Everyone's an author chapter 12

andrea lunsford stanford university

michal brody sonoma state university

lisa ede oregon state university

beverly j. moss the ohio state university

carole clark papper hofstra university

keith walters portland state university

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Everyone’s an Author W I T H R E A D I N G S

 second edition

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Names: Lunsford, Andrea A., 1942- author. | Brody, Michal, author. | Ede, Lisa S., 1947- author. | Moss, Beverly J.,

author. | Papper, Carole Clark, author. | Walters, Keith, 1952- author.

Title: Everyone’s an author with readings / Andrea Lunsford ; Michal Brody ; Lisa Ede ; Beverly J. Moss ; Carole

Clark Papper ; Keith Walters.

Description: Second Edition. | New York : W.W. Norton & Company, [2017] | Includes bibliographical

references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015044578 | ISBN 9780393265293 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: English language--Rhetoric. | Report writing. | Authorship. | College readers.

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For our students, authors all.

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Preface

s everyone an author? In the first edition of this book, we answered that question with an emphatic “yes!” and hoped teachers and students would agree. We’re happy to say they did, embracing what is now even more obvious than it was during the years we

spent drafting that first edition: that writers today have important things to say and want—indeed demand—to be heard, and that anyone with access to a computer can publish their writing, can in fact become an author. So we are thrilled that our book has found a large and enthusiastic audience.

As we began work on the second edition, we went back to our title, which has come to have many levels of meaning for us. Two key words: “author” and “everyone.” Certainly “author” informs our book through- out, from the Introduction that shows students the many ways they are already authors to the final chapter that offers advice on ways of pub- lishing their writing. Indeed, every chapter in the book assumes that students are capable of creating and producing knowledge and of shar- ing that knowledge with others, of being authors. And we know that this focus has struck a chord with teachers and students across the country; in fact, we now meet students who talk comfortably about their role as authors, something we surely didn’t see a decade or even five years ago.

And then we thought about the other key word in our title: “every- one.” And like good rhetoricians, we thought about the primary audi- ence for this book: our students. Have we reached every one of them? When they read what we say or imply about college students, will they see themselves, their friends, their communities? Will our book inter- est them? Will the examples and readings we’ve chosen inspire them to write? Have we, in other words, written a book for everyone? We went on to ask ourselves just who this “everyone” is: as it turns out, it’s a very

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[ vi ] P R E FAC E

expansive group, including students in community and two-year colleges, in historically black colleges and universities, in Hispanic-serving and Trib- al colleges, in dual enrollment classes, on regional campuses of large state universities, in private liberal arts schools, in research one universities. Students from many different communities, from all socioeconomic back- grounds, with a wide range of abilities and ableness. In short, anyone who has something to say—and that’s EVERYONE.

But let’s back up for a moment and ask another question: what led us to pursue this goal of inviting every student to take on the responsibility of authorship? When we began teaching (we won’t even say how many years ago that was), our students wrote traditional academic essays by hand—or sometimes typed them on typewriters. But that was then. Those were the days when writing was something students were assigned, rather than something they did every single day and night. When “text” was a noun, not a verb. When tweets were sounds birds made. When blogs didn’t even exist. The writing scene has changed radically. Now students write, text, tweet, and post to everything from Facebook to Blackboard to Instagram at home, in the library, on the bus, while walking down the street. Writing is ubiquitous—they barely even notice it.

What students are learning to write has changed as well. Instead of “es- says,” students today engage a range of genres: position papers, analyses of all kinds, reports, narratives—and more. In addition, they work across me- dia, embedding images and even audio and video in what they write. They do research, not just for assigned “research papers” but for pretty much ev- erything they write. And they write and research not just to report or ana- lyze but to join conversations. With the click of a mouse they can respond to a Washington Post blog, publishing their views alongside those of the Post writer. They can create posters for the We Are the 99% Facebook page, post a review of a novel on Amazon, contribute to a wiki, submit a poem or story to their college literary magazine, assemble a digital portfolio to use in apply- ing for jobs or internships. The work of these students speaks clearly to a sea change in literacy and to a major premise of this book: if you have access to a computer, you can publish what you write. Today, everyone can be an author.

We began to get a hint of this shift nearly a decade ago. In a 2009 ar- ticle in Seed magazine, researchers Denis Pelli and Charles Bigelow argue that while “nearly universal literacy is a defining characteristic of today’s modern civilization, nearly universal authorship will shape tomorrow’s.”1

1. Denis G. Pelli and Charles Bigelow, “A Writing Revolution,” Seedmagazine.com, 20 Oct. 2009,

Web, 3 Jan. 2012.

http://www.Seedmagazine.com

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They go on to offer a graph of the history of “authorship” from 1400 pro- jected through 2013, noting that while we’ve seen steep rises in authorship before (especially around 1500 and 1800), the current rise is more precipi- tous by far.

Tracking another shift, rhetorician Deborah Brandt suggests that now that a majority of Americans make their living in the so-called informa- tion economy, where writing is part of what they do during their workday, it could be said that “writing is . . . eclipsing reading as the literate skill of consequence.”2 Pelli and Bigelow put this shift more starkly, saying, “As readers, we consume. As authors, we create.”

Today’s authors are certainly creators, in the broadest sense. Protestors are using Twitter to organize and demonstrate on behalf of pressing social and political issues around the world. Fans create websites for those who follow certain bands, TV shows, sports teams. As this book goes to press, U.S. presidential candidates are using Facebook and Twitter to broadcast their messages, raise money, and mobilize voters.

Clearly, we are experiencing a major transition in what it means to be a writer. Such a massive shift brings challenges as well as opportunities. Many worry, for example, about the dangers the internet poses to our pri- vacy. As authors, we also understand that being a productive author brings

2. Deborah Brandt, “Writing at Work,” Hunter College, New York, 12 Nov. 2011, Lecture.

Time

100%

1%

0.01%

0.0001%

0.000001%

10,000,000,000

100,000,000

1,000,000

10,000

100

1 1400 1600 1800 2000 2005 2010 2013

Authors per year (as % of world pop.)

Authors per year

BY CENTURY BY YEAR

Blog authors

Facebook authors

Twitter authors

Book authors

Number of authors who published in each year for various media since 1400 by century (left) and by year (right). Source: Denis G. Pelli and Charles Bigelow, “A Writing Revolution,” Seed- magazine.com, 20 Oct. 2009, Web, 3 Jan. 2012.

http://www.Seedmagazine.com

http://www.Seedmagazine.com

[ viii ] P R E FAC E

certain responsibilities: working fairly and generously with others, taking seriously the challenges of writing with authority, standing behind the texts we create, being scrupulous about where we get information and how we use it, and using available technologies in wise and productive ways.

This book aims to guide student writers as they take on the responsi- bilities, challenges, and joys of authorship. As teachers who have been ac- tive participants in the literacy revolution brought on by changes in modes and technologies of communication, we’ve been learning with our students how best to engage such changes. As scholars, we have read widely in what many refer to as the “new literacies”; as researchers, we have studied the changing scene of writing with excitement. Our goal in writing this text- book has been to take some of the best ideas animating the field of rheto- ric and writing and make them accessible to and usable by students and teachers—and to invite everyone to become authors.

As Beverly Moss put it in a recent presentation, one challenge in writ- ing any composition textbook is to find a balance between meeting stu- dents where they are and where they come from—and yet at the same time challenging them to move out of their comfort zones: to embrace the unfa- miliar, to see themselves as meaning makers and see writing in whatever medium as an opportunity to create, to inform, to entertain, to move, to connect with others—including those who are not like them, who maybe do not speak the same language or hail from the same communities. With each page that we write, we try to achieve that balance. Every one of our students has important things to say, and we aim to help them do just that.

Highlights

• On the genres college students need to write: arguments, analyses, nar- ratives, reports, reviews—a new chapter on proposals—and new guid- ance in visual analysis, literacy narratives, profiles, and literature reviews. Chapter 10 gives students help “Choosing Genres” when the choice is theirs.

• On the need for rhetoric. From Chapter 1 on “Thinking Rhetorically” to Chapter 5 on “Writing and Rhetoric as a Field of Study” to the many prompts throughout the book that help students think about their own rhetorical situations and choices, this book makes them aware of the importance of rhetoric.

[ ix ]Preface

• On academic writing. We’ve tried to demystify academic writing—and to show students how to enter academic conversations. Chapter 4 offers advice on “Meeting the Demands of Academic Writing,” and we’ve add- ed new guidance on writing visual analyses, literature reviews, literacy narratives, and other common college assignments.

• On argument. Chapter 11 covers “Arguing a Position,” Chapter 17 covers “Analyzing and Constructing Arguments” (with new coverage of Clas- sical, Toulmin, Rogerian, and Invitational approaches), and Chapter 18 offers “Strategies for Supporting an Argument.”

• On reading. Chapter 3 offers guidelines on “Reading Rhetorically”: to read not only with careful attention but also with careful i ntention— to listen, engage, and then respond. And it offers strategies for reading texts of all kinds—written in words or images, on-screen or off-.

• On research. The challenge today’s students face is not gathering data, but making sense of massive amounts of information and using it ef- fectively in support of their own arguments. Chapters 19–28 cover all stages of research, from finding and evaluating sources to citing and documenting them. Chapter 20, on “Finding Sources,” has been reorga- nized to combine print and online sources in a way that better aligns with how students today search for information, and new examples guide students through annotating, summarizing, and synthesizing the sources they find.

• On writing in multiple modes. Chapter 34 provides practical advice on writing illustrated essays, blogs, wikis, audio and video essays, and posters, and Chapter 35 covers oral presentations—both new to this edi- tion. The companion Tumblr site provides a regularly updated source of multimodal readings.

• On social media. We’ve tried to bridge the gap between the writing stu- dents do on social media sites and the writing they do in college. We reject the notion that Google is making us stupid; in fact, we find that student writers are adept at crafting messages that will reach their in- tended audiences because they do so every day on Facebook and other such sites. Chapter 30 shows how the rhetorical strategies they use in- stinctively in social media are used in academic writing—and also how social media is now used in academia.

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• On style. We pay attention to style, with guidelines that will help stu- dents think carefully and creatively about the stylistic choices open to them. Chapter 29 defines style as a matter of appropriateness, and Chapter 31 covers “How to Write Good Sentences.”

• On social justice. Minimum wages, affordable housing, Black Lives Mat- ter: many of the examples in this book demonstrate how people from various walks of life use writing in ways that strive to help create “a more perfect union,” a society that is more just and equitable for all its members. We don’t always agree on how to go about reaching those goals, and that’s why rhetoric and civic discourse matter.

• Many new examples about topics students will relate to. From a descrip- tion of how Steph Curry shoots a basketball and a rhetorical analysis of what makes Pharrell’s “Happy” so catchy to a blog post from a student NASCAR driver and a visual analysis of the New Yorker’s Bert and Er- nie cover, we hope that all students will find examples and images that will make them smile—and inspire them to read and write.

• An anthology of 32 readings—and more readings posted weekly on Tumblr. Marginal links refer readers from the rhetoric to examples in the readings—and vice versa. You can center your course on either the rhetoric or the readings, and the links will help you draw from the other part as need be.