I contend that tinkering is a critical-creative endeavor that merits a prominent place in the teaching of reading and writing. It intersects easily with writing and other acts of making at the present moment. Because tinkering works simultaneously to develop immediate goals and long- term payoff, activities in tinkering help writers to modify specific texts while also enhancing
44 Scholarly discourse communities, especially in the sciences, acknowledge the value and prevalence of tinkering
with one’s own writing with the concept of self-plagiarism, which typically occurs when a writer reuses bits from a previous publication or dataset without citing the earlier contexts in which they have appeared. Self-plagiarism thus becomes a special risk when working with one’s earlier writing in some formal environments. See Bretag and
their general familiarity with language and even the pleasure and play they associate with it. In labeling these practices tinkering, I mean above all to convey an interactive orientation toward language and preexisting texts; tinkering signifies more of a habit or stance than a single exercise. One who repeatedly tinkers with language approaches texts with skepticism and even rebelliousness, viewing them not as finished objects whose use is restricted to reading and analysis, but as opportunities for modification and invention. Tinkerers express curiosity and restlessness, an inquisitive attitude toward every textual encounter. Their relationships to texts are open-ended because they do not prioritize rules and norms but favor subversive, unpredictable production. Developing this long-term engagement with texts requires regular exercises in tinkering throughout the duration of a course or curriculum.
Tinkering furthers visions of writing as a social practice advanced by scholars such as Karen Burke LeFevre and Joseph Harris, to name just two, but prompts a greater depth of dwelling in texts than affiliated exercises do. To tinker means to collaborate with prior texts and their authors, making it a social rather than autonomous practice even when the tinkerer physically works alone. Yet tinkering goes beyond the turns of thought that characterize writing as a social practice toward material procedures of reuse. In Rewriting, for example, Harris treats academic writing as inherently responsive to prior contributions and offers general approaches to building one’s own ideas out of others’. He writes that “[Intellectuals’] creativity thus has its roots in the work of others—in response, reuse, and rewriting” (2). Rewriting develops rich models for writing alongside other texts but not within them. Tinkering by contrast involves working inside texts, modifying their parts, and thereby redirecting them. Tinkerers use old texts to build new ones, creatively blurring the boundaries between original and reused texts (what we might think of as the “they” and “I” of “they say”/“I say”) as response alone does not.
Tinkering is a disposition that various textual practices in English studies could support, though currently they seem only on the fringes of the field. As Chapter 2 demonstrated, exercises that involve transforming prior texts for critical and creative benefit have a long history in the teaching of English, appearing in textbooks of rhetoric, composition, grammar, and literature of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. More recent affiliates include critical reading strategies such as Michel de Certeau’s poaching and Jerome McGann’s deformative criticism (in Radiant Textuality). De Certeau encourages reading with an eye toward appropriation, while McGann develops creative means of interpreting texts by first deforming them.45
In its attention to words, phrases, and sentences, tinkering is also affiliated with sentence- level editing and stylistic concerns. Several scholars invested in style and sentence pedagogies wish to reintroduce sentence-level invention and combination into our teaching and toward that end, have outlined lessons in rhetorical grammar, figurative language, and sentence combining, among others.46 Much of this scholarship affirms a generative relationship between style and invention. It avoids focusing exclusively on sentences by exploiting the interplay between composing at lower levels of discourse and inventing at higher levels. This interplay is fundamental to tinkering, yet tinkering is distinct from stylistic work in its relationship to prior writing. Tinkering requires working within preexisting texts and therefore may not occur when just incorporating stylistic resources like figurative language into composition classes.
45 Stephen Sutherland describes another critical reading strategy aligned with deformation: “generative quotation,” a
practice of tinkering with texts in order to advance students’ reading. Among the methods of tinkering he outlines are adding sentences around quotations, modifying quotations with square brackets and italics that add emphasis, de- and re-contextualizing quotations, and deleting passages from quotations (75-76).
46 See Butler 2008, Carillo 2010, Connors 2000, Delli Carpini and Zerbe 2010, Johnson and Pace 2005, MacDonald
2007, and Myers 2003. Despite the renewed interest in style that these authors support, writing with sources at the sentence level has recently received more attention in applied linguistics (see, for example, Keck and Shi) than in
Still, tinkering exists in productive relation to style pedagogies, particularly those known as “alternate styles.” A subversive, playful ethos underlies both tinkering and alternate style, a concept first developed by Winston Weathers in 1976 that Patrick Bizarro cogently captures as follows: “alternate style intentionally asks students to subvert the standard practices most young writers are taught to employ” (295). The techniques that contribute to alternate style are playful and unconventional (e.g., fragments, lists, discontinuity, simultaneity, and language variegation [Weathers]), yet not just peripheral games to try out once. They are ways of rethinking writing altogether. In fact, Weathers attributes his interest in style to a view of writing that invokes the language of tinkering. In an interview with Wendy Bishop, he remarked,
Have always thought of composition (whatever kind) as construction work. How do we put the bricks together? Can we find new building materials? What does the final product look like? I’ve always enjoyed taking a piece of writing apart (in the laboratory, that is) to see what makes it “tick,” “hold together.” I see “writings” much as I see “buildings.” What is the architecture? What is the style? (Bishop, “Alternate” 4; emphasis added)
Weathers identifies textual activity—creating, observing, and thinking through texts—with the technical, material practice of building, and positions himself much as a tinkerer. And importantly, with alternate style—even that label—he marks tinkering as a contrary practice, a means of deforming rather than maintaining the status quo. In forwarding the ethos of alternate style, tinkering contributes to writing that doesn’t just play with language, but plays with it in unconventional and unexpected ways.
In its procedural nuts and bolts, tinkering also resembles patchwriting. The most positive treatment of patchwriting decouples it from plagiarism and defines it instead as a developmental
writing strategy that helps students gain language appropriate to unfamiliar discourse communities. Tinkering by contrast is a more durable, long-term practice that entails dwelling inside texts, engaging actively in their (re)composition rather than extracting choice bits from them. Tinkering often subverts its sources, whereas patchwriting may do so only incidentally, not as a means of endorsement. Even when characterized as an acceptable transitional practice, patchwriting is still incorrect or improper, positioned against correct models like summary and paraphrase. Tinkering opens more possibilities for source use.
Tinkering may be at home already in creative writing classes and curricula, which often incorporate writing exercises and experiments. Jeffrey Walker identifies a resemblance between today’s creative writing curricula and classical rhetorical education in that both feature a sequence of exercises and imitations, known as the progymnasmata in classical settings. These sequences develop students’ linguistic and rhetorical abilities by training them to produce multiple component forms, which they can later combine and revise into longer texts via further tinkering (Walker, The Genuine 290). Much creative writing pedagogy acknowledges the value, and perhaps inevitability, of imitation, and affirms the power of authorial influence and the possibility of transforming a text or idea through reuse. (See Hunley, who traces imitation as a pedagogy in the rhetorical and poetic traditions, and Donnelly, who includes mimetic pedagogy among the major creative writing pedagogies in Establishing Creative Writing Studies as an Academic Discipline.)
Recent attempts to reintroduce the progymnasmata into writing curricula (Delli Carpini and Zerbe; Fleming; Ray, “A Progymnasmata”) align with the renewed attention to language and form that tinkering promises. Unlike the progymnasmata, however, tinkering does not offer readymade forms or follow a predetermined sequence of activities. Tinkering features reuse of
language, not generic forms. But the progymnasmata is a rich affiliate because it supports textual reuse more generally in encouraging the accumulation of samples that can feed into future writing, as is also true of commonplacing.
Finally, tinkering is essential to much emerging digital pedagogy. Where the term has already arisen in composition studies, it has been used in relation to digital media and as a synonym for hacking (see Sayers; Vee). Students learn how to use new software by playing around with it, experimenting in an inquisitive, open-ended manner before committing to a larger project. Rather than teach a given procedure via step-by-step directions, instructors encourage students to figure it out themselves (often collaboratively), an approach through which users may unexpectedly stumble upon new tools and insights too.47
Connecting these affiliated pedagogies and exercises with the term tinkering reinforces that they promote critical insight and creative production. Where McGann fiddles with texts to reveal new meanings and Snodgrass degrades poems to help readers understand and appreciate them, tinkering produces writing as its immediate payoff. Furthermore, tinkering offers strategies that can help students revise texts for short-term gain while developing a longer-term generative relationship to source texts. In this way, tinkering elevates sentence-level exercises above preparation for more substantive assignments, indicating that they can constitute a critical, creative activity with value in itself. (With the term creative, I mean to convey a constructive and generative process rather than the novelty or originality typically associated with creative or
47 Jentery Sayers has advocated for what he calls a “tinker-centric pedagogy” in English language and literature
classes in order to introduce into print domains questions and concerns of the digital humanities. He has imported concepts from computational and hypertext environments—such as change logs and non-sequential organization—
imaginative writing.48) Finally, introducing tinkering into our pedagogical vocabulary helps to connect some of the disparate practices already in use across curricula. It is in advancing an inventive stance that tinkering could most benefit the teaching of English, bridging its disparate concerns through an investment in experimenting with language. Widely implementing tinkering could gradually foster a new emphasis in the discipline.