The Limits of Written Discourse

Today I'm embarking on a journey into unknown territory and overused platitudes. I've decided to incorporate informal public writing, like the words that I write right now, into my first-year composition course here at TCNJ. The purpose of my course is to get students thinking about the ways that they might use writing to affect the world around them and it seems to be that blogs are working toward that end--there appear to be millions of these open journals floating about the internet and someone seems to be reading just a few. But my question is this: who is reading, for what purpose, and to what end? I keep thinking of all the things that I could write in this online space and keep finding myself constrained my my own shyness or sense of modesty. At what point does a public blog begin to interfere with my public face?

Blogs seem to exist in this no-man's land between private discourse and public discourse. If one has a Gmail account, as I do, then I don't believe one can make a blog private. And what would be the point anyway? I'm not inclined toward gossiping about colleagues (at least by name or institution), nor am I inclined toward saying mean things about my students or my relatives, so why would I want to keep this journal private and keep myself anonymous?

I suppose there's always the fear that I could be taken to task for bad prose, or for self-indulgent prose, or, worst of all, for grammatical errors! In the grand scheme of things, how bad could that be? Perhaps I could embarrass myself with a short list of my hobbies (paper-crafts--a clever euphemism for scrapbooking and stamping-- and knitting), although they are quite tame. My political inclinations are also quite public (I'm a Democrat for those who care, although I still haven't made up my mind about the election. I ducked the primary.). My own disappointments are fairly public as well: I received a few "we regret to inform you" letters this morning about on-campus funding--nothing I didn't expect. It's been hard to recapture my scholarly enthusiasm and energy after the birth of my youngest daughter. It's substantially more difficult to be a professional and a mother of two than it was to be a professional and a mother of one little girl who grows more independent by the day. Once I had two, my oldest seem to be more insistent about my time commitments to her. But all this isn't unusual.

So what am I so afraid of? Why do I fear letting my hair down in such a way that someone might want to read? Perhaps that's the fear itself: blogging presupposes that there are readers out there. And when a writer surrenders words to a reader, she loses control of their interpretation. She can't pull the page back. Once it's been read, the words are gone and in another's mind, never to return to the writer's control. Now I ask my students to do the same as first-year college students, albeit on a smaller stage. Our online courseware system, SOCS, has a blog function, so their writing will only be visible to their peers. But it will be visible to them. So, lest I be a hypocrite, I have to keep writing my blog which no one reads; just because someone might.

New Words from the Field

According to the "dashboard" of Blogger, it's been ten days since I've posted any comments. Our students had tremendous success in Louisville, Kentucky, at the Sigma Tau Delta convention. We won a best chapter and best website award, two students won for writing two of the best papers of the convention, and two students won $4000 worth of scholarships. My goal for next year is for our students to win $10000 worth of scholarships from different sources, not just from the national organization.

In addition to some very bad behavior from certain south central faculty members (one made a student cry through the sheer force of her hateful polemic), I also heard a few innovative (at least to my approaching-middle-age ears) usages. On one short story panel, a student referenced the "Emo poetry we all write in high school" as she explained the point of her story.

I found this term an interesting semantic weakening or generalization. I thought that the qualifier "emo" referred to a musical genre of punk rock, exemplified by Fugazi. Clearly, it's a clipping of "emotional" or "emotive."

So I suppose this young poet intended "emo" to serve as a synonym for "adolescent angst." What I find so interesting is that her usage presupposes a dependence upon the conventions of this genre and subculture for the composition of this type of poetry; those of us with greater age can see that the poetry is simply a function of adolescence.

The News from "Lulville"

Ten students from our local chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the national English honor society, are presenting critical and creative work at this year's national convention in Louisville, Kentucky. I'm eagerly anticipating rich regional variation, but, so far, all I've heard is the pronunciation "Lullville"--parodied to great amusement on local street signs. With any luck, I'll have more to report that is much more interesting.

When research doesn't seem to pay off...

In stolen minutes here and there I've been trying to do some genealogical research to reconstruct the history of my oft-fractured family. My father and my maternal grandmother were both estranged from their respective families. The generations are so extended (my grandmother was born in 1881 and my father in 1913) that the records for my great-grandparents are very difficult to find on my father's side.

I almost feel as if I can find more evidence about Anglo-Saxon England than about my own family history. I'll continue to post as I discover more about Rosa Ellen Maxwell (my maternal great grandmother) and Samuel Steele (my paternal great grandfather).