My half-truth

Today, I made the claim that I wanted this course to work toward an "understanding" the occupy movement without necessarily swaying you one way or the other. While I still maintain this as my goal, I must confess my own political bias. Although I maintain the movement has its issues and problems, it is probably clear that I am sympathetic with the movement, although remain ambivalent about many of its particular practices. And yes, I probably lean a bit more to left than some of you--fulfilling the "English graduate student" stereotype. Despite this bias (and we all have our biases) I am open to debate and argument--some of you may even want to argue the uselessness of the movement. This is fine. I hope that we can use the Occupy phenomenon as a 'subject' to write about. That is, I hope that by using Occupy as content, we can focus on the form of your writing. The ideas and opinions will be important, but this is a writing and research course--not a political science course, not an English course, and not discussion group on current events.

That said, I hope that together we can become more aware of our own roles in society and culture. Writing is always a situated activity; even the "essay prompt" is a particular situation that calls for a certain type of writing. We always write for a purpose and the most useless and arbitrary purpose is to write merely for a grade. We will write for each other. Your audience will be the class and, potentially, other people on the internet. As I'm sure you all have heard at one time or another, writing is all about audience. What are strategies to convince people of your point? What do you want to say? These are some of the hardest parts of the writing process.

Example: What is the purpose of this blogpost?

1.) To admit my own political bias

2.) To further explain how we will "use" the occupy movement

3.) To reflect generally on the situatedness of writing.


What I just did there is reflect on my purpose. Reflection will be a key component of this course. We will read and re-read our writing and write more based on our reading. We will create a feedback loop, where thinking happens between the writer and the page rather than in the writer's head. I am a firm believer that writing is thinking rather than writing as an "expression" of thinking.

Some of you may be reading this wondering what the hell I'm talking about. Perhaps I have not taken my audience into account. But who is my audience?

The blog format is not merely for others, but for yourself. Your final projects will take a broader audience into account and indeed your blogs will be read by fellow students and me (so think of some assignments like that) but also think of your blog as a place for brainstorming or even as a digital memory--a kind of journal that compiles your own thoughts, quotations from texts or articles you read on the web, links, images, and videos. Hopefully, we all will look back at our blogs as a record and archive of our thinking and learning.

If you facebook, I encourage you to post a link to your blogposts for your friends to read--who knows, maybe they will be interested in what you have to say.

Good luck.