On Yancey’s “Made Not Only in Words” (2004)
Lisa suggested I read
Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key.” CCC 56.2 (Dec. 2004): 297-328.
And I’m most struck by the good qestions Yancey asks:
How is it that what we teach and what we test can be so different from what our students know as writing?” (298)
“Is it [writing] the ability to move textual resources among spaces, as suggested by Johndan Johnson-Eilola? Is composing, as James Porter suggests, not only about medium but also specifically about technology? Suppose I said that basically writing is interfacing? What does that add to our definition of writing? What about the circulation of writing, and the relationship of writing to the various modes of delivery?” (299)
“how many compisitions are in this text?” (300)
how does this text — with call outs, palimpsest notes, and images — cohere?
And:
How do we reate such a text?
How do we read it?
How do we value it?Not least, how will we teach it? (301)
On our focus:
Suppose that if instead of focusing on the gatekeeping year, we saw composition education as a gateway? Suppose that we enlarged our focus to include both moments, gatekeeping and gateway? And further suppose, to paraphrase Elizabeth Daley, that we designed a curriculum in composition that prepared students to become members of the writing public and to negotiate life. How might that alter what we think and what we do? (306)
I especially like the way Yancey envisions the composition classrooms (meaning, not just First Year Composition). She proposes that we ask students to:
- consider the issue of intertextual circulation: how what they are composing relates or compares to “real world” genres;
- consider what the best medium and the best delivery for such a communication might be and then create and share those different communication pieces in those different media, to different audiences;
- think explicitly about what they might “transfer” from one medium to the next: what moves forward, what gets left out, what gets added — and what they have learned about composing in this transfer process;
- consider hwo to transfer what they have learned in one site and how that could or could not transfer to another, be that site on campus or off;
- think about how these practices help prepare them to become members of a writing public. (311)
I really like the focus on transfering, especially in relation to my previous experience with the necessity to teach transference: asking students, how can you transfer your abilities here to your abilities in another area? How can you transfer your ability and savvy as an analyst of this to analyze something else? Now, Yancey asks, how can you transfer a message or purpose to a new medium or audience. Yancey’s “class culminates with text in which they [students] write a reflective theory about what writing is and how it is influenced or shpaed or determined by media and technology” (314).
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