At Stanford, May has always been my second favorite month of the year. First is always September, when fall term opens and we welcome a new class of students: nothing can match the excitement and anticipation I feel then. But May comes very close because that is the month we celebrate writing, with awards presented to first-year writing students, second-year writing students, and students in writing in the majors courses. Over the decades, I have been consistently elated by the depth of research, the quality of thought, and the unique voices that these awards honor. Traditionally, these awards—like similar ones all over the country—were presented at receptions on campus, with friends and family and instructors there to congratulate and celebrate the writers. But then came the pandemic, the shutdown of the entire area, and the shift online. Like teachers everywhere, the Program in Writing and Rhetoric instructors at Stanford, under the always brilliant leadership of Adam Banks, Marvin Diogenes, and Christine Alfano, worked ceaselessly to adapt to the new learning and teaching environment and to meet students—and student needs—wherever they were. And like students everywhere, our students worked to meet the challenges of online writing seminars, learning to work together in online teams, to deal with the glitches and intricacies of Zoom and other virtual meeting spaces, and to try to stay connected, to build and maintain a virtual classroom ethos. It hasn’t always been pretty: I’ve talked with teachers across the country who were exhausted, frustrated, and stretched beyond the limit, and more than once I’ve wondered whether I shouldn’t be thankful to be retired (I taught a small online grad class in summer 2020 but nothing more). Yet here we are, over a year after the lockdown and shift, and I’m wondering how best to recognize and celebrate the student research and writing and speaking that occurred during this pandemic, online year. Thinking through this issue led our writing program to make this announcement: Since Spring 2020, all PWR 2 courses have been taught online in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Typically, Lunsford award [the award for second-year writing students] honorees would present in front of a live audience and two winners would be selected. Giving and recording an oral presentation in an online environment provides both new challenges but also new possibilities and we saw a range of creative and powerful responses to oral presentation research. We've created a gallery of Spring/Summer 2020 honorees, Fall 2020 honorees, and Winter 2021 honorees, featuring the exemplary work that students produced in their fully online environments. So this year, the program decided to honor every student nominated by an instructor—and to create a gallery of the work of these students for all to enjoy. I’ve been dipping into these galleries for the past week and I have been impressed, over and over again, by both the research these students have conducted during this very strange and very trying year and their presentation of that research. So once again, May is bringing me great happiness in the form of these remarkable presentations. Please dip in too! I’ll be taking a summer break from blog postings as I anticipate a new fall term and some form of returning to campus. I will be catching up on reading, doing some writing and research, and working in my community organic garden. And I will be thinking of teachers of writing everywhere, and of our students, wishing for a healthy, productive, and restorative summer for all. Image Credit: "MacBook Minimal Setup" by MattsMacintosh, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

[For Part 1 of “Beyond Standardized English: A Personal Journey,” click here.] I began trying to put what I had been learning in the 70s and 80s into practice, and in 1993, I added a chapter on “Language Variety” to the first textbook I ever wrote, The St. Martin’s Handbook. This chapter attempted to embody the principles of Students’ Right to Their Own Language and to recognize and value the legitimacy of ALL languages and dialects. As far as I know, this was the first composition handbook to take such a position, however timid and naive, and it is one I have tried to build on and refine and expand as I have written other textbooks. And I kept trying to learn. One way was through developing a course I taught for years at Stanford and at the Bread Loaf School of English called “The Language Wars.” This course began with the struggle over vernacular literacies in many countries; then moved to the obsessive insistence of early U.S. “settlers” that the native population learn English, no matter what; through the withholding of literacy from indigenous people and African Americans; through the intricacies of “the Ebonics debate;” and to the powerful work of writers of color who were moving beyond—way, way beyond—“standardized” English. Teaching that course was about the most fun I could imagine, especially because, unlike me, my students almost always “got it” immediately and went on to produce brilliant writing that pushed beyond all manner of “standardized” boundaries. This steep learning curve was, for me, often a painful and humbling journey, one that led me to fully recognize the roles that literacy in general and writing in particular have played in regulating and oppressing many—and to analyze or try to analyze my own motives and complicities. It led me to study and appreciate as many Englishes as I possibly could along with what Peter Elbow calls “vernacular eloquence” and what Carmen Kynard called “vernacular insurrections,” and to approach the teaching of writing and writing development—always—as a learner. It has also led me back to a renewed appreciation of basic rhetorical principles and particularly to the notion that rhetoric cannot operate when choice is not present. That means that as teachers we must always begin with writers’ choices, with what they want their writing to do, to whom they wish to speak, and why they are writing in the first place. This sense of writing as an act, as a doing, as a making—rather than the mere noting down of thought—is powerful for teachers and students alike. I watched this sense of writing as doing and making grow in the students I followed in the five-year Stanford Study of Writing, as they moved from viewing writing as a perfunctory way to get a grade to viewing writing and especially good writing as “making something good happen in the world.” This same sense of writing as doing is emerging in The Wayfinding Project of Jonathan Alexander, Karen Lunsford, and Carl Whithaus, who reported this finding during the 2021 CCCC meeting. What I find encouraging about such findings in general, but especially about how teachers of writing can capitalize on them, is that NOW—thanks to persistent and courageous scholars and teachers of color—the tools and strategies students have at their disposal in pursuing writing as doing and making are so much more diverse, more varied, and more powerful in this time of “vernacular eloquence” and “vernacular insurrections.” As Elaine Richardson, Adam Banks, Keith Gilyard, Gwendolyn D. Pough, Vershawn Ashanti Young, Aja Y. Martinez, Damián Baca, Jaime Armin Mejía, John R. Rickford, Christina Devereaux Ramírez, Khirsten L. Scott, Lou Maraj, and scores of other teachers and scholars of color are demonstrating every single day, these strategies—from the deployment of spoken soul to autoethnography, hashtagging, signifying, rhetorical reclamations, narrative framing, and dozens of others—are being used brilliantly by student writers today. It’s more than high time, then, for white teachers like me not simply to recognize varieties of English as valid and valuable, not just to honor students’ rights to their own languages, not just to teach about these strategies—I’ve been trying to do that for decades—but to invite students to put these concepts into practice, to use strategies characteristic of their own languages and dialects in their own writing-as-doing, all within a rhetorical framework that encompasses their particular purposes for writing, their particular aims and goals for reaching their particular audiences. And it means a lot more learning—in fact, continuous and ongoing learning—as I investigate rhetorical strategies across a wide range of vernacular literacies, and as I engage students in similar investigations. Most of all, it means continuing to ask all students to join me in investigating the history of “standardized” languages, recognizing the way such regulation has served the forces of systematic racism and much more, and exploring ways to resist such regulation while using all the available means vernacular literacies provide for speaking truths, for connecting with audiences, for moving forward toward more just and more inclusive ways of communicating with one another. As I’ve said, for me, this has been a steep and often daunting uphill journey, one that is still challenging me to examine my own assumptions and biases, my own blind spots, and my own limited and limiting abilities. But it is also one I continue to embrace with humility—and with hope. Image Credit: "Modern Languages..." by LeafLanguages, used under a CC0 1.0 license ... View more

Sonia Maasik, my wife and co-author through 10 editions of Signs of Life in the U.S.A. and three editions of California Dreams and Realities, passed away at 12:50 p.m. on May 10, 2021. I was by her side at the end, as well as during an extraordinary two or three hours the night before when she summoned the very last of her strength to break through the increasing drip of pain killers and the coming darkness she knew only too well was approaching, to utter words that those of us who were there now realize she must have been preparing for some time, gathering and hoarding her dwindling strength and waiting for just the right moment to say them. Those words, in all truth, were simply and entirely words of love, prefaced by explicit declarations that these were her last words. She so wanted us to understand this. She was so triumphant when she saw that we did understand. She was so brave. More than this on such a public medium as the World Wide Web would be out of place. But I want to note, once again, that the creation of Signs of Life in the U.S.A. was entirely Sonia's idea. I thought that it was a very good idea from the start, but it bears pointing out that it was Sonia's. The books that have descended from Sonia's brainstorm over twenty-five years ago will be a part of her legacy; the other will be the love that she felt for, and inspired in, those who knew and worked with her: at UCLA, at Bedford/St. Martin's, and in our home. ... View more

I grew up in the hills of eastern Tennessee, speaking an Appalachian dialect—like everyone else I knew. I expect I spoke mostly so-called “correct” English, but with vocabulary, syntax, and pronunciation characteristic of my home place. No problem—I was like everyone else in my community. Plus I had the significant privilege of being white. So far, so good. But years later, when I left my home region and got to graduate school, I was taken up short when a person I’d been in two classes with came to me to say he “needed to apologize”: “I haven’t been paying attention to what you have to say in class—I didn’t think you were very smart. It’s your accent, you know: country.” That would have been in 1972, and it coincided with my growing interest in rhetoric and composition and my commitment to a field I thought might have a chance of bringing pressure to bear on the exclusionary practices of colleges and universities that had long denied or restricted access to many, sometimes because of the way they talked or wrote, but all too often because of their race and/or class. I was in the CCCC business meeting in 1974 to argue in favor of the Students’ Right to Their Own Language, a statement that taught me as much as (or more than) anything I had learned in grad school to date. It also helped me conceive and develop Ohio State’s Basic Writing Workshop—which focused on the strengths students brought with them rather than on their “deficits”—and the dissertation study that grew out of research I did on that program. In 1977, in my first post-PhD job, I read Geneva Smitherman’s Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America and Mina P. Shaughnessy’s Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing—two books that (amazingly enough) appeared within months of one another and that were absolutely transformational for me as for so many others. I wrote articles advocating for student writers and for access to higher education for all, even as I struggled in my own classes to balance a recognition and respect for all students’ languages and dialects with access to what I thought of as “the language of power”—standardized English. At the time, I was more than anything an advocate for writing and for the empowerment I somewhat naively thought writing could bring to my students, for how writing could help them get their voices and messages out there. That meant, however, that I was also an apologist for writing: in that regard, I still had so much to learn. The research I carried out in the 1980s with Lisa Ede and with Bob Connors—on collaboration and on error in student writing—helped me begin to see how constructed our notion of “correctness” is and how very arbitrary. I found that what counted as an “error” in one English-speaking country was not considered so in another, and that what constituted “correctness” shifted and changed over time. Duh. I began to study the history of writing and to develop a course on that subject that I taught for years, one that began with the struggle over and rise of vernacular literacies in many countries (for example, England [Chaucer] and Italy [Dante]). And I began writing textbooks, hoping to put what I was learning about writing into a form that could be useful to students. My first text, The St. Martin’s Handbook, presented “error” and “correctness” as shifting concepts—but as ones that could be very useful to students. Along with Bob Connors, I identified the twenty most common “errors” in first year student writing and showed that these patterns that bothered teachers so much could be eliminated fairly easily—in order to concentrate on more important aspects of writing. I saw these patterns as shifting and mutable and rejected any kind of rule-governed approach to grammar. But I still taught standardized English as an entry point, as a tool to be used to “advance.” In many ways, I was still the Appalachian student who wanted to “fit in,” but I also felt inclined to resist: an uneasy balancing act I was certainly not very good at. At the same time, I was beginning to have the privilege of working with grad students or color who were doing exemplary ethnographic work with undergrad students of color—students who were using brilliant rhetorical strategies that their white teachers didn’t even recognize, much less value. I was hearing talks by Arnetha Ball and John Baugh (at the 1988 CCCC meeting, for example) about rhetorical strategies and patterns characteristic of African American English. I was reading everything Geneva Smitherman wrote and learning from so many other scholars of color. I was reading Helen Fox and learning about the elegance and power of “ESL writing.” And I was reading Elspeth Stuckey’s furious and groundbreaking The Violence of Literacy. Thanks to the work of these and other scholars, I was finally beginning to put two and two together, to take a long, hard look at my assumptions and to understand, fully understand, that while writing and writing pedagogies could at times be empowering and liberating, they also could and did constrain, suppress, and silence many of the students I was most interested in and most wanted to teach—that my attempt to find a middle ground, a “both-and” approach to language and language variety was at least partly self-delusional. Twenty years of thinking and listening and researching is a long time to “get it,” which is just one more testament to how deeply entrenched the idea of standardized English was as a means of access and empowerment. I was a slow learner, for sure. But I was learning.   To be continued… Image Credit: "Appalachia" by spablab, used under a CC BY-ND 2.0 license ... View more

Riverside Church in New York City: April 2010 (Photo by Susan Bernstein)   For the past few years, students in my first-year writing classes have shared with me that most of their previous school-based writing was objective. By objective, students meant that their supporting evidence was based on information from several sources. Additionally, to emphasize objectivity, students did not include their own opinions and did not use the first person singular pronoun “I.” Our second writing project is an opinion/analysis essay that involves an evidence-based close reading of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1967 speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” For the students, this assignment resulted in cognitive dissonance. Writing their own opinions contradicted students’ internalized rules for “good” writing. The students were familiar with analysis from studying literature. They asked me how they could use analysis to form their own opinions. Before responding to this question, I took a breath. There were various potential responses to this question. Literary analysis is not objective. As writers, we make choices about analysis based on opinions and biases, conscious or not. Analysis allows writers to discover what they believe and why they believe it. As creators and consumers of social media, students already work with opinion-based analysis, especially in the current contexts of the pandemic, the Movement for Black Lives and #StopAAPIHate. In the students’ lifetimes, these contexts might well be studied as history. The events in the last year of Dr. King’s life, including his decision to break the silence with “Beyond Vietnam,” were the backdrop of my childhood. For me, the historical context of the speech is ever-present even as, for most of my students,  those events are long past and often unfamiliar. Familiarity with that context can be a useful tool for analysis. With this in mind, I tweaked the assignment by adding historical context for “Beyond Vietnam.” We watched three videos. The first video, “The Promised Land 1967-1968,” from the Eyes on the Prize series, covered the last year of Dr. King’s life and included clips of Dr. King’s speech on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City.  The second video was intended for primary school children and offered a brief biography of Dr. King’s life. It focused on Dr. King’s childhood and the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Absent were the difficult details from “The Promised Land,” which included Dr. King’s evolving perspective on the need to speak publicly against the Vietnam War, and his vilification by the media.  These two videos were meant to stand in contradiction to each other, and show how “facts” of Dr. King’s life and work could be revealed or withheld based on the intended audience and the opinions of the contented creators. The third video showcased clips from a mural based on “Beyond Vietnam.” In the spring of 2008, I assigned first-year students an in-class multimedia project, and the students created the mural from crayons, blank computer paper, and tape. Using multimedia, students were invited to question the relevance of Dr. King’s work in the twenty-first century. In spring 2008, I suggested to my spring 2021 classes, students were concerned about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with the 2008 presidential primaries. This video was meant to show an affective response to “Beyond Vietnam” that appealed to pathos, and also to ethos and logos. The text and context of “Beyond Vietnam” mattered in 1967 and still mattered to students in 2008. Dr. King’s struggle to break the silence on the global intersections racial injustice, poverty, and war was still relevant forty-one years later. In 2021, students connected to “Beyond Vietnam” through similar intersections. On Zoom, we analyzed  a passage in which Dr. King urges his audience to join him in struggle, using the personal plural pronoun  “we” for emphasis:  Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. ...Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement, and pray that our inner being may be sensitive to its guidance. For we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.   Dr. King’s struggle feels transcendent and still relevant to everyday lives. How do we break the silence in a world that often responds with hostility? How do we resist old rules and learn new practices? And how do we do this “with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision”? The students’ writing is still in process. Keywords: current events, online education, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,  multimedia, teaching in a pandemic,  rhetorical knowledge, grammar and style, online learning, writing process   ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn, a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. 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 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 Overview As our field shifts and changes, we ask students to write for multiple purposes, audiences, and contexts. Multimodal composition has clearly moved out of exclusively academic settings into a variety of writing and reading opportunities. As we prepare students to write in our world today, we can help them realize the ways that content creation is part of the work of the writing classroom. Lisa Dush reminds us in her 2015 article “When Writing Becomes Content” that the field of writing studies is changing and encourages us to bring this relevancy to our classes through the content metaphor and reconsider the ways we discuss and teach writing. She says, “The real danger is in ignoring content: if content has indeed changed the rhetorical game, composers who ignore it risk failing in their rhetorical attempts, and a field that ignores it risks marginalization and missed opportunities for growth.” (193) As writing teachers, we have embraced this challenge and students now compose blogs, videos, tweets, and other kinds of content that is shared and repurposed across the web and into many interactive formats. I include a range of content variations in my classes and always focus on acts of composition within a rhetorical framework. In my previous posts, I have shared examples of longform assignments that are similar to academic texts, except that students now learn to write non-linear, interactive texts that include links, exploratory paths, and multimodal components. Recently, I have been thinking about the value of including low-stakes, micro content assignments. The term micro content was first credited to Jakob Nielson (2017) who defined it as “a small group of words which can be skimmed by the reader to understand the wider message of the article.” It can take the form of small fragments, phrases, or descriptions that can be added to longer pieces, provide information, or create audience engagement. He points out that micro content generally stands on its own without context and provides a way to skim texts for quick meaning. We have expanded this definition to include a variety of “bite-sized” or “digestible” chunks of information that now include multimedia, mini-content such as photographs, mini-videos, memes, tweets, graphics, gifs, lists, Instagram posts, TikToks, and other small form content. Although this micro content stands on its own, it also engages readers to further explore ideas as they click through and go deeper into long-form or other related content. In other words, these content artifacts work cooperatively to create content packages in which micro content fits together to contribute to larger pictures, ideas, or articles. Micro content is particularly important since our attention span is decreasing and we now get much of our information and entertainment through our phones and consume it in “small bites.”   Resources The St. Martin’s Handbook – Ch. 24, Communicating in Other Media The Everyday Writer (also available with Exercises) – Ch. 20, Communicating in Other Media EasyWriter (also available with Exercises) – Ch. 9, Writing in a Variety of Disciplines and Genres   Steps to the Assignment As writing teachers, we already scaffold our assignments and integrate low-stakes writing into our courses at all phases of the writing processes. I combine these two ideas and design low-stakes micro content assignments either as quick, turnaround assignments; as parts of scaffolded, larger assignments; or as stand-alone micro content activities. Background: I find it beneficial to help students define the concepts and terms (content, micro content, long-form content). I present concepts, definitions, and examples of micro content. I often have them read Dush’s article “When Writing Becomes Content” and other definitional articles that explore the nature of content and the shifting roles of writers. Have students search the web to identify and analyze different types of micro content and create a collaborative class list to show the range of artifacts and their variations. You can also have them post links with short descriptions to a discussion post. Share with the rest of the class in a full class discussion. Next, have students choose a particular type of micro content and write a reflective analysis in which they compare and cite examples and discuss the genre conventions of their choice (length, style, links, images, etc.). Challenge students to compose micro content and scaffold these low-stakes assignments into your existing course assignments. Here is a quick list of some of these assignments I have tried in my own courses. Many of these are described in some of my earlier posts: Quick image assignments that combine text and image such as a digital, visual series or short slideshows Longform content rewritten as micro content Memes Mini-videos Researching trending topics and creating micro content based on topics Gifs and emojis Curation on a particular theme or subject area—quotes, articles, sharing of other content #hashtags Infographics Polls or questions—research and survey data Pinned maps Podcasts An optional extension of this work is to have students incorporate their micro content into another long-form artifact created in the class. For example, they might include an infographic to help visualize data in a research article or essay, or embed a short video in a blog post.   Reflections on the Activity Longform content and detailed academic texts will always have a place in our writing classes and in other world contexts. Students will still engage in a range of rhetorical and research practices as they shape their ideas. However, including low-stakes micro content assignments encourages them to reframe the ways they understand their roles as writers who write for many rhetorical contexts. The teaching of micro content communicates to students the ways we can pull together multiple content artifacts to create engaging multimodal writing.   Works Cited Lisa, Dush. “When Writing Becomes Content.” NCTE, 2015, library.ncte.org/journals/CCC/issues/v67-2/27641. Loranger, Hoa, and Jakob Nielson. “Microcontent: How to Write Headlines, Page Titles, and Subject Lines.” Nielsen Norman Group, 2017, www.nngroup.com/articles/microcontent-how-to-write-headlines-page-titles-and-subject-lines/.   Image Credit: “Digital Literacy Clipart 1560126” from WebStockReview, used under a CC BY 3.0 license; “Water Drops” from PxHere, used under a CC0 license ... View more

Well, of course, The Social Dilemma is the title of the much-watched and much-reviewed documentary film by Jeff Orlowski. It includes a series of hair-raising interviews with many of the people who brought us social media in the first place but have now had second, and third, thoughts about its dangers—so much so that many of them make sure that their children are NOT users of social media. I have a grandniece whose access to screens and social media has not been curtailed, and watching this film practically set my hair on fire. I could relate many of the stories told in it to what I’ve seen in my wonderful grandniece’s experience and behavior. I came away shaken. And so, as we teachers do, I watched the film again and did some reading of reviews, including a neutral one in the New York Times, two critical ones in The Verge and Nir and Far, and several largely positive ones, including a review in Variety. I also went back to re-read Jaron Lanier’s page-turner of a book, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Lanier is featured in The Social Dilemma and I’ve followed his work for many years, finding him reasonable and fairly even handed. Indeed, he concludes his Ten Arguments by saying he knows it is asking a lot to delete all social media and so he asks simply that readers take a pause—a week, maybe a month—and then assess how they feel free of the constant invitations to click, click, click—and to be manipulated. So I’ve often recommended Lanier’s book to my students, asking them just to hear him out and them to consider taking a break from all social media. Some have taken up the challenge, but a lot have not. So I’m left this week not with answers but with questions. Just what is the “dilemma” that social media pose to us and especially our students? How clearly and persuasively is it delineated in Orlowski’s film, or how much is the argument there itself exaggerated in an attempt to manipulate us? And most important, what is our responsibility, our obligation, to our students in continuing to bring these issues to them, to insist that we try working through them together? For my part, I have not deleted my social media accounts yet—but I rarely use them beyond sharing my blog posts. I would very much like to hear your take on the “social dilemma” of our times. Image Credit: "Social Media" by magicatwork, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned" video, Stuart Selber, one of the authors of Technical Communication, reflects on the challenges of being present and available for students in online environments, and creating channels for interacting with and providing feedback to students. ... 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

In today's "What We've Learned" video, David Starkey (@davidstarkey), author of upcoming first edition Hello Writer, reflects on teaching in small, 2-3 minute chunks and the necessity of focusing on the most important information to communicate to students, as well as the surprising opportunities offered by the pandemic for reflection, mindfulness, and equity mindsets. ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned" video, Quentin Miller, author of The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature and Literature to Go, reflects on taking advantage of the opportunities presented by technology to broaden the types of assignment and engagement available to students.  ... View more

Gina Atkins Gina Atkins (recommended by Casie Fedukovich) is pursuing her MA in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. She expects to finish in May 2021. She teaches English 101: Academic Writing and Research and serves on the First-Year Writing Program Council as the MA Representative. She is also CRLA III certified. Her research interests relate to developing antiracist pedagogy, antiracist praxis, accessibility in the writing classroom, and linguistic justice. Eric D. Brown Eric D. Brown (recommended by Kyle Jensen) is pursuing his PhD in Arizona State University’s Writing, Rhetorics and Literacies PhD program, where he studies writing technologies, writing pedagogy, and writing program administration. He has taught First-Year Composition, Persuasive Writing and Public Issues, Writing for the Professions, and Business Writing. Eric is also Assistant Director (AD) of Writing Programs, where he aids the director in growing the scope of Writing Programs and creating professional development for faculty. As Assistant Director, he also co-runs the National Day on Writing, ASU’s annual Composition Conference, and is an editor of Writing Programs’ bi-annual newsletter, Writing Notes. Emily Gresbrink Emily Gresbrink (recommended by John Logie) is pursuing her PhD in Rhetoric, Scientific and Technical Communication at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. She expects to complete her degree in 2024. Emily currently teaches University Writing, housed in the First-Year Writing program. Her research interests encompass technical communication, the rhetoric of health and medicine, pandemics, rhetorical analysis, archives, bioethics, and mentoring. She also serves on the University of Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts Assembly as a Graduate Student Representative, co-chairs the graduate student mentoring subcommittee for the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication (CPTSC), and works with the mentoring committee for the Online Writing Centers Association (OWCA). Brendan Hawkins Brendan Hawkins (recommended by Elias Dominguez Barajas) is pursuing his PhD in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition at Florida State University. His research, teaching, and faculty development interests and experiences span rhetorical genre studies, histories of rhetoric, online writing instruction, and general education composition classes. He serves as a College Composition Program assistant director where his primary responsibility is mentorship for first-year teachers. Hyoung Min Lee Hyoung Min Lee (recommended by Dr. Claire Carly-Miles) is pursuing her PhD in English at Texas A&M University. She teaches Writing About Literature as a graduate teaching assistant. She has also taught Rhetoric and Composition and worked as a grader for Technical and Business Writing. She is interested in teaching 20th- and 21st-century American literature with a focus on diversity and social justice. Her research interests include theories of race and biopolitics and 20th- and 21st-century American literature, especially African American literature. Courtney A. Mauck Courtney A. Mauck (recommended by Rachael Ryerson) is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at Ohio University. She expects to finish her degree in Spring 2022. At OU, she serves as Assistant Director of Composition and primarily teaches first-year writing courses. She also teaches junior composition courses themed around feminist game studies and has co-taught two graduate courses, “Teaching College English” and “Learning Transfer.” Additionally, she has received her certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies. Her research interests include digital rhetorics, multimodal composition, social media, game studies, learning transfer, and first-year writing pedagogy. Michael A. Reyes Michael A. Reyes is pursuing his MA in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition at Cal State LA. He teaches in the First-Year Writing program and leads creative writing workshops in LA public schools and organizations. His research interests are critical affect theory, decolonial rhetorics and pedagogy, contemporary poetry and poetics, creative writing pedagogy, and anti-racist and formative assessments. Jacob Richter Jacob Richter (recommended by Megan Eatman) is the Assistant Director of First Year Composition and a PhD candidate in the Rhetorics, Communication and Information Design (RCID) program at Clemson University. Jacob’s research has appeared in Computers & Composition, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Prompt: A Journal of Academic Writing Assignments, and Textshop Experiments. He teaches First-Year Composition, technical communication, and business communication courses, and is the Assistant Communications Editor for Xchanges. Jacob’s research examines rhetorical theory, composition pedagogy, and writing in digitally networked environments. Rhiannon Scharnhorst Rhiannon Scharnhorst (recommended by Samantha NeCamp) is pursuing her hybrid PhD in Writing Studies and Victorian Literature at the University of Cincinnati, where she expects to defend her dissertation Willful Objects and Feminist Writing Practices in May 2022. She teaches a variety of courses in writing, from first-year composition to advanced topics classes, including Writing with Style and Food in Literature. She has also served as the Assistant to the Composition Program, writing and designing the department's handbook, overseeing graduate student education, and hosting the annual graduate conference. Her research draws on feminist rhetorics to make sense of objects in writing studies, including typewriters, cookbooks, and other tools. She also writes about materiality, embodiment and writing practices of nineteenth-century women writers in Great Britain.   Leah Washburn   Leah Washburn (recommended by Wallace Cleaves) is pursuing her PhD in English Literature at The University of California, Riverside and hopes to graduate in Spring 2023. She graduated from University of Central Florida in 2018 with an MFA in Creative Writing, where she taught Intro to Creative Writing. She also worked two years on The Florida Review, coordinating undergraduate interns and providing administrative support. During her undergraduate years, she worked as a writing fellow at Rhodes College for three years. Her research interests include digital media, ludology, narratology, contemporary speculative fiction, and postmodern fiction. ... View more

My students and I are slowly making our way through Absalom, Absalom! this semester, contending every class meeting with another blast of Faulkner’s tidal waves of prose. Three weeks and three chapters in, we took a break to write together about word choice. The novel challenges even those with the most robust vocabularies and I’ve used this challenge to introduce the students to the value of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). In doing so, I don’t mean to have my students see the OED as the final word on any given word’s meaning; rather, I’ve been at pains to help them see that the meaning of any given word evolves over time and that we can track the changes in meaning by attending to the context within which a given word is used. So, for our week of writing about Faulkner’s language in the first three chapters of Absalom, Absalom!, the students are tasked with producing what I call an “interpretive footnote.” Any of us can type an unfamiliar word into Google and pull up the word’s definition; and anyone in the class can go the extra step and do the same in the OED. That’s a start, but it doesn’t get us any closer to understanding whether the word is being used in a new or divergent way in the context of Faulkner’s chronicle of the South in its time of “undefeat” post-Civil War. Accordingly, the students are to choose a word or phrase that seems important and then provide an interpretation of that word or phrase in context. To help get the students started, I do the assignment myself and post the response along with the assignment. And then, during the week while we are writing together, when I’m not conferring in a breakout room with individual students seeking on-the-spot guidance, I work on a second entry for our collective lexicon. (I’ve done with using websites I administer; this time I used “Piazza,” a wiki app in the Canvas LMS.) When the students are satisfied with their responses, they share what they’ve written with the rest of the class and everyone reads along. Every time I do this assignment (and this is the first time I’ve ever done it with a work of fiction!) I’m amazed at the results. Freed of the idea that the footnote is for facts or for documenting erudition or for stockpiling support, the students use their time to explore nuance and ambiguity; they write about possible meanings and shades of gray. And, with no word limit provided, they keep writing, instead of preemptively tying things off because some outside indicator has signaled that the assignment is “done.” The range of words covered goes from the familiar (“ogre,” “swagger”) to the less certain (“doubtless,” “sardonic”) to the unfamiliar (“chatelaine,” “grim virago fury”). I wish I could share the responses here, but they’re still current students. (We do include examples of student responses in Habits of the Creative Mind from when I was using Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts in my slow reading class.) I can share a slimmed down version of one of my modelled responses, though, . You can show them how to be curious on the page and that, in turn, gives them permission to engage their own imaginative powers as they write.     The Stage Manager: "Yes, he had corrupted Ellen to more than renegadery, though, like her, unaware that his flowering was a forced blooming too and that while he was still playing the scene to the audience behind him fate, destiny, retribution, irony--the stage manager, call him what you will--was already striking the set and dragging on the synthetic and spurious shadows and shape of the next one" (57). As you know, I'm interested in thinking how the participants in Absalom, Absalom! make sense of what is happening to them and why the South lost the war. In my last entry (cf. "vouchsafed instinct"), I looked at how Miss Rosa's way of talking about herself places her at the mercy of the Old Testament God--a god of vengeance and punishment. She also uses words that are more readily associated with Greek tragedy: she speaks of her relatives having committed a "crime" (14) that has left her "family cursed;" and, too, she sees herself and others see her as Cassandra-like. In the passage above, the speaker is Mr. Compson and the topic is Sutpen's influence on Ellen. Compson refers back to his earlier claim that the aunt "would have" described the years after Sutpen left for the war as Ellen's period of "renegadery." In that earlier passage, he elaborates on the form that this "betrayal" took: Ellen comes to take "pride" in her life at Sutpen's Hundred and her marriage to Sutpen. She has cast off the aunt's influence and has "bloomed" into having a bearing that is "a little regal." (This is when she starts going to town with Judith and having all the shopkeepers bring out their wares.) Compson continues that Ellen’s renegadery allows her to disavow reality itself and to see herself as "chatelaine to the largest, wife to the wealthiest, mother of the most fortunate" (all quotes in this paragraph from p. 54). THREE pages after these observations, Compson returns to Ellen's renegadery, as the flourishing conclusion to how fully and completely Sutpen has corrupted her. First he tells Quentin that, after ten years of marriage, Sutpen now “acted his role too--a role of arrogant ease and leisure . . . " (57). Then Compson's analogy catches up with him: if Sutpen and Ellen are acting their parts, who's in charge? Sutpen thinks his "flowering" is of his own volition and so misses that what has occurred is a "forced blooming" set in motion by . . . ? None of the options Compson provides can be construed as being divine or sacred. Indeed, none of the nouns rise to the level of requiring capitalization: "fate, destiny, retribution, irony--the stage manager, call him what you will." The first two options ("fate" and "destiny") deprive Sutpen of free will. There's a reason for what happens to Sutpen but invoking "fate" or "destiny" places that reason beyond human perception or interference. The second two choices ("retribution" and "irony") also deprive Sutpen of free will, but they place Sutpen in a context where whatever happens to him can be cast either as punishment doled out by the [lower case u]niverse or as the [lower case u]niverse getting a kick out of crushing reversals in human fortunes. It is in this context that Mr. Compson adds an additional possible name for the cause of what lies ahead for Sutpen: the stage manager. As soon as Mr. Compson invokes this evanescent figure, he makes clear that nothing significant hangs on which term one prefers: "call him what you will," he says. What matters is that Sutpen thinks he is charge of his life, as he settles into the comforts of his enormous estate, his outsized cotton profits, his progeny, but "the stage manager" has already struck that set and is preparing the next one, which will also be composed of "synthetic and spurious shadows." All of which drives me to note that Miss Rosa is the one to invoke God in the opening of the novel; Mr. Compson, covering much of the same ground and covering it more exhaustively, doesn't look to God or a god to explain why the South lost the war. He gives us, instead, the stage manager, who is a puny figure indeed.       ... View more

In Everything’s an Argument (soon to be in its 9th edition!), John Ruszkiewicz and I devote an entire chapter to defining terms and arguing that definitions matter, legally, socially, personally—and providing lots of examples to back up that claim, from the way the word “marriage” is defined in the now infamous Defense of Marriage Act to how "racism” is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary (a definition the dictionary revised after recent college grad Kennedy Mitchum wrote to them pointing out the inadequacy of their current definition). And we point out how definitions can shape or control or oppress us personally, as when a label (“developmentally disabled,” for example) puts us in a category that limits our potential. During the second Trump impeachment trial, I paid close attention to the words and phrases the two sides used most often, remembering an analysis from the first impeachment of the former president that compared the frequency of words and phrases used by the two sides and found that they seldom overlapped. I’m hoping one of the news organizations will undertake similar research for this second impeachment. But in the meantime, this event provides a fine opportunity for our students to investigate, explore, and perhaps challenge frequently used words and their definitions. Here are just a few we might start with: impeach/impeachment oath of office managers desecration mob incite/inciting insurrection fight/fight like hell patriot traitor acquit/acquittal convict/convicted These are words I heard over and over, with numbing regularity, as I listened to speeches and statements and watched video clips. But how were these words being defined by those who used them? How should they be defined? Where do these words come from—what’s their history? (I learned for the first time, for example, why the representatives bringing the charge of impeachment from the House are called “managers.”) So perhaps we can give students a chance to process some of what has happened during the impeachment trial through the analysis of terms. Ask them to work in pairs or small groups to research the history and derivation of a term on the list above—or choose another one they heard mentioned often—and then try to deduce how it is being defined by those using it during the trial. Then ask them to offer a definition of their own, with their reasoning fully explained. I think doing so may lead to some good critical thinking and also to an engaging class discussion based on substantive reasoning rather than often uninformed opinions. And on a completely separate note, the big news here in my little part of the world is that I got my second vaccination on February 14: Happy Valentine’s Day! Image Credit: "Dictionary" by greeblie, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

  Over the last few years, I’ve written and spoken often about the power of stories, about why we “need” stories, and about how the stories we create can lead to narrative justice. In short, the stories we tell shape realities, and so stories that continually represent a group of people in negative ways create injustice for the people in that group. It’s our obligation to resist and replace such stories. (This is the major point of a talk I gave at the 50th anniversary of the RSA, which you can read here.) As I was doing research on stories and storytelling, I was thinking a lot about the speaker, the teller of the stories, and about how to create just stories. But it takes (at least) two for stories to work, and so lately I’ve been thinking about the hearers of stories, the listeners, and about listening in general. Krista Ratcliffe has been teaching us about the importance of listening for over twenty years now, and her lessons have never been more germane than they are today in an age of echo chambers and of stories that can reach millions in seconds and reiterate them endlessly. So it was with particular interest that I read about the work of Professor Uri Hasson and his colleagues at Princeton who have been studying stories and the connection between speakers and listeners. During experiments using brain scans, these researchers noted that in certain narrative circumstances the sound waves of a story “couple” the brain responses of the speaker and the listener. As TED Conferences puts it, “a great storyteller literally causes the neurons of an audience to closely sync with the storyteller’s brain.” That’s an oversimplification, of course, but it gets at Hasson’s finding that our brains have evolved to develop a “neural protocol that allows us to use such brain coupling to share information.” In a series of fascinating experiments, Hasson and his colleagues had speakers narrate text to listeners in various ways: read backwards or out of order, and so on. While these experiments led to some surface-level coupling, only the story, its narrative elements intact, led to coupling deep inside the brain. Furthermore, Hasson found that “the better the listener’s understanding of the speaker’s story, the stronger the similarity” between the two brains. In rhetorical or compositional terms, Hasson’s findings demonstrate that effective, meaningful communication depends on establishing common ground. The current climate of distrust and division, of viral misinformation repeated endlessly, makes finding common ground increasingly difficult if not impossible. When listeners hear the same thing over and over again, day in and day out, they will have trouble “synching” with anyone telling a different story. The message for us as teachers of writing seems clear: we must work harder than ever to engage students in listening to and understanding stories and perspectives they are not familiar with or that differ significantly from their own. When novelist Richard Powers points out that the only thing in the world that can change a person’s mind is “a good story,” he now has neuroscientific evidence to back him up! Stay tuned for more on listening in the coming weeks. Image Credit: "Orange and Blue Brain Anatomy Hoop Art. Hand Embroidered." by Hey Paul Studios, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more