General talk about software patterns

[Linda Rising <risingl AT tds.net>]

Call for Essays

Onward! attendees are looking for ideas—interesting, challenging, and 
provocative ideas—and are looking to Onward! Essays to provide them.

While SPLASH and Onward! authors are adept at writing technical papers, 
the essay form has proven to be more elusive. This year the Essays Track 
will take the form of a writer’s workshop.

Authors are invited to submit a proto-essay—a draft—of their idea.

Selection for the workshop will be simple: does the idea look 
interesting and does the draft show potential? The author must be 
committed to the development of the idea and completion of the draft at 
the workshop.

There are no absolute limits to page length but authors should heed the 
following guidelines. Two-to-three pages are probably ideal. Less than 
one page hints that the idea is insufficiently conceived. Four pages is 
close to the limit for valuable and detailed feedback.

Ideas that make it through the workshop and become essays will be 
published in the ACM Digital Library as part of the Onward! Companion.

Important Dates:

• Friday, September 23—Ideas submitted. (Early submission is encouraged. 
You will receive prompt notification and feedback that would allow for 
revision and resubmission before the final deadline (if necessary).
• Friday September 30—Final notification of acceptance.
• Wednesday October 5—Accepted Authors must be registered to attend.
• Monday, October 10—Workshop groups formed, authors supplied with 
copies of all essays in their group.
Essay drafts should be sent directly to the Essay Committee Chair: Dr. 
David West at profwest AT fastmail.fm.

Selection Committee:

• David West—New Mexico Highlands University
• Leigh Fanning—University of New Mexico
• Jenny Quillien—New Mexico Highlands University

Workshop Leaders:

• David West—New Mexico Highlands University
• William Cook—UT Austin
• Richard P. Gabriel—IBM Research

Inspiration:

If you wish more background for composing your draft, consider Robert 
Atwan’s comments on writing essays, especially the second paragraph. The 
point of the workshop is to help authors, and readers, use the essay as 
“an act of discovery, an opportunity to say [think] something they had 
never before thought of saying.”

Years ago, when I was instructing college freshmen in the humble craft 
of writing essays - or ‘themes,’ as we called them—I noticed that many 
students had already been taught how to manufacture the Perfect Theme. 
It began with an introductory paragraph that contained a ‘thesis 
statement’ and often cited someone named Webster; it then pursued its 
expository path through three paragraphs that ‘developed the main idea’ 
until it finally reached a ‘concluding’ paragraph that diligently 
summarized all three previous paragraphs. The conclusion usually began, 
‘Thus we see that….’ If the theme told a personal story, it usually 
concluded with the narrative cliche, ‘Suddenly I realized that….’ 
Epiphanies abounded.

What was especially maddening about the typical five-paragraph theme had 
less to do with its tedious structure than with its implicit message 
that writing should be the end product of thought and not the enactment 
of its process. My students seemed unaware that writing could be an act 
of discovery, an opportunity to say something they had never before 
thought of saying. The worst themes were largely the products of 
premature conclusions, of unearned assurances, of minds made up.… So 
perhaps it did make more sense to call these productions themes and not 
essays, since what was being written had almost no connection with the 
original sense of ‘essaying’—trying out ideas and attitudes, writing out 
of a condition of uncertainty, of not-knowing….

The five-paragraph theme was also a charade. It not only paraded 
relentlessly to its conclusion, it began with its conclusion. It was all 
about its conclusion. Its structure permitted no change of direction, no 
reconsideration, no wrestling with ideas. It was—and still is—the 
perfect vehicle for the sort of reader who likes to ask: ‘And your point 
is…’.

http://onward-conference.org/2011/essays-call.html
http://splashcon.org/2011/cfp/due-september-23-2011/208-onward-essays