I’m happy to say that my POS passed (!), and I’ve begun tackling my reading list. I’ve here posted the descriptions of my field, focus, and dissertation, if only because they deal with autism and rhetoric in a large way. Of course, things are subject to change, and my thinking will evolve, I’m sure. But nonetheless, this seems to be an accurate picture of where I’m at right now.

Field || Digital Media and Composition
During my tenure as a Master’s student, when I first began identifying as a compositionist, I was heavily under the influence of Richard Fulkerson’s “Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century.” Fulkerson asserts that, in order to effectively teach a writing course, compositionists need to consider four major questions—questions of axiology, pedagogy, process of writing, and epistemology. In other words, when we, as teacher-scholars, consider and promote “good” writing, what/whose values do we promulgate? What do we assume about knowledge and meaning-making, and in what ways are our assumptions ideologically imbricated? I believe that recursively engaging Fulkerson’s questions leads to an even larger matter, one more thematically pertinent to my exam, to my ever-evolving sense of composition as a field: what does it mean to write or to compose in the twenty-first century (Selfe, Technology)?

It is with these questions that I find myself tethered to digital media studies, to the field of digital media and/or/as composition. Embedded in Fulkerson’s questions are questions of definition and being, questions of what writing itself is, of what texts are (Bolter). In what ways do we privilege alphabetic texts on a printed page—and how have these models of traditional writing been naturalized in the composition classroom? How does adherence to traditional, print-based composition diminish the importance of alternative forms of communication and meaning-making?

My own view of writing, as I approach my exam, is a multimodal one, one that considers multiple sensory channels in the making of meaning. In exploring multimodality and 21st-century writing, I look to the work of Kress and Van Leeuwen, who conceive of modes as semiotic channels through which we derive meaning—and media as the materials we use for producing multimodal texts (22). Traditional, alphabetic writing is itself a multimodal phenomenon, perhaps even a synaesthetic one, a phenomenon that might engage or mix writers’ senses of sound and/or sight (how does it sound? how does it look?), or their sense of touch (feeling the pen or the keyboard). Yet, in the academy, we privilege one medium (the printed page) for the transmission of a multimodal phenomenon, a medium that arguably excludes a large number of readers. What assumptions are made about audience when we privilege traditional texts and traditional ways of composing? And, as Fulkerson might ask, what composition processes are deemed as essential, as “right,” as “good”?

In addition to employing Fulkerson’s heuristic to composition theory, I believe we need to consider the affordances that digital media might bring to composition—the changes (or stasis) that digital mediation brings to academic genres, academic discourses, academic rhetorics, the distances bridged between composer and audience. Of course, in reconceiving traditional writing, I do not wish to naively forward multimodality and/or digital media as an accessibility savior. Yet, critical theories of media and modality, access, and audience, I would posit, undergird how we think about composition studies and digital media studies—both as distinct fields and as overlapping fields.

Although I recognize that composition studies is a broad, wide-ranging field with its own unique histories and theories¹, my own interests lie in a particular subset, that which intersects with digital media studies. Similarly, digital media studies is a field in its own right, one that stretches across disciplines in the humanities and the computer sciences and includes theories of technology, philosophy, performance, and social communication (Knievel). I believe that my defined field—digital media and composition, itself a distinct discipline with a 30-year history—both shapes and is shaped by composition studies and digital media studies as separate fields.

Because of these overlaps, I have divided my field reading list into three sections: composition studies, digital media studies, and digital media and composition. Though this categorization is somewhat contrived, I do wish to consider digital media and composition as both integrated and separate entities. My list contains texts that consider history, theory, and practice in all three categories.

Focus || Disability Studies
Though I realize that there are many overlaps, I see two major points connecting my focus to my field—issues of axiology (or, questions of value) and issues of access (or, questions of in/exclusion). Within the past two decades, many compositionists have come to understand “good” writing as a social negotiation among community members, as rhetorically catering to one’s audience (Bartholomae; Devitt, et al.; Ede and Lunsford, Singular Texts). The problem with this current configuration, I would posit, is that, even as teacher-scholars, our conceptions of audience are largely “imagined” to be a non-disabled audience, an audience filled with what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has coined normates (Ede and Lunsford). In addition to audience, we might also examine how the other ends of the rhetorical triangle, those of writer and message, have been normalized in composition studies. Teacher-scholars still, despite much debate in the field, revert to metaphors of diagnosis and detection, of blindness and deafness in their descriptions of student writers (for examples, see Flower, “Writer-Based Prose”; Gruber; Villanueva, “Blind”). Furthermore, in academia, the printed page is the primary vehicle for intellectual activity, and writers are construed as able, literate, and/or educated in accordance with their ability to encode or decode messages via this medium.

Persisting in composition studies is the ideological belief that traditional writing and intelligence are somehow inherently linked, that traditional literacy is central to defining one’s intellectual worth (Graff). This ideological understanding of composing masks the notion that writing is simply one among many systems of making and conveying meaning, that “writers” do not necessarily privilege “writing” as their primary form of communication, that among our “readers” are those who cannot always access the messages delivered within print-based texts. If we limit our definition of writing to alphabetic text on a printed page, we need only question what medium we privilege in order to grasp which audience members we privilege—and those whom we exclude (Davis, “Deafness”).

In academia, conversation has become trope—a metaphorical exchange occurring on printed pages rather than literal, interpersonal, face-to-face communication. Embedded in composition scholarship is an assumption that students best learn, think, and write by means of alphabetic text on a printed page (Bolter). I believe that studies in digital media and disability give us reason to think otherwise (for digital media, see Anson; Miles, et al.; for disability, see Wilson). Disability studies allows us to perceive the ways in which traditional writing—and composition studies’ investment in traditional writing—normalizes and has been normalized by our understanding of “the” rhetorical triangle (Dunn, Talking 150). In some sense, as evidenced by recent discussions on the Writing Program Administrator listserv, digital media technologies such as screen-readers or social networking web sites are commonly perceived as assistive technologies, as tools that help those with disabilities better approximate normate writing and normate discourse. Yet, if we revisit the Spring 2002 issue of Kairos (titled “Disability: Demonstrated By and Mediated Through Technology”), we can begin to recognize the differences between digital media as assistive versus digital media as accessible or inclusive: the former, depending on the context, can imply that the writer is somehow lacking and is in need of a technological tool to make up for this lack, whereas the latter moves toward recognizing digital media composing as a valid and valued form of intellectual communication and exchange (Duffelmeyer; Miles, et al.).

I would offer that digital media studies, in conjunction with accessibility concerns, can aid us in unmasking these naturalized assumptions about communication and meaning-making, can aid us in moving toward a 21st-century, synaesthetic, multimediated theory of writing. As scholars in digital media and composition have argued, traditional theories and practices of writing are (and should be) shifting, especially if we diversify audience in terms of disability, race, gender, nationality, class, sexuality, and other markers of difference (Anson; Wysocki). Who does digital writing allow us to reach, and how does it let us do so? In what ways can digital media render writing and writing pedagogy more accessible, more inclusive? (And, lest I sound too optimistic about digital media and the potential for access and universal design—who might digital media exclude (Banks; Selfe & Selfe)?)

Of course, disability studies is a rich, dynamic field that, despite its overlaps, finds its roots outside of studies in digital media and composition. Borne out of activism in the 1960s, disability studies, generally speaking, is concerned with a social model of disability, where societal barriers and discrimination are more disabling than any so-called disability or form of bodily difference (Linton; Robertson and Ne’eman). A humanities approach toward disability has much in common with cultural studies and other theories of diversity (Powell). For example, comparisons have been made between the civil rights movement and the activities of the Deaf community, and parallels have been drawn between gay pride and autistic self-advocacy movements (see Robertson and Ne’eman; Autism Hub).

Through this social model, individuals have reclaimed the word disability and have embraced their identities as (dis)abled, even referring to normate populations as being “temporarily able-bodied” (Heilker, “Autism and Rhetoric”).  Memoirs and other personal, narrativistic forms of life-writing have functioned as one major lifesource for disability advocacy—and, perhaps most relevant to my areas of interest, the blogosphere has also served an important role in activist movements (Couser; Wilson). Because disability is an inherently personal and embodied identity, my disability studies reading list contains memoirs, novels, blogs, and narrative theory, in addition to scholarly texts that position disability studies within composition and/or digital media. I believe that these narrativistic texts are pertinent to the questions posed above concerning axiology and access—specifically, how (dis)ability affects our conceptions of audience and how it is we conceive of “text” and “writing.” Finally, as Paul Heilker has argued, the 1974 CCCC position statement on Students’ Right to Their Own Language has potential applications to the study of disability and composition because it invokes questions of value within the context of language and culture—and disability communities arguably occupy and form their own unique cultures (e.g., Deaf culture, autistic culture) and their own unique dialects and languages. Each of my reading lists contains texts by authors who grapple with the complexity of what writing and language are, and thus what it is that we as teacher-scholars value or privilege in/as writing and language.

Dissertation
My dissertation is directly tied to the themes touched upon in my field and focus descriptions. At this moment in time, I expect my dissertation will be divided into sections concerning 1) media and modality, 2) access, and 3) audience. Though these three topics relate to many key topics in disability studies, I plan to focus my research on autism specifically: I hope to explore certain key issues within popular autism discourse, namely, 1) representation of/for/by autistic individuals, 2) medical constructions of autism and autistics, and 3) common binaries/categories used to describe autistics (e.g., high-functioning vs. low-functioning). These issues shape our cultural conceptions of autism and autistics, which, in turn, shape our conceptions and our pedagogy in the composition classroom. Below, I briefly describe how consideration of media and modality, access, and audience might encourage different ways of talking about writing, teaching, learning, difference, and what have conventionally been considered disabilities.

Media and Modality. Digital media technologies—especially blogs and social networking sites—have enabled the autistic community to connect and to “speak back” to powerful, normate-run charities such as Autism Speaks without having to meet face-to-face, without having to worry about nonverbal nuance, without having to experience sensory overload, without having to worry about discourse conventions specific to traditional forms of writing (Clark and Van Ameron; Robertson and Ne’eman; Wilson). Many of these so-called autistic worries have been medicalized, with the sensory experiences and social communication of autistics being construed as neurological dysfunction in need of cure—an approach that many autistic individuals ardently resist (for examples, see the Autism Hub). If we as compositionists construct autistic writers as neurologically diverse rather than defective or diseased, how might we reconsider our axiological assumptions about writing and digital media?

Access. As G. Thomas Couser has commented, the affordances that digital media lend to those with disabilities are not widely available within the generic strictures of the publishing industry, which often call for “typical,” formulaic narratives—such as the triumph novel, or the sentimental/pity-me novel—when the topic involves disability. Accounts that disembark from these formulas are not as marketable—and, as a result, many autistics who advocate neurological diversity rather than cure find themselves relegated to the blogosphere while charities control popular and cultural discourses surrounding autism (Garland-Thomson). Of course, these examples of narrative perhaps lie within the realm of genre more than they do media. Yet, media are inextricably tied with our conceptions of genre, writing, and access. For instance, recent composition scholarship has painted autistic individuals as inherently, rhetorically clueless writers: acute attention to detail and lack of transition statements have been depicted as symptoms of autism in dire need of treatment (Jurecic, “Neurodiversity”; Yoder). How might we reconceive academic genres and acknowledge—or, I daresay value—autistic discourse conventions within traditional writing? How might we involve digital media as we strive to make writing more accessible?

Audience. A common medical construct in scholarship regarding autism involves empathy: autistic individuals supposedly lack what has been termed “theory of mind,” or the ability to imagine the mental states of others (Baron-Cohen). In terms of rhetoric and composition, teacher-scholars have connected this lack of empathy to lack of audience awareness, assuming that autistic writers are egocentric and self-centered because they cannot connect with a neurologically typical audience (Baron-Cohen; Jurecic, “Neurodiversity”). From a disability studies standpoint, however, I believe we need consider how the amorphous audience concept in composition studies has been normalized—that is, how audience has come to exclude those with disabilities, or, in this case, autistic individuals.

Methodology. Without prematurely committing myself to a data set, I anticipate analyzing discursive trends within the blogosphere, particularly blogs belonging to the Autism Hub, an online community that approaches autism from a positive and neurologically diverse perspective. Additionally, my research might also include interviewing a very small sample of autistic college writers who are active in these online advocacy movements. In sum, I hope to examine constructions of autistic writers both in and outside of the composition classroom, and I also wish to consider the communication affordances that digital media might offer autistic individuals. Finally, because I do not want to privilege the printed page as my sole medium of transmission, nor do I wish to assume that all of my readers are self-identified normates who prefer to read, think, and learn via traditional alphabetic text, I anticipate that my dissertation will include digitally mediated components.

–
¹ Composition studies traces its immediate history to the development of writing-specific courses in the mid-1800s, with sustained study and graduate-level programs having emerged only within the past 40 years—a stark contrast to the emerging subfield of digital media and composition, which is even more nascent (Brereton; Miller, Textual Carnivals). Michael Kneivel and others have set the birth date of digital media and composition within the mid-1970s, and the first major journal within the field, Computers and Composition, came into being in 1983.

Of course, I think that this theory has done quite some damage. Autistics have been represented as characteristically unempathetic individuals. And this “unempathetic” characterization has often been conflated with emotionlessness, conceitedness, apathy, and plain old malevolent and murderous evil. While I don’t deny that I’m hardly able to place myself in the shoes of others, I do posit that no one can really, truly place themselves in someone else’s shoes, unless we’re talking about literal shoes with similar foot sizes. In any event, I think there’s a limit and a danger to this thing we call empathy, because empathy isn’t wholly concrete and logical. Empathy, by definition, involves assumption and guesswork.

Empathy (or imagined understanding) can only be remotely successful when engaged between people with similar backgrounds, people who occupy similar social stations. Thus, in the same manner that auties have difficulty empathizing with NTs, so too do NTs have difficulty empathizing with auties. (James Wilson, in Weather Reports from the Autism Front, makes this very point about empathy. He can’t pretend to understand his autistic son’s experiences, his ways of knowing and being. Neurotypicals are just as empathetically impaired as autistics.)

[Jenny McCarthy: "expert" on autism, empathy, and strapless bras]

I like Dennis Lynch’s complication of empathy in “Rhetorics of Proximity: Empathy in Temple Grandin and Cornel West.” In his article, Lynch suggests that true empathy is never possible because such an act results in “bodily displacement,” in colonization or assimilation. So, in order for an NT to step into an autistic’s shoes, the autistic has to physically remove her feet from her shoes. As a result, when an NT claims to empathize with autistic experience, the NT is really imagining what it would be like for an NT to be an autistic — not what it is like for an autistic to be an autistic. The same could be said about an autistic person attempting to empathize with an NT: bodily displacement results.

Of course, because neurotypicality is the dominant neuro-discourse, NT ways of empathizing are considered more acceptable than autistic ways of empathizing. Warning of empathy’s co-optive dangers, Lynch writes,

Empathy in this way may seem like a harmless practice as one imagines how another may be feeling about an event, circumstance, or issue, but, as these critics argue, whatever’s empathy’s expressed aims may be, asking people to empathize usually locates the obstacles to empathy—to listening and to being heard—solely in the minds and habits of individual participants, and so obscures or ignores the political and economic and bodily dimensions of social struggles. (6)

This isn’t to say that empathy is inherently bad or wrong. However, empathy has its limits and dangers — severe limits and dangers. In assuming we can experience the fullness of another person’s “lifeworld,” we erase, or make transparent, very real differences (Lynch 9).

So, as I now listen to “September Song” for what is probably the fiftieth time today, I am also trying to complete a “map” of what I want to complete (and when) in my independent study this term. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I’m focusing on autism, rhetoric, and representation. I’ve so many things that I want to read, and I keep having to tell myself that I only have ten weeks to accomplish this, and it’s hard for me to figure out what a workable reading load is. This past weekend I wanted to read a couple books written by parents of autistic children (including Jenny McCarthy’s book — and not because I like Jenny McCarthy’s ideas). However, I ended up on a rabbit trail of sorts, and ended up re-reading Michael John Carley’s Asperger’s from the Inside Out. (I suppose he counts as both an aspie AND a parent of an aspie. So I wasn’t completely off track.)

I also finally worked up the nerve to email a professor in the field of rhetoric and composition who has been doing work with autism. I wasn’t sure whether or not it was socially appropriate to email random professors at different colleges because of e-stalking I’d done via Google and CCCC electronic conference programs. So, I spoke with a couple of non-random professors (a.k.a. my professors) and got some tips on what to say (and what not to say). After spending three days writing the email and having two fellow grad assistants read over what I’d written, I finally hit “send,” and actually got a response — a very pleasant, encouraging, and helpful response. He sent me several pieces he’d written, and so I decided to read those in lieu of vaccine-bashing narratives.

I’m really excited to finally connect with people in my field who are looking at rhetorical and social constructions of ASDs. It’s hard to talk about my interests in autism to non-humanities people a lot of the time. It’s not their faults, necessarily: we just have different disciplinary approaches, and the things I’m interested in are wrapped up in language and philosophies about meaning-making and axiological assumptions, not studying brain functions or therapeutic interventions.

This past fall, in a composition theory course, we were asked to compose our “entry tales” into the field. I decided to focus my narrative on the intersections I saw between my experiences as an Asperger’s autistic and my experiences as a compositionist wannabe. As I reread what I wrote nearly one year ago, I’m struck by how much I’ve learned since then — “then” being a moment when I thought I knew lots. And I realize that I’ve got lots more to learn… which makes me want to stick around in academia for another fifty years, even if it does mean that I have to socialize.

What I wrote, October 2007:

I have in my stockpile two narratives for describing my entry into composition studies. The first, and most often used, relies on metaphor and describes my aspirations to become a computer programmer when, lo and behold, I “saw the light” and realized, via divine inspiration, that English studies held my salvation. This first story often makes for wonderful application fodder: it lumps my previous computer science background and my newfound love of writing into a realization of spiritual proportions, thereby opening up the digital communication doorway in composition studies. Through this story, I have somehow become the mediator of two discourses, the champion of writing/communication and technology or writing/communication as technology—anything dealing with both words, as long as the emphasis remains on writing or communication.

My second narrative, however, does not meld the right-brain/left-brain worlds quite so fluently. In fact, of the few times I’ve dared to disclose it, my audience has probably doubted the existence of any “mediating” corpus callossum. Like many an interesting story, this one begins with the lost me seeking to be a saved me—a high school drop-out attempting a technical college. There’s a stock character, Professor Dan, the pony-tailed English teacher with a penchant for hacky sack and Donald Murray truisms. At one point, as with all stock conversations, an exchange occurs between the outside-the-box hipster and the conservative, inexperienced student, an exchange meant to spark conflict and radical new ideas, man, an exchange meant to so totally blow minds—except, this exchange results in all of the wrong things. After reading several of my essays, Professor Dan tells me that I’m in the wrong major and that I should switch to English. And I, horrified that I could be in the wrong major, visit the English department head and switch majors that day. Later, I learned from a mortified Professor Dan, after one of his close-your-eyes-while-freewriting techniques, that he was merely complimenting me, not really suggesting that I must go change my major that instant. He had wanted me to “think about it,” to muse and question, not to take immediate action. I recall thinking, in a bemused and irritated manner, Why didn’t he just say so?

Literally speaking, story number one occurs after story number two: after I’d already done the deed, I began to question being a student of English. There have been other notable misunderstandings on my part along my path toward grad-student-hood, but all theoretical perceptions of writing and communication began, for me, the moment I failed to understand the subtext of an important conversation: I could not register the simple genre of “the compliment,” and yet there I was, an English major. As a composition scholar wannabe, issues of understanding, of perception versus reception, strike me as most paramount. As a student-teacher with Asperger Syndrome, a mild variant of autistic disorder, I supposedly cannot communicate appropriately: I am what some (but not what I) might label as idiot savant, social retard, or male-brained. In everyday situations, I fail to meet the aims of the English 110 text, Writing Analytically, to make the implicit explicit, to root out the subtext from the apparently literal, or the literal from the apparently subtext. And somehow, I am a person with a communication disorder teaching first-year students how to communicate. This paradox used to trouble me, therefore keeping me closeted and guarded—until very recently.

During my first year as a Master’s student in (creative) writing at DePaul University, requirements forced me into a composition theory course, my first explicit introduction to studies of rhetoric and composition. Our professor divulged a useful heuristic for reading articles—marking and noting instances of epistemology, axiology, pedagogy, and procedure, this method borrowed from Richard Fulkerson’s “Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century”—which inadvertently captured reading in such a mechanistic, quantifiable light that I began to perseverate on the course readings, treating articles like word searches rather than theories. This method worked for a time, and my left-brained brain rooted out keywords and synthesized them with keywords from other articles, thereby allowing me to mimic understanding and reception. As we plowed through process and post-process pedagogy, eventually landing at social epistemics, one class member began critiquing David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University,” referencing ideas beyond the scope of our pristine Fulkerson-derived heuristic: he began comparing discourse communities to his seven-year-old Aspergian son.

My classmate, R, began describing the plight of the high-functioning autistic, this inability to grasp issues of nuance and audience. Bartholomae, he complained, was all bunk for people with Asperger’s. How could they, as writers or speakers, grasp the values of a discourse when they lack a theory of mind, when they lack empathy, when they lack the ability to understand any appropriate social convention? They could only anticipate and emulate—not reciprocate meaningfully. I did not respond to my classmate and his insistence that his son would never be a good writer or speaker. I had, at this point in time, been determined not to disclose unless absolutely necessary, instead preferring the labels of eccentric or neurotic to high-functioning and autistic. Moreover, how could I presume to speak for his son? And how could he or his son presume to speak for me? I fumbled with my Bartholomae text and my neat little “axiology” markings in the margins. At this very moment, were we shaping a discourse on autism, or were we letting that discourse—that discourse of medical statistics and manuals, of parents and suffering and hopelessness—shape us?

This conversation of which I was not visibly a part, I think, steered me into composition studies. I had long viewed writing in terms of detail and pattern, loving stylistics courses more than workshop courses, where expression and individuality usually reigned. R’s musings jettisoned me out from my pattern funk, so to speak, causing me to grapple with something far more abstract—what/who makes certain forms of writing and speaking socially appropriate? And why, did he feel, that these forms were unattainable for certain people?

Regardless of (dis)ability, I think that we all experience communication breakdown, lapses and gaps in understanding and intention. While R described his son’s obsession with baseball statistics, I immediately recalled my childhood obsessions with New Hampshire roadmaps and the governors of Montana—but in relating his rants to myself, in taking things so personally, I was ignoring his intent, ignoring his message. If, as Bartholomae argues in “Inventing the University,” a dominant academic discourse prescribes what student writing needs, then how are individual students, each with her own unique cognitive makeup, to infer what those needs are? Somehow, I must have inferred these needs: while my speaking abilities are lacking, and while I routinely fail to interpret subtext and humor, I can still discover patterns, even figurative patterns. Even if we, autistics and non-autistics, are able to deduce the “how” of communication, then how are we to surmise the why—and how are we to change discourses, to make rhetorical practices and conventions more explicit and malleable, more attainable to those that desire them? I’m not so sure that we can even answer these important questions—but we certainly can try.

What we relegate to common sense is, in reality, constructed. To say that I or R’s son, as autistics, lack common sense, is really to say that we lack the means or power to have a common sense that is constructed by others, a common sense that is perhaps not so common. If something is created, then somebody must create it, and it somehow must be distributed or regulated. In the composition classroom, in my role as teacher, if I desire for my students to receive and distribute this creative power, then I should aim for them to be cognizant of ideology and how it functions in a given discourse, an area that Bartholomae decidedly leaves out of his argument. To just tell students that something is “accepted” is to merely teach regurgitation: I see little difference between this and Applied Behavorial Analysis, a treatment for autism that involves rewarding socially acceptable behavior and punishing socially unacceptable behavior—which bears a remarkable likeness to grading. (This is not to say, of course, that grading is as awful of an experience as ABA, or that it’s “bad”—but it can certainly seem this way.) Rather than teaching others to merely accept conventions that are “accepted,” we should have them explore the ideologies that shape discourse and the discourses that shape ideology. If Aspergian children are taught to clone neurotypical or “normal” mannerisms, for instance, then they are merely relegated to a life of mimicry.

Mimicry is not communication on any level—not that of autistic or of writer. Communication involves conflict and contending for legitimacy. If we are to have others understand our intent, our personal nuances and contexts, then we must strive for middle ground rather than accepted ground. As James Berlin, in “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Process,” maintains, “Every pedagogy is imbricated in ideology, in a set of tacit assumptions about what is real, what is good, what is possible, and how power ought to be distributed” (697). Like Berlin, my current approach to teaching involves a lens through which we view writing as “historically bound,” as a construct that has been shaped by certain discourses and beliefs (695). In this vein, I feel that my responsibility is not confined merely to the teaching of writing, the how; I must also encourage students to examine discourse conventions, the accepted axiologies that govern writing, the why. I am of the frame of mind that, no matter how perspicuous we try to be, we can never exactly capture, communicate, or think our thoughts through language—but we can realistically hope for some shared understanding, some idea of intent, context, purpose, and audience, if we only foreground ideology and power dynamics and present communication in a way that is more accessible, more explicit. After all, isn’t this what we really strive for—to understand and to be understood?

Perhaps I’m currently fretting because of issues related to my professional identity. I’ve “published” a short article related to AS experiences. I’ve also composed a bizarre webtext that features me and AS prominently. And I’m uneasy about all of this, because even though it explains me and helps others to understand my communication differences, it nevertheless casts me into some sort of inferior position, I feel. Almost as though I’m making “excuses” for my incurability, or as though I’m so different that I’m not worth anyone’s time. I’m probably projecting here, but I think the fear is warranted. At this point, I’m not sure how thoroughly I should broadcast my label, no matter the potential benefits. What must my confessional motives be?

I just finished reading the collection Teaching Writing with Computers (edited by Takayoshi and Huot). In many respects, I really wish I’d come across some of the articles within before I became a red-pen-handler-of-doom. (OK, actually, in all honesty, I usually swap between pencil and Word’s “Track Changes” when I grade. And I’ve generally set “track changes” to blue when I leave comments. But I digress.) While some of the material in the various essays is outdated, much of the content deals with broad, general suggestions for integrating technology, and not so much specific tool-based ideas. Nevertheless, despite the conglomeration of really cool ideas (e.g., having an outside speaker/specialist “speak” with your class via chat room or discussion board), many were really, really commonsensical. However, especially since I come from an AS perspective, I *do* realize that “common sense” ain’t exactly a universal since it’s constructed. I’m a bit hesitant to say that any of these ideas are “no-brainers.”

Consequently, I continually had to re-analyze my starting points here, especially since I do consider myself to be technologically/digitally literate. And, I’m sure most FYW instructors haven’t had the benefit of learning Flash or C++. So, I decided to try my hand at sarcasm (and the color pink) in creating an e-Teaching how-to manual.

I’m kind of wondering: who would indeed claim the below items to be true? Non-writing instructors? Writing instructors who haven’t read the TWWC essay collection? My mom? The only slightly agreeable one, it seems, is my very first image (behind the cut). Are these images blatantly sarcastic? (Translation: how utterly obvious is it that writing instructors should do the opposite of what these images command? And, if it is obvious, why?)