Agenda:
- Review of responses to Clueless in Academe
- Queries considered
- Next three sessions of 1020
Queries Considered:
Why Wikis?
- Storage: everything in one place (paperless classroom)
- Collaboration: asynchronous multi-author document construction w/ time-tagging and user ID *
- Access: comprehensive searchability *
- Motivation: Panoptic, Hawthorne-ish effect *
Assignments for 10/14:
- Post your response to Clueless in Academe as a comment to this post w/in 48 hours of class end
- Read chapter 8 (”Teaching Invention”) and the Lunsford/Glenn essay (474) in the St. Martin’s Guide and essays by Booth, Crowley, Fish, Fulkerson, Hawhee, Kugelmass, & Walker
- Compose a one-page, single-spaced response to the latter essays and bring it to class with you on Wednesday
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October 7, 2009 at 2:12 pm
Derek Risse
In the fairly recent publication Clueless in Academe, Gerald Graff, lifetime intellectual and professor of English at the University of Illinois, makes several insightful contributions to an extended discourse on academic culture. To this end, Graff offers a critical, though sometimes-redemptive, rendering of post-1940s American intellectualism in the university. Though the text voices his interest in a multitude of contemporary academic practices, Graff is ultimately frustrated with what one might best describe as a recurrent failure, namely amongst those in the field, to make certain important connections: Academics ultimately fail to communicate what intellectual work might contribute to society more generally, to inspire important inter-disciplinary crossings (namely between the humanities and sciences), and to facilitate, in a strange sense, student learning. Graff’s point, widely drawn, is to illustrate the ways in which intellectualism fails intellectualism. This is to say, that he is, at the very least, interested in what we might do to change not only the image of academic work, but the type of intellectual transactions that occur on a daily basis.
Most important to Graff’s criticism of the post-war university system is the general theme of compartmentalization that he introduces in the very first section of the text. Graff begins contemplating this problem when discussing the strange way that we wall off classrooms, essentially inhibiting students from experiencing professional research: “When we wall off undergraduates from the culture of research, in effect we invite them to be alienated from the intellectual life of the faculty” (Graff 33 – emphasis mine). Here, Graff begins constructing an image of the university that details this highly compartmentalized and segregated system of vacuum-sealed environments. This somewhat simplistic though generally satisfying criticism of college culture drives discourse throughout the text. In chapter three Graff discusses the general disconnect between academic discourses, trying to account for the confusing and often diverging ways that knowledge is constructed across the university (62). He argues that although we view knowledge as a dynamic conversation we still fail to facilitate dialogue. In chapter six and seven, Graff tries to account for the way in which academics fail to make their work clear to “nonspecialist audiences” (134). Chapter eight addresses how professors fail to draw on the personal capacities for argument that students bring with them, while chapter ten begins to account for problems with application; how can students use the tools that they have been given?
Taking a cue from Deborah Meier, Graff is hopeful that the university might be able to incorporate something like a “progressive traditionalism.” Though the strategies that Graff advocates seem somewhat intuitive, there is some difficulty with their application. For Graff, following Meier’s lead, the university can incorporate youth culture more constructively by allowing students access to the culture of those at a more advanced stage of intellectual development (264-266). Furthermore, Graff advocates the type of important inter-disciplinary crossings that Meier works towards at the high school level. In essence, sharing a preoccupation with separation akin to that of Paul Simon, Graff hopes to motivate students and faculty to bridge contentious waters. For Graff, no man can operate effectively as an island, and no system of education will benefit students as intensely as those that revise the tendency to compartmentalize.
Though many universities, ours included, have, in recent years, made significant moves towards what Graff and others refer to as “writing across the curriculum and university” courses, this text leaves the reader wondering if this is enough. Simply put, intellectualism itself seems awkwardly militated against intellectualism. If the metaphor that Graff uses, that of “curricular suburban sprawl” (74) is particularly convincing, it is for reasons that are antithetical to those Graff prompts in Clueless. How does one reverse or revise such a problematic and systemic trend? How might we begin, constructively, to remove the filters through which we import information?
October 7, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Andy Engel
Andy Engel
6001, Wk5
10/7/09
Reflecting on Cluelessness:
Graff, Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind
The general argument made by Graff in his work, Clueless, is that the confusion about the practices and aims of academe obscures how non-academics view the system and limit their participation in its conversations. What, he asks, is it that makes academe so disorienting, opaque, and scary to the uninitiated? Graff sees academe, as a cloistered institution, short-circuiting or preventing students from using their “street smarts.” Specifically, he understands students as already having the capacity to think and argue easily in their daily lives. While these are the same skills needed in the higher education system, it is the space and the unexplained expectations of that space that stop students from bringing those skills with them. My chief interest here, and in our practicum more broadly, is this relationship between the student and the skills she brings with her, the “problem” to be discussed or conveyed, and the role of the teacher. As I will explain, on this last point, I prefer the terms practitioner or coach.
One strategy Graff suggests for providing students a way of entering into an ongoing conversation, is to use argumentative templates, such as the one I am using here. These templates are productive, he writes, because they show students that they should not write in a conversational vacuum. On this point, Graff suggests that all to often professors “stop short of providing intellectual socialization. They need to go beyond teaching study skills, time-management, using computers, and test-taking to give students more help in entering the academic culture of arguments and ideas” (loc. 165-7). While his emphasis of moving beyond simple study skills is useful, it does not, however, go far enough. For example, Graff writes, “In other words, withholding crucial formulas from students is at least as disabling as teaching such formulas too mechanically. It is simply condescending for educators to withhold tricks that they themselves have mastered” (loc. 1990-1). As we can see from this passage, Graff does still see the teacher as having access to a bag of tricks that can be imparted to the student through various writing templates and by emphasizing conversational inclusiveness.
It is helpful here to contrast Graff’s views of the role and function of the “teacher” by looking to another author who is taking a designed-based approach to instruction and the classroom. Therefore, I also want to add to the conversation the text I am reading for Prof. Marback’s course this week, Donald Schön’s Educating the Reflective Practitioner. While both authors are working toward similar ends, Schön’s arguments are much more substantive in terms of the actions and responsibilities of what he calls the practitioner or coach. Schön describes the relationship between coach and student as one of trying to describe the indescribable:
“Their coaches cannot make things easier for them. They cannot tell them what designing is, because they have a limited ability to say what they know, because some essential features of designing escape clearly statable rules, and because much of what they can say is graspable by a student only as he begins to design” (100).
This is in contrast to what Graff describes, where the role of the teacher, as the one imparting knowledge about a discipline and its conversations, persists largely unchallenged. This tension between teacher and coach goes to the heart of Graff’s main argument about the bafflement of academe. Indeed, as we see in Schön, the process at least of academic work is still baffling to the practitioner. It is something mysterious, and not readily transferable. For Schön, coaching involves a “reflective practicum,” a model of instruction with “students mainly learn by doing, with the help of coaching” (xii). Therefore, while Graff’s text has merit, the bafflement he describes and tries to dispel would benefit from less of a teacher-centered model of academe, and more of a focus toward reflection-in-practice and coaching.
October 7, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Andrew Winckles
In reading Graff’s Clueless in Academe, I was really refreshed by his down to earth look at college culture, what is wrong with it, and how to change it. Specifically, as regards the writing classroom, I really liked his conception of teaching writing as a conversation that utilizes the rhetorical tools of argument and analysis to enter an academic discourse. I think a lot of times writing instructors and university administrators get frustrated because they’re students “can’t write,” but they never really stop to think about why that is, or if that is even really the case. In my experience, with only a few exceptions, most college students can write, they can even write well; however all to often they have to write in genres and in a manner that makes very little sense to them and that they couldn’t care less about – thus it appears that they can’t write, or their writing doesn’t make sense.
In my opinion and experience, the idea of academia as a conversation is an important one and, as Graff points out again and again, it need not be a confusing conversation. When you cut through all the jargon, Derrida is not difficult to explain, but we have become so attached to the jargon in academic life that we end up trying to teach it to our students. Instead, it would be much better to conceive this conversation as something that everyone can participate in and contribute to at some level – from the first semester freshmen to the full professor. This is not to say that sometimes all of us might not say or argue something that doesn’t make much sense, but it is to say that we all have something to contribute.
The key then, as Graff points out, is to provide students with a point of entry into this ongoing conversation. Too often, students are thrown into the university without even being told that it is a conversation or how it works; thus they end up bouncing from class to class, hearing different parts of the conversation without being able to conceive of the whole or even the part of it they fit into. As, according to Graff, student writing is often “flat and unfocused,” because we have failed to “provide students with a conversation to argue in.” They don’t even understand what their discipline or conversation is, much less how to engage in it. As a result they end up regurgitating information without much comprehension or analysis of it and if they don’t care about or understand it, if they aren’t passionate about it, it clearly isn’t going to make much sense.
The question then becomes, how to we provide students with an entry point into the conversation, how do we help they care about what they are thinking and writing about? And this question leads us right back to the writing classroom for it is here that we should be educating students in the language of the conversation and how they can contribute. We can only do this if we are allowing them to study and engage in topics they are interested in. Having them read and write about poetry, then, is useless because most of them aren’t passionate about poetry and aren’t English majors. When I taught freshman composition before, I allowed my students to choose their own topics in their own disciplines and then explore how the conversation was held in that discipline – how people argued within it, what the conventions were, what the gaps were. Of course, the specific assignments had parameters that helped the students to practice argument and analysis, but students were always doing this within a conversation that they cared about and felt they could contribute to. At the end of the semester, many students told me that mine was the first writing class they ever really enjoyed because they got to write about what they cared about.
October 7, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Aaron Pellerin
Response to Gerald Graff’s Clueless in Academe
In Clueless in Academe, Gerald Graff explores the problems plaguing the world of academia – and it turns out there are a lot of them. Graff’s central thesis is that the academy is needlessly obscure and inaccessible to students and other outsiders, a charge I enthusiastically second. In fact, only very recently have I begun to realize how ignorant I once was about how academia works. I especially recognized something of myself in Graff’s description of how the average undergraduate does not understand how or why academics enter into scholarly dialogue. It wasn’t until I entered my MA program that I began to recognize the discursive patterns that Graff describes (briefly, identifying what others have said and responding to it). For a long time, I didn’t understand the real purpose of secondary research; I thought it was something you included to bolster your own analysis of a text, which was rather hard to do since that analysis should consist of some brilliantly original observation that nobody before had even considered. Now, obviously, by some combination of luck and instinct, I managed to get things mostly right in my arguments, but I can only wonder how much more effective and efficient I could have been had I grasped long ago how to, to paraphrase one of my previous professors, put myself in dialogue with the critical tradition.
I doubt my experience is unique. Unfortunately, as Graff argues, most professors and programs simply don’t do a good job of explaining to students even the most rudimentary workings of academic discourse. Part of the reason for this, I would suggest, is that it seems like many academics are not themselves consciously aware of what they do, how and why. Many of those who have “made it” professionally probably found their way, as Graff says he did, through trial and error, rather than through thoughtful analysis of how academia works. By the time they make it to a teaching position, they have forgotten just how unintuitive their profession is, and never realize that they actually need to explain to students, step by step, how to “do” scholarship. (I have taught before and I include myself in this indictment). Of course, it doesn’t help matters that academia seems at times to go out of its way to be confusing and exclusionary, as Graff illustrates, for example, in his analysis of stereotypical academic writing.
So, the question is, how can we demystify the academy (not just for our students, but for ourselves)? Among other solutions, Graff proposes teaching students the formulas that underlie academic writing and argument. This is the same approach Graff advocates in They Say/I Say; I have read partway through that book, so the idea was familiar to me, and both times, I have had some concerns about it. My previous experience with a writing formula was with students who had been taught to write essays using the five-paragraph formula. The result was generic, utterly uninsightful essays that privileged slavish adherence to a structure over argument, critical thought, or simply saying something interesting. I don’t blame the students, either, at least not solely. Formulas enable lazy writing, but more damagingly, they enable lazy teaching and thoughtless evaluation. The pedagogical idea behind formulas is imitation, which is a powerful learning strategy, but only if the students understand first what they are imitating and why, and second, how to move beyond imitation into other forms of production. The danger is that providing that understanding takes effort, whereas it is temptingly easy to teach the formula as an end in itself. Yet, I very much like the strategies outlined in Graff’s books, not least because I wish somebody had explained this stuff to me a long time ago. My question, then, is how can we use formulas to teach writing without encouraging formulaic teaching and writing?
Works Cited
Graff, Gerald. Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003.
October 7, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Amy Metcalf
Amy Metcalf
ENG 6001
Pruchnic
October 5, 2009
I have to admit that there has never been a text I have agreed with more than Graff’s Clueless in Academe. The text continues to touch on many issues that we’ve already explored including (but not limited to) how to approach the rigidity of “Standard English,” and how to adjust to, navigate, and in many ways decipher the politics of an academic department. Graff’s ability to address concerns of both graduate students and the undergraduates they teach is invaluable to me. I can remember some of my earliest thoughts about applying to a graduate program being riddled with anxieties over not being able (or willing) to write in the style of many texts I had read. It always seemed incredibly odd that someone would write to express defend an argument, but write in such an inaccessible way that something potentially profound could be lost on many people.
In my pervious response I discussed at length my issues with instructing students how to write for an academic audience, while still respecting their unique voices and the backgrounds that inform them. I put down each text thus far without complete satisfaction, ultimately feeling as if no one has provided a solid answer to such pressing questions – how do I bridge these two very delicate issues? Graff managed to answer my question in his first chapter – and I attribute that glaring success to the very practice of his matter-of-fact approach. To this issue, Graff beings by quoting compositionist Victor Villanueva’s claim that students can identify their own voices if they “recognize and exploit the conventions we have agreed to as the standards of written discourse.” (36) Graff goes on to state that “we can teach and use these standard conventions without necessarily buying into the social prejudices and biases that have historically accompanied them.” (36) In essence, if I help my students realize that they have the power to influence and change conventions that don’t work for them, I can encourage them to let their voice guide the writing in the proper direction. It is not the feeling of power, but the empowerment that makes the difference.
Graff’s ideas have helped me feel less shy and apprehensive about the thoughts I’ve been having for the past few years. His text gives me a confidence that I will carry to my students – a confidence that will encourage them to be a communicator, not just a writer. His fearless criticism of academic culture is inspiring and serves to remind us why we want to endure all of this: to be educators and to extend knowledge as far as possible. As I progress in my graduate work, my teaching and my tutoring, it is my goal to practice “unlearning to write.” I firmly believe that the more open I am about the evolution of my own writing, the more suited I will be to encourage my students to challenge the norms they feel closing in around them
October 7, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Danny Sain
In the Introduction to his book, Clueless in Academe, Gerald Graff states that one of his teaching maxims is “dare to be reductive” (11). The inaccessibility of both literary and critical texts, says Graff, coupled with the facts that most students, especially those in introductory composition courses, have little to no critical vocabulary, and that few professors offer students effective means to shoehorn themselves into critical discourses, requires that teachers of writing take the necessary step of shirking the “kneejerk antireductivism(137)” that so many academics are guilty of, and give their students what they need to survive university writing: the skill of summary and a basic knowledge of the foundations of certain discourses, which can be provided to those who stand outside the exclusive club that is academia only by means of reduction. In short, to mix my academic vocabulary with my vernacular vocabulary (another necessary step in getting students into the club), teachers have to give their students the straight dope.
Reductivism, in Graff’s view, is not only necessary, it is unavoidable. Graff says that “ideas cannot circulate in a complex society unless they can be reduced to concise formulations that encapsulate a concept or argument, often in the speech genres of the vernacular” (140). Not one to set himself up for so easy a piece of deconstruction, Graff, at this point, heeds his own advice, and reduces his explanation of reductivism for ease of use: “Simplify Whenever You Complexify” (140). Yet, to “stake out a position in opposition (91),” as Graff informs us any good argumentative paper must, I wonder if, in reducing his reductivist views, Graff hasn’t actually exposed one of the limitations of reduction, namely that most reductions require their own expansions in order to make sense. This curiosity was brought to my attention while discussing Graff’s book with a friend who, upon hearing Graff’s soundbite “Simplify Whenever You Complexify,” said “That makes no sense,” requiring me to explain his view on reductivism in full detail. To be fair, Graff accounts for this in his book, saying “I am in no way proposing an Oxford Book of Quotations view of the intellectual world, whereby Great Thoughts can be lifted out of their complicated contexts without loss” (141). To reduce that quote, Graff states that you have to know something—a book, a work of art, an argument or idea—before you can reduce it effectively. This notion, while not necessarily contradictory, does however present a peculiarity: if part of the point of embracing reductivism is to give students the skills they require to summarize and reduce complicated texts and ideas for the sake of understanding, Graff here suggests that it is still necessary for them to have that sought-after understanding before they can engage in that process of reduction. If, on the other hand (to present an oppositional viewpoint, which Graff instructs us is also a hallmark of quality writing), one were to say that the whole point is for the professor to reduce what s/he knows in order to give students access to academic discourses, after which the student can then begin to use the process of reduction her/himself, it would seem that we still have to acknowledge that whatever reduced knowledge the professor might give her/his students, that knowledge is incomplete for the fact of it having been reduced, requiring on the part of the students engagement in the process of complexification of that reduced knowledge which, by Graff’s own account, would require simplification by reduction again, leading one on a never-ending reductivist spiral of simplification and complexification which, at one and the same moment, require and negate each other. Or, that is to say, if we think students really get something out of reductivist accounts of discourses and knowledges, do we have an idea what that something is, given that we still require students to complicate that knowledge to the point that their understanding of said discourse or knowledge mirrors our own when we first reduced it for them.
In his book, Graff also states that a piece of good writing involves two parts: “one in which you make your argument and a second one in which you tell your readers how and how not to read it” (276). So, let me tell you what I am not doing here: I am not trying to be obtuse, and I am not trying to suggest that Graff’s belief in the necessity of reductivism is misplaced. Quite the opposite, I think he’s right on the money as far as teaching practices go and should go. What I am doing is pointing to the fact that, since Graff isn’t just talking about giving students what they need to survive college writing—he’s talking about introducing students to the meta-discourses and guiding questions of academia itself and, in the process, seeking to make them into intellectuals—reductivism as a guiding star falls short: the nuggets of knowledge provided by reductivism are not enough to genuinely engage in academic discourses, and these students, if they are ever to engage those discourses will need a full understanding of what they are doing and why they are doing it. We can’t give students the skill of reduction without first giving them something to reduce, and even the reduced pieces of information we might give them will need to be complicated and expanded before they prove genuinely useful. Sure, reductivism might be a shoehorn to use in getting students into academic discussions, but we shouldn’t pretend that reduction is a panacea for students’ problems with writing and/or academia, and students will be left with the same choice as before: pursuing difficult academic discourses that will still appear hazy for all the reduction one might employ, or at some point just saying “Screw it”.
October 7, 2009 at 4:49 pm
Joe Paszek
As graduate students, there are certain ways in which we are expected to present our thoughts in writing. It becomes deeply ingrained in the minds of students that they are supposed to write in such a way that lends itself to complex intellectual exploration. Even before entering my undergraduate work I had heard teachers say that you should write your papers “two steps above the level in which you speak.” Unfortunately, the imitation of “teacher talk” can also lead to writing that is filled with empty phrases and disconnected ideas. The writer (not to mention the reader) becomes lost in the endless jargon and elevated rhetoric, leaving clarity at the wayside along with any potential point the author may be trying to convey. While this may not be the rule, for me it certainly has become a common enough occurrence to cause a moderate amount of anxiety as I enter into the professional field.
Gerald Graff’s Clueless in Academe finally began to clarify some of the questions that had been rattling around in my head (and consequently in my responses) over the past several weeks. Graff discusses bridging the gap between every day speech and academic language, stating: “the appearance of vernacular voice in academic writing seems to me a promising development for education, if you agree that improving education requires closing the gap between teacher talk and student talk” (120). While this proposition seems particularly appealing to me, such a melding of the two forms proves to come with its own set of problems in regards to my experiences in academia.
The first problem comes in the form of my own writing once again. As a graduate student trying to compose “impressive” pieces of critical writing while simultaneously hoping to impress my professors enough to garner strong recommendations for later job opportunities, I am expected to have that ability to communicate with both a certain level of lucidity as well as with a certain expertise of the language used in my given field of academic interest. Can this negotiation between different conversational skills still be utilized in a graduate department in English? But it also calls into question my own investment in “teacher talk” and why this mode of writing is continuously perpetuated (to myself, by myself)?
The second problem now arises when I step out of my role as student and into my duty as teacher. With my own uncertainties about the appropriateness of “student talk” in the academic world can I really step to the front of the class and indoctrinate them into a mode of writing that may be accessible to them, but I myself have been conditioned to see this way of writing as inappropriate in the classroom? Do I have the power (as a first year GTA) to tell them to balk the academic world and put a bit of your own language into your writing, despite the fact that even Graff himself has encountered heavy criticism by the academic community? Can I really say f*ck it and present my class with a methodology that may not be supported by professors that these students will have later on in their academic careers? If so, when running the risk of indoctrinating student talk into academic writing, where should the line be drawn to say how much is too much? Should students be taught to write this way, especially at a lower level of class work, when later on in their academic careers such practices may negatively impact their ability to adapt to writing styles of higher-level conversations?
October 9, 2009 at 9:01 am
Katrina Newsom
Formulaic Writing: Why Not?
I applause the type of work Gerald Graff is doing in Clueless in Academe to make academia more accessible to the students. His suggestions to incorporate the skills and knowledge that students obtained from practices of conversation and argument making in everyday life gives a different spin on how teachers can approach teaching writing. Also, his approach seems to alleviate some of the resistance instructors may experience with students who struggle with the practice of critical writing.
I found the chapter entitled “Why Johnny Can’t Argue” most appealing because Graff discusses types of formulas that can be used when teaching students to engage in critical writing. Perhaps, my background in math drew me to this particular section because the process of learning math is based on formulaic modes of operation. The instructor provides a formula (writing template) for the student to work out a problem demonstrating step by step the way to solve the equation. The student, then in turn using a variation of variables, performs the steps shown returning again and again to the model that was provided by the instructor.
I recognized that English and math embodies distinct forms of critical thinking; however, there is something to be said about using the instructional tools of formulas when teaching composition. First and foremost, it gives students an idea and a sense of direction as to the “how(s)” of meeting the instructor’s expectation. Far too often, which I have experienced personally, instructors become frustrated with the class when many of the students do not meet the expectation of an assignment. One can argue that students are deficit in writing abilities, which is a plausible explanation. On the other hand, one could use this moment to see the gaps in instruction that the students fail to fill in resulting in types of writing that do not to meet the requirements.
Another important reason why one may consider writing templates as an effective tool to teaching writing is that such tools allows the instructor to illustrate the best ways to engage in intellectual conversations. In previous chapters, Graff pointed out that students shy away from intellectual conversations because they feel that they do not possess enough information about a given topic to participate. Yet, those same students outside the classroom can carry on elaborate conversations about many topics. So, in thinking about Graff’s argument for the writing templates, one can see the potential for it to mediate the inconsistency inside and outside the class. Graff gives an example of the template to illustrate how it can be use.
I think that this approach to teaching writing is productive for me both as an instructor and a student. The writing process is tedious and sometimes, certain skills that one acquires along the way can get lost under the mixed-messages” received from the many different instructors one encounters. Moreover, it dismantles the notion that writing can be performed by some students and not by others. To approach writing using writing templates/models take the guess work out of the writing exercise. Let’s face it, learning is mimetic and great writers are those who modeled those before them.
October 9, 2009 at 10:21 am
Sue Muecke
Gerald Graff is my hero. His book Clueless in Academe discusses many of the academic brick walls I’ve beat my head against in the past, from trying to guess at what intangible elements are being sought on a graduate application to trying to write “academically” while still making myself understood. So it’s refreshing to hear a successful, established academic come right out and say, “Hey guys, we’re doing it wrong.”
I am particularly elated by Graff’s critique of academic writing. Now maybe that’s just because I spent several hours this week suffering through an article by Judith Butler, desperately trying to figure out her point. But I always thought the whole purpose of academic writing was to share our scholarly research and ideas, starting a dialogue with other practitioners in our fields around those ideas. How can we participate in that dialogue if we can’t even figure out what the other conversants are saying? At times, academic writing seems to have been intentionally designed to exclude as many people as possible from these scholarly conversations. With each convoluted twist of syntax, another academic falls silent. Every scholarly article then becomes a kind of amusement park measuring stick of intelligence – “You must be this smart to read this article.”
So I heartily support Graff’s call-to-action for a synthesis between academic and vernacular writing. The critics I have found the most influential have been the ones who express themselves in clear, concise, elegant prose – they let the brilliance of their ideas speak for themselves. With other critics, I sometimes feel as if they’re trying to mask the pedestrian nature of their ideas behind fancy vocabulary. But can such an incorporation of the vernacular go too far?
Graff waxes rhapsodic about Michael Berube’s use of the phrase “roach motel” in his discussion of transgressive works’ being co-opted by the university establishment. The vernacular “roach motel” paints a visceral picture of what Berube is saying in a way that a more refined phrase wouldn’t. Recently, however, I employed this same tactic in an Early Modern essay, using the term “cocktease” in my discussion of Petrarchan modes of female behaviour. Let’s just say that my professor did not shower me with the same praise for this move as Graff bestows upon Berube. Now maybe that’s because I’m a first semester Ph.D. student rather than a leading academic such as Berube. Maybe it’s because “cocktease” is a more loaded phrase than “roach motel”. But it nevertheless leads me to wonder: as we move towards a more naturalistic style of academic writing, where do we draw the vernacular line?