Getting Personal

Teaching Personal Writing in the Digital Age

Laura Gray-Rosendale

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781438468983

Silver Medalist, 2019 Independent Publisher Book Awards in the Education (Commentary/Theory) Category At a time when Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Instagram, and other social media dominate our interactions with one another and with our world, the teaching of writing also necessarily involves the employment of multimodal approaches, visual literacies, and online learning. Given this new digital landscape, how do we most effectively teach and create various forms of "personal writing" within our rhetoric and composition classes, our creative writing classes, and our community groups? Contributors to Getting Personal offer their thoughts about some of the positives and negatives of teaching and using personal writing within digital contexts. They also reveal intriguing teaching activities that they have designed to engage their students and other writers. In addition, they share some of the innovative responses they have received to these assignments. Getting Personal is about finding ways to teach and use personal writing in the digital age that can truly empower writing teachers, writing students, as well as other community members.

Part One

Personal Essays,
Digital Compositions, and
Literacy Narratives

1	Teaching the Personal Essay in the Digital Age
	Ned Stuckey-French

FOUR YEARS AGO I served on a committee at Florida State University that was charged with reforming the university’s liberal studies program. We identified several problems, some of which stemmed from the decline of first-year composition. The recent transfer of first-year writing to high school AP courses meant fewer students were taking freshman composition on campus.

This change had two big consequences. First, because the training students were getting in high school was uneven and a score of just 3 on the AP exam enabled them to test out of a semester of our two-course sequence, many of them didn’t have the writing skills they needed for college or, more generally, for life in the Digital Age. Second, first-year writing had been the one course all freshmen took, and without it students missed out on the socialization and introduction to college life the course provided. First-year writing had been a place where these students met each other, shared their personal writing, learned research and writing skills, and ended up talking to each about possible majors. Our solution to this problem was to require two new courses: a one-semester 2000-level writing course (which students cannot test out of and must complete by the end of their second year) and a one-semester interdisciplinary course organized around a single “big idea.” This second course is geared mainly for first-year students but is open to others. My work on this university committee left me especially committed to these reforms, and I decided to propose one of these “big idea” courses.

Prior to my work on this committee, several of my English Department colleagues and I had been thinking more and more about how we might reform our departmental curriculum to better reflect the needs of our students in the dawning Digital Age. During the 2007‒08 school year I was part of a departmental committee that conceived and designed a new track for our undergrad English majors, an alternative to our existing literature or creative writing tracks. We called this third track “Editing, Writing, and Media” (EWM), and summed up its mission with the tag line “Writing for 21st Century.” EWM was launched in the fall of 2009. It was meant to be a pilot project with a “soft rollout,” but students loved it and within two years it was the most popular of our three tracks. EWM majors take a core set of traditional literature and writing courses but supplement those with courses (some required, some electives) in areas such as visual rhetoric, digital design, line editing, and the history of text technologies. Most EWM students also do an internship. The EWM track is currently home for more than half of our 1,400 undergraduate English majors.1

Within the EWM track I taught a course on the history of publishing, which included units on book, magazine, and digital publishing. Each year the unit on digital publishing grew until the three units in the course were about equal in size. I also began to include a unit on digital and video essays in my essay-writing workshops, wrote a review essay for the American Book Review on film and video essays, and organized panels at conferences. For almost thirty years, I had taught mainly upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses, but I was committed to our liberal studies curriculum reforms. I saw the new interdisciplinary courses for freshmen as an opportunity to get reacquainted with first-year students and to teach a course focused exclusively on new media and multimodal composition. I titled it Reading, Writing, and Speaking in the Digital Age.

The Course

I have now taught two iterations of this course and am currently revamping it as an upper-level EWM course for the upcoming school year. The first two versions of the course were different in many ways. The first year the course met three times a week for fifty-minute periods, sixty-seven students were enrolled, and I was assigned a very capable teaching assistant. The second year the course met once a week for three hours, twenty-three students were enrolled, and I had no teaching assistant. These different logistics meant for some changes in the readings and assignments, such as more discussion and less reliance on lectures during the second year, but all in all it was the same class.

My interdisciplinary course for freshmen explores what the Digital Revolution means for books, magazines, copyright, and libraries as well as for publishers, readers, writers, and society as a whole. Because my area of specialization is creative nonfiction, I decided to focus on the personal essay as a way to organize the course. I went into this course confident I knew more about the personal essay and the history of text technologies than my students did, but just as sure that my students, all of whom were digital natives, would be more experienced and adept at composing in new media than I. It seemed likely that some of these students had been blogging since eighth grade, made their own music videos, built websites, and experimented with animation software. My goals in this course would be teach my students how to read, write, and speak as essayists, and how to assess what the Digital Revolution might mean for the essay and for our culture and society, but also to learn from them about how to create exciting new multimodal compositions.

Day One and the Readings for the First Eight Weeks

I realized later that in pursuing these several goals I created a course that in a sense took on the form of a braided essay, for we moved constantly between content-driven readings about big issues and readings that offered more personal expressions of the self. I tried to help students study the Digital Revolution but also learn how to express themselves in multimodal compositions. They became knowledgeable about issues such as copyright and the digital divide, and they became twenty-first-century essayists. These two approaches were not, I found, mutually exclusive at all. As Scott Russell Sanders famously remarked, the essay “is an amateur’s raid in the world of specialists” (660). With Sanders’s comment as my mantra, I tried whenever possible to find readings in which a popularizer was synthesizing the work of specialists and making that work accessible, or alternately, readings by experts who were trying to write more personally and in a familiar style so as to reach a general audience. To put it another way, we were often reading the work of public intellectuals. This seemed appropriate for an interdisciplinary, “big idea” class geared to first-year students, many of whom were still looking for their major, but it also seemed to me strategic for a course in which I wanted to introduce students to the personal essay. The readings for the course pushed my students to think of themselves both as researchers who were acquiring real expertise and as individuals who had something worthwhile and important to say. All this is not to say that the readings did not vary considerably in their registers. They did—sometimes perhaps neck-snappingly so—but I explained to my students that this was because most of our readings would be what I call essays and the essay is a diverse genre. The word essay, I said, has been preceded over the years by all kinds of adjectives, including personal, formal, informal, humorous, descriptive, expository, reflective, nature, critical, lyric, narrative, review, periodical, romantic, scholarly, and genteel. I explained, however, that in addition to essays we would also be reading articles, and in so doing raised the question of what the difference is.

On Day One, after I introduce the syllabus and go over course policies and procedures, I pass out our first readings, two short essays on the essay: Edward Hoagland’s “What I Think, What I Am” and E. B. White’s foreword to his collected essays. After reading these aloud in class, we discuss them in order to find a definition of a personal essay. In his essay Hoagland compares the essay to both the article and the short story. His comparison suggests that essay exists on a spectrum somewhere between these two forms. It is akin to the article in that is a short piece of nonfiction that relies on memory and research, but shares with the short story a willingness to employ narrative and to supplement memory with imagination. Of articles and essays Hoagland writes:

Though more wayward or informal than an article or treatise, somewhere it [the essay] contains a point which is its real center, even if the point couldn’t be uttered in fewer words than the essayist has used. Essays don’t usually boil down to a summary, as articles do, and the style of the writer has a “nap” to it, a combination of personality and originality and energetic loose ends that stand up like the nap on a piece of wool and can’t be brushed flat. (102)

Hoagland goes on to complicate the story/article spectrum by proposing a second spectrum. He says that the essay hangs “somewhere on a line between two sturdy poles: this is what I think, and this is what I am” (102). At this point, I turn to Montaigne to up the ante a bit. Montaigne, I reveal, continually asked himself not just “What do I think?” but also “What do I know?” (In a few days students will be reading Montaigne’s “Of Repentance” and Sarah Bakewell’s “What Bloggers Owe Montaigne.”) After asking the students what differences they see between these two questions and talking about the skepticism that lies at the heart of the essay, we move on to Hoagland’s second pole (or, to put it another way, we move from epistemology to identity). What I am is at the heart of White’s essay on the essay in which he advances the apparently contradictory argument that while the essayist must strive for Montaigne’s “natural candor” and never “indulge himself in deceit or in concealment,” he must also be one who

arises in the morning and, if he has work to do, selects his garb from an unusually extensive wardrobe: he can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter—philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil’s advocate, enthusiast. (104)

After some discussion of persona as a kind of mask and what constitutes authenticity, our first class comes to a close and I remind the students to begin reading Gabriel Zaid’s So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance for our next meeting.2 This short, accessible book was published in 2003, about a year after Amazon turned its first profit but before the arrival of the iPhone, iPad, Kindle, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Pinterest, and Snapchat. Zaid provides a sweeping history of the book, discussing everything from Socrates’s distrust of the printed word to the arrival of print on demand and eBooks. So Many Books presents an argument for the book as the main and continuing engine of human culture and conversation despite the fact that we now live in an age when many publishers have been swallowed by multinational entertainment conglomerates.

We continue this warp and woof, tacking back-and-forth between our studies of the digital age and explorations of the self, throughout the semester. During the first half of the semester, we cover such topics as

»The History of Text Technologies from Gutenberg to Google

»Reading on Paper, Reading on Screens

»The Evolution of Television from Tubes to Cable to Digital

»Blogging

»Social Media and Social Activism

»Digital Editing

»The Globalization of Media

»Copyright

»Privacy

»Digital Technology and Disability

»The Digital Divide and Democracy

»The Digital Public Library of America

»Online Book Clubs

The readings for these units included articles by academic experts, often, but not always, written for general readership magazines such The New Yorker or the New York Review of Books. The authors of these articles included writers such as Shakespeare scholar Gary Taylor (on digital editing), cultural historian Robert Darnton (on libraries), and historian Anthony Grafton (on the future of reading). Students also read articles by journalists from online magazines such as Salon and Inside Higher Education, as well as pieces that appeared first in print journals such as Scientific American, the Nation, and the Wall Street Journal. They also read blog posts from former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish and Syracuse University poet, professor, and activist Stephen Kuusisto’s Planet of the Blind. Finally, students explore websites such as Jeremy Norman’s massive history of text technology timeline, HistoryofInformation.com, and Patrick Madden’s wonderfully curated digital archive of essays, Quotidiana, as well as TED Talks and the RSA Animates series. Finally, they view several videos during this part of the course, including film critic Tony Zhou’s A Brief Look at Texting and the Internet in Film and Bucknell Professor Eric Faden’s hilarious sampling masterpiece about Disney and copyright law, A Fair(y) Use Tale. These and other readings take us through the first eight weeks of our fifteen-week semester. These readings introduce students to the Digital Age conceptually and historically, but also model multimodal approaches that they might use in their own work for the course, including sampling, hyperlinks, remediation, mash-ups, audio, and embedded video.

First Assignments
(Reading Responses, Group Presentation, Blog)

Students are required to post reading responses on a discussion board prior to class ten times throughout the semester. Because the class met three times a week the first year, students had thirty-one opportunities to post their ten responses. They were allowed to post whenever they wanted, as long as they posted at least five times during the first half of the semester. My teaching assistant and I decided to limit the posts to ten so we were not overwhelmed with grading and so posting the responses did not become tedious for the students. The second year, because the class met only once a week, there were only ten discussion board forums and so students had to post each time. These reading responses were designed to make sure the students did the readings and came to class prepared for discussion. I told the students I wanted it to be a discussion board forum so I would reward reading responses that also responded to at least some of their classmates’ responses on the forum. Students were also expected to refer to and quote specific passages from the readings and were graded on the specificity of their responses. I tried to design my discussion board prompts so that students focused not only on the content of the readings but also on their formal aspects (especially essay form). Finally, students were given a couple of reading quizzes during the semester and at the end of the semester they took a final exam that included objective (multiple choice and true/false) and essay questions.

Students were also assigned with four or five other students to a small group. Job one for each group was to visit our reading-writing center and digital studio to meet with a tutor and learn what resources are offered there. During Weeks Six through Ten of the semester groups presented on topics featured in the syllabus (e.g., privacy, the digital divide, digital technology and disability, copyright, etc.). These presentations were to be twenty to twenty-five minutes long and followed by a short discussion (10 to 15 minutes) that the group helped launch with discussion questions and then lead. Each group member was responsible for presenting four to five minutes of the initial presentation and for participating in the discussion/Q&A period. Groups accompanied their presentations with a PowerPoint or Prezi slide show and a one-page handout. I gave each group a group grade on the presentation, and in addition, each member of the group submitted a self-evaluation as well as evaluations of the contributions of the other group members, utilizing an evaluation form and rubric I provided.

Their first individual project called on students to keep a blog for four weeks (Weeks Six through Nine of the course). In this blog they explored some aspect of new media that intrigued them. Their four posts presented an opportunity to refine their thinking about new media, experiment with multimodal composition, and begin the search for a form and subject for their final project. I assessed each post along the way on the basis of a rubric I provided to the students. We also projected and viewed some of thei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: Personal Essays, Digital Compositions, and Literacy Narratives
• Part Two: Blogging, Tweeting, Texting, and Online Classes
• Part Three: Voice Lessons, Multimodal Genres, and Digital Stylings
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover