In Kelly Scope , Kelly writes "I think that this class has shown me that no matter what we write there is no wrong way to write.  The best part of this class is that there is no wrong way to write or to understand an assignment"

At "Scope" Jacob Parker writes "I have most enjoyed the classes we have read aloud our seperate pieces.  There is something  about giving an audible voice definition through the reciting of ones' work.  In particular, I enjoyed the hints of poetic engagement prevailent in a few of the narratives read aloud.  An audible voice provides a rhythm in which we may interpret differently in our minds' recitation of the same piece"

These two posts share so many unconscious connections, and I have been alternately lulling/agitating in their interval all morning, and so, in google chat, I shared my fixation with my inspired and inspirational teacher Dr. Rich Doyle aka Mobius. Below is a remix/cut-up of mobius/shareriff chat rhythms and tag-teaming on the subject of right/wrong writing in wiki, polished and revised into a direct response to the ideas of Kelly and Jacob, sampled above. Please interrupt, add, remix, link:

Of course, on one level, Kelli is right to notice the beautiful truth that there is no wrong way to write. Writing is a practice that inescapably records a communicative act. In some ways it is the George Washington of Media: It cannnot tell a lie. However, our writing does not emerge in a vacuum—where there be writers, there ye find readers. By reading what another writes, we have access to a "snapshot" of who and where they are, what they are thinking, and perhaps even what their past was/what there future is likely to be. When we read, we use heuristic strategies for making hypotheses about the other, the one who writes. We draw our own map of the territory. So in this sense, there is no wrong writing.

But in another sense there is always lots and lots and lots of wrong writing. In Nietzsche's pithy way of putting it, writing is a mobile army of truth and lying in the extramoral sense! Please pardon this paradox: accepting and working with the wrongness of writing, is absolutely essential and axiomatic to the no-wrong-writing game. Again, our writing does not emerge in a vacuum—we write in response to each other. When we write in response

to each other, as in wiki, we write with an intention, an inclination, an impulse. It is an action we carry out in response to a fellow wiki denizen's action of writing. And in this action we wish to do something: we wish to address, caress, cajole, and console each other. We wish to make each other laugh, and sometimes, we fall flat, flat as a (dead)pan cake! We endeavor to enlighten, and sometimes cause misery and misunderstanding. And so forth. So in this sense, of course there is wrong writing. As fearless wiki writers, we accept that we will often make “a mistake” that undermines our desire to cook up the most savory and flavory of dishes for the big pot latch gathering. It is all One, ding dong, there is no wrong. Yet to find this One, we must empty (writing emerging out of a "vaccum") and surrender to the collective edit--and overcome the corrective edit.

Let there be right writing and wrong writing...but most of all let there be song writing!

ShareRiff

This is a painting of Hillary Clinton with a pancake on her head. This guy, Dan Lacey, Painter of Pancakes, paints celebrities and politicians with pancakes and Obama with unicorns. - Carola