What follows is a sample of an evaluation such as my students are asked to write for the Eval assignment in the Fall 2015 term at Oklahoma State University. As is expected of student work, it treats the same piece treated in the earlier (sample) textual analysis, and it borrows text from the earlier assignment–as is to be expected. Additionally, it adheres to the length requirements (the assignment asks for 1,750 to 2,450 words, exclusive of headings and citations; the sample is 1,905, judged by the same standards), although the formatting will necessarily differ due to the different medium of presentation. (This is particularly true for the Works Cited list, which is bulleted for ease of reading online; paper-formatted essays should not bullet their citations.) How the medium influences reading is something well worth considering as a classroom discussion, particularly for those students who are going into particularly writing- or design-intensive fields.

In a 15 August 2015 New York Times opinion piece, “Puzzling through My Fiction,” Ben Dolnick treats the use of crossword puzzles as practice for writing fiction. He asserts that solving puzzles is an analogous practice to sorting out narrative prose and plot arcs. The process he describes as common to both moves through at least four phases–“The Blank Beginning,” “The Walk-Away,” “The Dam Breakage,” and “The Slow Clap.” Each is provided illustrative examples of how crossword-solving reflects narrative construction, making clear the connections between the two. An end-note describes it as the last entry in the Draft series maintained by the New York Times, and it is good that the series ends on an effective piece of writing. It is good also that it ends on one generally representative of that series, and Dolnick’s piece is typical of Draft series essays.

There are limitations to such a claim, of course. At one level, pieces which end series are by dint of that ending atypical. A “normal” member of a series is written and presented in a context that implies more is to come. A planned end to a series is not, but will typically be written to bring to completion any lines of discussion that are still ongoing; it may also work to reflect upon the series as a whole, offering summative statements of the series’ accomplishment of its expressed purposes and other comments meant to offer a vision of the collection of works. Since such a reflection is not likely to be the ongoing purpose of a series, a work which offers such reflection cannot be typical of it; since concluding members of a series are likely to offer such reflection, it follows that they are not likely to be typical of their series; and since “Puzzling through My Fiction” is described in an addendum as “the last essay in the Draft series,” it seems likely to be atypical of that series.

Such an assertion, although sensible in itself, falters when the note is made that Dolnick’s essay does not take the reflective stance expected of concluding articles. It falters further when the article is assessed against a sampling of other entries in the Draft series. To offer some standards for evaluation of the last article in the series, the first article in the series–Jhumpa Lahiri’s “My Life’s Sentences”–seems a useful counterpoint. Six other articles from the series, some of which have proven useful for teaching–Aaron Hamburger’s “Outlining in Reverse”; John Kaag’s “The Perfect Essay”; Phillip Lopate’s “The Essay, an Exercise in Doubt”; Sean Pidgeon’s “Rapturous Research”; Molly Ringwald’s “Act Like a Writer”; and David Tuller’s “The Jargon Trap”–complete the survey sample. Taken together, they suggest some common features among the members of that series, helping to assert the typicality of Dolnick’s piece.

Perhaps the most obvious unifying feature of the series is its initial impetus, noted in an addendum to the Lahiri piece that begins it; Draft is “a [then] new series about the art and craft of writing [emphasis in original].” Other articles surveyed bear out the initial assertion; among others, “Act Like a Writer” gestures toward the subject in its title and addresses the utility of writing character biographies for actors, “The Essay, an Exercise in Doubt” treats an oft-derided writing genre, and “The Jargon Trap” treats concerns of style and usage. Dolnick’s article, linking the process of fiction writing to the processes involved in another activity, corresponds perhaps most closely to Ringwald’s among the examples surveyed, but it treats writing as a general topic, and in so doing, it marks itself as fit for inclusion among the Draft series in at least one regard.

Less obvious but more concrete concerns also suit Dolnick’s article to the Draft series. For example, “Puzzling through My Fiction” is of a length similar to the articles surveyed. Those articles range in length from the 700 words of Pidgeon’s piece to the 1,213 words of Ringwald’s, but they tend to cluster in the higher end of that range. The average word count among them is 1,020.86, with a standard deviation of 173.25 words. Dolnick’s piece is 1,118 words long, less than a hundred more than the average and well within one standard deviation of that number. As such, it is firmly in accord with other Draft articles in terms of word count, helping to mark it as typical of the series as a whole.

Other, similar concerns further position the end of the Draft series as representative of the collection. Reviewed essays in the series run from ten paragraphs–Pidgeon’s is again the shortest article among those investigated, being the one with ten paragraphs–to eighteen–Ringwald’s is again the longest, at that length. On average, Draft essays cover 13.43 paragraphs, with a standard deviation of 2.94. Dolnick’s “Puzzling through My Fiction” takes up some 15 paragraphs, no more outside a single standard deviation of the average than its word count. Its paragraph count is therefore every bit as representative of the series it ends as is its word count.

Average paragraph length functions similarly to indicate the representativeness of Dolnick’s concluding Draft article of the whole series. Paragraphs in the articles reviewed range in length from the 67.29-word average of Hamburger’s article to the 101.55-word average of Lahiri’s. The average paragraph length of the articles is 77.33 words, with a standard deviation of 12.78 words. “Puzzling through My Fiction” averages 74.53 words per paragraph, less than three words off from the average paragraph length of the surveyed contributions to the series. That it cleaves as closely to the average paragraph length as it does may be a small point, but it does serve to reinforce the idea that the last article in the Draft series represents the series as a whole.

Reading level also helps to demonstrate how “Puzzling through My Fiction” is typical of the Draft series. The Flesch-Kincaid grade level of articles surveyed ranges from the 6.6–that is six months into sixth grade, per idealized United States standards–of Lahiri’s piece to the 11.5–five months into eleventh grade, not long before most students in the United States will take a final battery of standardized tests for their schools, as well as college entrance exams–of Pidgeon’s; the average is 9.46, with a standard deviation of 1.70. Dolnick’s article displays a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 10.0; it is aimed at those just beginning their sophomore year of high school. Being less than one standard deviation away from the average reading level of Draft articles surveyed suggests that it is in line with what is to be expected of Draft articles in yet another regard, further supporting the idea of Dolnick’s piece as a synecdoche for the series it concludes.

Examination of such mechanistic factors as word and paragraph counts or reading levels may not be something commonly thought of as appropriate to the review of texts, but they do offer quantifiable data that can be used to argue a point convincingly. More typical of the study of writing, however, is the identification of problems; a commonplace concerning those who teach writing (voiced among the surveyed essays by Kaag) is that they search out mistakes, pouncing upon them. Something to pounce upon in several of the essays reviewed is the use of second person reference, which often reads as presumptuous. It certainly does so when it appears in Ringwald’s piece and Pidgeon’s, Hamburger’s and Lopate’s and Kaag’s. (There are, admittedly, instances in some of those essays, as well as in others reviewed, in which the “you” used is appropriate–even when outside of quotation.) Dolnick’s essay, as is noted elsewhere, also deploys second-person references annoyingly (Elliott). Annoying as it is, though, it is typical of Draft essays; the annoyance appearing in Dolnick is another indication of its typicality.

Also typical of the study of writing is examination of opening devices, and in its opening, “Puzzling through My Fiction” is typical of the articles surveyed, suggesting it is typical of the series they represent. The articles surveyed tend to open with brief first-person statements that give context to the essays that follow. “The Perfect Essay” offers one such example, opening with the following five sentences: “Looking back on too many years of education, I can identify one truly impossible teacher. She cared about me, and my intellectual life, even when I didn’t. Her expectations were high — impossibly so. She was an English teacher. She was also my mother.” In doing so, it serves to offer the tone of the piece–reflective and not overly serious–as well as asserting Kaag’s ethos and indicating the vehicle for presentation. A sense of the author’s voice emerges quickly, making the piece more human and therefore more accessible immediately–as is the case for the other articles surveyed.

Something similar occurs with “Puzzling through My Fiction.” The piece opens with a sketch of a childhood construct:

When I was growing up, crossword puzzles were — along with watching Ken Burns movies and eating lox — among the unfathomable pleasures of grown-ups. My grandmother would sit in her den for hours, the puzzle in her lap, looking blankly around the room as if she had just read a piece of news whose enormity she could scarcely comprehend. Other adults would periodically drift by to offer their condolences (“A nine-letter religious figure, hmm…”) and I would stare from the rug in disbelieving boredom.

In three sentences, the author suggests the didactic tone of his article–a child at the feet of family elders is often in a position to learn–and the motion towards tone is typical of opening paragraphs among the essays surveyed. The sentences also assert authorial ethos through noting long association and involvement with the topic, a move common in Draft essays. The vehicle for the presentation–crossword puzzles–is indicated, as well, which also serves to align the opening with Draft standards. Dolnick’s introduction further constructs a vision of a simple childhood mystified by the pursuits of adults–something with which many readers can identify, having been similarly mystified children themselves. That identification serves a humanizing function also typical of Draft essay openings.

Essays in the Draft series also tend to return to the authorial first-person in their endings. Aside from Hamburger’s essay, which leaves off first-person references after the second-to-last paragraph, the essays surveyed all return to authorial self-reference in their final paragraphs, whether by making some statement about things that have been learned or through offering some heartfelt recommendation for actions to take. “Puzzling through My Fiction” does much the same thing, concluding with a comment about the thrill of realization “is why I [Dolnick] became a writer.” The piece comes close to ending on the word “I”; it certainly ends reflexively, and in doing so, it positions itself yet more decisively as a representative ending to the Draft series.

It is a shame that the Draft series has ended; there is more to say about writing than the contributions to the series can contain, other accounts of writing than those offered already. That it ends on a piece that is of a piece with the rest of the series, however, is welcome. If nothing else, Dolnick’s “Puzzling through My Fiction” is a fitting conclusion, serving to remind readers that more things are connected than might initially appear to be. Searching out those connections seems a thing worth doing.

Works Cited

• Dolnick, Ben. “Puzzling through My Fiction.” New York Times. New York Times, 15 August 2015. Web. 23 October 2015.
• Elliott, Geoffrey B. “Sample Textual Analysis: Picking apart a Fictional Puzzle.” ElliottRWI. Geoffrey B. Elliott, 30 September 2015. Web. 29 October 2015.
• Hamburger, Aaron. “Outlining in Reverse.” New York Times. New York Times, 21 January 2013. Web. 23 October 2015.
• Kaag, John. “The Perfect Essay.” New York Times. New York Times, 5 May 2014. Web. 23 October 2015.
• Lahiri, Jhumpa. “My Life’s Sentences.” New York Times. New York Times, 17 March 2012. Web. 23 October 2015.
• Lopate, Phillip. “The Essay, an Exercise in Doubt.” New York Times. New York Times, 16 February 2013. Web. 23 October 2015.
• Pidgeon, Sean. “Rapturous Research.” New York Times. New York Times, 5 January 2013. Web, 23 October 2015.
• Ringwald, Molly. “Act Like a Writer.” New York Times. New York Times, 18 August 2012. Web. 23 October 2015.
• Tuller, David. “The Jargon Trap.” New York Times. New York Times, 4 August 2014. Web. 23 October 2015.

What follows is a sample of a textual analysis such as my students are being asked to write for the TxtAn assignment in the Fall 2015 term at Oklahoma State University. It conforms partially to the content guidelines expressed on the TxtAn assignment sheet for that term (it treats an article from the appropriate location but too early a date for student use), and it adheres to the length requirements (the assignment asks for 1,400 to 1,750; the sample is 1,515), although the formatting will necessarily differ due to the different medium of presentation. How the medium influences reading is something well worth considering as a classroom discussion, particularly for those students who are going into particularly writing- or design-intensive fields.

On 15 August 2015, Ben Dolnick’s “Puzzling through My Fiction” appeared in the online New York Times. Described in a postscript as the “final essay in the Draft series” the paper’s Opinion pages have maintained, it articulates and expands on the idea that crossword puzzles offer practice for fiction writing, with the process of solving such puzzles mapping neatly onto the process of drafting a work of fiction. Dolnick lays out major stages of the shared process–“The Blank Beginning,” “The Walk-Away,” “The Dam Breakage,” and “The Slow Clap”–providing illustrative anecdotes of each as it manifests in puzzle solving before making explicit the connection to writing fiction. In all, the piece is an effective presentation of one writer’s process, as paralleled in a literacy activity enjoyed by many who do not style themselves authors.

That Dolnick’s essay is effective overall does not mean it is without flaw, however. Some points of usage argue against the paper’s effectiveness. The readership of the New York Times tends to skew towards inclusivity and social justice, given the long association of the newspaper’s home and movements for various civil rights concerns. For the article to make the mistake of gendered assumptions, using masculine pronouns as universals, comes across as an abrogation of the presumed readers’ values. Authors are not universally masculine. They are not predominantly masculine in the United States of the early twenty-first century, as glimpses at bookshelves and at the still-often-feminized disciplines of writing and literary studies suggest. The essay’s deployment of masculine pronouns reads as exclusionary, therefore, and not in accord with the expectations its audience is likely to have.

Additionally, the presence of second-person reference outside of explicit instruction grates. While readers of the New York Times may be expected to be familiar with crossword puzzles–the paper is famous for the quality and difficulty of those it presents–they may not be assumed to be engaged in solving them. Even those who are thus engaged are not necessarily going to think along the lines the essay casually assumed. The second-person usage in such sections of the essay as “The Blank Beginning” comes off as somewhat presumptuous, and the New York City audience that is the primary readership of the paper is not noted for responding kindly to presumption.

Other usage is not problematic, although it does introduce some potential confusion. In the first paragraph of the section called “The Dam Breakage,” Dolnick references “an unprecedented lapse into Esperanto.” As a created language, Esperanto is spoken by limited numbers of people–and by vanishingly few as a native language. For the language to be chosen as one into which a writer lapses–with the word usually signaling something habitual taken up as a lack of effort not associated with speaking a non-native language–comes off as odd. That oddity distracts from the flow of the text, inhibiting its effectiveness.

While some of the article’s usage is problematic, and some is perhaps confusing, “Puzzling through My Fiction” deploys many other phrases that work remarkably well. The overall metaphor of the piece, linking crossword puzzles to fiction writing through geographic imagery, casts the two disparate items in a similar frame of reference, making the connection between the two evident and easily taken in by readers. Additionally, the metaphor allows for framing the discussion of the article as passing a series of landmarks–an image that resonates with New York City readers, living as they do in a place where many buildings have historical significance and seemingly all of them attract tourist gawking. In that resonance, local readers are able to access the text easily, increasing its overall effectiveness.

Individual phrases in the work serve to make the text more effective by making points succinctly and memorably. For example, the comment at the end of the section titled “The Blank Beginning” that “Even a granite wall, studied with sufficient patience, reveals its cracks” is telling. The referenced granite, a mottled stone, evokes the dark-and-light patterns of both crossword puzzles and printed pages, connecting them for effect. It also evokes the commonplace impression of granite as strength, speaking to the seeming intractability of puzzles and the blank page as they are initially confronted. That the granite, a stone used for things meant to last long, admits of its own breaking and division in the image thus suggests that the less monolithic problems of solving crosswords and making text admit of their own openings and resolutions. Reiterating a point without reiterating the words used to make it allows for repetition–useful for affirming messages–without the potential for nagging, making the tactic effectual.

Other examples of particularly vivid phrases appear in the text, as well. In the section titled “The Walk-Away,” Dolnick uses the image of having as an answer to one clue only “FARMLAND, and this FARMLAND seems to have been salted.” The image calls to mind the legended destruction of Carthage by Rome, in which the fields were sown with salt that nothing would grow in them again–a particularly vengeful act and one that sticks in the mind through its ferocity. Articles do well to stick in the mind, so the deployment of the example helps “Puzzling through My Fiction” make its point. Too, the image of a river surging forward in “The Dam Breakage,” while perhaps somewhat conventional, still carries much weight; its deployment therefore serves to help the article remain in mind, helping its point stay put across to the reader.

The article’s overall format also conduces to its effectiveness. As noted above, it makes free use of illustrative anecdotes in asserting the utility of crossword puzzles as practice for fiction writing. The anecdotes immediately humanize the process; in presenting stories, they make matters more accessible to readers who, by their very nature, seek out stories to read. They also subtly reinforce Dolnick’s ethos. In the article, he is an author writing about writing, particularly about writing fiction. The anecdotes, while based perhaps in observed events, are fictionalized. They are presentations of the very thing Dolnick is discussing doing, and so they provide direct evidence that he is capable of doing what he discusses doing. He demonstrates his expertise in the act of making assertions based upon it, increasing his authority to offer insights. Having simultaneous appeals to Aristotelian pathos and ethos promotes engagement with the work and makes it more authoritative; the two combine to make the essay more effective than it otherwise might be.

The introductory vignette serves as a particularly prominent example of how the essay deploys the two to effect. The opening sentence speaks to New York erudite culture–lox, a brined salmon fillet, and Ken Burns’s documentaries both loom large in the city’s lore and in the conversations of its many thinkers–and flatters those who participate in it, labeling as mature, thus refined and desirable, the attributes of that culture. Flattery tends to promote good feeling, and good feeling tends to entice further investigation and engagement–the development of which is one of the hallmarks of effective writing. Too, it situates the writer as long-embedded in the culture of New York City, asserting that he belongs among its people and among its writers. He is one of them, raised as such and therefore empowered to address them–and making that kind of appeal makes his writing all the more effective in reaching them.

Also effective are the patterns of presentation deployed in the article. The sections of the piece move chronologically, working from earlier in the process to later in the process; the order is sensible, easily accessed, and it reads well as a result. Similarly, the pattern of presentation within each section reads easily. Anecdotes occupying one or two brief paragraphs each are followed by one or two other paragraphs explaining both what the lesson in the anecdote is and how it applies to the task of fiction writing. Demonstration precedes explanation, following a common and effective teaching model. Again, the familiarity breeds ease of access and effectiveness of presentation, and motion from the concrete to the more abstract and general mimics some common understandings of learning. That mimicry allows the points Dolnick makes to reach the reader more fully, making his writing all the more effective.

The lesson Ben Dolnick teaches in “Puzzling through My Fiction” has implications for other writing than fictional. Poetry and drama both suffer from the problems of composition attendant on prose fiction; poets and dramatists suffer the traditional tyranny of the blank page and benefit from taking time away from work when it frustrates them, and they exult in the opening of their projects and the appreciation of their completion no less than their prose-writing counterparts. The same is true for writers of nonfiction, problematic as that definition may be. Essayists, for example, do as much to create as their “creative” counterparts, and they therefore encounter much the same kinds of difficulties in their creative acts as do poets, dramatists, and fiction writers. They, and all writers, potentially benefit from practice with word-puzzles–cross- and otherwise–as much as Dolnick reports doing.

Work Cited

• Dolnick, Ben. “Puzzling through My Fiction.” New York Times. New York Times, 15 August 2015. Web. 30 September 2015.

What follows is a sample of a profile such as my students are being asked to write for the Profile assignment in the Fall 2015 term at Oklahoma State University. It conforms partially to the content guidelines expressed on the Profile assignment sheet for that term, and it adheres to the length requirements (approaching 1,600 words; the assignment asks for 1,400 to 2,100), although the formatting will necessarily differ due to the different medium of presentation. How the medium influences reading is something well worth considering as a classroom discussion, particularly for those students who are going into particularly writing- or design-intensive fields.

I am grateful to the subject of this sample, my brother, for agreeing to it and for offering information. If there are errors in the text, they are entirely my own.

Daniel Elliott was born in northwest Louisiana, a bit more than five years after I was. Like me, he grew up in the Texas Hill Country. We graduated from the same high school a bit further apart than our ages would have it, and we started our baccalaureates in more or less the same way, majoring in music at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He succeeded where I failed, however; while I was obliged to change my major and pursue another field of study entirely, he was able to complete his music degree, earning a Bachelor of Music in 2011.

While the degree itself provokes no few jokes among the family—Daniel grew up among people who enjoy wordplay and direct it at and to one another as a form of entertainment, so that his holding a BM could be expected to prompt comment—Daniel himself is not a joke. Instead, he is a serious musician, dedicated to his craft and hardworking in its pursuit. Having been a touring musician at one time, he has also played with no few bands in school and outside it. His keyboard, trombone, and vocal work feature on the Juantanamos’ debut album, Ghost Tracks, and they sound out several times a week across much of Texas with the eminent party band Play It 4ward. In each, Daniel presents himself as a consummate professional, attentive to the fine details of performance and to ensuring that those details are as they ought to be.

His family background, in addition to offering no small number of quips, helps suit him to the work he does now. Growing up, Daniel displayed musical talent early on, aided in the display by the long association of his extended family with music. A great uncle, Denny Hardy, had himself been a touring and local musician for several decades, family history having him playing with such eminent figures as Duke Ellington, Fats Domino, Count Basie, Diana Ross, David Lee Roth, and Kenny Rogers; a grandfather, Russell Elliott, had been a music teacher, vocalist, and saxophonist for every bit as long. His father, Kevin Elliott, played in a local swing band for several years in Daniel’s youth, as well, and others in the family played instruments or sang for their own enjoyment and work in school. As such, there were many instruments available to Daniel during his formative years, and he was encouraged to play with them early on. His doing so built a familiarity with them that has stood him in good stead since, making music not a thing to do for him so much as a thing that is part of who he is and where he is.

That Daniel’s talent was recognized early did not mean he was not pushed to develop it. From an early age, he was enrolled in piano lessons with a local music teacher, Gaylene Ingram; his lessons with her continued through high school, and they were supplemented by other instruction in college. They were joined in sixth grade by formal instruction on trombone, picked up because of amenable facial structure and the odd chance of his father having a spare instrument at the house, as he noted to me in text messages on 15 September 2015. Daniel continued studying trombone through high school and pursued it with a different teacher in college. From sixth grade on, he also participated in a number of school ensembles: concert bands, marching bands, big bands, jazz combos, orchestras, and the occasional rock band. The breadth of his performance repertoire did much to enhance his abilities in each mode; he freely borrows across musical genres in his performances, doing such things as inserting strains from Sousa into jazz trombone solos or writing lines evocative of Gershwin into tracks for the Juantanamos. The tactic is unusual, borrowed from his great uncle and deployed without ostentation. Daniel simply plays what seems right—and what ends up being right, something betokening his mastery of his craft.

Similarly, as he plays, his body is remarkably relaxed. At shows where I have seen him perform as a trombonist, his posture is upright but not painfully so. No tension appears in his shoulders, even when thunder booms from the bell of his horn or when notes better suited to trumpets call out from it; his eyes close and any hint of lines upon his still-young forehead smooth away as the muscles beneath ease themselves in a way unlike that seen upon many who put horns to their faces. As a keyboardist, he almost slumps over the many racks of ivories—he usually plays multiple keyboards at a time: an electric piano complemented by synthesizers of various sorts—again closing his eyes, his head weaving around in sympathy with the sounds surrounding him. He moves with what he does, not so much making music as being it and serving as a conduit for some other voice that only he can hear before he makes it manifest for his audience. And when he sings with a voice that does show the effects of playing in bars and smoking in them and elsewhere, there is still no strain in him; the notes are full, not restricted, save when he sings for metal music—and even then, he does with air what many do by constriction. Only from long familiarity with the work of playing and training to make that work a thing that is rather than a thing that is done can such performance proceed; that Daniel does so nearly daily surely says that he is a consummate musician.

That Daniel already shows the skill he does does not prompt him to rest contentedly. Instead, he continues to work to refine his craft, approaching the task with a paradoxically confident humility—the knowledge that there is room for him to improve and that he is capable of making improvements. In part, doing so takes the form of attention to equipment such as typifies the greatest workers in any craft; mastery of a discipline includes caring for the tools involved in that discipline. I have seen him spend no small amount of time cleaning his trombones, for example, ensuring that nothing remains in the bore to interfere with the flow of air and sound through it and that the outside of the instrument gleams under sunlight or stage light. I have seen him also search far for a new keyboard cable or pedal to plug in, the specifications of it only slightly different than what he had had before, but in that small difference registering no small change in sound or responsiveness. I freely confess that the details of what he does with his keyboards exceed my understanding, but I know that the hours he spends in assembling, testing, and reconfiguring his equipment produce subtle changes telling in the performance, small shifts that occur only to those at the highest levels of their craft—and who recognize that there are higher levels yet to attain.

All of this is in addition to what would be expected of any professional in a given field: continued study. Many people spend much time listening to music, but they tend to confine themselves to a handful of artists and genres, and they tend to use it as background for their lives. Daniel, however, listens to every scrap of music he can find, from contemporary progressive metal through old recordings of Baroque scores on period instruments, to live performances by Big Daddy Kane in a park in Crown Heights or by Chicago and Earth, Wind, and Fire at a San Antonio amphitheater. Unless he is himself performing or asleep, he is most likely listening to music, attending to it in a way most cannot and processing what he hears so that he will know later on how to make more of it fit together—as would be expected of the musician he is.

Perhaps less expected but not less vital to Daniel’s musicianship is his professional handling of the managerial side of it. His training equips him to do so; his college coursework was directed towards music marketing in no small measure. I have never known him to be late to a performance, even when he has more than one booked in a day, and I have never known him to act in such a way that his fellow musicians have not been happy to hire him again—unless it is in knowing his worth and asking more for his time than a venue might be willing to pay. Even when his fellows have been less than upright, he has not acted out, finishing the jobs he has contracted before leaving a group or dismissing bandmates quietly and in private. Not for him are the flashy eruptions endemic to musicians in popular conception; for him instead is a respect for the work he does and that others do around him that bespeaks a level of professional integrity rare, but desirable, to see.

Setting aside any notion of jest, Daniel Elliott is a fine musician. More than proficient in several instruments and as a singer, attentive to his equipment, and possessed of a keen sense of how to work as a member of a musical group, his is an example well worth emulating. It may well not be the case that any given other person has the kind of innate talent that Daniel has spent decades honing, but his display of talent is a result of the honing—and that, most anyone can do, whether as a musician or in another endeavor entirely.

What follows is a sample of a literacy narrative such as my students are being asked to write for the LitNarr assignment in the Fall 2015 term at Oklahoma State University. It conforms partially to the content guidelines expressed on the LitNarr assignment sheet for that term (the article read for it differs from those available to students), and it adheres to the length requirements, although the formatting will necessarily differ due to the different medium of presentation. How the medium influences reading is something well worth considering as a classroom discussion, particularly for those students who are going into particularly writing- or design-intensive fields.

I hold multiple degrees in English. I teach writing and literature, and I work as a freelance writer, drafting reading guides to popular works of fiction and distilling the reports of others into easily digestible forms. It is therefore to be expected that I do and have done quite a bit of reading. What is perhaps less to be expected is that I have no recollection of learning how to read. I do not recall being taught the names and sounds of letters; I recall school lessons treating them, certainly, but I also recall thinking that I already knew what was being taught in them, and more besides. Indeed, I do not recall a time when I could not read and when I did not read, and I do not recall struggling with reading. It is, for me, a habit trained through many repetitions into a reflex, something that occurs for me as easily as breathing, as the blinking of my eyes, or the beating of my heart. Reading is not a thing I do anymore; it is a thing that happens for me, and I make such a comment not out of hubris but as a simple statement of how things are.

When I am obliged to have my students carry out a literacy narrative, then, and am compelled by my professional practice to draft one alongside them in the hopes of offering them a model to follow, I often find myself at something of a loss. Most literacy narratives discuss the formation of identities as writers and readers, but I am not aware of myself as having formed such an identity. So far as I can recall, I have always had one; I have always been a reader, and I have no watershed moment in which I “became” a writer. Lacking such a thing, I encounter different problems in drafting a literacy narrative than my students do, although I certainly face problems. It is partly to help surpass my own issues, then, that I asked my students to focus their literacy narratives on the experience of reading one of three selected pieces by Frank Bruni. I can easily mimic the task, although not by detailing my own reading of those pieces. Doing so would do much of my students’ work for them, and they would be denied an opportunity to improve. Instead, I read Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s September 2015 piece in The Atlantic, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” and my account of that reading is what follows.

I first encountered the piece in my usual online reading; I start most mornings by checking several email accounts and poring over my social media feeds for items of interest, and the piece came up as I did so one morning in mid-August 2015. The tagline, “In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education–and mental health,” caught my attention. It did so not only because of the mention of the college students I teach, but also because it bespeaks the kind of trigger warning–notice that content may be present in a course or its readings that reenacts trauma upon students–that has been hotly contested in a number of the publications that cater to those in the academy. I copied the article’s URL and emailed it to myself, meaning to print it out later, and I let it rest for a time.

At length, however, I returned to the piece, pulling up its URL and printing out a copy so that I could review it with pencil in hand, as is my custom. Long experience has taught me that the reading I do in support of my professional identity is best done with me ready to make annotations, even if only simply underlining key points. I turned to doing so, finding quickly that Lukianoff and Haidt do, in fact, treat the phenomenon of trigger warnings, citing a number of examples that range from the reasonable to the egregious. I am not at an institution that requires or encourages trigger warnings, so I am somewhat removed from the direct experience of the phenomenon, but I am well aware of it, and I share the fears of many academics that such warnings, although intended well, will serve to stifle the kind of free academic inquiry that informs the best classroom teaching and will be used by students not to avoid retraumatization, but the work of learning.

I had thought that I would find emphasis on those points, largely because my background led me to the expectation. I was surprised, however, to find that Lukianoff and Haidt take a different approach. One of their points is that such warnings indicate a belief in the fragility of the college student psyche, and I found myself taken aback by the assertion even as I understood their reasoning. I have had students who did need to be protected, and I have had others whom I have wanted to protect. At the same time, it is my task to confront students, to challenge them, and I found myself conflicted–I still do, in fact–about how to negotiate the two, the desire to protect and the duty to confront. I do not want to reenact trauma on my students who have been traumatized already, and I do not want to enact trauma on those who have not, but I cannot refrain from presenting not only the materials with which I am charged but frames through which to approach them and the rest of the world. It is a position I do not know how to occupy stably.

I pressed on in my reading, finding that the article discusses the compartmentalization of culture and the intensification of demands made upon students. My surprise and confusion faded; I found myself in familiar ground. For I have seen the minds of those around me shrink as they hear less and less the voices that disagree with them, that call into question the ideas upon which they base their conceptions of themselves–or even less vital things. And I have been the object of intensification, seeing the demands placed upon those who would hold even entry-level positions in my field and similar fields to mine. Long gone are the days when a doctorate assured an enduring job, let alone a master’s or a baccalaureate; publications and club memberships galore are obligatory, at least nominal involvement in myriad fields while maintaining the outward appearance of perfection at any cost. But that I found myself in a thinking-space familiar does not mean I found myself in a comfortable one; that I recognize the truth of Lukianoff and Haidt’s statements does not mean that truth is easily accepted.

Moving on, I came to the article’s statements about the conflict of trigger warnings and cognitive behavioral therapy. The authors assert that the two are mutually exclusive, that avoiding a thing does not prevent reinscription of trauma, but that it instead incises that trauma more deeply into the psyche of its sufferer. The classroom, then, becomes a controlled environment for encounters with what evokes the traumatic, a place where healing can begin. That revelation woke something in me, something pleasant and unexpected. I have long been accustomed to students regarding my classes as sites from which to flee and upon which to reflect with aspersion; I know what my attrition rates have been, and I have looked at the comments students have left me in the past. To be presented with the idea, and from outside academia (and there is much to be said for having the outside perspective), that my class could instead be a place from which students draw not only knowledge and understanding, but also healing, was uplifting. There is a joke that my doctorate is the wrong kind with which to attend to people’s health, but if the Atlantic piece is true, then it gives the lie to that joke–and it makes my work more worthwhile, justifying again what I do through my writing and reading.

I know that my reading experience is atypical. Few if any who enter the professoriate are “regular” readers, and this is more true of those who study languages and literatures than for those in other fields. But I also know that not all who come into a classroom are “typical” readers, themselves, and they tend to be underserved by the conventional materials upon which teaching tends to rely. There are reasons to focus such materials as they generally are, but that does not mean people who come to college English classrooms with “non-standard” experiences find much with which to connect in them. Perhaps, as I work through my own difficulties in relating to my mainstream students–and they are people, decent and hardworking, with whom I want to connect–I can offer to the less “typical” reader something of use.