June 2

Assessment of yesterday's goals and goals for today: I read and took notes on my chapter and worked on revising my essay to highlight place as a character and include scenes, but in emphasizing the setting (Chicago), it started out long before the events of the previous writing--i.e., when I moved there, so it's starting to be a different piece of writing.  I'll see where it leads me today and maybe it will link up with the previous writing, maybe not. My goals for today are to work exclusively on that creative piece because I spent all yesterday afternoon researching for my academic project.

My visit to University Archives yesterday was successful in that after a half hour with the staff, they found the box that contained the Ryan Report I was looking for, although the finished draft was a yellowed copy of FYI (what is now Iowa Now). So I scanned key pages of a rough draft.  Because it was pre-computer, the rough draft was full of typos and pencil markings. I thought that the content of the Speech, Writing, and Writing in the Major sections would be different in content and language in the final version, but it wasn't.  The content was fascinating. 

I need to go back and copy the report of the Speech and Writing sub committee because they did an amazing survey similar to our recent survey except they surveyed departments rather than faculty, which actually makes more sense.

I'm realizing that there were two writing events in 1979-80 so maybe my article just wants to focus on those because the two projects (the NEH Seminars and the Ryan GER committee) were very different and never came together, although one English professor, Richard, Lloyd-Jones was part of both endeavors.