The article that I was cited in is: Dean, Deborah. “Shifting Perspectives about Grammar: Changing what and how we Teach.” English Journal 100.4 (2011): 20-26.

I skimmed along until I found the moment in the article where I had been cited by the author.

And then I was dismayed, dismayed because what the citation attributed to me is not my own unique work, and indeed is work that I never have nor would attempt to take credit for.  So, I’ll explain, and offer a correction to the author of the article.

Dean’s passage reads: “In a recent conference presentation, Nate Kreuter noted another element that may be part of the future perspective. When we go online, he explains, ‘Information is not in short supply. Attention is.’ He suggests that one key to effective communication in this new writing space might be style-an idea that should inform future shifts in perspective.”

Those familiar with Richard Lanham‘s work will immediately recognize that the ideas attributed to me by Dean are really Lanham’s ideas, the ones he articulates at length in The Economics of Attention.  I don’t recall the exact details of the conference presentation of two years ago, except to say that I am sure of two things: 1) that I certainly would have referenced Lanham in the presentation, and 2) that I attributed Lanham’s ideas to him.

In many ways, Dean’s understandable error, but error nonetheless, illustrates the risks of citing a conference presentation.  Usually delivered verbally and without leaving an enduring video or audio recording, scholars are apt to misremember or misconstrue a conference presentation after the fact, particularly since most of us are not trained in the methods of responsible journalism.

Frankly, I’m also a bit surprised that English Journal‘s blind reviewers didn’t, 1) nix the idea of citing a conference presentation for which there is no enduring record, and/or 2) recognize immediately that the ideas incorrectly attributed to me are in fact the quite famous thesis of Richard Lanham’s most recent book, especially given the fact that Lanham is quite important to the field and that I, well, am not.

I have been an evangelist on behalf of Richard Lanham’s work for some time now.  I’m happy that his ideas on the economics of attention (incorrectly attributed to me by Dean in this case) are finding purchase with a range of scholars.  I do believe, from what I observe in the world, that Lanham’s notion that attention, rather than information, is what’s in short supply in the information economy, is correct.  And that the notion is correct has potentially dramatic consequences for rhetoric and rhetorical instruction.  And while I have evangelized widely on behalf of Lanham’s idea, I certainly couldn’t take credit for it.

The info for my grad class, ENGL 614, 20th Century Rhetorical Theory, may undergo some refinements, and largely is intended to fulfill the needs of our rhet/comp MA students preparing for their comprehensive exams, but with my own spin.

I have also revised and updated the syllabus for my version of our sophomore rhet/comp course, ENGL 202 Rhetorical and Critical Inquiry.  I haven’t gotten the major assignments posted for this one yet, but will have them up within 48-72 hours.  I’ve left more wiggle room in this syllabus than in the past, so some things will be filled in as we go along.

As always, please feel free to crib from here, or from any of my past courses, but I appreciate attribution.

I’ll offer  this as my only comment:

Among his many unjust criticisms of Iowa and Iowans, Bloom relays at the end of his article an anecdote of doubtful veracity about a driver asking him as he walks his dog, “Do much hunting with the bitch?.” The point of the anecdote remains obscure to me.

What bothers me most, perhaps, about the anecdote though, and Bloom’s telling of the anecdote, is that Bloom has not yet, despite his twenty years in the state, managed to grasp the dry wit for which Iowans are famous.  When, as he relays in his self-loathing article, a driver supposedly asked the dog-walking Bloom, “Do much hunting with the bitch?,” I myself assumed that the native Iowan interlocutor in the pickup truck was talking to the dog.

Pity that the humor was lost on Bloom.

-Nate Kreuter

BA, English, University of Iowa, ’02, with Honors and Highest Distinction, Collegiate Scholar, ’02

PhD, English (Rhetoric and Writing), University of Texas at Austin, ’10

Those who know me personally know that I’m not too often serious, and that I have a profound, blood-borne hatred for rules that I perceive to be arbitrary.  Why then am I so suddenly issuing such a seemingly arbitrary and senseless and rigid decree?  This ban is (notice, the ban does not apply to me, and I’m completely willing to be hypocritical THIS time around) admittedly a suddenly imposed rule that initially appears to bear all the hallmarks of tyranny and madness rolled up into one stupid moment.  This rule, at the outset, seems to smack of our worst memories of the worst writing instructors, those humorless and rhetorically naive instructors we’ve all encountered in our pasts who harped upon pet grammatical peeves without any sense that grammar is a rhetorical and social and political construction, or that grammar is a fluidly drifting constellation of conventions, not a rigid and universal set of commandments.

So, then, why “this”? Why “this”? Why this? Why this ban on “this”?  Why this ban on this?

Because it’s necessary.  But neither is the ban actually arbitrary or capricious, or related very directly even to issues of correctness or a pet peeve.  The ban is about encouraging precision in graduate student writing, and discouraging imprecision.  For the past three semesters I have noticed a surprising tendency in graduate student writing.  The tendency is for students to use the word “this” without specifying what the word demonstrates or refers to, as if the idea(s) it is intended to indicate are self-evident, when in fact (or, in rhetorical effect) those ideas are not self-evident and need to be explained or elaborated for the reader.

I’m going to go a little Wikipedia here.  The word “this” is the “singular proximal demonstrative” in the English language.  As the Wikipedia explains in terms easier to simply cite than to translate into my own terms:

In linguistics, demonstratives are deictic words (they depend on an external frame of reference) that indicate which entities a speaker refers to and distinguishes those entities from others. Demonstratives are employed for spatial deixis (using the context of the physical surroundings of the speaker and sometimes the listener) and for discourse deixis (including abstract concepts) where the meaning is dependent on something other than the relative physical location of the speaker, for example whether something is currently been said or was said earlier. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This)

The problem is occurring primarily in grad student discussions of abstract concepts, where the referent that the word “this” should point to has been left unstated, or has not been restated in a way that allows the reader to follow the writer’s logic.  What is self-evident to the writer is not stated for the reader, and to confusing effect.  The problem is not, typically, with the students’ logic or thinking in these cases (for some reason it only seems to be happening with “this” and not with the plural demonstrative “these), but with their written representations of their logic and thinking.  I’ve spoken with many grad students about this issue in their writing over the past three semesters, and last spring I banned the word for one student in particular, and with positive end results.  So, as a grand thought/writing experiment, I’m banning the word “this” for the entire class for the remainder of the semester. I’ll report back on the results.

As a last note, I’ll point out that in object-orient computer languages (Java, C++, etc)  “this” frequently functions as a keyword (learned all this crap from the Wikipedia today) to refer to the object being worked upon.  In these object-oriented computer languages, it is a word that indicates itself, and the object as a self, a me.  That’s sort of the problem coming up in some cases with grad students–the word points to the selves of their own private thoughts, and not to externally articulated ideas that the reader needs to share access to in order to access the writer’s text(s). The result is that I as a reader feel like I’m falling off of someone else’s mental cliff, and I assume that other readers would feel similarly  . . .

The Freedom to Fail

Teaching Student-Athletes with contributions from Eric Dieter

The Frustration of Not Seeing

To Moonlight or Not

Get a Financial Education

Advice on Academic Advice

While students were working on an in-class writing exercise today, I decided to crunch some numbers for them.  Western Carolina University‘s current in-state full-time tuition is $3183.50 per semester.  So, I divided that by 4, because 12 credit hours is the minimum number of hours to be full-time as an undergrad, and thinking that most classes are 3 credit hours.  So, after dividing by 4 I come up with the number $795.86, which is essentially the price they’re paying for each class.  Then I divided that number by the number of times a class meets each semester, 45 for a three times weekly class, and 30 for a twice weekly class.  This gave me a pretty exact number of what students are paying in tuition per class meeting.  Excluding fees and housing costs, if a student is taking 12 credit hours at Western Carolina University, they are paying either $26.53 or $17.67 per class, respectively, depending upon whether the class meets two or three times a week.

If a student is taking more than 12 hours–which they should, because that’s where the most value is to be found in tuition–these numbers obviously go down. For comparison, a student taking 18 hours per semester only pays $11.80 or $17.67 per class session, which shows the tremendous value of maximizing hours once you hit the full-time end of the tuition scale. Of course, if over-extending oneself causes a student to fail a class, that value is obviously lost.  It’s a balancing act between academics and finances.

I gave the students this information, showing my math.  They were a little shocked.

It would be unacceptable to most students to simply skip a $75 cello lesson or $20 yoga session or rock climbing session that they had paid in advance, and if they are aware of the numbers, they might find it just a bit more unacceptable to miss class too.

I’ve had great attendance for the most part this semester, in part because of a newly strict attendance policy, as opposed to my laissez-faire attitude of old.  But it might be worth pointing out to classes these sorts of numbers, particularly in apathetically attended service courses.  What do your students pay per class session?  Do you know? I think we as instructors should be aware of these sorts of breakdowns.  How much do you owe students every time you walk into a classroom if each of them is paying close to $20 a day, excluding additional fees, to be there?

It’s common to call the printing press revolutionary. But the printing press did not eliminate handwriting. To this day, we have Moleskine notebooks, Post-It Notes, hipster PDAs. Similarly, the digital revolution will not kill print. We still buy books online and mark them up with pencils and highlighters. Pens are still more ubiquitous than digital mobile apps. People pay for photographic prints to hang on their fridges and walls. Bookstores do not merely exist; they legitimate neighborhoods. Every coffee shop has a bulletin board full of printed posters. Instead of predicting “The Future of Print in the Digital Age,” this panel celebrates the present of print, and focuses on emerging print-digital hybrids. The panel consists of a printer, a couple of scholars, a poster distributor, and a print photographer who started a photo booth. Together we will explore projects that capitalize on the permeability of the boundaries separating manual, print, and digital realms.

Questions that the panel will address include:

1. What does the history of print suggest about the present of print?
2. What economic factors are shaping print presently?
3. What challenges and affordances are offered by the production and distribution of printed products?
4. What does the printed photo offer to an instagram world?
5. What print/digital hybrids are emerging to question the print/digital divide?

My own presentation will focus upon the ongoing symbiosis between analog and born-digital maps and mapping technologies.

SXSW does require you to register in order to vote, but it’s quick and painless. So, please vote for our panel, and vote early and often (seriously).

I think that in the humanities there is culture within which it is almost politically incorrect to lecture, especially in small seminars and especially to graduate students.  Humanities teachers tend to be heavily invested in the open-ended or guided class discussion, and in my experience (both as a student and observer of fellow graduate faculty at many different institutions), graduate faculty virtually never lecture.  But I think another resistance to lecturing, especially at the graduate level, comes from a Freire-inspired fear that to lecture is to participate in the now widely discredited “banking model” of education.  Personally, I’m a pluralist in most all things academic, and I think that dismissing a particular teaching method wholesale is a mistake.  Moreover, I think that always lecturing, and then testing on the material covered in the lecture, is exactly what Freire was criticizing.  Lecturing sparingly and with purpose, on the other hand, seems entirely different to me, and even necessary, rather than oppressive.

Frequently graduate faculty, especially at top tier institutions, are world class experts on the subjects that they teach within their graduate programs.  I think that it is a positive sign of humility when these world class experts do not simply assume, as experts both world-class and mediocre would have in the past, that students want to hear them drone from a lectern for three hours each week.  And yet, I think graduate faculty in the humanities should lecture more frequently.  Students want to hear the expert’s perspective sometimes, don’t always want to hear themselves or each other, and sometimes need a break from the demands of propelling a rigorous discussion each and every day.

I don’t think that a graduate level course should ever consist only of lecture.  But I do think that the lecture format is under-utilized in graduate education in the humanities, and to the detriment of graduate students’ educational experiences.

All of this was brought home to me this past week as I was preparing for the History of Rhetoric class I’m teaching this fall.  History of Rhetoric is probably the only course offered in my department where I and the students are responsible for covering 2500 years’ worth of theory and texts.  By necessity, “history of” courses must move in fits and starts, and detour around even important material.  Any one of the -isms that we will cover this semester could constitute its own graduate seminar.  But the purpose of such a course is not to cultivate expert knowledge in each –ism, but instead to show the relationships between people and periods and –isms so that students can get a sense of the “big picture” of the discipline and its past.  With all of this in mind, I’ve decided that I will be lecturing for 30-60 minutes each week (which represents 1/6 to 1/3 of our once-a-week 3 hour meetings).  First, it’s pretty tough on graduate students to expect them to sustain intense conversation for a full three hours.  Second, with so much material to cover, lecture can be a very efficient delivery method, and can be utilized without invoking the liabilities of the “banking model” of teaching.  Third, since I’ve started writing my lectures I have no doubt that I have better organized my thoughts about the course and refreshed my command of the material.

The ability to write and deliver lectures is an important skill for graduate students to develop as well.  At many institutions the graduate students who are hired into faculty positions will be expected to be able to lecture within the context of certain courses that their departments offer, especially for large undergraduate survey courses.  (Given the budget situations in most states, and concomitant increasing class sizes, the ability to lecture will be even more in demand in the short term.)  Isn’t it ironic then that humanities programs, which I think generally do a much better job training graduate students in sound pedagogical practices than other fields, do not teach graduate students how to lecture, nor even provide imitable examples in the course of graduate education?  It certainly is contrary to the ethos of my own discipline of rhetoric and composition to expect a student to excel at a skill, like lecturing, without first giving the student explicit instruction in the skill.

So, I’m going to do a little lecturing this semester.

Fellow teachers, also as always, please feel free to crib from me if you see something you like, but I of course appreciate attribution.

My blogging frequency has dropped off lately because: 1) it’s summer, and I have been traveling and I need a break and have less to say anyway; and, 2) because I recently began writing a column dealing with professionalization issues for Inside Higher Ed.  The column is called “Tyro Tracts” and is intended to deal with the professionalization issues that face advanced graduate students and junior faculty (in all disciplines).  Because of the column, most of the stuff I have to write about professionalization issues, a past focus for this blog, will now be posted over at the Inside Higher Ed site (I won’t be cross-posting the columns, though I may index them somewhere here on 3 x 3).  I’ll continue to write about issues specific to rhetoric and composition here at 3 x 3 in Cullowhee, and my blogging frequency will pick back up in the fall.  With the IHE columns, I’m trying to address issues that don’t typically get addressed, or that people may find awkward to ask about, or not even know to ask/think about.  If you have a topic for a column, I’d love suggestions.  For example, I had no idea that the column on how to properly address professors would get such a strong response.  Anything is fair game.  Just drop a line or leave a comment if you have a column question or idea. The column runs every two weeks.

My first four IHE columns are here:

Cultivating Serendipity

Respect Departmental Staff

Doctor, Professor, or ‘Hey, you’?

Rules of the Game