Twitter and Guerrilla Composition in the Classroom In the midst of chaos, there is opportunity.
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War
We often talk of change and chaos as things to be feared, and yet, there are underlying circumstances that show us how our series of choices brings us to where we are today. Thirty years ago, communication was a completely different creation, and the first hints of real-time, personal, global conversations were there, but still years away. Now, people get upset when their phones are only transmitting in 3G, and dialup is something that our students have heard of, but they have never experienced the sound of their own computers squawking and buzzing. Many of them have never even heard the sound. To them, the hashtag has always been called that, and they have no idea that it is also called a pound sign. The majority of our students are post- Millenials, and they have grown up in a world where technology changes fast, and the tragedies happen even faster. Our collective sense of what is normal changes almost every day, and this constant feeling of being off-balance is disconcerting.
In “The Post Apocalyptic Turn,” Moon notes that, “Modern technology has made it possible to destroy the world or wipe out entire peoples, as borne out by the Holocaust and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” (4) and I would add to that the many attempted genocides around the world, the small attacks in our schools, as well as the global attacks via the Internet. He goes on to suggest that instead of focusing these acts as portends of the end of the world, that “apocalypse can also refer to a catastrophic change that results in the demise of old order and the creation of a new one” (4). As I have suggested throughout, the apocalypse is something to be accepted and used, not fought.
Fortunately (and unfortunately) for our students, they are more accepting of and adaptable to these changes than those of us who lived before and through all of these
technological advances. Then maybe educators should help our students harness that adaptability and use it to bridge the gap between all that once was in recent history, and all that is now. This can be done if the academics from older generations can learn to adapt our ways of thinking and composing to their styles of learning and communicating. Adaptation is one of the major keys to survival in any situation, even in the area between the academy and the rest of the world. For all of this to happen, though, we need to explore all ways of adapting composition with technology.
In Chapter 2, I gave a brief outline of Twitter, its history, and its typical usage. I did not fully address retweeting, because it is here that the practice can be better explored. The ability to share another person’s tweet, or retweeting, was not originally part of the programming, but something that people came up with in order to share with other people in other parts of their networks. boyd and Ellison, in their defining of Twitter as a social network site, suggest that “Structurally, retweeting is the Twitter-equivalent of email forwarding where users post messages originally posted by others” (1). In the past, the act of retweeting required some mental
gymnastics because of the 140 character limitations. If a user wished to retweet, etiquette
required them to not only note that the message was a retweet, but to also notify the originator of the message, via their @ symbol. To work around having to cut and paste messages, and in order to give credit to the originators of the Tweets, users came up with different ways of identifying their posts as a retweet. The acronym “RT” was one of the most common, generally followed by the originator’s @username. This often left people short of available characters, and so some aspects of chat speak (or l33t speak) would be employed. boyd and Ellison refer to this practice
as “disemvoweling,” or the removal of vowels to create more room for the original message (boyd et al. 5). To further this, users often remove punctuation like apostrophes, which are easily ignored. This functionality has since been integrated into the system, and retweeting someone no longer requires giving up precious character space for their @username. Additionally, the
platform now includes the ability to comment on the retweet, with another full 140 characters, allowing individuals to engage in actual conversation. The appearance of the retweet is much like a snapshot and caption. Even though the platform now automatically includes retweets,
usernames, and the quoted messages, the 140 character limitation still requires some savvy on the part of the person retweeting. boyd and Ellison write, “What participants value and the strategies they use when retweeting reveal salient aspects of the conversations they seek to create on Twitter” (boyd et al. 2). In many cases, people choose to retweet without comment, allowing the initial message to stand on its own. If a person wishes to engage in the conversation, whether they want to speak directly to the person who originally tweeted, or at large to their perceived audience, they have to make rhetorical choices that either complement or oppose the original verbiage enough to make its own impression. Regardless of whether the initial message is replied to, or of the originator chooses to engage, “Retweets can knit together tweets and provide a valuable conversational infrastructure. Whether participants are actively commenting or simply acknowledging that they’re listening, they’re placing themselves inside a conversation. Even when they are simply trying to spread a tweet to a broader audience, they are bringing people into a conversation” (boyd et al. 7).
David Crystal believes that, “Twitter does not seem to be a type of social network in which conversational dialogue and group cohesion predominate” (Crystal 53). Just as language
on a screen is different than on a page, conversations online are also wildly different. With Twitter, conversations can take part from one single tweet, the whole of a thread, or just one aspect of that thread. Being able to retweet from individual segments of a longer thread allows for what we could consider sidebar conversations in person. Additionally, each of these sidebar conversations attract the attention of different groups.
If we imagine this as a room full of people, our speaker would be on a stage. Clusters of people would be around the speaker, each trying to comment on different sentences in their speech. Some of them would also be yelling across the room at other people. A few of those people would be running back and forth from one conversation to another. And there would be a few who are standing on the fringes, just nodding their heads at everything that is being said. It would look like live action pandemonium. This isn’t a normal conversation map; Twitter does not thread in a logical way, and so people have to adapt their responses accordingly. Not only that, they also have to keep track of what they’ve said and where in order to continue the conversation.
Retweeting is what brings Twitter to life. Without this ability, there is no conversation, but rather, millions of people yelling into the void. As boyd, Golder, and Lotan state,
“Retweeting is also an important practice to analyze because of the larger issues it raises concerning authorship, attribution, and communicative fidelity. In an environment where
conversations are distributed across the network, referents are often lost as messages spread and the messages themselves often shift” (boyd et al. 1). Keeping this in mind, I began to think about how to bring this social medium into the classroom, and how I could use it to help students understand composition, context, and the clues that would help them to make sense of the chaos,
while being a part of it. One of my challenges in the beginning was to overcome their own notions of what composition is, and help them to see what many educators actually consider it to be.
Miller, in “The Coming Apocalypse” says that before the Internet, “no other means of human communication has ever had the capability to travel so far so quickly to such devastating effect” (143). He goes on to say that going into any language arts classroom, one would never know such change is out there (144). These unchanging behaviours in many classrooms is concerning, but not surprising, as traditionalists have held as long as composition has been in place, that the place of composition is to serve English departments. Sharon Crowley, in her 1998 work, Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays, takes aim at the
historical norm of white, Christian, wealthy men being the sole beneficiaries of the classic liberal arts education (48). In a 1989 article, a former professor at the University of Texas at Austin, in response to an attempted modernization of composition classes, said that writing should be about literature, and that he expects “an English faculty to represent a widely varied range of views about literature, centered around historical and aesthetic traditions (Gribben 89). Further, he said that, “If you really care about women and minorities making it in society, it doesn’t make sense to divert their attention to oppression when they should be learning basic writing skills” (qtd. in Crowley 255). The message is clear, people should know their place and only stay in that place.
While the UTA scandal and subsequent publications6 happened well before the Internet age, and Crowley’s historical assessment came about during the Internet’s infancy, they show the long held beliefs of the traditionalists in the field. Many of these academics are still teaching in
6 A number of articles about this situation exist behind a paywall in the archives of the Chronicles of
universities, and their “expectations of education remain frozen in time, preserved like some prehistoric insect in a golden drop of amber” (“The Coming Apocalypse” 144). Is it any small wonder, then, that the academy is still trying to find a place for composition, and that modern composition as a field is still misunderstood? While my own experience has not been extreme, I have gotten quizzical looks from some literature professors about my plans for using Twitter for narrative writing, as well as this thesis. Composition as a field is its own guerrilla entity within the larger academy.
Not all historical models are bad. Lynch, quoting Latour, discusses the Icelandic
Parliament, or Althing, which is the oldest government still in use today (467). The Thing, as it is called, is a designated place for people to come air disagreements and settle disputes. In the Early Middle Ages, all free members of a society7 had the right to attend the Thing; there were no secret meetings, and all laws were read aloud for the populace. If we consider our classrooms as a place where students have equal voice and are free to “make their experience and their vision part of composition’s Thing” (468), then perhaps we can consider the medium of Twitter as a place to settle those disputes and give name to their experiences in small group settings within a larger context. In this way, students can examine issues outside of their immediate realms, and integrate their own experiences with the “social, political, and environmental problems of their communities” (464). In doing so, they build from within, techniques for dealing with those issues when they are faced with them outside of the academy.
The classroom is a temporary community with predetermined end dates. Classes last 15 weeks or so, before the population breaks off to join other communities on the campus. Most
7 There were no definitive regional borders during this time, so there were many societies, or tribes, and therefore, many Things.
students take more than one class, so are part of many of these communities. When they realize that each of these communities are interconnected, and begin to transfer the knowledge from one community to another, and then realize where this knowledge fits into their lives outside of the academy, we consider it a turning point in their education. As a first year composition instructor, I consider it a goal to help them along the way to achieving this kind of clarity. This semester, I wanted to try something new. Instead of focusing on standard assignments like song analysis essays, I wanted to explore ways of composing to enhance student thinking, processing, and reacting. We teach writing as a process, and go through the motions of brainstorming, outlining, writing, and revising, but I think a few things are missed sometimes. During the process, we talk about vague concepts like audience, and I’ve had issues with getting students beyond the “my instructor is my audience” phase. Some of them never move beyond that idea, and it’s no surprise, given the vagueness of the concept on the Internet. Marwick and boyd wrote that some users “imagined their audience as people they already knew, conceptualizing Twitter as a social space where they could communicate with pre-existing friends” (5). While many of us follow friends and colleagues on Twitter, a lot of people tend to also follow people they do not know, or who follow them back at all. Who then, are we writing to? According to this idea, we are writing solely to our friends, but it’s not necessarily our friends who are listening. This was also an important piece for students to understand, that “The potential diversity of readership on Twitter ruptures the ability to vary self-presentation based on audience, and thus manage discrete impressions” (3). Unless their accounts were locked down, which they had the option to do if they chose, what they were going to tweet was to be considered as going to a far broader audience than the peer group to which they were tweeting.
The standard set of assignments for Graduate Teaching Assistants, Adjuncts, and Lecturers at AUM for English Composition I, which teaches the essentials of composition and rhetoric, begins with a narrative essay. We are given a lot of freedom in choosing what type of narrative, and my standard is a literacy narrative. I like to see where my students are coming from in terms of their reading and writing history, so I have an idea of where to go with each of them through the rest of the semester. For the Fall 2017 semester, I decided to incorporate Twitter into my classroom. I know professors who have had students live tweet lectures and classroom activities, but I’m not certain that students are ready for this type of summary exercise this early in the semester. I have also heard of exercises where students use tweets to outline thesis statements, and if I keep using this exercise, will be using that. In fact, a Google search gave me hundreds of thousands of hits on how to use Twitter in the classroom. The top search hit, “Teach Hub,” has a list of 50 exercises for K-12 students on Twitter, ranging from political activism to meme tracking.
I decided to do something a little different. My original lesson plan stated that their final essay was going to be submitted as a Twitter thread. Initially, students were to write out their narrative in standard essay form. Rough drafts would be peer reviewed in that format. Afterward, students were to split their essays up into a series of tweets and post them as threads.
This changed by early the second week when I realized there was a lot of confusion about the difference between rough and final drafts were going to work for grading. Instead, I realized that the lesson could be adapted to show them the differences between writing an essay through the process of invention, writing, and revising, to including a last step of reinventing for social media consumption. With my students’ agreement, we changed the assignment, and the Twitter
thread took the place of one of their weekly writing posts. Their standard narrative essay is what was graded as part of the assignment. This was fair; it was the first assignment of the first semester of university for most of the students, and deviating fully from their expectations of English class was too stressful for all of us.
To prepare for the Twitter thread exercise, I created my own thread and tweeted it. The thread, as shown below, isn’t a narrative, but more of an interactive instructional essay to give them an idea of how it works. The text is as follows:
This is an example of a Tweet thread. 1/
Twitter, for those unfamiliar, allows the author 140 characters per tweet. 2/ This count includes spaces, emojis, and punctuation. 3/
Most threads also include a numbering system, like I'm using for this. 4/ That way, if people retweet something in the middle, 5/
other viewers know to go to the beginning. 6/
When composing in such a small space, the author needs to make good rhetorical choices. 7/
Some of these choices are stylistic; 8/ cutting off in the middle of a list, or 9/
highlighting a single word or phrase are effective ways of making concise points. 10/ People fail in tweet threading when the begin to ramble. 11/
Instead of saying precisely what they mean, they fall into bad habits. 12/ Filler words and phrases take over. 13/
Alternative choice... 15/ Each and every... 16/ During the course of... 17/ I believe... 18/
At this point in time... 19/ It's all fluff. 20/
Too much fluff and your audience loses interest. 21/ Your thread isn't engaging anymore. 22/
Remember, this is a composition. 23/
If something doesn't work, if it doesn't make sense, you can fix it! 24/ This is not spur of the moment writing! 25/
People who create these threads do so in document form prior to posting them. 26/ This allows for both revision and editing, 27/
which, you should have figured out by now, 28/ is the final piece of the process. 29/29
I then sent the students a link to a Twitter thread with the instructions to just read it. We then went over it in class. Next, we looked at a thread written by Anthony Breznican, a senior staff writer for Entertainment Weekly, and an author. Shortly after the bombing at the Manchester Arena, he took to Twitter after seeing a famous quote from Mr. Rogers. His first tweet, as seen in Figure 3.1, sets the stage for him to share his own story. The following screenshots and
At the bottom of the tweet, there are a few data sets. Directly below the tweet and date/time information, there is a section with an exact count of Retweets and Likes. To the right are the user icons of a few of the people who have retweeted this particular tweet. I don’t know if those were the first, or most recent people who retweet that message, or if they are chosen at