It's interesting to me how regularly "inkshedding" is defined as
pen on paper, in-class public freewriting. If you define it
that way, I hardly ever use it any more. But in my view what
inkshedding has become is writing with an immediate,
instrumental audience and purpose. The introduction of computer-
mediated text into the situation has changed everything. I use
physical, paper-based inkshedding in class when something comes
up that it seems appropriate to, and that's almost never planned
(here's a problem or a surprise or a controversy; let's inkshed
about that), and happens one or two times a year.
What I _do_, however, almost as a default mode for conducting
class, is to use short-term texts immediately read as a basis
for oral discussion, or as a substitute for it. For example,
toward the end of last term's course in John McPhee, everybody
had written on an online bulletin board a short reflective
description of the McPhee articles they'd chosen. Nobody had had
much of a chance to read them, so I printed them out and brought
copies to class. We took ten minutes or so to read each others'
-- as we would with an inkshed -- and then I did a round,
inviting people to ask someone else a question about hers.
Is that inkshedding? Well, I don't know. But I do know I'd
never have thought to do it (or most of the other things I do)
if I hadn't been working on and with inkshedding. Inkshedding,
for me, has always been about making text rhetorically real in
an immediate and authentic sense, one that's very hard for the
writer to ignore; as far as possible, I don't use writing in any
other way (no term papers, indeed no writing at all for the
purpose of being evaluated by an authority).
What does all that say about the future of the practice? Well,
it says to me, anyway, that it's alive and well, even if
unrecognizable.
There are other things to be said about the future of Inkshed as
a community, but I'm most interested right now in whether other
people are, like me, doing things that are clearly descended
from, shaped by, inkshedding.
(I think of it as filling the empty generic spaces between text
messaging and the formal essay.)
-- Russ
St. Thomas University
http://www.stu.ca/~hunt/
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