stuck

I am in a hotel room in Marquette, getting a short/quiet Thanksgiving away, and trying to push through a too-familiar wall in a short writing that is overdue.

The wall is this: at a point in this writing in which I am arguing for a pedagogy that mixes rhetoric with the New London Group's (arhetorical) notions of available designs-designing-the redesigned, my justification is simply to repeat what so many have been repeating ever since someone first brought a writing class to a computer: Look, writing is changing! Look, we need to acknowledge this in our teaching and so we need to acknowledge that we need to broaden/change how we teach! Look, writing is dead! Long live writing!

It's not that what I am recommending is tiring to me, it's that the justification is. It's worn and in that part of my writing I just want to insert a citation list of the 8 million before me who've made the same argument. I don't think I can get away without making it -- I need to offer some justification for what I am doing, given the context of my writing as a response to something published on hypertext almost 10 years ago now -- but I wish I could. I worry that when they come to that part of my writing (after some paragraphs that I admit to liking for their rhythms and cheery density) others reading this are going to start making that "yeah yeah yeah" sound in their heads -- and not in a happy Beatles remembering kind of way or even with Karen O in mind.

How can I make the argument that the NLG/rhetoric mashup can be one possible answer to a need without stating the need as that old retread?

Well, the need isn't exactly the exigency I've described (writing is dead, long live...) so much as it is the lack of change in our abilities really to understand what it means that writing *is* changing. (And, of course, to write that is to imply that *I*, Queen Anne, do understand.) If writing really is changing, in other words, then the audiences and contexts are changing just as much as the technologies and kinds of texts we make -- the texts with which people younger than I are so much more fluent. I need to approach this as a strong suspicion I have that maybe, just maybe, when we say writing is changing there is a whole lot more attached to than simply "Look, now I can cut and paste! It's easier than typing!" and that it's also a whole lot more than "Oh, and now I need to pay attention to typefaces, too." Like, duh.

I wish I could just presume that we were all on the same page about this and simply move on. I wish I had a pony. I wish I were 16, too, because I want to be fluent like a fish with some of these technologies that trip up my fingers. So I'll continue to work out in this writing just what it is I am recommending against, then, but I also want to point out (to myself, sigh) that I am now trying to use this blog-writing thing to think out loud, which I have not done before. (And so just where are my feet?)

We are off to one of the main reasons (other than Mavis, Andy, and Lily, and Snowbound Books) to make the trip to Marquette: Thai House.