The Meaning of Works Cited

                Throughout this semester, I have been working on researching an article regarding the relation between the Otherworld in Irish folklore and the poems of W.B. Yeats. In the past I have had to do research papers, but never anything this in-depth. I think that one of the differences between writing something for an undergraduate class and writing something that may (hopefully, eventually, if the publication gods smile upon me) be published is the responsibility to familiarize oneself with the entire field that is being studied. It is no longer enough to be familiar with a primary text and maybe a few articles that help to strengthen one’s argument. There must be understanding of where your work fits within the larger scope of the criticism. Only then can you actually work to advance the field that you are writing about, as opposed to being an echo chamber for old ideas.

                Because of this research project I have developed new appreciation for that old companion of essays—the works cited. Or foot notes. Or end notes. However you cite your sources. Previously I thought of works cited pages primarily as an annoyance, that one last thing that still had to be done when I had finished typing out my essay. Though I understood their purpose in avoiding plagiarism, as word that from my youth I have been taught to fear, I nevertheless thought of works cited pages primarily as an inconvenience. I now see that, much like the people in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, I was only seeing the shadow of what citing sources could really be about. Or perhaps it was as if I was a musician and, having been taught to play scales, I imagined that there was nothing else to music. Just as essays written for undergraduate classes are a shadow of actual scholarship, works cited pages for those essays are a shadow of what actual citations can be.

                For my part, this realization has already come to be useful for my writing, as I have been able to find a good amount of useful articles and books simply by the old trick of citation mining—looking at the sources referenced in other essays in order to further my own research. As I continue to work towards the final draft of my own paper (it’s due next Monday, so for better or worse it will be complete soon) I’m taking care to weave together my literature review and other references in such a way that my readers can follow where my article fits within the larger scope of Yeats scholarship, as well as within the scope of Irish Otherworld scholarship. My argument is contingent upon weaving the two together in a way that is both fruitful and coherent, and I’m glad to say that it seems to be coming together well.

“Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear”

-W.B. Yeats, “The Scholars”

Thoughts on "Underlife and Writing Instruction"

Since I will not be writing an article for this course, I've decided for this week's blog post to comment on Robert Brooke's article "Underlife and Writing Instruction".

Before this last week I was unfamiliar with the idea of underlife. In an abstract way, though, I have been familiar with the concept for years. I believe that anyone who has been a student has experienced underlife in the classroom. What started as occasional note passing, a prodigious amount of doodling, and sneakily reading novels under the desk in grade school (no surprise that I wound up in the field of English, I suppose) has in more recent progressed to any number of possible distractions thanks to the presence of a laptop on my desk.

Of course there is always the ever-popular witty comment to whoever happens to be sitting beside me. This type of comment usually has something to do with the material, and so is perhaps more noble and positive than simple distraction and escapism. Brooke writes about this behavior in a class he observed, saying “Their retreat from class participation was a retreat which took a class concept with it, and which applied that concept in a highly creative and accurate way.” (725) I agree with Brooke’s optimistic assessment of this type of behavior. If someone is able to joke about the material, then they clearly understand it and are processing it in some fashion. It’s kind of the same idea as that which says that taking handwritten notes helps students to remember material better. You take in the information and the put it back out into the world in a way that you can understand.

While there are any number of reasons for a student to be distracted during class, I know that at least for me my distraction has in the past been partially an attempt to preserve my individuality. In high school I was not exactly the picture of a rebellious youth, but I did have some idea of resisting what I saw as public school’s desire to indoctrinate me into their system. Everything is more dramatic when you are fourteen.

In recent years, having at last the opportunity to study more or less what interested me, I was much more likely to pay attention and seek to contribute to class discussions. Doubtless this is also due to my growth in maturity since I’ve been in high school, but I think it would be foolish to discount the fact that if a student is interested in the material they are more likely to pay attention. In my own experience the times I have paid most attention in class is when I have been actively seeking to comment on something. To a certain extent this goes back to what Brooke says about information games—we are all communicating certain information in order to be perceived in a certain way (722). If I feel I have nothing valuable to contribute, I will generally remain quiet. Abraham Lincoln famously remarked “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.” So I think that it all goes back to the teaching—ideally the instructor will be able to communicate the material in such a way that it can be understood by students and lead to a fruitful class discussion.

The Objectives

Review the learning objectives for this course. What's one thing you've learned that connects to an objective and to your future job?

For this post, I'll be discussing the objective "audience awareness", which is stated on the syllabus as follows:

• Audience awareness. Students will analyze audience and purpose in rhetorical situations and make appropriate choices. Measurement: observation and analysis of artifacts produced, including active participation in classroom discussion and blogs.

Throughout this course so far, I feel that we've discussed audience awareness fairly extensively. Before this course, I was of course aware of the idea of audience, but I do not think I understood its full implications. To me, an essay was written for the professor. Anything else was written to, well, anyone who would read it. It seemed to me that a piece of writing was sent off into the world and, though it might follow certain conventions, it was not necessarily written to a particular group of people.

This class has helped me to realize that the idea of audience is considerably more complex that I previously believed. Being aware of a writer's audience helps to better analyze certain pieces of writing. In my opinion this has the most application regarding things published in specific papers or journals, although if audience awareness can be considered to fall under the heading of analyzing historical and cultural circumstance then it certainly has implications for literary analysis.

Before this class, I was unaware of the idea that every piece of writing has an audience. Certainly, I thought, that when writing in a journal there is not an audience. Or even in the case of a short story or novel, which certainly the writer hopes to have read, it did not much occur to me to take audience into account.

Theoretically, I will one day be a professor of creative writing. As a professor I think that audience awareness will be incredibly important. There are a variety of people that you need to avoid enraging in order to get tenure and, after that holy grail is gained, to continue to be successful in your field. In order to do this I think it will be very important to be aware of who I am addressing as I seek to publish and to teach.

Even in applying to PhD programs, audience awareness is important. One's personal statement should be tailored to fit the needs of each specific program, In a broader sense, it's important to be able to write something that would appeal to an admissions committee in general. This audience is different than the audience one might have in mind when writing an article for publication, and worlds away from the audience of students that one has as a classroom instructor,

On the whole, I am now more aware of the concept of audience and the need for it to be taken into account not only in analysis of texts, but in my own writing as well.

What could possibly go wrong?

Identify where you think students may fail in an assignment in your syllabus, and how you will use that at a teachable moment by design. If you didn't produce a syllabus, discuss the relevance of this week's readings to your future workplace.

I included a Current Events presentation in my syllabus in the hopes that it would help both the student giving the presentation and the students listening to the presentation the opportunity to become more aware of the current state of the world and things that are going on, as well as the controversies we are faced with. I wanted them to read about an event from two different sources and analyze the differences. The description I gave in my syllabus is as follows:

Current Events Presentation (5%) Presentation dates will be assigned

Choose any current event that is being discussed in the news today. Select two articles that cover the same event but are from different news sources. The news you consult can be paper or online. Note the differences in the way the event is portrayed in both sources. What does each seem to emphasis? Does one leave something out? For class, prepare a five minute presentation on this topic. You may use a PowerPoint but this is not required. Take into account the audience of each news source and what the purpose of the journalists was.

Ideally students would be able to find a controversial topic and analyze it objectively, but I can see the assignment going wrong in several ways. Perhaps the greatest danger might be a lack of objectivity among the student giving the presentation. Depending on the topic they choose, there might be a tendency to let their presentation become emotionally charged and speak in absolutes regarding either the event they were covering or the news source they were analyzing. Given the conservative bent of many students at Texas Tech I can see more liberal news sources tending to take a beating, but the opposite could easily be true at an institution with a more liberal population of undergraduates.

The students also might find their emotions getting in the way of the presentation of a particular news event, depending on what they chose to cover. So the presentation might become less about analyzing the rhetoric of the two different news sources they have found and more about them speaking their mind regarding whether one or the other was “right” or “wrong” in what they said, not meaning that one news source was inaccurate but rather that they gave the story a slant that the student did not approve of.

I hope to use this, should it occur, as a teachable moment in that it would allow me to talk about the importance of stepping back and viewing things objectively in order to properly analyze argument. It might therefore provide the opportunity for discussing the differences between rhetorical analysis for the sake of analyzing an argument versus analyzing something to find out if you agree with it. I might even be able to talk about the believing and doubting game and how to consider someone else’s ideas even if you know you don’t agree with them. Ultimately I think that I would still be able to accomplish my initial goal of encouraging my students to broaden their worldview and decide for themselves whether or not an argument is valid.

List 5 terms you don't quite know yet how to define from our final keywords list

List 5 terms you don't quite know yet how to define from our final keywords list. Next identify three in other students' blog you do know how to define, and comment on them there in those blogs.

Here are five terms I could use help defining, especially within the number of characters given us for the exam. I understand some of them in a nebulous way, but putting down their exact definition is another matter. Thanks in advance to those who comment.

1) Discipline

2) Making of Knowledge

3) Power

4) Style

5) Social construction

What is one assignment you will include in your syllabus assignment that uses collaboration and/or technology and/or other things Yancey, Selfe, Breuch, Bruffee, or Shaughnessey have discussed?

As I reflect on the topic of technology and collaboration in the classroom, I am drawn to thoughts of my junior year of high school. I took AP English, which I suppose is the closest thing that I’ve taken to the English 1301 classes that our students are taking. We had an excellent teacher, one I still remember as having an impact on my later decision to study Englsih. For that class, we were assigned the infamous Movie Project.

This was a collaborative project. We were put into groups of eight, and then given four options of classic movies to adopt into the present day. This involved writing a new screenplay, as well as filming, acting, and editing all ourselves (my group did an adaptation of Macbeth).

It was an extremely stressful project, as perhaps you can imagine. However, I must admit that I did learn a lot more than I would have by working on a simple essay. How many people can say they put together a fifty minute movie when they were seventeen years old?

Thinking about my own syllabus, I can’t justify putting my freshmen through the trauma of being put in a group with seven people they probably don’t know. I like the idea of making a project involving a video, however. The Texas Tech Library has video cameras that are available for students to check out for forty-eight hours at a time, so access to technology shouldn’t be a problem even for students that might possibly not have video cameras on their phones.

Since in undergraduate classes it’s common not to really know your fellow classmates, I think I would assign them to groups of four and set them about the task of making a short film. I think it would be interesting to give them a specific time frame that their movie must fit within, maybe either exactly three or exactly four minutes (give or take five seconds). Like with the photo essays we’ve been discussing, I think that giving specific parameters will encourage students to be intentional in their choices about what to include or exclude.

As far as prompts, I wouldn’t be too specific. I think that simply telling a story will be the main point of the assignment. Does it have a beginning, a middle, and an end? By the end of the video is something concrete different than it was at the beginning? Is the tension, climax, character development? Granted, that’s a lot to expect from a short video, but that’s the art of it.

Alternatively, I might give students the option of making their video persuasive, rather than creative, in which case I would evaluate whether or not they were able to effectively present and defend their argument within the time constraints.

Regardless of the prompt followed, I would require each student to appear in the video, even if just for a few seconds. I would also require each student to write up a brief statement, maybe 250 words, explaining the part that they played in bringing the project to completion. In that way I would assure fairness of grading and prevent any students from profiting by slacking off while others did the work.

But how do we make them care?

Engage in discussion about something that captured your attention over the past few weeks in the course. Relate it back to specific class discussions, readings, and your grading/teaching when possible.

For this week's blog post, I'd like to invite you to go on a journey with me into the perilous world of flashbacks.

The year is 2011. In about a month, I will graduate high school and make my first faltering steps into academia. But for now, I'm stuck in my hometown, counting down the days I have left in my concrete box of a high school. And I am a theater kid.

Every year, the advanced theater class puts on a student written show, composed of various scenes and vignettes written by the students in the class. Aside from the evening performances which we have for every play, we are also performing several times throughout the school day for students from classes whose teachers decide to take them to the play. It is my first experience with a captive audience, and though I am happy to get out of class for the day in order to perform, I am also nervous, wondering how my peers will receive the play. My fellow actors and I make snide comments backstage about the lack of culture in our fellow students, but really, we all want to be liked.

We make it through the first couple of performances and on break, getting ready for the next one, when one of our star actors comes bursting into the room. "Guess what I just heard in the hallway!" he says. "I heard a couple of guys talking and one of them said 'I thought it was going to be lame, but it was actually pretty cool'!" 

We laugh, triumphant, joking about how we should make that our new slogan. But really, each of us is very pleased. Our show is doing what we'd hoped it would- entertaining. We're getting through to people!

Flash forward to 2015. It's been a while since I trod the boards in my high school theater, but I'm facing the same problem as I did then. How do I get through to people? How do I get them to care?

As I document instructor this year, I am not actively teaching. Yet as I look around me at the classroom instructors, and look forward to the teaching that I will be doing next year, I see many similarities between my situation back in high school, having to perform a show for people who are not necessarily interested, and the plight of the composition instructor having to teach a class full of students who are required to be there.

We've discussed many times in class the problem of getting our students to care about their composition classes. This would be much easier, I think, if each instructor had a bit more autonomy with regards to what assignments they required. But as this is not currently an option in our program, the best solution I can come up with is the one that I've carried with me since that day in the theater.

Our fellow students liked the show because we liked it. We were invested in it, and did our best, and stayed late and showed up early in order to put together a show that we were proud to be in. We cared. And because we cared, we got other people to care too.