week 12 Jose Covo

With relation to the previous texts, the Lorraine case is evidently more accesible to what we might term an everyday reader experience. While I, personally, did find this non-fiction piece more enjoyable and maybe easier to relate to my own experience in the writing center, I cannot say that it is somehow a superior form of academic writing. Traditional academic efforts are designed, I believe, to convey information in an appropriate and close-to-scientific way. It would be beside the purpose of academic writing to embellish or reduce the amount of jargon. Having said that, it might be useful to have the type of writing seen in the Lorraine case side by side with more technical texts. Each form has something the other lacks, but instead of trying to synthesize a third form that would include aspects of these previous two, I see the distinction as necessary and useful. In their distinctness, they serve different purposes, none the more important.


As to my online writing center, I have yet to receive a student in my online office. I can report, however, on my other zoom-related activities. Attending classes is enjoyable, and obviously a very different experience than sitting in a classroom. Seeing everyone's faces at once has a very panopticon feel to it, without there being, in distinction with the traditional idea of the panopticon, a center from which all are regarded. I am reminded, apropos the state of online life, of the famous dictum from a somewhat obscure twelfth century book: “God is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.”

Comments

  1. KathApril 7, 2020 at 2:41 PM

    Hi Jose,

    I like that you make the distinction re: the kinds of writing that "they serve different purposes" while pointing out how one style could potentially lend some element to the other. In my own work, the discourse between "public-facing" and "traditional academic" is something we discuss; to what extent/to what end do we write for a specialized audience, and when/how is it more appropriate to write for a larger audience?
    Side note: I love the quotation. There is something very strange and surreal about talking to my student in California and my classmates in the same town in consecutive sessions!

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  2. Carol SeverinoApril 8, 2020 at 2:38 PM

    I agree with you that creative and academic writing are complementary: one possesses what the other lacks. And I do think there is a third genre, let's call it creative academic writing or academic creative writing, where research findings on a theme--say, how the pandemic is changing our culture--can be constructed with survey and interview data as well as personal anecdotes creatively rendered. Twenty years from now when we're looking back at this pandemic and dozens of social and natural scientific studies have been done on it, a creative-academic hybrid would be to compare and contrast the studies' findings in as Kathleen says, a public-facing way. Many non-fiction and fictional works are based on and incorporate extensive research, for example, The Boys in the Boat, about the University of Washington Rowing Team winning the Olympics in Nazi Germany in 1936. I recently read it because my granddaughter in the fourth grade was reading an abridged version of it.

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