Hilarie's Response: the Comp Native

[Website Services Admin]

#341

I have recently been introducing myself (as I did in this class) as someone new to comp/rhet, but as I think more deeply about Palmeri’s essay, I realize that’s not the case. I’m new to comp theory, to Elbow, to Bartholomae, and to any number of acronyms, from WAC to FYC. I’m an old hand, however, at the study of writing – its why and its how – and, even more importantly, I think, I’m an old hand at wanting to study it. From a very early age, I’ve been interested in written voices and how they make themselves unique. My childhood diaries allude to Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne Frank, and Louisa May Alcott even as they begin to hash out a voice of my own, subtle elements of which may still persist now. (I’ll have to get back to you on that.) I’ve also always had a deep and spacious interest in process of all kinds. I want to know how others writer write, how other students read and annotate, how my professors prepare their syllabi and lectures. At the risk of being presumptuous, I’d say I’m a native compositionist who’s currently immigrating into the theory side of things.

Parsing my sense of myself as a compositionist and more generically as a scholar and a writer couldn’t be better timed, as I embark on studying for this summer’s comps. I’ve been poring through Comprehending the Comprehensives and other online resources. Reading about other people’s ways of studying – and ways of keeping calm or avoiding panicking – is so instructive, and I think it’s particularly helpful to have it written rather than shared in conversation. I’m reading what they did as they saw it, and as they choose to describe it, and because it’s written, their annotations on their experience combine with those of others in the program. The collective is helping me study, and I’m interested to see which methods stick and which ones I’ll toss aside. I’ve also dragged my binders of college notes out from their blanket of dust bunnies (and in that, I’ve revisited my own handwriting of 2001, so different from my handwriting of 2014). The content is important and interesting, but so are the flourishes and the shorthand and the – something of a paratext within the text. I had a whole system of arrows and indentations that created a mini hierarchy of ideas. The ideas that I saw as most key to my learning were enthusiastically asterisked. Sometimes I included who had made a certain comment. Some comments were quoted verbatim. Though the arrows have fallen by the wayside, I still use many of these methods in my notetaking now.

With all of this swirling around in my head, what most resonates with me in Palmeri’s prologue is his detective’s desire to sift through the past and find the kinds of connections he’s currently making within the influences that have shaped his thinking. In this, he’s doing what Hayles advocates – finding the middle way between the old and the new, bringing them closely together enough that the terms “old” and “new” don’t matter so much. He’s also doing what I’ve been doing in the service of scholarly identity building and comps prep. I’m excited to keep this going for my students when I begin teaching. As Palmeri notes, “many students were already composing multimodal texts outside of school” (2). Perhaps in addition to this, I’ll want to know what kinds of habits they have that have carried through their education, what kinds of habits they think they could or should develop, and how their own self-definition as a student plays out in their educational experiences in and out of the classroom.

[Author]

Posts