3/10 (4)

Okay...I think I've found some direction here today on how to revise the essay for CE. 

First, I think it's clear that I have to rework the beginning...I have to cut a good deal, if not all, of Tony's background literacy narrative OUT and just focus on explaining his work and the various hats he wears and how these hats engage his literacy skills. 

The Reverse Commute: Take One focuses on genre antecedents and Tony's Entitlement Generation essay. I have been trying to get in touch with Laurie Quinn to try to track down Tony's American Popular Culture instructor so I can get a bit more context on the assignment and perhaps even talk with her about Tony's essay. But, tonight, I've been reading Linda Adler-Kassner's essay and as I'm reading, I'm realizing that she is doing a lot of the same kind of analytical work that I'm doing...see the two case-studies in the middle of her essay. The writing there, where she is sharing excerpts from these two texts that her students created, is very similar to the kind of analytical writing that I produced in the Take One section of my article. She's analyzing student writing, making assertions about what she sees and thinking through how the students' texts do or do not conform to the standard "academic essay." This is very useful for my project and I might hold my own writing up to hers to compare and see what I can do to make mine better. She also lays out a nice simple definition of academic writing, defining it as "thesis, evidence, conclusion, with topic sentences and other points of reference that help the reader follow the writer's argument" (98-99). Her explanations of what the academic "essay" entails (and I think we could substitute the word "genre" here) are useful and helpful to me for what I'm up to. 

The attribution section...how much of the story of the way Tony creates the competencies did I relate? Here is a question about revising part II of the article. I don't know how much I actually wrote about Tony's process of creating the A) Competency Manual or B) Orientation Manual. I think that, essentially, the entire second part of my article just focused on the point: we all know about intertextuality, why not bring students in on this conversation. In the first section, I think I do a good job contextualizing the "Entitlement Generation" essay--surrounding it, so to speak, with Tony's workplace writing. But how good of a job do I do with this in the second part of the article, when it comes to his "The 1960s" PPT presentation? I'm not sure I do. 

Fuck. I just went and looked at it and sure enough, I do talk a bit about how he composed the competency manual. But, I think that this could be expanded. I talk a lot more about assemblage. I think I can do a better job showing and discussing his dominant composing strategy at work--right-click-steal. The question that Schlib asked me is something along the lines of--what would you say to those who would argue that he is plagiarizing? I think I can answer that question--and the answer might take a bit more research on plagiarism and working this into the text, but it seems to me the answer is, yes, he is plagiarizing, because "The 1960s" is an academic endeavor. But this gives us the opportunity to reflect on teh reverse commute because, just like if a guy writes the same genre over and over again, if he composes in the same way all the time, you can bet that his composing strategies are going to jump contexts...which is to say that the way he put the 1960s together would have been a perfectly logical way to do it, and the way he WOULD HAVE done it, had he been creating this presentation for his job. 

So, I'm beginning to map out strategies for revising this piece:

1. Cut beginning, move up argument. 

2. The first part of the essay focuses on The Reverse Commute: Genres (and here, I might be able to draw on Adler Kassner's work to talk about the kinds of generic "academic essays" or genres that nontraditional and traditional students alike are often asked to produce in liberal arts classes like American Popular Culture...and also how these genres and the values behind them are, perhaps, in conflict with the genres students produce outside of school.

3. The second part of the essay focuses on The Reverse Commute: Composing Strategies. Here, now that I've freed up space by cutting the beginning, I can develop a bit more to contextualize the extent to which Tony uses "right-click-steal" in the workplace. 

The question is, what do nontraditional students bring with them? Sort of, the things they carried. This could be fun, by the way--I could use that quote from Tim O'Brien about the things they men carried into combat to sort of set the stage. I might, then, be able to salvage "The Reverse Commute" for the other article I'm working on? 

Implications: as more and more of our traditional and non-traditional students compose in more and more diverse environments outside the classroom, we are likely to face new kinds of problems of transfer. We can no longer assume that most of the writing students do they do in school--and this goes for traditional and nontraditional students. I might share James' email to me to show how this is relevant to traditional age students, as well. Here's the part of his email that might be useful:

When I write something, for example at work or for virtually any class, I usually do not have to consider keeping the reader's attention. Technical documentation or specifications are usually not read for pleasure, so I can use the language and style which I'm comfortable with and not have to worry about keeping people interested. The majority of writing I've done is in response to something... something is broken so I write describing the problem and how it should be, or if I've programmed something I write how or why something works, etc. When someone reads what I write, they do so because they *have to* with the intention of extracting certain pieces of information. As soon as they figured out what they need, they stop reading -- and that's good. I guess with most things in work I try to adapt what I'm writing to *minimize* what readers need to read. The things I write (and read!) less is more: the faster the reader gets what they are looking and stops reading the better I've written whatever it is.