Can we revise?

As Peter has posted emails from previous weeks and a comment on them, it might be worthwhile to think about genre.

Our blog, in effect, works as a genre that is distinct from email or its close relative, the list-serv discussion. While the audience for the list-serve is usually wider than personal email, both tend to inspire back and forth exchanges and impromptu texts. Like conversations, these exchanges are often short; the tone and diction informal; the standards for evidence somewhat more relaxed than in publishable academic writing.

Some bloggers will do the same thing and--in effect--publish emails to the Internet. We're aiming, I think, for a scholarly blog--one that readers beyond our circle will find relevant, current, authoritative, and well written.

I used Fish in the previous post, "Savior or Narcissus," partly because I was interested in the issue he raises and partly because he's using the blog genre in ways that I find useful, both for the humanities generally and for our project particularly.

Regardless of one's opinion of Fish's blog or his sometimes polarizing posts, he writes to a broad audience, states a thesis, frames an issue, and offers evidence. His posts usually begin with a description of some (often recent) source or with a summary of and response to comments from the previous week. Once a week, he produces a professional and reasonably complete bit of discourse.

I think we can accomplish and should expect similar work from our group. Yes, there is the matter of time and the lack of it. Perhaps some English professors of the Golden Age had a more leisurely work life. Certainly, many faculty will recognize the difficulty in managing teaching and administrative responsibilities with scholarly productivity.

The 2007 MLA Task Force Report on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion notes a 25 percent increase in the work week for faculty between the years 1972 and 1998:

As Jack H. Schuster and Martin J. Finkelstein point out, the weekly work effort of faculty members across institutional types increased from 40 hours per week in 1972 to 48.6 hours in 1998, and it increased most dramatically, to 50.6 hours, at research universities, where the faculty has been subjected to both increasing instructional demands and increasing research demands (79). Across the board the proportion of faculty members working more than 50 hours a week has doubled since 1972, rising from a significant minority (23.2%) in 1972 to nearly 40% in 1998. (17).

The 40-hour work week has disappeared for professionals everywhere, not just faculty. We are a busy culture. Productively busy at times, franticly so at others.

Peter's post concludes with a sort of big picture question: What change do we really want?

That question may be so big that we'll have trouble making headway without breaking it into smaller parts.

For that, here's the small-scale change I'd like:

Can we productively and collaboratively work to revise Peter's comment and post into a thesis-driven post, written in an voice that would find a receptive audience at MLA? That is, there's good stuff in the comment and in the email, but it's still too raw for the genre conventions that we have to work with.

If last week, we had a pretty good and expansive discussion, then maybe this week we can work to revise a single post: fashion the rant into a page or two for our article.

How's that for a manageable task that fits into our 50 + hour work weeks?