fetch

For the midterm in my doctoral seminar in rhet/comp, I emailed each student an individualized question and they had 4 hours to compose a response, which they then emailed back to me. The following week, one student asked what the average page length was, and without really thinking through the effects of what I was about to say, I told them it was about 7-8 pages. So of course the people who wrote less than that felt like they didn't do enough work (the theme of the seminar is rhetorics of work in comp).

It then occurred to me that we never really get over this internalized message that more pages equals better work. I told them about the damn book manuscript I'm working on, that it's just over 100 pages right now, that I feel like it's wimpy, and in that very moment the best metaphor occurred to me. My book will be a frisbee, I said. I can ask the publisher to print it round, and its title, which previously had no colon, could be The Affective Economics of Citation: A Frisbee.

K. revises for me on the spot. No, she says, The Affective Economics of Citation: Fetch!