speaking/writing/performing

A PhD advisee of mine, C, did her exams yesterday. The exams in Writing Studies are oral (the exams in Communication—formerly Speech Communication—are written, but this curious transposition is a matter for another post).  C, more than anyone I have ever met, is a writer. She has an M.F.A. in creative writing, for starters. She wrote her way through two seminars with me, and when I say that, I mean she sat through each class, head down, scrawling in a big notebook from one end of the page to the other, top to bottom, page after page, occasionally looking up to see who was talking. This is how she learns, and I’m reasonably sure that what happens in her notebooks tilts more toward invention than transcription.

Her response papers are the reason I became very strict about length limits. They always spilled over, and she also prefers a smaller-than-usual font, which more than anything else, serves to underscore the density and liveliness of the writing. (I had to finally ask her to at least bump it up to 11-point.) Emails from C, too, tend toward the unusually long, thoughtful, and carefully crafted. The most challenging part of these exams, she and I have both known for awhile, would be that she would need to put down her pen, pull her head up, and speak rather than write. This was the cause of much anxiety for C, and has been since she first entered the program three and a half years ago.  

I don’t know the details about her exam preparation, except that she read or re-read probably 250 or so books and articles in the past several months. I’m fairly certain that writing featured prominently in her preparation—I rarely saw her in recent months without the 3-inch-thick notebook she brought back from Portugal, which seemed to be getting thicker.

Listening to C in her exam yesterday, I realized that she speaks like a writer, like she writes—in full, vivid, paragraphs, her answers forming something like narrative arcs. Plato talks about writing taking the place of memory, and whether he is right about that or not, it is definitely the case that writing facilitates memory. C buttressed her answers with quotations, illustrations, descriptions (my favorite description was when she compared reading one particularly troubling scholarly book to watching a house burn down—“at once fascinating and horrifying”), weaving answers on the spot to our pointed questions.

C's answers brought the seventeenth-century chironomist John Bulwer as close as he has ever been to composition researcher Janet Emig, thickly described psych-lab experiments that suggest gesture does not just convey thought but helps constitute it, and explained to us precisely and without hesitation why Descartes ought not be so easily tossed out with cartesianism.  Toward the end of the exam, I wondered whether it was possible to speak in a 10-point font. If it is, she was doing it, only instead of filling the page, her words filled the room. No squinting was necessary.

Comments

[J. K. Gayle]

Wow, your post is beautiful writing. You bring us there in the room, filled with 10-pt font speaking and John Bulwer and Janet Emig, overhearing C. And then we stand outside again looking in, with Plato and you, wondering where we are. (I wonder if I hadn't been through this exam process, experiencing the performance, if I'd know what you mean -- or what I get from what you "say" here, without squinting). Thank you.

[dave's not here]

And underscores the notion of just how language, whether spoken or written, depends upon place and body (as if these two could ever be without one another). There are no disembodied or displaced communiques, even to ourselves, if that's how we are defining thought. I wonder if this is what it really means to have an open mind?

[caraf]

Yay for C! And especially for those notebooks!

[caraf]

Yay for C! And especially for those notebooks!

[Richard Graff]

"Listening to C in her exam yesterday, I realized that she speaks like a writer, like she writes—in full, vivid, paragraphs, her answers forming something like narrative arcs. Plato talks about writing taking the place of memory, and whether he is right about that or not, it is definitely the case that writing facilitates memory. . ."

And/or that writing -- long practice in writing with care -- can give a written "color" to one's more-or-less unplanned speech. Cicero and Quintilian sought and cultivated such facility:

"One who approaches oratory by way of long practice in writing, brings this advantage to the task, that even if [she] is extemporizing, whatever [she] may say bears a likeness to the written word" (Cic. De or. 1.152; cf. Orator 200)

"Certainly, writing is never more necessary than when we have to improvise a lot. It is the way in which weightiness can be maintained, and the superficial verbal facility acquire some depth. Think of the way farmers prune away the topmost roots of the vine, which pull the plant towards the surface, to enable the lower roots to go deeper and get stronger. It may well be that if we do both these things with care and persistence, each will help the other: we shall speak more exactly because we write, and write more fluently because we speak (ut scribendo dicamus diligentius, dicendo scribamus facilius)" (Q. Inst. or. 10.7-28-29)
And later:
"Is the orator always to speak as [she] writes? Yes, always, if [she] can" (12.10.55)

All this calls to mind W. B. Yeats' famous description of a specific later-day case of such "cultivation":

"My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment. I never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all over night with labour and yet all spontaneous. . . I noticed, too, that the impression of artificiality that I think all Wilde's listeners have recorded, came from the perfect rounding of the sentences and from the deliberation that made it possible. That very impression helped him as the effect of metre, or of the antithetical prose of the seventeenth century, which is itself a true metre, helps a writer, for he could pass without incongruity from some unforeseen swift stroke of wit to elaborate reverie. . . " (W. B. Yeats, Four Years)

(Not that I assume from your account that C's performance gave an artificial impression!)

Way to go C!