A Conversation with Michael Palmquist
Rebekah Shultz Colby

A professional writer who owned his own business, Michael Palmquist never planned on becoming an academic. However, when his wife decided to get her Masters of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon, Palmquist decided to join her and went straight into a PhD program in Composition and Rhetoric. He said that at first he felt a bit like Nate Huckin, a famous composition graduate student who struggled with the different writing conventions expected in graduate school, especially in a graduate school as famous for its focus in cognitive psychology as Carnegie Mellon. Palmquist explained that, as a professional writer, he had become adept at deciphering professional genres simply by looking at a few examples. Academic writing, however, was far too complex for this approach, and he struggled with mastering it. He was also amazed that the scholars who were often published the most were also not necessarily the best writers. They were just the most knowledgeable.

On a sunny afternoon on Thursday, January 24, Richard Colby, Kamilla Kinyon, Eliana Schonberg, and Doug Hesse asked Michael Palmquist a few questions about writing, teaching, and publishing for the web.

Richard Colby: What affordances does sustained textual argument shaped with familiar print influences have over layered visual, hypertexual, and audio arguments?
Michael Palmquist explained that on the web, it is easy to stage things; however, its difficult to sustain argument in the same way as print text, especially since readers quickly become annoyed with too much text on the screen. Whatever we do online, the power of narrative cant be replaced. However, online journals in composition rarely take full advantage of the medium and how, as Jay Bolter and Richard Gruesin argue, the web remediates writing.The web is all about pacing and framing, but most articles are usually strictly linear. With print texts, writers can make assumptions about readers and how readers will read a text that they cant make with web text. However, there is hope for web texts as a more fully realized academic genre. The web is such a completely new technology that it is little wonder that academics have not figured out how to fully utilize it yet. In fact, the printing press created the same problem. Early print texts were awful because scholars were still working out the conventions. In fact, print arguments didnt get good until at least 50 years after the invention of the printing press.

Genres are still being worked out on the web. For instance, MySpace has a genre more based for web writing, but is it an essayist argument or is it something else? Does the web suit the argument being made or not? Theres still lots of experimentation going on, but experimentation is not celebrated as much as it was in the 90s. For instance, one year at CCCCs, he had what could be termed as a happening occur during a presentation where the audience spontaneously added on to a hypertext. Then someone suggested that he should put it up online. So, he added a story about a study, and it turned into an online article. Now hed probably be using java script, etc.

Kamilla Kinyon: In Writing in Emerging Genres, you conduct case studies of students writing for the web. There was a particular student who was writing on Emily Dickinson. She wanted to write in a circular pattern that was more evocative of Dickensons work, but ended up designing a more linear web text. Were their other examples of this sort? Were they more experimental or did they all go traditional?
Palmquist said that in a course he was teaching on writing hypertext, he discovered that poets usually create the most interesting web texts. For instance, sometimes students compose poetry in flash. Words explode and rearrange themselves. He had another student who wanted the reader to be forced into a strictly linear path. One student composed a thesis which was sort of a personal narrative collage, containing snippets from her life -- political insights interwoven with personal tidbits. Upon entering her first page, readers could then click on any link to start and choose their own path, interweaving parts of her life as they selected links to read. However, this brought up interesting problems and considerations. How do readers find their way out? Readers have to have some control in a web text. The writer cant have total control.

Doug Hesse: How much of a foothold does this type of hypertext have beyond our discipline of English?
Palmquist explained that he hadnt seen that much. Most disciplines are aligned with preparing students for the professions. Professors will assign PowerPoint presentations but not hypertext. However, he also explained that there is new software that encourages other disciplines to experiment in other ways. For instance, virtual labs can allow students to explore the simulated production of textiles. Online portfolios that use a template allow people to experiment with layouts, and other aspects of the tool have potential. Wikis have potential for creating experimentation as well, although he explained that he has yet to find a wiki that he really likes.

Richard Colby: Current trends in web-based technologies (Web 2.0, etc.) have begun to alter how data is displayed and read from an author-defined view to a reader-defined view. How does such a change affect the importance of teaching author-defined design in both web and writing courses? And, as more of these technologies such as CSS and XML become standards, do you think they will have a standardizing effect on just how varied and experimental the web can become?
Blogger or Facebook have specific designs. You purchase a template and can easily use them, but the templates limit too. So, technology has a tendency to constrain genre. However, as the technology matures, users can more easily do more with it. Designers decide how much freedom to give users. He explained that he took a 3-week sabbatical to learn xml because he was interested in embedding comments in documents in a way that made more sense for students. XML allows users to set things up in multiple ways allowing for a more flexible display. He also said that database stuff is exciting; it divorces content from presentation.

Doug Hesse: With increased visual/textual relationships, what are the skills required to be a writing teacher today?
Palmquist explained that as a comp director at CSU, he was interested in visual issues. As a professional writer, he was always intrigued with images and text as well. He even wrote a textbook in which he included a chapter on design. While writing this chapter, he realized that the language for design wasnt friendly, especially for students. Although it is better, he still doesnt think Robin Williams design terms work out. So, for his chapter on design, he reframed his design terms from a rhetorical perspective designing writing. He wanted students to think about writing in as design as they repurpose a research paper for a popular magazine, analyze conventions, and figure out who their readers are. When students do this, they suddenly realize, I have to cite differently. Use shorter sentences. When he has taught writing in this way in the past, students have turned out some beautiful stuff with different fonts, colors, and pictures. In fact, students could do a lot just using Word. What wasnt gratifying to him in using this approach though were instructors reactions, especially from those who hadnt taught long. They would say thinks like, Well, Im teaching writing, mostly because they werent comfortable with the tools. Nowadays though, most people are comfortable. In fact, many people have what Palmquist terms the Mac disease in which they might use 16 different fonts in one document, etc. However, he still thinks that assigning essays with nothing but visual images is too extreme in a first year writing class. Students still need to write.

Richard Colby: How do you get academic credit for software development?
Palmquist stated that it depends on the institution. However, its hard to get credit by just programming without doing any writing. Its important to publish in order to share work. Academics are only doing half of their job if they arent.

However, this makes doing technical, online projects difficult. For instance, even though the WAC Clearing House is successful today, it almost fell apart when it first started. Although many people were initially very excited about it and willing to work on it, Palmquist quickly became the only person working on it because academics do not usually get credit for working on a website. To solve this, he and his collaborators turned the WAC Clearing House into a journal; then they started publishing books and put out another journal.

Eliana Schonberg: How did you get funded for the Writers Studio?
Palmquist laughed and said that he didnt ask for permission. In early 1990, he got a grant to start a research center. It generated 15-20 million in grants, some of which were in pedagogy. After that success, he built an online writing center. When that, too, became successful, he was able to turn the writing center directors position into a tenure track line. After that, he got more funding from the provost and just kept going with it. He was able to keep it going because of all the big grants that were generated, which the university did not want to lose. After awhile, he said that he didnt like what they were doing with the online writing center. He wanted to change it to take better advantage of technology. Now they have five servers, which do load balancing, to minimize crashing. If one server gets overloaded, the other servers automatically take up some of that load.

Home