From the Bridge: Reaffirmation and Recommitment, even in times of Reinvention: Or, Why There’s Joy In Repetition

Those of you who have endured my Twitter (yes, I still call it Twitter for however long I have left that I can endure the hellsite that it’s become) shenanigans over the last several years know a bit about me that I don’t readily share on campus. You probably know about the long running Butter Pecan ice cream joke that leads me to get tagged 20 times or more any time it comes up. You know that my silly side gets prominent air time, primarily as a way of calming my rage at so much of what has been happening in our society. And you likely know that along with Star Trek, I love the “slow jam” genre of music—so much so that I dub myself “a slow jam in a Hip Hop world.”

Several of my absolute favorite entries in this genre, including the one that is the greatest of allll tiiiiime in my book, Adore, come from the genius from Minneapolis, Prince. In this moment when it would seem that everything about what we do, how, and why is poised to experience deep ruptures and call us to thorough reinvention, I’ve spent most of the summer thinking about another of my favorites from him, Joy in Repetition. I’ve even imagined reworking it for the Composition Blues Band, “There’s Joy in Those Revisions,” but decided against it for now (those who know the song would understand why, but let’s just say Prince and his many writing personae were often a bit racy and suggestive).

I’ll talk in more detail about the ways generative AI tools will challenge us to think about what we do throughout the year, but Prince and this incredible song have been on my mind all summer because where many think the challenge for rhetorical education right now, for writing and speaking instruction, is one of reinvention, I want us to see this moment as one where there is more need for what we do here in PWR. Our students need more experience writing, speaking, reading and listening and they need even more of our particular approach to that work. I want us to see the era we’re entering as one that calls for reaffirmation of our core commitments. I want us to see that there is, truly, joy in repetition.

I used to see repetition as the exact opposite of what I wanted to be and do: as an emerging scholar, I wanted every course I taught and every conference presentation I gave to be new and thoroughly different. I wanted to find something new to bring to the way I taught style or structure or audience analysis. I wanted everything I did as a scholar to be not just creative and original, but “fresh,” in the 80s Hip Hop sense of the word. I’ll also say something about “originality” in the context of generative tools during September Sessions, but as we get into all that is new and fresh and challenging and interesting and infuriating about this moment of social and technological change, I want us to move into this year knowing that not only do our students and colleagues across campus need to hear more about what we’re committed to, not only does this moment need repetition of how we approach our work and why those commitments matter. And it is not only that we need to be grounded in reaffirmation of those principles, but that there can be joy in that repetition.

Among the many principles we commit to every time we come together for September Sessions or program meetings or class sessions or conferences or Hume Center tutoring are several I want to highlight for us here:

We are committed to helping students become strategic, ethical, thoughtful communicators who are deeply attuned to audience and situation.

We are committed to individual feedback from instructors, both written and spoken, in the various stages of writing and speaking processes, as a core element of our pedagogy in the classroom and in the Hume Center.

We are committed to honoring the wide range of language, literacy and rhetorical practices students bring with them, and to helping all our students see those practices and the traditions they come from as offering strengths and assets they can bring to academic writing and speaking.

We are committed to helping students understand that writing and speaking are deeply, thoroughly connected: that we write our way into speaking and speak our way into writing.

We believe that writing and speaking—that rhetorical education—involves so much more than  polished prose and careful argumentation. That they are about problem solving, about building connections and relationships, and about world-building.

We believe and teach that writing and speaking education at Stanford is deeply connected to research, to the search itself, to inquiry.

We believe that no matter the “available means,” the tools and technologies at our disposal, the more we are embedded in various technological ecosystems to communicate, the more we need discernment and deep cultural knowledge(s) to write, speak and create.

I’ll end this particular bit of repetition with an idea that I try to keep close and repeat to myself about why we do what we do. I study rhetoric because it allows me to look at any phenomenon or moment, no matter how mad or maddening, with an emphasis on human agency. Rhetoric allows me to look at how people find answers to the challenges of a moment; build, seek and respond to audiences in that search, and imagine and create new worlds big enough for all of us, as our Admiral Marvin told us a couple of years ago. That emphasis on human agency and that the attempt to persuade shows us that there are always people who would rather figure it out than fight it out does more than give me hope in difficult times. The faith that people, that humanity broadly, have a chance to figure all of this out helps me have a starting point to return to when so much seems tenuous. Just that possibility helps me believe even in this particular midnight hour and find the joy that helps me come back to you, to the classroom, and to this broader work we do, truly does come, in the morning.

Here's to the ongoing reinvention that we’ll do together this year and beyond, and to the ongoing reaffirmation, the repetition of the core principles and commitments that have grounded our work and sustained PWR for the last twenty-plus years.