English 5365 Technical Literacy Paper: Blogging it out

My paper is still taking shape. Sources are piling up, yet none of them seem quite right yet. Could be that my brain is still churning it all up and trying to make sense of it. It could also be that I am losing my mind and will never make sense of it. :)

Mott Greene stated, "Any issue of Nature today has nearly the same number of Articles and Letters as one from 1950, but about four times as many authors. The lone author has all but disappeared" (2007). According to Greene, "From the late 1600s until about 1920, the rule was one author per paper: an individual produced an increment of science and obtained a corresponding increment of credit. This symmetry was breached in the 1920s, diminished in the 1950s, and largely abandoned by the 1980s" (2007).

Greene also notes, "Curiously, however, in most journals we are not told which of these did what part of the work, nor may we be certain (have we ceased to care?) who drafted the paper" (2007).

The question I ask myself is have we "ceased to care" about which individual drafted the paper because academic writers are supposed to be writing as one entity anyway with a unified style across all papers or because we see the content as more important than the style?

In my role, I see these papers before the technical editor (me or one of my colleagues) has cleaned them up, and I can tell that they were generally not drafted by one author. I can see changes in style, inconsistency in abbreviations, mathematical presentations, terminology, etc. Sometimes, it looks like the authors took a stab at smoothing it out, some succeed in writing a seamless collaborative piece, and others fail to even attempt it.

Have you ever read a paper in which you can feel the change of author like running over a pothole? I have. It is almost like they did not even read each others sections. They just combined the files and submitted the combination for review and eventual publication.

This is clearly an impact on style, resulting from multiple authors contributing to one work.

My link to technology is more tenuous (that is, I have not found as many sources supporting this link), but I still feel that it has a role to play. I think that the increased speed of modern communication has led to this boom in multi-author papers and, therefore, to the corresponding impact on the style of the work.

I see collaborations not just among colleagues at the same institution, not just among those even from the same state or the same country. I see papers where one or two authors is from one country, another one or two are from another, and sometimes, there are even third or fourth countries involved.

Imagine collaborating on a work with a person halfway around the world prior to e-mail, Skype, and electronic files? You find this collaborator at a meeting perhaps and decide that your interests are similar. You then begin the process of mailing data back and forth to each other (snail mail, remember) with some phone calls thrown in for good measure. Then when you actually start writing, you have to mail drafts back and forth and mail the proofs?

Remember that we live in a publish or perish world. Would you wait for the regular mail or just move on with other researchers closer at hand so that you can get published and get published often.

I believe that the proliferation of better, faster communication makes collaborations more attractive. Why race for the finish line when you can collaborate and get both names on the paper, especially when it can be done quickly without delaying time to publication?

English 5365 Week Twelve Post

Topic: Refer to high, middle, and low styles with what you read/worked on from the edited collection.

According to Lanham, "The oldest set of categories for prose style is the division into high and low" (p. 160). Lanham notes that high style resulted in our new formal style, which he calls "The Official Style," in which bureaucrats will say things like "an upsurge in suicidal ideation" (p. 160). Lanham states that we crave the high style, yet we fear it. We have developed an idea that "down home, plain, folksy, colloquial, ungrammatical" is sincere, while high style is not (p. 161).

The middle style is more difficult to define precisely. It depends on the placement of high and low styles. Lanham states, " It can be clearly and consistently defined as halfway between the high and low style, whatever we think those extremes may be" (p. 164). This means that my definition of middle style will differ from someone else's definition because our placement of high and low may differ.

I worked on Carl Whithaus's chapter. I would place it firmly in the middle to high range. I did not see anything that I would definitively call low style in the work.

For example, "Grego and Thompson develop the Writing Studio as a systematic method of helping student writers, but their pedagogical practices also allow an understanding of composition’s meaningful work as contingent upon localized needs" is clearly in the middle to high style in my opinion. "Pedagogical practices" and "contingent upon localized needs" are clearly high style. I could not imagine using these terms in everyday conversation. [I do use uncommon words at work frequently, but that is work, which is hardly low style.]

Another example is "the RCS approach engages participants in intensive communication practice for making sense of their engineering research experiences." "Engages participates" and "intensive communication practice" are more high style than low.

However, when I consider that this is a chapter in a book for a professional audience, it makes sense that the author would tend toward higher style. Slang is not usually acceptable in peer-reviewed content.