[a guest post by Cindy Wedding, MA student in the Department of English at Florida Atlantic Univeristy]
The College Writing classes I teach are broken into some essential components. Before the writing can begin, these components generally include close reading and analysis of the text. As a lifelong student, I have spent so much time burning through highlighter ink and making marginal notes that I have entirely lost my ability to read just for fun. These students, however, the digital natives, have earned their reading stripes online, and have therefore developed significantly shortened attention spans and a quick disregard for the value of annotated, researched analysis. Bait-click media has taught them that sensationalism outreaches logic, but I still need to teach them to closely read the text, so that when they leave my class, they are prepared to prove whatever they find worth arguing in the college of their major, and beyond.
In trying to bridge this gap, Voyant Tools technology has provided a surprisingly simple, free and online platform through which students are able to analyze the material in the text. I can still assign them articles that require intellectual thought and active participation in some pages, and they can get a read on the article in a matter of minutes. Neither of us has to give up what we have become accustomed to, and yet, they are able to earn a stronger more thorough understanding of what they have read. What will follow, for the remainder of this blog, is an example of one way this tool can be used in encouraging close reading. There are many others. Although online tutorials are available, I have found nothing replaces taking the time to just play with the different features Voyant Tools offers and letting it lead you to ask questions about the results. I also want to preface this by saying, not every student engages with this format, but also, not every student engages with the text and not every student engages in discussion. I have found that adding this tool to my classroom has been useful for many of my students, but I have not used it to replace any of the traditional close reading “training” moments I already had built in.
Just like in the past, students are asked to read the text and come to class prepared to discuss it. In my 9am class, I walk them through the analysis that follows, their attention ebbs and flows and I’m unsure if they “get” how useful this can be. When I arrive at my 10am class, I decide this was not a useful exercise, but I wonder if it might be if I let them be the ones to lead.
One group of students is chosen, they walk to the podium where they are emailed a PDF of the text. The text is uploaded onto voyant-tools.org, and an analysis appears. We recently worked with David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster”. When my students are asked to create a Voyant Tools analysis of Wallace’s article, this is what we find.
Most of this we will get over the course of this blog series, but first I want to talk about the top box on the left. The tool on the top left is called “Cirrus”. Cirrus creates a word bubble that identifies the most frequently recurring words and arranges them, with their size corresponding to their frequency. By looking at this word bubble, students can clearly identify some of the focus and rhetorical choices in Wallace’s article. This word bubble, however, contains 55 words, and some of those words only occur a handful of times. To simplify things even further, I ask my students to slide the bar just below Cirrus to the left. The lowest number of terms Voyant Tools will allow them to select is 25. The picture of 25 words is far easier to sift through.
I can feel the tension drain from the group at the front, and I start to see the remainder of my students nod their heads in understanding. Now they can see it. Wallace’s article is about “lobster”. But it’s not just about lobster, he is trying to persuade his audience that there is value in their “pain”. That pain is valuable because of the “way” “people” are “eating” it. And then I ask the question. The one that turns the conversation, I ask what about this other word…what about the word “like”. They are puzzled. Then they do this…they open their books, and they start to search the text.
I was worried, at first, about introducing Voyant Tools to my class. I don’t want them to use it as a shortcut. I don’t want them uploading the article, reading the analysis, and then coming to class pretending to participate. I want them to engage with the text. I believe this is the most crucial skill I have to impart. So, I watch them. I stand at the front of the class, and I dismiss the group to their seats. They open their books too, and they start to look for occurrences of “like”. Some students ask questions. “Is it that he means we like lobster?” they ask. “Is he asking us to think about whether or not the lobsters would like to die a different way?” They ponder. It is not. You know it is not. So do I. “Like,” in this case does not mean enjoyment, it means lobsters survive like cockroaches at the bottom of the ocean. It means the lobster looks like a person afraid he will fall to his death. It is a simile. “What’s a simile?” they ask. “It’s like a metaphor,” another student replies…and so the discussion about rhetorical tools begins. Eventually, one student notices that “eat” is not just part of the subject-matter, Wallace uses it as imagery to describe his observation. Eventually, this conversation can transition, and we can discuss ethos, pathos, and logos – the rhetorical strategies that most of their essays will focus on.
Not every class will be like this. Some days, or some students, will be better served by reading response assignments that require traditional close reading or by a quiz. Some students will have difficulty understanding how to control the outcome for it to become usable. But on this day, for this class of students, when trying to interpret this particular text, Voyant Tools provided a refreshing change of pace wherein my students educated me about the value of this technology.
I have found, in my classroom, letting my students lead me generates far more fruitful discussions and far more interesting essays. When the content selected is outside of their area of interest. However, I find myself having to work twice as hard as them, just to get the brainstorming started. It’s even worse when they think they already know what’s in the article. They don’t want to interact with the page. I do. I want to curl up in a library and just inhale the smell of books all day. But they don’t. For me, it’s home, but for them, it’s their grandparent’s house…and that’s just not as much fun.
Voyant Tools is not a replacement for close reading, it’s an assistant. It’s scaffolding, through which I can create an alternate point of entry and engagement for students who would far prefer to stare at their phones than to discuss the ethical treatment of lobsters. It’s a toy for them to play with, and I give them license to, letting each student go up and mess with the slide bars and clickable links. Now they’re in the text, whether they know it or not. They’re looking at the way things connect, they’re examining Wallace’s voice, they’re analyzing the way his article is organized, and they’re having a lot of fun.
Advanced Media Production Lab 