CompBlog

Sue Hum’s annotations

In a week or so, I’ll finish uploading Sue Hum’s annotations for a large chunk of articles indexed in CompPile. The annotations cover all pieces relevant to comp/rhet published from 1970 through 1979 in College English, College Composition and Communication, Freshman English News, and Journal of Basic Writing. So far 583 are available to CompPile users, with the year 1977 not yet completed. All told, I estimate there will be over 700.

Hum’s annotations are not the one-sentence nuggets of the CCCC Bibliography. They are paragraph sized, averaging about 50 words. They provide an objective summary of the piece, including topics covered, positions taken, and authors and works discussed at length. Providing an informative gist of a scholarly article is not easy, but Hum makes it seem so. I think hers are model annotations. They are certainly ideal for CompPile (they are searchable, just like the Keywords field).

If you want to take a look, just type in “Sue Hum” into the Annotation field (without the quotes), and you’ll get all the ones I’ve entered so far. I’ve been uploading them chronologically, and the exercise has revamped my sense of the field in the 1970s. Among other things, the annotations have reminded me that the social turn and the critique of cultural discourse got under way in our profession before the 1980s. Plus lots of minor revelations. Did you know that John Brereton’s first published piece (in Freshman English News, 1977) was on teaching basic writing?

Rich