Seamwork

The convenor opens by auditing herself, and does it first rather than as a closing flourish, because the exercise is not credible in the other order.

Twelve weeks ago Wren Halloway named which parts of her own job she was still performing. Today she goes back through that list in front of you and marks each one: became true, still scaffolding, quietly abandoned. Some of the entries have been on the list for a decade. She will say which, and why one of them is probably permanent and fine.

Then the same operation, turned around.

Seamwork is the labour of finding the join between the version of you that was performed and the version that became genuine, and deciding what to do about it. By now the join exists — you have spent a semester constructing surface and a semester acquiring substance, at different rates, and they have not converged evenly.

The audit has three findings and each one has a different response:

• Became true. Claims that were a storey above your truthfloor in February and are level with it now. These stop being performance and become description. Update the materials to say so plainly; understating a thing you can now do is its own small dishonesty.
• Still scaffolding. Claims still held up by framing. This is not a failure — scaffolding is how anyone enters a field — but scaffolding is provisional by definition and you need to know which pieces are load-bearing.
• Should come down. Claims that were fitted to a target you no longer want. Deleting these is the cheapest thing you will do all semester and the thing most students resist, because the sentence is well written.

The closing argument is that the honest version of this audit is a professional skill rather than an end-of-course ritual. People who run it on themselves once a year know what they can do; people who never run it are eventually surprised, usually in a room with a panel in it.

The viva asks for the audit out loud, in eight minutes, and the capstone asks for it in writing nine days later. No moralising coda. The course ends where it started, on the distinction between framing what is true and claiming what is not, having spent twelve weeks making the first one easier and the second one unnecessary.