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Television, authorship, and student writers.

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Abstract

The seemingly un-authored presentation of television conflicts with the characteristics of authorship teachers want students to display in college-level writing. Teachers can use television to help students understand and act more fully as individual authors.

Who Am I?

Do you see my name printed above this essay? What does it signify to you? You probably expect my name at the top to mean that the ideas, words, and research substantially reflect my thinking, my consciousness. We can theorize all we want about the death of the author--and certainly I understand my writing is shaped by multiple discourses in my past and present--but the truth is that in the academic world I produced this essay expecting it to be read as representations of my thinking.

Now turn on your television. What do you see? A commercial? A sitcom? A news broadcast? A soap opera? Unlike this essay, most television programs appear on our screens without a clear indication of authorship. We know that someone somewhere is creating the programs we watch, but we rarely have an idea who they are. Instead, our televisions offer us the illusion of looking through a virtual window at real and imagined people and events without sensing that we are responding to an individual author's ideas and thoughts.

The ubiquitousness of television and the vast experience students have in watching it have a profound influence on how our students write. Yet no other form of communication is viewed as more antithetical to the teaching of writing, and to intellectual thought in general, as television. It is perceived as superficial, sentimental, commercialized, and the breeder of short attention spans. But when students talk about their experiences in watching television they display a sophistication and critical acumen often unmatched in their reading or writing of print texts. Although writing teachers often ignore or dismiss this influence, students' experiences offer teachers important opportunities for teaching writing and reading of all texts, print and electronic, more effectively. The rhetorical skills students learn from television--particularly in terms of genre and style--can contribute in a positive way to the work of a writing classroom. At the same time there are places where students' experiences with television runs counter to the kinds of print literacy we try to teach, particularly in conflicts between the emphasis of images or of words, of time or of space, of pleasure or of detachment, and of discrete print texts or the "flow" of television (Williams 2002).

The seemingly un-authored presentation of television substantially conflicts with the ethos of authorship writing teachers want students to display in college-level writing. Yet teachers can use television to engage students in productive ways that help students understand and act...

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