On Blurbing

On Monday, October 22, after working for several hours everyday for a long time, and after working all weekend and all day that Monday, I turned over the first draft of my prospectus. This was a big step for me. I first started thinking about this project in late March/early April, the journey to one intelligible project idea has been very hard for me. My project is about autism advocacy, a huge topic that affects me profoundly from a personal standpoint. Because I am so personally connected to this project idea, I’ve kept my cards very close to my chest (I’ve been using that phrase a lot!). I’ve had conversations with my director about it, and these conversations have been encouraging and positive and helpful, but turning in the draft represents the first time I’ve turned in some that tries to articulate a rationale, a beginning, a middle, and an end–a complete project and how such a project might be situated in Rhetoric and Composition and other areas like disability studies and new media theory. In my final push for a draft to hand over, I just had to do it–make some conclusions, say some projections, speculate about specifics, etc., for the sake of getting this document out and moving on to a part of the project where I can actually do some real research and figure things out where they matter.

It’s been 10 days since I turned over my draft, I haven’t heard back from the director. I’m not upset, just anxious. Not only do I want to see what she thinks, I want to keep working on this project. It had become such a big part of my daily routine, but I can’t work on it right now. I need to wait to see what she thinks about direction I’m taking. I need to breathe. I need to be able to come back to my writing with fresh eyes.

I also need to work on my blurb. People have told me that I need to have about three dissertation blurbs for different social situations. The easiest blurb, I’d guess, is the one that can be written out in a few paragraphs, explaining the project’s overall impetus and the section by section breakdown. Kinda like a shortened version of the prospectus. I also, however, need to work up a 30 second and 3-5 minute blurbs for when people ask me what I’m doing my dissertation on. Whether I give the 3o second or 3-5 minute blurb depends on who’s doing the asking and what their interest level is. Right now, I simply don’t have 30 second blurb that I’m happy with, one that doesn’t completely over-simplify/underexplain–even for 30 seconds. On the other hand, my attempts at 3-5 blurb attempts always end up being too long and convoluted. Clearly, the more I understand my project, the better I’ll be able to talk about it, but this is also something I can choose to work on as well. Here’s an attempt that the 30 second blurb.

I’m looking deeply and critically at the autism epidemic that you may have heard about, not from a scientific standpoint, but from a language standpoint. I’m arguing that in addition to a drastic increase in diagnoses of autism, knowledge-making and advocacy discourses about autism have become more diversified and complicated, involving many stakeholders, from scientists, to parents, to autistic individuals themselves. I’m using Rhetoric and Composition studies as a lense to show the depth of autism discourse. More specifically, I’ll be showing in turn how autism might look considering the aims, methods, and agenda of several sub-fields of Rhetoric and Composition: Rhetorical Theory (Chapter 1); Literacy Studies (Chapter 2); Writing Studies (Chapter 3); New Media Writing Studies (Chapter 4); and Composition Theory (Chapter 5). In all, I’m considering Rhet/Comp as a broad field of inquiry to look deeply into the complex discursive realm of autism.

So, that’s the first attempt. More work on this later.