Post 06: The Complexity of Writing

I like to talk about complexity and writing. In short, I view writing as a complex activity, and that changes the way I teach it.

First, I should define what I mean by complexity. Everyone knows that complex is different from simple, but too many people confuse complexity and complicated. A complex process, for instance, has many intricate steps and usually requires great expertise to competently complete; whereas, a simple process has few steps and does not require great expertise. But complicated processes are also not simple, and many people confuse complicated and complex. They are not the same. For example, a jet fighter—say, an F-18—is complicated. It is composed of hundreds of thousands of parts assembled in intricate patterns to create a marvel that flies at 1,200 miles an hour and can out-fight most anything else in the sky, except the F-35. It takes great expertise to maintain and operate these machines. However, an F-18 is not complex because there are very few ways to configure it so that it will function as intended. There is basically one right way to put it together, and the military spends great energy and money making sure that its people know how to do it.

An essay, on the other hand, is complex. It, too, is composed of lots of parts (morphemes, words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, division, etc.) assembled in intricate patterns to create a marvel that helps people communicate with one another, but unlike an F-18, an essay can be put together successfully in many different ways. Moreover, changing any element in an essay (for instance, a different reader) changes the entire essay to meet a new demand. Unlike a complicated process or artifact, then, complex processes and artifacts have many more solutions and can restructure themselves to meet new demands. So complex things, such as humans and essays, are complex because they have more than one solution and arrangement (think of the millions of different looking people), and they can morph or evolve to meet new situations and demands.

This complexity makes essays—and people—more difficult to work with and master than an F-18. Lots of us don't like that. We want essays to be simple, or at least merely complicated. So we create little formulas such as the 5-paragraph essay to try to make writing a simple process that anyone can do in 30 minutes, which is about as long as we want to spend on any given writing assignment. This formula seldom leads to an essay that anyone other than your mother wants to read. Most 5-paragraph essays are insufferably boring and maudlin. Believe me—I've read thousands of them.

Good writing is complex: a complex process leading to a complex product. The best essays are always complex, and complexity is damned hard to teach and even harder to master. But it's the only writing worth writing or reading.

Post 05: Fear

The one social issue that I most want to see corrected is our loss of faith in the future.

Too many people around the world believe that society is collapsing and we are all going to hell in a hand basket. We are afraid to go outside our houses. Both as individuals and as a nation, we arm ourselves to the teeth and store up canned goods against the coming apocalypse. If the terrorists don't get us first, then global warming will. Each new government leader is the absolute worst ever for one-half our population, and we are sure our nation is doomed. All we can do is huddle behind our walls and hope/pray the bastards don't break through. This is an awful way to live.

I do not suggest that society doesn't have some real issues—we do—but they are not the end of the world, and if we will quit hunkering down and will get up to face our issues, then we can resolve them or work around them. We can.

Matt Ridley wrote a book called The Rational Optimist that looks at the data from 10,000 years of human history, and he says that by any measure you want to apply, we humans are better off now than at any other time in history. No doubt about it. There is no Golden Age in the past when things were better. We are the Golden Age, and tomorrow is likely to be better. His publisher's blurb summarizes his argument this way:

Over 10,000 years ago there were fewer than 10 million people on the planet. Today there are more than 6 billion, 99 per cent of whom are better fed, better sheltered, better entertained and better protected against disease than their Stone Age ancestors. The availability of almost everything a person could want or need has been going erratically upwards for 10,000 years and has rapidly accelerated over the last 200 years: calories; vitamins; clean water; machines; privacy; the means to travel faster than we can run, and the ability to communicate over longer distances than we can shout. 

Yet, bizarrely, however much things improve from the way they were before, people still cling to the belief that the future will be nothing but disastrous. In this original, optimistic book, Matt Ridley puts forward his surprisingly simple answer to how humans progress, arguing that we progress when we trade and we only really trade productively when we trust each other.

Where has our faith and trust gone? Just 100 years ago, you were far more likely to die a violent death either by attack or accident than today, but we seem more afraid today. Why? It is easy to blame the media who feed us daily with an endless parade of screaming heads telling us how bad things are. Whether you watch Fox or CNN, it's the same awful news with either Obama as the bad guy or Trump, the Muslims or the Russians or the North Koreans.

So what do we do? Well, you scholars are doing the best thing: you are preparing yourselves for the future. You are completing your degree as an act of faith that you will make life better—for yourselves, of course, but also for your families and communities. That's the best antidote to pessimism. Do something positive. Get a new degree. Prepare yourselves to face the future.

I have faith in you.

Post 04: Swarm Writing vs. Traditional Writing

My online friends and I have devised a new way of writing. It ain't your grandma's style of writing, but it is interesting. I call it swarm writing. Let me introduce you.

Back in 2015, my colleagues and I wrote an article called "Writing the Unreadable Untext" for Digital Pedagogy in which we described a group writing project that we stumbled into as we were trying to write an article about a massive open online course (MOOC) that we had all taken. My friend and teacher at The American University in Cairo Maha Bali and I started writing what became the Untext in October, 2014, and soon we had swarm of friends from all over the world writing with us:

• Keith Hamon - Florida (at the time)
• Maha Bali - Egypt
• Rebecca Hogue - California, 
• Kevin Hodgson - Massachusetts, 
• Terry Elliot - Kentucky, 
• Simon Ensor - France, 
• Scott Johnson - Canada, 
• Sandra Sinfield - England, 
• Apostolos Koutropoulos - Massachusetts, and 
• Sarah Honeychurch - Scotland

It was fun as you can see here. If you get through it, then you may question my competency to teach you anything about writing, especially formal, academic writing. Well, welcome to the rabbit hole, Alice.