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

As I write this, my final blog of the season, I find myself thinking of that awful day in September 2001 when it appeared, briefly, that writing about popular culture at all was beside the point. Sonia and I were working on the fourth edition of Signs of Life in the U.S.A. at the time, and with pundits everywhere predicting that things were never going to be the same in America, we both wondered whether we should go through with it at a time when the World Trade Center was burning and the nation would soon be at war. However, it didn't take long to see that popular culture in America was not going to disappear into the ashes, but rather it was going to become more important than ever. After 9/11, Americans rallied around events such as the Concert for New York City, the World Series, and the Super Bowl. And so, we continued with our work. When the full force of the COVID-19 pandemic struck America in the late winter and early spring of 2020, we were already well into the copy editing stage of the 10th edition of Signs of Life, so there was never any question of going through with it. But now, over a year since the calamity broke, the question of just what American popular culture is going to look like going forward has emerged again. This time it appears that, unlike twenty years ago, some things really are going to change. For it is becoming ever clearer that, just as the shock of the Civil War accelerated historical developments that were probably inevitable anyway, the pandemic has jumpstarted trends that are transforming the way pop culture is both delivered and consumed in America, and it is likely that these changes will be permanent. To begin with the delivery side of the matter, the most dramatic change can be found in what is happening to the movie theater industry. Traditional movie theaters were already under siege by the emergence of new content providers like Netflix, but the forced closure of theaters all over the country has left the industry in tatters. Americans still watch movies, of course, but more and more it is becoming a private, digitally streamed experience. A sign of the effect that this is having on American audiences is the drastic decline in interest in such venerable institutions as the annual Oscar award ceremony. Feeling little connection with films that they have not seen—or if they have seen them, not in the publicly shared space of a movie theater—Americans appear to be losing a sense of connection not only with movies but with each other as well. And here is where the cultural significance lies. When America turned to popular culture for solace in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, it did so (largely) in a spirit of national unity, which is simply unthinkable today after twenty years of digital development that has splintered what was once regarded as a "common culture" into a myriad of niche markets. But more significantly, twenty years of political polarization has had an even more profound impact as Americans, ensconced in their highly partisan news-and-entertainment silos, are not only not consuming the same media products, they are not living in the same reality either. And so, when we eventually do emerge from the pandemic (just as the Civil War finally did come to a military end), not only will America have changed, but its popular culture will have as well—perhaps beyond recognition.   "Alone in a Movie Theater" by Studio Sarah Lou is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

While not all aspects of the shift to online and hybrid instruction have been smooth—and many will be jettisoned or revamped significantly in future semesters—I have found one unexpected boon in the process: new possibilities for asynchronous discussions.  I had taught composition online prior to the onset of the pandemic, but in 2020 I shifted my corequisite courses online as well—and in the fall, I was asked to teach both composition and corequisite as hybrids, so that I had half my class on Tuesdays and the other half on Thursdays. Thus, students could interact with some class members only in the online space, since they were never together in the classroom.  In the first online iteration of my corequisite/composition course (summer 2020), I converted one of my favorite in-class group activities involving quote and paraphrase to the discussion board in our LMS. The results were mediocre, at best. It was obvious students needed some coaching, not only on the logistics of posting, but also on strategies for reading and managing a conversation that is threaded—with multiple strands of thought unfolding in tandem.  The subsequent hybrid format in the fall allowed me to do some of that coaching, both via video and in class.  In the hybrid format, I also extended the length of discussions to at least two weeks, if not longer, inviting students to return to discussions multiple times, leading ultimately to a set of “reflect and review” questions after discussions closed: which posts challenged you to think differently? Why? Which posts generated the most responses? Why? These questions helped students situate discussions within rhetorical contexts, particularly when they connected our course discussions to more familiar types of online communication. But as part of the writing about writing focus in my first-year and corequisite pairing, I’ve found another discussion style that seems to engage students more than traditional prompts: the multimodal gallery. I’ve used two of these in my composition classes, both with success. The first gallery occurs as students are working on a researched profile of a discourse community, which is the second major project in the class. As students begin the process, they read definitions of a discourse community, either from John Swales or Dan Melzer. Using that theoretical information as background, they research a discourse community and profile its shared goals, means of communication, language choices, common genres, and ways of recognizing members.  For the gallery discussion in the online classroom space, students then create a multimodal piece to introduce their chosen discourse community and one aspect of its communicative practices to the rest of the class. The multimodal pieces are shared via the online discussion, and students respond to each other in two ways: first, they talk about the rhetorical choices made in the multimodal piece itself, indicating aspects that drew their attention and or seemed problematic for some reason. Then, they ask questions about the discourse community in relation to the class readings. In a later multimodal gallery, pairs of students are assigned a key term for rhetorical and lexical analysis—terms which students will be expected to use in the final paper for the course: claim, counterargument, concessions, ethos, logos, pathos, as well as some of the terms used by Ken Hyland to describe a writer’s stance or engagement strategies, including booster, hedge, aside, self-mention, and directive. Students find definitions from class readings, and they design a multimodal composition to define and illustrate the target term. Once again, students can respond initially to the composition itself, but they also build on the content: students practice illustrating these terms, composing their own paragraphs to show the terms at work, and identifying the strategies they used. (Later, I’d like to add a component in which students talk about how these concepts translate to multimodal compositions, but we haven’t done that yet). This discussion familiarizes students with the terms they will be using as the basis for their final assignment—in which they profile the rhetorical context of an argument about writing and analyze the structure and effectiveness of that argument. These discussions occur over two or three week spans, allowing students time to think, respond, read, and respond again. Critically, by the time the discussion has ended, students will have composed not only a multimodal piece, but an additional 500 to 800 words focused on the meaning-making possibilities of different texts. In short, I think these discussions would qualify as what Myhill and Newman call “high-quality classroom talk” about writing that supports students’ metalinguistic and writing development. How have you used asynchronous discussions to encourage writing development and talk about writing in your first-year composition classes? ... 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

    Today’s guest blogger is Tanya Rodrigue‌, an associate professor in English and coordinator of the Writing Intensive Curriculum Program at Salem State University in Massachusetts.   My last two blog posts, “Facilitating Online Peer Review” and “Various Methods for Conducting Peer Review,” provides instructors with a scaffolded approach for orchestrating online peer review as well as several different peer review methods and activities that can be employed in an online or face-to-face environment. While a pedagogical approach and directed activities are sure to create a productive environment, the only way students will find peer review productive is if they believe it is a valuable activity and will result in feedback that will help them revise their work. Students who believe in peer review as a worthwhile endeavor are more likely to give productive feedback to their peers as well as take up peer feedback for the purposes of revision. Yet how do we persuade our students that peer review is valuable? In this post, I offer several possibilities for doing so.   #1 Deconstruct the notion that peer review is only for “struggling writers.” Students often think any kind of revision feedback, whether it be in peer review or at the writing center or from an instructor, is an indication that they are not a “good” writer. Many think that if they were a “good writer,” they wouldn’t have any “mistakes” and thus not need to revise their work at all. Students need to be explicitly told that feedback is not synonymous with mistakes and is one of the strongest mechanisms in helping people grow as writers and thinkers.   #2 Share your experiences with peer review. Students don’t often recognize that their own professors engage in peer review on a regular basis, either giving or receiving feedback. Students would benefit from knowing the circumstances in which professors partake in peer review and the peer review processes. For example, a professor might discuss the process of journal manuscript submissions with students and show them real peer revision recommendation letters. They may talk students through the process of what they decided to take up and how they decided to revise based on particular suggestions. They might then discuss the differences between the original submission and the revised document.  An activity like this would help students immediately recognize that teachers and students share something in common: they are all writers in an academic setting who receive feedback in efforts to revise and strengthen their writing.   #3 Show students the value of feedback using student work. Students can see the true value of peer feedback in the classroom by looking at other students’ work. An instructor, for example, may ask students to read through a previous student’s draft, the feedback comments they received on the draft, and the revised version that took up some feedback suggestions. A strong revised piece of writing that used feedback effectively would show other students the instrumental role they and their peers could play in supporting one another in producing effective writing.   #4 Show students peer (in the broadest sense) review is ubiquitous. While students may buy in to peer review from learning about its function and value in an academic setting, they are more likely to be persuaded when they understand peer review in broad terms and that it happens in all shapes and forms in life outside the academy. A peer can be thought of as anyone who understands and is willing to read one’s work, and this act can occur in both personal and in public spaces. Students would benefit from specific examples of how professionals and everyday people provide each other with feedback for the purposes of revision. For example, a person on a marketing team might ask their boss for revision feedback on a PowerPoint presentation. A grandmother might ask her adult grandchild to give revision feedback on a letter to an insurance company. A musician might ask their band manager for feedback on a song. People read and give each other feedback in all different settings, inside and outside of school. The recognition of feedback in personal and public spaces normalizes and destigmatizes the practice of peer review and positions it as a common way in which people strengthen their writing.   The combination of fostering student buy-in and using a scaffolded approach to orchestrating peer review is sure to create an atmosphere in which students, their writing, their feedback, and their interaction with each other are important and are valued. ... View more

In an excellent February 2021 article in the Atlantic entitled “5 Pandemic Mistakes We Keep Making,” Zeynep Tufekci contrasts the recent reception of the COVID-19 vaccine with the reception of the polio vaccine in the 1950s: “When the polio vaccine was declared safe and effective, the news was met with jubilant celebration. Church bells rang across the nation, and factories blew their whistles. ‘Polio Routed!’ newspaper headlines exclaimed. . . . People erupted with joy across the United States. Some danced in the streets; others wept. Kids were sent home from school to celebrate.” In contrast, on November 10, 2020, “[t]he first, modest headline announcing the Pfizer-BioNTech results in The New York Times was a single column: ‘Vaccine Is over 90% Effective, Pfizer’s Early Data Says,’ below a banner headline spanning the page: ‘BIDEN CALLS FOR UNITED FRONT AS VIRUS RAGES.’” We teach our students how slanted language can affect an audience’s reaction, how the connotation of individual words can influence opinion. We are also influenced by what is included and what is left out or, in this case, what is emphasized and what is relegated to a single column. Why is there so much emphasis in the media on the negative possibilities of the vaccines and so little celebration of the fact that they exist? Have we become so cynical that we worry about the new variants to the point that we can’t appreciate the drugs’ effectiveness in saving lives? This type of media coverage plays into the hands of anti-vaxxers who welcome any opportunity to denigrate vaccines. Opponents of vaccines in general or of these in particular like to argue that there is really not that much more that Americans can do once they have had the vaccine than they could before it. Yet well below the glaring headlines are the sweet stories about grandparents finally getting to hug their grandchildren again and of nursing homes cautiously opening their doors to visitors. Does the news media’s reluctance to celebrate the vaccines arise from political partisanship? Perhaps. After all, former President Trump issued a statement recently on pseudo-White House stationery, trying to take credit for their existence: "I hope everyone remembers when they’re getting the COVID-19 (often referred to as the China Virus) Vaccine, that if I wasn’t President, you wouldn’t be getting that beautiful 'shot' for 5 years, at best, and probably wouldn’t be getting it at all. I hope everyone remembers!" His choice of verb tense (“if I wasn’t president”) reflects his refusal to admit that he lost the 2020 election, or perhaps he’s just not that astute a student of grammar. His supporters might celebrate with him his gift of the vaccines to the American people, but for others, the very thought of Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic from the beginning might dampen down any spirit of enthusiasm.  However, it’s not as though we have to give credit to former President Trump for the existence of the vaccines, but rather to the scientists who labored to create them and the volunteers who participated in the development trials. Should our optimism be guarded because these vaccines were developed quickly? It was unprecedented to develop a vaccine, let alone several, in a matter of months instead of years. As Tufekci put it, “Vaccines that drastically reduce hospitalizations and deaths, and that diminish even severe disease to a rare event, are the closest things we have had in this pandemic to a miracle—though of course they are the product of scientific research, creativity, and hard work.” They show what can be done when the full power of the scientific and pharmaceutical communities come together in a shared mission – something, again, to be celebrated rather than feared. Unfortunately, our nation is not prepared to come together, as a nation, to celebrate anything at this point. We could not celebrate together the inauguration of a new president - not when large numbers of Americans believed the former one’s claims of a stolen election. Nor could we, as a united nation, celebrate democracy and the peaceful transition of power because of those same dissenters, some of whom turned to violence in an effort to stop the lawful counting of electoral votes and disrupt the election of Joe Biden. For the moment, everything is seen, still, in political terms. In a nation where wearing a mask to prevent the spread of COVID or not wearing one became a political statement and led to injury and death for some trying to enforce mask mandates, rolling up one’s sleeve for a vaccination can hardly be seen in apolitical terms. Likewise, it’s hard to celebrate the “reopening” of America when many feel it is coming too soon. We long ago left behind the idea of news as an objective account of the world’s happenings. To deny the political leanings of the news networks would be ludicrous. Maybe the time has come to move back toward some type of balance at least. Ideally a network would report any problem with the vaccines while also reporting successes in getting the vaccines out to more people and making strides toward ending the pandemic—and to keep both sets of facts in proportion. Maybe a time will come when, even if Americans don’t take to the streets in celebration, we can at least breathe a collective sigh of relief that we are returning to something closer to normal, in our news media and in our lives.   Image Credit: "A newspaper with the headline Coronavirus News"  by Jernej Furman, used under a CC BY 2.0 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