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January 17, 2007
Teaching prosopopoeia
My sophomore research writing course this semester is investigating crimes of writing. One of the first readings is Robert Shenk's "Ghost-Writing in Professional Communications" from the 1988 Journal of Technical Writing and Communication. Recalling Quintilian's recommended exercises in prosopopoeia, Shenk recommends that today's technical writing students be instructed in techniques of ghostwriting:
Although the requirement to write for the signature of somebody else is widespread in government agencies, corporate office and businesses, and by no means only the province of speechwriters for politicians, most texts and scholarship on technical writing ignore the practice altogether. (378)Leading me to wonder, is the practice still ignored? Have technical writing curricula followed Shenk's recommendation? I'm curious because Shenk was writing prior to the internet-based literacy revolution, a feature of which is the intellectual property gold rush combined with mass plagiarism hysteria. And it's curious to think about Shenk's recommendations in the current context. Ghostwriting is, of course, as much a part of political and corporate life as ever. But I would think that instruction in prosopopoeia today would perforce in some way be contextualized in the anxieties of contemporary textuality.
Posted by senioritis at January 17, 2007 10:04 AM
Comments
ooh ooh ooh! For a course on crimes of writing, you HAVE to read, at some point, Simon Worrall's _The Poet and the Murderer_ on literary forgery. Good shit.
Posted by: aerobil at January 17, 2007 11:58 AM