The New Work of Composing

Edited by Debra Journet, Cheryl E. Ball, & Ryan Trauman

Book overview. This edited collection explores theoretical and practical questions about multimodal, digital production through lenses of rhetoric/composition, digital writing studies, English studies, and the humanities.
- Computers and Composition Digital Press
- Utah State University Press
Not Your Mother's Argument

Morgan Gresham and Roxanne Kirkwood Aftanas

Abstract. This chapter explores how identity and expectations change audience responses to our work as scholars. Using our own compositions as a point of departure, we argue that authors cannot use the master's tools of traditional argument to look at the new work of composition scholarship. As our discipline transitions to new compositions, we see the increasing expectation of a "second shift" of work that requires remediation into traditional argument if our work is to be viable. We push against this expectation, using our digital compositions to create feminist identities and scholarship.

APA Citation: Gresham, Morgan, & Aftanas, Roxanne Kirkwood. (2012). Not your mother's argument. In Debra Journet, Cheryl E. Ball, & Ryan Trauman (Eds.), The new work of composing. Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press. http://ccdigitalpress.org/nwc/chapters/gresham-aftanas/
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“The dated technology is not an incidental condition in this effort because its limits accentuate a concern that pervades all efforts to teach programming and writing in a writing course.” (Kalmbach & Fortune, 1999, p. 323)

I, Morgan, started working with computer technologies in the composition classroom in 1992. I made my first website in 1994 when my class in Kentucky was working with a class in Mississippi. Coding was easy then. Formulated like algebraic equations, using <p> and <br> tags that were similar to the codes we needed in early word processors, my beginning foray into the World Wild Web was fun. More importantly, however, the time-to-production ratio was small and the payoff—in terms of both student engagement and production—was high when I started teaching my students to create web pages in our first-year composition classes.

At the Digital Media and Composition Institute in 2011, however, one workshop presenter stated that she worked for 75 hours on one three-minute video. If this is the norm for production time, it is no wonder that those of us at trailing-edge institutions may not have the time to produce such digitally sophisticated scholarly compositions. Because our field has worked within expectations that scholarly arguments need to have both the argument and the container to explain them, and that, further, they must be digitally significant, we have added a second shift to our work.

This is the way my days usually run: I have five minutes before I have to go to a meeting so I hope that you will walk with me for a minute while I explain my daily routine (see right). I no longer have time to play with the code, but I can make a Google site in fifteen seconds and fully populate it in thirty minutes. For me, I have to make a decision to do what is doable rather than to do what is best because if I try to do what’s best, I will never make the argument at all. Isn’t it better, ultimately, to take one step in the right direction than to never take a step at all?

I recognize that this conversation is about choices, and the choices that I have made as a scholar/teacher, as a woman, as an employee, and as a feminist.

•My scholarly self is working on a project in collaboration with the CCCC’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession (CSWP) and the Digital Archives of Literacy Narratives (DALN). This project is gathering and archiving women’s lives in rhetoric and composition in an effort to offer a counter-narrative to Women’s Ways of Making it in Composition. The project serves to recognize the number and range of choices women in the profession make and how those choices, and the responses to them, code us as having made it. Or not.
•The institution I have chosen is an X-tier institution, meaning that it is trailing edge in terms of technology, that it is “not the research campus” in our system, and that we have a department of eleven. But, that it does have high standards and expectations for teaching, research, and grants.
•This tiering means that for tenure and promotion we write five plus two (articles) or one (book) plus two (articles) while teaching a 3/2 load and managing a heavy service commitment.

I have made choices that have been right for me. I have moved institutions to be in the right place for me; I have refined the topics of my scholarship to be more truthful about my own experiences as a feminist; I have publicly proclaimed being a feminist; and I have strived to do the work that is expected of me. But in many ways these choices are not sufficient.

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