Maria Elwan

Eng 440/540

August 27, 2012

Reading and Field Log Notes #1

REL Intro.

The social upheaval on US campuses in the late 60s and 70s helped to legitimize cultural rhetorical studies and bring it into mainstream university academia. This was initially met with resistance from college professors who up until this time saw “the problems of composition as intellectually inferior to the normal concerns of the academy and professionally unrewarding”(Nystrand et al xxii).  The advent of huge numbers of community colleges being opened in urban areas brought many students from the lower socio-economic neighborhoods to enter the world of academia. The social unrest occurring on the streets made its way to the campus halls and composition and cultural rhetorical studies began to get respect and be seen as worthy of research and study.

The “new discourse on writing” is still very much relevant today. The study of writing is not confined to the classroom but being researched in all aspects of social life. The democratizing of writing curriculum which started as a response to the social unrest that was unleashed in the late 60s and 70s, is now shifting its focus and researching the role of social media and technology in teaching American students (or all students) to be better writers and communicators.

There has been a shift in the everyday conditions and genres of writing since the 1960s and 70s due to the internet. On-line search engines make research is a lot quicker, but there is a glut of information available, so it can be time consuming to narrow down what to keep and what to discard. You also must discern between what information is scholarly and well researched and what may not be very factual.

The writing genres of texting, and twitter have had a profound influence on writing. This new shorthand with an emphasis on economy of words and removal of most vowels is finding its way to billboards and magazine ads. Twitter the online social networking service limits its tweets to messages of up to 140 characters. This new phenomena is in its early stages so, it is too soon to tell the impact it will have down the road on acceptable spelling and sentence structure.

This social media shorthand has even found its way to our Albuquerque billboards with the NM Dept. of Transportation’s ad campaign aimed at young drivers cautioning them about texting while driving and driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs.  One billboard reads “ENDWI” in capitalized letters with no other image or words. There are examples of this condensed language all around us. Texting and this new shorthand make communicating quicker. But along with the quickness comes less intimacy between the writer and reader. The practice of conversation and letter writing has been seriously impacted. Being from the older generation, I feel that the personal connection of hearing a voice on the other end of a telephone line or receiving a hand-written note in the mail adds an additional level of intimacy that is missing in today’s social messaging.

This de-personalization will inevitably affect the writer’s composition skills. When the writer is texting and trying to get their message across with as little words as possible, do they handicap themselves when they try to describe complex ideas on paper. On the other hand, perhaps this simplification in writing may actually help the writer describe complex ideas in an easy, quick manner.  It will be interesting to observe the developments in these styles of writing.