I love meta-language. It's great stuff. Joseph Williams does some great meta-lanugage in his article about error in putting errors in it for readers to find. Pure genius, I say. His points about error are very important ones, methinks, but what I found even more important about his article was his consciousness of meta-language, language about language (five points for every error you find in this paragraph and the rest of the blog post).
This is the sort of thing I hope to engender in my writing students. Once you're conscious of language as language, things get fun. Linguistic play is what I like about being an English major, writing papers, writing wall posts on facebook, writing emails, and even writing blog posts. I think most people enjoy some form of writing for this reason, but things start getting really fun when you are fully aware (or even partially aware) of what you're really doing.
The example of this that came to mind immediately for me was Stephen Colbert's book I am America (And So Can You!). The whole thing is one big play of meta-language, as is more or less everything Stephen Colbert says. If you haven't read the book, you should. It's funny. Colbert actually makes reference to the typos in his own book and says something about how they have relevance that will only be understood by members of his cult at some point in the future.
This is where I usually make a vain attempt to bring my ramblings back to some sort of relevance to the class reading. Here's what I'm going for: the Williams reading was relevant for his discussion of error consciousness and correction, but it was even more relevant for his tone and his understanding of meta-language and linguistic play. I enjoyed this article more than any this semester except possibly the Mem Fox piece because the guy understands these concepts, which are exactly the concepts I'd like to impart to my students.
Make sense? No? Read it again. Look for errors or something.
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2 comments:
I liked much of Williams' article too. I even liked the violation/response piece, and I usually zone out when lit crit forays into scientific study (I guess that is why I am not in the rhet/comp program).
BUT, I least liked the part you liked the most. The embedding of 100 errors? Cute, but not representative of the errors and authorship we'll likely encounter next year. To understand the rules and break them is completely different from not understanding them at all. We'll come up against the latter in the freshman comp classroom. If my students split infinitives and dangle modifers ON PURPOSE or to gain a certain impact... good for them. I just don't think that's what we'll see.
I get his point. I do. But his errors are +V-R and they are that "grade" because of their scale AND because of his authorial intention.
More on this in a separate post.
I don't think the question is whether we're going to encounter something like that. It's certainly unlikely that students will try to pull off meta-writing on this scale or in this sense. What I liked wasn't the idea of error-embedding itself, it was the level at which he engaged writing, the intentionality of it, if you will (and I certainly will).
I obviously won't use this particular text in my course next semester, but this is the type of thing I'm going to try to teach. It kind of relates back to the reading we did a while ago on being reflective. As a writer, being aware of what you're doing, reflecting on it, and operating on a level "above" what's expected can only make one better. I try to do this when possible. It's not something that comes naturally, even for snooty English majors like us, but it's something that can be developed.
THAT'S what I like about his writing. The content and message are irrelevant to this idea (though they have merit in themselves). I like how much he thinks.
Any errors in this post are probably accidents. Probably.
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