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 PRETEXT and other sites. For the list of posts in the discussion, go to CCCC.
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: Pre/Text issues discussion [PTISSUES@MIAMIU.ACS.MUOHIO.EDU]
Subject: ch--et al--to write or not to write at CCCC
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now that I've thrown out the gauntlet, so to speak, I want to follow up with more specific reasons for my concerns, and some responses to those who have expressed themselves too.
As Peter Sands said, the trouble is that "most 'conference papers' seem to be written to *read* as in a book or journal, not to be delivered and *heard*." Indeed, this is often the complaint I hear about the formal reading of papers at conferences. Some believe that formal papers belong ONLY in journals, not in conferences. Why spend all this money to go to a conference when I can read this stuff at home, or so go the arguments I have heard. Of course there can be no guarantee that we won't be bored by hearing papers poorly delivered and written without consideration of the performative occasion for the piece of writing. BUT...aren't we (as a field) ABOUT the business of the production of writing? If we don't PRODUCE writing, and PERFORM writing, why should our students? YES, our conferences are also (and some say primarily) about pedagogy, about the "accretion of approaches" to what "hundreds of us are doing and thinking," as Richard Long noted. My concerns are not about setting up this issue into an either/or dilemma. Pedagogical theory and practice can be presented in many, many ways...and should be.
And, as Joan Richmond suggests, it is a disconcerting prospect to not only face students "who are to conditioned the 'station-break' syndrome," but to face academic colleagues with the same "limitations." Well...as she also suggests...these are not limitations, so much as a function of an emphasis on electronic media. Whether it's the pause-mute-abort-retry-fail GEN Xers or the Netscape Netoricians, these are not limitations in my view!! Jeez-louise, I'm one of the most technomanic people I know! :-) I run a MOO, and I'm involved in any number of projects related to the technocultural agora many of us now participate in. So, again, I'm not interested in an either/or solution. I liked Joan's way of putting it... "taking advantage of the increasingly diverse way of dipping our toes into the stream."
Dick Fulkerson gives us good insights into the background of the trend toward the various alternative formats at CCCC. I think, though, that for me it's not just an issue of reading vs extemporaneous speaking, or even of the amount of time allowed. Granted, there are few who can do that extempo thing well...Christina Murphy is by far the master (mistress?) of this genre. I have had the privilege of presenting on panels with Chris several times, and believe me, it's not easy :) But, it's always been a learning experience, and the times I have tried the extempo thing, I know it would have gone worse had I not studied Chris's techniques. But, study I did. And, as Dick suggests, I also practice my readings (when not extemping) with a timer and my 15 cats as my audience. I just wonder, then, why we need to fold on the issue of reading formal papers when we could encourage these kinds of practices? Study good speakers. Learn to listen, to stay WITH a paper. Write our papers with reading them in mind. Practice in advance of our readings to time them, and to *hear* them aloud ourselves.
Finally, I want to respond to Richard Long's "sense" that some oppose sessions with many participants out of some resistance to chaotic disorder. I don't believe that the issue of reading papers at conferences is *necessarily* related to a desire for neat and orderly sessions in general. At least I don't see the connection. Personally, I love chaotic sessions, and I have heard excellent papers in sessions that were not orderly. Nor do I believe that a preference to hear papers is a function of the desire for a session in which the speak dominates, is in control. To me, the issue is the writing...the thinking. THAT is what I lament in the trend I am questioning. When I hear a piece of music performed, I don't question that the musicians are in control. They are performing a composition. So, I don't think we can assume this link between resistance to chaos and resistance to sessions with more speakers and fewer time limits on those speakers. Richard ends by supposing that "one's dislike for one or the other says more about the nature of the disliker than the value of the session." I don't think I dislike the large sessions, so much as lament the fact that they are displacing more of the conventional format sessions in which formal papers are read. I am a rhetorician. I always want MORE, not LESS of anything! I want BOTH/AND, not either/or! As for the question of value. The question of value is, of course, always in the heart of the one e-valuating.
Cynthia Haynes
UT-Dallas