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.