CCCC 2005: ReviewReview: Chair's Address--Who Owns Writing? “My lord what a morning when the stars begin to fall” sang Doug Hesse. This was a beautiful and startling beginning to his multimedia opening address. “Who owns the conditions under which the writing is taught” and other questions lead Hesse to question “Who speaks for writing?” Hesse had the crowd laughing with his essay for “the essay generator”—a web site that uses standard formulas with his submission. Then, he fed the phony essay from the essay generator into the Intelligent Essay Assessor to focus us on the “machine dreams” that our field has about not having to evaluate essays in order to focus on teaching. But what does our teaching mean? Hesse predicted several scenarios then sang “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child” to continue developing his title question. His next screen was the ETS National Commission on Writing which Hesse used to focus questions of turf. How the CCCC speaks or doesn’t to the general public about “the whole of writing” is at the heart of Hesse’s concerns. Next, Hesse considered “the circulation of composition,” “the cannons of rhetoric,” and “the deicity of technology.” He claimed “we began as conference on the school subject of composition.” “Who owns the idea of writing?” led Hesse to wonder why we are losing respect for our profession on college campuses. He imagined a biological perspective of composition as “a giant stem cell” to see composition as a universal course in higher education. Hesse broke down composition into the academic, vocational, social, personal, and belle letterteristic categories to think about models for student writing so that we might question our expectations about what we do. We ask students to write about the public sphere, not in it to set up his discussion about the use of blogs and the way new technologies challenge existing institutional structures. Writing in the civic sphere is self sponsored but we teach composition as if it is institutionally sponsored. It comes down to “the nature of an activity changes according to who organizes and to what ends” claomed Hesse, or the simple questions, “who?” and “who owns writing?” “My lord what a morning when the stars shine over all” sang Hesse to conclude his remarks. From my perspective, Hesse used voice and sound in ways that continued Kathleen Yancey’s multimedia tradition of chair’s addresses. |
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