I am a CompRhet scholar in New York. Research interests include linguistic justice, archival history and the possibilities for transformation in the writing classroom as a transhistorical space.
This essay explores the implications of The Elements of Style as a universally received narrative... more This essay explores the implications of The Elements of Style as a universally received narrative about literacy. I recontextualize the book as a product of 20th-century histories of literacy as normative middle class desires, and as a response to Cold War era ideologies of a white national language.
Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Using PBWorks, a group of Laura Lisabeth... more Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Using PBWorks, a group of Laura Lisabeth's students produced this artifact for a class she describes in her article "Empowering Education with Social Annotation and Wikis," published in Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning. This anthology of essays on digital writing pedagogy was itself assembled through an open peer-review process. (The CommentPress version of Lisabeth's essay may be found at webwriting2013.trincoll.edu/citation-annotation/lisabeth-2013/?doing_wp_cron=1442324537.1288309097290039062500.) Lisabeth asked students to respond to Strunk and White's Elements of Style—a freighted cultural object—encouraging them to comment not only discursively but also in ways that make use of links (literal or figurative) to other objects. This emphasis on objects deliberately pulls against the conventional notion of social annotation as conversation.
I argue that The Elements of Style by Strunk and White comes out of a history connecting it to th... more I argue that The Elements of Style by Strunk and White comes out of a history connecting it to the nineteenth century "conversation handbook" (Connors) and other cultural guides to middlebrow identity formation including The Book-Of-The-Month Club. The Elements of Style is a guide to a genteel language performance rooted in the racialized, gendered and classed discourses of these middlebrow cultural objects.
We intend this work to be less a bestiary of bad ideas about writing than an effort to name bad i... more We intend this work to be less a bestiary of bad ideas about writing than an effort to name bad ideas and suggest better ones. Some of those bad ideas are quite old/ such as the archetype of the inspired genius author/ the five-paragraph essay/ or the abuse of adjunct writing teachers. Others are much newer/ such as computerized essay scoring or gamification. Some ideas/ such as the supposed demise of literacy brought on by texting/ are newer bad ideas but are really instances of older bad ideas about literacy always being in a cycle of decline. Yet the same core questions such as what is good writing/ what makes a good writer/ how should writing be assessed/ and the like persist across contexts/ technologies/ and eras. The project has its genesis in frustration/ but what emerges is hope: hope for leaving aside bad ideas and thinking about writing in more productive/ inclusive/ and useful ways.https://mds.marshall.edu/oa-textbooks/1684/thumbnail.jp
In this paper, I show how, as a philologist, William Strunk's approach to language was a rich... more In this paper, I show how, as a philologist, William Strunk's approach to language was a rich historical and rhetorical experience far from the prescriptivism E.B. White ascribes to him in the first edition of The Elements of Style (1959). An interesting historical parallel exists between Strunk's tenure as a PhD student in philology at Cornell and Gertrude Stein's undergraduate years at Harvard during which these two influential figures of American language culture encountered the static epistemology of current-traditional rhetoric. In her own writing handbook, How To Write, Stein describes her idea of "inventional" grammar (Sharon J. Kirsch): "Think closely of how grammar is a folder" (Stein 110) This is a way of thinking about language as the site of knowing that is strikingly similar to the philologist's understanding of language as historicized and conditional. This paper questions what gets authorized and passed along as writing pedagogy and...
This essay explores the implications of The Elements of Style as a universally received narrative... more This essay explores the implications of The Elements of Style as a universally received narrative about literacy. I recontextualize the book as a product of 20th-century histories of literacy as normative middle class desires, and as a response to Cold War era ideologies of a white national language.
Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Using PBWorks, a group of Laura Lisabeth... more Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Using PBWorks, a group of Laura Lisabeth's students produced this artifact for a class she describes in her article "Empowering Education with Social Annotation and Wikis," published in Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning. This anthology of essays on digital writing pedagogy was itself assembled through an open peer-review process. (The CommentPress version of Lisabeth's essay may be found at webwriting2013.trincoll.edu/citation-annotation/lisabeth-2013/?doing_wp_cron=1442324537.1288309097290039062500.) Lisabeth asked students to respond to Strunk and White's Elements of Style—a freighted cultural object—encouraging them to comment not only discursively but also in ways that make use of links (literal or figurative) to other objects. This emphasis on objects deliberately pulls against the conventional notion of social annotation as conversation.
I argue that The Elements of Style by Strunk and White comes out of a history connecting it to th... more I argue that The Elements of Style by Strunk and White comes out of a history connecting it to the nineteenth century "conversation handbook" (Connors) and other cultural guides to middlebrow identity formation including The Book-Of-The-Month Club. The Elements of Style is a guide to a genteel language performance rooted in the racialized, gendered and classed discourses of these middlebrow cultural objects.
We intend this work to be less a bestiary of bad ideas about writing than an effort to name bad i... more We intend this work to be less a bestiary of bad ideas about writing than an effort to name bad ideas and suggest better ones. Some of those bad ideas are quite old/ such as the archetype of the inspired genius author/ the five-paragraph essay/ or the abuse of adjunct writing teachers. Others are much newer/ such as computerized essay scoring or gamification. Some ideas/ such as the supposed demise of literacy brought on by texting/ are newer bad ideas but are really instances of older bad ideas about literacy always being in a cycle of decline. Yet the same core questions such as what is good writing/ what makes a good writer/ how should writing be assessed/ and the like persist across contexts/ technologies/ and eras. The project has its genesis in frustration/ but what emerges is hope: hope for leaving aside bad ideas and thinking about writing in more productive/ inclusive/ and useful ways.https://mds.marshall.edu/oa-textbooks/1684/thumbnail.jp
In this paper, I show how, as a philologist, William Strunk's approach to language was a rich... more In this paper, I show how, as a philologist, William Strunk's approach to language was a rich historical and rhetorical experience far from the prescriptivism E.B. White ascribes to him in the first edition of The Elements of Style (1959). An interesting historical parallel exists between Strunk's tenure as a PhD student in philology at Cornell and Gertrude Stein's undergraduate years at Harvard during which these two influential figures of American language culture encountered the static epistemology of current-traditional rhetoric. In her own writing handbook, How To Write, Stein describes her idea of "inventional" grammar (Sharon J. Kirsch): "Think closely of how grammar is a folder" (Stein 110) This is a way of thinking about language as the site of knowing that is strikingly similar to the philologist's understanding of language as historicized and conditional. This paper questions what gets authorized and passed along as writing pedagogy and...
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