Rhiannon Scharnhorst | Duke University

Does this make sense? I ask my students during class. 

Does this make sense? I ask myself when rereading an essay draft.  

Does this make sense? I ask Chat-GPT. 

This response begins at the juncture of what it means to “make sense.” We increasingly live in a world where not much is making sense anymore: the continual denial of the climate crisis, the ever-widening socioeconomic disparity around the globe, and the evolving nature of what it means to be a writer at the dawn of AI composing. To “make sense”—at least in the traditional meaning of comprehension or coherence—feels antiquated and at times downright naive. How do we make sense against propaganda, against hallucinating AI chatbots, against the supposed dwindling value of college education? I find right now that to “make sense” as solely an intellectual response isn’t enough. There’s a need for something to make in a literal sense: to turn towards the material for sense-making. Put another way, to use making in its most literal definition is to construct, to assemble, to fashion, to frame; sense, then, becomes the object. We create sense in our world by making. 

Makers and scholars who study process (Luther, Koupf, Hanzalik)—in spaces embraced by handcrafted rhetorics, remix scholars, or proponents of multimodal composing—have been arguing the importance of creating with our bodies long before Chat-GPT was on the scene. Making draws upon the senses and the awareness of bodies in research while also externalizing those affects through representative pieces that capture the intellectual work. We come to consciousness through our senses; thought and meaning arise from the power of bodily awareness suggesting that “making sense” of anything is a bodily process, not only an intellectual one. I don’t mean to suggest AI-informed practices can’t be beneficial, but only that these tools are unlikely to push us to see something fresh and new through our work. Instead, they are often simply replicating the very biases, values, and meanings inherent in language already. 

In composition classrooms, we often teach a maker’s approach as a form of remix or multimodality (Shipka, Palmeri) by asking students to turn a written essay into some other modality for an assignment. The process of changing the project draws their awareness to affordances of genre, to the need to consider audience, to the ways purposes are changed by modality. What I am currently excited about is decidedly not that approach, wherein the practice of changing medium is an afterthought designed to teach about rhetorical situations. Instead, the maker’s approach intervenes at all stages of a writing and research process, becoming just as vital a component of how we begin to make sense of the work we (and students) do. Making should not just be thought of as remixed responses to genre but instead as an integral part of the research toolkit—becoming the very process through which we see what we don’t or can’t already know.

All this is to say my approach to revision—for a research-based project in a first-year writing course—is grounded in the arts-based practices advocated for by creativity studies scholars (Davidson, Markham), particularly in the social sciences. One citational brick in my house is indebted to Dr. Helen Kara, who writes “The processes involved in making art can be surprisingly similar to the processes involved in doing research. Higher level thinking (as we like to call it) demands connections, associations, linkages of conscious and unconscious elements, memory and emotion, past, present, and future merging in the process of making meaning. These are the very processes which poets actively seek to cultivate” (15). I push my students to cultivate these same processes through their own makers’ interpretations of their research projects throughout my writing class. 

We begin this work first by paying attention to art, either by visiting our university’s museum or taking a virtual tour. I ask students: How might looking at a painting for an extended period, considering it from multiple angles, from multiple perspectives, with and without an awareness of its or the artist’s history, change our understanding of its meaning? If we interrogate this awareness as it develops, we can use it to further our understanding of the work, perhaps even allowing it to revise our previous thoughts on the meaning of the artwork. The same process can work even when trying to represent alphabetic text in other artistic modalities. Throughout the semester, I ask students to intervene in their writing process in small ways by approaching it from a maker’s standpoint: how might they draw, perform, enact, or share their work anew? Something as small as asking them to draw their research for ten minutes and then share it with a peer becomes a way to intervene in their thinking early on. These students do not think of themselves as artists—often I first have to teach them what Lynda Barry says, that everyone can draw, and too often we stop around age seven when we are told there’s a “right” way to do it. 

Once we have a full “shitty” rough draft of a project, I bring in two giant boxes of material for them to create a piece of art that represents their work. Students use magazine images, legos, playdoh, yarn, and a random assemblage of objects to create their art. I tell them they can destroy whatever I bring in, which sometimes leads to creative uses of the containers, lids, and leftover scraps of material.

In the process of creating their art, I ask them to think about how their choices and meaning-making reflect and alter the written project itself. We then feed these realizations back into the writing through a revision process that emphasizes how making might make us see new ideas, structures, organizational strategies, or even purpose differently. This, then, is the successful revision, a re-seeing of the work that would not be possible in the brains of AI. 

It would be impossible to delineate everything students have created over the years. Some standouts include a ransom-style propaganda poster about the university, which led the student to revise her essay to highlight her own political position; another created a tiny lego dining table covered in fabric scraps, which led the student to feature how restaurant design in fast food focused on different cultural expectations around seating; a third created a short video and decided to change (with permission!) their essay’s genre entirely, from standard academic essay to documentary script. 

My most memorable classroom example comes from a student who realized through the creation of her artwork that her essay’s focus was on the wrong subject. Her initial draft began with pages of background on her home country, including historical and economic data. But the soul of her work came through in her interviews with people living there. Her artwork took a similar track initially: she began with a more traditional booklet format before deciding to draw intricate standalone portraits of the people she interviewed. In drawing, she decided to let the background of the drawing fade away so the viewer’s focus was maintained on the person’s face in the center. While shifting the viewer’s attention to the face in the foreground, she had her epiphany. Assembling her work-in-progress through this new modality allowed her to “make sense” of her sprawling project, and she was able to put that realization into her written revision by eliminating or moving much of the background information—in essence, she “foregrounded” the people in the written draft so the reader’s attention would remain on their stories.

Not every example is as successful, and I admit, it’s a messy, nonlinear, sometimes frustrating process. But that ultimately mimics what the writing process is. And an arts-based process is just one way in which I push back against the idea that all writing can be done by large language models. Knowledge is not built only through language; we need to embrace processes that weave together the body, brain, and affective moment to move us beyond language. I only have to look, read, and listen to my students to see how creating art sometimes cracks the revision code. 

Works Cited

Barry, Lynda. “I Can’t Draw.” Youtube, uploaded by The Badger Herald, 20 Nov 2017,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbpb2cxKhaE. 

Byrd, Antonio. “Truth-Telling: Critical Inquiries on LLMs and the Corpus Texts That Train Them,” Composition Studies, Vol. 51, No. 1, 2023, pp. 135–142.

Davidson, Judith. “The journal project: Research at the boundaries between social sciences and the arts.” Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 18, no. 1, 2012, pp. 86-99.

Hanzalik, Kate. Arts-Based Research Methods in Writing Studies: A Primer, Routledge, 2021. 

Kara, Helen. Creative Research Methods in the Social Sciences: A Practical Guide. Policy
Press, 2015.

Koupf, Danielle. “Proliferating Textual Possibilities: Toward Pedagogies of Critical-Creative Tinkering.” Composition Forum, vol. 35, 2017, https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1137815.

Lamott, Anne. “Shitty First Drafts.” Language Awareness: Readings for College Writers. Ed. by Paul Eschholz, Alfred Rosa, and Virginia Clark. 9th ed. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005: 93-96. https://wrd.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/1-Shitty%20First%20Drafts.pdf

Luther, Jason. “More Than Paper Islands: The Pandemic Circuitry of Quaranzines.” Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric, vol. 21, no. 1, 2022, https://reflectionsjournal.net/2022/02/more-than-paper-islands-the-pandemic-circuitry-of-quaranzines/.

Markham, Annette N. “Bricolage” in Keywords in Remix Studies, edited by Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, xtine burrough, Routledge, 2018, pp. 43-55.

Morgan, Rachel. “What Students Can Do with AI in the Classroom,” FEN Blog, 13 Dec. 2023, https://compstudiesjournal.com/2023/12/13/what-students-can-do-with-ai-in-the-writing-classroom/. Accessed 23 Feb. 2024. 

Palmeri, Jason. Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy. Southern  Illinois UP, 2012.

Shipka, Jody. Toward A Composition Made Whole. U of Pittsburgh P, 2011.