I found this article in my local newspaper yesterday, and while it’s specifically discussing text messaging, it got me wondering about what counts as writing—and what doesn’t.

First, full disclosure, the professor mentioned in the article teaches in my former department at Michigan State, and I have nothing but good things to say about both the Professional Writing program and the Digital Rhetoric program. And I think what it comes down to is this: “The study, led by Jeff Grabill, a professor of rhetoric and writing, was an effort to characterize student’s writing lives, to figure out what sort of writing they do so that the people charged with teaching them to write better will know where to start the conversation.”

This isn’t to say, of course, that writing a text message is the same caliber of creation as writing a ten-page research paper, or a braided essay—and that’s coming from someone who uses correct capitalization, spelling, punctuation and grammar in all of her text message, no exceptions—but that communication and the ways in which its done are both changing.

Grabill still believes writing teachers have a ways to go in acknowledging changes in the way writing is done, the environments where it happens, the technologies used to do it.

“The fact that we still more or less teach writing the same way we taught it 100 years ago is kind of a remarkable thing,” he said.

And this, too, I can’t help but agree with. Granted, I’m not familiar with other disciplines like I am writing, but off the top of my head I can’t think of others that are this stuck in the past. And this is something that my professional writing degree, and professors like Grabill, as evidenced in the article, are trying to change: To teach students that communication matters, you first have to show them that you recognize their forms of communication as valid. Because like it or not, they’re here to stay, so let’s do what we can to make them successful.

I thought I’d run out of things to write about this week. (I’m moving after all, and putting all my books in boxes makes me sad and unable to function properly in society.) So I googled “Poetry in America” in a half-ass, smart-ass attempt to come up with something to blog about, and low and behold, what did I find but the Poetry Foundation‘s 113-page report called, what else, “Poetry in America: Review of the Findings.” And it’s fascinating. Here’s a look at what the study did:

Poetry in America is the first national, in-depth survey of people’s attitudes toward and experiences with poetry. The survey was conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago on behalf of The Poetry Foundation. The survey investigated people’s leisure time pursuits and general reading habits, their early and more recent experiences with poetry, their perceptions of poets and poetry readers, their favorite poems, and their experiences with coming across poetry in unexpected places. The survey sample includes more than 1,000 adult readers with varying levels of interest in poetry. Respondents included adults who currently read or listen to poetry, those who have read poetry in the past but no longer do so, and those who have never read poetry.

Read more »

Listening to NPR’s On Point on Tuesday morning, I heard something that gave me pause.  The show, which was about new technologies and their effects on the brain, included the writer/journalist, Nick Bilton, who said that the brain isn’t programmed to read. He said that we’re programmed to communicate, but reading is actually quite unnatural. It’s something we teach ourselves to do despite our natures. I don’t know if I believe this, but it does kind of make sense. Most people, barring those with developmental disorders, who are exposed to other communicative people learn to speak, but reading is something that takes years of practice to get really good at, and even then, some people never get to the point where they can interact with texts in complex ways (locating implications and assumptions, arguing with the text, finding logical fallacies and holes in reasoning, making connections, etc.), so maybe, as Bilton later states, reading is much like other technologies that have an effect on the brain; it teaches our brains to behave in certain ways in order to collect information, just as using the Internet, iPhones/Pods/Pads, cell phones…do. The worry, though, and the difference for me, is that reading doesn’t seem to contribute to attention problems while these other communication technologies promote short attention spans, according to anecdotal evidence and other studies that were brought up on the show. The other guest, Nicholas Carr, who wrote the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and the book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, argues that these new technologies are changing the way we pay attention. Read more »