Garza and Hern highlight the ideas of "Clay Spinuzzi and Mark Zachry (2000), in 'Genre Ecologies: An Open-Source Approach to Understanding and Constructing Documentation,'" who "illustrate how working under the assumption that documentation functions as a closed-system creates systems that are, at best, marginally useful and do not meet the needs of users who function in an open environment; 'a perpetually open-ended, dynamic, shifting, and always unfinished ecology of resources encompassing a variety of media and domains'" arguing that "the same can be said of our systems for teaching and producing writing. A closed-system approach to writing, which depends on standard word-processing programs and course-management tools (such as WebCT), limits, in important ways, how writers plan, develop, design, write, test, and understand the act of producing writing."
Although I agree with Garza and Hern that writing is messy and that we do a diservice to students when we convey writing as clean and institute platforms that compel a "clean writing" ideology, I don't think that this open-source mentality should cause us to ignore the reality of constraint. Garza and Hern basically argue that the constraints of closed platforms leads to unreal writing, but we know too that writing is always influenced by rather arbitrary constraints. A journalist will be given only so many inches of the page to write for a newspaper or a piece of fiction much conform to a certain number of words: these are examples of constraints of space. An abstract for a paper submitted for approval at a conference must be limited to so many words or a writer confines the size and scope of his composition for that conference because she knows she only has 15 minutes to present her ideas: these are examples of constraints of time. An author is limited to how many photos he can put in his book or is restricted in the kinds of typeface color he can use: these are examples of constraints of medium. These constraints are rather arbitrary when it comes to the development of a rhetorically strong written message, yet we recognize a realize these limitations on our writing.
Although it may be good to introduce our students to a delimited system in the generation of their writing, I think it is also good to introduce them to constraints, since they represent situations in real writing. The key is not that they should be protected from constraint but that the should learn how to rhetorically negotiate that constraint.
About Me
- J. Edwin Paschke-Johannes
- n. ('jA-'ed-w&n-pash-kE-jO-'han-es) 1. A male homosapien of U.S. citizenship, w/ diffused hereditary origins from the Polish, Swiss, German, Lithuanian, Nebraska white trash, and Minnesota backwoods missionary. 2. Name of said male homosapien. 3. One of few individuals, if not the only one existent, to be credited, on public records and various publicly distributed documents, with a Bachelor of Arts in English Education from Midland Lutheran College and a Master of Arts in English, specializing in Creative Writing (Fiction), from Iowa State University, and enrolled in a doctoral program in English, specializing in Rhetoric and Composition, at Ball State University. 4. One of a married couple that have adopted two children, a precocious female and winsome male, from Ethiopia, thus constructing a nuclear family known as “multicultural,” or specifically “transracial,” and grafting onto the couple’s mutual/individual family tree a branch that, to America's racial psyche, is considered radically divergent.
1 comment:
You say "rhetorically negotiate that constraint" and I agree. It is a difficult balance to tell our students they have an infinite range to discover ideas and yet they have a finite space to communicate it.
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