Andrea Lunsford's Talk at DePaul

Last Friday, as part of an on-going program for professional development, made possible by a shiny new departmental budget, DePaul University’s Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse Department hosted Andrea Lunsford, author of (among other things) The St. Martin’s Handbook for Writing. I’ve used the SMH for about six years now (editions four through six are on my bookshelf, and edition seven is in my backpack), so I felt like I was meeting a bona fide celebrity in the world of rhetoric, and a servicable one in the world at large. Andrea Lunsford’s most immediate claim to fame is as the Writing/Rhetoric Director at Stanford, but despite that lofty title she was pleasantly down to earth, a trim woman with graying hair and a disarming smile that (in the words an NYC cab driver once used to describe her) has “English teacher written all over [her]”.

The meeting was billed as a discussion, and some of my First Year Writing colleagues and I were initially unsure what that meant. My own joking plan, if pressed for a question, was to whip out the handbook, point to a random sentence, and test her acumen for diagraming. Lunsford, however, was more than capable of extemporaneous lecturing, and over the two hour discussion described her thoughts on all manner of things regarding rhetoric, academic life, and the role her own handbook plays in her teaching. There was WAY too much to go into here, but these are the highlights from my perspective:

The Stanford Writing Center

The Writing Center at Stanford University that Lunsford described was unlike any I’d ever heard of, in that it seemed to be a resource for student development in addition to being a place where student’s could come for help. When I worked at Evansville’s writing center in college, we would read over student’s papers and then send them (the students) on their merry, hopefully unbaffled way. The Writing Center at Stanford, by contrast, seems almost like a social club. They have been responsible for helping start four journals and an oral club, and regularly host open mics, readings, and staff events on writing that are quite well-attended (even on Friday nights). According to Lunsford, this demonstrates that Institutions have a large number of students dedicated to learning writing, but who have minimal outlets available for expressing this interest. If run lovingly and well, a writing center can be a nexus for disciplinary advancement in addition to a place to pop by and get your grammar checked.

Writing and Families

Early in the discussion, a colleague of mine asked why an industry that makes its living on children (college academics) is so inhospitable to members of that community who want to have children of their own. Lunsford agreed that this was a paradox, and shared stories of several people she knew, women mostly, who had to give up tenure track jobs because of family obligations—geographically or otherwise. It’s a fault on my part, but as a man without children I’d never given thought to how hard it would really be to raise a child in circumstances where you were also required to publish a book in four years, among other things. Lunsford said that departments have an obligation to accomodate for the personal lives of their employees, and says that Stanford fulfills this duty by doing things like not scheduling meetings during pick-up times, scheduling all evening activities well in advance, and making a play area availible in the writing center. I was glad to hear of these efforts, even if I was ashamed that the problem, like I said before, had never occured to me. But that’s why I attend these discussions.

Responding to Disinterested Students

Lunsford was asked what she said to students that didn’t think they needed to take writing, and gave the following responses. (1) Writing is Developmentally Slow Students will need practice refining what they learn in high school, and nobody at eighteen, regardless of how much writing they’ve done, is the best writer they are ever going to be. (2) Writing is Changing More Now Than in the Past 2,300 Years. With the advent of the internet, and increasing obligations to integrate visuals into writing, students need to become familiar with updated discourse modes and conventions. (3) There is a Great Connection between Writing and Thinking. Recent research has suggested that the human brain, at seventeen, has not yet reached its highest level of cognitive ability, and skill at writing has proven quite effective at helping shape the ability to interact with the world. (4) The Best Twelfth Grade Education in the World Cannot Fully Prepare You. The gap between high school and college is simply too great, and the requirements of the two arenas too different, to think that you can make the transition completely on your own. Required writing classes can make the leap easier.

Those are all good ideas, and I plan on making them part of my opening day spiel.

Incidentally, I mentioned to some students that I’d met the author of The St. Martin’s Handbook, and their jaws invariably dropped, as though I’d said that I spent last Friday morning just chilling with Timbaland. Their astonishment threw me, but my working theory is that from their perspective the SMH is this ridiculously dense and comprehensive tome of archaic knowledge, and it is strange to think that it all came out of one person. She must be, like, a genius or something.

I don’t know about that, but she certainly leads one heck of a discussion group.

Posted by Alan Ackmann - May 20, 03:30 PM.
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