Image courtesy of DaveBleasdale (via Flickr)
Rhetorical Invention, Textual Reuse, Tinkering, and Scrap 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 currently studying how scrap writing can inform the teaching of reading, writing, and research and can promote the value of ordinary writing.
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.
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 currently studying how scrap writing can inform the teaching of reading, writing, and research and can promote the value of ordinary writing.
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.
