Today’s guest blogger is Jeanne Law Bohannon (see end of post for bio). Where did summer go? As I write this first post of a new academic year, I am looking forward to trying out some digital, public scholarship with my students and also reflecting on a first week icebreaker, in which my upper-division writing majors participate. In my classes we call it “No Fear Gramm(r),” deciding to intentionally misspell/(re)spell the word in order to indicate the no fear aspect of the label. Context No Fear Gramm(r) is a low-stakes opportunity to use traditional diagnostic tools to create dialogic growth and community.  In a class of eight professional writing majors, students not only take the diagnostic, but they share their top five grammar issues with each other in a discussion forum, responding to coursemates and finding commonalities among everyone’s usage mistakes. Assignment Students take a Grammar Diagnostic from Writer's Help 2.0 for Lunsford Handbooks. I don’t assign points to this assignment, but I talk with students on the first and second days of class about how we will use the results as departure points for the entire semester to grow specific qualities of our grammar usage. Although I don’t use the Gradebook option, Writer's Help does have one, so you can assign and grade the Diagnostic as well as the accompanying grammar exercises. Learning Objectives Examine results of a grammar diagnostic for areas of improvement Compare diagnostic results to others’ in an open discussion forum Synthesize content-meaning through dialogic writing and shared semantics Background Reading for Students and Instructors Acts of reading and viewing visual texts are ongoing processes for attaining learning goals in dialogic, digital writing assignments. Below, I have listed a few foundational texts. You will no doubt have your own to enrich this list. The St. Martin’s Handbook: “The Top Twenty” Writer's Help 2.0 for Lunsford Handbooks: “Diagnostics” The Everyday Writer: Ch. 1, “The Top Twenty” Writing in Action: Ch. 1, “The Top Twenty” EasyWriter: Sections 1c-1g in Ch.1, “A Writer’s Choices” Before Class: Student and Instructor Preparation My students and I run this writing assignment during the first week of the semester as a low-stakes icebreaker and departure point for semester-long evaluation. To prepare, I embed the Writer's Help link in our class LMS as a Newsfeed item; I also email students before the first day of class with the same link and an explanation of what we are going to do. In Class and/or Out Students begin by joining our Writer's Help course and then take the Diagnostic I have assigned.  You can either have students complete the diagnostic in-class if you teach in a writing lab or have students complete the assignment on their own.  I have tried both and have found better results when students work on this assignment outside of class.  Since this assignment is low-stakes, I really only care about their authentic participation, however I can get it. After students receive their results (immediate), they write up their top five grammar issues and post them, along with a reflection, in our online discussion forum. Then, they interact with classmates in the forum, seeking out connections and discussing why these issues exist. We re/group in our face-to-face class the next week and examine interesting conclusions together. Anecdotal Results This semester I have eight students, two are non-native speakers, and the results showed many commonalities.  The Top Five below represents elements of grammar reported by all students, in order of descending occurrence. 1. Pronouns 2. Parallelism 3. Semicolons/apostrophes 4. Specific uses of Punctuation 5. Sentence Structure/verbs Students will keep their Top Fives at-hand as they work through informal and formal writing opportunities during the semester. Reflections on the Activity – Students My Reflection For me, low-stakes writing means “no worry” opportunities, where students write openly, without fear of grading or making mistakes. This assignment is multimodal because students use real-time tech to see a snapshot of their grammar issues and then participate in digital forums to connect with other students about the same issues. “No Fear Gramm(r)” counts for me, in terms of multimodal composition, because it encourages students to reflect on their own writing practices and become active participants in community-driven, digital conversations about writing. Try the assignment and let me know what you think. Jeanne Law Bohannon is an Assistant Professor in the Digital Writing and Media Arts (DWMA) department at Kennesaw State University. She believes in creating democratic learning spaces, where students become stakeholders in their own rhetorical growth though authentic engagement in class communities. Her research interests include evaluating digital literacies, critical pedagogies, and New Media theory; performing feminist rhetorical recoveries; and growing informed and empowered student scholars. Reach Jeanne at: jeanne_bohannon@kennesaw.edu and www.rhetoricmatters.org Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! Want to collaborate with Andrea on a Multimodal Mondays assignment or be a guest blogger? Send ideas toleah.rang@macmillan.com for possible inclusion in a future post. ... View more

[[This blog post originally appeared on February 1, 2013.]] Dramatic writers aim to capture the way that people speak:  Therefore, grammatical correctness is not necessarily important in the text of a play or script.  What is unacceptable in academic prose is often quite desirable in drama. Unfortunately, students sometimes take drama’s emphasis on performance and the spoken word as a license for sloppy writing.  Dramatic writing, though often non-grammatical, must never be haphazard. Frequently, I encounter in beginning playwrights a lack of attention to punctuation.  Perhaps they believe that, because punctuation is for the eye, it is unnecessary to writing that addresses itself to the ear.  However, such a belief ignores punctuation’s significance as a means of suggesting vocal techniques of expression—specifically, the pause—which are readily understood to the listener but hard to convey to the reader.  Because punctuation captures the rhythms of spoken speech, it’s essential that playwrights employ punctuation to its fullest potential. While everyone is familiar with basic punctuation marks—such as the period, comma, exclamation point, etc.—there are others that beginning playwrights tend to neglect.  Here are some of my favorites.  (Similar lists can be found in textbooks such as Buzz McLaughlin’s The Playwright’s Process.) The ellipsis (. . .) indicates a trailing off, whether within or at the end of a speech.  It suggests confusion or a wandering of the mind, rather than an abrupt change of thought. The dash (—) indicates an interruption, whether within or at the end of a speech.  Characters interrupt themselves as their thoughts change in quick succession or as they make hasty additions to their statements.  Dashes are used, also, when characters are interrupted by other characters. The semicolon (;) links related thoughts. The colon (:) links related thoughts more closely than the semi-colon.  The colon is used for assertions that hinge on one another, suggesting a stronger—perhaps causal—relationship. The question mark followed by the uncapitalized question—e.g., “What do you think I am? a dog?”  This form suggests a subsidiary question that continues the first, rather than a wholly new question asked in succession.  This punctuation device can greatly affect an actor’s inflection. Consider working with punctuation in class.  For instance, you might have students come up with sample lines of dialogue in which they use these conventions.  Such exercises can help encourage greater precision in writing. To commit speeches to paper, dramatic writers should take advantage of all devices at their disposal—including italics, all caps, and the formatting of text as verse.  After all, playwrights have the difficult task of converting a complex medium (the spoken word) to another medium (the written word) and of doing so in such a way as to suggest delivery to actors. How do you teach punctuation in the scriptwriting classroom?  How do you discuss micro-concerns like the line, as opposed to larger concerns like plotting or character building? ... View more

This blog was originally posted on January 23, 2013. The question took me by surprise.  We were about halfway through the semester, and I’d finally figured out the rhythm and patterns of my 10:10- 11:40 Techniques of Fiction class.  I’d come in just before class started to a roomful of students talking and joking with each other.  I’d try to say something pithy to get us started, then remind everyone what we had read for the day—typically, two student stories to workshop and one story by the likes of Faulkner or Cather or Baldwin.  I’d say, “Let’s start with the workshop—who’s dying to go first?”  The student authors would exchange glances, both shrug slightly, and then one would finally speak: “I’ll go.”  This was business-as-usual. But on this day, I walked into the room and, before I could make any type of witty remark, a student said, “Can I ask a question?” “Sure,” I replied, settling into my seat. “What do you do when you have writer’s block?” As I said, I wasn’t expecting this question.  This is an intro-level class.  Writer’s block, it seems to me, is something people develop when they’re further along in their writing careers, surely.  And what’s more, I wasn’t even sure writer’s block really existed—too often, I think writers use “writer’s block” as an excuse to do something—anything—other than writing. So I led with that observation.  “I don’t really believe in writer’s block,” I said, noticing that the entire class had stopped their side conversations and were listening to me.  “I’ve found that when I have ‘writer’s block,’ it’s usually because there’s an article I want to read in The New Yorker, orRaging Bull is on TV, or there’s beer in the fridge, or I want to hang out with my wife.  In my experience, writers claim to be ‘blocked’ when they feel like being lazy.” An honest answer, but an unsatisfactory one.  I could tell by my student’s expression that this wasn’t helpful.  Judging by the expressions on the faces of some of her classmates, I wasn’t helping them either. “I assume you’re asking because you feel like you’re blocked?” I asked. “I just don’t know how to get started on my next story,” she replied.  I noticed some other students nodding, heard a few “Yeahs” too. I was actually relieved to hear this.  A sophomore’s anxiety about getting started, intimidation by the blank screen, is a different problem than “writer’s block,” it seems to me—or at least writer’s block as I understand the term.  The idea of writer’s block sort of affirms the belief that writing is all about inspiration, being touched by the muse.  That’s the sort of belief that I want to disabuse my students of—I don’t want them thinking that there’s something mystical about writing, that it’s something they either can do or can’t, depending on the whims of some supernatural force that may or may not anoint them.  I want them to understand that writing is hard work, and sitting around waiting for the story to present itself to you so that you can transcribe it is about the best way to not be a writer that I can think of. Having trouble getting started, though, is a different matter, I think.  Particularly when we’re talking about student writers.  I rarely have trouble getting started these days, but I remember a time—not too very long ago—that I struggled to come up with something to write about.  These days, I have the opposite problem—I’ve got a ton of ideas, and not enough time to write about them. How did I get to this point?  I wondered to myself.  What did I do that made it easier to get started, to face down the blank screen and create art? I talked about sitting down at the computer, without distraction, and just pushing ahead.  Forcing yourself to get started and trusting that you’ll discover what the piece is about as you go along—even if that means eventually going back and seriously revising (or even completely trashing) those first few sentences (or paragraphs) after you’ve figured out what you’re doing.  I told them about a former classmate of mine, who always started with what he thought was the most interesting moment or idea in his story or essay, even if it belonged at the end of the piece, and who then would go back and write the beginning if he needed to.  I talked about my experience in screenwriting classes, which taught me the value of working from an outline sometimes—sometimes, it’s easier to begin a journey when you have a map in front of you. Most importantly, I think the key to finding inspiration, I told my students, is in paying attention to the world we live in.  I don’t just mean go to the mall and people watch—although sometimes that works.  I mean taking the time to notice the stuff you frequently overlook in your day-to-day life.  Look at the trees that line the sidewalk you travel every day to get from your dorm to the dining hall.  Listen to the sounds that surround you—birds calling to each other from across the quad, laughter coming from someone’s open window, the faint sound of “All Along the Watchtower” coming from one of the fraternity houses down the street. I like to regard much of my life as research for a hypothetical essay or story—that way, everything I do can be considered “productive” in some way, even if it’s just drinking a glass of wine with my wife in our porch swing—who’s to say I’m not going to write about this experience?  When you regard your actions and interactions as potential material, I told my students, it’s downright impossible to find yourself “blocked.” This seemed to make sense to them, but I feel like this is something that I want to revisit with them as we get closer to the end of the semester.  I’d be interesting in hearing from readers of this blog: How you deal with the issue, either with your students or in your own writing? ... View more

[[This blog was originally posted on January 30, 2013]] The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. –T S Eliot Recently, I planned out my courses for spring. I wrote new syllabi for poetry and fiction workshops and revised my existing syllabi, too. And, this year I decided to include a new section.  After explaining to my students the Grades and Attendance and Formatting Your Work parts of my syllabus, I added a section called Creating Sacred Space. This is new territory for me, and will be for most of my students, I think, and I’m curious to know what you think. What I have noticed in the past couple of years is this. Students rarely take phone calls during class. Most of the time, they silence their phones, though a few times each semester (usually during an in class writing period, or when a student is reading an incredibly moving, incredibly personal poem aloud—aka The Worst Time), a phone will hum and buzz and there will be a frenzied patting down of a backpack or self, a litany of apologies, or, worst, weird silent ignoring while the buzzing or belling persists.  Once in a great while a student will take a call in class:  “I have to take this! It’s my mom!” Ugh. But last year, I noticed something truly deleterious, in my opinion, to the workshop itself. When we take our break halfway through the three hour workshop, many students get out their phones and text. Some of them text during the entire break. Often, I’ll see the little thumbs, the downward gaze, when we are in class, not on the break. Texting in class is okay, students believe, in a way that taking an actual phone call is not.  But, I think it’s very much NOT okay. So, this semester, I’m creating a new policy: Sacred Space. We bring very personal work to class, and of course there has to be a boundary of reverence around our discussion. On Day One, we formally vow not to discuss the work of this class with outsiders, and not to share any drafts with others. I’m not worried that students’ text communications with those outside the workshop during the workshop is violating trust. Rather, I believe that texting during class, even during the break, is hurting our ability to be present with each other. I believe texting even on the break is hurting students’ ability to learn how to be connected with the depth of their inner lives, and the range of their imaginations. You might disagree.  But if you can’t disconnect from other people for three hours stretches, how are you going to write a poem or a short story? When we are around a table, with work-in-progress spread out before us, there’s a lot that’s called for in terms of awareness, paying attention, thoughtfulness, and intuition. These skills are very similar to the ones we need when creating art.   For example, when we start break in class, I can look at Emily and see she is having a rough day. I can see how nervous she is—her story is up next. The break is not really a break from class; it’s a break from work, from concentration.  It’s a chance to stretch, to run to the restroom, to grab a snack. But we are still a class.  We’re still a group endeavoring to make meaning, give insightful feedback, hold and carry and nurture and tend to art and each other. If our attention is divided, if we are participating in conversations about dinner, about whatever, Mom found her car keys!—with folks who aren’t in our class, I feel we are not just missing out on opportunities to see each other with the full richness that is required for something as intimate and demanding as workshop, I think we are hurting our art. I think we’re damaging our process. To make art, we have to be able to enter a complicated dance between knowing and not knowing, between what’s clear and what’s chaotic.  We have to be able to space out—slightly.   We have to capture those notions that come from the right brain.  A creative writing workshop is a complex system of interactions—we have to be off-line, here and deeply here.  We have to be paying attention to surprise, to nuance, to everything. I am nervous about my new policy. I worry students will see it as draconian. Un-American. But you know what? Going to college means learning new ways to be in the world, honing one’s ability to work with others, and deepening one’s relationship with one’s inner self.  The ability to create sacred space—well, I think it might help my students create more productive, more rewarding writing practices.  And, I think it might be one tiny way to heal the world. ... View more

This blog was originally posted on January 18, 2013. Recently, I did a webinar for Bedford/St. Martin’s (which you can find here). During my lecture (which I pretended was a kind of little TED talk—I did so many rehearsals!!), I talked about the top three concerns students have when it comes to revision: 1. It takes a ton of TIME The most frustrating aspect of revision is the time it demands.  –Morgan 2. Losing my voice: AUTHENTICITY I write from inspiration deep down, and pre-Junior year I believed that deviating from that inspiration was untrue to myself as a writer. Now I know: the stuff that spits out onto the page at 1 AM isn’t necessarily what should be published in a book.  –Becca 3. FEELING DUMB The most frustrating aspect of revision is having to do it and making stupid mistakes, not getting everything right the first time…. –Victoria I started off my talk by naming and addressing these common student concerns.  The fear that we will spend forever revising and not really get anywhere, or, worse, revising but not knowing if we have improved (or destroyed) our vision.  The fear that trying to please readers and the teacher will ruin our original voice. And, the most important aspect of revision is right there inside of Victoria’s fear: you have to be okay with feeling dumb in order to be an artist.  You have to befriend mistakes!  You have to tend and befriend a very vulnerable part of your self.  It’s hard work! I think we—writing teachers—also have similar concerns as writers! We worry so much about our failures and the time it takes to be a serious, committed writer.  As we progress in our professions, it gets harder and harder to let ourselves “feel dumb” and start again. However, I’m very much wanting to keep my pedagogy crisply in line with what I actually do as a writer in my own studio.  So, I’ve been looking closely at how I talk about revision to my students. In my opinion: “Revision” is a problematic concept. Revision is a vague and useless umbrella term: We say revision when we mean composing, editing, experimenting, planning, re-seeing. Misleading concept: revision is actually writing; it’s not separate from writing. Writing and revising are the same act of mind. I have come up with my own New Goals for Teaching Revision. I want to create revision instruction that helps students: Focus more deeply. Spend more time on their writing because it becomes more likeplay (not necessarily light and fun but engaging—just hard enough). See results: strategies produce better work. If you like, check out my webinar on this topic and tell me what you think. I would love to hear about your experiences as a writer or as a teacher when it comes to revision. ... View more

I may be the last person in the country to have heard about Anand Giridharadas’s The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas, but I spotted the striking cover when I was walking through an airport a week or so ago and immediately went over to check it out. The first part of the title caught my attention because for years I had intense discussions with students in my writing classes about how to define an “American.” We’d read what Alexis de Tocqueville had to say by way of defining the people he met when he visited the country in 1831—along with several later attempts at definitions and then eventually our own try at this task. Along the way we were learning about the characteristics of good definitions, but the conversations over this particular definition were always beyond lively, often continuing far after the class discussion closed. Of course, the second part of the title is also arresting, so I grabbed the book from the shelf and took it with me onto the plane. The opening is as riveting a piece of writing as I’ve read in quite a while, and it’s based on a true story. It begins ten days after 9/11, when Mark Stroman, a tough guy covered with tattoos, enters a Dallas mini-mart, marches up to the counter, and asks the brown-skinned man behind, “Where are you from?” Raisuddin Bhuiyan, a well-educated immigrant from Bangladesh who has come to the U.S. in pursuit of his own American dream, sees that the man holds a gun and expects a robbery. But the question startles him and before he can find an answer, Stroman shoots him in the face. As he lies in a pool of his own blood, he thinks that if Allah spares his life, he will dedicate what he has left of it to serving others. The rest of the book explores the road that brought each man to this particular spot on this particular day, moving back and forth between the two and bringing both into remarkable focus. Bhuiyan doesn’t die, though he loses an eye and has many surgeries. Stroman is caught, tried, and convicted of this and two other assaults, including a death, and sent to death row. So far, a remarkable pairing of stories. But Giridharadas goes far beyond any simple linking of good and evil. With grace and great insight, based on hundreds of hours of interviews with both men and their families, he paints a more and more complex picture of what motivated and continues to motivate each man. Eventually, Bhuiyan not only forgives Stroman but mounts a campaign to save him from the death penalty; Stroman for his part undergoes a transformation that leaves him remorseful—and connected to Bhuiyan in several ways. I won’t say more because I really hope that teachers everywhere read this book. What I think you will find is a subtly nuanced as well as gripping tale that raises questions about just what a “true American” is and that refuses to provide any simple answers. I can imagine using this book as a key text in a course that invites students to do research on a whole range of issues related to “murder and mercy” and the American psyche. I’m so glad for that chance find in an airport bookshop and for an extremely rewarding summer read. Check it out to see if you agree. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community (it’s free, quick, and easy) to get involved! ... View more

Pictures of our new home in Lower Manhattan: Governers Island If you look really closely you can see The Statue of Liberty! Hello from the phone room Enjoying the view and the new space! ... View more

[[This blog was originally posted on January 1, 2013]] I once had a delightful student who, despite her actual talent for interpretation, would get incredibly frustrated by the ambiguity of much of the literature that we would read for class.  I could always see the wheels turning and her brows furrowing when she would begin to explain her interpretation, particularly when she didn’t quite have an end in sight.  As a major in social sciences, she wanted unambiguous results and quantifiable answers. And that’s just not what we do in literary studies. From my perspective, it was actually delightful: when I see students struggle like that, I know that they’re developing intellectually.  I’ve always enjoyed the ambiguity of interpretation – or at least the possibility of multiple interpretations.  I’ve also generally been most interested in the many links that we can make across works of literature. Most importantly, though, I think it’s important to emphasize with our students that this is a valuable skill: I’m reminded of Keats’ idea of negative capability or of James Baldwin’s idea in “Notes of a Native Son” of holding two apparently opposing ideas in his mind.  An ability to operate within that ambiguity, or to balance opposing ideas is necessary in our modern world: it allows us to deal with nuance and to sort out the complexities of our global lives. So how do we do this?  How do we encourage students to feel comfortable with ambiguity? One way would be to have students work through their own interpretations in small groups in the classroom, without the immediate intervention of the professor/authority figure. They could then report back to the class, offering possible readings and asking questions to spark discussion. It’s important, at the outset, to point out that there are some interpretations that will be more plausible than others, and that there’s no single correct interpretation. At the same time, each interpretation needs to be supported by evidence from the text. So students need to be able to make a claim and back it up with specific passages. This approach would be most productive for students in introductory literature courses – it could work particularly well for non-majors – because it encourages interdisciplinarity in interpretations.  Asking students to talk about a text in terms of their own majors and areas of expertise will benefit the class discussion as a whole. This approach does require a level of comfort on our part as instructors: We have to be willing to admit a lack of knowledge about something to our students (e.g., I’ve had students explain rules of football, the bone structure of birds, and music videos to me).  It also means linking literature to things in our own lives, or with our own interests.  It also means, I think, recognizing that our goal in the introduction to literature classroom is to develop the ideal reader, which is different from our goal in a graduate-level course on English. And really, deep down, it’s about sharing our own love of reading and our own comfort with that ambiguity. ... View more

[[This blog was originally posted on January 15, 2013]] I’m sitting on the train from New York City to Boston, writing my talk for the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association which I don’t have to give for a couple of days yet so please don’t judge, and I’m watching the trees and snow fly away from me, backward. I sat down facing the wrong way, but it seems the appropriate orientation for a year-end post. The past year of teaching, looking back, was a lesson in the value of being unprepared. I say this with some trepidation, for the obvious reasons—as academics, former good students all growed up, we are conditioned to do all our homework and the extra credit—but due to circumstances both beyond and entirely under my control, the last two semesters were My Year of Winging It. In the spring I took a course over from an instructor a few weeks into the semester, inserting myself into a preexisting syllabus and telling the story of American Literature since 1865 that it was designed to tell. So my winging it here was not completely improvised; like the actors hurrying to learn their lines just offstage and receiving prompts from the wings, I had a script, I just didn’t write it. This past semester I taught a new course on the rock novel (which I’ve already written about here). In the past, I’d occasionally included a novel in a course that I hadn’t read prior to putting it on a syllabus. Once or twice I’d not read it until the semester had already started. This time out, for reasons practical and pedagogical, I hadn’t read most of the books on the syllabus prior to putting together the syllabus, and chose not to read them until teaching them—that is, I taught  the novels blind, reading only the pages assigned to the students and reading them the night before. Was this a little terrifying? In some cases, it was. Day to day, I couldn’t depend on the big picture, knowing where things were leading and what themes would emerge as major; I was unable to rely on having the whole novel under my belt in choosing where to direct discussion. The downsides to this are obvious. The upsides were not, always, so I got to discover them as I went, and foremost among them was this very process of discovery. Threads of ideas and form emerged for me as I read, at the same time as the class made their own discoveries. A central tactic of my pedagogy has always been (as I suspect it is for many teachers) the creation of an atmosphere for discussion in which discoveries can happen collaboratively, rather than the leading by the nose I too often fall back into (which I occasionally realize I’m doing mid-discussion and end the string of leading questions with “What number am I thinking of?”). Teaching unread novels did this work for me. The “we” in the question “So what did we learn last night?” was genuine. Reading without knowing the plot—or without knowing the end—was quite instructive for me as, well, an instructor, and helped me see that this is what students are always doing. This seems an obvious point, and maybe it is, but I tend to forget from class to class that I usually have the benefit of hindsight when I teach fiction. Not knowing how things would turn out made me more cognizant of the construction of plot, of the narrative devices employed, and more aware of the existential fact that a plot can turn any way it wants to. We have the sense after we’ve read a narrative that it could only have gone the way it went (this is the moment of retrospection Peter Brooks describes), but as we read a story for the first time, we can only guess. Another effect of reading without knowing where the plot is going is that it encourages something I value but don’t always practice as much as I’d like, which is close reading. Focusing only on the pages at hand makes it easier to focus on the pages at hand—that is, to pay sustained, slow attention to the words in front of us. As Jane Gallop has discussed so eloquently (here and elsewhere), the historicization of literary studies has tended to lead to a focus on the thematic to the exclusion of the kind of close attention to form that is one of literary studies’ chief joys and benefits. Whether we are arguing for the value of the English major or just the occasional English class from the instrumental side (employers value the skills associated with textual interpretation) or the humanist (citizenship of the world values the attention to ambiguity, irony, beauty, etc., that exposure to the literary affords), we can agree on the value of close reading. One last effect of effect of Winging It in this way was, in one case, the assigning of a novel that wasn’t very good, one to which I’d been pointed by someone whose literary judgment is unimpeachable (though maybe should receive censure for this one offense). While I won’t be teaching this novel again, there was something positive to doing it. Practicing full disclosure, I had told the class at the beginning of the semester that I hadn’t read most of the books, so as we read this one and discovered that many of us didn’t love it, we were able to talk about our own tastes and what they consisted of and even about taste as a thing in itself and, without bringing in Bourdieu and taste as a social phenomenon, were able to get pretty far into what it means to like or not like artworks. I’m not much for resolutions, and even if I were, a resolution to work harder to prepare less assiduously wouldn’t be one I would make. I am still one for working up pages of notes about career, context, theme, form, and divergent interpretations. I am hoping, looking back at the year flying away behind me, that I can find ways to remind myself of the value of not knowing the end of the story. ... View more

This blog was originally posted on January 14, 2013. There’s a band called “Tallest Man on Earth” that for quite awhile I thought was called “Tallest Men on Earth.”  And I was disappointed to realize I was wrong (never mind that the band is just one guy and so the singular is appropriate), because Tallest Men on Earth just sounds so much more interesting than Tallest Man on Earth.  This to me is the perfect lesson on titles.  When you see something titled “The Tallest Man on Earth,” you know, or at least you assume you know, exactly what it’s about (he’s a Turk named Sultan Kosen, and he’s eight foot three).  But if you see something titled “The Tallest Men on Earth,” that sets a greater mystery—it raises a reader’s curiosity right away. At the moment, in fiction, nobody is coming up with better titles than  Karen Russell.  Her short story collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, establishes her sense of humor, the stories’ strangeness, and their originality.  But she topped that with her second book, Swamplandia!, a title that I sometimes call out just for the fun of it.  Never have I loved an exclamation point more.  It’s a title that actually gets stuck in my head.  Easy to remember when you’re in the library or the bookstore or recommending things to friends.  And like St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, it sets the reader up for what’s to come—a strange, atmospheric novel set largely in an alligator theme park. Students often struggle with titles.  They use a lot of clichés.  Or puns.  Or abstractions. They often use words that appear in the very first sentence or line of the piece.  My advice to students is twofold: 1)     You want a title that will draw readers into the poem/story/essay before they read it. 2)     You want a title that helps readers see the poem/story/essay in a new light after they’ve read it. Titles can raise curiosity and they can satisfy it, helping point readers toward an interpretation of a piece. Of course, there are many, many great books with only ordinary titles, or perfectly ordinary books with great titles… a scan of the books piled right in front of me includes this mixed bag: Game of Thrones (I like it!), Farewell, Escape, Sultana’s Dream,Joseph Anton, Water for Elephants and the for-sure winner, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You.  If I judged a book only by its title I certainly wouldn’t be reading Farewell or Escape; given that these are not romance novels, the authors probably didn’t do themselves any favors there.  Joseph Anton is Salman Rushdie’s autobiography, and the brilliance of the title lies in the realization that Joseph Anton was the false identity Rushdie lived under during the Fatwa.  It’s a book about that other version of himself; the title points to a reading of the book. For readers, a title is the beginning of the reading experience and it’s the thing that lingers longest in the end… And one possible fun exercise for the last day of the semester—have students each brainstorm a title for an unwritten piece and then donate that title to another student as a parting gift—a piece to be written later.  It’s a way of getting students to think about titles as their own entity and of encouraging students to keep writing once the semester is done. ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Cassandra Stephens (Bishop), a PhD candidate in rhetoric and composition at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where she is writing her dissertation on an empirical classroom study. Her project combines an identity theme and a quest narrative essay format in a research writing course; the model was designed to bridge potential disconnects between narrative writing and formal academic writing. Her academic interests also include tutoring and teaching ESL students, mentoring graduate students, and advising undergraduate students.  The study described in this blog was presented at the 2015 CCCCs in Tampa. Contact Cassandra at  cassandrapstephens@gmail.com. During the fall of 2013, I taught a technical writing course in which students collectively requested to try something innovative.  My developing interest in digital media and multimodal literacies led me to propose that we incorporate video résumés as a tool for the revision of the students’ written résumés.  I obtained IRB approval from my university and proceeded with a formal study. A comparable alternative assignment was offered to students with concerns regarding videotaping. One student chose to complete the alternative assignment. Learning Objectives To become familiar with current technological practices in the student’s field of study. To encourage a reflective written revision of documents through visual presentation of the student’s résumé content. To have the student complete and assess a visual artifact of his or her current presentation style so that he or she possesses a digital tool that allows him or her to hone strengths and practice areas of weakness for future interviews and presentations. Origin of Idea as a Visual Teaching Model The idea originated after I recalled a television sitcom and its use of the video résumé; the concept had a resonating appeal, and I was certain that it had a place in the classroom.  That particular episode titled “The Possimpible,” from the popular television series How I Met Your Mother, aired in 2009.  Robin Scherbatsky, one of the lead characters, distributes her flamboyant video résumé to potential employers. It is a desperate effort to quickly find a job and maintain her visa status; it works. The episode references a real life dissemination of a video résumé that did not end quite so well. In 2006, a Yale graduate, Aleksey Vayner, distributed his “over the top” video résumé titled “Impossible is Nothing” to prospective Wall Street employers. Instead of setting him apart from other candidates, the video went viral on the internet, leaving Vayner widely ridiculed and ostracized from Wall Street. While the approximately seven minute video is still available on the internet, it tends to change locations. (You can likely find a version by doing a quick YouTube search.) As it turns out, Vayner may have just been a bit ahead of his time. After all, he was the catalyst that inspired a television show episode, which in turn may have had an effect on the manner in which many job seekers market themselves to employers through media. In 2010 and 2011, career websites offering to host video résumés attained a larger internet presence.  However, while many multimedia career websites utilizing videos are operational, they have not yet gained a strong grounding or reputation due to affirmative action concerns and other liability issues.  Even with reservations regarding current market viability, these videos still offer students the opportunity to approach their writing and revision in a multimodal manner that encourages the use of digital rhetoric as a valuable tool for revising their essays. Background Reading for Students and Instructors Ask students to prepare for class by reading relevant content from your handbook or rhetoric: The St. Martin’s Handbook: Ch. 2, Rhetorical Situations; Ch. 18, Communicating in Other Media The Everyday Writer or Writer’s Help 2.0 for Lunsford: Ch. 3, Multimodal Assignments; Ch. 5, Rhetorical Situations Writing in Action: Ch. 4, A Writer’s Choices; Ch. 6 Multimodal Assignments EasyWriter: Ch. 1, A Writer’s Choices; Ch. 4, Multimodal Writing Everything’s an Argument: Ch. 14, Visual and Multimedia Arguments Classroom Application of Video Résumé Overview After reviewing and revising their graded written résumés, students planned one to three minute presentations for the filming of their video résumés. They were encouraged to capitalize on information from their written résumés in designing their oral presentations and were reminded to remain focused on an audience of potential employers. The university’s Center for Teaching Excellence staff offered to film a professional recording; however, some students chose to film their own, using computer or cell phone cameras.  First, students rehearsed these presentations and decided on a style, either formal or creative, before they recorded their monologue, designing video résumés that would only be used for their own personal benefit and only viewed by myself or other academics interested in further research. Thus, students felt comfortable being as imaginative as they wanted without fearing that their videos might become viral on the internet.  The video recordings were returned to students, and they watched and reflected on the differences between the visual representation and the written version of their credentials. Students were asked to address what changes they would make to their documents and video; they also were asked to examine how their perceived strengths and weaknesses  of their video presentation affected their overall assessment of the project. The students then revised their original written résumé and cover letter or statement of purpose as the last step of the video résumé project. For the final exam, students completed a post-write reflection on their experience with the project in which they were asked to elaborate on any changes that they made to their written materials, specifically highlighting how the changes in medium altered their rhetorical choices. Scaffolding of Major Assignments and Group Work The first assignment required students to complete a written résumé.  The final assignment was a threefold project that included a video résumé, a revised hardcopy résumé, and a reflection on any changes in perspective or presentation of the written résumé after creating and viewing the video résumé.  The course design allowed the students separation and incubation time away from their written résumés after the first round of revisions while they moved on to other projects.   The interim assignments included A semester long group project in which students were grouped by majors to research, compile, and present information on the prevalence of digital hiring methods in their fields e.g., Skype or video résumés. Students divided up the 20-page written paper requirement, depending on the number of people in their group, typically four or five, and they then collaboratively prepared and executed the presentation component of the group project at the end of the course. A cover letter or statement of purpose, written to a particular job ad or degree program of each student’s choosing.  This was a practical assignment since most of these students were either in the midst of applying for part-time work, full-time work, or to graduate school. An interview with advisors, professionals, or teachers in their fields of study.  Students attached those transcripts to their completed prose document. Recommended Guidelines for Recording Sessions Limit edited video résumé time to 90 seconds. Encourage students to memorize an outline of their talking points. Ask students to dress as they would for an interview in their field. Suggest that students participating in a formal recording session provided by the school become familiar with the selected recording location. Prepare students for the awkwardness of speaking to a camera and of viewing themselves on tape by encouraging them to practice during the weeks preceding the formal filming. Want to collaborate with Andrea on a Multimodal Mondays assignment or be a guest blogger? Send ideas to leah.rang@macmillan.com for possible inclusion in a future post. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community (it’s free, quick, and easy) to get involved! ... View more

I’m writing this post the day after receiving an Honorary Degree from Middlebury College, home of the Bread Loaf School of English where I have taught off and on since 1988. I am deeply honored by this award, but I didn’t expect to be positively thrilled by it. But I was, first of all because the Bread Loaf Commencement is a wonderful annual ritual, as each graduate receiving an MA or MLitt is greeted by the president of Middlebury and director of Bread Loaf and presented not only with a hood and diploma but with a replica of the founder’s cane to boot! The small theater on the Bread Loaf campus is bursting with proud family and friends who have joined together for a truly sumptuous meal beforehand and who will spill out of the theatre afterward for dessert, good fellowship, and New Orleans jazz piano in the Barn. But this year’s ceremony was made even more special by the speaker of the evening. Each year the graduating students (almost all of whom are teachers) choose a faculty member to be the Commencement Speaker—and it is a big and well-kept secret all summer. I still remember the year the honor was mine: I never worked harder on a speech in my life! This year’s speaker was multitalented playwright and 27-year Bread Loaf faculty member Dare Clubb. For 30 minutes he held all of us spellbound as he moved from a meditation on the unconscious drives that matter so much in our lives. Along the way he told a story of watching a tiny waxwing out in a devilish storm earlier this summer. Dare went out onto his third-floor balcony to watch the wind and rain lashing the trees and blowing limbs around, only to see the little bird battling against the storm time after time in search of food for her young ones waiting in a nest right above Dare’s door. So he watched as she skittered and darted and fought her way in the lashing rain and high winds, a “gentle warrior” with a singular, defining, instinctive goal: freedom and food. And he marveled at her perseverance and determination, then paused as she seemed to say to him, “This is how you do it.” "Cedar waxwing Courtship" by Minette Layne from Seattle, Washington - Courtship. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cedar_waxwing_Courtship.jpg#/media/File:Cedar_waxwing_Courtship.jpg Dare then segued into a parallel meditation on the word “forgive” and the role it played in the aftermath of the killings at the Emmanuel AME church in Charleston. I cannot capture the lyrical power of this meditation, but it transported all of us to a higher level of consciousness and inspired all to accept Dare’s challenge to dive deep into the spirit of forgiveness embodied by Nadine Collier, another gentle warrior, when she said to the killer, “I forgive you.” With those words and that act, Dare said, Collier was also saying to us, “This is how you do it.” Turning to the graduates, he said “Oh my gentle warriors,” please “go in peace, go with peace, go toward peace . . . always.” I’ve heard a number of eloquent and moving commencement addresses at Bread Loaf, though none more so than this one. But equally inspiring to me is the work done by Bread Loaf students and teachers. As we were gathered in the cool, sunny Vermont mountains, Bread Loafers were convening a conference in Mumbai, organized and led by Bread Loafers Lee Krishna and Rich Gorham. Working together with other Bread Loafers from around the globe and some 60 Mumbai teachers, they led writing workshops for middle and high school students followed by extensive discussions and debriefings about teaching in culturally sensitive ways. Similar meetings have been held in Haiti and Karachi—and others are in the planning stages. These gatherings are part of the ongoing work of the Bread Loaf Teachers’ Network, the country’s oldest teacher network and one that provides a model for teacher agency and advocacy, effective teaching and learning. So even as I savored the celebration in Vermont, my thoughts moved forward, to the work this year’s graduates will undertake when they return to their classrooms. They will face challenges, roadblocks, hurdles, obstacles of every kind. But they will also persevere, guided by the principles of freedom, forgiveness, and peace. And like the tiny waxwing and the mourners in Charleston, they will hope one day to say “This is how you do it.” ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Michelle Stevier-Johanson, who teaches Basic Writing and coordinates the Writing Center and other tutoring at Dickinson State University in Dickinson, North Dakota.  She has taught developmental writing and first-year composition, writing about the environment, and women's studies courses since receiving her master's degree in composition and literacy studies from Indiana University in 1996.  Her scholarly interests include writing as empowerment, civic literacy, and activism; writing course/writing tutor partnerships; and rhetorics of resistance. Last fall, one of my Basic Writing students – I’ll call him Brandon – wrote about his experience with the Bakken oil boom.  Brandon supports North Dakota’s oil industry, but he’s dismayed by what he sees as an injustice inherent in mineral rights. In his third essay, Brandon was able to research and clarify his thoughts and concerns about this injustice. This third essay, what I call the “explanation of opinion” paper, arises out of a pedagogical struggle of my own. In previous courses, I found that no amount of discussion of reader-oriented prose was enough to make sure that students used our final paper, a Toulmin-based argument, as an opportunity to persuade rather than preach. The “explanation of opinion” paper is designed to put a brake on the tendency to articulate our beliefs before we consider the beliefs and experiences of others. In Essay 3, students state their opinion as their thesis, but the task of the essay is to discuss how they came to this belief. How did family and friends’ beliefs influence them? What specific life experiences shaped this opinion? For Brandon, Essay 3 offered a significant opportunity to learn more about the injustices he perceived in his community. Although Brandon knows farmers and ranchers who own the mineral rights to their land, Brandon’s family had to buy their land without these rights in place. In his essay, Brandon addressed the complex consequences of this difference:  His family’s livelihood is tied to their farmland, and yet that livelihood can be undermined at any moment by a mineral rights owner who wants access to “drill, baby, drill.” As a result, while the oil industry booms all around, landowners like Brandon’s family don’t experience the same economic growth. Instead, their rights are thrown into question. As I worked with Brandon, I found myself struck not just by his eloquent depiction of his family’s situation, but by the way in which this story provides a metaphor for Basic Writing itself. Like many Basic Writing teachers, I spend a lot of time thinking about place, politics, and ownership. These things are central to Basic Writing whether we want them to be or not. Whenever I try to argue with the politics of administrators, colleagues, and others who characterize the work of Basic Writing as remedial and perceive our students to be outsiders to the academy, I realize the enormity of our marginalization and separation – our students’ and our own. Worst of all, at least in my opinion, there is that seemingly inexorable belief that enables the perception of outsider status:  the idea that the “basic” in Basic Writing refers to grammar, vocabulary, punctuation, and formatting, not to the real writing students will do in first-year composition and elsewhere in their undergraduate careers and lives. My students and I are repeatedly turned into mere observers of changes to the land we thought was our own. In just the last six years of my career, the “place” called Basic Writing has been radically altered without much input from me and without any input from the students whose lives are profoundly affected. For example, there’s the course credit we lost a few years ago when my university system decided that Basic Writing is “pre-college” material. There’s the course name change that took us out of the English Department and linked us to “academic success” rather than the discipline of writing. As he worked on his essay about compromised land rights, Brandon kept coming back to a simple question: “Why can’t people understand that this is about rights and fairness?” It’s a question that plagues me with Basic Writing as well. How do we help outsiders to our field understand that, in the American academy, Basic Writers are not tenants without rights but landowners? Why must the power of certain stakeholders come at the expense of the power of others? Indeed, any unthinking chant of “drill, baby, drill” is as irresponsible an approach to Basic Writing as it is to this nation’s energy problems. Marked by the always-already compromised turf of Basic Writing, my students are not simple observers of fences, gates, and rights-of-access issues:  they are, and they can remain, the fenced and the gated. Furthermore, unlike issues of land ownership in the Bakken – the agricultural and industrial prairie that once belonged to Native peoples – Basic Writing students’ access has no ugly consequences. No environmental damage can occur from Basic Writers’ full participation in American higher education.  Just like Brandon, these students have vital stories to tell and talents that need to be supported, even prized.  As a space for some of the academy’s best direct action, Basic Writing must be liberated from compromised status and assume its rightful place:  a guardian of students’ rights and a central location for academic and civic empowerment.   Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

I’ve been spending some time with the 14-year-old grandson of a good friend, who is visiting. He came out to California fired up about learning to play golf and intent on keeping up with baseball (he’s a Cubs fan but checks other box scores daily). He’s also been glad to help out with gardening and other chores. What he has NOT been excited about is READING. Listening to him complain took me back to an encounter with my nephew, then in middle school. It was summer time and he had a big reading assignment: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. He was reading it, but very reluctantly, and with a certain amount of disdain. I remember his saying, voice dripping sarcasm: “I don’t know why people say this is a great novel. The girl that wrote it is sure wordy.” I did wonder about that choice of text, certainly not one I would have thought would have great appeal for middle schoolers! Well, at least my friend’s grandson isn’t assigned to read Frankenstein. Instead, his obligatory summer reading is of Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies. I looked up the book and found out that it’s YA novel set in a society where everyone gets extreme cosmetic surgery at 16 to become “pretty.” You can imagine the complications and tensions (and triumphs?) this premise leads to, and I read a few pages, enough to see I could easily read more. But not my young friend. He declared it endlessly boring and not what he wanted to be doing during his summer holidays. So—is it the fact that it is required reading that makes this task so objectionable? In this case, that seems to definitely be part of the problem. I have seen the same kind of resistance in Stanford students, who are assigned three books to read before they arrive on campus for their frosh year. When I had an opportunity to choose the three books, I selected Lynda Barry’s 100 Demons!, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and ZZ Packer’s Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. But I and the other faculty members who have chosen these books have a good ace in the hole: the authors of the books come to campus during orientation for interviews and Q & A with the frosh. The year I chose the books, some of the first year students confessed that they hadn’t read the books during the summer. But the session with the authors was so riveting that they all rushed back to their dorms to read them after the fact. So. If we want kids to be reading books during the summer, it would seem like a good idea to provide some hooks. One might be to let them choose the books they want to read. That’s worked well with my grandniece Audrey, now 11 and reading away this summer at five books of her choice. Another might be to engage the students with the authors in some way, most likely online. Still another might be to assign a graphic novel or narrative, or a book along with a movie version. There are probably lots of other good reading programs out there, along with hooks to get students engaged in reading. If you know one, please write! Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community  to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

The academic year is fast approaching. I’m looking forward to meeting my students and returning to the classroom. One of my goals during the first weeks of the semester is to introduce students to the handbook we’ll be using, A Writer’s Reference. I tell students on the first day of class, Everything you need to become a successful writer in any college course is in A Writer’s Reference; become friends with it. I want students to learn, right from the outset, that questions are a natural part of learning how to write; and I want to show them how their handbook is designed to answer their writing questions.  This year I’ll be introducing the handbook to students with these first-week activities—, , and —to help students become successful college writers. The activities are designed to promote collaboration, too, so that students can work together as fellow writers while learning to navigate their handbook.  I think students will have fun with the because they provide real writing problems—“you are writing a research paper and are uncertain how to punctuate quotations”; “you’ve received feedback that your paragraphs need clearer topic sentences”—and ask students to work with classmates to find the answers in their handbook.  Once students learn to navigate the handbook, they see how quickly and efficiently they can find solutions to their writing problems.   We know that the more comfortable students become using their handbook, the more confident and successful they will become as college writers. If you’re using A Writer’s Reference, you’ll find these first-week activities a great way to help your students become confident college writers. ... View more