Chapter 9 – “The Future of Writing Ability” by Robert Gundlach – in REL: 247-263.

We have computers, which provide us with “a reconfiguration of human abilities”; we don’t need to memorize lists of spelling words, nor even the rules of grammar with spell check, interactive programming, bla, bla, bla.

Change! “Changing contexts, changing spheres of knowledge, changing roles for readers and writers, changing relations of power and authority [hopefully changes in underwear too]… the future of writing ability will be shaped by shifts in the ecology of discourse in which developing writers find themselves. These shifts might be brought about by the use of new technology, by new social and cultural arrangements, or, most likely, by technological change and social change.” Wow. No kidding. Do we need a 20 page essay to tell us this! All this change, just makes a fellow dizzy. Jason Epstein is quoted: “The invention of movable type created opportunities for writers that that could barely be imagined in Gutenberg’s day. The opportunities that await writers in the near future are immeasurably greater.” Oh, brave new world, that hath such computers in it. Writers using computers to create multi-media texts.

Gundlach speaks of change but has no sense of radical change, it’s “change,” developmental and incremental. This is typical of bourgeois thinking. Radical change for them is too risky, may lose them some of their privilege and power. Gundlach is pretty much happy with the way things are and with his knowledge of how the world works!

He needs to pay more attention to his own writing ability or lack thereof. This is an example of the worst kind of scholarly writing. It seems to be telling us what we already know in language we can’t understand.

Gundlach says that “the abiding question in my own work is how people learn to use written language to say what they want or need to say.” How naive is this! Fifty years of poststructuralism has already demonstrated that we can never mean what we say, nor say what we mean. Does he think there exists some kind of pre-language non-discursive, pre-verbal faculty, which “knows” the “rightness” of the words which we come up with? If if he wants to challenge poststructuralism on this, he must argue it. He can’t just pass it over, without commentary, especially in an article which purports to be a kind of bibliographic essay on the major thinking on language acquisition and use.

I defy anyone to tell me what there is to learn from reading this article? Here’s a writing lesson for Gundlach; try to avoid sounding like the slave in Waiting for Godot, when he is commanded to think. He spits out a reducto ad absurdum of “scholarly” thinking, citing and squawking out the names of authorities and sources for his gibberish. All these sources and authorities! Such a display of  learning and erudition. Such sharing of the benefits of his labors. What’s this essay even about? How people will learn to write in the future and thus develop writing ability? What we need to pay attention to as writing instructors in the development of our students? What’s at stake in the conflict between Chomsky’s standard model and this other more use based theory. In the future one learns to “reintegrate writing with speech, drawing, and other systems of symbolic representation.” Indeed, “multi-media” texts. Wow. Who ever heard of such a thing!.

Finally, we are addressed explicitly as writing instructors: “The teaching of writing can be understood as an effort to contribute to the future of writing ability [last sentence].”  Sounds good! Especially when we writing instructors understand that learning to write begins before our intervention and will continue after our instruction ends. It’s on ongoing process and we ought to orient ourselves toward the future in that, perhaps, we will teach multi-media writing.

What does the “future of writing ability” mean? How people will write in the future, that is, with the use of interactive mechanized help from computer programs? How writing ability might be redefined in the future? The very concept of writing ability will be changed in the future? Why not just say “writing ability?” Because the future of writing ability includes a sense in which writing ability might be something entirely different from what it is considered to be right now. The closest thing to any practical advice might be glimpsed in his offhand remarks about “multi-media texts,” which of course are already here.