andrea lunsford

I’m an expert in rhetoric, argument, and writing. I taught at Stanford University and am the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor, Emerita. Emerita status doesn’t mean I have a lot of time on my hands. I keep busy turning over ideas and keeping myself and others current with my popular Everything’s an Argument textbook. In fact, my Norton Anthology of Rhetoric and Writing is forthcoming. By all accounts I am a Giant in the field.

I don’t normally enjoy people “putting words into my mouth,” but Muhlhauser and Self are. I see the value in find and replace and its connection to invention. Find and replace is an efficient way to make changes and see the world differently. It is straightforward to replace colors, numbers, and words in an efficient manner. On the other hand, find/replace is quite a technofeminist function primed for change and being inefficient, for not copy and pasting (i.e., interpellating) ideas, allowing one to reveal the inequities of culture. For instance, the Chrome extension "Jailbreak the Patriarchy” finds and replaces gender pronouns in web browsers altering a user’s reading of the web. It is humorous and, for many, an unsettling experience pointing out how genders are, as the always insightful Tannen observed long ago, “marked” differently—revealing assumptions about gender in our culture. In plain vernacular instead of “One-size fits all” try find and replacing to “One-size-fits some people.”

I am self-reflexive and a date with me could mean finding and replacing “argument” with “agreement.” See how the world changes using find and replace. I am positive an alternate version of my textbook could be written called, “Everything’s an Agreement.” One could argue my textbook becomes less about technomasculinity and more about technofemininity: the joy one feels at coming to understand one another.