The Web Writing Style Guide from Writing Spaces was released today.
I’m impressed with what a few folks did in a very short amount of time–6-7 weeks I think. It was an experiment in crowdsourcing that worked. With 16-17 writers, a few editors, a copy editor or two, some code gurus who made it happen online. I read it already as I copy edited, and I learned a lot.
What a cool thing to do. Please read and enjoy.
My goal in the course of our WAC class is to read something about WAC five days a week and see how I can apply that to my own writing, my teaching this summer term, and also to the fall classes I’m preparing to teach: a composition studies class on basic writing pedagogy and a freshman honors comp on Civil Rights writing.
My favorite place to find WAC inspiration is the WAC Clearinghouse. And I’m interested in Across the Disciplines in particular because I’m writing something this summer to send off to them by Sept. 1.
This morning, I’ve read Michael Pemberton’s “Reflections on Across the Disciplines” for two reasons: 1) my goal–mentioned above; 2) I need to know something more about the journal I’ll be submitting to–mentioned above. But there is a third reason, I heard that online journals were moving fast these days so that publication was not taking a year to reach readers, but a matter of weeks. I was hoping to see how ATD was handling this and was delighted to see that they are embracing the whole publish articles when they are ready, not when the whole issue is ready. I like that. It adopts a “just-in-time” method of knowledge dissemination that more mimics teaching (the point of publishing in the academy is teaching one another!).
One of the featured article Pemberton talks about is of particular interest to me: Katherine K. Gottschalk’s, “Writing from Experience: The Evolving Roles of Personal Writing in a Writing in the Disciplines Program.” I’m deeply invested in the idea that if we work from a personal place as writers, and get entirely comfortable being writers, then we can work as writers in a number of disciplines given appropriate content and vocabulary knowledge. But it all comes from seeing ourselves as writers–one of the reasons I sequence freshman comp 1 to move from personal writing to writing that projects outward and to the future, one of the reasons I always want student reflects and responses to reading to take on a more personal note–what are you really learning when you read, what are you really thinking.
If we don’t see ourselves as writers, we are hobbled. When we write a lot and write from our central core of self, then we learn to see ourselves as writers, in a community of writers (so true of a class), and we start to see ourselves as writers. Writers can do anything. Give us 36 hours and we can research and understand a particular issue and then write about it–maybe not in total depth, but we have no fear that our thinking in text will be good communication, at the least, raising questions that need raising.
The Gottschalk article isn’t long. If you have time to read through, go for it. If not, bookmark it for later. It confirms my belief that our first term comp assignment of a literacy narrative is both personal and opens the door to talking about academic endeavors across the disciplines. Sometimes reading scholarship is so affirming. Not always, but today, I got that, and I totally feel like a writer.
I’m going to try to enjoy that feeling all day.
write across this_________ 