Making waves

The CCCC ripples continue with Will Richardson extending the discussion of blogging as reading over at his weblog today, where he generously takes the time to link to, digest, and speak kindly of the lengthy post I wrote yesterday. He mentioned earlier some doubts about whether K-12 students can really blog, and today he talks briefly about

the disconnect [he's] been feeling between the act and the tool of late. The tool requires writing. (There is no blog without writing.) The act requires reading. (There is no blogging without reading.) Without reading, you're just writing, not blogging... #

It's clear that weblog software is a pretty good web posting tool, and educators can use it to collect and pass around student writing, all well and good, without there being any blogging going on. Blogging as a genre (or more likely, a whole series of genres) uses the software's ease of posting, linking, and commenting, along with our regular practices of writing about reading, to build a community engaging some topic of shared interest.

So there is writing and then there is writing -- kind of like Truman Capote's old joke from the Tonight Show, when Carson would name a popular author and Capote would say, "That's not writing, that's typing!"

Writing, the good stuff, reads the unfolding materials of culture with some urgency, with a project, with a point of view, with something at stake, and takes the time to try to make a mark on some bit of the culture, to reinterpret it, to reorder its priorities, to cast it in a new light, to set it in a new context, to have a say about some part of it, and in doing so creates a voice and a position of authority for the speaker. If there is a chance for a strong person to change the world a little bit, this person will change the world.

Writing, the weak stuff that is not much more than typing, repeats stock phrases in pre-established order, preaches to the choir, summarizes without a point of view, catalogs without passion, tells you things you already know, and buries the speaker in a pile of pre-fab materials that have no fingerprints on them, or maybe so many sets of fingerprints that no one's prints can be made out any longer. If they are passing out rewards to conformists, this writer will get a reward. When the secret police pass down the block, they'll know in a glance they don't need to arrest this person.

So we say to our students, you are each an intellectual, you have an active life of the mind, you care about some things deeply, you want to move ahead and fulfill certain goals and dreams for yourself, you want to see your community thrive -- you have projects that matter to you. In light of those urgencies, in light of your projects and the best work of your heart and mind, which of these writers speak to you and which do you challenge or resist? Which of their concepts could be used to carry your projects further, and how? Which challenge the way you've named the world to yourself, and what do you make of that? In the conversation of humanity that you hear going on around you, what do you want to insist upon saying? Where do you want to make your mark? Where can you see a chance for common ground?

So there is something about the web and weblog software and our historical moment that has made it easy for lots of people to see blogging as a way to be that strong kind of writer who creates and resides, virtually, in that kind of community and who reads and rewrites her culture a little bit at a time at the top of her blog's main column every day.