In Response to Prompt 2 – How is seeing writing/communication as Artificial or Natural useful?
Writing is, as Emig points out on page 124, a “primary technology”. A device through which an individual transforms their thoughts into a form that can be stored and reproduced by someone else. The whole concept is mind blowing when you really think about it. “I CAN PUT MY BRAIN ON PAPER!” It’s the earliest form of recording device.
But there’s still this distinct artificiality to it, at least when it’s done poorly. That’s kind of this underlying issue that a lot of these readings are trying to deal with. Bartholomae, when he talks about writing being caught up in culture, and of a need to be critical, speaks to a thought that I’ve had about writing ever since I started incorporating Engfish into my curriculum: some writing just feels… fake.
There’s a concept called the Uncanny Valley, which is a term coined by robotics professor Masahiro Mori. The idea is that humans are hardwired to recognize certain traits as being “human”. When these traits are replicated, we tend to accept them (and even find them cute) when they’re highly stylized. After a certain point, however, things become too realistic. You end up with something that looks extremely human, but is off somehow. On a bell curve, this creates a sharp dip in the response. Once things look 100% human, then acceptance levels spike back up. This creates a “valley” effect.
I’d argue that writing, particularly the writing that Bartholemae and Elbow are talking about, functions in a similar way. You have papers that are obviously just… bad writing. The person doing them is very young, or is new to English, or is just really bad at grammar. Or maybe they have this informal honesty to their writing, but they’re not quite college ready, yet. Up to that point, this may not be acceptable, but we accept the fact that the person in question is still learning.
But at the first year comp stage, the students typically have a functional grasp of language and grammar, and they’ve been exposed to “academic” discourse for the first time. They have an idea of what things are supposed to look like. They also have thoughts and opinions in their head, but may not know how to articulate them properly. So the end result is this kind of double translation. There’s the translation of natural thought and speech into text… but there’s also the translation of natural thought at speech into discourse, which is an entirely new language for most of these students. The result, often, is a text that looks correct to the student, but contains numerous flaws that inspire revulsion in the instructor.
This is where the problem comes in. These students should be able to think. They look like they can think, but that thought isn’t being articulated properly. The result is this idea that there’s some sort of mental deficiency in our students. That they’re incapable of thought, or caught up in social dynamics, or that there’s some sort of flaw in their logic. It ends up creating a situation where writing is like CGI in movies. When it’s done well, you don’t notice it. When it’s done poorly, it becomes the target of revulsion and mockery.
It would be more helpful to approach writing classes as a course on teaching students how to use an intellectual toolkit. We’re not some sort of department of Promethei that bring down the fire of Thought to the unwashed masses. Students can think. They just don’t know how to operate the machinery of the university yet.
