This post is part of a 2025 series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach founded in 2018. Raegan Gronseth and Marshall Kopacki, 2025 Bedford/Saint-Martin’s WIS Fellows, are recent graduates of Marquette University and coauthors of a novel-in-progress. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.”   By Marshall Kopacki and Raegan Gronseth In Part One, we talked your metaphorical ears off about ourselves and our process, but what does that have to do with you? It doesn’t, really – but we can offer you something to take away from all this! We’ve compiled a series of collaborative writing tips with recommendations for how you can implement what we’ve learned through trial and error, specifically for undergrads learning to write together effectively.    Knowing who you’re working with will help with communication. Work together and form partnerships. Anyone can learn to be in sync with anyone else with enough time and effort.    Having a good relationship with your project partner is imperative to having a shot at making an entire shared project work. For the purposes of this kind of writing, having people that are very similar work together will make the entire process much easier. Too much disparity in demeanor or interests can/will result in disengagement with each other, one student doing the majority or all of the work, and/or developing a project neither student particularly cares about. Random partnering will guarantee similar problems.   The key to collaborative writing is essentially being on the same wavelength as your partner to the greatest extent possible. Feeling alienated by the person you’re working with is never fun or effective. Having a pre-established relationship to your project partner is a huge advantage when communication is key. It also cuts out the time required to get comfortable enough with strangers to be productive. However, being paired with a friend isn’t always an option. You may have to get to know someone from scratch. It can be a daunting task, but it also can help you make friends with someone you may not have otherwise talked to. One of the most enriching parts of collaborative writing is developing a working relationship and friendship with your partner. Who knows, it could continue on outside of class. (Ours did.)   When working with a partner you don’t know, try to find common ground as fast as possible. You might be surprised about what kinds of similarities you share. Do you both have pets? The same minor? Are you taking other classes together? You’ve already ended up at the same school, taking the same class, at the same time, so surely there are other things in your life that overlap in some way. Identifying similar interests will help develop project concepts later down the line that you’re equally invested in.    Try not to let your project ideas develop too much before partnerships are formed. When someone gets an idea they’re really excited about in their head, any suggestion from the other party will feel like compromising. Instead, allow room for play. Brainstorming is the most fun part of projects, it’s also the best way to engage with each other’s unique perspectives.    To make this really work as a collaborative project, you have to find something you both want to work on equally. For example, you both like poetry. You think: I want to write a series of poems about nature, and they want to write a series of poems about the human experience. Great, we can work on writing poems together! Now, here’s the problem. You both already have in your head a theme you want to focus on. If you get this far, you’ll probably try to pitch a project where you can just both write separate poems with their respective themes and put them together into the same document and call it a poetry collection. That wouldn’t be wrong, you would complete a writing project you both contributed to, but that really defeats the purpose of collaboration. You would be working independently, with your own creative goals, to put together something less than cohesive. Alternatively, you could work towards a common, driving theme to center the poems around. People don’t love to compromise, and having to piece your concepts together, or come up with something new after the fact, will make you feel forced out of your own ideas, and frustrated with the partnership. You don’t want that.    We know we’ve been drilling the idea of working with people as similar as possible into this, but really, no two people are exactly the same. Having things in common is important for establishing a baseline for connection and potentially a project concept, but embrace each other’s differences, too. Lots of (super interesting!) interdisciplinary projects are the result of people with different interests working together towards a common goal.    Regardless of how alike you are to your working partner, you will both be exposed to new ideas and perspectives. This is where creativity starts to flourish. One of you wants to write about nature, and the other wants to write about the human experience? Now you’re both working on a shared collection about the relationship between humans and the environment with each partner focusing on different perspectives, and taking stylistic inspiration from your personal favorite authors.    An additional note, play time is integral to brainstorming, but also developing a relationship to the partner. Getting off task is beneficial here, within reason. The more you know about each other, the easier productive communication will become.    We outlined what works for us, but that won’t work for everyone. No formulas, procedures, or steps will ever work for everyone. Figure out what works for you. Lots of verbal communication is the only thing we can say for certain makes working together more effective.    Writing methods aren’t something that can be strictly taught so much as are stumbled upon. This is frustrating for everyone, always – writing collaboratively or individually. Processes, tips, and methods can be suggested, but trying to follow specific steps to write successfully and expecting them to work for you and your partner together, is often unrealistic. As everyone’s individual writing process is unique, so is every writing partnership’s process. We swear by our method, and wholeheartedly believe that nothing else could be easier or more effective, but that all has to be taken with a grain of salt.    If you can’t follow a miracle method, you can (and should) find your own groove. Writing collaboratively is impossible to do without excessive thinking out loud and sound boarding. Even at the point where the project is plotted and just needs to be written, having someone physically present to give feedback, read aloud, or discuss direction is significantly more helpful than exchanging paper feedback or emails. And again, the point of co-writing is to co-write. Every step of the process should be based on shared ideas, decisions, and visions. The more comfortable you are with verbalizing your concerns or ideas, the more integrated both you and your partner will be throughout your shared work.    The theme for WIS ‘26, artifact, invites colleagues to connect writing, art, and facts. Special features include a makerspace, an Artifact Exchange, and an opportunity to contribute to a scholarly publication. Proposals as well as applications for Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellows are due 10/24; undergraduate contributions are due 11/21. Registration opens in November, and the event itself takes place onsite and online January 29th and 30th, 2026. ... View more

This post is part of a 2025 series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach founded in 2018. Marshall Kopacki and Raegan Gronseth, 2025 Bedford/Saint-Martin’s WIS Fellows, are recent graduates of Marquette University and coauthors of a novel-in-progress. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.” By Marshall Kopacki and Raegan Gronseth This January, we had the pleasure of attending our first professional/academic symposium ever. Being undergraduate students, this opportunity was hugely edifying because, well, these kinds of things have a demographic of almost entirely instructors. We often felt like flies on the wall, listening in on panels and flash talks about how to work with and teach students that were functionally us.    Our interest in the way these well-established educators interacted with each other and communicated about their research and pedagogies was borderline anthropological; it felt like a deep dive into a culture completely disparate from our own, with terms and mutual understandings everyone but us seemed to be in on. Apparently, they would eventually be doing anthropological research on us too – a cultural exchange, if you will.   The role of educators as students, and the “cultural exchange”, was most apparent to us when we had the chance to explain why we were there. We were told before the symposium that people would be especially interested in our process as collaborative writers, but we thought it wouldn’t be as big of a deal as we were told it would be. When we started writing collaboratively, it felt like second nature. It didn't occur to us that that would be interesting to anyone. That was quickly proven wrong. It seemed that everyone we talked to wanted to know how we do it, what we did to figure out a sustainable process for creative co-writing, especially as undergrads. It turns out that collaborative writing is something people have been trying to crack for a long time.   How we make it work   The process we've outlined here is what we've found works for us when we're working on the same project together (the same process we used to write this post), but, interestingly, is different in some significant ways from the processes we follow when we each write solo. That's not to say that this process couldn't work for an individual, too, but it's tailored for ease of writing with a partner.   The two most important things to remember are that you must trust in your partner's creative competency, and that you can't take anything personally. Writing with more than one person means more than one mind producing ideas, and not all of those ideas will be the best way forward; make sure you're both ready to express and receive critical feedback! It should be more fun and exciting than stressful or daunting, ideally.   Thorough plotting: All chapters are outlined beat by beat prior to writing. Because we know most of what happens before we start, creative conflicts are avoided during writing.    Before we sit down and attempt to produce any actual prose in a new chapter, we verbally discuss and then bullet point all of the major events that'll happen and what order they'll happen in. We also make notes for specific details or descriptions we want to include, bits of dialogue, minor events, gaps, questions, and other unsure spots. This ensures that we can be fully on the same page when we start the prose.   Bracket system: The outline is broken down into individual brackets for every action. We build the chapter out from the main actions, then fill in the details using the bracketed summaries as a guide.    If writing is like making a Build-a-Bear, the brackets are that first step where you pick out your favorite empty plush bear skin. The stuffing, in this case, is all of that detail and internality. A bracket might say something like [John has a thought about his mother's cooking before telling Andy that he can't make it to dinner]. To get that out of the brackets, you have to fill in all of the internal bits. What prompted John to think about his mother? Does the restaurant Andy wants to go to serve food like John's mother makes? Does John hate his mother's cooking? Love it? What does that thought tell us about his decision to not go to dinner?   If you're using a word processor that offers the ability to leave comments, those can be a helpful tool for working out the tougher brackets. When tackling harder chunks of the story, we often write out several possible draft paragraphs and leave those as comments on the bracket for the other one to read and weigh in on. Having a second mind can really help cut down on time spent waffling between two ways to describe a guy’s eye color.   Verbal dialogue writing: Everything we put on the page we say out loud first.    It's really that simple. One of the most frequent comments we receive on our collaborative work is that our dialogue feels convincing, human, and realistic, even when it's ridiculous. Every time people talk to each other in the story, we're talking to each other out loud, adjusting until it feels like a conversation that two people would actually have. The whole process of writing can be so overwhelmingly messy, but funnily enough, we think that a big roadblock new writers experience with dialogue is trying to keep it too clean; in real life, people do a lot of half-answers and talking past each other. Some characters might communicate in clear, precise terms, and that's a telling trait! But when we're going for a natural conversation flow (or even a purposefully scattered flow), building the dialogue verbally first goes a long way. This is one of the privileges of writing a collaborative work: there's always someone that knows just as much about the story as you do.   Writing as the characters: We did a lot of character work before starting our book, and we write using the character’s voice rather than our own.    Another comment, or question, we often get is: "How do you keep it from sounding like you've Frankensteined together two different stories?" (Or something to that effect; I can't say anyone has asked in those terms specifically.) The answer to this comes in two parts.   The first part is character guides. We made cheat sheets for every prospective character in our novel which outline the character's general demeanor, how broad their vocabulary is, how they address the other characters, and how various moods, stressors, or changes throughout the story affect all of those things. This, much like the thorough chapter-by-chapter outlines, keeps us on the same page and makes editing way easier. When we’re working on nonfiction works together, we preemptively discuss tone, casualness, and sometimes structure/format of the writing, which seems to be enough.    Two writers, two editors: We write and edit each other's work. Most paragraphs end up being written about 50/50 because of the heavy editing and re-working.   This is the second part of the answer to that cohesion question. We know that we're not going to get it right every time. We also know that we have different strengths and weaknesses, so we made peace with the fact that we both have to trust the other to edit our writing. It can be hard to relinquish control like that, but it's necessary for the process and always ends up better than it would have if we were working separately.   The theme for WIS ‘26, artifact, invites colleagues to connect writing, art, and facts. Special features include a makerspace, an Artifact Exchange, and an opportunity to contribute to a scholarly publication. Proposals as well as applications for Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellows are due 10/24; undergraduate contributions are due 11/21. Registration opens in November, and the event itself takes place onsite and online January 29th and 30th, 2026. ... View more

Kim Haimes-Korn is a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. She also trains graduate student teachers in composition theory and pedagogy. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning and critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She is a regular contributor to this Multimodal Monday academic blog since 2014. She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy, and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website: Acts of Composition   I just returned from the 4Cs (Conference on College Composition and Communication), our discipline’s premier national conference in Baltimore. It was a great opportunity to interact with other engaged composition teachers and to explore new ideas. I was encouraged to see the number of presentations focusing on and featuring multimodal projects and pedagogy. Multimodal composition is firmly planted within our field.   This trip was particularly special because I had the pleasure of presenting and mentoring three of my graduate students on a panel at the conference. I met these students through my work in my Composition Theory and Pedagogy class in 2024, where I teach about the impact, processes, and practices of multimodal composition. These students, who are now Teachers of Record in their own FYC classes, have incorporated these approaches into their curriculum. I dedicate this post to our experience at the conference and share materials from our presentation.   Some Context: In his essay “Writing Is Not Natural,” composition professor Dylan B. Dryer calls to our attention to the fact that writing is, and always has been, an expression of technologies. The feather quill, the ballpoint pen, and yes, the very laptops our students use are all technologies in their own right. Writing has always been a way to embrace technology. As a cohort, we have bonded over the possibilities of this communication. We remix the ideas surrounding multimodality and sample this idea across different formats, believing that the best way to honor composition’s past is by embracing its future. Our students, as it turns out, often agree. We share a series of low-stakes assignments that celebrate multimodal technologies and practices. Follow links for Presentation Slides and Handout Writing itself is a remix as we cross disciplines and genres. Digital and multimodal composition brings together visual, audio, and kinesthetic modes along with the written text. We now consider design and audience experience as part of our rhetorical situation and train students to move around and explore options that lead to critical and creative thinking. Our classrooms themselves are intricate symphonies that harmonize through collaboration, composition, cadence, pitch, and rhythm. Music is a natural metaphor for what we do as composition teachers. The A-side of composition is reading and writing, but the B-side is the low-stakes multimodal assignments where the students experience learning through invention without a heavily weighted penalty, developing a soundtrack for their writing. Remixing the first-year composition course requires innovative scaffolding.  We share multimodal, low-stakes assignments that draw upon music, both literally and metaphorically. Through using music as a lens, students come to understand connections to events, emotions, ideas, and cultural influences. What follows are our individual ideas and the ways we use technology tools to promote critical and creative thinking. For the full details for each assignment, see the attached presentation slides and handout.   Kim Haimes Korn  - Curating Creative Playlists Curation is an important skill for students to understand the processes of collecting, selecting, interpreting, creating, and sharing in the FYC classroom and across the curriculum. Students curate research articles, images, and a variety of shared content. We tend to think about playlists existing outside of the classroom, but they can engage students in a range of important rhetorical and interpretive skills that promote research and critical thinking. Playlists can inform, tell stories, express themes, and communicate ideas. Kim shares some low-stakes assignments that engage students in curation and interpretation through playlists, such as the soundtrack of your life, cultural critiques, thematic threads, and place-based and generational research. See my full post, Curating Creative Playlists (2023) as part of the Multimodal Mondays blog.   Emily Crocker - Jamming With Canva and Mood Boards The power of visuals cannot be overstated, especially in an attention-based environment such as the FYC classroom. Much like how an album cover is vital to the promotion of a record, Canva serves as a design platform that allows students to deliver professional content such as videos, presentations, Instagram reels, wallpaper, and much more. Emily shares her Canva Mood Board assignment that remixes student research through collage. Students learn the benefits of visual design and data visualization through extending their research ideas in new ways. Heather Voraphongphibul - Composition Karaoke Students can delight in the aural qualities of traditional rhetoric as they aid in understanding audience awareness and rhetorical appeals. Modern recording technologies provide instructors with mediums that enhance the repetition, alliteration, and poetic waxings of rhetors that impact audience awareness and the skills of growing writers. Heather shares a Composition Karaoke lesson, using Voice Thread, that further pushes these remixing practices by allowing students to incorporate songs, sound effects, and other sonorous approaches to convey meaningful messages. She has students research, rewrite, and record movie monologues through the lenses of genre, audience, and tone. Emily Chick - ReVision and Remix Remixing is revising through changing, blending, or altering to create something new. In this project, students remix the narrative essay through three modes: text, visual, and audio. Each part of this project extends students' creative and critical thinking skills. Students write a narrative, create a vision board, and generate a song using the Gen AI program Suno Music creator. This program offers features like personalized lyrics, discovering new artists, and curating playlists, making it a versatile tool for creative projects. Emily discusses the ways instructors can incorporate multimodal, low-stakes assignments through reVision and remix. ****************************************************************** As academic professionals, we often present at conferences to share our ideas and teaching practices, but this post gives us a chance to expand our reach and share with our readers here. As a long-time teacher of teachers, I appreciate the mentorship opportunities that these platforms provide.  bell hooks reminds us in Teaching to Transgress, that teaching is about experimentation and engagement in the classroom. Multimodal pedagogies offer many possibilities for learning and expression. We are reminded that integrated, low-stakes, multimodal assignments provide incremental scaffolding that helps students think critically and creatively on their way to their larger, major assignments. References: Dryer, Dylan B. “Writing Is Not Natural.” Naming What We Know, Linda Adler-Kassner, University Press of Colorado, 2015. hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress. Routledge, 1994. ... View more

Kim Haimes-Korn is a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. She also trains graduate student teachers in composition theory and pedagogy. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning and critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She is a regular contributor to this Multimodal Monday academic blog since 2014. She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy, and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website: Acts of Composition Why is digital literacy important for teachers and students? In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, digital literacy is a range of essential skills that help us navigate the digital world where we spend a significant amount of time.  Our students are continually immersed in online situations, making digital literacies an integral part of our teaching and learning.  They must learn how to communicate, critically analyze online content, and creatively use digital platforms in meaningful ways. In their article, Digital Writing Across the Curriculum (2010), Hague and Payton define eight components of digital literacy: creativity, critical thinking and evaluation, cultural and social understanding, collaboration, finding and selecting information, effective communication, e-safety, and functional skills.” Even though students are engaged in these digital practices, we can expand our teaching to include practices in these skills along with the analysis of the cultural and ethical implications of digital literacy.  Components of Digital Literacy (Hague & Payton, 2010, p19)I try to incorporate all of these practices into my curriculum design and have recently focused on functional skills. I always say, “I don’t teach tools; I teach digital intuition.” The reason I say this is 1) Tools change, 2) I like to give options for platforms and tool choices rather than prescribing a particular one, and 3) Digital intuition is a critical literacy skill that students only develop through “mucking through” and figuring it out on their own. It also teaches them research and reading skills as they independently seek out solutions and solve their own problems through articles, forums, and documentation. While I feel strongly about this approach, there are exceptions to this stance when we find tools that are so versatile and offer many possibilities that they open up possibilities rather than limit them. Recently, I have directly integrated some tools into my assignments and deliverables and found that they have the potential to create collaborative discussion spaces for problem-solving and extending students’ digital intuition. Canva, a conceptual and visual design platform, is perfect for multimodal composing and enhancing a range of digital literacy skills. With its low learning curve and user-friendly interface, Canva requires minimal additional classroom instruction and is a vital resource for content creation. Canva’s mission is to “empower everyone in the world to design anything and publish anywhere.” Using visualization tools is also a marketable skill that students can take into professional contexts. This platform easily integrates with composition pedagogy throughout the writing process, from invention to drafting to delivery. And it’s free. Applications of Canva in the Classroom   Brainstorming and Invention While Canva is often thought of as a tool for creating polished content, it also offers embedded components that help students with brainstorming, drafting, and collaboration. I introduce it to create storyboards, concept and mind maps, and planning documents (proposals).  The whiteboard tool encourages real-time collaboration and visual brainstorming techniques. We can encourage Design Thinking as a problem-solving framework.  “Unlike other brainstorming methods⁠, design thinking uses empathetic observation to focus on human-centered needs first before diving into ideation.” Data Visualization Research is an important skill that we teach our students.  Data visualization brings research to life as students take their research data and create infographics, charts, and graphs, giving them visual ways to represent their work.  Canva provides an abundance of templates for students to create impactful visual arguments that transcend traditional text-only documents. Microcontent Our students interact with microcontent regularly as they surf the internet and participate in social media. Canva offers many possibilities for students to create microcontent for academic, personal, and professional purposes. Through community engagement and service-learning projects, I have students create content such as memes, reels/videos, posters, flyers, promotions, and newsletters for professional organizations. I teach students about the ethical use of images, but Canva offers thousands of copyright-free images that students can use in their work. Additionally, digital storytelling and comic strips provide creative avenues for expression. Presentations Canva provides a variety of templates for creating engaging presentations, such as pitch decks, proposals, and presentations.  Students can present research, collaborative projects, marketing plans, and media kits, among others.  Check out (and share with students) their beginners guide to Creating Engaging Presentations.  Students can also present their work and learning through digital portfolio templates to showcase their work. Educator Resources Canva has also done a good job of providing resources for teachers and students.  They have resources specifically for educators to create lesson plans, presentations, and pedagogical tools (see 10 Ways to Take Your Lessons to the Next Level with Canva). Teachers can create interactive polls and surveys to evaluate student engagement and learning. You will find an expansive educator community that shares pedagogical perspectives, classroom practices, and samples such as book covers, literary quote books, and narrative maps. **************************** Although this post focuses on Canva, many other tools are available for students to explore. However, Canva’s versatility makes it particularly effective for practicing a wide range of digital literacy skills within a single platform. For more ideas, The NCTE Definition of Literacy in A Digital World offers a specific breakdown of digital literacy skills and ways to apply them in the classroom. To this list, we also need to add strategies and ethical components of AI.  As students move into professional contexts, they will adapt and expand these skills with more advanced options and new rhetorical contexts. As the definition of digital literacy continues to expand, teachers play a crucial role in helping students navigate new technologies, create meaningful content, and engage thoughtfully in the digital world. ... View more

This series of posts is adapted from a keynote address given by Stuart A. Selber for the Teaching Technical Communication and Artificial Intelligence Symposium on March 20, 2024 hosted by Utah Valley University.   As we kick off the 2024 fall term, I want to offer something of a conceptual manifesto for how to think about artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of technical communication programs. I hope to provoke pedagogical and programmatic initiatives that are both productive for our students and responsible to our field. The manifesto includes five tenets, each of which will be explored in its own post: AI is evolutionary, not revolutionary AI both solves and creates problems AI shifts, rather than saves, time and money AI provides mathematical solutions to human communication problems AI requires students to know more, not less, about technical communication Teachers can use these tenets as talking points for their students and to frame curricular developments and revisions in their courses and programs. Which leads me to our focus for this week. Tenet # 1: AI is evolutionary, not revolutionary When I was working on my dissertation in the early 1990s at Michigan Technological University, hypertext was all the rage, and many scholars in our field considered it to be a revolutionary technology that promised to suddenly change the nature of textuality in central ways. I am thinking especially of scholars in the groundbreaking collections edited by Edward Barrett (1988, 1989) and Paul Delany and George Landow (1991). But what hypertext really offered us was a platform for enacting postmodern theories of writing and reading that were at least two decades old. In this respect, hypertext was more evolutionary than revolutionary in nature. Historian of science Michael Mahoney (1996) has argued quite convincingly that “Nothing is entirely new, especially in matters of scientific technology. Innovation is incremental, and what already exists determines to a large extent what can be created” (773). We see this reality in AI itself: How can an AI chatbot generate anything entirely new when its training data comes from the historical past? Technical communication teachers and program directors have managed to domesticate everything from microcomputers and mobile devices to production and communication platforms to course-management systems and the internet of things. We will also learn how to domesticate AI for our purposes and contexts. Historically, a popular approach to the curricular integration of technology has been to “forget technology and remember literacy,” to reference what my dissertation director Cynthia Selfe (1988) wrote in the late 1980s. What continues to be powerful about this sentiment is that it reminds us that what we already know about teaching and learning will go a long way toward helping us address artificial intelligence. This is why the AI position statement from the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum re-affirms best practices grounded in decades of writing research. So too does the AI position statement from the MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI. There is a trap, however, and that is relying too heavily on one-way literacy models as a foundation for AI initiatives. Many people simply transfer their existing assumptions, goals, and practices into AI contexts. Although it is comfortable and sensible to begin with current ways of knowing and working, such an approach is ultimately limiting because it is non-dialogic: Not only does the model assume that AI is neutral, but it fails to recognize that AI can encourage us to reconsider taken-for-granted assumptions, goals, and practices. So, in addition to addressing the possibilities and problems of AI, we should also see this liminal moment as an opportunity to revisit the status quo and consider how AI might encourage us to reinvent certain aspects of the field, including writing processes and the roles and responsibilities of technical communicators. On the broadest level, one of the more valuable aspects of AI might end up being that it can defamiliarize the familiar, as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2005) might put it, at least for the foreseeable future, so that we can look anew with fresh eyes at how we construct our professional world.   References Barrett, Edward, ed. 1988. Text, Context, Hypertext: Writing with and for the Computer. Cambridge: MIT Press. Barrett, Edward, ed. 1989. The Society of Text: Hypertext, Hypermedia, and the Social Construction of Information. Cambridge: MIT Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2005. Liquid Life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Delany, Paul, and George P. Landow, eds. 1991. Hypermedia and Literary Studies. Cambridge: MIT Press. Mahoney, Michael S. 1996. “Issues in the History of Computing.” In History of Programming Languages, Volume 2, edited by Thomas J. Bergin and Richard G. Gibson, 772-81. Reading: Addison-Wesley Professional. Selfe, Cynthia L. 1988. “The Humanization of Computers: Forget Technology, Remember Literacy.” The English Journal 77 (6): 69-71. ... View more

This post is part of the Campfire Session series from Corequisite Composition Summer Camp 2021. You can find all recorded sessions and resources from Camp here. By Christina Di Gangi, Dawson Community College The Problem: Bridging the Gap between Informative and Analytic Writing In teaching terms, I am a career literature generalist with almost sole responsibility for my college's co-requisite writing model. From my vantage point, I understand that my students struggle to bridge the gap between informative and analytic writing. Close reading is ‘back’ in part due to the CCSS (Common Core State Standards)—but while students may know how to find extensive information on a given topic, they do not always start college fully equipped to write a more analytic research paper using peer-reviewed research writing. This gap becomes especially pressing if the research paper is taught in the first-semester writing class, with students going on to write papers in their major immediately thereafter. My job is to get students up to speed. For this reason among others, reading research articles is a major focus in our co-requisite model writing labs. One Potential Solution: Inquiry Charts or I-Charts (Hoffman, 1992)  In completing ancillary graduate coursework on reading to facilitate my teaching of our co-requisite-model courses, I learned about James V. Hoffman’s 1992 Language Arts article, “Critical reading/thinking across the curriculum: Using I-charts to support learning.” Inquiry charts, or I-Charts, are graphic or cognitive organizers that K-12 students can use to map information from prior knowledge—“activating prior knowledge”—along with their reading from informative sources: This lets students build connections in ways that simply restating information from pre-selected readings does not. Hoffman proposes a model where students work together in class before moving to individual practice, but the graphic organizer concept is flexible and adaptable. Before and during reading, students have space to enter information they already know about a topic, and then space to combine this prior knowledge with additional detail and meaning from other sources that they read. The I-Chart struck me as a flexible tool. Since my first-year writing students face the challenging task of improving their facility with peer-reviewed research articles while at the same time learning how to put together a college-level research paper, I wanted to design a cognitive organizer for them that would help them both to read the research articles that they had selected and then to place those articles in level-appropriate research papers of their own.  I note that instructors can prepare students to use a cognitive organizer like the I-Chart within the natural flow of class, as they teach students to search, organize, analyze, and write about research topics. Within our co-requisite model, I find that students benefit from preparatory instruction both on isolating the content of research articles and on writing about individual research articles before moving to a longer paper. Two preparatory techniques that I would highlight are quizzes and short reviews: For quizzes, I have students practice isolating the methods and findings of abstracts, then of whole short research articles. I pick level-appropriate articles and have them annotate their copies as well as practice writing analytic clusters and paragraphs using page numbers and quotations from the articles.  Writing short reviews of single research articles helps students improve in that genre but also prepares them to write a summative research paper in my class, basically a review of research. Using the I-Chart to Plan and Draft Beginning College Research Papers Preparatory work on isolating the features and key points of peer-reviewed research articles prepares students to complete an I-Chart or similar cognitive organizer, which they can then use to structure and complete shorter and longer research assignments. Students can practice using multiple articles to complete an I-Chart in groups before moving to individual practice; they can then apply the technique to the topic of their own paper, whether that topic be pre-assigned or self-selected. Once the table has been completed, students have a visual that should suggest to most how writing about their chosen articles can be organized in a longer framework such as a research paper. In my first-semester writing class, students are specifically asked to organize their final research papers as a survey of current research using six or more research articles. Again, this is a very flexible technique. I have students write a three-source midterm, more of a ‘sandbox’ for the final paper than a full-length research paper, and then write a final paper using six or more peer-reviewed sources—but the I-Chart can easily be adapted to the needs of your particular class. For example, students could use the I-Chart to organize thoughts about a set of theme-based readings before they get into research writing; if they were more advanced, they could write about six articles for a draft around midterm and expand the number of sources for their final project. Some students may even want to change the organizing categories to suit their thought process a little better, which has certainly worked for students of mine in the past. As I emphasize to students, the goal is to track their personal analysis of the peer-reviewed research sources that they are using, then to place them in the context of their future thinking and writing—rather than to have a beautifully completed chart. An added bonus is that students can learn to detach their analytic process from trying to produce beautiful writing—they can focus on organizing and showing their thought process before they turn to redraft and polish their work.  Given all of these benefits, it is my hope that this use of a graphic organizer to facilitate analytic reading and writing for beginning college students is an honest use of a technique from the teaching of reading, a field from which—in terms of my own teaching, certainly—I still feel that I have much to learn. ... View more

I live on the coast of California about 150 miles north of San Francisco in a community called The Sea Ranch. It has quite a history, of which I was completely unaware when—after love at first sight—I bought a lot here in 2000 and eventually saved enough money to build a home. Now I am a ‘full-timer” here and over the years have come to know a lot about this place. It was the home of the Pomo people before a “settler” received a Mexican land grant in 1846 for the property. In the early sixties, an architect surveyed the ten miles of coastal land before a group purchased the property and engaged a distinguished group of young architects to design a community whose watchword was to be “living lightly on the land.” Graphic designer Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, known for her supergraphics, designed the Sea Ranch logo, which you can see below, as well as large and very striking interior paintings for several of the original buildings.  And here’s where fonts come in. As they wrote materials about The Sea Ranch, the founders settled on the very modern, very “in” Helvetica font. As I got to know more about The Sea Ranch and became friends with one of the original architects—the fabulous Donlyn Lyndon—I got curiouser and curiouser about this favored and pervasive font and learned of its rise to prominence as “the most famous” Swiss Style typeface. Launched in 1957, the neutral sans serif design was meant to be versatile and unobtrusive—to go unnoticed. But noticed it certainly was, soon becoming the go-to font for many brands, from Target to Apple’s Macintosh, from Yankee Stadium to the side of NASA’s space shuttle. Wow. Learning a little bit about this history, about the rise and fall and rise of Helvetica, of the wars between those who loved and those who loathed it, made me think of asking students what they know about fonts and why they choose them. I have them work in pairs to choose a font they admire and then see what they can find out about its history, about who created it and why, and about where and by whom it is used. Then we use their findings to launch a discussion of different font “personalities” and to write up little bios of a couple of fonts, describing them, giving them nicknames and character traits. We have some fun along the way, and students become much more conscious of the design choices they are making, often without even thinking of them. So the next time you give an assignment, ask students to pay special attention to the font they choose—and to append a memo to you at the end of the assignment explaining their choice. I always find these explanations fascinating! Image Credit: "helvetica 50" by _Nec, used under a CC BY 2.0 license (top); Photo by Andrea Lunsford ... View more