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Invention, Textual Reuse, Critical-Creative Tinkering, and Scrap Writing
Textual reuse describes any practice of appropriating old writing for new purposes. My research examines reuse in literature, historical textbooks, student writing, workplace writing, and Internet culture. I take a new approach in bringing together many versions of reuse to identify textual procedures common to them. I demonstrate how manipulations like combination, substitution, and rearrangement promote invention. This concern for invention orients my inquiry toward future composition and pedagogy. I outline how writers can reuse texts in productive ways and advocate for a practice I call critical-creative tinkering: an open-ended method of dwelling inside texts by rewriting them. Tinkering encourages an interactive, generative orientation toward textual activity that I argue should be central to the teaching of reading and writing.
To further my research on textual reuse, I search for, save, share, and archive bits of scrap writing--small found texts, such as grocery lists, Post-It notes, and materials lost in books. I also follow the publication of such scraps in online venues such as Found Magazine. I have recently published an article on scrap writing in enculturation, called "Scrap Writing in the Digital Age: The Inventive Potential of Texts on the Loose." I am continuing to study scrap writing and am especially interested in how to incorporate it into the teaching of writing, rhetoric, and making.
Additionally, I am fascinated by histories of composition and have been combing through an archive of nineteenth-century composition and rhetoric textbooks designed for both schools and colleges/universities. In these, I have located a persistent set of exercises in style and invention that require students to reuse preexisting materials to gain literacy skills. I am at work on an article relating these exercises to the practices of critical-creative tinkering that I advocate for in my classes.
Textual reuse describes any practice of appropriating old writing for new purposes. My research examines reuse in literature, historical textbooks, student writing, workplace writing, and Internet culture. I take a new approach in bringing together many versions of reuse to identify textual procedures common to them. I demonstrate how manipulations like combination, substitution, and rearrangement promote invention. This concern for invention orients my inquiry toward future composition and pedagogy. I outline how writers can reuse texts in productive ways and advocate for a practice I call critical-creative tinkering: an open-ended method of dwelling inside texts by rewriting them. Tinkering encourages an interactive, generative orientation toward textual activity that I argue should be central to the teaching of reading and writing.
To further my research on textual reuse, I search for, save, share, and archive bits of scrap writing--small found texts, such as grocery lists, Post-It notes, and materials lost in books. I also follow the publication of such scraps in online venues such as Found Magazine. I have recently published an article on scrap writing in enculturation, called "Scrap Writing in the Digital Age: The Inventive Potential of Texts on the Loose." I am continuing to study scrap writing and am especially interested in how to incorporate it into the teaching of writing, rhetoric, and making.
Additionally, I am fascinated by histories of composition and have been combing through an archive of nineteenth-century composition and rhetoric textbooks designed for both schools and colleges/universities. In these, I have located a persistent set of exercises in style and invention that require students to reuse preexisting materials to gain literacy skills. I am at work on an article relating these exercises to the practices of critical-creative tinkering that I advocate for in my classes.
