You Cant Sling No Bull

You Cant Sling No BullTeaching Writing With SoundBruce BallengerBoise State University Ive been teaching writing now for over 25 years, and the first thingand most important thingI learned about writing was from my first teacher and mentor Donald Murray. As most of you know, Don was a giant in the writing process movement. Along with Peter Elbow, Ken Macrorie, and Janet Emig, he encouraged instructors to teach process and product. As he once said, you cant infer a pig from a sausage. And so he wanted writing teachers to not only evaluate the sausagethe paperbut help the student analyze the pighow that paper came into being, the process. Don suggested that we might start with examining our own writing processes, not as models that students must emulate, but as a site for research. What can we learn about ourselves as writers that might help us to understand the struggles our students have?

Don was very keen on voice. He thought that learning to write well had as much to do with hearing as anything else. Don wrote once that If we force the writer to read the text aloud (forget the shame, pass over the apologies, push aside the embarrassment) then the writer in the act of reading to a teacher, a classmate, a workshop, will hear a meaning that was not in the writer's mind, but was in the writer's language. That's what we have to be able to hear, the meaning that is in the language. The music.

Im pretty sure that Don Murray would have loved the idea of recording students reading their writing, and as I look back on those early years of the process movement, Im surprised we didnt think of it. What better way for students to hear their writing voices? On the other hand, the revival of the radio essaywhich today is, I think, the most vibrant form of the essay genrewas a few years away. And not everyone had tape recorders or any idea of how to edit a tape. But now all that has changed. Nearly every student in my writing classes this semester can make a digital recording on their smart phones, and all of them have learned the basics of audio editing using free software available on the Web.

Writing voice was always a powerful idea for my students. But it was an abstraction. What they understood about itand what I tried to teach themwas that all writing has a voiceeven academic writingthat we adjust the register to the rhetorical situation. They got this, I think. But when I started asking students to record their essaysto write work that was written to be heard and to be heard oncethey began to understand voice in ways I didnt expect. They developed a remarkably sophisticated and powerful understanding of voice that just blew me away. When you record your own voice it is, in a literal sense, embodied language. These are words that are issued from the chest and mouth, that are spoken with the lips, and uttered with the vocal chords. These are the sounds that the speaker knows belongs to him or her. What students realized as they began to write audio essays was that they not only were able to hear awkward languagethe kind of thing we hope when students read their essays aloud in peer workshopsbut as Don Murray put it they could also hear the meaning that is in the language. And not only that, they felt a sense of responsibility for that meaning.1Before this class, I was a self labeled bull-slinger. I wrote what I was expected to write, what my professors wanted to hear, and I got good marks for it. Audio, however, is much more personal. You can tell when a person doesnt believe what they are saying, and even more so when they do. Take Jeff. He was a student in my advanced composition class, a senior English major, who signed up for the class to meet a requirement for his writing major. Jeff had no idea he would be writing audio essays. His experience was typical. Before this class, I was a self labeled bull slinger. I wrote what I was expected to write, what my professors wanted to hear, and I got good grades for it. Audio, however, is much more personal. You can tell when a person doesnt believe what they are saying, and even more so when they do.

I heard this over and over again in every class I taught with an audio essay assignment. It becomes harder to lie, to bullshit. In fact, for some students its unbearable.

Speaking writers truths through voice is only one of the powerful lessons my students have learned from recording their writing, and today Im going to make the case that sound projects can teach other things as well and just as powerfully. In fact, audio essays have succeeded in teaching things Ive been trying to teach for years in my writing courses, but much more effectively. Things like rhetorical situation, unity, clarity, as well as voice.

But first, what am I talking about when I say audio essay.2Commentary (Voice Only)

I use the word radio essay in my class but it is largely 3Narrative (voice and music)

Level 2 audio essays are narratives, which incorporate both music and voice. Two tracks4Documentary (Voice, Music, Interview, Ambient Sound)

Level 3, the most complicated, and for more advanced students, the most rewarding, involves three to four tracks.5

6 Motivation

Andrea talks about engagement7Write the way you talk.

Its a didactic medium. You have to say what it means.

Youve got ten seconds to convince me its not just about you.

Listeners should hear what youre saying, not how youre saying it.

Begin and end strongly.

8Rhetorical Situation

Melody on the fleeting nature of the genre9

I grew up with Marlon Brando. Well, technically not the real Brando, but the idea of Brando, the mythology of Brando. I gratefully stood in the glittering trail of his celebrity, a comet that has always shown brightly over the dark nights of my childhood. And, in a way, even now. My mother grew up with Brando in Chicago, and after the war, they both left the city for New York, where they hoped to land acting careers. If you ask her, and sometimes if you dont, my mom will show you pictures of the two of them: smirking at the camera at a table in a New York restaurant, feeding her cocker spaniel in her Brooklyn apartment, and when they were younger still, beaming at the camera together, hands full of bocce balls, standing in front of my grandparents country house in Wheeling, Illinois. Briefly, mom played Stella opposite Brando in Streetcar Named Desire. He rocketed to fame and they never spoke again. Naturally, I always enjoyed my second-hand brush with fame. It made me feel special, and in my family feeling special was a salve for feeling shame.

Embodied writing

Matt on voice13S.O.F.T.

Collaborating on Meaning

Major AssignmentsCommentaryNarrativeDocumentaryConciseness and clarityIn creating these simpler sentences that work to convey a point sooner and more clearly, I found that my writing became more pure in a sense. There was no dancing around the subject, or lengthy flowery descriptions that could trigger disinterest in a listener.Adam17Audacityhttp://audacity.sourceforge.net/Other Sound ProjectsIra Glass Style IntroductionsPodcastAudio draftVeterans History ProjectResearch essayThis I BelieveResourcesThis American Life, Kitchen Sisters, This I BelieveTransom.org, libsyn.commoneyCaleb MattraversCaleb's Essay23954.365XXX - 00000250 00000023 0000E3B1 0000655E 00038539 00038743 00008069 0000804E 00038D49 00038D49The Smoke of EmpireSeth S. MarlinENGL324Speech65592.055XXX - Soundtrack: "Trekka (Desert Porn Remix)" by PusciferTwinkies Audio DocumentaryKatie Arimanull134797.17nullBlues46262.438nullBlues53785.312nullBlues72071.055nullBlues28369.16nullBlues31660.664nullBlues30955.342Jake Infatuation IntroEmily RyanIntrotoJakeInfatuation192324.42