Response to: Spooner

From my understanding of the text, Spooner is persuading the reader that alternate forms of academia writing can be useful in challenging and expanding an idea. I can understand that when one works within certain guidelines, it can create limits in how one expresses ideas. I do like the idea of Spooner questioning the academia industry and guidelines. I believe it opens a new way of creative thinking and understanding. But taking cues from the film industry, I believe that there needs to be some sort of motif that runs throughout a piece of writing. By including this, it helps to guide the reader in interpreting. As we've seen through Spooner's piece, he has the ghost editor fill in certain aspects of writing. It acts to help focus the reader and to get into the mindset of Spooner and explain why he took this approach. As he says on pg. 165 "...this requires the responder to imagine the text as the writer, not the reader, sees it." In appproaching a piece of writing this way, it has the ability to focus on the author. Now this may or may not be a good thing or a bad thing. In one sense, it creates a signature to the writing, that it isn't a conglomeration of past research and writings, but a seperate piece of work. However, I fear that if taken overboard or not used properly, it could steal the focus or importance of the subject, and redirect it upon the author. To exagerate, it would create an almost celebrity author of academia. Perhaps that's quite a stretch. Getting back to how academic writing reviewed, the guidelines that they follow often streamline the process ofthe peer review for being published in a journal. (I actually have no idea of the process). If each author is creating their own style, I can imagine it would slow the process of this review, with each reviewee(?) having to interpret the piece. I know Spooner hits upon this counterargument saying that writings are approved too often and rejected too less. But having a set of guidelines can streamline the process. Finally, I do support the idea of Alt. writing but, the idea of having a, overarching style or motif is essential in promoting this idea. If a piece of work has no overreaching structure, I would fear that it would be schizophrenic with the audience questioning hte motivations of the author.