The main idea I took from this week's readings is that people hate change. As a general rule, the older and more established a person is, the more he or she hates change. But they don't say that; they go to great lengths to prove why their resistance to change is not because they are set in their ways, but because their ways are better.
Baron's article really exemplified this; he noted several examples in which people denounced new technology because they found it to be pointless, or maybe because they found it threatening (Thoreau needed to sell his pencils, so he wrote that the telegraph was dumb).
Trimbur would do well to embrace the changing style of rhetoric that is more reader-friendly; I unfortunately found his prose unnecessarily dense and hard to follow.
Finally, Stroupe took the bull by the horns to tell people like Trimbur what is happening in a lengthy article they can appreciate (although with much more reader-friendly prose). Stroupe had to do this to convince all of the aging academics out there that change is good, that the internet is changing rhetoric and the rhetorical power of combined words and images, and that all those aging academics would do well to take the hint (nobody wants to read dense scholarly prose anymore, if they ever did in the first place).
Anyway, I know there is much more to these articles, but since everything we are reading is converging into the theme "writing is still quality if there are pictures involved, and the two combined are probably better than text alone," the real issue here seems to be convincing the world of higher education to embrace this and teach students to capitalize on it.
I have to agree with your abhorrence of dense scholarly prose. Sometimes it seems so pointless, and very ego oriented(look how big my vocab is...).
ReplyDeleteIf the point of writing is to connect, then let's use language that actually allows it. I'm not for the dumbing down of America, and I personally love learning new words, but some scholarly articles just make my head spin. I guess the question is, if people stop writing in high-minded language, will it lower the bar?
I completely agree with this post! i agree the main idea is change and how we as humans naturally resist it. Bringing that into light is always a good learning topic, but telling us in 40+ pages of reading is ridiculous. in my opinion, Trimbur also proved overly scholarly and pretentious in his writing style. Your last paragraph really brought into light a good point. Do you think Trimbur's article would effectively reach the opinions that need to be changed in higher education because of his dense prose?
ReplyDeletei like how you summed everything up as those who don't want change are not just against it, but that they are more than likely threatened by it as well.
ReplyDeletei also agree that Trimbur was a hard read...i did not like him much. Basically what i got out of it was that change is coming and has in fact already happened, just look at all the changes the pencil went through. We (those who are not all too excited about the change) are probably just going to have to embrace it at some point and someday will be hoping that these changes don't change for the newer changes to come...
"As a general rule, the older and more established a person is, the more he or she hates change. But they don't say that; they go to great lengths to prove why their resistance to change is not because they are set in their ways, but because their ways are better."- HA excellent wording. I could quote every time you write a blog. So great. Oh, and loved your video by the way. Highly amusing. (Sorry I hardly have anything useful to post, but you sum things up so nicely there's nothing left to say. And your writing always makes me giggle).
ReplyDeleteIt does seem pointless whenever someone tries to resist change. Whether it is bad or good, it will always be inevitable. We always progress through time, technology, and greater understanding of human values, so most of the change we do experience is always for the better. Therefore people should try to embrace it and try to adapt to it so they can learn to understand from it.
ReplyDeleteI really liked what you said about people resisting change and then how "they go to great lengths to prove why their resistance to change is not because they are set in their ways, but because their ways are better." It made me laugh--because it is so true! If we personally dislike something or are offended by it, why don't we just say so, instead of rearranging "what is right" so that it defends our position? It must be a human nature thing to do.
ReplyDeleteKaren, your post reminds of something that Trudi posted to her blog this week, "If technology is going to be the end of humanity as we know it the news to you would be: it is too late: life as you know it has been altered previously by technology." That statement really resounded with me: no matter where we fall on the continuum of becoming a digital world (a-hem, we've been a digital world for a while now!), technology changed things way before we arrived on the scene (pencils, typewriters...) and I think we would be wise, as we sit down to use our favorite form of writing technology (even if it's a pencil), to look back and see how it rocked the world up on it's heels--and yet here we are, literate and writing.
Many people will always be afraid of change, I think--it's human nature.