Matt Switliski (nominated by Christina Ortmeier-Hooper) is completing a PhD in English with a concentration in Composition at the University of New Hampshire. He has taught First-Year Writing, Introduction to Creative Nonfiction, Professional and Technical Writing, and other courses. His major research interests are writing centers and creative writing. His secondary interests include response, stylistics, and craft books. Matt was a 2018 Bedford New Scholar.   In the First-Year Writing classes I teach, I often ask a series of questions on the first day of the semester to get students involved and to access some of what they already know about writing. “What were you told to do (or not do) in writing?” generates plenty of ideas and usually some disagreement. The answers encompass the expected (Your thesis should be in the first paragraph) and the surprising (You can’t start a sentence with “because”). For as many times as I’ve asked that question, I’ve never had a student ask, “What kind of writing?” To shake up their ideas about school writing being one universal variety, I try to integrate discussions of genre throughout the term.   Some context: At the University of New Hampshire, our one-semester First-Year Writing (FYW) course is the only requirement for all students regardless of program (save those with appropriate transfer or AP credit). While individual instructors have a lot of flexibility, the course is generally structured around three major assignments—an analytical essay, a researched persuasive essay, and a personal essay—with a rhetorical emphasis throughout. The first assignment asks students to rhetorically analyze an argument, integrating the appeals of ethos, logos, and pathos. That language bridges nicely to the next essay in which writers make their own arguments, supported by evidence. It’s in the early days of the researched persuasive unit that I raise the matter of genre with the assignment linked here.   One way I’ve introduced genre is to have students brainstorm as many different kinds of writing as they can. I encourage them to be as broad with it as possible. If it contains language, it’s fair game. As students call out ideas—Lyrics! Menus! Lab reports! Poems!—I scribble them furiously on the board, both to signal that their contributions are valuable and to give us a powerful visual of the diversity of writing. Breaking into groups, they discuss what’s common and what’s distinctive about each of these sorts of writing, sharing their findings as a whole class afterward. (I realize there are much more nuanced approaches to genre, as in the work of Amy Devitt and Anis Bawarshi, but I’m not even sure I understand those views as well as I should. Besides, this exercise is really just scratching the surface of a much bigger topic.)   From there we consider the research papers they’ve written in the past, whether those are a genre themselves or if they include a range of genres. Some have written diverse work that integrates research, but many more have written a kind of generic research paper that just gathers information and solders it together without opinion, without audience, without purpose. That, I tell them, is not the case here. The research will help them make a point that they believe. And in doing so, they get to experiment with genre.   As you can see in the assignment, I provide students with the introductions to three approaches to the same basic research topic. The audience for each is different, however, as is the evidence used. In the past I’ve given them the choice of writing their research paper as an op-ed, a report, or a letter, though I do like the idea of making it entirely open-ended; that way, they would not only need to research material to help them make their arguments, but they’d also need to research how to write whatever genre they choose, something they will need to do in the future as FYW cannot prepare writers for every contingency. (Here I align myself with Downs and Wardle in rejecting teaching a “universal academic discourse” as a goal for FYW [553].)   While each example obviously differs in style and structure, I emphasize audience, purpose, and evidence. The letter addresses an individual, the report a larger group, and the op-ed the largest. Given those audiences, we discuss what issues are relevant to each of these audiences and, if we don’t know, how to find out. What the audience cares about changes the angle of the argument and thus demands different evidence. We discuss what each argument is asking its audience to do and if that course of action is within their power—something I expect them to address in their own writing. And we talk about evidence not just as it relates to the audience and purpose but what seems appropriate for the genre. A report probably won’t have much room for pathos, whereas a letter or an op-ed might. The ethos of the writer can sometimes be relevant for an op-ed and almost always is in the case of a letter. As for logos, well, that’s key to nearly any argument, something they generally notice when writing their own rhetorical analyses.   How do you bring up genre in writing classrooms? How do you work against the ubiquitous generic research paper?   References Bawarshi, Anis S. Genre and the Invention of the Writer: Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition. Utah State UP, 2003. Devitt, Amy J. Writing Genres. Southern Illinois UP, 2008. Downs, Douglas, and Elizabeth Wardle. “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning ‘First-Year Composition’ as ‘Introduction to Writing Studies.’” College Composition and Communication, vol. 58, no. 4, 2007, pp. 552-584.   To view Matt’s assignment, visit Persuasive Genres. To learn more about the Bedford New Scholars advisory board, visit the Bedford New Scholars page on the Macmillan English Community. ... View more

President Trump’s condemnations of the press as the enemy of the people has linked him immediately in some minds with dictators who have stifled the press as a means of controlling the people. Today’s press is far from stifled, however. If we never could have foreseen a president who so publicly maligns his enemies in the way that Trump does, should we have foreseen a network condemning him night after night or one defending him in the same manner? The bias is so widely accepted that it is taken as a given. But it is not the news.   Long gone are the days when news anchors simply reported the news and any brief commentary was clearly labeled as such. As I’ve discussed in previous posts, the death of the objective news report came when news coverage expanded to twenty-four hours. It is impossible to report the news twenty-four hours a day, so the anchors talk about the news and bring in panel after panel of “experts” to talk about it. I like as well as anyone to hear commentators who agree with me. I don’t object to commentary. I simply feel a line should be drawn between reporting events and expressing an opinion about them. The primary reason Russian infiltration of social media was so successful was that we grasp at “news” we want to hear and pass it along uncritically.    What about news outlets that try to be objective? Consider this recent headline from Vox: “Coverage of Trump’s latest rally shows how major media outlets normalize his worst excesses.” The news outlets referred to tried to be objective and were criticized for that. Newspapers early in this presidency had to decide how to report on what Trump said when it clearly was not true. The Vox article explains it this way: “Major media outlets have long struggled with how exactly to cover Trump, with the Times famously coming to the word ‘lie’ in a headline late, something the paper’s own public editor criticized it for. This effort to find euphemisms for the word ‘lie’ is actually normalizing his worst excesses. Coverage of this sort makes him seem like any other politician . . . [I]n their articles about the rally, CBS, USA Today, the Associated Press, and the Hill failed to so much as mention that Trump pushed a number of false claims.” Ironically, the press was one of the primary targets of Trump’s attacks at the rally. He referred to the members of the media in attendance as “sick people.”    In his letter resigning as Assistant Attorney General on April 29, Rod Rosenstein sums up the goal of the Department of Justice, which is also a worthy goal for members of the media working in a difficult political environment: “We ignore fleeting distractions and focus our attention on the things that matter, because a republic that endures is not governed by the news cycle.”   Photo Credit: “News Anchors” by Peter Alfred Hess on Flickr, 10/13/10 via a CC BY 2.0 license. ... View more

We know what composition curricula looked like as far back as Aristotle’s time. Students were taught to present their compositions orally, but the compositions themselves, even that far back, were introduced in an order that matched the development of cognition. The narrative and descriptive assignments we used to teach at the beginning of the first-year writing course are now relegated to the first twelve years of education, but there has long been the acknowledgment that these assignments are the least challenging cognitively. Then comes exposition, followed by argumentation. James Moffett, in works such as Teaching the Universe of Discourse, taught us to constantly cycle back through the easier modes of writing as we built into the increasingly challenging ones. He reminded us why some assignments are harder than others, relating each to time. A narrative looks at the past—what happened. Exposition looks at the enduring present—what happens. Argumentation looks at the future—what could or should happen. No wonder writing arguments is challenging. A part of argumentation is establishing that a problem exists; the other part is predicting how a suggested change would solve the problem. Having come of age as a teacher under Moffett’s influence, I tend to have students write three essays on the topic they choose to research. Having inherited Annette Rottenberg’s Toulmin method with Elements of Argument, I have to adapt that sequence to accommodate claims of fact, value, and policy. It’s not too much of a stretch to see that writing a claim-of-policy essay is the most challenging because of its future orientation, while claims of fact and value are less challenging. Students can accumulate a body of research and first write an essay supporting a factual claim about it, incorporating as few as two sources to start to establish their knowledge of the subject. Then they can support a value claim about it, going beyond the basic information to express an opinion. With those preliminaries behind them, they are better prepared to support a claim of policy—and to have worked out problems with documenting sources before the last assignment in the course comes along and it’s too late. An example: One of my students wanted to write about the use of thalidomide as a treatment for cancer. Anyone tackling that subject must know the history of thalidomide’s use. If nothing else, the writer must be aware of, and inform the reader, that in the 1950s and early 1960s thalidomide caused thousands of birth defects when it was taken during pregnancy. An essay supporting a claim of fact could establish why the drug, understandably, fell out of favor. An essay supporting a claim of value could argue that the use of thalidomide under carefully controlled circumstances is worth the risk. An essay supporting a claim of policy would turn this research into an argument in favor for or against the use of thalidomide. There would be similarities among the essays. They would draw on the same body of research. Whole sections of an earlier essay might be incorporated into a later one. And they would get more practice getting the documentation right. Too often in the “real world” we find out the hard way what should have been done. There is seldom an opportunity to write about the should-haves, to practice getting it right. It’s hard to write a policy against possible future outcomes. I think of the tragic death of a young student at the University of South Carolina who got into the wrong car, thinking it was her Uber. Along with his condolences, the university president sent USC students and parents a list of ways to avoid a similar tragedy. Students may have gotten similar warnings when they arrived on campus. Lyft and Uber are implementing new safety policies. However, the narrative of Samantha Josephson’s death and the generalization that it could have happened to anyone reinforced what should be done in the future. It’s clear now – too late – what claims of policy should be implemented.   Photo credit: “Summ()n – Exploring Possible Futures” by cea+ on Flickr, 2/7/12 via a CC BY 2.0 license. ... View more

Those who read these posts know that I’m wont to talk about style and about its crucial importance to writers today. Responding to one of my posts, Tom McGohey wrote: Took me years, but I eventually discovered that the key to integrating style in a meaningful way was tying it consistently to student writing throughout the semester, in daily informal reading responses and class exercises, and in papers. From day one, we discussed rhetorical situations and strategies. In particular, I emphasized ethos, and how style contributed to ethos, and how that in turn contributed to the impact of a piece in a particular rhetorical situation. With every reading assignment, we spent some class time examining how style and ethos affected their response to a writer and the advantages and drawbacks of a style. When and why did the writer employ this style in particular passages? All along, I encouraged them to consider their own style/ethos on the page and how they might make more conscious use of it. I encouraged them to imitate a writer’s style they really liked during in-class writing exercises. Tom reported that such careful integration of style paid off and that “on the whole, students liked doing all the style work. It gave them a sense of control over their prose, and seeing an immediate payoff in their writing, even if it were just one small area like shifting from passive to active voice or punctuating a long sentence perfectly, spurred them to pay more attention to style.”     I’ve had much the same experience with students over the decades, finding that taking time to get a sentence just right, to use an analogy to striking effect, to attend to the rhythms of prose, eventually got student writers excited: they too can “make sentences sing.”  So I wrote back to Tom thanking him for his comments and in return he generously shared an assignment he gives, called “Stylish Writing.” Here’s Tom’s prompt: Rhetorical Situation: You’ve been invited to submit an essay to a professional journal titled Stylish Writing explaining your own development as a “stylish writer.” This journal is read by practicing writers who take a great interest in the craft of writing and who like to learn from other writers about the joys and frustrations of struggling to write well-crafted sentences. With your essay, you will be entering a larger conversation about the role and importance of style in writing. Tom goes on in the assignment to give students a series of questions to help them begin to analyze and describe their own writing styles and to link their stylistic choices to the establishment of ethos and to the rhetorical effects achieved by those choices. Throughout the assignment, he encourages students to experiment, to take risks, and to have FUN.   This is just the kind of playful but serious assignment students can really shine on. Indeed it may be one you might like to try, or modify, in your own classes. Tom has generously allowed me to share it here. If you have an assignment that engages students with style and stylistic choices, please send it along!   Image Credit: Pixabay Image 1209121 by Free-Photos, used under the Pixabay License ... View more

One of the key principles upon which the semiotic method is based is that of the cultural mythology. Grounded in Roland Barthes’ pioneering study Mythologies, a cultural mythology is an ideologically inflected worldview (or set of worldviews) that shapes social consciousness. Unlike more strictly held views on social constructionism, however, which hold that reality itself is a social construct, the mythological viewpoint—at least as I present it in Signs of Life in the U.S.A.—is essentially subjective, and can be tested against the objective realities that surround it. So passionately are cultural mythologies held, however, that when reality does break through, the result can be quite emotional, even violent. Take climate change denial, for instance. Effectively a sub-cultural mythology in its own right, a steady stream of objective evidence that climate change is real only produces ever more insistent denials by its adherents. Or then again, take America's fundamental mythology of the American dream, which holds that opportunities for social and economic advancement are open to all who make the effort to achieve them, and what happens when uncomfortable realities challenge it—as just happened with the still unfolding college admissions scandal. The extraordinary level of emotion—and media attention—that has greeted this scandal is especially indicative of what happens when a cultural mythology smashes into reality. For here is evidence, especially painful for the middle class, that even college admissions can be bought through schemes that are open only to the upper class that Americans are so slow to recognize exists at all. In a certain sense, I must confess, I'm a little surprised by the profundity of the reaction. I mean, didn't everyone already know about the advantages—from legacy admissions to exclusive prep schools to expensive SAT tutoring—that America's upper classes enjoy when it comes to elite college admissions? Somehow I can't help but be reminded of that iconic scene in Casablanca where Captain Louis Renault is "shocked" that "gambling is going on” in Rick's Café Américain, just as he is about to receive his own winnings. So there is something about this current glimpse into what upper-class privilege is all about that has really struck a nerve. I see at least three facets to the scandal that help explain how and why. First is the high-profile celebrity involvement. As an entertainment culture, America adores and identifies with its favorite entertainers, so when two popular actresses, and their children, are alleged to have taken advantage of their wealth in order to slip past the guardians of a supposedly meritocratic college admissions system, the feeling of betrayal runs especially deep. The second component to the scandal is that—even before the Great Recession hit—career opportunities for America's college graduates (especially if they are not STEM majors) are closing down, increasing the pressure to get into one of those schools whose graduates have the best chance at getting the few good jobs that are left. Suddenly, where you go to college seems to matter a lot more in determining where you are going to get in life. Which takes us to the third angle to the phenomenon: the stunned realization that not only is the American dream a cultural mythology but that the whole game appears to have been rigged all along. This apprehension cannot be overestimated in its affect on American society today. It is, in good part, behind the rise of political "populism" (it may be significant in this regard that conservative commentary on the scandal gloats over the "liberal" Hollywood elites involved), as well as the accompanying divisions in a society where more and more people are competing for fewer and fewer slots in the good life—which appear to have been purchased in advance as part of the social scenario of a new Gilded Age. Photo Credit: Pixabay Image 1701201 by davidsenior, used under the Pixabay License ... View more

BRAVO and KUDOS to Program Chair Vershawn Young and to Local Arrangements Chair Brenda Whitley—and to all their teams—for a truly memorable CCCC. I can never remember so many “must see and hear” sessions at every time slot. And thanks to all who attended this one, which is for the history books.   As far as I know, Erika Lindemann holds the record for attendance, with 46 consecutive CCCC meetings. But I can come close to that: since 1973, I’ve missed only one CCCC and that was in 2012 when I was in Vietnam teaching on an around-the-world Semester at Sea. So I’ve been to a lot of 4Cs gigs. In the early days, the meeting was pretty small: I recall Richard Lloyd-Jones in the 70s writing to say he needed “more proposals” in order to put a program together. Compare that to this year when each time slot offered between 40 and 50 concurrent sessions. This is just one small mark of how much our field has grown in size and stature.   I arrived at the Pittsburgh Convention Center on Wednesday, just in time for the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in Rhetoric and Composition’s celebration of the group's thirtieth anniversary (!) and the inimitable Cheryl Glenn’s exemplar award—and in time to hear four outstanding speakers. From there, the race was on to see how many sessions I could learn from.   When I close my eyes and try to conjure up the conference and its attendees, my mind’s eye focuses on the many young scholars of color I saw there. I don’t know yet what the total attendance numbers were—and I know that some people didn’t make it because of the huge blizzard and “bomb cyclone” that hit Denver and closed the airport—but I felt the presence of colleagues of color keenly and with great gratitude. I attended several sessions that put a spotlight on the outstanding work being done by graduate students and new assistant professors of color, such as “Black Disruptive Rhetorics: The Novel, the Pubic Sphere, and the Classroom,” featuring standout talks by Mudiwa Pettus, D’Angelo Bridges, Brandon Erby, and Gabriel Green, all from Penn State. “’Walk It Like I Talk It’: Performance Composition in Black Education and Beyond” was another session that held me spellbound, as Khadija Amal Bey (NCA&T) traced the changing labels used to designate people of color and introduced us to archives she is working with at the Moorish Science Temple of Philadelphia, and Landy Watley (Howard) examined the embodied performance of #blackwomenatwerk. I also took copious notes at “Our Liberation Wasn’t Never Gon’ Be Televised. . . Black News Ain’t Fake,” featuring Khirsten Echols (U Pittsburgh) on “Tougaloo Student Got Something to Say,” Brandon Erby (again!) on Mamie Till Mobley’s tactical work that kept her son Emmett’s name and image circulating through the Black Press in ways that eventually set the record of his murder straight, and Rhea Estella Lathan (Florida State) on redemptive literacy activism. And these were just three sessions that highlighted brilliant young scholars of color, who taught me so much in three days that I’m still trying to absorb all of their wisdom.   If this is a trend, it’s one that gives me a great deal of hope for the future of our organization and field of study. I’m grateful to have been a witness at this event and expect that many other conference-attendees feel the same way. I came away with renewed inspiration and renewed commitment to the work outstanding teachers of writing and rhetoric are doing every single day.   Image Credit: Pixabay Image 3964054 by rawpixel, used under the Pixabay License ... View more

Last week, I shared an activity encouraging students to move beyond using a Google search to find research. This week’s activity asks students to check the resources they have found for variety. As was the case last week, Alison J. Head and Michael B. Eisenberg’s 2010 article “How Handouts for Research Assignments Guide Today’s College Students” inspired the activity. Head and Eisenberg found that students typically searched only for the kinds of sources required by the assignment. For instance, if the assignment asks students to find two books and an online source, students find only those items. Instead of prescribing sources for students’ work, this week’s activity asks students to look for variety in their sources and provide brief annotations that explain how they will use the sources. In the activity as shown below, I removed some information that is relevant only to the students in my classes. The five kinds of research sources came from the course textbook, Markel and Selber’s Technical Communication (12th edition). You can easily customize the activity for your class by using the list of resources from your course textbook. Any textbook that covers writing research projects will include a similar list. Checking for Variety in Research Sources Review the information in the section on “Types of Secondary Research Sources” (pp. 123) in Markel and Selber’s Technical Communication. The section discusses the following five kinds of sources: Books (including ebooks) Periodicals: Journals and Magazines Newspapers and online news sources Government documents Websites and social media Checking for Variety For each type of research sources above, list the sources you have found so far that fall in the category, using the example to guide your answers. Include the following information for each source: Bibliographic citation, using whatever format is appropriate for your field (e.g., Electrical engineers use IEEE). A one-sentence (or fragment) summary of the information included in the source. Details on how you plan to use the source in your project. Once you list all of the sources that you have found, evaluate whether your sources show variety, using the following questions: How many different kinds of sources you have found? If a type of secondary research source is not appropriate for your project, explain why. How varied are the sources in each category? Consider the author(s), publisher, publication date, and other relevant factors. Review your audience analysis for the project, and state the kinds of research sources your readers will expect in your document. Explain how your sources meet the audience’s expectations. Explain whether the research sources you found show variety, using specific details. If your sources do not demonstrate variety, set additional research goals to find more secondary sources. Specifically state the additional kinds of sources you will look for in a paragraph or list. Review your answer to make sure it uses business-appropriate spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Students are still working on this activity, so I don’t have results to share. I hope students will develop a habit of examining their research for variety. By having them include annotations that indicate how they will use the sources, students should move beyond variety simply for the sake of variety. Their choices have to be useful to their projects. I’m looking forward to reading their responses. I would love to hear your responses to the activity too. Please leave me a comment below telling me your thoughts or sharing strategies that you use when teaching research projects. Photo credit: A place to study. by San José Public Library on Flickr, used under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license. ... View more

“Now: What questions do you have?” I heard a colleague ask this of her students, midway through a class I was visiting, and I was struck by the helpfulness of the phrase. Rather than asking, “Any questions?” (which can imply that the professor wants to move the lesson along unless someone still doesn’t get it) this question instead suggested there certainly should be questions. And she made space, expectantly, for the conversation. I took mental notes.   Whether you are newer to teaching or have decades under your belt, it’s good to have more tools for effective classroom discussions. There will always be days when students seem lifeless and you feel like the hapless teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: “Anyone? Anyone?”   In this spirit, I have been following with interest a discussion my colleague Jay Vander Veen alerted me to on the surprising virtues of “cold calling” in the classroom. “Done right,” Gerard Dawson argues, cold calling can improve student confidence and ensure more voices are heard. Of course, when “done wrong” this practice can be used to shame or embarrass students, so Dawson suggests some in-class scaffolding (quick conferring with a neighbor, moving to corners of the room to express a perspective, or quick reflective writing) so that students have an “intellectual rehearsal” before being called on. He notices a dynamic you likely recognize from your own classrooms: Once students’ ideas have been affirmed in a discussion, they are more likely to speak up again.   I hadn’t thought about cold calling as the friend of less-confident students, but Doug Lemov, author of Teach like a Champion, makes the case that with warmth and encouragement, cold calls can be a tool for classroom inclusivity, encouraging students who otherwise may feel their ideas aren’t worth sharing. Significantly, those less-confident students might be disproportionately first-generation or marginalized.   Certainly, I keep these real classroom dynamics in mind as I craft open-ended and wide-ranging questions about readings in the prompts for students and instructors in From Inquiry to Academic Writing. My co-author, Stuart Greene, and I offer many ways for students to practice the question-asking habit of mind that is foundational to scholarly discovery — both aloud and in writing — inviting connections within texts, between texts, and between texts and experience.   In the rest of this piece, I’ll offer a reflection exercise that helps students see classroom conversation as a place to practice and name the academic moves they make in their writing, the topic of my last post. This reflection tool, designed by my colleague Ken Smith, helps over-talkers, under-talkers, and occasional talkers name the different purposes of their interactions, and helps them connect oral and written academic conversation. This checklist brings class participation into focus, and is quick to administer at the end of a class. Adapt as you like, and let me know how it works for you:   —————————————————————————————————————               Your name_______________________________________             Date____________________________________________               Thank you for your thoughtful evaluation of the work today. I hope you will             be encouraged to continue good habits of class preparation and to build             other practical participation skills for use in college and beyond. Keep me             informed if you have questions about this part of the course.               How many times did you contribute to the large group discussion today:              _____ 0-2 _____ 3-5 _____ 6-9 _____ 10 or more             In discussion today, did you do any of these valuable things:             _____ Ask a question that advanced the class’s conversation             _____ Help answer a question that advanced the conversation             _____ Point out an example that helped advance the conversation             _____ Explain the meaning or significance of an example             _____ Build on a comment by a classmate             _____ Build on an idea from a previous class             _____ Other:               If we had small group work today, were you:             _____ A more active contributor than most of your group             _____ A less active contributor than most of the group             _____ Silent or rarely spoke               _____ No small group work today             Any questions you wish we’d turn to next time? Other suggestions?             Thank you. —————————————————————————————————————   Any of the strategies in this post can help you foster richer classroom discussions that will help students practice the habits of mind of academic writers. Of course, this can only happen in an atmosphere in which student responses — and questions and ideas — are truly valued. That part is up to you. Image: Ferris Bueller "Anyone?" meme, via memegenerator.net ... View more

When I create an assignment, I intend the information I include about research requirements to suggest starting points and to encourage exploration. Instead, students probably use that information to determine the bare minimum required, doing only the research described instead of jumping off into deeper exploration. Alison J. Head and Michael B. Eisenberg (2010) examined “How Handouts for Research Assignments Guide Today’s College Students,” finding that students use assignments less as a guide and more as a road map. If the assignment handout calls for three sources, students use only three sources. Directed by the assignment handout to use at least two books and an online site, students meet the requirement and find little or no more. In an earlier study, Head and Eisenberg (2009) reported that “Almost every student in the sample turned to course readings—not Google—first for course-related research assignments. Likewise, Google and Wikipedia were the go-to sites for everyday life research for nearly every respondent” (3). I’m left with a conundrum: I want students to look beyond the course textbooks, Google, and Wikipedia, but I don’t want to prescribe the kinds and number of resources they should consult. My ultimate goal is to teach students how to thoroughly research a topic on their own, choosing the best tools to use and gathering relevant sources for their research projects. I designed the following activity to kick off students’ research. In it, I ask students to evaluate the available research tools and then plan how to use those tools to conduct their research project. The activity below has some minor changes to remove specific information that is relevant only to the students in my classes. I took the six kinds of research tools from a list from the course textbook, Markel and Selber’s Technical Communication (12th edition). You can easily customize the activity for your class by using the list of resources from your own textbook. Any textbook that covers writing research projects will include a similar list. Finding Useful Research Tools for Your Project The section on “Understanding Research Tools” (pp. 121–122) in Markel and Selber’s Technical Communication discusses the following six kinds of resources you can consult when you conduct research: Library catalogs Online databases Newspaper and periodical indexes Abstract services Web search engines Reference works For each of the six research tools, provide the information below. Your answer will map out how you will conduct research for your project. Step 1: Determine the Usefulness of the Research Tools Indicate how each of the six research tools is (or isn’t) appropriate for your research project by responding to the following questions. What specific research tools in the category are available for your topic? For example, name the online databases that are appropriate for your topic. What kind of information are you likely to find using the particular tool? How relevant is the information to your research project? Based on your evaluation, how appropriate is the kind of tool for your research project? Step 2: Plan Your Use of the Research Tools For each tool that is appropriate for your research project, explain specifically how you will use the tool. What keywords will you use with each tool? What kind of research sources will you look for with each tool? How will you manage the sources that you find? In other words, indicate how you will save or borrow the sources. The answers to these questions may be similar for the different research tools. Try using a table to organize the information to simplify your response. You do not need to use full sentences for Step 2. I’ll supplement this activity with links to some specific resources from the campus library, such as these Research Guides for Various Subject Areas. I will also suggest that students consult a librarian for help. I think my assignment meets my goal. It encourages students to research beyond the familiar sources like their textbook and Google. At the same time, it guides students toward easily accessible resources without telling them exactly what to do. Next week, I will share a follow-up activity that asks students to report on the specific resources they have discovered. Do you have an activity to share that helps students engage in deeper exploration when they conduct a research project? I’d love to hear from you. Tell me about it by leaving a comment below. Photo credit: All She’s Armed With Is Research. by Markus Binzegger on Flickr, used under a CC-BY 2.0 license. ... View more

Writing in The New York Times in 2011, Neil Genzlinger bemoans “the problem of memoirs,” opening with this notable illustration by Timothy Goodman. Genzlinger is ostensibly reviewing four recently-published memoirs, but he spends most of his time elaborating on four principles for would-be memoirists: that you had parents and a childhood does not qualify you to write a memoir; readers don’t want to “relive your misery”; don’t jump on the memoir bandwagon just because it’s there; and “if you must write a memoir make sure you are the least important person in it.”   This is not bad advice, but potential memoir writers seem not to have heeded it. In 2011, Genzlinger notes that if you want to browse memoirs on Amazon, you better be in a comfy chair since you will get 60 to 120,000 “hits” depending on how you search. Today the number is even greater.   Why the avalanche of memoirs? Genzlinger attributes it to “me-ism,” an age of narcissism. While there is no doubt some truth in that assertion (pretty much all of us, after all, like to talk about ourselves), I think it ignores other important factors. I first noticed the huge uptick in memoirs about 20 years ago and often commented on it and discussed it with my students. After years of worrying the issue, we came up with two factors that seemed to be associated with the rise of this particular genre. First is the resistance to what Lisa Ede and I have called “radical individualism” by theorists of many different stripes, who point out that the long-held assumption that we were the “masters of our fates, the captains of our souls” is belied at every turn, that we are rather shaped by forces far beyond our control. Hence “the death of the author” and the concept of “author functions” that so exercised theorists in the 80s.   These were frightening concepts to many, and the ensuing culture wars stirred up passions on all sides. Feminist rhetoricians and compositionists noted a bitter irony: just at a time when women and people of color were able to come to voice, establishment theorists told them that such voices were really constructions, not results of their own agency. And many in society at large felt vaguely that the concept of selfhood as they had known it for centuries was called into question.   In addition, the 21 st century brought with it enormous advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, moves that presaged something like the industrial revolution on steroids, with huge categories of jobs being taken over by machines. As I write, Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur running for the Democratic presidential nomination, is criss-crossing the country, demonstrating in graphic detail how many jobs—indeed entire professions—are already being taken over by robots and other machines and talking about how to “save jobs from automation” while at the same time facing the necessity of introducing a guaranteed monthly income for all.   These changes are threatening on an existential level—to many, they threaten the sense not only of self but of self-worth. In such times, it is no wonder that we see signs of writers trying to reclaim a traditional sense of self, of saying with every new memoir published, “Here I am. Look at me. I count. I really count.”   Students today are caught in this maelstrom of change, this industrial revolution on steroids. But far too little of what they talk about and study in college acknowledges these realities or engages students in responding productively to them. That doesn’t need to be true of writing programs and courses, however. We are well positioned to tackle these issues with our students, to engage them in tracing challenges to traditional notions of the self as well as technological change in order to better understand the relationship between the two. We are also well positioned to ask students to write about their own relationship to these issues. They might even decide to do a bit of memoir-writing themselves, focusing throughout not on ME ME ME but on how to understand self always in a web of contextual relationships that includes other people as well as other important factors in their environments, including machines with which (or whom?) they may well find themselves engaged in more ways than they can imagine.   To pursue these ends, teachers of writing might well begin with a recent essay in Rhetoric Society Quarterly: “The Ethics of Memoir: Ethos in Uptake.” In this essay, Katherine Mack and Jonathan Alexander show how the concept of ethos “illuminates memoir’s rhetorical potency and its dubious ethics,” noting particularly the way that the over-personalization of memoir bemoaned by Genzlinger can yield to a critique that insistently embeds the ethos of the memoirist within “larger social, cultural, and political debates” like those I have been describing. Mack and Alexander put their recommendation into very good practice in an analysis of two very recent memoirs, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. They conclude that we need many more critical studies of memoirs and especially in the context of “uptake,” that is, how readers “talk back” to them: “At a time when the ‘personal’ and ethos are used to justify a variety of often contradictory positions, a revitalized study of the genres of the personal, such as memoir, and their rhetorical deployment, strikes us as more pressing than ever” (68).   Mack and Alexander’s astute analysis will give teachers of writing a lot to think about—and provide another way to engage students in examining, critically, the “problem of memoirs.”   Image Credit: Pixabay Image 1149959 by Free-Photos, used under the Pixabay 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. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had several conversations with faculty and graduate students about "buy-in" in the classroom.   Current and future teachers wonder: how do I get students to buy-in to the idea that writing and learning how to write well is important?   I’ve posed this question to myself many times over the course of my career and have actively sought different ways to foster student buy-in. Some ideas have worked and some have not. While there are many factors that play a role in the extent to which instructors can foster student buy-in, I have had success at different institutions with the activities and strategies below. Discuss the importance of writing inside and outside of the classroom For a 15-20 minute in-class activity, ask students to respond to the following questions in a freewrite.   What do you want to do after you graduate from college? What kind of writing do you think you’ll do at your job? What do you think might happen if you’re unable to communicate effectively at your job? What do you think might happen if you’re really good at communicating effectively at your job? Based on these questions, why do you think writing and learning how to write is important? Ask students to share what they wrote and make a list of responses on the board. Orchestrate a conversation wherein students engage with the list and brainstorm about what we need to learn and practice in class to in order to strengthen our writing abilities. I encourage instructors to be transparent about how the skills, abilities, and knowledge gained in the course are transferable across writing situations, including the situations they’ll encounter in the future workplace. (I usually have this discussion on the first or second day of class, but it’s never too late to do so.)   Assign lots and lots of low-stakes writing assignments Ask students to write every day in class and out of class. For example, you might provide a brief prompt at the beginning of every class intended to either help get them thinking about course material or just to practice writing in general. Here are some interesting prompts that you may consider using in your class. You can explain to students that research has proven informal writing assignments support student learning and function as ripe sites for invention work. Perhaps most importantly, research states that the more people write, the better writers they become. All of the writing students do in your class will sharpen their writing abilities and communication skills, which in turn will help them learn and succeed in other college courses and in the workplace. Analyze writing in the workplace Ask your students to engage with research that reveals the importance of writing and learning how to write. For example, you may assign sections of two studies on workplace writing: “Writing: A Ticket to Work…Or a Ticket Out” and “Writing: A Powerful Message from State Government.” The findings from the first study reveal that most people (2/3 of 8 million surveyed) in business have writing responsibilities and that writing abilities play a significant role in promotion, demotion, and job loss. The second study reveals that all 2.7 million state employees surveyed have writing responsibilities and all agree writing is important. This study is perhaps most persuasive for student buy-in because it demonstrates that jobs and careers that may not appear to demand strong writing abilities and skills may in fact do so.   Reflection In using these activities and other variations of them, I’ve recognized that pedagogical and curricular transparency is effective in fostering student buy-in. When we tell our students why we’re doing what we’re doing and how our decisions are informed by research in the discipline, they are more likely to recognize the value of the work they do in the class. Further, I’ve learned that discussions and activities that draw connections between school and the workplace and that emphasize transferability make a strong impact on students, especially students taking required classes or classes they think are unrelated to their major or future career. In positioning students to think about other courses they will take as well as their futures, they are more likely to be persuaded that writing and learning how to write matters. ... View more

One of the most common logical fallacies in argumentation is the either/or fallacy. We see this fallacy a great deal these days because our two-party political system is as deeply entrenched as it has ever been, and each party accuses the other of the most extreme positions on hot topics, as if no center ground is possible. Often, the either/or fallacy leads to the straw man fallacy, as the other side finds itself defending against a much more extreme position than what it truly supports.   President Trump wants a wall on our southern border. That leads Republicans to support the unfair assumption that anyone who opposes the wall is for open borders; Trump even went so far as to accuse House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of supporting human trafficking because she opposes the border wall. However, immigration is not an either/or proposition. Both sides are in favor of border security, but if the Democrats must defend themselves against the false charge that they want no restrictions at all on immigration, they waste time and energy that could be spent on reaching common ground. Thus the straw man that Democrats are distracted by and find themselves attacking instead of the real issue.   New York’s new legislation about abortion is another example that can be examined in light of either/or logic. Some of those who oppose abortion assume that those who cheered the passage of the legislation must be willing to accept killing an infant in the process of being delivered. The law actually stipulates very specific circumstances under which a late-term abortion can be performed. That “if” clause is what opponents of abortion do not hear. The either/or fallacy comes in accepting that either one opposes abortion under any circumstances or accepts it under any circumstances. If those who support a woman’s right to choose have to defend themselves against the charge that they think it is okay to kill a baby during delivery, they are attacking a straw man rather than addressing the real issue of why a woman would choose a late-term abortion.   Any time a speaker or writer argues that if you don’t believe this, you believe that, it is worth pausing to consider if that dichotomy really exists. Is it true that anyone who supports gun control wants to take all guns away from every law-abiding American? Is it true that parents who allow their children to be vaccinated do not care about their children’s welfare?   The whole idea behind Rogerian argument is that it seeks common ground from which to work toward reconciling opposing or differing positions. That’s not easy when the issue is something as heated as abortion or the killing of black men by white police officers. It’s not easy because the first step toward reconciliation is being able to accurately state your opponent’s position. As long as every statement is weighed first in terms of its political impact, that step toward common ground will be slow in coming.   Photo credit: “Democratic Donkey & Republican Elephant - Caricatures” by DonkeyHotey on Flickr, 2/12/14 via a CC BY 2.0 license. ... View more

I have a tender spot for students who struggle to find their tone as they enter an academic conversation. I remember writing my first (terrible) essay in college with no idea how to assert my heartfelt (and weak) claim: “Shakespeare’s Hamlet is brilliant!”   So, ham-handedly, I conjured an antagonist and self-righteously typed on my IBM Selectric something like: “While some people fail to recognize Shakespeare’s brilliance, I will argue that Hamlet proves Shakespeare is indeed a brilliant playwright.” The comments and grade on that paper were sobering, and (thanks to a skilled instructor) helpful to my growth as a thinker and writer. But I remember well the late-night struggle to enter a serious conversation about literature.   Early in each semester, my own writing students often reach for outrage as a conversational entree (“X’s idea is ridiculous!”) or sarcasm (“X claims to be a social justice advocate but totally fails to recognize their own privilege!”). In a recent accidentally amusing malapropism, a student trashed an author for being “totally hippocratical.” (Alas, the author in question was not a doctor.)   But who can blame students for assuming an "argument" must be built on forceful disagreement? Most of what we hear in the public sphere are gut-level judgments rather than reasoned analysis. Students can be forgiven for mistaking agreement with weakness, or believing that generous and empathetic readers simply are not tough enough to take a stand.   Our task, as writing instructors, is to model the tone of academic conversations, and to make the syntax of engagement transparent, so students can practice it. In 2019, I’ve found the Burkean metaphor (“Imagine a parlor!”) doesn’t take our students very far. So, in our book, From Inquiry to Academic Writing my co-author, Stuart Greene, and I offer steps to help demystify the process:   Steps to Writing Yourself into an Academic Conversation: Retrace the conversation, including the relevance of the topic and situation, for readers by briefly discussing an author’s key claims and ideas. This discussion can be as brief as a sentence or two and include a quotation for each author you cite. Respond to the ideas of others by helping readers understand the context in which another’s claims make sense. “I understand this if I consider it from this perspective.” Discuss possible implications by putting problems aside, at least temporarily, and asking, “Do their claims make sense?” Introduce conflicting points of view and raise possible criticisms to indicate something the authors may have overlooked. Formulate your own claim to assert what you think. Ensure that your own purpose as a writer is clear to readers.   You may have other steps you’d add to this list, and, certainly, as we close-read texts with students, we can name and “close write” additional rhetorical moves that academic writers make. Providing students the opportunity to name and practice these moves helps them see that syntax itself can guide their tone, helps them generate ideas, and provides structures for nuanced analysis.   Ultimately, our goal is to foster thinkers and writers who are inspired to engage meaningfully with ideas, as Bedford New Scholar Cecilia Shelton’s recent post demonstrates so powerfully.   By modeling thoughtful engagement with writers’ ideas inside our classroom, we can give our students the practice they will need to engage thoughtfully in the public sphere, too. Photo Credit: April Lidinsky ... View more

Today's featured guest blogger is Lisa DuRose Professor at Inver Hills Community College  On the first day of my Introduction to Literature course, as soon as we’ve finished our introductions and reviewed course policies, I distribute the first assignment, a poetry analysis. Although we’re still just getting to know one another, students are quick to react. “Poetry?” asks the bubbly guy in the corner, who just won a prize for memorizing everyone’s name. And from the look I his face, I can tell he’s not thrilled. He has not selected this course to be enraptured by poetry. This student, and most of his classmates, enter my Introduction to Literature course to fulfill a general education humanities requirement. We’ve just learned, from class introductions, that the room is filled with a wide variety of backgrounds--from high school students to a retired military personnel to retail managers—and an even wider swath of career interests: nursing, finance, neuroscience, teaching, family counseling, physical therapy, etc. Few identify as English majors. Even fewer declare a love for poetry. This setting is ripe with urgency. In their entire college career, this may be the only course where these students read poems, where they get the rare opportunity to be startled by their own humanness and consider, in the words of the late, beloved poet Mary Oliver, “their one wild and precious life” Because of this sense of urgency, I always begin the course with an analysis of a poem, a recently published poem, far from the scope of Shmoop.com and Sparknotes.com study guides. This assignment works as a formative assessment tool, a way to determine how much knowledge of poetry students already possess; however, the assignment also provides me with a chance to slow down the pace of students’ typical reading experiences and ask them to really consider the way a poem works. Designed as a sort of “tell me what you notice about this poem,” the informal assignment gives them a low-stakes chance to practice a skill they will use throughout the course: paying close attention to language. Like the students themselves, the short papers produced from this assignment are varied in knowledge of poetic devices and sophistication of analysis. After this initial assignment on a poem, we devote several weeks to the study of fiction, and after that, we launch into a three week unit on poetry. As such, by the time we delve into poetic devices and look at the contours of a poem’s design, the first poem students encountered in the course is slowly fading from their mind. After the poetry unit, we launch into the study of drama and by then, that first poem is a distant memory. All of this memory loss works perfectly when the course nears completion and that first poem reappears in a portion of the final exam that now asks students to perform a much deeper analysis, apply poetic devices with sophistication, and convincingly demonstrate how a variety of critical approaches could open up the poem to varied and rich meanings. This final summative assignment allows students to return to the poem that may have caused trepidation at the beginning of the course, but this time they are equipped with more tools and experience. The assignment has consistently worked well at demonstrating the confidence and skills students have gained in the course. Many of them are impressed with their evolution as they’ve gone from providing a surface-level description, to conducting a close reading of a poem. In their final reflection of the exam, they often remark on their growth: At first analyzing poetry was definitely not my strong suit at the start of this class, but recognizing the specific diction, syntax, imagery, and audience each poem contained aided me in combining everything I could figure out about each poem in order to find the overall theme and meaning. After this class I feel better prepared for writing essays about literary texts since I was able to develop a better understanding of different techniques. Digging deep into this poem and all the poems we did in this class was enjoyable as it allowed me to be free with my thoughts and build on them as I continued to read. I appreciate that the students feel more confident and less weary of poetry at the end of the course. And though I realize this new found appreciation for poetry will not convert any of them into English majors or, heaven forbid, poets, I do hope that they learn, as Mary Oliver advised that “Poetry, to be understood, must be clear. It mustn’t be fancy.”  ... View more

Most teachers of writing I know are concerned, along with their students, about using inclusive language in (and out of) the classroom, and especially in acknowledging that the traditional male/female binary doesn’t come close to adequately addressing the fluidity and range of human gender and sexuality. These insights have been a long time coming. As a white woman raised in the south, I grew up with that binary firmly fixed and would never have thought of questioning it—until I got to college. I was an avid student and eager to take advantage of every lecture, concert, or other cultural event offered at my state school, so I found myself one evening in a big auditorium to hear a talk by philosopher Alan Watts. I remember that he drew an imaginary line across the stage and then said that it represented human sexuality, and that every point along the line was different, that the range of our ability to experience sex stretched literally from sea to shining sea. I don’t remember much else about the lecture, which occurred over half a century ago. But I do remember sitting in the auditorium at the end of the talk feeling as though I were looking over an abyss and understanding, for the first time, just how much I had to learn about what it meant to be human.   Well, that’s why we go to college—and I hope students everywhere are being led to question their own assumptions and to expand their ways of thinking. So I’ve been a big advocate of the use of gender neutral language. In the latest edition of Everything’s an Argument, we talk about pronoun preferences and quote Peter Smagorinsky: “It may well be that “ze” and “zir” will replace current pronouns over time" (as "Ms." has replaced "Mrs." or "Miss"). And of course the use of singular “they” is now regularly accepted, as in “Jamie called me and so I called them back.” The important point is that writers and speakers need to be sensitive to difference and need to choose terms (like pronouns!) appropriately.   That goes for identity labels as well, and in this regard I was interested to read an essay by Jonathan Rauch called “Don’t Call Me LGBTQ: Why we need a single overarching designation for sexual minorities” in the January/February 2019 issue of The Atlantic. Rauch argues that “LGBTQ is coalitional and inclusive. But no matter how many letters are added, one group is pointedly excluded.” After much thought, he says, he has come to the conclusion that “the alphabet-soup designation for sexual minorities has become a synecdoche for the excesses of identity politics—excesses that have helped empower the likes of Donald Trump.” So Rauch urges us to “retire the term” and replace it with a single letter: Q. . . . the term would be understood to encompass sexual minorities of all stripes. When we speak of ourselves as individuals, we would use gay or lesbian or transgender, or whatever applies. When we need a blanket term, we would simply call ourselves Q. As in: the Q population and Q equality. Q is simple and inclusive, and carries minimal baggage. When we speak of Q equality, we are saying that discrimination against sexual minorities—or for that matter sexual majorities—is not the American way.   As writing teachers, we have an opportunity to engage students in exploring terminologies and labels of all kinds—and to help them to use language in describing others that is inclusive and sensitive to difference. In doing so, we help them become more conscientious and effective communicators. And as always, we stand to learn a great deal from their discussions.   Image Credit: Pixabay Image 3751930 by SharonMcCutcheon, used under the Pixabay License ... View more