were once fans, I chose a light orange background and red lettering for the title screens because the opening credits sequence for the show emphasized the “New England-ness” of their small town with autumn colors like red, orange, yellow, and brown. These details would give people who were once fans a sense of nostalgia for the show and hopefully encourage them to see the film, whether they followed all seven seasons or not.

I chose to focus on Lorelai and Luke’s wedding because, according to discussions (and avatars) on the Gilmore Girls Forum on http://www.gilmoregirls.org/, the Lorelai and Luke romantic subplot is extremely popular with women of all ages. Many fans—many of whom seem to fall within my primary and secondary audiences—want a film version of the show simply to see Lorelai and Luke get married. Although the younger women might sympathize with Rory because of her age and situation, the character of Lorelai seems to be the point of overlapping interest for young and middle-aged women, so she receives slightly more focus in the trailer. Rory’s romantic subplot, however, is still summarized to entice a younger generation as well. Most of the humor in the trailer relies on previous knowledge of the characters’ personalities and relationships with one another—for instance, Lorelai and her mother, or Lorelai’s parents and Luke—but it can still be understood by people who have not followed the show.

A popular characteristic of the show is its fast dialogue. The average script for the show is about thirty pages more than scripts for most hour-long shows.[1] The numerous coffee cups in the trailer and the second half of the tagline (“and they’re caffeinated”) points to the show’s motif of coffee, which not only adds to the almost frantic speed of the dialogue and movement in the show, but also comments on relationships between characters (Luke is a diner owner who, Lorelai says, “keeps [her] in coffee”). To reproduce the show’s fast pace and allude to these commonly discussed aspects of the show, I chose short clips for the most part and strung together a series of still shots that play in very quick succession. Additionally, I use Jenny Lewis’s song “See Fernando” for its quick and upbeat tempo and her folksy female voice. By using what my audience members already associate with the show, I hope to trigger their nostalgia and convince them that the film is worth seeing.

This feeling of nostalgia is particularly important for selling this film because many fans were unhappy with the show after creator, producer, writer, and sometimes director Amy Sherman-Palladino lost creative control of the show in its last season. In fact, some dissatisfied fans formed the website http://www.savethelorelais.org with the goal of convincing Sherman-Palladino to write an additional season, TV film, or feature film of Gilmore Girls. Capitalizing on fans’ lack of closure and disappointment with the final season, as well as their nostalgia for the earlier seasons, I stressed the importance of “returns” in this trailer. As shown on the credits page in the trailer, Sherman-Palladino is the writer and director of this film. This information allows “They’re back” to suggest, among other things, that this film is a return to the original Gilmore Girls, before Sherman-Palladino left—convincing even disillusioned viewers to also return to the show in the form of this film.

Another return in the trailer is, of course, Rory’s return home and reunion with her mother. This is not only necessary for the premise of the film, but it also appeals to the primary and secondary audiences in several ways. First of all, Rory and Lorelai’s reunion offers a reason for real daughters and mothers reunite as well—to see the film. Like Rory, young women in their twenties are probably in college, beginning their careers, or away from home in some capacity. Many mothers and daughters, who may have watched the show together when the daughters still lived at home, would be eager to go see the film with one another. In addition, the mothers-and-daughters-as-friends theme extends this appeal. The show was based on the idea that a liberal, young, single mother would be more like a friend to her daughter than a mother. I stressed their friendship in the trailer by choosing numerous clips and shots of them sitting or standing beside one another, a clip of them talking jokingly about alcohol, and a heartwarming cliché (“Mother and daughter by chance…Friends by choice”). Many middle-aged mothers would not mind being a “cool” mother like Lorelai and being friends with their daughters at this point in their lives. Young women in their twenties might also enjoy being friends with their mothers and going to the movies with them, but the trailer’s focus on friendship could also encourage them to go with friends their own age.

The trailer would probably appear before another film targeted toward women—perhaps a romantic comedy. It would be released in the summer to allow mothers and daughters a better chance at reuniting, since many people take vacations or visit family during the summer. Also, the mention of Barack Obama is only relevant to the trailer because of the timing: Rory left in the show’s last episode to cover Obama’s campaign, and now that he has been elected President, she is coming home. The trailer could be shortened and shown as a television commercial as well—perhaps during soap operas and reality TV shows, which are popular with white, middle- class women, and during syndicated Gilmore Girls episodes on ABC Family, targeting the younger generation of girls who are becoming fans of the show as well.

The trailer plays off audience members’ previous knowledge of Gilmore Girls, suggesting the film is a return to what they remember and enjoyed about the show. At the same time, however, it portrays the film as something rejuvenating and new. Within the narrative of the trailer, Rory has returned home but is considering her opportunities in life and Lorelai is starting over herself by marrying Luke. The mixture of familiarity and renewal in these women’s lives aims to attract both daughters and mothers, both young women and middle-aged women, who may be at different points in their lives, but who can find these themes appealing.

 Here is the first part of my major assignment. The written component is on its way.

Trailer for fake Gilmore Girls Movie

 Here’s my Flickr project:

http://flickr.com/photos/29938619@N04/sets/72157608686748268/with/2923467468/

Craig Dworkin, “Mycopedagogy”

“the difficulties of the avant-garde are, perhaps surprisingly, especially well suited to the classroom.” Self-conscious linguistic disruptions, antinarrative texts, etc.

Avant-garde: a model for a radical pedagogy

Experimental, enactment rather than explication, inquiry, not about what you know but what you do not know

Mushrooms: experimental and antiprofessorial, refuse foreknowledge, hallucinogenic, indeterminateàleads back to the unknown

To have nothing to teach, and to be teaching it (like true poetry caring nothing for poems)

Jeff Rice, “The 1963 Hip-Hop Machine: Hip-Hop Pedagogy as Composition”

Research-based argumentation

Alternative or additional ways of getting students to engage the argumentative essay

Hip-hop, constructs a discourse, digital sampling

Hip-hop, “Whatever”: when an experience or reaction can’t be named, elusive

Barthes-punctum translates into whatever

Recontextualizing a detail taken from another source

Challenges conventional reading practices

Whatever-unproductive, problem for invention? Or heuristic?

Students can research and form arguments through sampling

Linear structure is challenged by sampling

Cynthia Haynes, “Writing Offshore: The Disappearing Coastline of Composition Theory”

“We are tourists on a search for why.”

Comp pedagogy-beached whale

Reason as pharmakon-both poison and cure

Abstraction, not argumentation. To abstract-to pull or draw

Greg Ulmer, “Kubla Honky Tonk”

Wanted to compose a remake of “Kubla Khan”

Problem: “how to conduct the practice of humanities education online?

Chora-place in space, mediation, sacred nature of specific places

Computer connected to the Internet is a choral device, “mediating, supplying a place to sort the different materials of the chaos of world cultures into a signifying order.”

Syncretism, pidgin

More positive attitude toward hybridity

Kathleen Blake Yancey, “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key” (CCCC address)

Technologies of writingàcreation of new genres

What is literacy? To what does it refer?

The typed version of the address (in CCC) is interwoven with pictures (some of the slides from the original presentation) and marginal comments by the author (which create a sort of meta-narrative of the address).

She wanted to create a multi-genred and mediated text when she gave the address (which included 2 PP presentations going at once).

Geoffrey Sirc, “Virtual Urbanism”

Visual—demographic–form-patterns people make in their lives

1.      1954 (the “real)

Virtual academic—“a textuality whose form and content fuse together in perfect synergy: stilted academic prose as the ideal medium to represent this image of university pomposity.” Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University” (1985) is a manifesto for virtual academicism.

Virtual urbanism—“a different textuality, one in which actual humans, with needs, fears, desires, memories, drift through the important spaces of their lives, encountering other humans similarly engaged in the ongoing mystery of existence”

“bound not by formal conventions, but human passions,” “in lived spaces”

2.      2000 (the drift)

Macrorie as champion of virtual urbanity—belief in people’s natural language patterns

3.      Modernism (the un/official city)

Virtual academic machines—like functional architectural design-“Le Corbusier and his ilk”

Hacker—writing as orderly, visible, and easy to understand. And, utterly uninteresting.

What about more conversational patterns, loopy and languid, hyperlinking, nonlinear

Writing teacher as virtual urbanist—building in encounter-possibilities, pile on, not clear out

4.      1952 (technology)

All freshman, no world

5.      1953 (the fantastic)

Unité broken down into smaller zones d’ambiance: good way to conceive of text, as a whole that can be broken into smaller pockets of interest.

Interested in students’ sincere experience/engagement with reading texts and responding to them.

Diana George, “From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing”

“I argue that throughout the history of writing instruction in this country the terms of debate typical in discussions of visual literacy and the teaching of writing have limited the kinds of assignments we might imagine for composition”

Tension between visual and written communication—sometimes can be productive, but one doesn’t have to be chosen over the other.

Asked students for a visual argument (assignment at end)

Explores questions like Yancey’s about what literacy is and how we teach different types of literacy in composition.

Traditionally, words are linked to high culture and production, and the visual to low culture and consumption.

“Literacy means more than words, and visual literacy means more than play”—message of much commentary on visual communication, including the Dick and Jane instructors’ manual and the New London Group’s report.

The Commission on the Study of Television: tv is children’s “primary source of literary experience”—teachers must use that to foster students’ “taste and critical judgment.”

But they all imply that visual texts should be read and studied in the same way as literary texts

Need to ask students to do more than simply reading visual texts and writing essays about themà multimodal designs

Berger’s Ways of Seeing aimed to break down barriers between high culture (art history) from low (ads), Bartholomae and Petrosky’s Ways of Reading applied that to comp.

The Visual Literacy Toolbox

http://www.arhu.umd.edu/vislit/exercises.html

from instructors of a variety of disciplines, including English, history, art, women’s studies, urban planning, communications, political science

Designing

http://www.stanford.edu/~steener/f03/PWR1/research/visarg.htm

McLuhan and Brooke both fool with the way we conceptualize space, sequence, and point of view. In The Medium of the Massage,  McLuhan incorporates Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland–reading this text was something like falling down the rabbit hole for me. I didn’t really know what was going on most of the time, but a few moments struck me. When I read the page about the legacy of Renaissance art, the Vanishing Point, I thought, Well, how else would we look at something? This is what I see when I look. Then I turned the page and saw the backwards quote by John Dewey. I thought, I could get up and read this in a mirror, but I don’t want to get up. I figured if I could concentrate really hard, I could read it backwards, but it made absolutely no sense to me. I finally stopped being lazy and read it in a mirror, realizing that I was looking ahead (into the mirror), but there was no vanishing point in the distance–instead, I was reading a text and seeing myself at the same time. This counters the idea of the detached observer, who, in Renaissance art is “systematically placed outside the frame of experience.” McLuhan states, “The instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all of us, all at once.”

Somewhat related, is the page with the words “the book” at the top and the thumbs on the sides of each page [followed by the page that read “is an extension of the eye”]. I thought this urged a wonderful self-reflexive moment, because the image looked so familiar to me at first, and then I realized it was what I was looking at at that very moment–my own thumbs on either side of the book, holding it open. This, of course, calls attention to the act of reading–reminding me that I am reading a book, and what I’m holding is, in fact, a book. It again screwed up my sense of knowing space. I am familiar with reading on a certain level and attempting to maintain that same level throughout. At times, self-referential statements in the book (everywhere of course in postmodern lit), can bring me out of it, but usually I am looking outward, trying to make sense of the words.

This book also got me thinking about the effects of media has had on this upcoming presidential election. I have been watching so much news, reading so many things online (news articles, feminist blogs), reading random things in newspapers and magazines, and talking with various people about the presidential campaigns, that I’m never sure exactly where I heard/read/saw anything. And I was thinking about repetition in terms of media and how it’s often manipulated. I think the media can be extremely self-reflexive in that the topic of discussion is not only what’s happening in the campaigns, but questions like What is the media covering? Is this important to talk about? Have we talked about it too much? Is it trivial or meaningful? I’m not saying this self-examination has been very productive–many times, it seems even contradictory–for example, pundits will claim a news item appearing everywhere is trivial (like Obama using the saying, “If you put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig”), yet they still cover it non-stop until it dies out, because that’s what people are curious about. And it’s the repetition that stirs people’s curiosity. So when Sarah Palin says “Obama’s been palling [what’s up with that spelling?] around with terrorists,” she knows that this is a message that will be repeated over and over again in the media. Although she did say it at more than one rally, she didn’t even need to–sure enough, it was repeated everywhere, whether people were taking it seriously or criticizing it. Without the media, that message might not have gotten much farther than the rally. It’s truly a frightening thing when she (or whoever is advising her) realizes they can scare people away from Obama by putting this terrorist association out there and allowing the media to repeat it and work it into people in some way or another.

Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner’s Writing Conventions (2008, Pearson/ Longman) defines “writing convention” as an activity writers engage, as opposed to a rule to follow. Lu and Horner have designed the composition textbook with this student/writer-centered pedagogy in mind. The text includes a variety of reading and writing exercises that ask students to compose their own conventions according to their rhetorical situation. Similar to Vatz’s conception of rhetorical situation—as something “created by rhetors” (157)–Lu and Horner’s definitions of writing convention and rhetorical situation emphasize the agency of the writer over any static set of rules and circumstances.

As much as the text asks students to understand how they themselves can transform existing conventions in their writing, it also requires students to recognize these existing conventions and the logic behind them. The first part of the text discusses important elements of writing, such as process, genre, audience, vocabulary, goals, and error. These chapters, however, manage to consistently emphasize a writer’s agency, control, and choice. For example, most of the chapter titles in this part begin with the term “Composing” (“Composing Genres,” “Composing Goals,” etc.), stressing not only process-centered writing, but the power of the writer to compose elements of writing like genre, goals, and even meaning of words. Again, this recalls Vatz’s point that a rhetor does not discover meaning in situations, but creates it him/herself.

            Writing Conventions encourages students to take an active role in the composing process, rather than assume a passive role as conventions are imposed on them. Throughout the first part, “Try Out” class activities and more in-depth writing assignment sequences ask students to engage with the concepts discussed in the chapters. One “Try Out” in the chapter entitled “Composing Genres,” for example, asks students to use their experiences in other courses and disciplines to examine the relationships between media and content/purpose. Other activities ask students to connect the content of the chapter to other parts of their lives outside of school. In fact, many of the activities and writing assignments in the text acknowledge the existence of what Brooke calls “the underlife” of the student—an underlife the student attempts to assert when they want to resist the traditional role of student. Lu and Horner aim, as Brooke suggests, to treat student writers as writers first and foremost.  

            To highlight students writers’ active role in writing, the text offers a variety of choices and freedom concerning writing assignments. It encourages students to reflect, ask questions, and make decisions. While the first part presents significant elements of composing processes, the second part consists of selected readings that show those elements at work in specific and complex examples, and the third part gives numerous writing assignment sequences that engage a variety of disciplines (such as “Writing History,” “Writing Science,” and “Language and the Self”). The sequences allow students to experiment with different disciplines, genres, and styles, and their own composing processes. Lu and Horner demonstrate throughout the text that composing processes are rarely linear, as early writing-process models might suggest; rather, composing processes are often recursive. Through sequences of writing assignments, student writers can explore their ideas and, as the first chapter posits, compose their own composing processes.

            The title Writing Conventions can be understood on two levels. Initially, one might read it in the traditional way, in which “writing” is an adjective that describes “conventions.” This reading might suggest this is a text that presents students with numerous writing conventions. However, Lu and Horner have constructed a text that values another reading of the title, in which “writing” becomes the verb and one is continually “writing conventions.” Such a title highlights the main philosophies of the text—the concept of composing as recursive, ongoing processes, and the active agency of the student writer who engages these processes and writes conventions themselves.

Andrea Lunsford and John Ruszkiewicz’s Everything’s an Argument (2007), in its Fourth Edition from Bedford/St/ Martin’s, is a useful textbook for composition instructors who would like to emphasize persuasive writing in their courses. Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz aim to widen the definition and understanding of the term argument for student writers, arguing, as the title suggests, that arguments are everywhere in everyday life. Assuming a social constructivist approach to teaching composition, the text demonstrates that there are no pure, ideologically free spaces in writing or in any of our surroundings.

Everything’s an Argument is a highly visual text composed of five parts: Reading Arguments, Writing Arguments, Style and Presentation in Arguments, and Conventions of Argument. With so much attention to arguments, the text might seem narrowly focused, but Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz’s inclusive definition of “argument” (“any text that expresses a point of view”[4]) allows them to address various written, spoken, and visual texts and forms of writing, from essays to proposals to evaluations. Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz also stress that an argument has more than two sides by highlighting in each example the complexity of arguments and multiple points of view.

The first few chapters focus on classical rhetoric to set up further discussion of arguments later in the book. In the preface to the fourth edition, Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz explain that they have revised the text to present Aristotelian appeals of ethos, logos, and pathos “more clearly and emphatically” (viii). They build on this foundation of classical rhetoric throughout the rest of the text, frequently asking students to analyze texts in terms of ethical, logical, and emotional appeals. This approach emphasizes that not only is everything an argument, but arguers and their audiences have ideological stances as well, no matter what their point of view.

A new addition to the fourth edition—boxes within each chapter labeled “If Everything’s an Argument…”—asks students to consider the textbook itself and its production. One activity has students examine the front and back cover of the book to find arguments and appeals, while another activity has students perform a Toulmin analysis of the introduction to the chapter. These types of exercises encourage students to understand the text they are learning from as a rhetorically motivated text; in other words, the text is its own argument and it wants students to recognize this.

The social constructivism and self-referentiality of Everything’s an Argument encourage an awareness of “situatedness”—how everyone is ideologically situated, including themselves, their instructor, the writers of their textbook, and how everything is situated in terms of those ideologies. Texts and arguments are not restricted to writing, but understanding the way they work in everyday life can help students in their writing and in their surroundings.  

Because of some of the readings we’ve done, I find myself thinking a lot about creativity and imagination in the comp classroom. At first I was thinking about how to alter my class for next semester, but then I realized, there are a lot of things I can do right now in my current class. I feel that my role as a composition instructor is to prepare students first and foremost for the Writing Intensive courses they will have to take–the ones English 1000 is a pre-requisite for. I may not be able to address the different ways that people their various disciplines write, but I try to teach them certain skills they can take to any classroom, including an ability to address an audience in an academic setting. Earlier in the semester I blogged about whether I was comfortable with assigning and evaluating non-traditional writing assignments, and because I’ve gotten more used to the idea, I think I’m ready to experiment a little bit. The most important thing is that I’m trying to let go of the idea that English 1000 has to be a boring class. The reason I have this association in my head is that I think a lot of standard, academic expectations are incredibly boring myself. But they’re things I’ve learned to be aware of, and I just want my students to be aware of them too, so they can succeed in their college classes. The question for me becomes, then, not how can I abandon my old goals or course objectives, but how can I teach them in a more interesting way for students? For instance, I think that the compare-and-contrast essay can be valuable, and while there are other valuable forms that ask students to compare texts, I would still like to explore the usefulness of this type of essay with my students. And the assignment I put on the Wiki, which was a group activity in class, actually worked really well in class and I felt like my students had fun and learned at the same time, which is ideal. Allowing a certain level of freedom along with a stable element in an assignment (like the other assignment I posted to the Wiki that asks students to use the film Babel and to choose another film), helps my students and I appreciate both the direction and the creativity in the assignment.

I ended up changing the major assignment in the course–whereas I initially was going to ask them to write a traditional research paper about standard or vernacular Englishes (which has been the theme of the class), I now ask them to make connections between their language(s) and what they see as their identities. It is still a research paper in that they must practice similar skills to construct it, but one of the major texts they have to analyze and incorporate is their personal experience regarding language and communication. I gave them a list of specific questions for exploration to give something less abstract, but they can take it where they like. I hope this will be more enjoyable for them to write (or for me to read).

Berlin, “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class” (1988)

Ideology in the rhetorics of cognitive psychology, expressionism, and social-epistemic

Uses Theborns’s The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology.

Ideology addresses 3 questions:

What exists? (epistemology)

What is good? (ethical and aesthetic)

What is possible? (limits of expectation)

Cognitive Rhetoric:

Heir of current-traditional

“Transcendent neutrality of science,” refusal of the ideological question

“the real is the rational”-what can be explained in “linear, hierarchical terms”

“The existent, the good, and the possible are inscribed in the very nature of things as indisputable scientific facts, rather than being seen as humanly devised social constructions always remaining open to discussion.”

Expressionistic Rhetoric:

Gift of writing genius democratized.

The individual subject

“expressionistic rhetoric is inherently and debilitatingly divisive of political protest, suggesting that effective

resistance can only be offered by individuals, each acting alone.”

Social-Epistemic Rhetoric (Berlin approves):

Social construction

“the real is located in a relationship that involves the dialectical interaction of the observer, the discourse community (social group) in which the observer is functioning, and the material conditions of existence.”

Critique of economic, political, and social hierarchies

Try to externalize false consciousness

No way of teaching is “innocent”—always ideological

Vitanza, “Critical Sub/versions of the History of Philosophical Rhetoric” (1987)

Composition should not be considered a discipline, but a meta-discipline, subset of Rhetoric, or nondisciplinary—not systematic knowledge or teaching.

Appreciation of literary criticism—a subset of cultural criticism, which is also under Rhetoric

Methodology of Provocation

Philosophical Rhetoric v. The Antibody Rhetoric

Antibody—alt. to philosophical  rhetoric–festive mood, nondisciplinary, nonlogical, ability to suspend counterbalance readings. Post-philosophical Rhetoric.

Sub/version of serious self with carnivalesque laughter.

Trimbur, “Composition and the Circulation of Writing” (2000)

“I argue that neglecting delivery had led writing teachers to equate the activity of composing with writing itself and to miss altogether the complex delivery systems through which writing circulates.”

One-sided view of production obscures circulation.

Uses delivery (of a paper)and the Marxian notion of circulation interchangeably.

Parts of Trimbur’s argument:

1.       Comp has neglected delivery and circulation by making class like a middle-class family drama—teachers tell students to account for themselves.

2.       Neo-Marxist cultural studies approaches attempt to transcend the domestic space of the classroom link student work to the circulation of cultural forms and products.

3.       Marx’s notebooks from Grundisse (‘57-’58) offers a better model for conceptualizing the contradictions in circulation.

4.       Applies 3. to the writing classroom and offers practical ways to link composing and circulation.

Latour,  “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”  (2004)

Intellectuals warring against the wrong target? One war late, one critique late?

Critics need to cultivate “a stubbornly realist attitude” dealing with matters of concern rather than matters of fact.