This post on the topic To Read or Not To Read at College Composition and Communications Conference is part of an electronic conversation that is taking place on PRE/TEXT List and other sites. For the posts in the discussion, go to CCCC.

---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: Pre/Text issues discussion [PTISSUES@MIAMIU.ACS.MUOHIO.EDU]
Subject: ch: To read, or not to read at CCCC?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I sit here wondering how to begin a question (rumination) on the issue of reading papers at CCCC (and conferences in general), and the song "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" pops into my head. You remember the one from the 60s. So, right away I think what I'm about to say will smack of some nostalgic desire to cling to the good ole days when the Cs meant that you were going to hear "writing" and witness performances that you would later recall by city. Remember St. Louis, someone would say...that historiography panel? Yeah...incredible. Or Boston? When Elbow and Bartholomae went head to head? Or San Diego? When Schilb, Faigley, and Vitanza packed a sell-out crowd? And remember when Crowley, Jarrett, Worsham all read staggering papers? Remember when you heard graduate students stumbling nervously through some really wonderful paper they labored for months writing?

You get my point. At last year's CCCC (and at other conferences in our field), there were fewer formal papers read and more 5-minute position statements, forums, roundtables, poster sessions, etc. I understand this is a trend also designed to be more inclusive, to respond to the growth of CCCC in recent years. But, I think there is an underlying agenda that the Cs organizers are bowing to, namely, the growing complaints against the "reading" of papers. In Washington last year, I heard there was actually a staged protest against the reading of papers during one panel session. And this was reported to me rather gleefully by someone who applauded the protesters' motives.

Richard Lanham wrote the following in his book _The Electronic Word_ (and he also discussed "The Economics of Human Attention" in a writing center roundtable I chaired in Washington):

"In a society based on information, the chief scarce commodity would presumably be information not goods. But we are drowning in information, not suffering a dearth of it. Dealing with this superabundant flow is sometimes compared to drinking from a firehose. In such a society, the scarcest commodity turns out to be not information but the human attention needed to cope with it."

Now for my question...

_____What commodity are we now producing if human attention (the kind devoted to hearing "writing" by teachers and scholars who teach rhetoric, writing, and critical thinking) is so scarce that conferences like CCCC are the hotbeds of protest against reading (rather than protests against CTR, or against outdated writing assessment practices, or against any number of worthwhile topics in our field)? In other words, why is the field of composition and its official conference bowing to pressures to eliminate, or severely reduce, the venue of the essay, and the reading thereof? Is the 5th canon of rhetoric in danger of extinction altogether? Is Delivery something we reduce to 5 minute statements or posters where we stand dutifully waiting for the customer to buy our wares? Where have all the readers gone?

Cynthia Haynes
UT-Dallas

To PTIssues and the conversation.