Writing, says Richard E. Miller, is "a technology to think with." In Writing at the End of the World, Miller thinks his way through some really important questions: "How--and in what limited ways--might reading and writing be made to matter in the new world that is evolving before our eyes? Is there any way to justify or explain a life spent working with--and teaching others to work with--texts?"
These are the questions that keep me awake nights, but Miller does not offer easy answers or simple steps arranged in bullet points. Instead, Miller's engaging and elegant essays model writing as a technology to think with, demonstrating that writing can create space where big ideas can be tried, tested, wrestled with in ways that matter.
I don't see this happening much in student writing or in academic writing in general--and neither does Miller, who notes that both students and professors tend to see writing as "a tool for succinctly recording the thoughts of others" or "a weapon for fending off other points of view." Miller wants something more risky, more personal, more like thinking out loud.
And so do I. I don't know exactly how I'm going to encourage this kind of writing in my own life or in the lives of my students, but I have a feeling I'll spend the rest of my life trying out all the features of this amazing technology.
1 comment:
As I sit in the chair I have been glued to for the past literally, the past fifteen hours finishing up a paper that's due within the next six, I can honestly say that never before have I understood exactly how...cheap academic writing is. Truly, what have I just spent the past fifteen hours proving? Who will care? What does it earn aside from a grade and even then, how arbitrary! My mind has never been changed, I have never been moved by academic writing the way I have by novels, poetry, and essays. I think blogs matter, I think the doodlings we write on the back of a napkin when we think no one's watching, I think the kinds of words that attract themselves together as if by magnet are the ones that invoke actual change, actual understanding. I'm with you in the search.
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