Composition: The New Keys to the Kingdom

I find it very interesting that at the time this article was written, just on the cusp of the commercial internet/computer takeover of the 20^th century in 2004, Yancey was already preparing the world and the writing discipline to face the challenges of a world where print and digital had to exist side by side. She states, that "according to these (early) assessments...writing IS "words on paper," composed on a page with a pen or pencil by students who write words on paper, yes-- BUT who ALSO compose words and images and create audio files on Web logs, in word processors, with video editors and Web editors and in e-mail and on presentations software and in instant messaging and on listservs and on bulletin boards--and no doubt in whatever genre will emerge in the next ten minutes" (298).

The genres that have emerged in the next 10 minutes, such as Facebook, twitter, YouTube, etc. have all followed in this same pattern. They have all come with their own sets of rules and functionalities that, while different from the written word, still actively seek to expand the accepted definition of writing and what is considered academic writing. The interesting note that Yancey points out is that "most faculty and students alike have learned these genres on our own, outside of school" (302). No one had to teach you how to use facebook  or twitter. It gained popularity and, in order to keep up with the digital and social landscape, you taught yourself "largely without instruction and, more to the point here, largely without OUR (academic) instruction" (301).

So what does this say about the academic writing discourse? If students are already teaching themselves the essentials of digital communication, what is left for the classroom to teach them other than outdated English practices that will one day be considered “ancient”? Yancey recognizes this problem as well, saying that "the screen is the language of the vernacular, that if we do not include it in the school curriculum, we will become as irrelevant as faculty professing in Latin" (305).

Already, departments calling themselves English have diminished, and in their place departments calling themselves Communication and Division of Humanities has risen to take their places. Writing and communicating are so much more than English, the pedagogy of the internet allows for visual elements, spoken, audio, and more. Many of them, like visuals, don’t correspond to a particular language either. Yancey argues that "education needs to get in step with life practices and should endeavor to assist students to negotiate through life" (305) rather than just turn in assignment to a single teacher and receive a single grade. If we believe writing to be social, shouldn't academic writing then be able to exist outside of the feedback loop of just the teacher to the student to the teacher? (310)

"We ALREADY inhabit a model of communication practices incorporating multiple genres related to each other, those multiple genres remediated across contexts of time and space, linked one to the next, circulating across and around rhetorical situations both inside and outside school," (308) says Yancey. In our daily lives we interact with dozens of different media, remediated from form to form, and all interconnected. What is stopping us in the classroom from doing the same? Moving forward, academia’s best bet is to develop classes around the idea of circulating material between mediums and establishing that there is a flow and a direct connectedness between them all. This type of interconnected awareness not only allows the student to become better-rounded by acknowledging the value of different genres and their media representations, but also allows the student to truly show off their self-learned skills in social platforms such as Facebook and YouTube, tools that are already helping them navigate their lives. Why not allow the students to navigate their own education as well?

Yancey feels the largest barrier to this integration of new composition with old composition is the academic system itself. "It is past time that we fill the glaringly empty spot between first-year composition and graduate education with a composition major" (308). I strongly agree with her on the point. My undergraduate education would have felt far more useful had I learned even just a few of the things I have learned in my graduate course on Computers and Composition. Instead of learning outdated study (and people) skills as I did in my Freshmen orientation course, it would have benefited me far more to learn about remediation and how printed text is just one of hundreds of ways to present a material and that some materials are just more effective in certain platforms and less in others.

On a different note, I wanted to point out something Yancey said in her article that had to do with a discussion I had with Chris and Tom about my Rhetorical Analysis. Yancey says "the writer invented through such a text is a function of that arrangement. In other words, you can only invent inside what an arrangement permits--and different media permit different arrangements" (317). If this is considered part of the pedagogy of composition, how does one truly create a new theory of writing within an established technology when the coding of the technology allows for certain things and doesn't allow for others?