Post 6: Texting vs. Academic Writing

I was intrigued by your posts about the differences between texting and academic writing, and I want to add some points of clarification to what you have said.

But first, I want to point you to a few excellent posts that, first, illustrate what I'm looking for in a blog post and, second, will teach you something. Luke Maloney-Grimes offers up the best description of the problem with documenting sources in academic documents by imagining what our texting would be like if we had to document our sources. The post is funny, engaging, and insightful and well worth reading. Then, Robert McKenzie explains why texting is so much easier than academic writing. Again, this is insightful writing that will teach you something worth reading. Finally, Madisen Mitchell challenges all of us to step up our game by writing beyond our comfort zone (texting, for most of us). This is basically what this class is attempting to do for you: get you to move beyond the familiar to learn something new.

I've been so impressed with the posts you have been writing, and I thank you for the serious efforts. It's paying off.

Now, what about comparing texting to writing academic documents? First, I want to go on record by saying that texting IS a form of writing, and it is by far the most common form of writing ever devised by humankind. Actually, no other form of writing even comes close. The most reliable data that I could find says that, as of 2017, the world was sending over 8 trillion messages a year (Portio Research). The math majors in the class know that this is an astronomical sum. The human race is writing its collective tail off. No generation has ever written this much, and we have genuinely entered a new stage of human development. 

Still, texting isn't the form of writing that gets you through college, and that's why all of you are here. So why is texting so preferable to you? Because it's more comfortable. Texting is like having coffee with your family or friends. You can wear your old jeans and a raggedy tee-shirt or stay in your pajamas. Academic writing, on the other hand, is like a job interview for a job that you really want. You should dress up, shake hands, avoid four-letter words (imagine how awkward it would be if you were to offer to shake your spouse's hand over morning coffee).

Does a suit and tie make you smarter? a better potential employee? No. But it recognizes the formality required to negotiate and navigate relationships between people who don't know each other very well. We rely on conventional cues and customs to make our first meetings with new people go well, but this formality is a bit awkward if we try to maintain it for too long. MLA and APA are the conventional cues and customs that academia uses to formalize communications among scholars. We scholars don't use formal citations when we are talking over coffee in the snack bar, but we do use them when we are making formal presentations or writing formal documents. We want you new scholars to do the same.

Some of you say in your posts that you prefer texting because it is so loose, casual, and formless. For instance, Ms. Mitchell says, "Texting is easier than academic writing because it doesn’t have to have any structure." But this isn't quite so. Texting has a definite structure and order. It has its own grammar, punctuation, and spelling, and if you violate the rules, then people will not understand your texts. All of you have received texts that you couldn't understand, and often, it was because the text broke the rules of texting. The rules for academic writing are indeed different than for texting, but both have rules. Communication depends on structure. Structureless texts are nonsensical.

But perhaps the biggest difference between texting and academic writing is the context: the reader, writer, and subjects. Usually, we text to people we already know about issues we already know something about. This means, for instance, that when I text my son: Jason says no, I can be brief because my son already knows who Jason is and the question that Jason is answering. Think of how much context — the background story — I would have to supply one of you if I were to text you that my nephew Jason is not joining us for Christmas this year because the tickets to the Bahamas are too expensive. Context is critical to understanding, and academic writing requires much more context building than most people are used to supplying. 

So of course texting is easier, but only if you are texting to the right people about the right issues. Imagine how confusing this blog post would be if you did not already share some context with me: I'm a writing teacher, you're a writing student, and I'm discussing your seventh class blog posts. I would have to give my son lots of back story and context for him to fully understand this post, which most of you already understand.

Finally, Ms. Flanders says:

Writing for academic purposes is often put off until it seems like an almost impossible task. With so many rules to follow, it becomes a struggle to feel free as a writer, instead you feel trapped in a cage.

I insist that any kind of writing — texting included — is a kind of cage. It has to be. Think about it: a text is trapped into a tiny little screen in the palm of your hand with exchanges bouncing back and forth from one side of the phone to the other, and don't dare confuse the sides. My stuff is on the right, their stuff on the left. Mine is blue background, theirs is gray. Don't change it, or you get confused and annoyed. So texting doesn't feel like a cage because you are accustomed to it — you do it every day.

And that brings me to my concluding point: if you want to be comfortable with the constraints of academic writing, then do some every day. It's the only way to learn how to write anything.

Summer 2020 Post 2: Getting Ideas for Posts and Papers

We are exploring the early phases of writing in which we are casting about to discover what we want to say. I have given you some ideas, and the posts, articles, essays, and videos that I've shared with you offer lots more ideas. But I have another method to share with you today, and I'm actually using this method now to write this post. Let me explain:

When I saw on my schedule that it was time for me to write my blog post for this class, I wasn't really sure what I wanted to talk about. I was finished tweaking your Assessment 8 (yes, they are all done), and so my mind was full of stuff that we will discuss at the end of this term — not now. So to procrastinate (yes, all of us procrastinate), I decided to check my Gmail, and I saw this link to a blog post by Stephen Downes, a Canadian educator whom I've been following for almost 20 years now. To procrastinate just a bit more, I followed the link down the rabbit hole to find just the article that I wanted to share with you this morning. Wow.

Downes' post is entitled (take note as Downes writes pretty good titles) "Where Do Blog Post Ideas Come From?" Can you already guess what his article is about? Of course you can. So learn something here: titles for blog posts and chemistry research papers are important. They are like the big red X on a treasure map. They point to whatever message or value your reader is supposed to take away from reading your document, from following the winding path through your maze of words. After reading your document, your reader should be able to look back at the title and say, "Yeah, I got that." If they add, "And it was worth it," then that's even better.

Downes wrote this post in response to a question from one of his blog readers who is also trying to write a blog, just as you are doing in this class: 

Do you have any advice on how to come up with blog post ideas? I recently launched an informational website, so far I have around 40 articles and I'm already finding it difficult to come up with ideas that aren't just a regurgitation of something else I already discussed in another article.

Appropriately, Downes uses a standard response pattern of question/answer to organize his post. He starts with the question and then he answers it. This is easy for his readers to follow and for him to write. We will talk more in the term about organization patterns, but the lesson now is to see how a skillful writer does it. If he wants his readers to find the X, the message in his document, then he has to start where they are (in this case, clueless about how to get ideas for blog posts) and then lead them turn by turn to the X (in this case, with some ideas about how a prolific blogger gets ideas for his thousands of posts — really, thousands). He sets up the question and gives the answer. Simple and very effective.

I could stop here, but I really haven't told you yet how I'm using Downes' post to write my own post, though you may be seeing hints of it already.

For me, Downes' advice boils down to paying attention and taking notes. Downes connects to lots of people and ideas, and he keeps notes about what he sees — lots of his blog posts are his notes about something that he's read or some conversation that he's had with an interesting person (see his post "The TRUST Principles for digital repositories"). He then gives a six phase heuristic for processing all these information flows that he calls the "critical literacies":

I link things together. This is what can be called the 'idoru' phase of the work - the intuitive perceiving of patterns of phenomena (and like anything 'intuitive', it takes practice, a lot of practice). Over the years I've identified six major forms (which I call the critical literacies): 

1. evidence of similarities, rules, patterns, regularities
2. patterns of meaning, truth, valuation
3. uses and applications of things, affordances 
4. influences of frames, contexts, environments 
5. cognitive applications, such as explanation, inference, definitions 
6. patterns of change, including cycles, exponential change, tipping points

So not only is Downes constantly alert to the information flows that he has set up for himself and constantly taking notes about what he observes, he is also constantly massaging that information and looking for new connections, new meanings. These new connections and meanings allow him to write things that are from time-to-time of value to his readers. For instance, I do not find all of his posts of value. His post about "The TRUST Principles" does not directly affect me just now — or I don't see the effects — so I did not pay it much attention other than to use it as an example in this post. No writer always writes something of value for every reader (snarky aside: only your mother sees ultimate value in everything you write, but she doesn't grade your papers).

This approach to writing takes a lifetime to master. I'm still working on it. I read a post from an information flow that I attend to regularly and made a connection between that info and my need to communicate with you today. Hence, this post.