14.2: Anthologizing in the Composition Classroom

One of the most obvious contemporary examples of patchwriting is the anthology. This essay, for example, is part of an anthology called Writing Spaces. The editors, Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemlianksy, didn’t write the book, but they played a huge role in its construction. In fact, if you have ever made a portfolio of your work, then you already
pretty much understand anthologizing. The only difference is that anthologies are collections mostly of other people’s writing, instead of your own. And it turns out that many of the goals of portfolio work equally apply to anthologizing in the classroom:

• Anthologizing and portfolio creation require you to move large chunks of texts around in relation to each other, almost as if you were rearranging a bookshelf.

• These practices help you to realize that texts, no matter the size, derive their meaning from the relationships of the parts that make it up.

• Each is an exercise in coherence. As Alan Schrift mentions, “For an anthology to work, the pieces must hang together, they must build on each other and if not articulate a thesis, at least give voice to several related theses” (192).

• In both portfolios and anthologies, you can inflect the pieces by placing them in different contexts, and you will begin to understand “how ideas fluctuate in specific types of spaces and contexts” (Rice 131).

• The anthologist and the portfolio manager have to manage what Ann Moss calls a “peculiar property”: their “inherent capacity to balance unity and multiplicity” (430).

As convincing as this list might be to me, students don’t always immediately warm to patchwriting as a brand of composition. For example, on the first day of class last year, during a break, Lorraina caught up with me in the hallway. “I am probably going to switch to a different section,” she said. Drops are normal, I thought to myself, but not necessarily after the first hour of the first class.

“Are you concerned about the amount of work?” I said.

“Not the amount so much . . . more the type of work. I don’t see how this so-called anthologizing is going to help me. We’re going to be editing other people’s work and writing introductory prefaces but none of that is what I need to do in my job.”

“What is your job?”

“I work 9 to 5 all week for an insurance company, writing letters to customers,” she said. “I want to get better at that, and I don’t see how this type of work is going to help me.”

Another student, Lisa, was on the brink of quitting as well. She was listening in on the hallway conversation, but, unlike Lorraina, decided to stick around. Months later, as the semester was finishing up, Lisa told me, “I thought I was going to drop this class after day one. I wanted to run when I heard about the anthologizing.” She added, “But I’m glad I didn’t.”

Not to say there wouldn’t be a lot more drops by other students throughout this particular semester. I can’t say whether it was students fleeing from the odd Sunday morning hours, the pockets of swine flu that kept flaring up in our region of Queens, or the challenging coursework. Many students, I realized more and more as the semester progresses, plainly didn’t have time to do all of the work that I asked them to do. They had full-time jobs, families to take care of, and a heavy course load of other classes. And, quite frankly, successful patchwriting requires a ton of reading.