The Unabomber and Me?

A couple of weeks back I got to chatting with Sara and Joshua Seely at the big retirement shindig for our department.  The conversation eventually got around to birthdays, and it turned out that Joshua shared his birthday with my oldest niece, Morgan—May 18^th.  I of course made the comment that it was clear that awesome people are born on that day, and Joshua then proceeded to rattle off a few famous names that shared the day as well (Tina Fey is the one I remember).  My birthday was coming up (and has since passed), and I admit that I was curious about with whom I shared my birthday.  Wikipedia comes quite in handy for such deep questions.  A quick search led me to a list of births and deaths on my birthday—May 22.  I scrolled through the list not really recognizing any names that seemed worthy to drop into conversations at social gatherings.  That was, of course, until I came to one name: Theodore Kaczynski—the Unabomber.  I paused, not sure how to feel about such a fact. 

So…how does this piece of trivia fit into the mission of this blog?  Well, as I sifted through Devan’s journals, one title beyond “Rhetoric and Bullshit” stood out to me in a recent issue of College English: “The Unabomber’s Strunk and White.”  So, to celebrate my 30^th birthday, I read this article about the Unabomber’s copy of The Elements of Style on the plane ride home from the Computers and Writing conference (which very well might be the nerdiest and most awesome conference hosted by our field).  Being that’s how I spent my 30^th birthday, I think the only thing missing from my nerd repertoire is a tattoo of a Tolkien quote somewhere on my body.  So here’s it is, folks:

Article 2:

Prendergast, Catherine.  “The Fighting Style: The Unabomber’s Strunk and White.” College English 72.1 (2009) 10-28. Print.

The title, of course, caught my attention in light of the recent discovery of my weak link to the Unabomber.  But beyond that, I’ve also been thinking of issues of style recently.  In the fall I’ll be teaching English 201: Nonfiction Writing for the first time, and one of the features that makes this course different from English 102 is the greater emphasis on style.  I’ve dug through many style manuals over the past few years, but I’ve never spent much time with Strunk and White (though before reading this article, I probably wouldn’t have mentioned that for fear of having my Comp/Rhet card taken away). 

The connection between Strunk and White and the Unabomber is this: after his shack in the woods was raided by the FBI, they discovered a well-used copy of this style manual.  Prendergast then goes on to provide a historical accounting of how The Elements of Style came to be (and this was interesting information to me, as I did not know that White came on board many years later to revise Stunk’s work).  After reading through the historical accounting of this manual and its use by the Kaczynski, one thing became quite clear: White and the Unabomber are both assholes.  They seem to both use language as way of berating people and declaring their intellectual superiority (or so they perceive). 

This all brings me back to the larger discussion of style and grammar.  I have yet to find a grammar book that I totally love.  The book I’ve read the most and tend to agree with the most is Kolln’s Rhetorical Grammar.  Her discussion of grammar as another rhetorical tool in a writer’s tool belt was revelatory for me, and I have often used that metaphor in teaching and consulting with writers. Students respond well to the idea that grammar is often a set of choices rather than a steadfast list of rules that no one understands (other than crazy assholes like the Unabomber).  I also enjoy reading Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves, and Prendergast mentions this book as one that follows Strunk and White’s “warlike, exhortative style” (13), and while I do recall that Truss made a strong stand against the misuse of apostrophes, I don’t think she was as big of an asshole as Strunk and White.  I remember thinking that she backed off considerably from her strong stance and seemed to be having some fun (which would have completely stroked out Strunk and White).  In grad school I took a class on the theory and practice of teaching grammar (from Devan, no less!), and we sifted through many books about grammar.  I found myself often dissatisfied, particularly by books that seemed to make a strong stance in their titles.  Grammar Alive!, I remember thinking, should have been titled Grammar…Alive?.  Another grammar book we read was Breaking the Rules, and it rarely seemed to actually call for breaking the rules.  Ugh.  Would somebody please write a style guide that is interesting, often entertaining, and perhaps even user/student-friendly?

So…my search for a non-asshole style/grammar guide continues.  Devan uses Adios, Strunk and White, and while I haven’t read it yet, the title is catchy in light of my new knowledge about The Elements of Style—I say adios, indeed.  I plan on checking it out soon, and I hope the authors don’t disappoint. 

More tomorrow!

mk

Maiden Post (including some thoughts on "Rhetoric and Bullshit")

Hello, all.

I was recently handed down a collection of scholarly journals about composition studies by Devan Cook, a teacher and mentor of mine who retired (a bitter, bittersweet gift!). I was unbelievably humbled by this gift and promised that I would cherish them—this blog is an attempt to honor that promise.

This blog is really an excuse to assuage some of my current fears.  Because I am no longer taking classes, I fear my brain is going mushy, growing more and more waterlogged by my day-to-day duties as a teacher and Writing Center AD.  And since I’ve completed my program, I haven’t had much of a chance to write, and I fear that writing may very well be a skill that might get rusty.  And, worst yet, I fear my voice—the writer’s voice I toiled to develop—might dry up as a side effect of teacher/administrator burnout.  Ultimately, though, this blog is chance for me to do something I haven’t done in a while—to commit to something, to really tackle a project—for myself.  And while this is a project I am undertaking for selfish reasons, I hope it serves another purpose, as a "thank you" to all of my teachers from grad school who have inspired me to want to keep learning, even long after our classes ended.  (Too mushy?  Okay, enough of that…)

So, here’s my plan: I hope to read and write about an article from one of these journals every day.  (Okay, I fully intend on reading and writing nearly every day, or hopefully some days, or perhaps just as often as I can.)  Some days this blog will be my excuse to read an article that’s been on my to-do list for some time.  Other days I intend on playing article roulette, selecting an article to read by randomly pulling a journal off of my shelf.  I can’t say as of yet what the responses will look like, what exactly their purpose will be, or how they might shift over time.  I might just end up posting pictures of my dogs.

Well, here it is folks, my maiden post…

Enjoy or ignore!

Best,

mk

Article 1:

Fredal, James. “Rhetoric and Bullshit.” College English 73.3 (2011): 243-259.  Print.

For those who know me, this choice for a first article to read for my new blog will probably seem quite obvious: “Rhetoric and Bullshit” certainly caught my eye as I skimmed through my newly acquired journals, as I’m sure it caught yours.  It should also be of no surprise that my favorite Hemingway quote is, “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector.”  I would argue that that this kind of shit-detector is absolutely a crucial tool for any composition instructor.  (And this is not to say that students go out of their way to bullshit us—though some do—but I find it’s more common that students are bullshitting themselves through their essays, and we must be able to identify their bullshit so that we may help them to better understand how to avoid it themselves.) 

I have also grown increasingly interested in rhetoric over the past year since Clyde has been around.  Rhetoric, of course, has garnered a bad rap—that rhetoric is really just bullshit (and, to some extent, I can see where that perception comes from).  Fredal relies on the previous work of Harry Frankfurt to start fleshing out the definition of bullshit.  Frankfurt says that bullshit is “what results when speakers conceal from their audience a lack of concern for the truth” (qtd. In Fredal 244).   Fredal doesn’t fully agree with all of Frankfurt’s assertions, however, because there are many factors to consider when considering a writer or speaker’s intention regarding the truth.  At one point during my reading of this article I began to question Fredal’s own intention.  Here’s the beginning of a sentence that left me wondering:

“Like bullshitter bullshit, bullshit bullshit focuses on one important element of the bullshit phenomenon…” (249).

Was Fredal bullshitting us in this article???  I ultimately decided not because of Fredal’s final point of defining the difference between rhetoric and bullshit:

If bullshit is one-sided discourse, and arises in encounters characterized by the perception of arrogance and insult, then rhetoric must be defined as discourse that affords due regard to all participants in an encounter and all perspectives in a dialogue or discourse, particularly the non-dominant positions most likely to go unheard. […] Rhetoric ought to be defined with reference to the affordance of due attention and regard to all participants in an encounter, all perspectives in an exchange, all side of an issue. (257)

Fredal clarifies for me that rhetoric is not just about the “art or science of persuasive discourse” (256), which was my previous understanding.  I like this new definition, I suppose, because it will help me better explain the purpose of argument to my students, who often think that argument is about picking a fight as opposed to recognizing and contemplating all sides of an issue (and even acknowledging where the opposing side has a good point).

Final thoughts about rhetoric and bullshit: Fredal’s discussion definitely encourages me to continue exploring rhetoric.  I have always considered myself a natural rhetorician because of my ability to size up people and situations and adapt accordingly, and now I’d like to be more conscientious about it.  At the same time, I also recognize that being a rhetorician can only get you so far.  There are times in life when you need to be a bullshitter.  (Small talk with strangers and family members is a bullshitting strategy I could improve on!)

As I was wrapping up this first post, I was flipping through the TV channels. I chuckled to myself as I came across the season premiere of “The Bachelorette”.  Speaking of bullshit and the lack of concern for the truth…!

More tomorrow (and I hope it's not bullshit...)

mk