Major Ideas We’ve Covered This Term
This class asks you to think about writing a little differently than you may have in the past—or maybe just to think more than you have in the past about how writing works. This page reviews the highlights so you can, too.
Writing in the “Parlor”
When you write in university, you're not just writing for yourself--you're entering a conversation.
Imagine showing up at a party with faculty and other students. Everyone else has been here for a while already, and they're deep in conversation. You're going to need to listen for a while to figure out what's going on, and then formulate meaningful contributions to the discussion--plus support your positions and modify your claims when you learn new information from others. Eventually, you'll have to leave the party, but others will still be there--you'll need to have done your best to communicate clearly and effectively, so people remember what you said (and remember accurately what you meant to say).
(Thanks to Kenneth Burke, who articulated this idea in The Philosophy of Literary Form, 1941).
Click through to a gallery of first-day bicycles.
What Do We Really Know?
We often think we know something--until we have to explain that something in detail. Figuring out what we know and don't know is key to writing. To deal with a gap, we either need to learn the thing better, or narrow the scope of our text to something more manageable.
In the meantime, though, we “draw the bicycle” the best we know how, and refine it in later drafts!
(Thanks to cognitive psychologist Rebecca Lawson and artist Gianluca Gimini for demonstrating this idea so nicely in their bicycle projects!)
Click here to go to the full archive! keepdigging
Where a Text Begins
What is this document? By reading manuscript and note pages out of context, as we did in sequence over our first several class periods, we have to apply close analysis and deduction skills to sort out what we’re reading. Seeing these early notes to what we’ll learn is a prominent published book helps us understand the text more intimately than reading the public, distributed version first and alone.
Click through for photos of the displays from our time at special collections. Here is a materials list of most of what Mr. Riser and Ms. Appiah presented for us, in case you want to follow up on anything you saw. If you see something missing, feel free to ask!
A Text Is Not One Thing
Any “text” is more than just the published version, as we saw in special collections. Which edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is the “real” one? (The first edition with 12 poems? The “deathbed” edition with nearly 400 poems? One of the several iterations in between?) How do we take into account the notes, drafts, correspondence, and alternate versions associated with work by Phillis Wheatley, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, and so many others? While of course we have to eventually choose something static to read or publish for others, whatever we’ve chosen is just one moment in time for that particular text.
(Special thanks to UVA librarians Krystal Appiah and George Riser for curating this exhibit and sharing their expertise with us!)
Samples from the archives we studied in Unit 1, where we can see the authors working out ideas, changing their minds—and changing the world with each decision they made. Pictured here: pages from the archives of Leonidas H. Berry; Marie Curie; Albert Einstein; and Oliver Sacks. Work that would become what we recognize today as: a paper Berry presented in 1934; Curie’s Nobel Prize-winning *Radioactive Substances*: Einstein’s Nobel Prize-winning *Relativity: The Special and General Theory”; and Sack’s—well, this one could go with anything, but I’m guessing his memoir, *On the Move.*
Writing as Discovery/Writing to Learn
We so often think of writing as the thing we do after we know something—we learn the thing, then we write it down. But time and again, studies and experience alike show that on the contrary, we learn AS we write. Writing, therefore, is not simply an act of documentation, but of discovery.
This shift in understanding allows us to recognize the urgency of note-taking, brainstorming, planning, drafting, and revision—these are not merely activities that make the final product better, but are instead activities that help us learn our material and work out our own ideas along the way.
This version of the “rhetorical triangle,” as it’s sometimes called, is only one of many. All of them call us to notice that the meaning-making work of communication is a task that happens among the Author, the Reader(s), and the Text—no one actor controls the meaning; they have to work together.
Rhetorical Situation
Any author, and any text, is part of a rhetorical situation—a complicated confluence of reader, author, and text in the midst of converging and diverging sociopolitical activities and forces. Authors and readers alike must account for these contextual influences in how a text will be interpreted, in what kind of life the text will have and create for others.
Thanks to the Dept. of Humanities at the University of Utah for this helpful distillation of the science-humanities relationship.
What is “a scientific approach to artful communication,” anyway?
Writing in the sciences is technical, using specialized language and conventional representations of data. We’re reading some scientific publications this term, but we are not writing scientific publications. Instead, we’re drawing on scientific approaches including the scientific method (observation, research questions, hypotheses, testing, refine hypotheses, etc.) and RAD principles (using content that is replicable, aggregable, and data-supported) to create written materials that are substantive—that is, as much as possible, tangible, or based on tangible subjects. Art has to do with how we present and craft our material for audiences, how we interpret and create meaning with our data. We’ll revisit these ideas for the rest of the semester.
Click here to see more “levels of abstraction images/notes.
Finding Our Levels of Abstraction
Any text is some “level of abstraction” away from the foundational ideas it seeks to represent/interact with. A mind map might be a little closer to representing lots of components involved, but it usually makes most sense to you as the writer. To translate those underlying ideas to a reader, you’ll have to “abstract up”—and for the most part, every time you go up a level, you lose some precision, but gain comprehensibility. So a print ad or an infographic might be easiest for a reader to quickly read and grasp, but of course, you can’t convey everything in such a distilled format—and you could make lots of versions of those “surface structures” that all represent parts of the deeper content you care about.
So what? A few things:
As a reader, you should pay attention to the “level of abstraction” you seem to be accessing—and pay attention to what might lie beneath or conversely, how you might abstract things up (accurately!) to make them more sensible for yourself and others.
As a writer, you have to decide what level you’re working with and render a text that’s appropriate to the situation.
But also, you should know that a surface text without adequate support underneath comes across as weak or shallow—even when you can’t render ALL the things on the surface, you need to do your due diligence in research and writing to get things up there—in part because what’s underneath changes what’s on top.
What’s coming up next?