Episode 1 Transcript: Ryan Skinnel
Episode Transcript
[Music]
Vincent del Casino: Hi there, my name is Vincent Del Casino, and I want to welcome you to the podcast, The Accidental Geographer. Today on the Accidental Geographer, we'll be speaking with Ryan Skinnell. Ryan is an Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric here at San Jose State University, as well as the Director of our First Year Writing Program. This is going to be a really great, wide ranging conversation. We're going to touch on a number of different topics; from the rise of fascist rhetoric to the ways in which we teach and students learn writing in the classroom. So come on board this is going to be a great discussion. Alright, well, it's so great to be here. Thanks for being the inaugural season guest on the Accidental Geographer, I really appreciate it, Dr. Ryan Skinnel.
Ryan Skinell: My pleasure
Vincent del Casino: So I always like to begin with this sort of question, you know, of why the question? What has motivated you to get to this place? So you have a background, you know, you're at Santa Barbara and then CSU Northridge and then you went on and did your PhD at Arizona State University, all in the field, sort of at the intersection of rhetoric and composition and writing. How did that become sort of an interest space for you and what brought you to the questions you’ve asked?
Ryan Skinnel: Yeah, actually, my background is not really in rhetoric. So I showed up at Santa Barbara, you know, went behind the ears 18-year-old kid and told them that I was really interested just in how language works and how the... meanings accrue to the same thing, the same word. So I asked the advisor, "Where do I go from here?" And they said, "Linguistics." And I went to linguistics and failed miserably. So, from there I just sort of scooted over into English and thought I'd hang out there as I tried to figure out where to be. So I got my undergraduate degree in literature and then I went and got a job at a bank and worked for three years in a bank and I hated it, just hated it. So I decided to go back to school, got an undergraduate degree in lit, and went back to school at Cal State Northridge and lit and I got there and took a class in teaching first-year writing and fell in love. That was it. And I just really hadn't even known rhetoric existed, and fell into it from there and from there to PhD and all that. The question really for me, at its sort of highest and most abstract level, how do groups of people, huge groups of people… countries, communities all these sorts of things. Um… how do they make collective-- decisions, and how do they change their minds as a group. And I expect I'll probably never actually answer those questions.
Vincent del Casino: Yeah fair enough! In some ways, it's a question without an answer. Much of what we do in the Academy is meant to be about actually is seeking out those questions. It is a fascinating - I started as a chemistry major, ended up with international relations and East Asian studies with a minor in Japanese. It’s a common story even for most students, they find their way. So you ended up - it is interesting cuz Linguistics on the surface is about the language and there's a field like the Chomsky analytic side, or not the analytic side but the rhetorical side of Chomsky, but Chomsky's own work is where like I've heard him talk about Linguistics and I'm with you, I'm like, it's one of the social science fields I have a really hard time. Like really, it's complex and they do very technical analytic work. And so you drifted more towards that English. I think you minored in history as well. So you've always had this interest in sort of the emergence of the idea, like where it might have come from, and what does history tell us a little bit about that? Is that fair to say?
Ryan Skinnel: Absolutely. Yeah.
Vincent Del Casino: So, so you go on it - so what, what was your, what was your masters on then when you were at Northridge and, and, and then you started teaching writing, which is great that you love it because so many people actually go, "Well, I'm an English major, but I'm the literature person, and now I gotta teach this writing stuff." Very different sort of connection, right?
Ryan Skinnel: The teaching the writing part is the best part. It's, you know, it's those kids who I was, the young, went behind the ear, 18 year old, not sure what's happening and so rarely do we get to encounter them in spaces where they're trying on new things. And I just am fast, endlessly fascinated by them. And they're smart and they're funny, and they're weird and they're odd and they're confused. I just love the uncertainty combined with... enthusiasm, but that's also sort of kept close to the vest. I love it. So what my, my the thesis that I wrote at Northridge was trying to bring rhetorical methods to literature, sorta bridge the gap. And in the process of doing that, I took an independent study with one of the faculty members there, Irene Clark, about sort of the history of first year writing. So I wrote a paper, a 20-25 page paper, whatever it was, about where first year comp came from, and so right at that point I was going, starting to go to conferences and I had met some big names in the field, and all of them were, to a person, just kind and welcoming. And I had other friends who were going to Shakespeare conferences or were going to medievalist conferences and coming back just shell-shocked.
Vincent del Casino: There's a mission of people who believe in writing, and then believe in the educational pursuit of that, that they wanna collectively work together.
Ryan Skinnel: Yeah, and so, I love this thing, I'm interested, I'm baffled, right? I didn't really understand what I was getting myself into, but they were asking all the questions that I was interested in finding out. And so, and then they welcomed me. I was like, all right, well, don't really have a choice, do I?
Vincent del Casino: There you go. The world comes to you sometimes.Yeah, for sure. So you go on and pursue your doctoral work. Is this where you start to think about those questions with these groups and how they get to the ideas and where is that rhetorical moment that comes and starts to emerge where all of a sudden everybody seems to be walking in one direction. You're like, how did we get there? Yeah. Right? How did we get there? And I guess it even goes from your historical question of how did writing get here? Writing education in this way, right?
Ryan Skinnel: The first class I took, first class I signed up for as a PhD student, was a history of American feminism - rhetoric of American Feminism with Sharon Crowley. And Crowley wrote one of the landmark pieces of history in where freshman writing came from. So that was why I chose to go to ASU, signed up for this class. I didn't even really understand - I knew that she was teaching the class, I knew that the class was called, you know, it was like 650 “history of something,” “history of social movements” or something like that. But I didn’t even know it was about feminism until I showed up. And so we walked through a lot of sort of key historical moments, and got through 1848, and their meeting at Seneca Falls, and Cady Stanton and Anthony are shaking things up and then after the Civil War, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who's - she's brilliant and smart and incredibly capable, goes full-in on all of the racist, you know, the fourteenth amendment should have been for women, how dare they let those people in and not let us in. So over the course of that I'm just like... First of all, learning more than I could possibly imagine. Second of all, really getting a much more complicated sense of like, heroes and villains and all those sorts of things, and then watch over the next seventy years that plays out. 19th Amendment doesn't come around until 1919, 1920? Right? And so it's in that class really that I started. I mean I think I always had those questions but it was in that class that they started to become choate, the opposite of inchoate. Is that a word? *laughs
Vincent del Casino: We'll take it. I'm gonna buy the professor of rhetoric and composition. Just say yes.
Ryan Skinnel: Just make words up. That's a great thing about this job.
Vincent del Casino: Well as Thor says in one movie he goes, someone says “well that word’s made up” and he goes “all words are made up.” *laughs
Ryan Skinnel: There you go. For all neologisms all the way down.
Vincent del Casino: It's a perfect moment and now I brought Marvel into our conversation.
Ryan Skinnel: Perfect. - We should probably just end here. It can only go down. *laughs
Vincent del Casino: So this interesting, similar thing in the field of geography, Ellen Churchill Semple, one of the first women to get a PhD in geography. She, you know, very few places would employ women, you know, in the field. She's in and she buys into and, you know, the German kind of theories of Lebensraum and the questions which eventually led to very much your own interest area on the growth of fascism and Nazism in Europe. And here is someone trying to understand geography from these concepts, right? And at the same time, she's pushing the envelope of the gendered politic of field, you know, in a way. And so, when I've even taught this, when I used to teach this work a lot, I was like, the easy answer is to say she's embedded in this racist ideology. The more interesting question is “why at this moment in time are these ideas coming together and then being exemplified through the thought?” And I think in this moment in time where we're jumping so fast into the rhetorical flourish and like getting in, we're failing to step back and ask where the idea came from and why, in a thoughtful way. And I know that's important to you because you’ve spent a lot of time digging in on that question.
Ryan Skinnel: Well, for me, this is, the paradigm that you're describing is ancient, right? We're easily sold the idea of heroes and villains, right? This person's always been good and this person's always been bad and these sort of oppositions that serve us really well in some important ways. If we’re Romans going to war with the Phoenicians… that's good to know you’re fighting for a particular team and that you're not fighting your people. Now, should we go to war? That's a different question. Is it worthwhile? But when you’re on the battlefield you like to know which team you're playing for I suppose. But those sorts of oppositions that seem so clear in some ways really fail us in other ways and become almost Trojan horses. Like everybody loves... let's say... Thomas Edison, right? Thomas Edison, America's greatest inventor. And it's easy to sort of align ourselves and lean into our identification with that. "Well, I'm like that guy. And I’m like that guy and that makes me feel these ways and so I believe these sorts of things.” But when you sort of screw down on them, right? That Elizabeth Cady Stanton in my case turns out to be invested and not just like using, but deeply invested, in visions of race and gender and class that I find in some ways, I find abhorrent. And so it's in those places that I, that I want to understand, like, not just, how did she get to it? Though I think those are interesting questions and not just, how does she sort of convince other people to follow her. How do you hold those things together? And then, how do I... make a coherent sense of self and knowledge and vision and action, that takes what's possibly good from her without just wholesale taking on the good or the bad.
Vincent del Casino: Yeah, and I think that's the, so there's two layers here. It's sort of understanding that intellectual kind of history and the ways in which those ideas come together and whether or not we can or should, and sometimes we shouldn’t parse those things out. But the other side of it is how these ideologies, for lack of a better word, get embodied in the practices of people, and then that oppositional space that you're talking about becomes reified. Yeah. And, um, and much, much of Western epistemology and Western thinking is very much that binary logic and, and it plays out very, very powerfully, particularly in the context of some of the work you've been interested in. Is that, is that where you're merging sort of questions, for example, around the rise of fascism and fascist rhetoric come? Is that where you start to ask those questions?
Ryan Skinnel: Well, actually, where I started to ask those was around Trump. So in 2014 I finished my first book, which was the history of first-year comp in the academy. And I was moving here, I'd gotten offered the job here. So in summer that I was moving from Denton Texas to San Jose, Trump announced. And so I had some time, I had some freedom, I had some availability. I'd been interested in political rhetoric for a long time, but I was really sort of interested in what was going on with Trump. So I wrote an article, It was the first public-facing article I wrote about Trump for the Washington Monthly and basically what I argued was that lots of pundits are saying “people are going to write him off as a candidate because he's too chaotic and he's violent and he's promising to ruin everything” and my argument was basically that that's why they like him. Things are bad. So when things are bad, the candidate who says, I will break everything has a certain cache. So, started watching Trump pretty closely and within, a month, people were comparing him to Hitler, all through the late summer and early fall of 2015. There’s stories breaking; The New York Times - “his dad had been at the KKK rally in 1948” or whatever it was. And I mean just like an endless stream, “he's got Mein Kampf, a copy of Mein Kampf that he keeps on his bedside table.” And I just became sort of wrapped up in those questions, is this a fair comparison? And there are not good answers to that question. Even though lots of really intelligent and really knowledgeable people are trying to have good answers to them, they really don’t exist for thinking about him as a person who uses rhetoric.
Vincent del Casino: Thank you for kind of walking us through how you got to that question, because from there, it's kind of driven now. Like you've dug in on some of the things, including, it's timely, you know, around the questions of whether this rhetoric is playing out. But this interesting moment around Trump as an example, but more importantly the bigger question of what is he pulling from and my question is around that, or rather, whatever's available. Which is a contextual moment because it hasn't always historically been so easy to pull from so many different things at once. But there's so much information in front of us now that you can pull on all kinds of thread, and then just recontextualize yourself. Do you see that with Trump is his ability to kind of just pick up and go with wherever that moment seems to be.
Ryan Skinnel: Yeah, so the comparison between Trump and Hitler is in many ways not fair at all. Right? What they talk about, the ways that they argue, are in some cases, incompatible and in some ways its not only not useful, but it's undermining to try and understand him that way. But one of the ways where they're really similar is on associational logic. So when politicians generally talk about politics, they have a pretty linear logic, it’s a thing you have to learn, it doesn't come naturally. Right? You have to learn to connect A to B and B to C and C to D. And Trump is not in any way compelled by that series of - He finds it unnecessary- unnecessary altogether. So he does the sort of associational thing right. It's like that thing's bad. We're not like that. Therefore, we're good. We are good. We don’t like that thing and therefore it’s bad. And so he plays into in very similar ways to what Hitler did, in identifying things that are good and things that are bad and opposing them to each other. And, what's interesting about Trump, what’s interesting about Hitler is how you can shift what people think of as good into something thats bad and what you think of is bad into something that's good. By virtue of this associational stuff, right? Like wind power, to take just a sort of silly example. Wind power's probably good. It creates less environmental pollution. It creates less heat for the environment. But, Trump for whatever reason decided he didn't like wind power at one point, and so he connected, you know, wind turbines in the desert to the death of birds to the Republican interests in freedom to Donald Trump's campaign. And so all of a sudden that wind power is like this evil thing by virtue of this associative path, which has a logic, it’s not illogical. People will treat it as illogical, but it's not. It's just that the logic is not linear. Right? And people don't, I mean like pundits in particular, don't really know what to do with that.
Vincent del Casino: Right. And so it's about that exploration of how that language develops over time. That's your genuine interest. Does that lead you then to that question so you write about the big lie? -Yeah. The rise of Hitler. Is there something, you know, and what is that when you say that and how does that play out and again why was that a sort of question that you thought logically flowed from some of the work you've been doing.
Ryan Skinnel: Yeah, so the “big lie,” Hitler defines the big lie in Mein Kampf, and he says basically that he accuses Jews of using it. nd he calls them liars, but then he defines it in these really sort of detailed ways. What he says is that the big lie is based on the theory that if you're going to tell a lie, you need to tell the biggest version of it. Because if you tell a small lie, people will catch you on the falsity. But if you tell a big lie, people will assume that even though some of it is false, there's at least a nugget of truth to it. So he's, he says he's not advocating, but he is in fact advocating for telling the biggest, most audacious, most ridiculous lies because people will find some, not only will they find some nugget of truth in it, but they’re going to be impressed, right? They’re going to be impressed if you’re willing to confront them with how audacious you are. And so the big lie article, so I was trying to write about fascist truth and a lot of times when people talk about fascists what they say is he's just a liar. How can you trust this guy when he's a big liar? And so I was trying to make sense of that thing. Like, Hitler was a huge liar. Everybody knew he was a huge liar. Mousseline? Huge liar. Trump? Liar. Nobody doesn’tknow that they're liars. So how is it still persuasive for them to walk out on stage and say “I’m going to tell you a bunch of lies. Also you should think that I am truthful and sincere.” So I was trying to make some sense of that, and it has a certain amount of power if what you can convince people is that you really believe the kernel, right? And you're so dedicated to it. that you're willing to misrepresent it, which is fundamentally opposed to what most of our politics is about.
Vincent del Casino: It's a deep sincerity in the belief that when you bring all these things together, there is a truth. And it's a capital T truth. Sure. It's not, “I'm gonna negotiate that truth” either rhetorically you're getting at that question of how the big T shows up in our world. Well, I don't think this is part of your work, but what are the effects of that big T? That is kind of out of the scope of the rhetorical kind of question you're asking.
Ryan Skinnel: Yes, no, I mean, I think they're sort of right over the horizon, obviously. Yeah. Always. The problem with effects is that they’re really hard to measure, and in particular they're hard to make a case for on a large scale. Right. So, I can go up and give a speech to a hundred thousand people and from that speech, I might say that the consequences are this that and the other but how you prove that is a real challenge. So often the effects are in my mind, the effects are at the forefront of the research I'm doing but I'm really sort of hesitant to make claims that push into areas that are....
Vincent del Casino: 100%. You're not doing the work to kind of go wire people on the train, so to speak. But this kind of rhetorical strategy isn’t exclusive to fascism per se, I would imagine. So, you know, in what other facets Do you see it kind of emerging, do you think?
Ryan Skinnel: Well, what it is, I would say, unique to is authoritarianism. That takes lots of different forms across lots of different political positions. But the notion that one person or one party or one group has the answer. You can see that play out everywhere from, you know, communists in post-war Russia, to Leninists in Berkeley, to, you know, Nazis. -
Vincent del Casino: The rise of Pol Pot in Cambodia. - Absolutely, absolutely. - With a very clear sense, and that, you know, that genocide that emerged. Or the one in Rawanda, right? They're not they're not tied to fascism as a thing but they're tied to this question or this way of producing, rhetorically producing, that sense of truth which lacks, truth, at the end of the day, interestingly. It's not made up of a little tease. It's made up of one big thing. So, yeah, it's a really interesting question and the right time to be asking it, obviously, I think within the context of this. I've also noticed like from your own kind of professional carer, and I do want to get back to the writing question because I do think it's really interesting and where you do the research and think about that. And where writing is going because I want to, you know probably what I want to touch on, but you've also been very much engaged as a public intellectual. We brought some of that to the campus, but even before we fully invested in that as a campus, you've been thinking about how do I take my ideas that I'm working on in my field and put them in the Washington Post or the Hill or other things. What got you thinking and you even talked about that when you were first going, "Hey, how does Trump emerge?" I should write a little bit something about that because not all academics see themselves as public intellectuals or have public scholarships. So what drew you to that. Why do you see that as important? How does it inform back then the larger scholarly project you're interested in? Yeah.
Ryan Skinnel: I have lots of answers to this question. Part of it is a really sort of simple sense that I want at least some of the writing that I do to be accessible to my mom, my dad. You know, people that aren’t academics, that don't have long academic history, but that nevertheless have been incredibly supportive and are, you know, foundational in my life and my development, and I want them to have some things that they can, that I can write for them. Part of it is a disciplinary thing. I mean rhetoric is by definition invested in civics. And so, since by Socrates, well I mean earlier than that, right the pre-Socratics, are invested in running the city and running politics. So it's always part of the disciplinary question. It is just that I am a bit of a writing geek. And I want to try and do things that I don't know how to do. So part of it was like, okay, once I've learned how to write a dissertation and learned how to write a journal article, what can I do that's different that I don't really know how to do?
Vincent del Casino: Yeah. I found the first time I wrote it was actually during the Great Recession and when the system and the state did big budget cuts and I got a piece in the LA Times op-ed section about the budget cuts and what the implications were going to be, and I ended up on Which Way LA with Warren Olney and never thought in a million years like this was the thing I would do. And it's a completely different way of writing and engaging. It's shorter, it's pithier, there's not a lot of commas, we don't need seven clauses. *laughs We don't need an academic flourish, but to get to a cadence, it's not natural for an academic to get there. But I do think it's important because I do think we have quite a bit to offer. I mean, in fact, that's why we trained, was to ask these questions and put them out in the world. Sometimes there's consequences for that, but that's important as well, like to learn from that. But how is that, like when you think about it, how is that writing different for you?
Ryan Skinnel: Well, I think a lot of people think about it as being the simplification of your ideas, right? If you can just distill down. In fact, I've talked to several people who are like “it’s like teaching, you take something that's complicated and you distill it down into something that's easier for people to digest who don't have all the academic...” -Training. We'll say training. -Yeah. -Weirdness, as the case may be, right?
Vincent del Casino: They didn’t spend all the time reading the stuff that we obscurely read. - Right.
Ryan Skinnel: And I don’t think it’s that at all, right, I think that it is a very hard kind of writing, in some ways much harder than academic writing, because you have to figure out how to distill things in ways that make sense, that uphold your own sort of ethical beliefs, right. You don't want to just like go spouting off unfounded claims, but you have to say it all in a very short spot. And it's, so I don't think it's like teaching at all. In teaching, I have lots of opportunities to clarify and repeat. - That's right, that's right. - I don't, you don't have that at this game. And so learning how to do this thing is a very challenging. - In 500 words. - Yeah.
Vincent del Casino: You know, it's often not, they often don't even give you a thousand. Like its tight and yeah how to get, that hook sentence is hard because you really have to engage in “why does someone want to read the next 450 let alone the first sentence?” And it's not a hook as in a I'm trying to gimmick you in. It's more like how do I take very complex questions and ideas and get it into a way that you can see the value in what you’re about to read. - In 18 words. - Yeah totally. And it's, and you can't even bury that in sentence two or three, right? They want to see it right up front and to learn that, it is, it is, it is a trick. - Yeah. - I will say for me, it's helped because I write letters out to the campus and so forth. And even though I can write as many words as I want, after a while I know people will stop scrolling. Trying to be able to convey complex things about the university, where we're going, or big questions. I've learned from that. And so what I think too is it really has helped me as an academic write more thoughtfully and engaging as well. Have you seen that also?
Ryan Skinnel: I agree, it helps me think differently. It doesn’t always change what I think or how I think about things but it allows me to think differently about things that help me approach the idea differently.
Vincent del Casino: So through this entire journey that you've been on so far, you've also held on to this question of the writing, like as an academic area, like how do we think about writing? How do we teach writing? And I know you've even recently written a piece like, about producing PhDs, you know, how many should you know, like the questions, - why are there so many of us? - why are there so many of us and yet many English people with undergrad degrees and a president of the United States, actually, probably tied to the ability to think about some of these questions. But so how has your thinking about writing, and the teaching of writing evolved over time, relative to this career you've developed around the question of how writing programs even emerge and why we do it.
Ryan Skinnel: The rhetoric and composition have been yoked to each other in some cases in really uncomfortable ways over the last 50 years, give or take. And if you wanted to do like a six hour podcast, laughs I’d be happy to give you the whole backstory. But the thing that they have in common, the reason that they're yoked together is that they're about the ways that we use and build words and thoughts and ideas around, identity and things happening in the world in order to communicate with others. It’s sort of at the basic level, it's communication and how do we do communication. Well, I think over the last-- I got into this game because I wanted to teach writing. That was really my first substantive engagement with it. And in order to do that well, for me, I felt like I needed to learn some of the rhetorical stuff, right? How do you make sense of who you are, who your credibility is. How do you make sense of evidence that's appealing to one group of people and not to another group of people? And rhetoric has really good and interesting answers to those. And so then how do you translate that in some way into writing in some ways that might work well in writing but not so well with speech or you know things like that. I have been involved in program administration since I was in the second year of my PhD I think. It’s a fundamental part of the field that I'm in. Which means that I have a lot of knowledge and interest in how organizations work, how universities work. - or don’t - From occasion? Yeah. Once in a while. - How it intersects with bureaucracy, for example. - Exactly. Well, that's also part of the question of like how do people, groups of people, make decisions? - Yeah, 100% - And what are the ways they're allowed and not allowed. Who do you go and talk to when you need? So for me, all of that is wrapped up in the questions of rhetoric and writing and what I think of as first year writing. I'm... I should say, when I think of first year writing, what I think of is really a sort of introduction and extension of students' incredibly sophisticated backgrounds, but into... sort of maybe questions they haven't always asked.
Vincent del Casino: And I think resting at that night, that's a really valuable insight is that ability to tell your story because it's so hard for, particularly, I mean, when I first got to university, my parents didn't have bachelors degrees, never been through that sort of thing and, and being able to figure out where I fit in this larger conversation. That storytelling piece is actually fundamental to a sense of belonging and connection, right? - Mhm - But, but how it gets baked in and how writing plays into that, there's sometimes an instrumentalism that like, oh, I just got to get through it to do it kind of thing so there's value there. How to... it's important for me to turn to this question because if I didn't I think I would have misused my time with you a little bit. So in the world of generative AI, the emergence of chat GPT - Yeah. - And I was just at an online learning consortium conference where this question is threaded throughout the entire discussion. We're in a world now where we can have conversations in real ways with machines. Right? And writing is the most obvious, but it's coding, it's art, it's hitting everything. It's not in any one unique space. But how are you thinking about it? You know, intellectually, and then the practical side of it.
Ryan Skinnel: I promised you before we started recording that I would say provocative things, and this, I mean we've talked about, fascism and Hitler and Trump and here's where the provocations will come. I have been increasingly convinced over 20 years of teaching and writing that we have done a tremendous disservice to our students, in the pursuit of correct, good writing. And when I say that, it takes up points that entail colonialism and racism and gender and class and sexuality and all those sorts of things, right, the way that we have for years and years and years talked about writing. Particularly in the larger culture, is whether it's good or bad and whether the people who are using the good language, or the people who are using the bad language, belong with us. And so we have often treated writing in the academy as a way to get rid of sort of those yucky people who don't really do, you know, maybe it's the first gen students, or maybe it's international students. I don't know who it is, but we do know that we need to protect the gates. - Right, right. - And there are still lots of us deeply invested in that way of thinking about writing and education and all those sorts of things. I remember years and years and years ago, when I was a master’s student, we had a writing assessment test that you had to take to graduate, even if you were a master's student. The questions were simple. They were like, you know, “describe a thing that doesn't work well that you think you can make work better” or something like that. And I was training to read those and to grade those. And one of the examples we got, the prompt was, "Describe a time that you overcame a significant challenge." And the writer was a Rwandan woman who had been in Rawanda during the genocide. And her response was about how she and her mother and her child had been chased out of the village that they lived in, in advance of the coming army, because they knew that if they got caught in the village they would be raped and murdered and all these sorts of things and so they had hid in the brush half a mile outside their village, trying to keep the babies from crying until the army left. And that response failed because it was littered with grammatical errors and usage errors and things like that. And that has stuck with me, forever. There's a woman trying to tell us about this incredible time of trauma. And we're like “well but your subjects and verbs don't agree.” So, I know you asked about...
Vincent del Casino: No, no, it's really powerful because what you're suggesting is, have we lost the point of the consequence of what we're trying to do. Right. And the subject-verb agreement could follow if it's important.
Ryan Skinnel: Well, and that's the thing that generative AI does, a generative AI can do. We can find ways to get our students, our colleagues and families and everybody to say the things that are important to say. And if we want to offload generative AI, the tidying up work? We can do that. And so in some ways I'm cautiously optimistic about generative AI, because it means that the writing that we do might possibly be meaningful, and the writing that's not meaningful might possibly be the robot's business. - Yeah. - Even as I say that, you know when we ask for correct writing from ChatGPT, for example, what it gives us is standard American English, which reinforces a whole other set of what is normal, what is good, and what it is turns out to be white colonial.
Vincent del Casino: Well, 'cause guess what, it's pulling from everything that someone said was “right writing” in the first place. I think it is that my fear is that we will lose the humanity by giving too much authority to the artificial right. And it's not artificial at all. And so that's important. Well I think I could sit here and we could do this podcast all day, but thank you for taking the time to walk me through this. It’s been absolutely fascinating.
Ryan Skinnel: Yeah this is great, thanks for having me.
