Preface
Background and Rationale
Close and careful reading of texts has long been recognized as a key component of developing writing skills at the college level, but the role of reading in college composition has become increasingly problematic in recent years. Some writing instructors have argued that building an introductory college course around a set of shared readings—no matter the genre, medium, or level of literariness—interferes with a focus on student writing. They associate difficult and challenging course readings with a teacher-centric tradition from which student writing is trying to escape. They cast reading in a dichotomy against writing. At the same time, these same writing instructors agree that students must write about something, and college is the time to begin interacting with texts at an advanced level. But which texts, and how do we keep them from taking over the course and eclipsing our focus on student writing?
Part of the problem with reading in composition is the current medium through which college students interact with course readings. The traditional composition “reader” is an anachronism, especially when we compare it with how students already consume texts outside of an academic environment and with how they will be expected to read professionally. A bound, print collection of “all rights reserved” readings freezes a sliver of the universe of texts into a closed, expensive, and finite product.
The use of an anthology of readings in composition reinforces a hierarchy in which the instructor (or the department) ostensibly controls the content of the course through a narrow selection of readings the students are supposed to consume. But some fictions underlie this hierarchy. Too often, the instructor ends up controlled by the content, and the student, already pressed for cash and time, takes a pass on consuming it. The irony here is that readings that go unread don’t actually take over the writing course at all; they instead become a stand-in for course content and genuine student engagement. Forced to choose between a $100 collection of readings and a $60 tank of gas, students take the gas and fake the reading.
As a result, many writing instructors (and some entire departments) are beginning to wean themselves from $100 readers and instead are considering the prospect of going DIY, cobbling together alternatives. But this can be a very labor-intensive and daunting process, given the lack of coherence and cohesion in the current universe of open educational resources (OERs) and the reading difficulty of many texts in the public domain.
If you’ve been dipping your toes into these waters, The Flat World Knowledge Rhetorical Reader for Writers (FWKRRW) aims to validate what you are doing already and to help you arrange and curate what can otherwise be a bewildering and overwhelming assortment of options. Like a good museum installation, FWKRRW refrains from making the claim that its exhibition is exhaustive; instead, it attempts to inspire and guide users (both you and your students) to seek out additional examples on your own.
If you currently use a traditional composition reader, FWKRRW may be an appealing first step into the alternative universe of digital texts. It features a recognizable apparatus you would expect to find in a reader (introductory headnotes, questions before and after readings, assignment sequences, rhetorically arranged chapters, and an alternative table of contents [TOC]). But because it is born digital and draws its content from OERs, from material published under Creative Commons licensing, and from texts in the public domain, it is entirely and immediately accessible online at a fraction of the market cost of a print reader.
Organization
The standard, “off-the-shelf” version of FWKRRW is arranged rhetorically into six chapters based on the six types of discourse laid out in the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Statement on Multiple Uses for Writing. The relevant portions of that statement are reprinted here:
The Conference on College Composition and Communication affirms that many genres and uses of writing must be taught well in the nation’s schools, colleges, and universities:
forms of academic discourse that document with integrity what is known, while recording principled inquiry into the unknown, including analyses, reports, exploratory essays, essay exams, case studies, summaries, abstracts, and annotations;
forms of aesthetic discourse that encourage the individual imagination to engage with diverse cultural traditions, including poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, drama, screenplays, and songwriting;
forms of civic discourse that energize all manner of inclusive deliberation, the ideal product of which is just relations among the citizenry, broadly conceived, including arguments, commentaries, charters and manifestoes, surveys, debates, petitions, and editorials;
forms of cross-cultural discourse that bridge the divides among speakers of various Englishes as well as speakers of other languages, especially collaborative, visual, and Internet-based projects, including websites, wikis, blogs, newsletters, interviews, and profiles;
forms of personal discourse that create and maintain relationships, including a relationship with one’s self, as a means to social and emotional well-being, including journals, personal narratives, memoirs, reflections, meditations, conversations, dialogues, and correspondence, all in various media;
forms of workplace discourse that observe established conventions, though never at the expense of failing to convey ideas that enlighten and compel, including memos, proposals, evaluations, oral presentations, lab and progress reports, letters, reviews, instructions, and user manuals.
In an alternate, thematically arranged version of the book (the first “MIYO,” or make it your own, if you will), these same readings are arranged into six broad themes—education, work, politics, commerce, identity, and technology—with a separate set of thematic writing assignments. Thanks to the digital nature of Flat World Knowledge texts, with the click of a single button, you are able to select the rhetorical or thematic version of the book, depending on your approach to teaching composition. This rhetorically arranged version features an alternate thematic TOC (at the end of this preface), and vice versa: the thematic MIYO features an alternate rhetorical TOC. Flat World Knowledge’s MIYO customization feature will also make it possible for you to create a hybrid of rhetorical and thematic approaches to the readings (besides, of course, altering the collection as you see fit).
We encourage you to “own” this collection by adjusting it to meet the demands, modalities, and local characteristics of your course. Flat World Knowledge’s flexible and customizable model (MIYO) is the perfect vehicle to help users to refine, expand, and improve on this 1.0 version of the reader. Our sincere hope is that in the years to come, several alternative MIYO versions of this collection will emerge.
Uses and Applications
Regardless of the arrangement you choose, rhetorical or thematic, the guiding principle will be to expose students to as many as six different kinds of discourse at the same time that they are exposed to as many as six thematic fields of interest. Like the Flat World Knowledge Handbook for Writers, FWKRRW gives students the tools they need to become full participants in higher education. In this case, they will come to know their strengths and weaknesses as readers and writers in certain thematic areas and certain types of discourse.
By emphasizing that themes can be expressed through multiple genres and discourses, FWKRRW will present students with a matrix of reading questions, writing assignments, and possibilities for further work. The goal of the reading and writing processes that form this book will be for a student to isolate a couple of themes and a couple of discourses to explore in more detail over the course of the semester, and beyond, as in these examples of students X, Y, and Z:
student X, pursuing a high school teaching career, might explore how both academic and personal discourses inform the world of education;
student Y, pursuing a career in information systems, might explore how both workplace and aesthetic discourses inform the world of technology;
student Z, pursuing a career in international marketing, might explore how both cross-cultural and civic discourses inform the world of commerce;
and so on.
FWKRRW is not about reading for reading’s sake. It’s about reading widely and well in order to find one’s way into the world. By learning how writers use different types of discourses to explore a similar theme, or how different themes employ similar discourse types, students will begin to see that their college-level reading and writing experiences will take them well beyond the mere academic essay.
We close with a couple of final suggestions for how to expand your students’ horizons beyond the traditional essay modes: the first involves your students in reflection; the second, in publication.
Consider building a reflective capstone project into your course, perhaps using the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, recently released by the Council of Writing Program Administrators, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Writing Project. Your students could use a reflective letter and portfolio to showcase through artifacts their most important reading and writing milestones of the term. The Framework builds on the already highly influential WPA Outcomes Statement by adding eight habits of mind deemed to be essential for success in postsecondary writing classes:
Curiosity—the desire to know more about the world.
Openness—the willingness to consider new ways of being and thinking in the world.
Engagement—a sense of investment and involvement in learning.
Creativity—the ability to use novel approaches for generating, investigating, and representing ideas.
Persistence—the ability to sustain interest in and attention to short- and long-term projects.
Responsibility—the ability to take ownership of one’s actions and understand the consequences of those actions for oneself and others.
Flexibility—the ability to adapt to situations, expectations, or demands.
Metacognition—the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking as well as on the individual and cultural processes used to structure knowledge.
These habits are emphasized throughout the book—in headnotes, chapter introductions, and questions before and after readings—just as much as the six discourse types and the six broad themes. After engaging with the readings and assignments in this book, students will be ready to take a comprehensive backward glance at what they’ve accomplished, while plotting a much clearer forward pathway to pursue as they make their way through the rest of their academic experience and professional lives.
The second idea is to consider using this collection as a springboard to enhancing or even replacing your current, top-down “course management system” with something constructed a little more from the ground upward, like a course wiki. Regardless of the platform (Wiki Spaces, PB Wiki, Weebly, Google Sites, or whatever), a wiki allows you to subject your course documents to frequent revision in collaboration with your students, and more important, it invites a space for your students to publish their work. Instead of having your students submit their essays directly to you, they could publish them to collaboratively designed pages on the wiki.
Central to this concept is the “editorial board session,” where you collectively agree as a class on the voice, audience, message, tone, attitude, intended reception, and overall design for the particular issue of the wiki page (or “weblication”). Students might then be expected to write individual essays that could find a comfortable home in the collective weblication, to create a page on the wiki for their essay, to write a fifty-word blurb advertising it, and then to link from the main weblication page to their essay.
Why go to the trouble of weaning our students from traditional essay modes? We live in an era in which information has never been cheaper and education has never been more expensive. If we as educators are not adding value, rigor, and focus to our students’ daily experience of consuming fistfuls of bandwidths of data, if we’re not challenging our students to produce as much as they consume on the web, they can be forgiven for bypassing us as antiquated, full-service tollbooth attendants guarding an E-ZPass–enabled digital superhighway. Agreeing to meet students where they live—in the fungible, slippery world of socially mediated, digital textuality—will put their Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook feeds through a necessary academic spin cycle. Above all, encouraging original digital production from students accustomed to recycled digital consumption will give them a good reason to stop by our full-service rhetorical tollbooths after all.
Alternate Thematic Table of Contents
This version (also available as a MIYO [or make it your own]) arranges the same readings of the rhetorical version of the anthology into six broad themes: education, work, politics, identity, commerce, and technology.
Chapter 1: Education
The New National Primer (1840)
“America at School” (1894–1915)
The Library of Congress American Memory Project
My Pedagogic Creed (1897)
John Dewey
The First Year Book: Teacher’s Edition (1914)
Decennial Census Data on Educational Attainment (1940–2000)
US Census Bureau
Commencement Address at American University (1963)
John F. Kennedy
“Student Commencement Speech” (1969)
Hillary D. Rodham
“The Wilderness of Your Intuition” (1980)
Alan Alda
Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever (1996)
Arthur W. Chickering and Stephen C. Ehrmann
“Find What You Love” (2005)
Steve Jobs
“Real Freedom?” (2005)
David Foster Wallace
Character Education: An Historical Overview (2009)
Robert Tatman, Stacey Edmonson, and John Slate
“National Address to America’s Schoolchildren” (2009)
Barack Obama
“Your Money or Your Life”
Barbara Kingsolver
Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts (2010)
National Governors’ Association
Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing (2011)
Council of Writing Program Administrators
Chapter 2: Work
“The Way to Wealth” (1758)
Benjamin Franklin
Part Two from the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1784)
Benjamin Franklin
“Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853)
Herman Melville
From Ragged Dick (1867)
Horatio Alger
“Wealth” (1889)
Andrew Carnegie
“America at Work” (1894–1915)
The Library of Congress American Memory Project
“Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives” (1935–44)
“Radio Address Unveiling the Second Half of the New Deal” (1936)
Franklin D. Roosevelt
WPA Posters (1936–43)
Chapter 3: Politics
“Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” (1775)
Patrick Henry
The Declaration of Independence (1776)
Library of Congress
Gettysburg Address (1863)
Abraham Lincoln
“Excerpts from The First Kennedy-Nixon
Presidential Debate (1960)”
John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon
“Farewell Address” (1961)
Dwight D. Eisenhower
“Inaugural Address” (1961)
John F. Kennedy
“The Great Society” (1964)
Lyndon B. Johnson
“The Crisis of Confidence” (1979)
Jimmy Carter
“Excerpts from The First Reagan Mondale
Presidential Debate”
Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale
“Address on the Space Shuttle Challenger (1986)
Ronald W. Reagan
“Remarks by the President during ‘A Time of Healing’ Prayer Service” (1995)
Bill Clinton
Address to Joint Session of Congress: September 20, 2001”
George W. Bush
“A More Perfect Union” (2008)
Barack Obama
“Excerpts from The First Obama Mccain Presidential Debate (2008)”
Barack Obama and John McCain
Chapter 4: Identity
“Petition” (1777)
Prince Hall
From Notes on the State of Virginia (1784)
Thomas Jefferson
“On the Equality of the Sexes” (1790)
Judith Sargent Murray
From The Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
Mary Wollstonecraft
“The Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions” (1848)
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
“What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (1852)
Frederick Douglass
“Civil War Glass Negatives and Related Prints” (1861–65)
Library of Congress
“Liljenquist Collection of Civil War Photographs” (1861–65)
Library of Congress
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
Lewis Carroll
“The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“The Story of an Hour” (1894)
Kate Chopin
“The Four Freedoms” (1941)
Franklin D. Roosevelt
“World War II Poster Collection” (1941–45)
Northwestern University Library
“After the Day of Infamy: ‘Man-on-the-Street’ Interviews Following the Attack on Pearl Harbor” (1941)
The Library of Congress American Memory Project
“Executive Order 9066” (1942)
Franklin D. Roosevelt
“Ansel Adams’s Photographs of Japanese Internment at Manzanar” (1943)
Library of Congress
“Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (1963)
Martin Luther King Jr.
Selections from “September 11 Television Archive” (2001)
Internet Archive
“Featured Drawings” (2001)
The Library of Congress American Memory Project
Interviews from the “September 11, 2001, Documentary Project” (2001)
The Library of Congress American Memory Project
Chapter 5: Commerce
From An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)
Adam Smith
From The Communist Manifesto (1848)
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Selections from “Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850–1920”
Duke University Libraries
“Barnum and Bailey and Adolph Friedlander Circus Posters” (1900)
Wikimedia Commons
“Prosperity and Thrift: The Coolidge Era and the Consumer Economy” (1921–29)
Library of Congress
Selections from “Popular Graphic Arts”
Library of Congress
“Selected Classic TV Commercials from the Prelinger Archives” (1950s–1960s)
Internet Archive
Selected Political Advertisements from the 1960 Presidential Campaign
Living Room Candidate
Selected Political Advertisements from the 1984 Presidential Campaign
Living Room Candidate
Selected Political Advertisements from the 2008 Presidential Campaign
Living Room Candidate
“What’s Your Consumption Factor?” (2008)
Jared Diamond
Chapter 6: Technology
“The Mouse’s Petition, Found in the Trap Where He Had Been Confin’d All Night” (1773)
Anna Laetitia Barbauld
From Frankenstein (1818)
Mary Shelley
Selected Patents (1838–1905)
Smithsonian Institution
“The Birthmark” (1844)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
From Looking Backward, 2000 to 1887 (1887)
Edward Bellamy
From “In the Year 2889” (1889)
Michel Verne
“Inventing Entertainment: The Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies” (1891–1918)
The Library of Congress American Memory Project
From The Time Machine (1898)
H. G. Wells
“The Belief That Flight Is Possible to Man” (1900)
Wilbur Wright
“Wright Brothers Negatives” (1903)
Library of Congress
“Youth” (1952)
Isaac Asimov
“Three Special Events in the History of Technology for Creating, Organizing, and Sharing Information” (2006)
C. Sidney Burruss and Richard Baraniuk
“Technology Marches On” (2011)
Television Tropes and Idioms
“Envisioning Technology” (2011)
Michael Zappa