Upate on the Tully piece

I've been working sporadically on this piece about Tully, and the (near) daily attention is very interesting.  I can see it evolve under my gaze.

Insight 1: Walking up the stairs on a very lovely morning this week, I got a chance to walk a little while with Dr. David Miller, GIS, and we got a chance to talk about writing.  He has been working on a fascinating book about hot rodders -- craftsmen and artists, really, with proprietary knowledge about how to build these automotive artworks.  He's asking these guys to tell the stories of what they know about building cars.  First person, very detail-oriented, very tedious work to transcribe.  Takes forever.  I asked him why he didn't hire someone to do the transcription for him, and he surprised me by saying that he didn't want to skip this step.  By going over them, word by word, phrase by phrase, he was able to develop a deeper understanding of what the project was turning out to be.  He said something like "the book is teaching me what form it should take," and I could connect.  Being immersed in the language, in the complexity, is necessary.  It's the only way that you can sense the patterns in the text, see places where the division are and the way they build into something (sequence, development, trajectories, arcs).  Immersion in the thick of things as a form of scuba diving into your work.

Insight 2: Talking on the phone with my brother yesterday, he talked about his teaching his students art, which is always interesting to me.  He said that sometimes he would ask his undergraduates to work on a single piece for an hour, doing some mundane task such as sanding it or carving it.  Very often, they were incredulous.  "You want me to just do that for an entire hour?" he reported them as saying.  The idea of not making progress, of having an accomplishment, of working on something for a while and having it develop out of the work, to not have there be an obvious alternative and immediate resolution, was hard for them. Heck, it was more than hard, it was not going to happen.  If it doesn't happen easily, then it doesn't happen.  But the point is not just that his students were distractable (Nicholas Carr, anyone?!), but that they didn't know -- they didn't even suspect -- that knowing somethignusualy requires being immersed in it for a long time.  He said it takes 15 years of doing woodworking before you start to have a vision of a project as if from above, with the know-how embedded in your hands and a feel for what makes sense and is likely to work.  Malcolm Gladwell called this the rule of 10,000 hours, and that seems about right.  Immersion, not insight, is the way of the craftsman.  Writing is one of the last hand-made crafts, and that is as it should be.

Insight 3: No time for number three, but it has to do with finding tensions, putting the myth first, and developing detail sentence by sentence............................𕶕†©ø¨˙ø†¶ˆ®ˆ¥ƒπ¨ª§§£∞¨˙∫∆˙©¬øˆæ¨ø¥´¶•

Tuesday, April 19

PWR 497

We have five writing days left after today.

We write:

• What has your progress been on your project since last Tuesday?
• What are your writing goals for today?

> and at the end of class, we return to this page and write about our accomplishments<

+++++++++++++++++++++

Rubrics help us know we're on track.  Here is a rubric for the final project.  Hope you find it useful:

What readers want:

·      A sense of direction and development toward greater complexity.

·      A sense of investment: characters that are not “flat” or clichés, plots that surprise, images that are fresh

·      A distinct style to the piece

·      A sense of voice, of the author’s sensibility

·      A clean page, free of distracting errors (what’s “distracting” may depend on the reader, of course)

·      Length.  Readers should not want it to quit.

·      Challenge.  Though some readers are interested in reading the same thing over, most readers want to see something that challenges them to think differently.

·      A sense of quality: the parts fit together and the work is revised

     Humor, wit, insight – the mind at work helps give the work freshness

Thursday, April 14 and Scholars' Day

Wow, you guys did great, both as revisers Thursday and in the reading Friday.  Nice way to support each other.

Tuesday, April 12

Class: Early on in Senior Seminar we made a list was just a list of what would go in the portfolio.  This time it's the actual documents themselves that are to be brought to class: the entire portfolio, printed out, in the flesh, for us to read and share.  Today is workshop, giving feedback on how to improve your peers' portfolios.

Major Projects Revealed!

Today was a fast day in Senior Sem.  Folks brought their major project drafts, and we read them.  Sounds simple enough.  Fascinating stuff, all of it unfinished and in-progress.  Authors asked for specific kinds of feedback on their papers (something other than the vague "do you like it," which means very little).  We read, annotated, and gave comments.

For Thursday, authors are to write two more pages (500 words at least) and somehow (how this will be done is a mystery to me), draw from the handout, below.  It has to look natural, too!


Print this for class.  I'll print it if you send it on before class.  

Looking forward to it.

DRF

-------------

• Malcolm Gladwell writes “Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.  Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig” Outliers, 150.
• “Working really hard is what successful people do….[it gives] a way to find meaning the midst of great uncertainly and poverty” (239)
• “Intelligence has a threshold” (80).
• “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good.  It’s the thing you do that makes you good” (42).
• “We all live inside our own private version of the adjacent possible” Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From, 40.
• “Darwin’s ideas evolve because on some basic leel the notebook platform creates a cultivaten space for his hunches; it is not that th notebook is a mere transcription of the ideas, which are happening offstage in Darwin’s mind” (83). 

Tuesday, March 29

So Fish is trying too hard, huh, to write "good" sentences?  Nice point in class from several people.  I concur.  The book is not unsmart, but the prose is self-conscious and sometimes overwrought.  Yet his principles remain: good prose has to be part of  a strongly held and powerfully understood purpose.  In fact, in class we discussed how "purpose" and "context" are nearly synonymous.  This parallel or synonymity (to coin a word) is in many ways Johnson's argument, too.  Context makes (induces, elicits, promotes, supports, "under-stands") our discoveries.  The papers you all wrote on Johnson make explicit connections between his book and writing -- again, it's interesting, but, more importantly, it is useful to find these metaphors and images and stories of "where good writings come from."  One claim, for example, that came from class discussion, is that inspiration and insight is not nearly as important as the context and community that sponsors your "personal" discovery.  Being in a stimulating environment (and what that means varies for everyone, but it seems to generally include conversation and reading) is important.  We discussed also the ways that a commonplace book can serve as a form of "conversation" with oneself and one's influential authors.

On Thursday we will spend the entire time writing on our individual projects.  At the end of class, we will post them, perhaps to Google Docs.  Conferences are as follows next week (Taylor, you and I will hold our conferences on the phone).  The point is to discuss your project's process.

9:00 Monday Elise
9:30 Heather
10: Sean

Richard 9:00 Wednesday
Taylor 9:30

9:00 Corey
9:30 Zack
10:00 David

We're on The Map

A list of Professional Writing programs was just released.  Note that we're rubbing shoulders with Perdue, Little Rock, and even Syracuse.

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=217085203997748400413.00049f2ccd987df5bb24a&z=0%3E

Assignments out of Thursday, March 24 for March 29

Today we entered with both the Fish and Bell books, took a grammar quiz, filled out a form that identified our major projects' status and orientation, used google docs to summarize this information, went over the quiz, listened to a short lecture on sentence structure, and received several assignments.

The assignments for Tuesday next (March 29) as follows:

>bring the Fish and Bell and Johnson books<

1) Annotate and finish Johnson.  Write a one-page paper from that book that explains how his ideas connect to writing. One page sounds easy. I think it is not.  We will be discussing and finishing the book in class.

2) Read chapter 4 of Fish, annotate it, and find in your reading, from whatever source, four sentences that you feel are what Fish would call "good."  Bring those four sentences, typed clearly, to class on a single sheet of paper, assuming they will fit.  You will be expected to explain why they are "good," using Fish's criteria.

3) Bring the grammar test completed.  We will go over the sentences in class.  The test can be found here for you to print out and bring to class completed.  You are not to restructure the sentences, but merely fix the punctuation.  

5) Ten additional pages of your your major project (2,500 words) will be due in finished draft form on April 5.  We discussed how to break some of these unwieldy and ambitious projects into manageable sections.  

6) Scholar's Day is April 15

7) Transition has been fully funded.

Contact me if you have questions.

Readings for Thursday

> Please read Janis Bell's "Grammar Terminology" and Stanley Fish's "Why Sentences."
> Read over and add two comments each to the two google docs pages -- the one on Johnson's book and the one on your own project.

See if you can figure out how to use that comment feature and the other annotation tool, the one that allows you to insert footnotes.

Google Docs Day

Agenda:

1) Discussion of projects as heuristic (generative practices): project, the most interesting term of all.  I see in "project" a compelling set of problems and the urge to organize and undertake a developing argument that propels one into a certain environment and requires the cultivation that Johnson discusses.  I think Johnson has it wrong when he talks of inventions as the culmination of one man's work (and the germination of another's) -- or at least it's incomplete.  A good project will elicit and direct thinking into new forms of the "adjunct possible," making a sinuous path that you, the writer, really can't predict.  In fact, that is maybe the most valuable thing about a project: it is unpredictable.  It requires the writer to hit the "sweet spot" between control and passivity, the same sort of stance that a skier or biker has to develop.  New drivers, for instance, tend to oversteer; experienced drivers "feel the road" through the car and pay attention, but not too much attention, to what they are doing.

2) Go to the Steven Johnson page at  https://docs.google.com/document/d/12nxRkdnLX6nqmEWx0TYq1F1oHDHTBXo2mgTxSPbd-4w/edit?hl=en&authkey=CKH6-58B

3) Go to the Project in Process page: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mes-SVr0DA61ByCfjCJmkt6SKeVahNYrYhk1zjJVamM/edit?hl=en&authkey=CPz6x4IL

4)  Go back to the Johnson page again and develop your commentary under your section and other people's sections

5) Go back to the Projects in Process page and develop your commentary about two other people's projects

6) Add in at least two more thoughtful comments on each page before the next class.  We will be reading and commenting out of these for that class.

7) For Thursday, please bring the Fish book and the Bell books.  Thursday is very much about sentences.

Heal these sentences

Senior Seminar

After Break

Grammar Test

Clause has a subject and verb:

Subject > verb <object

John > threw < a tantrum.

She returned only the most important calls, the rest could wait.  Mail piled up and memos went unread. This meeting today determined her future, it could make her career and bolster her status in the office. Or the opposite.  When the razor-thin office manager finally called her into the back office, she sensed a trap, it was too late to back out.  Afterward, she hid in the supply closet.  She sobbed and sobbed, everyone could hear.  Everyone but the one person who needed to hear them; her mother. 

She awoke with her head on her mothers stomach to the grumbling voice of her doctor.  Soft and smooth but with a down to business overtone.  Her face froze, she pretended to sleep.  But the news was bad.  It turns out, Danielle was very sick.  Everyone knew.  How could her mother have been hiding this for so long?  Cue tears, tears.  It was a very sad moment.

Later, Danielle dashed from one end of the room to the other, looking for her favorite pants. The ones that were most comfortable, the pants she felt she could do anything in.  “Where are my pants, I can’t go to work without my pants.” Once she found them, she would circle the track all afternoon, never wanting to leave.  Never wanting to stop running.  She loved to run.  It gave her a thrill, it made her smile, it gave her purpose, provided a certain nobility. When she thought about graduating, however, her smile quickly evaporated, she blamed it on the grueling years of college, there was one more semester left.

Obligatory pictures everywhere: her first date, and of the family vacation. Memories: Danielle, I have a question for you, can you please step into my office for a minute? I am very concerned about your work record, it seems to me you are almost never on time to work, this has to STOP!  Danielle tries to play it calm and nods and says, “yeah, sure, that’s true”! She did not mind this for it was a peaceful part of her day.  A time where she can relax and not be afraid, a time when she could reflect on her life and what it had become.  She clenched her eyes and folded her arms across her chest tightly, maybe she’ll think I am taking a sudden nap or sleeping?

Steven Johnson

When we return on the 22nd, bring a list of your projects and choose one: bring a reasoned discussion of why that is the most rewarding and challenging (the best) project for you to complete this semester.

We'll also discuss the next two chapters, up to 148.  Or finish the book.  It's certainly not a problem.

This book is on innovation and success is pretty exciting, maybe simply because it allows me to hear people talking about the subjects.  But more than that, I think.  It's exciting because it's very grounded theory.  The examples and connections are powerful, and I want to use them as a writer (not just for cocktail party conversation).  (And I wonder about his blog, too),

liquid networks
spillover
hunch
building 20 and building 99
commonplace journal
flow
environment
patterns
cultivation
global brain


My favorite is the term project.  I see in "project" a compelling set of problems and the urge to organize and undertake a developing argument that propels one into a certain environment and requires the cultivation that Johnson discusses.  I think Johnson has it wrong when he talks of inventions as the culmination of one man's work (and the germination of another's) -- or at least it's incomplete.  A good project will elicit and direct thinking into new forms of the "adjunct possible," making a sinuous path that you, the writer, really can't predict.  In fact, that is maybe the most valuable thing about a project: it is unpredictable.  It requires the writer to hit the "sweet spot" between control and passivity, the same sort of stance that a skier or biker has to develop.  New drivers, for instance, tend to oversteer; experienced drivers "feel the road" through the car and pay attention, but not too much attention, to what they are doing.

Steve Johnson

Can't wait to see what we do with Johnson's book (up to or past 65) and the Amazon reviews of it.

Liked this:
1. Adjacent possible: different innovations vary in their ability to unlock adjacent capabilities. In other words, timing matters. 
2. Liquid environments: from a coffee house to your lab, the environments ability to circulate ideas plays an incredibly important role. 
3. Serendipity: more often than not, it is a rare connection of two existing ideas that sets off a lightbulb, not discovery of a new one (see 2). 
4. Slow hunch: instant flash of insight usually comes from years of exploration, where at some point, those ideas collide (see 3). 
5. Error: many discoveries come about as an unrelated, and unexpected consequence (ex: penicillin) - be flexible with your ideas. 
6. Exaptation: existing components and discoveries can often be adapted to different use cases (ex: consumer GPS applications.. see 1). 
7. Platforms: where possible, build platforms and ecosystems that foster environments where 1-6 can be recombined at will. 

contents of portfolio

Contents of PWR Senior Portfolio

Over your four years in Professional Writing you will collect quite a lot of work from your professional writing courses. In Senior Seminar, you will assemble that work into a professional portfolio.  Here is the bare bones list of the portfolio for 2011.  Feel free to include other materials at the end

1. Table of Contents
2. Reflective Essay from an early course (perhaps PWR 295) on your own writing process or style
3. A paper that comes from one of your very early undergraduate courses (not necessarily PWR course) on any topic
4. A paper that explicitly refers to rhetorical principles.  Appropriate selections include a rhetorical analysis of a text (speech, an advertisement, a piece of literature, a business document, or a bumper sticker, etc), a theoretical paper in which the writer demonstrates her understanding of a rhetorical concept or principle, a genre study where writer applies rhetorical theory to the discourse conventions of his minor, or a cultural studies paper that demonstrates how discursive practices shape and are shaped by cultural forces
5. A document exemplifying a technical genre.  Likely sources for this paper will be
6. Technical Writing, Internship, and elective PWR courses like Business Writing. This paper often “translates” from an expert audience to a general audience or vice versa.  Examples of such documents include a set of instructions, a grant proposal, a technical report, a feasibility study, a progress report, a business plan, a public relations document, a public service announcement, white paper, or other problem-solving document.
7. One example from each of several creative genres: poems, fiction, novel, creative nonfiction essay, screenplay, script, and the like
8. Your resume
9. Project paper written this semester in Senior Seminar
10. Portfolio reflection
11. Any other interesting papers you’ve written as an undergradate

All the papers should be clean two-sided double-spaced final drafts assembled in a SUNY Cortland folder OR on a CD.  All should be set up like the top of this page.  Except for papers papers 1, 2, 3 and 11, be sure you are submitting revised work in the best condition. 

Bye, Malcolm

That was exciting.  Wow.  From Kentucky clansmen to rice paddies to Korean airline pilots to Asian math kids.  And now we're done with Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: A Story of Success.

I started class by talking about two "impertinent" questions: "What good is this" and "Is this good news?"  The first question, "What good is this," when addressed to Gladwell's book, might seem pushy or rude.  I don't think it is.  In fact, every writer should be asking this all the time.  "How does this apply to my writing" is the best question a writer can ask.  "How can this help me succeed as a writer"?  If writing is your priority, asking this question needs to be, too.

I argued that his book has a lot of implications for us as writers.  It talks about the conditions necessary for success, and puts down the idea that grit and determination is enough.  Instead, success depends on sustained critical practice, deep attitudes toward possibility and risk, sustained challenge (but not too much), visible success, a degree of autonomy, etc.

My second question was more or less simply "Should we worry"?  If Gladwell is right and we are in many ways handed our options -- rather creating success out of our will -- then is his story deterministic, even pessimistic?  Is there any hope?  Has he stripped us of our freedom to be become better writers?

Of course, I want to see it as a positive story.  If Gladwell is right, becoming a successful anything depends on luck -- but you can't know if you are lucky while you're in the thick of trying.  Faith -- or if that's too inflated of a word, hope -- is about all a writer has.  This leaves knowing or not knowing in the dust and leads to a question more useful than "Will I make it as a writer": it leads to "How do the successful succeed?"

Gladwell suggests that they have to move toward challenging problems, real tasks for a real community.  It means drills (and skills) are meaningless.  It means that being smarter is not better: there is a threshold above which predictions for success are not meaningful.  It means your community -- the writers you work with and know -- matter more than your GREs or SATs.  It means sustaining work as a writer -- not knowing "about" writing -- is the best thing you can do for your future career.

I collected papers today on your "heroes."  Thursday, we will look at the writing that begins your "unfamilar" genre.  Bring 10 copies.

DF

Tuesday, Feb 22

What an interesting conversation over Gladwell's "The Art of Failure"!  His terms "choke" and "panic" were useful ways for us to reflect on the strategies that writers use.  I was interested in how writing is a slow-burn sort of event: there is no clear win/lose threshold.  We often don't know if writing was good (or bad) until we reflect on it -- and as Corey brought up, that's one of the uses of looking back on writing (as we are doing in our portfolio of previous writing).  Choking -- thinking too much -- is a perennial threat because we deal with words, the stuff of thought.  The opposite -- reverting to thoughtless instinct -- is interesting because sometimes writers seek out the state of "flow" where there is little explicit thinking; other times, it's terrible because it's like trying to start a car on ice: no thinking happening anywhere, like a high-stakes "casual" discussion with the President: words escape us, almost literally.

So how do writers avoid the art of failure? David suggested time spent writing, practice, developing experience to carry us through those blank spots of panic.

Today we're discussing the first section of the Gladwell book, up to page 116 (Outliers).  We will look for questions in class on the material, share them, and develop possible answers.  We will read well into the second section for Tuesday and do the same, but I'm going to ask you to email me your questions before by Monday.

We will also take a grammar test, located at http://www.kristisiegel.com/grammartest2.html

Comment with your comments!

Just after Raquette Lake

Tuesday at 1:15:

• Grammar Test
• Reading for Tuesday: Annotate and write on Malcolm Gladwell's "The Art of Failure" (eLearning) and you can also find the article here: http://www.gladwell.com/pdf/choking.pdf

The first major paper of Sen Sem

Seminarians,

I am looking forward to the "Project Map" paper you are turning into prose for Thursday.  It occurs to me that there might be two different kinds of papers in the world: those that develop an argument out of one text (a close reading of a poem, for example), and those that develop  the implications implicit in many sources.  One is deductive; the other is inductive.

Your paper is inductive, developed from examples and patterns you've seen in many sources: the Table of Contents for your final Senior Seminar portfolio (you don't need to include the actual papers at this point), the StrengthsFinder results, those crazy dialogues where you created a roomful of characters discussing your future and abilities, and the original project map -- and each other as we discuss things in class.  Be sure you turn in all those pieces of "data" with the actual paper on Thursday.

Your goal is to make claims about what will/might/could count as writerly "success" for you from this day forward, through the semester's projects and beyond.  For data, you the sources above.

So the question you're trying to answer is this: What writing projects fit your experience, knowledge, and abilities?  How will you capitalize on those personal qualities as you push forward through this class and after graduation?  What kind of a writer should you be?

What's unusual here is that you're asked to look at productive tensions in your writing self -- the struggle, say, to be easy to read but at the same time challenging your reader (to draw from one of my own tensions).  How can both be true?  They are in contradiction.  But it is from trying to write through these tensions that everything emerges: your style, voice, topics, audience, self-image...and your version of success.

I'll be in my office all week if you want to stop by to talk over a draft.

THURSDAY: Project Map due in prose.  Topic: As a writer, what will count as “success” for you?  Draw from the early project map, the portfolio table of contents, strengths inventory results, dialogue among your inner voices (Feb 8), etc.  Examine the major tensions in your writing style, habits, topics, audiences, etc.  Five pages min.


That's it for now. 


DF