An Illusion of Keys in Discord

After weeks of focusing on Kathleen Blake Yancey for my upcoming presentation, I felt I knew exactly where Peter Kratzke was headed from the moment I read his title: “Recopying to Revise: Composition in an Old Key.” And, Kratzke didn’t disappoint – though he was actually a little more adamant than I expected in his admonitions that “an ounce of precaution is in order,” and “we need to tell our students to slow down and double back” (10) before we get too caught up in Yancey’s “New” key.

In her 2004 CCCC Chair’s address, “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key,” Yancey empathetically states that “yes, it’s about change. Change, as we saw in the 19th century, and as we see now, can be very difficult, can be unnerving” (321).

“Unnerved” is the way Kratzke often comes across when he professes to not hear students talking about “drafts” and revision on campus anymore (10) as a consequence of an absorbing interest in and the rampant use of technology. As a student of composition who constantly revises (often by hand), I have to disagree that these discussions are not going on – more, as a writer-teacher, I know I constantly lead students into conversations about the art and craft of revision.

As I felt Michelle Sidler may have overstated her case for the privileging of biotechnology information by the rhetorical field, I feel here as though Kratzke is panicking a little more than may be called for when comparing the writing process with “warfare” and “nuclear power” (11).

Further, this technology is not just going to go away. Yancey points out that this “[has become] the language of the vernacular, [and] if we do not include it in school curriculum, we will become as irrelevant as faculty professing in Latin” (305). She does not say at any point I’ve found that we should eliminate print – or even typewriters if that is Kratzke’s want; though, I don’t remember them being my tool of choice for creativity, and I think he’d be hard-pressed to get his students to do more than play with one out of curiosity.

Still, I do encourage quite a bit of in-class writing myself, among other reasons, as a way for my students to experience this connection with their own work, but I’ve never seen anything in Yancey’s work to indicate she would be opposed to this. What she appears to be advocating, rather, is an exploration with our students of “a curriculum that carries forward the best of what we have created to date” (308).