Owning Writing

As I was reading this week's essays for 501, I kept noticing the theme of democracy and thought Hesse best summed up my concerns when he asked the question, "Who owns writing" (1248). He argues that it is teachers, but to be honest, I don't think that's entirely the case. It is true that writing teachers are important because a good one can help unlock a student's potential while a bad one can cause a student to crash and burn, forever destined to hate writing. So in that sense, Hesse is right. But in my mind, taking into account this matter of democracy and the celebration of the individual, I can't forget the writer. The writer owns writing.

Cynthia Selfe argues that one of the problems facing English departments is their unwillingness to address issues of technology in relation to issues of literacy. She says, "English composition teachers have come to understand technology as 'just another instructional tool' that they can choose either to use or ignore" (1178). Although she wrote the essay "Technology and Literacy" over a decade ago, the problem is still a valid one. However, I think a major problem facing the English departments is composition theorists. They spend so much time trying to dissect writers like frogs in a Biology lab that they oftentimes fail to see the human behind the act. As a result, we writers are reduced to machines. Just cold, soulless machines plugged into a mere equation or statistic in experiments that turn the Scientific Method on its head. The theorists' findings influence how teachers teach us, and those teachers unwittingly churn out armies of people able to compose merely average work. I appreciate the theorists trying to help people learn how to be better teachers and writers, but at the same time, their never-ending quest for composition's version of the philosopher's stone, that magical artifact that will create an elixir so powerful it will allow every writer to become Shakespeare, Eliot, or Emerson, is annoying. But the reality is, and the theorists always seem to forget, that humans are individuals. It's a fact of nature. No two are created equal. There will only be one Shakespeare, one Eliot, one Emerson. Humans haven't developed the ability to clone themselves, so why should writers be reduced to clones?

I appreciated Hayes essay, "Peeking Out from Under the Blinders," because he essentially tells his fellow theorists "Hey, while we're focusing on the 'big' issues, we're overlooking the important 'little' ones, these pesky human factors. He says:

Our interests build empires, subjugating neighboring areas, and surrounding them with high walls which separate the "interesting" from the "not interesting." This process can lead us systematically to ignore some very important topics which we may not see as important because they do not fit neatly into our current preoccupations (1032).

Incidentally, his six factors - task definition, perception, spatial skills, the psychology of the writer's environment, the cultural context, and the social context - are all issues that focus on the writer's mindset, not their product.

Perhaps I'm way off base in my rant here, and I probably am. But after I read the distasteful article "Universities, Corporate Universities, and the New Professionals" by Faber and Eilola, I panicked. I imagined a terrible future where composition studies became a corporate affair. I tried to minor in business administration as an undergraduate, and after a semester, I realized I'd lost part of my soul. And, having worked for a corporation that wanted a business-minded person, i.e. a mindless automaton, I know they don't really want someone with a mind of their own. This just want someone who can follow orders and generate the most profit possible. So when I see theorists reducing writing to a sheer mechanical skill, just like corporations reduce their employees to robots, and know that someday, some corporate stooge is going to mosey to us, scrutinize our inefficiency, and say, "We'll take it from here," I freak.

We have to get it together if we're going to withstand a corporate takeover. The reason, according to Faber and Eilola, those corporate universities will eventually replace traditional academies is due to our inefficiency. They see us churning out "baseline" knowledge that is generic and lacking in real-world application, and that when it came to teamwork, time management, deadlines, and responsibility, we fell short (1072). This is a democratic society, and in order to beat them, we must do so at their own game via supply and demand. If we can raise our standards by encouraging innovative thinking as opposed to generic thinking, encouraging real-world application of our knowledge (for us English people we can't simply be armchair scholars), learning rigorous self-discipline, and ultimately taking responsibility for ourselves, we can supply employers with workers whose knowledge is a valuable commodity, not just a rudimentary foundation, and we can do so while regaining our monopoly on education and keeping them from "buying us out."

But most importantly, we will have once again elevated the individual by truly owning our writing.

Faber, Brenton and Johndan Johnson-Eilola. "Universities, Corporate Universities, and the New Professionals: Professionalism and the Knowledge Economy. The Norton Book of Composition Studies. Ed. Susan Miller. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2009. 1059-1080. Print.

Hayes, John R. "Peeking Out from Under the Blinders: Some Factors We Shouldn't Forget in Studying Writing." The Norton Book of Composition Studies. Ed. Susan Miller. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2009. 1059-1080. Print.

Hesse, Douglas. "Who Owns Writing?" The Norton Book of Composition Studies. Ed. Susan Miller. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2009. 1059-1080. Print.

Selfe, Cynthia. "Technology and Literacy: A Story About the Perils of Not Paying Attention." The Norton Book of Composition Studies. Ed. Susan Miller. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2009. 1059-1080. Print.