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What is Writing For?

This lecture explains some of the limits of defining writing as a skill, offers alternative ways of understanding what writing is and how it works, and explains why embracing these alternative understandings can help us become better writers.

Faculty Member: Tisha Turk
Discussion Date: Oct. 28 at 4 p.m. 

Meet Professor Turk

Tisha trains Grinnell's writing mentors, coordinates the Writing Mentors program, collaborates with the Writing Lab's professional staff, and consults with faculty across campus about how best to assign and respond to writing in their classes. Prior to joining Grinnell, she was writing center director and associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota Morris, Minnesota's public liberal arts college.

As a scholar, Tisha studies transformative works: texts that transform other texts. Her current research questions have to do with how and why media fans make and watch vids, short videos that combine clips from movies or television with carefully chosen music to celebrate, interpret, or critique the original texts. Most scholarship about vids has been grounded in media studies or literary studies; Tisha looks at vids through the lens of composition studies and digital literacies, analyzing vidding as a multimedia writing process through which fans both respond and contribute to fan conversations about film and TV narratives.

Tisha's fan studies research has been published in journals including Transformative Works and Cultures and Music, Sound, and the Moving Image and in collections including the Routledge Companion to Media Fandom and A Companion to Fandom and Fan Studies. She has worked with legal teams from the Organization for Transformative Works and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to win Digital Millennium Copyright Act exemptions granting vidders and other remix artists the right to break copy protection on media files.

When she's not geeking out about writing, Tisha is usually reading, cooking, gardening, biking, listening to music, or watching sci-fi TV of dubious quality.

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Wednesday October 28
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
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