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A One-Hour Tour

My parents came into town from St. Louis to see the new house this weekend, which went a long way towards making it feel like a completed home. And since, like most residents of Chicago, I view out of town relatives as a handy excuse to do touristy things, we decided to take an architecture boat tour of the city’s main river. My wife had taken one years ago, and said it kept the attention of most of her high school classmates—high praise. Since the company that boasted finishing their excursions with a thirty-knot speedboat ride along the lakeshore didn’t seem quite our speed (my mother has a rule about not engaging in any activity prohibited to women who are pregnant) we opted for the more leisurely folks at Shoreline Sightseeing, who did not disappoint.

Some highlights of the tour included learning how and why civil engineers reversed the flow of the Chicago River, as well as what styles of architecture speckle the skyline. We saw the architecturally insignificant home that now stands on the spot where Abraham Lincoln was nominated for president, and saw some early construction for the Chicago Spire (which, at 2,000 feet, will be one of the tallest buildings in the world upon completion in 2011). There was history about the John Hancock building and the Sears Tower, as well as a fresh little fable about the Great Chicago Fire—that the famous cow has been exonerated of all charges, and there is now a theory, evidently, that the fire was actually started by meteorites.

I know—it was new to me too.

The most literary aspect of the tour came towards the end, when the guide mentioned Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, which tells the tale of the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. I’m currently reading the book, and many of the architects in the 1893 fair—such as Daniel Burnham, John Root, and Louis Sullivan—were key in designing the city itself. It was fun getting a more vivid picture of how Chicago has changed in the past 100 years. I know very little about architecture, really, so a novice like me got a lot out of it.

The tour was also a nice way to get a fresh start to the month. May was surprisingly hectic, which took a toll on both my personal life and writing productivity. I’m glad to say, however, that this past week I was finally able to get some work done on the novel I’m writing, and that I cracked 60,000 words last Friday. There is much revision to be done, but I also have no shortage of things I still want to write. So here’s hoping that June, in the spirit of the afternoon, brings calmer waters.

Posted by Alan Ackmann - Jun 1, 11:38 PM.
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I have a Facebook Page Now

In keeping with my pattern of catching up to trends about six months after they hit their peak, I started a Facebook page yesterday. I’ve already made contact with some people from college and high school that had vanished into the distance long ago, and in the coming weeks will be working to integrate Facebook and my website here more thoroughly. But if you’re on Facebook in the meantime, drop me a line. Maybe we can be friends . . .

Posted by Alan Ackmann - May 24, 12:10 PM.
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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, 02:30 PM.
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