For example, he refuses to have a computer at home, and religiously refuses to watch TV, and is a very literate person in terms of writing textbooks and things like that. He dispelled many of the stereotypes I have about computer scientists. We’ve done people from Computer Science, Eric Roberts, the last conversation we had, which was totally remarkable. But he was very adamant that that is his way of working, and he was not going to change I had afterwards talked to him about, you know, “I can suggest…”, “No!” So those are just two examples. And it had a lot of ramifications in terms of his career, and people thought he was lazy because he wasn’t publishing things: all kinds of issues. As a consequence of that approach, it took him fifteen years to write his last book, a very large book, but still a very slow-going style. He would do a certain type of writing, but not formally try and write his essay because what he would do is take notes of his research and write commentaries and from that would emerge his argument. The other kind of extreme would be David Abernethy, from the Political Science department, who would not write anything, anything, until he figured out his complete argument and worked out everything. And the example that I’ve been giving from our first two conversations is Mary Lou Roberts from the History department, who has now gone to another university, who would write eighty pages before she figured out what she was writing, and just was part of the process, that she would file away or toss those eighty pages, and it wasn’t painful at all for her to do that she’s very fluent in writing, but she would have to work things out to get to that point. And what we’ve discovered over the course of time-of the approximately, if I’m remembering correctly, something like twelve or so conversations that we’ve had with a wide range of different people writing in different fields-is that people are incredibly different, are idiosyncratic, have many different ways of approaching things. Content is always an important issue-you know, writing, what you’re writing about something-but what we’re really interested in is all of the kinds of issues of work-style, how someone approached different problems, revision, what happens if you get stuck, how you overcome it. And we have a conversation, talking about the nuts and bolts of writing, the actual business of writing. HO: If you’ve been to any of these before, what we do is have a conversation, myself and the person-and I’m Hilton Obenzinger I’m associate director for Honors writing at the Undergraduate Research Programs. Transcript of How I Write Conversation with Andrea Lunsford “No matter what you’re doing, even if you’re sitting by yourself at your computer you’re collaborating with somebody, something you’ve read, or some voices you’ve got in your head, or your friends, or something, there’s some kind of collaboration going on.” In this conversation, we can see all the ways that we can begin to collaborate with Andrea Lunsford, and they are myriad. “I believe that all writing is collaborative,” she explains of her work with other writers. She shares a remarkable range of experiences, from her relationships with editors, to the way she wrestles with writing blocks, to her memories of her first writing experiences as a child. She confesses that she hates revision, but she has learned “to accept the really arduous revision process, which I don’t like, but which I do.” She reveals that “I don’t like to really start writing until I can feel what I call the shape of my argument.” Consequently, she has to struggle to find an “arc in my head and can see where I’m going” in order to begin the process. So it’s especially interesting to hear how she has to struggle to practice what she preaches. She’s one of the foremost experts on composition and rhetoric – her publisher even brands her books with the slogan: “The Difference is Lunsford” – and as director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, she’s made a major difference, putting into practice years of research and experience to create one of the most innovative writing programs in the country. But when Professor Lunsford toys around with writing, it’s serious business, and she’s been doing it for years. “I are writing, or writing are me,” Andrea Lunsford jokes at the beginning of our conversation, parodying the name of the toy store.
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