 We're going to get started. I'm Les Perlman, and I want to welcome you to this MIT symposium on academic writing in the 21st century looking forward. The first item on the program is not on the program you have, and it's a very sad one. As many of you know, two weeks ago, an esteemed colleague and friend of many of us, Gregory Colom, director of writing programs at the University of Virginia, passed away in his sleep. Professor Joseph Bizzup of Boston University has kindly offered a few words of remembrance about Greg while we see some images of him. Following Joe's short talk, there will be a minute of silence. Thank you. On Tuesday, October 11, 2011, at the age of 60, Greg Colom died at his home in Charlottesville, Virginia. And it is an honor to be able to remember him here with you today. Although I, of course, knew him through the craft of research, I met Greg in person in 2003 at the WPA annual conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I had just completed my first year as a full-time writing program administrator, and I found myself on a roundtable panel with Doug Hess and Greg Colom. I can imagine the amusement of both of them as I tried to hold my own in the Q&A. But what I remember most about that conference is the warmth with which everyone, and especially Greg, welcomed me to my new professional home. In having this sort of recollection, I know that I am not alone. I knew Greg for almost a decade, and I have many fond memories of him. But for this audience, I want to focus less on my personal recollections than on Greg's professional and scholarly life, and particularly on the elements of it that made him such a distinctive presence in our field. In pondering this topic, I have found myself dwelling on a passage from the 19th century English poet, artist, and designer, William Morris. In an 1878 lecture on the lesser arts, a phrase Morris used non-pejoratively to refer to what we would call today the art of design. Morris argued for the interdependence of the lesser decorative arts and the so-called greater arts of architecture, painting, and sculpture. It is only in latter times, Morris wrote, and under the most intricate conditions of life that they have fallen apart from one another. And I hold that when they are so parted, it is ill for the arts altogether. The lesser ones become trivial, mechanical, unintelligent, incapable of resisting the changes pressed upon them by fashion or dishonesty, while the greater are sure to lose their dignity of popular arts and become nothing but dull adjuncts to unmeaning pomp or ingenious toys for a few rich and idle men. Morris here is decrying the state of the arts in his own country and in his own time. But he is also noting more generally the different but reciprocal dangers that befall both sorts of arts when they are separated from one another. The lesser arts slide into fattishness and banality, the greater into an indulgent refinement and irrelevance. Greg was a consummate scholar and practitioner of what following Morris we might call the lesser arts of writing. His first book designs on truth, The Poetics of the Augustine Mach Epic, is a fine work of literary scholarship and criticism. But Greg made his career studying not the greater literary genres, but a whole range of lesser textual forms, reports, legal briefs, business memos, PowerPoint decks. Similarly, he made his career working not in the greater genre of the scholarly monograph but in a host of lesser modes, the research guide, the handbook, the public lecture, teaching notes, the textbook, and most recently with the Little Red Schoolhouse online project, the online tutorial. Like the best examples of Morris's lesser arts, Greg's work in these lesser genres is deeply informed not only by his probing intelligence, but also by his broad and deep reading in an array of greater scholarly fields, including literary studies, rhetoric, writing studies, philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive neuroscience. Greg's work, consequently, is as notable for its erudition as it is for its practicality and its accessibility. Greg's writing is his legacy, and in writing that was popular in both senses, but never common, never in Morris's terms unintelligent, or trivial, or mechanical. Greg consistently sought to exercise what he called composition's franchise, quote, a public trust that gives us a license to operate the largest block of classes in most universities, but also the responsibility for the nation's ability to write. Greg took this responsibility personally. He was always the teacher. He did not write for JSTOR. He wrote for all of us, for his colleagues in the academy, certainly, but also for students, for lawyers, for accountants, for journalists, indeed, for anyone who wanted to argue with intelligence and generosity, or to write with clarity and grace. His commitment to this public trust is nowhere more visible than in his most recent project, The Little Red Schoolhouse Online, a free website offering a series of tutorials on argument and style that Greg was developing with a team of his graduate students at Virginia. The site's great, I can remember assuring Greg, but you have to get more material up. I know, I know, I can hear him replying. The graduate students have developed a bunch of stuff. It's on my desk, but I have to edit everything they write. They just can't quite catch the necessary avuncular tone. The necessary avuncular tone. This phrase of Greg's nicely captures what I like to think Greg was for all of us, an authority and a star, certainly, but also one of the family. Of course, as the 19th century French critic Saint-Bove tells us, the style is the man. And indeed, the warmth, the generosity, the humanity that we find on every page of Greg's work was to be found as well in the man himself. I will conclude, therefore, with one personal story. My children, Grace and Charlotte, now ages six and nine, don't think that Greg just looked like Santa Claus. They think that he actually was Santa Claus. Now, Greg was greatly amused by this fact. And when my youngest child, Charlotte, was in kindergarten, she told all of her friends that she knew the real Santa. Needless to say, this raised a few brows among the more cosmopolitan jaded and jaded of the Brookline kindergarten set. And poor Charlotte came in for a bit of teasing. But Greg decided that he could take care of that. On one visit, he walked up to Charlotte and a group of her girlfriends, folded his hands across his belly, and said, Charlotte, so nice to see you again. I see in my book that you've been a good girl this year. So I hope that you will send me a nice long list for Christmas. All of the children were speechless. Greg had a very good laugh. And Charlotte's personal capital got a very significant bump. So Greg, Santa, thank you for everything. We'll miss you. In memory of Greg, I'd like to have one minute of silence. People can stand if they want to. Thank you. It is my pleasure now to introduce Deborah Fitzgerald, the Kenan Sahin Dean of the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and Professor of the History of Technology. Deborah? Good morning. I want to, my primary job here this morning is really to welcome you to the Institute, to say how delighted I am to see so many of you so early on a Saturday morning. We're very, very pleased to have you here for the day and for what promises to be a terrific conference. I want to thank a lot of people also, though not every single one by name. A lot of work went into conceptualizing this terrific conference and in making all the details work seamlessly. So I want to thank especially Suzanne Lane and Les for coming up with much of the idea. I want to thank the Dean for Undergraduate Education, Dan Hastings, and his staff for making a lot of this work as well. It's a great partnership that we have between the school and the Dean for Undergraduate Education and making the writing program work for all of our undergraduates. Our school, I have to just say, for those of you who are not from MIT, our school is the home for the writing across the curriculum program, for the program in writing and humanistic studies. And it is where most of the faculty and lecturers who do the actual teaching of communication reside. Something I'm very proud of, something that is always a challenge and an exhilarating challenge frequently to make work and to make work effectively. We don't have very many majors at MIT in writing or in any of the humanities, arts, and social sciences. But we teach everybody every semester because we have a very robust requirement for all students to take classes in these fields. And just about all of these classes offer students the opportunity, nay, the demand, that they really work on their communication skills at a very high level. And so this is something that is a privilege for us, it's a responsibility. And the faculty and staff who we have here are just really extraordinary. And they work tirelessly, as I know many of all of you do in your own programs, to ensure that MIT students succeed in communicating ideas of all sorts, not only while they're here, but even more importantly, once they leave here. It's not always obvious how to do this, as you know. It's not always simple, but it is always a joy to see a student who breaks through some personal ceiling to realize that they really can do this and they can do it beautifully. So with that, I will turn the podium over, I think, to Dan. Is that right? Once again, thank you all for coming, and I hope you have a terrific conference. So let me also offer my word of welcome, and thank you for actually coming here. And in my comments, I thought I'd tell you a little bit about how we see undergraduate education, the importance of communication, and specifically what we do in this thing we call the communications requirement, because this is where it gets to the essence of, at least for all undergraduates, how we think about writing. So it turns out this fall marks the class in this fall, the 10 years since the communication requirement was actually put into place. This communication requirement replaced an earlier requirement that we had with just our students to demonstrate competency at writing at two levels. Now, many people say that this is a data-driven place, and this actually is an example of where data actually did drive this place to make some changes. So there was an alumni survey. We surveyed our alumni quite regularly, and going back a long time. So there was a 1996 alumni survey which reported that our alumni felt that MIT did some things very well, and in particular, nurtured three or four skills very well in their post-MIT lives. And those skills were analytical and problem-solving skills, critical thinking, and the capacity for lifelong learning. So I mean, especially the first one is not particularly surprising given the nature of the education here. But fewer than a quarter of the alumni said that MIT contributed almost anything to the fourth most important skill, which was their communication skills. So this was a glaring deficiency. And in true MIT spirit, the faculty and administrators actually set out the task of engineering a new requirement to give the students the tools they actually needed to have serious communication skills. So this was a faculty-driven initiative based on data, and this is what it actually looks like. So under what we call the CR, the communications requirement, all MIT undergraduates have to complete a program of four communication-intensive subjects that integrate substantial instruction in the practice in writing and in oral communications. It's actually designed so it's distributed over several years of study. It doesn't adjust to the beginning or adjust to the end. And it's actually the only requirement we actually have that's called PACE. The students actually have to do one subject per, for each year that they're actually here. And the first two subjects are chosen from a group of designated subjects in actually humanities, arts, and the social sciences. What we call, this is MIT, C I H subjects, which provide a foundation in effective writing and oral communication. And then the next two subjects are within the student's majors. Most of the majors here in science and engineering, they're called CIM subjects, which stands for communication-intensive in the major. And then they learn about communication in the form that's specific to the discipline that they are actually in. Now, to give you a sense of how important this is to MIT, that's four requirements, which is four of the 17 general institute requirements that all students actually have to satisfy. So that tells you something about the importance. Let me assure you that changing the general institute requirements is a very hard task. So the fact that that was done there tells you something about the importance. And you could look at it as the faculty voting to take a leadership role in teaching communication across the curriculum and attesting both to written and to oral communication as being so important to actually what the students actually do. And the result of that is we have actually seen in the data, we can see an increase in the student's self-efficacy around issues of communication. That's pretty clear. It's a linear trend since that time. And we also hear anecdotally from students who go on internships that they feel much more confident about their communication skills in both writing and in terms of oral communication. So in this 10th year of the actual communication requirement, there was actually a 10th anniversary celebration where a number of instructors actually spoke about what they had gotten out of 10 years. And here are some of the themes that actually came across. So first of all, the demands of what were called the CI subjects had necessitated innovation in course design and pedagogy and instruction, which is good. Secondly, it was very challenging for faculty to balance the demands of teaching the subject, disciplinary content, writing and oral communication. That balance is actually very good. It's actually hard to achieve. I mean, I can tell you in my own department, which is aeronautics and astronautics, that some of the faculty still struggle with this actual balance, because they think they don't know anything about communication. And they need the continuous help of the professionals in there. And thirdly, the students in faculty value the importance of those skills and recognize that without the structure of the CR, this pay structure, it just might not be as effective as it actually is. So those are the things after 10 years we've actually been learning. In closing, let me add some other comments. I was actually, it turns out, in Shanghai earlier this week at a conference on engineering education, global engineering education. And so with a bunch of industry people and senior people in the Chinese government, as well as academics from all over the world, there was a lot of conversation about the skills that engineers need at this time. So all the industry people took it for granted that engineering schools should be in the business of teaching the students technical skills. So that was just taken for granted. And then they went on to talk about all the other things that engineering schools should be giving to our students. And actually, the number one was cross-cultural communication. And basically, this is specific to a particular company, but it illustrates the point. So General Electric has plans in a number of different places. So they have a big research facility that's connected in New York where they put people in. They have a big facility in Shanghai, it turns out. They have a facility in Bangalore, and they have a facility somewhere in Europe, actually. What they basically said is we want engineers to be able to go seamlessly from one place to another place. We are innovating all over the world, and that ability to do the cross-cultural communication is a skill set that you, looking at the academics, you need to be giving your engineers. And if you don't do it, then they're not much good to them, to General Electric. I'm not saying that all students should work for General Electric, but it illustrates the point, right? By the way, they actually said that we were noted. MIT was noted as a place that actually gets it at least better than many other institutions. I didn't say we did it perfectly, but better than many other institutions in educating our students to be able to make that seamless cross-cultural transition between all of those places. And this is in part due to this communication requirement that we actually have here. So in closing, I want to actually thank Les for his service to undergraduate education here for what he has contributed to the creation and maintenance of this requirement. His work over 25 years here with both the earlier writing requirement and now more recently communication requirement has actually helped shape our students here and helped shape how our students are developing as communicators and as writers. And I want to thank him very much for that. So with that, I guess I turn it over to Tom. And I hope you have a great conference. I look forward to learning what comes out of this and may it mean many good things for what occurs here and elsewhere. Thank you very much. I'm Tom Levinson. I'm head of the program in writing and humanistic studies here, which means that I am nominally in a position of oversight over the groups that do much of the teaching across the communication requirement, including the writing across the curriculum group. And so it falls to me to actually, I think, have the happiest task of the day, which is to make one of our number blush a little. So as I'm sure many of you or all of you know, this is Les Perlman's retirement year. And we are going to miss him enormously. But this is not a valedictory. It's not an in honor of conference. Les Perlman asked me to take no notice of his scheduled retirement nor anything that would detract from this day. So of course, I'm going to ignore this, which is just about the only time in which it is safe to ignore something that Les says to you with great force and vehemence. So what is Les meant to MIT and to the education of students here and all over the country? In a nutshell, and obviously with the help and support and collaboration with many, many other contributors here and elsewhere over a long career, but fundamentally at MIT and in the lives of many of you here, Les has been the one constant over a period that spans four calendar decades now in transforming the teaching and writing and a teaching and inquiry into writing and communication in MIT from what one of those present at the creation told me was, quote, a very primitive state into what it is now, a program of national significance and influence and of great importance to every undergraduate who passes through here. And you don't have to take my word for it. You can ask those who were in fact present over the course of these four calendar decades. So here's what Lang Quays, the chairman of one of the key committees engaged in the effort to create the current form of a communication requirement had to say. And remember, this effort was, as Dean Hastings said, a non-trivial piece of work. So here's Lang Quays, quote, as our chief staff person, Les Perlman was a sign from the gods that they had intended our experiment to succeed. We would not have made it without Les, his understanding of the institutional complexities of the MIT administration. Isn't that a lovely way to say it? Was that of an organizational analyst? His capacity for work for rolling out yet another memo rivaled John Henry's abilities with that hammer. This remains true, by the way. His knowledge of the actual process of academic writing in a technical institute was invaluable. He had great political judgment and an extraordinary capacity to keep his ego out of the room. OK, Les will have been at MIT for 25 years exactly, if I read his CV right, by this coming commencement. He will have seen 22 classes come and leave in that time. And here's how Roz Williams, dean of undergraduate education and student life at the time the current MIT approach to communications pedagogy was formed. Here's how she describes Les's significance. She started in our conversation with a quote from Robert Louis Stevenson describing his grandfather. Of that man, Stevenson said, he came to engineering while it was yet in the egg and without a library. And then she said, Les found communication at MIT in the egg and without a library. And he built it into the extensive, robust, and thriving educational network, a system that is a real, here I'm glossing what she said. It's hard for me, who was not here at the time, and it's hard for some people for whom the memories are now blessedly distant. But it was not easy imparting, even people who were dedicated the idea found it very challenging to impart communication skills to students at MIT. I mean, it's a complicated place. There were and remain enormous demands on people's times. And even those people who found it vital to get this skill available to students, even students who recognized they needed it, found it very difficult. Which is why we have the new system, the now 10-year-old system that we have. But it took enormous effort and foresight to make it happen. And Les was a catalyst and engine of that change for years. Here's Rosigan. She said, it's a real tribute to the system that evolved out of the work of Les and many, many others here, that in the review, the very large formal review of the communication requirement that we did a very few years ago, that everybody accepted it and praised it. It's now the new normal, just a part of MIT. And in some, she said, Les moved communication from the margins, something that was almost optional to its current role front and center in an MIT education. And she also emphasizes, and I can attest, as one of his regular coworkers, that this is very much true, that Les has this just extraordinary capacity for work. She said, for much of the time, Les was essentially working two jobs. The whole task of getting the communication requirement approved took 10 years. The process began in 1991 before the review in 96, but clearly that gave it an enormous boost. And the communications requirement was approved by faculty vote in 2000. And at the same time, Les was running the existing requirement with a freshman essay exam and online classrooms and the move into academic computing and all this other stuff. He did two jobs for a decade, in some ways he still does, but with different responsibilities. So essentially, under Les's guidance and with the collaboration of many others, MIT made a commitment to its undergraduates that they would leave here able to write and communicate their thoughts sufficiently clearly and powerful to be able to make the best use possible of their formidable intelligence and their exceptional technical training, which means we're all in his debt, of course. And by all, I mean every member of the MIT community. But I don't want to limit it to Les's role as a institution builder, because of course, he's, as you all know, again, better than I. Les has been an advocate and a rigorous scholar and investigator into the best practices in the work of writing programs. And he's done that at such a level and for so long, of course, he has, again, as this day and audience attests, an influence across the country. He's always been innovative. Just remember, now from 1997, the Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing written with Ed Barrett and Jim Parity who I don't know if Ed's here, but Jim is sitting right there. It came out in 1997 as both book and software. And Les has made something of a reputation for himself recently as being a sharp and acute critic of the misuse of computing in teaching and assessing writing. But it's very important to remember that Les is no Luddite. He's an enormously practical and innovative guy. And if there's a tool to be used, he uses it, he tests it, and he works with the community to find the best applications of it to the task we all face. He is, of course, formidable in his insight into the best practices. And he takes no prisoners, suffers fools with all the pleasure that one might. So just to remind you of his research and criticism, I want to give you a couple of the titles of his works that I love best. Most recently, I think this is a chapter in a book, Mass Market Writing Assessments as Bullshit. Or, you might prefer, the five paragraph essay makes people stupid and machine smart. And one that has much less of that snark but a real gracious long road home kind of aspect to it, a return to MIT, this title. The Machine in the Garden, Economic and Global Pressures to Homogenize Machine in Human Writing Assessment. That captures Les's broad learning, his wit, his capacity for drawing on an enormously wide range of literature and influences as he develops his work. Enough. I mean, you get the idea. It's a formidable presence. We've been very fortunate to have him here in my year and a half so far as head of writing. I've learned a great deal from him. And he's been the stalwart in this sort of quaint but necessary notion that universities that seek to make citizens out of their students have to get one thing right. We have to teach them as best we can how to take what they know and transmit it to other human beings. So that's what we're going to talk about, of course, for the rest of the day. Les was correct in telling me that this was not a day for looking backwards. But as we do so, I just want us all to recall that we get to have this conversation here today because, once again, Les Perlman, with much help, made this happen. So thank you, Les, for giving me the opportunity. I hope to make you blush. I think I succeeded. I may have. Thanks for this day. And from all of MIT and many places beyond, thank you for the decades of great work that have brought us together here ready to plan the next quarter century of your career. Thank you very much. As those titles tell you, the real secret is knowing who to steal from. As many of you notice, one of those titles I stole from Leo Marks. But thank you. And it's really been my honor. I think teaching at MIT and especially the students here are remarkable and a privilege to teach. And it has been an incredible experience. And I think, as Tom said, the change happened because of a lot of people, a lot of people in this room. And a lot of people helped affect that change. It was not just one person. And I would never, but thank you all. I'd like to welcome you, myself, and try to be short. Academic writing is a topic that has been an interest to me since I took a freshman comp class at Berkeley with a mutual friend of Jerry Graf and me. And the second writing assignment was a five-page paper on Nietzsche's genealogy of morals. I was to use the title of one of Jerry's most famous books, Clueless in Academe. Slowly I became less clueless, but still anxious about academic writing. I think anxiety is a permanent resident of the academy. I also think that in these early decades of the 21st century, the explosion of new media has made that anxiety even greater. I think that any radical change in media produces anxiety, especially among those who have worked so hard to be proficient in the old. And now I'm going to sort of go back to my roots. And I first began my academic career as a medievalist specializing in Anglo-Saxon, old English. One of the first poems that I learned to read in old English conveys that anxiety. It's often known as the bookworm riddle. And I'm going to actually read it in old English, but then translate it, since I don't assume that everybody in the room knows old English. Moth-weired frat, me the thut, rachla-weird, the ich, that wonder your frame, that's a worm for swelg, where a yead sumas, thief in thestro, theme frasna swede, and thas stragin stopol, straginist niwas, wich thy yolawah, the the heidam weirdem swerg, which translates as a moth eight words. To me that seemed a strange event when I heard that the wonder that a worm should swallow the songs of a man, a thief in the darkness, the glorifast sayings of heroes, and in their place of strength, that thief was no wiser for having swallowed those words. The poet, an old English shope, which literally meant shaper or maker, is anxious about the transition from the oral tradition when the songs of heroes were passed from generation to generation to those stories being embodied in books, which being merely physical and not cultural could be subject to the vicissitudes of fire, theft, and the bookworm. Today, we are at another one of those trajectories. And I've asked Suzanne Lane, my colleague and great helper and friend to the associate director of writing across the curriculum here at MIT to help frame today's discussion before we hear from our keynote speakers. Good morning. 2011 marks the anniversary of the online public library of science and MIT's open courseware and the 20th anniversary of archive.org, the digital repository of physics article e-prints. All of these developments, which the internet has made possible, have the goal of universal access to research and education, and have substantially broadened the audience for information that used to be available primarily to students and scholars in university libraries. This year is also the 10th anniversary of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that anyone can write or edit that is not meant to be a repository of original research or scholarly opinion, but which students and others sometimes confuse as an equivalent source of knowledge. If we follow these trends and the debates about them, it appears that collectively, we favor equal access to knowledge through digital media while simultaneously worrying about whether we're entering a world in which all kinds of knowledge are assumed to be equal. In this context, it's useful to pause and assess what we know about recent changes in academic writing and where we might be headed. Perhaps it's best to begin by describing the core of academic writing and exploring the margins and where they're shifting. Historically, academic writing has been bounded by the figurative walls of the ivory tower. And this boundary has helped to define the purpose, audience, and genres of academic writing. We produce academic writing within the tower for an expert audience of other scholars, for the purpose of advancing research using the precise methods and technical vocabulary of our fields. Of course, these elements have always been in a dynamic state of change. Genres vary and evolve. As we know from the study of rhetoric, any genre is only stabilized for now. Yet this research has shown that since early in the last century, the landscape remained recognizably settled for some time. Scholars shared the products of their research through fairly standardized print texts with few visuals, usually published in peer-reviewed journals, with relatively small distributions, often primarily read by members of a particular scholarly society. During the first half of the last century, academic articles became longer with more complex internal structures of headings and subheadings, more codified citation practices, and more references to the work of other scholars. The now-in-reference of academic work shifted in most fields from a broader range of events and phenomena in the outside world to a more narrow range of data in field-specific theories. Throughout the second half of the century, these elements of academic writing remained quite stable, policed by journal editors and the mechanism of peer-review. Digital publishing with its worldwide access and more open democratic practices of communication, the rise of English as the common language of academia, particularly in the sciences, and changes within university towards interdisciplinary research have all contributed to the shifting of these boundaries. Some of these developments might only tweak the nature of academic writing around the margins, while others might change the genres more centrally. First among these forces reshaping academic writing is the advent of digital technology and the development of the internet. One has only to think of the many arguments around the turn of the century about whether publications in online journals could count for tenure, to recognize both the speed with which some academics embrace the affordances of these new technologies and the anxieties felt by other academics about whether something essential to the nature of academic writing was changing. In some fields such as classics, rhetoric and literature, the digitization of texts has changed not only the media in which academic writing is published, but also the methods for scholarship and thus the kinds of questions one can ask within the disciplines. As one example, Columbia and the University of Michigan have created an open digital archive of papyrus fragments complete with images, source and translations. In an interesting move, classic scholars have begun to crowdsource the character recognition of incomplete papyrus fragments. Since those who don't read ancient Greek are more able to identify partial characters as they don't simultaneously try to interpret whole words. Texts that were only available to scholars with substantial prior training and research funding are now available to almost anyone worldwide. And perhaps these new readers will bring new questions, new critiques of the existing arguments and new ways of writing about them. When texts are digitized, we can analyze them in new ways. Recently, for instance, Franco Moretti started the literary lab at Stanford to quote, pursue literary research of a digital and quantitative nature. As part of this work, Moretti has developed his project of distant reading, large scale computer mediated analysis of literature as opposed to the longstanding literary tradition of close reading. The results of some of this research are presented as scatter plots, graphs and charts. Not surprisingly, the articles resulting from this research share features with academic writing in the sciences or social sciences, perhaps more than with the standard features of a literary essay. When our methods, our questions and our research goals and scholarship change, our genres will also change. In other fields from film criticism to microbiology, the ability to embed not only visuals but also video and 3D animation into scholarly texts is modifying the rhetorical relationship between evidence and claim. For instance, the Journal of Visualized Experiments is an online peer-reviewed journal that embeds videos of experimental methods and results within the articles. It is published over 1,300 articles and similar journals will likely follow. Our teaching of writing will consequently need to attend more carefully to both the critique and the production of visual rhetoric. And our theories of how visual rhetoric functions in academic argumentation will also need to develop more fully. Other changes stemming from new media such as hypertext and multimodal composition also have important implications for our understanding of rhetorical structure. Changes in media also change the audience for academic writing. Open Access Publishing, whose goal is to make scholarly work available free, online, worldwide, invites an audience of non-academics that small press print journals simply could not have reached. And thus one aspect of the divide between academic and public writing is slipping. This potential expansion of the audience for academic writing may result in shifting relationships between academic writing and civic discourse, between the writing we do to advance scholarship for its own sake and the writing we do as a means of educating the population and informing public policy decisions. We know that at the beginning of the last century before the trend to small academic journals, academics more commonly wrote as public intellectuals to a wider audience. Should this trend return, one might wonder whether the term academic might eventually shed its pejorative connotations of impractical, unrealistic, impenetrable and overly conventional. Digital open access publishing means academic writing is not only public, but also global. Particularly in the sciences, English has become the common language of academic writing, which means that scientific writing in English is often produced by writers whose first language is not English and his writing may be shaped by varying cultural and linguistic practices. We know from the work of historians of scientific rhetoric and of genre theorists that the features of writing and science are shaped not only by the practices of science, but also by language, cultural attitudes towards communication and national interests. So that for instance, 18th century scientific articles in France were more empirical and mathematical than the more bellatristic, descriptive genres developed in Britain. More recently, research has shown how economics articles in Denmark, Bulgaria, Germany and England changed over the course of the 20th century, becoming increasingly complex with the use of headers, more codified citation practices and trends toward multiple authors. Yet within these shared moves, differences between cultures emerged as well. With English articles presenting a more developed problem-based introduction format and including more reader-oriented features, such as meta-discourse, explicitly remarking on logic or structure. As thus as the internet makes the exchange of scholarship across the globe easier, we must expect that the genres of academic writing will shift with these changes in audience and authors, perhaps becoming more explicitly reader-oriented and formally structured as a way of easing transitions across cultures, but perhaps other cultures of writing will provide new models that shift these features away from a more standard English language model. Open access publishing also sometimes allows or even invites creative changes to the peer review process, such as post-publication or open peer review, which might begin to shift the rhetorical nature of academic writing. As the Council of Scientific Editors claims, peer review quotes, protects readers from incorrect or flawed research and from studies that cannot be validated by others and ensures that writers accurately acknowledge the work of other scholars. But along with editing, peer review also has a role in maintaining genre consistency. Peer review has historically been a time-consuming process and it too is shifting around the margins. As online journals are streamlining peer review and publishing a wider selection of articles with a less rigorous editorial process. When prestigious journals reject more than 80% of submissions and require revision on those accepted, we might see a smaller range of genre variation than when half or more of the submissions are accepted, perhaps without revision. Even if they're vetted by the scholarly community post-publication. Within the sciences, this move has been in the makings for a while. For 20 years, archive.org has been moderated rather than peer reviewed. Accepting quote, submissions in the form of an article that would be referable by a conventional publication venue. And more recently, the Public Library of Science launch plus one in open online and online open access journal that uses a streamlined peer review process with post-publication metrics except 70% of papers submitted and has published over 17,000 articles in the last five years. Disciplines other than the sciences have been slower to shift to open access publishing or changes in peer review. But even Shakespeare Quarterly recently tried open online peer review for one additional. Another arena where academic writing is shifting at the margins is in the decreasing distinction between academic and corporate writing. In its ideal state, the ivory tower kept scholarship pure from outside influences such as corporate and political power. Well, this ideal may never have been reached in practice. Scholars who have traced the history of academic writing have shown a clear trend towards narrower, more nuanced claims and syntactical features of hedging and delimiting became a hallmark of careful academic writing in the 20th century. However, recent work in the rhetoric of science has revealed that with increasing corporate sponsorship, for instance, pharmaceutical companies sponsoring university research in biochemistry, there is a corresponding decrease in hedging, qualifiers, and delimiters in claims of peer-reviewed articles that report on that research. In our own classrooms, we're seeing this merger between academic and corporate writing as well. The last decade plus has marked a rapid increase in the pedagogies of service learning in which students engage in real-world activities and write for an audience outside of academia. Sometimes as part of a public service agenda and sometimes more specifically in professional settings. As we guide our students through these assignments, are we also engaging in a shifting culture of what constitutes academic versus professional or public writing? And if we are collectively as writing teachers, charged with teaching students, sometimes from all across the globe who have found their way to our classroom to produce academic, public, and professional writing to write both print text and multimodal compositions, sometimes in the space of a single semester. To what extent are we, or are we helping students to become critical about negotiating rather than blurring the boundaries between these different rhetorical and genre conventions? I've been talking a lot about boundaries and how they're shifting and how sometimes these shifts make us anxious. As lines between academic and non-academic privileged and less privileged authority and the corresponding lines distinguishing genres change, I believe this anxiety can be put to good use through further research and analysis of the transformations of academic writing. As a discipline, we are well positioned to describe and assess the effects of these changes. As the late 20th century saw a boom in the scholarship and research methods in the rhetoric of disciplinary writing, in semiotics, genre theory, and the study of English for academic purposes. Ultimately, these questions about the nature of academic writing are ones we will face not only theoretically as we do here today, but practically. As we make choices in our work as academics in the 21st century, as writers, editors, and publishers of academic writing, and as teachers designing assignments for our students. Thank you. Thank you, Suzanne. We're now, it's my privilege to introduce Bob Scholes. Bob Scholes is research professor at Brown University based in the Department of Modern Culture and Media, and is the author of more books than I have ever had time to count. I was a great fan of one of his early books, The Nature of Narrative co-authored with Robert Kellogg long before I met him. Now I am a fan of all of his books. We met when I was a ruddy faced assistant professor at Tulane University, and Bob was the Mellon professor visiting for a semester. I gain much from our conversations. Bob, as he attests in his most recent letter to a New York Times book review in response to an article by Stephen Johnson, has the ability to make critical theory accessible, coherent, interesting, and even useful. I sat in his undergraduate critical theory class and learned much. He also taught me in other ways, I love wine, so does he, and I've had two excellent teachers. The first in my undergraduate days at Berkeley was Alan Renoir, the second was Bob. Bob taught me Burgundy and the Pinot Noir grape, for which over the years has made my family a little poorer, but much happier. As side note, which was we just discovered yesterday, that Bob and Alan Renoir were old friends, which I had no idea of. Bob's books are wonderful. His 1998 book, The Rise and Fall of the English is his Paradise Lost, Paradise Lost, or the Inferno. His recent book, which I highly recommend that you immediately order from amazon.com or your local bookstore, English After the Fall, this is sort of like your late night television ad, is his Paradise Regained, or I think more, his Purgatorio, is a wonderful and highly eclectic argument using text as diverse the man who shot Liberty Valence, something happened on the way to the forum, some like it hard, Wagner, Deuteronomy, and Paul's Epistles to Timothy, as well as texts within those texts to argue that the main function of English department as helping students become better users of language, basically better readers and writers. He argues that the field should shift from privileging literature, in other words, from it should remove some of those boundaries to studying the wide range of texts, including I extrapolate this, the scientific report, and texts in a wide range of media. His emphasis now is the same one I first met him almost 30 years ago and it can be summed up in one word, textuality, but I will let him explain that. Thank you. Thank you, Les. I think as we all know, Les is more. The title of my talk is Academic Writing Euphemism or Oxymoron. I thought rhetorical terms would be useful. The expression academic writing sounds like it might be a gentle way of pointing to bad writing, writing that is not real, but something less than real. Standing to real writing as pidgin English might stand to real English as a sort of dialect for communicating with the natives of Akadem who are incapable of using the standard version of the tongue. But the natives of Akadem are not really natives. That is they are not born into this culture but grow into it. Perhaps losing something real on the way. Nevertheless, there is such a thing as academic writing and students in the academic world need to master it. I'm not questioning that, but I am trying to point out that it is in fact a dialect of a larger language or more accurately a discourse. Someone who writes English well can easily master academic English. On the other hand, someone who seeks to master only academic English may find it difficult to reach even that limited goal. If academic writing is an Oxymoron rather than a euphemism, however, that is if it can't be both academic and writing, then those who teach it are in big trouble. On this occasion, I do not wish to argue that the expression of academic writing is an Oxymoron. Rather, I want to suggest that aiming exclusively at the academic dialect is not the best way to produce good writers, even good writers of academic discourse. I believe that students must be good writers before they can be good at academic writing. If I'm right about this, it means that the aim of writing instruction at colleges and universities should be directed to the larger target first before shifting to academic discourse. How can we help students become better writers period or perhaps question mark? That is the first issue we must address and I shall begin addressing it here by sharing some personal anecdotes that have to do with writing instruction. First anecdote, writing improvement without instruction. Many years ago, I directed the first course to use computer technology in the humanities at Brown. We used a section of the standard introduction to poetry course with a tightly focused syllabus in which students wrote responses to poems based on various levels of information about those poems. In the digital section of the course, every student could read the responses of every other student and each level of response was complete, after each level of response was complete and they could also read what the instructor said about such students' responses and they could comment on all that including the instructor's observations. Without going into excessive detail about the workings of the course, I can report that when we printed out each student's written work at the end of the semester, they had written an average of 80 pages with some going well over 100 and it was clear that most if not all of them were writing better at the end of the course than they did at the beginning. They were writing better, that is, without having had any instruction about writing or receiving any corrected papers or being dragged through stages of revision. So what happened? That is, to what cause or causes can we attribute this improvement in writing? As I understand it, there were three main causes. First of all, the fact that they wrote a lot. Secondly, the fact that they wrote knowing that their peers were reading every word. And finally, the fact that they got to see how academic writing was done. Practice may not make perfect, but it certainly makes better. If you shoot a lot of baskets, you will become a better shot. It's as simple as that. So the amount of writing makes a difference. The quantity of writing produced in the course actually contributed to the improvement in quality of writing at the end of the semester. That was a major aspect of the process, but so was the fact that every writer was aware of an audience that included not only the instructors, but also their own peers, their fellow students. They wrote a lot then, but they also wrote under a kind of gentle peer pressure. They wrote three times a week, first in response to a single poem, then in response to that poem and other poems by the same poet or on the same topic, and finally in response to what critics had said about the original poem. In the final assignment, students sometimes wrote about one another's work. For example, one student noted that another student had anticipated what a professional critic said about the poem. They praised one another sometimes, and they occasionally took issue with what the instructors had said. They were paying attention to one another's work, and they wrote with the awareness that this was happening. Without specifically concentrating on it, what Jerry Graf and Kathy Birkenstein called, they say, I say, was part of what they were learning, and it worked. There was also, I believe, a fourth contributing cause to the general improvement in writing, namely the material being studied, that is poetry. If we stop thinking about poetry as something irrelevant to writing instruction because it belongs to the despised category of literature, we might discover that it is simply a very demanding kind of writing in which to search for the best words in the best order is absolutely crucial. If we look into poems with some depth, considering revisions made in the course of composition and the poet's reasons for making them, we can scarcely help but learn something about language and become more conscious of the ways in which we use and abuse it, as well as the ways in which poets make their texts more pleasurable and powerful by their semantic and syntactic choices. Good poetry is always good writing, writing we can learn from. But there are teachers of composition who would ban poetry and other forms of literature from their courses, just as there are teachers of literature who consider rhetoric and composition beneath them and would not think of using their beloved literary texts to help students become better writers. These views represent a gap in the English teaching profession that we need to close. That computer course in poetry happened more than 30 years ago. There was no worldwide web then. In fact, we had only one monitor connected to the mainframe computer at Brown. And the students had to sign up for time on that monitor over a 24-hour day, with the instructors reserving the more civilized hours for themselves. Current digital resources make it much easier to reproduce certain aspects of the process that emerged in that experimental course. But if students are going to write a lot, instructors will have to respond a lot. Teaching writing is labor-intensive. Always has been, always will be. But one thing we should learn from this experiment is that instructors may, in fact, waste a lot of response time marking up errors and performing other tedious tasks when some other kind of response may be both less time consuming and more valuable, which brings me to my second anecdote. Sorry about my voice. Not what it used to be. And perhaps it never was. Second anecdote, one-page paper. Recently, the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown celebrated its 15th year of existence and the 35th anniversary of the establishment of its ancestor, the Semiotics Program. Students who had gone through the old program came back to Brown and interacted with current students in MCM, and many of those returning had a serious record of accomplishment, like the filmmaker Todd Haynes, or the radio innovator Ira Glass. They all spoke about their experiences at Brown and about the connections between that experience and their later work. One of the recurring themes in these discussions was their experience of writing one-page papers, which were a feature of this program that made a lasting impression on them. The one-page paper was tied to the pre-digital world in which typed papers were the norm. Papers had to be single-spaced on one side of a page, but were allowed to go all the way from side to side and top to bottom of that page. And the best way to write a good one was to write something longer and cut it down in revision to the size of a single page. There was no requirement to revise, but revision was the best way to write a good paper in this format. The formal requirement, like the formal requirements of composing a sonnet or a haiku, exerted a useful pressure on the content, leading students toward writing that was interesting for the instructor to read. At these anniversary sessions, the question of the origin of the one-page paper assignment came up more than once. The answer to that question is that it came through me, not from me, but through me. When I was a graduate student at Cornell, I took a seminar in Jane Austen with the great Chicago Aristotelian critic, Ronald S. Crane, who had just retired from Chicago and come as a visiting professor at Cornell, where one of his former students was chairing the English department. Crane required us to write a one-page paper on a Jane Austen novel every week. And after some harsh grading, we graduate students learned how to do this in a way that's earned the tolerance, if not the respect of the master. And I learned something that I used in every university in which I taught after leaving Cornell. At Brown and the semiotics program, other faculty followed this procedure because they learned, as I had, that it really works, producing more interesting papers. In responding to these papers, I rarely marked anything on the student's text, but always tried to make a comment on the back that demonstrated that I had really read it, that I had reasons for my judgment of it. I also put a number from one to 10 on the back, indicating how highly I rated it, later translating a student's total number into a letter grade. Some of my colleagues did things differently, I'm sure, but this method worked for me in that I kept getting interesting papers from students and felt confident that they were really reading and thinking before completing those papers. They wrote well for the most part, I believe, because they knew I cared about that and because they were convinced that I could tell good work from bad and very good work from just pretty good work. They also wrote well, I'm sure, because they were interested in what they were writing about. Academic writing is always writing about something, which means that the designer of courses must provide something interesting for students to consider and discuss. Just how to achieve that will be the topic of the last section of my paper. My recommendations will be based on more than 50 years of teaching, but I'll try to avoid lengthy personal anecdotes and make my discourse more appropriately academic. Non-anecdote, what should students write about? The ancient topic for students coming back to schools in the autumn, what I did last summer, always was a sign that I believe in the forlorn hope that those students might actually be interested in what they did last summer, along with the suspicion that whatever it was, it was probably more interesting for them than what they were doing right now, namely sitting in a classroom and writing a paper. Personally, much as I might have wished to be reliving my last summer on the present occasion, I had to compose an academic paper about academic papers on the orders of that notorious taskmaster, Les Perlman, with the further prospect of delivering the product of this work in an attempt to catch the interest of an audience who already know too much about this topic. And here I am now in the delivery room, so to speak, sustained mainly by the difficulty of the task rather than by any hope for success, all of which has led me to put this matter of interest at the center of my thought as the main problem of academic writing. Interest operates at more than one level in writing instruction. Students of writing need interesting things to write about and teachers of writing hope for interesting papers to read, since they must read and respond to so many of them. And these two interests are not in conflict but complementary. If the writer's interest is low, the writing is not likely to be interesting to the reader. But if the writer is really interested in the topic, there is a chance that he or she will produce a text that may stimulate the reader's interest as well. This combination of interests then makes it possible that the reader's comments and advice will in turn interest the writer and actually receive some attention. The whole instructional web is sustained by interest and likely to collapse without it. How then can we improve the odds that students in a writing course will actually be interested in what they are asked to write about? Well, part of the instructor's job is to make the material interesting to students, to organize it and present it in ways that will stimulate student interest, which means that the instructor must be interested in it first in order to pass that interest along to students. This, I believe, is an argument against all rigid curricula in which the same set of readings is forced on all the instructors and all the students. A certain amount of freedom is necessary for this process to succeed. And I would argue that the more freedom at this level, the better the result is likely to be. Imagine a course called Writing About X, in which each instructor chooses his or her own X, and all the students choose the section of the course in which they enroll. At Brown a while ago, an instructor offered a section of a basic writing course called Writing About Ulysses, in which all they read was James Joyce's novel and a few supporting materials. This worked and worked quite well because the instructor was very interested in Joyce and because all the students in the course had selected this section to attend, they knew what they were getting into and opted to learn about Ulysses while improving their writing. At present, however, in many universities the great divide between literature and composition functions to keep the text most English teachers admire out of the writing classroom. It also functions of course to keep many of the best English teachers out of the writing classroom as well. I want to suggest then that these two problems have a common solution. Let every teacher offer a writing course in some text or a set of texts that really interest that teacher and let students select the section they wish to attend. I can imagine a section called Writing About Food or even Wine. One called Writing About Food taught by a professor Dagwood perhaps and attended by a lot of little Elmoes. Though I would not advise a course called Writing About the Sandwich, which might be a bit too specialized. In a writing course, there must be texts that are good examples of the kind of writing being studied, which makes a course in writing about food a real possibility because there is a lot of good writing about food. I can also imagine a course in writing about Shakespeare or even writing about Hamlet taught by Steven Greenblatt or someone who aspires to that level of achievement could work very well. The point is to energize the classroom by bringing together instructors and students who share an interest. Another object of such courses should be to get good writing into the course for the students to read and discuss, and this means in a course on Shakespeare, not just some of Shakespeare's good writing, but some good writing about him. Another aspect of the computer poetry course that I used to begin this discussion was that students got to read some criticism or writing about the poems as well as the poems themselves and various drafts of them. They had a chance to learn from examples of this kind of academic discourse and to decide which examples of it were good in which were not so good. One difference between a writing about literature course and a regular course in literature might well be the attention paid to the writing about part. This is one way, as Jerry Graf and Kathy Birkenstein know very well, of providing clues for those who are clueless in the academic world. Students need to see how the critical or academic trick is done, but they also need to understand how the creative trick is done in the first place. I have really taught poetry without asking students to write poems. It is a very useful discipline. A haiku about what I did last summer might be more interesting than an essay on the subject. Something like this. On old brickyard pond, kingfisher, turtle, canoe, so near, so far. Learning about the history of that form while trying to write as its masters wrote should be a pleasurable experience. A kind of game that can lead to better understanding of how language work. A rise in semantic and syntactic awareness that can help a writer improve as a composer of ordinary prose and even academic writing. But there's another aspect of using creative text in the teaching of writing that I want to consider before concluding these remarks. And that is what I call comparative textuality. We live in an age of multiple media, which means that certain texts appear in more than one of them. Remaining the same in some ways while changing in others. Literary studies in recent decades have mainly taken the path of interpreting the complex or difficult printed text in some critical mode or other, whether new critical, deconstructive, new historical, or some other current fashion of interpretation. What all of these have in common is the way they position the student as interpreter of the single text, producing a subtext in a different mode of discourse from the original. They also of course position the teacher as a reader of a lot of very similar academic essays and criticism, which is sufficiently dull and demanding work to lead many faculty members to avoid it all together and others to do it without enthusiasm. Comparative textuality offers a way out of this situation for both students and teachers. Let me illustrate. In July of 1949, a woman named Dorothy Marie Johnson published a short story in Cosmopolitan Magazine. She was quite well known as a magazine writer at that time. This particular story and some others of hers were collected and published in a volume in 1953, going through a number of editions in the following years. For one of those editions, an English teacher wrote a note to teachers and parents in which he suggested, among other things, that this particular story could serve very well for a class of high school students if they would undertake to make a screenplay out of it. Students may indeed have tried this exercise, but it was also undertaken by some professional writers, James Warner-Bella and Willis Goldbeck, and the film based on that screenplay was directed by John Ford. The title of both the short story and the film was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and it is one of Ford's finest work in that genre of which he was a master. The film includes a teaching scene in which your lawyer from the East is teaching illiterates in the Western town how to read English and using the local newspaper and the sacred political texts of this nation as his materials. I have written about that scene, but I do not wish to dwell on it on this occasion. It's in that book that Les waved at you earlier, but rather I want to point the way to the way that that entire film and the story from which it emerged can be used together to stimulate writing by freeing the student writer from subservience to a single text and directing attention to how both versions of this tale were constructed and in particular, by looking at the ways in which the film gives a powerful embodiment to the verbal text and how it also changes that verbal text, modifying the events in the narrative in certain important ways. This modified version was actually returned to the print medium by Bella who published a story in the form of a novel based on the film and this too might be considered if the method of comparative text duality were being used in a writing course. Every time a text moves from one medium to another, interesting changes take place. And this is true when the Shakespeare play becomes an opera, as Shakespeare's Othello for example, becomes the Othello of Verdi and Boito or Shaw's Pygmalion becomes a film of that name and finally a musical called My Fair Lady. Our world is full of such changes in textual media and even Shakespeare's Othello emerged from a tale in another medium in language to take its place on the stage of King James's Banqueting Hall at Whitehall in 1604, not seeing print in this form until 1622. Studying comparative textuality can take us through time and space as well as from one medium to another but this is only one aspect of such study. It also directs our attention to the creative side of the compositional process. We are not just interpreting, we are looking at the choices made by the maker of each text. In the case of a move from story to film, we're considering the selection of certain actors to play particular roles, seeing their performances as interpretations of the text, as well as considering changes in the events depicted or the manner of their presentation. No longer hemmed in by the single perfect text, the student writer is free to debate the choices made by the composers of the textual variants being considered and looking at the creative side of the process should help the writer consider the creative side of his or her own process, compositional process and producing what is after all simply another textual interpretation added to a chain of such interpretations. Academic writing always involves performance, the playing of a role that is assumed by entering a discourse in progress. The study of comparative textuality can be excellent preparation for the academic role as well as for others. And the resources for such study are vast. A creative teacher should be able to assemble a set that is interesting and workable and also able to modify the set from course to course to avoid the repetition that stultify as much academic writing. The point of all this to put it as briefly as possible is to move the term academic writing from one rhetorical category to another. In this case, from euphemism, not to oxymoron but to encomium.