Tom Liam Lynch :: New Literacies, New Literatures

I can’t stop thinking about content and form.  Hardly the thoughts I would choose to have burrowed into the Unforgettable realm of my mind.  But that is exactly where the age-old pair has ensconced themselves.  They will not leave me.  So, I shall escort them out in this posting.  I hope.

In the last two postings, I’ve been trying to make sense of how both Gerald Graff and Laurel Richardson’s views of writing—in terms of content and form—relate to each other.  At first, they seem to be unrelated to me.  Richardson calls for us to consider writing as thinking; to write is to think.  She seems to be responding especially to the notion that in order to write one must know beforehand what one wishes to say.  In addition, Richardson thinks that the forms in which we write help to create knowledge themselves.  There are some things that one might only think of when trying to write a monologue, or in a strict poetic form.  Richardson’s position resists the trend in academia to write in a particular style, an opaque form that makes its content that much harder to understand.  Gerald Graff has a similar view, which he calls Arguespeak—the cryptic language in which scholars speak and write, and a way of communicating in which students are often denied explicit instruction.

Initially, it seems that Graff and Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say method of academic writing is in line with Richardson: they propose a form in which students can write, a form that ensures students’ ideas will remain focused and cogent.  But, there is a difference between the Graff-Birkenstein method and Richardson’s call for writing as thinking.  The difference is this: Richardson suggests formal conventions like genre, poetic rhythm, or characterization; the Graff-Birkenstein method gives students the language to think, isolating the core of a student’s idea.  This distinction is important because it sheds light on the inadequacy of my terms, content and form.  And especially form.  What is the difference between the conventional form of a genre—lyric poetry, for example—and the providing of (some) exact language with which students should think?  What effect does thinking in someone else’s sentences have on students’ own thoughts?  While it might ensure that they preserve cogency, how will it effect aspects of writing like voice, for example?

To be clear, Graff and Birkenstein suggest that after students master the basic idea—how to weave others’ ideas into their own—they are free to alter templates to be more original.  In this sense, the Graff-Birkenstein method is one way to train students to think a certain kind of way—a way that does not come easily to some (or many) students.  This is said with great clarity by two graduate students at University of Wisconsin-Madison who, addressing a colleague’s concern that the They Say/I Say method is too formulaic, write: “It seemed to us that our colleague had conflated Graff and Birkenstein’s transparency with a sort of rote, mechanistic method of learning that reduced the complexity of writing to a set of skills that could be grasped and implemented easily.” I agree.  (I wonder if I myself, in my first previous few postings, have fallen into this trap of rash opinion-making: mistaking clarity for glibness; treating content and form so separately; suggesting that Graff was either an education or and English professor.) As with most tools and methods, this one could be of great value to the writing teacher.  That is, as long as it is one tool among others.  A course in which this is the only way of writing—or, a teacher who teaches it as the “right” way, the only way—would be limiting students to only one way of thinking and expressing ideas.  And, unfortunately, as often happens when administrators wish to implement standardized pedagogy, it is quite possible that what would be a valuable tool might be misused as a magic wand.  This is precisely what happened with 6-Traits of Writing, Reading/Writing Workshops, and even Do Nows.  They Say/I Say is a valuable way to help students organize their ideas.  But, administrators must remember the most important word of that sentence: a.

This week, when Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan was questioned by Congress for approval, Senator Lisa Murkowski commented on Duncan’s son, who was conspicuously reading a book behind his father.  The New York Times noted that Murkowski commented  she was “glad to see that your boy is there reading books instead of playing with an electronic gadget.”  This must be addressed.  Did Mr. Duncan say nothing in response in defense of new literacies, or at least the complexity of literacy in the 21st century?

I imagine him responding, “Actually, Senator, electronic gadgets represent a new path in literacy.  Though we might think of them as senseless gizmos, there is much research that suggests we don’t actually know how such devices affect the mind.  James Paul Gee’s research suggests that video games, for example, can offer educators insight into the way the mind learns.  Donald Leu’s research on the way students read online versus on paper suggests that there is no simple correlation: skills in one does not translate into the other.  Elizabeth Birr Moje’s research questions the relationship between out-of-school literacy practices and in-school literacy practices.  In fact, if my son was sitting there reading Twilight on Amazon’s Kindle, I can’t imagine criticizing his reading device simply because it was electronic.”

He didn’t say this, of course.  Perhaps politics dictates such hearings as the wrong time to pontificate.  My worry is whether or not he wanted to say this?

Sociologist Laurel Richardson thinks that writing itself is a form of inquiry.  For her, writing is not something you do only after you have figured out what you want to say.  Writing is how you think it.  In a chapter on writing as a form of inquiry (Richardson, 2000), Richardson writes that “by writing in different ways, we discover new aspects of our topic and our relationship to it. Form and content are inseparable” (923).   Qualitative research, she thinks, is boring.  As a result, research doesn’t get read and has no impact on the field, let alone the world.  Richardson’s tone seems hopeful when she writes that qualitative research “could be reaching wide and diverse audiences, not just devotees of individual topics or authors.  It seems foolish at best, and narcissistic and wholly self-absorbed at worst, to spend months or years doing research that ends up not being read and not making a difference to anything but the author’s career” (924).  Both Graff and Eagleton would nod their heads to this in agreement.

Richardson then goes on to describe how the wide gap between content and form came to be.  She points to the 17th century, where the “world of writing [was] divided into two separate kinds: literary and scientific” (925).  Literature became synonymous with falsehood, science with truth.  What’s more, literary writing became associated with flowery poetry while science was plain and to the point.  Despite changes in 20th century, the distinction still remains mostly intact.  This is certainly the case in education where any research done in the era of No Child Left Behind must be “science-based” (Lewis & Moorman, 2007).  Richardson concludes the chapter with a series of writing exercises and tips for graduate students and other qualitative researchers.

The Richardson you read above, however, was not always so innovative.  Her dissertation (Richardson [Walum], 1963), for examples, reads like the voiceless template writing Graff advocates. Richardson begins her dissertation, “The major concern of this thesis is the explication and testing of a theory in the sociology of knowledge. Empirically, it is a study of the relationship between production of pure mathematics and social sanctions” (1).  Her voice is frigid.  There is no “I” here.  And it doesn’t get better.  Her introductory paragraph ends with the liveliness of a funeral march: “The thesis concludes with a summary of the theoretical orientations, procedures, and findings.  The major contributions are assessed and suggestions for future research are presented” (3).  Presented?  By whom?  As we continue, in the third paragraph of Chapter II, there is some sign of life: she uses the word my.  All at once there is a sense of Laurel Richardson, that she’s wriggled loose of academe’s suffocating grip.  Before reading her small possessive adjective, you wondered if a human being wrote this at all.  That simple two-letter word invites you into her page.  That is, until she follows my with: “orientation is not to the construction of a master conceptual scheme wherein all sociological concepts are integrated into a systemic whole” (4).  Richardson of 2000 wouldn’t know Richardson of 1963 if she, well, looked in a mirror.

The point of the juxtaposition between early and late Richardson isn’t to suggest the researcher a hypocrite.  Rather, it’s to temper her recent ideas with a harsh academic reality: breaking the rules of academic writing is not as simple as it seems.  There are times in young scholars’ careers when playing by the rules is necessary for advancing.  When Richardson wrote for her three-person committee at University of Colorado, she pretended like she had never even heard of form, let alone style.  Importantly, Richardson has chronicled at length (Richardson, 1997) the struggles she has faced trying to get her work accepted by others in her field.  Her representations of research as poems and plays are gleefully received by some, but woefully read by others who see her work as nearer a wordy prank than scholarship.

It is with great caution that a young scholar bends the accepted forms of academic writing.  There are resources available and pockets of alternative-minded professors out there, but young careers are fragile things.  Both Graff and Richardson are well established in their careers; they can write however their scholarly hearts desire.  They can also encourage their advisees to break the rules, if they like.  But graduate students beware: you do so at you own risk.

Part 4 to come soon…