Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Get-it-right writing
Turntaking in academic conversations is simply slow. The conversation that I announced missing yesterday is in fact beginning now, as I have received 7 pages of kind (yes!) and detailed comments from my committee. What a joy, and what a relief. Now I have more than six weeks to think about how to respond to their comments when I present and defend my work in public (on September 1 at 1 pm). This blog should be an excellent place to rehearse some of my arguments, but I have started out link-less, unconnected in the blogosphere, and it does feel strange to be writing in public and yet in almost total secrecy. A sense of direction is missing. And a title from Peter Elbow springs to mind: "Audience as Focusing Force" (and, hey, there was the full text online, go to page 191). Under this heading Elbow describes pragmatic, audience-oriented writing and contrasts it with more leisurely get-it-right writing (like this?) where you might be "writing to work out the truth about something important to you and you are trying to serve truth, not readers. Maybe the writing will in fact go to readers; maybe they'll like it; that's nice. But if they don't, that's their problem, not yours. (Of course you may use readers for get-it-right writing. Their reactions can help you enormously -- but for getting it the way you want it, not the way they want it.)"
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Just commenting on my own post... because, actually, I really don't like the tone of this passage by Elbow. It echoes exactly the quality which tends to put people off when they read writing in the first person: 'Hey, I write what I please, and I write it like I please, and if you don't like it that's YOUR problem'. Can't blame anyone for turning away from an attitude like that. Individual taste is all-important when you pick your personal reporter - but certainly the taste of the reporter is all-important too. It requires a sense of decorum and, more importantly, a sense of when and how to challenge whose sense of decorum.
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