Quick quiz: In the biblical story, what was Jonah swallowed by? How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark? Did you answer “whale” to the first question and “two” to the second? Most people do … even though they’re well aware that it was Noah, not Moses who built the ark in the biblical story. So wrote Lisa Fazio, an assistant professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, in a recent article titled “Why You Stink at Fact-Checking.” Fazio’s article was published in the very cool and credible online magazine The Conversation and republished last month in The Washington Post. Fazio says that psychologists call the relevant phenomenon the Moses Illusion. But not long after I read her article, I heard a non-Moses-related variant on NPR. It went something like this: “A humorous story is a …”                                                                               “… joke.” “Where there’s fire, there’s often …”                                                                               “… smoke.” “Another word for ‘people’ is …”                                                                                       “… folk.”       “The white part of an egg is called the …”                                                                                       “[???].”   Right. The Conversation article, based on a sizable body of research that Fazio and colleagues have conducted, demonstrates how easy and normal it is for all of us to unwittingly absorb—and share—false information. What’s more, the “negative effects of reading false information occur even when the incorrect information directly contradicts people’s prior knowledge.” Participants in Fazio’s studies accepted false information even if they’d been “warned that some of the questions would have something wrong with them.” They did so when the factual errors turned up in questions related to their field of expertise. They did so even when the “critical information” was highlighted in red and they were told to pay particular attention to it! If you’re concerned about your students’ ability to separate information from disinformation when they’re writing papers, I highly recommend you assign them to read Fazio’s article.   Writers beware too The article got me thinking, indirectly, about “indirection.” Most good nonfiction writers I know consider indirection a fault, whether or not they know that name for it. (I’ve never heard another one.) I learned about indirection from the legendary Eleanor Gould of The New Yorker, but just now I was surprised to find that among half a dozen or so of my go-to writing and editing guides, only The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage discusses it:   indirection is what Harold Ross of The New Yorker called the quirk of sidling into facts as if the reader already knew them. An example is this sentence, in a profile of a college athlete: The 19-year-old also plays the piccolo. The reader pauses to wonder whether the 19-year-old is the athlete or someone else.   The most straightforward remedy is, of course, to get the athlete’s name in there. For example, “Wilson, 19 years old, also plays the piccolo.” Indirection tends not to raise the hackles of readers who haven’t been trained to look for it—possibly because it’s common and accepted in fiction. For instance, take this opening sentence of a short story that appeared in The Atlantic: “It was Saturday and the house was full of flies again.” I’ve remembered that sentence for decades (although unfortunately I can’t remember or find online the title of the story or the author). It hooked me exactly because it sidles into the situation in a way that made me want to know more. However, in nonfiction, avoiding indirection strikes me as important in two ways: (1) Good ol’ clarity. I often advise writers who are trying to make an argument that the goal is to lead readers along step by logical step to their document’s conclusion—which, by the time readers reach it, will preferably seem inevitable. Firmly connecting the content of one sentence to that of the next underpins this step-by-step technique. Not “Wilson is an exceptional athlete. The 19-year-old also plays the piccolo” but “Wilson, at 19 years old, is an exceptional athlete. She also plays the piccolo.” Doesn’t the latter version feel much more grounded and authoritative? (2) Fighting against the Moses Illusion. Note that both examples of the phenomenon I’ve given in this post present the false information indirectly. They don’t say, “Moses took two animals of each kind aboard the Ark. True or false?” and “The white part of an egg is called the yolk. True or false?” I’ll bet that most readers would catch the falsehoods here. Allowing ourselves indirection can also lure us into making mistakes we’re not even aware of. The Conversation article concludes: Detecting and correcting false information is difficult work and requires fighting against the ways our brains like to process information. Critical thinking alone won’t save us. Our psychological quirks put us at risk of falling for misinformation, disinformation and propaganda.   This applies to the psychology of writers as well as readers, I have no doubt. Caveat scriptor.  Image Credit: Pixabay Image 1351629 by quinntheislander, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

The end of the semester often brings to mind Crystal Eastman’s 1920 essay, “Now We Can Begin.” Like any Commencement speaker worth her salt, Eastman, a feminist and pacifist, chose the momentous occasion of the passing of the 19th Amendment in 1920 to look forward rather than backward. She saw the long fought-for victory of granting women the right to vote as a beginning of the next struggle.   I see similarities to the semester’s end. Certainly, students have much to celebrate as they complete their final essays (as do you when you finish commenting on them!). But I think of a semester’s end not as a closure, but as an opening. This feeling came to mind as I read Andrea Lunsford’s recent post on “Recommended Reading,” which sent me searching for a pencil to lengthen my “Must Read” list.   As instructors, we devote a lot of time to recommending reading. We structure our classes around texts, building an arc that we hope will engage our students and inspire critical thinking and writing. The process Stuart Greene and I went through as we selected readings for From Inquiry to Academic Writing  felt a lot like making a “recommended reading” list. We chose pieces that excited us, and that we couldn’t wait to share with students. Every headnote I wrote for the reader functions as a recommendation, too: “Oh! You’ve just got to read this, because…”   After a semester of our reading recommendations, I like to turn to students, and ask them to suggest summer reading material for their peers and me. In my early teaching days, I would tape pieces of paper outside my office door, inviting students to list book titles and authors with a one-sentence endorsement: “You must read this read this, because…” These days, we gather those recommendations through courseware or campus social media, but the spirit is the same. Students are the authorities, with the responsibility of pitching their favorite texts to prospective readers in a tiny argument that can have big impact.   Among the student-recommended texts that I’d recommend in turn: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, by Marjane Satrapi What I Found in a Thousand Towns: A Traveling Musician's Guide to Rebuilding America's Communities—One Coffee Shop, Dog Run, and Open-Mike Night at a Time, by Dar Williams What’s on your summer reading list? And what do your students recommend? Like Crystal Eastman, but with a long list of book titles in hand, I say: “Now, we can begin.”   Photo Credit: April Lidinsky ... View more

Last week, I reviewed several word cloud generators and suggested a few ways that you can use word clouds in the classroom. This week, I am sharing some ways that you can use word clouds in your classes to engage students directly in the learning process. The ten active learning strategies below ask students to move beyond the absorption of ideas typical of a lecture-based class to deep engagement with the ideas and development of relevant content area and critical thinking skills. 1. 25-Word Summaries With 25-word summaries, students summarize (or otherwise discuss) their reading in 25 words or less. Students must concentrate their ideas and make every word count. Once students submit their summaries, combine them in a single document, and generate a word cloud that reveals the 25 words that students mentioned most. For nonfiction readings, the resulting word cloud can show the main points of the reading, significant facts that are included, and key issues that stand out for students. For fictional readings, the word cloud can reveal significant features from the reading, such as themes and symbols. The word cloud below is the collected response to the discussion question “What are the main themes in A Raisin in the Sun?” For accessibility purposes, include the table of word frequency, which screen readers will be able to read.   Word Frequency family     21 african     16 people     14 dream     10 dreams     10 abortion       8 act       8 knowledge       7 raisin       7 africa       6 2. Icebreakers with Survey Responses Choose your favorite icebreaker question: What’s your favorite food? What’s the last book you read? What kind of texts have you written in the workplace? Ask students to respond with online survey software, like Poll Everywhere or Mentimeter. Both of these tools allow you to present the survey responses in a word cloud, so you do not need any additional software. The cloud appears on the survey website as the responses are added. 3. Directed Paraphrase Check students’ comprehension by asking them to paraphrase the most recent lesson or activity that the class has completed. Encourage students to put the content of the lesson into their own words, rather than parroting back what they have seen or read in the class. Collect all of the responses in a single document, and generate a word cloud of the most commonly repeated words. Share the cloud with the class and ask them to consider why certain words showed up and why others were missing. Be sure to ask them to comment on how well the word cloud represents the lesson or activity they paraphrased. 4. Prediction Before students read the next section of an article or chapter of a book, ask them to suggest what they think will happen next. As with other activities, gather the responses in a single document and create a word cloud, which will identify the most popular predictions. Ask students to discuss why certain predications were popular, connecting to the available evidence from the reading they have completed. 5. Muddiest Point Ask students to write down whatever is most unclear about the lesson, in a word or two, before leaving the classroom for the day. Collect students’ responses and assemble them into a single document, from which you can build a word cloud of the points that most students noted. Open the next class session with the word cloud, and address the concepts that students have identified. 6. Focused List Build a focused list by asking students to respond to a question about a topic. This strategy can be used to stimulate prior knowledge by asking a question such as “What have you learned about the topic already?” Give students time to brainstorm a list of concepts that they recall, and create a word cloud of the ideas they have shared. Use the word cloud to extend discussion of prior knowledge by asking students to explain the concepts that appear in the word cloud. 7. Version Comparison As part of a research project, ask students to find two articles on their topic, ideally two that focus on different perspectives. Have students make a word cloud for each of the articles and then compare the two clouds. Specifically, ask which words that the two versions have in common as well as what their most significant differences are. Have students determine which of the most frequently used words communicate facts and which communicate opinion. If there are terms in the word clouds that students have not found elsewhere in their research, encourage them to examine these words further as they relate to the topic. 8. Role Play Again, set up a survey using online survey software, like Poll Everywhere or Mentimeter, but this time ask students to answer from another perspective. In literature courses, you can ask students to answer as they think one of the characters would respond. The activity can be used as a Prediction activity (#4 above) by asking students to predict what someone in a reading might do next or a decision the person would make. For any reading that students complete, they might respond as the author would. If you are studying argument, students can answer as someone on a particular side of the issue might. These role-playing surveys will result in interesting word clouds that reveal how well students understand whatever they are reading or studying. 9. Quiz-Style Games For this activity, you create the word cloud yourself. You could choose keywords from a text and manufacture a cloud, or paste in the text of a reading to create a cloud. Ensure that your cloud does not include the title of the piece or other words that would make the source immediately obvious. The word cloud above for A Raisin in the Sun would work for this activity. Use the resulting word clouds to quiz students: By looking only on the cloud, can they identify the piece that the cloud represents? Students could work individually or in teams to propose their answers, similar to a game show. This activity would work particularly well as a review exercise before an exam. 10. List-Cloud-Group-Label With this modification of the List-Group-Label strategy, you can stimulate prior knowledge as you introduce a reading, a unit of study, or a course theme. Write a word or phrase related to the subject area on the board. For instance, if the course will explore popular culture, you might focus on the word popularity or the phrase popular culture itself. Have students brainstorm related words and phrases using online survey software, like Poll Everywhere or Mentimeter (or in an open Google Doc). Make a word cloud of students’ responses. Next, arrange students into small groups, and ask each group to examine the word cloud closely. Groups can add or remove words or phrases as well as decide on whether particular items on the list should have been larger or smaller in the word cloud. Once they have considered the words, ask groups to arrange the words into several related subtopics and to provide a label for each subtopic. Have groups present their subtopics to the whole class and explain their arrangement. The whole class can compare the different subtopics that groups have created. Later in the course, after you have begun your exploration of the reading, unit, or theme, ask students to return to the labeled groups of words and consider how well they relate to the topic as it has evolved during the course. Final Thoughts As you can see from these ten ideas, word clouds can be a versatile tool in the classroom. They can be used for analysis, description, summary, and more. Perhaps my favorite thing about these uses of word clouds is that the results are always different. Although my classes may study the same topic or readings from one term to the next, the way that they create and analyze word clouds is always unique—and every so often, they reveal an idea that surprises me. What are your thoughts on word clouds now that you have seen some ways to use them? Do you have additional strategies to try? Would you complete one of these active learning strategies in a different way? Tell me your thoughts in a comment below. I can’t wait to hear from you. ... View more

Before the beginning of the spring semester, as I planned our assignments for the course, I tried to imagine where we might be by the end of the semester. I thought of skills to be practiced and outcomes to be measured, and I also considered multiple means of fostering persistence and resilience through the processes and products of writing. Through these means, I returned to a genre I had used in the past, the graduation speech. The end of the semester and the end of the school year can be a difficult time for many students in ways that they understandably may not be willing to share with us. They may struggle with intersecting issues of community and family, with food insecurity and racism, with the need to hold several jobs and to take a course overload to try to accelerate their education. In other words, the end of the year is a time when students need to keep most focused even as low energy levels may impede concentration. What to do? At the end of the semester, through the #redfored movement, public school teachers demonstrated against prolonged state defunding of K-12 education. The demonstrations began at the end of the last week of classes, impacting our community economically, politically, and emotionally. School defunding began during the recession of 2008, and accelerated over the ensuing nine years, or for half of the time that my traditional-aged first-year students had been alive. In the early part of the recession, in the first year of his presidency, Barack Obama had been invited to give a graduation speech at our institution. The speech became controversial, as described in the links connected to the assignment, when some people suggested that the President had not yet accomplished enough to earn an honorary degree. President Obama decided to speak at graduation anyway and wove the controversy into his remarks that demonstrated an exemplary understanding of kairos, or the rhetorical circumstances of the situation. Because this story held local interest for my students, I offered the speech as a reading to help understand the genre of the graduation speech. Also included was a website that listed fifteen themes and other suggestions for composing graduation speeches (see the link below). But the main point of assigning the graduation speech as a final assignment was to give us an opportunity to imagine the future in a positive light. Students not only needed to write a speech, but also to envision themselves as graduating and being chosen to address their classmates. They had to consider the kairos that had produced such circumstances, and to focus on what it would mean to arrive at that historical marker in their own lives. In the conclusion for their speech, one student wrote: Take this speech as a lesson, pass it down to others, give them courage, and give them confidence. Tell them they can do it, those 4 little words mean a lot to people. Makes them push that much harder. Be the one to make the difference in someone’s college experience, and college career. That’s what I am here to do today, you guys don’t need this, you already made it. Give this to others and help them be better, you could be the difference maker. Under the intense pressures that students endure in the culmination of their first year experiences, offering courage and confidence to others can be a significant gift not only to students’ sense of community, but also to students’ developing sense of themselves as writers. As this student suggests, that gift can make all the difference. PROMPT FOR GRADUATION SPEECH Take what you have learned and experiment with a different genre: a speech that you have been invited to deliver to your college graduating class Revise the letter that you wrote to a younger audience as a speech for your class and audience members at your graduation Include your reading from earlier writing projects as references See this link for a list of 15 themes and suggestions for writing graduation speeches. Choose one of these themes for your graduation speech. Look at former President Obama’s 2009 graduation speech at ASU-Tempe for another example. See these links for the transcript, the video, and the historical background of this speech. Music educators performing in the #redfored band at the Arizona state capitol in Phoenix on April 30, 2018. The writing on the drum says: “The true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige, and his life for the welfare of others.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.       Photo by Susan Naomi Bernstein ... View more

Today's guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn‌, a Professor in the English Department at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning, 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. Many of us find ourselves in larger class settings and look for new ways to encourage critical reading and writing. In one of my other Multimodal Mondays posts, Five for the Drive, I identified 5 easy ways that I have used Google Drive in my classes. I first came up with these assignments when I found myself teaching a literature class that had 35 students. The writing teacher in me wanted my students to write daily reflections on their reading selections and share those ideas with others. Although this worked for years, students often considered it a burden and it required quite a bit of reading and evaluation on my part. I decided it was time for a new model. First, I had to figure out what I considered important when it comes to critical reading: I want students to forge strong interpretations in which they connect their ideas to ideas in a text. I value it when students are text-specAific and can support their ideas through significant passages in a text. I encourage dialogic thinking as students discuss their ideas with others to help them move beyond their own thoughts and interact with the ideas of others. I want them to complete this interpretive work before we arrive in class so that our class discussions are purposeful, interesting, and substantiated. It is with these ideas in mind that I came up with this series of critical reading assignments. Background Reading The St. Martin’s Handbook:  Ch. 7, “Reading Critically”  The Everyday Writer (also available with Exercises😞 Ch.9, “Critical Reading” EasyWriter (also available with Exercises😞  Ch.7, “Analyzing and Reading Critically”   Assignment Series Collaborative Discussion Teams: Assign students to a collaborative discussion team that they will work with through the term. This is a place for them to try out ideas, engage in thoughtful conversation, and create interesting ways of looking at texts through active interpretation. This series of assignments trains them to be strong critical readers – skills they use in our classes and across the curriculum. Set up a Team Space: Each team will have online space and create an accompanying folder on the class Google Drive that includes the following sub-folders: Schedule of Facilitators and Weekly Questions and Passages   Example of Question and Passage Template      Students post weekly questions and passages to Google Docs: For each reading selection, all students in the group are required to post 3 significant, thought provoking questions and one interesting passage, reference or quote to the weekly Google doc. In some instances, I ask them to include more than one passage. The purpose of these questions is to open up discussion and to help students consider the deeper, multiple meanings in the texts we read. Students include their names next to their submissions. Students create a new document each week and curate their ideas of the course of the semester.   Example of Student Questions and Passages: Emerson Weekly facilitators: Students create a calendar of facilitators that will appear as an administrative document in their folder. All members will take several turns facilitating the team (through your LMS or through Google chat or other discussion software). The facilitator starts the thread by looking through the weekly posts to choose a question/passage or two or encouraging conversation and connected ideas. They should start a new thread for each selection, designated by the author’s last name or the title of the selection. In this online discussion, we look for quality conversations, which means that all members actively engage with the subject matter through bringing in their own experiences, ideas, and specific connections to our readings and class discussions. It is also the facilitator’s responsibility to frame and contextualize the questions to make sure that the conversation remains lively and connected.   Example of Facilitated Discussion   In-Class Discussion: By the time students arrive in class, they have already posed interesting questions, grounded their ideas in text-specific passages, and engaged in discussion with others. These exercises then become reference documents for engaged, full-class discussion. Students can access them on their devices and choose particular ideas and passages to share with the class. I have them do different things with their discoveries. I often have students copy them in class to another collaborative document on Google in which teams quickly transfer their questions and/or passages. All students and teams contribute their ideas towards an immediate visual aid for discussion.   Example of Collaborative Passages for Full Class Discussion   Reflection on the Activities I was originally motivated to create this series to manage larger classes and still encourage critical reading strategies. Now, I use them across my classes because they promote the kind of close reading that students often resist. Evaluation is easier because I am not reading full essays and can easily check for quality participation. Students also weigh in on the evaluation twice during the semester and report on their teammates’ participation and the significance of their responses. I also ask them to reflect, in writing, several times during the semester and read across their work from these collaborative discussions. I am not trying to say that these methods should replace exploratory, essay, or research writing. On the contrary, when students curate their ideas along with textual connections, they are more prepared to expand upon them in other writing projects. The most satisfying result is the quality of our class discussions. Every student participates and has a chance to have their ideas heard (which sometimes gets lost in full class discussion). Students always have available references to share with the class and are ready to contribute to the larger dialogic conversations.   Let me know what you think in the comments. ... View more

I have been talking with my students about the integral role that writing plays in building community and practicing democracy. Our discussions have followed the mapping exercise I described in my last blog entry. They drew maps to shed light on the lack of access to goods, services, and educational opportunities – where literacy happens – in economically depressed communities. The spatial inequality represented in the maps they drew led to questions about policies that have affected the lack of equity we witnessed: how have policies affected the built environment that surrounds us and what actions can we take to mitigate the effects of poverty on children and families? How can what we write frame conversations that prompt residents, educators, and policymakers to engage with one another to create access to what children and families need?   Addressing these and other questions has opened up spaces to discuss the ways writing is about creating relationships and changing conversations from problems to possibilities. Peter Block’s Community: The Structure of Belonging has provided a useful frame through which to understand the importance of using writing – especially stories – to invite disparate groups to the table, so to speak, and engage with one another. For Block, writing serves as an invitation to strengthen the fabric of communities by creating a sense of belonging. Individual transformation is not the point as much as imagining collective responsibility, relatedness, and forward action. Moreover, building community is also about seeing assets in a community, including people. Thus community change is not simply about identifying deficiencies and problems that need to be solved.   Block’s ideas have challenged some of the ways April Lidinsky and I have written about writing as conversation and the strategies for entering a conversation of ideas: understanding what writers have written before, what they may have overlooked or ignored in addressing a problem, and using writing as a way to fill gaps. These are useful ways to think about writing and Block’s formulation simply broadens the metaphor:   If we want a change in culture . . . the work is to change the conversation – or more precisely, to have a conversation that we have not had before, one that has the power to create something new in the world. This insight forces us to question the value of our stories, the positions we take . . . and our way of being in the world. (p. 15)   In this light, conversation can be broadly conceived and includes all of the ways that we use image and text to communicate in meaningful ways to one another in the different public spaces we inhabit.   Block goes on to explain that some stories we tell ourselves can limit our imagination and the possibilities before us. For example, my students and I discussed the extent to which policymakers and educators often place blame on individuals and the deficits that characterize children and families living in poverty. We shift the conversation by asking questions about the causes of poverty and by identifying the assets in a community that can increase social capital and civic engagement. The shift in conversation is from one of problems and fear to one of possibility and restoration. Thus the stories we tell are those that give meaning to our lives and enable us to lift up our voices.   In our writing, my students and I have framed the conversation in ways that Block has inspired: what can we create together to foster inclusion, relatedness, and perhaps reconciliation? Moreover, how can we use all forms of rhetoric as an invitation to ensure all voices are heard in building community and in ways that allow community members to take ownership in creating something that really matters? What new stories can a community create together that can become part of the public debate regardless of the current political context? How can we heal the fragmentation of communities and incivility as active citizens?   The conversation we enter, then, is the step that my students and I agree makes an alternative future possible. And entering conversations is the step toward active citizenship in communities where we are accountable to one another. Image Source: “7-Eleven” by Mr. Blue MauMau on Flickr 5/17/16 via Creative Commons 2.0 license ... View more

In talking to my students about the common logical fallacies, I stress that it is not as important that they are able to label a fallacy as it is to recognize when there is a problem with the logic in a given statement. The list of fallacies in our text and in every other argument text on the market, with variations, is useful for alerting them to what can go wrong with logic, but knowing the difference between a straw man and a red herring is less important than recognizing that the logic is skewed. That applies to seeing fallacies in what they read and hear, and also in what they write. You don’t have to look far in today’s newspaper or online news or listen too long to the news to hear logical fallacies. Our hope is that news reports will present facts and that commentary, where cases are built for or against interpretations of those facts, will be clearly labeled as commentary. Unfortunately, the line between hard news and commentary has become increasingly blurred. All it takes is comparing the coverage of an event by CNN and by Fox News to see that. Any controversial topic brings out flawed logic. The more controversial the issue, the more flawed the logic is likely to be because when emotions get involved, they can outweigh reason. Bias can change the way a story is covered simply because of what is included and what is left out. To be fair, reporting the facts alone of a case often includes a person’s stated reasons for his or her actions, and these reasons often include their own faulty logic. A fight breaks out aboard an airliner because one person is afraid to sit next to another because of the color of the other person’s skin or the clothes he is wearing. That’s a hasty generalization. To assume that to limit the sale of automatic weapons will lead to taking away everyone’s guns is a slippery slope. To justify one politician’s indiscretions because another politician is equally guilty of indiscretions illustrates the two-wrongs-make-a right fallacy. (They don’t.) For years, advertisers got away with false use of authority. An early ad claimed, “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” Actors who played doctors on television advertised all sorts of medications and cures. In an interesting recent play on that tradition, a group of television doctors admit in a series of Cigna ads that they only play doctors on television, but that they still want you to get an annual checkup. Is Marie Osmond or Jennifer Hudson any more qualified than any other user of a weight-loss program to argue for its efficacy? The claim to authority is only valid in such a case if the celebrity actually used or uses the product. In the political sphere, President Trump has actually been accused of ordering attacks on Syria as a red herring to draw attention away from the Stormy Daniels story. His administration has been compared to the early days of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, which most would classify as a false analogy, but some would not. Is blaming Hillary Clinton’s loss of the presidential election on a letter written by James Comey a post hoc fallacy or not? These examples are enough to suggest that students won’t have to look far if they are asked to bring in examples of logical fallacies from the news or from advertising. The class can discuss what is wrong with the logic and why. They can start to think about where logic goes wrong and maybe start to notice flawed logic when they see or hear it. Peer critiques of their argumentative essays can point out flawed logic that is so hard for a writer to see in his or her own writing. The terms matter much less than an eye or ear attuned to errors in reasoning. Image Source: “I Can Be Persuaded” by Martha Soukup on Flickr 10/30/10 via Creative Commons 2.0 license ... View more

In April 2014, I had the great pleasure of attending the First Symposium on Teaching Composition and Rhetoric at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. With the theme of “Let Our Voices be Heard,” the symposium was held at NC A&T and sponsored by publisher Bedford/St. Martin’s. Shortly after the symposium, I wrote about it, focusing on a powerful and provocative keynote address by Vershawn Young. (I also gave a keynote but didn’t need to talk about that!) As always happens when I get to visit an HBCU, I learned a ton–especially from the talented and vocal students who attended.   Everyone at that first symposium left hoping for another one, and this year our wishes came true: again sponsored by Bedford/St. Martin’s, chaired by David Green, and held at Howard University and at the United Negro College Fund offices in DC, this Symposium on Teaching Composition and Rhetoric at HBCUs: Remembering Our Pasts, Re-envisioning Our Future certainly lived up to my high expectations. Keith Gilyard closed out the first day with his keynote, “Paying the Price to Make the Mic Sound Nice,” in which he urged all of us to begin with who our students are, not where they are, and to put autobiography and an exploration of the “I” at the center of our teaching and writing. In Gilyard’s view, progressive education is characterized by “rigorous and democratic development of ‘I’” and by exploration of the social/political world our students inhabit.   The other conference keynote was delivered by my fabulous colleague Adam Banks. In “Hold My Mule: Black Twitter, Digital Culture, and a Renewed Version of Students’ Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL),” he offered a holistic view of what it means to “do language work,” demonstrating the influence of GIFs and memes especially in articulating and disseminating black culture. Arguing that if technology and technological issues are a key area of inquiry and if “Black expressive culture is on the rise, the goals in composition classes must change.” A renewed vision of SRTOL, then, would put an emphasis on Black language and rhetorical practices that go “far beyond the linguistic”; would go well beyond print; and see remix as an indisputable part of Black culture. These new foci would help us to completely rethink intellectual property (which, as Larry Lessig has long argued, we absolutely must do) and to create pedagogical and social spaces where young people can “come with the remix” as accepted and valued practice.   These very brief summaries don’t do justice to the rich talks given by Gilyard and Banks: for more from them, you can pre-order their forthcoming book, On African American Rhetoric.   While no open conflict erupted, it was clear that not everyone at the symposium embraced these “newfangled” ideas, and there were those who advocated adherence to standard edited English, citing a 2010 study that found that 58% of those using AAVE have writing problems and 73% have reading problems (see Abha Gupta, “African-American English: Teacher Beliefs, Teacher Needs, and Teacher Preparation Programs”). In spite of a lack of unanimity, I came away reminded, once again, that English has always been a plastic language, shifting and changing shape as it absorbed new features from many other languages and from many dialects. And there’s nothing I’d love more than a “renewed vision of SRTOL!”   Every panel I attended during the conference left me instructed and inspired. From Corrie Claiborne and Jamila Lyn’s description of a program they developed to work with young men at Morehouse around issues of gender and of sexual harassment, to ALEXANDRIA LOCKETT’s exploration of “Gender Politics of Excellence at HBCUs,” to Kendra Bryant’s forceful evocation of “Black Student Writers in the Social Media Age,” to Khirsten Echols’s “Turning the Page, Shifting the View: Considering HBCU Literacies,” and to a very powerful closing roundtable on the “Challenges and Triumphs of HBCUs” (featuring a searing testimonial by Faye Spencer Maor on why her work at HBCUs has been central to who she is and why she is where she is today) as well as Jason DePolo’s haunting reminder that “faculty working conditions [which are sorely lacking at most HBCUs] are student learning conditions.”   I could go on and on about this remarkable gathering, and I am grateful for the opportunity I had to learn from all these remarkable scholars. Best of all, I learned that there will be a THIRD symposium on HBCUs, this one to be held at Morehouse College in the Fall of 2019. You know I’ll be there! To view the full program from this year's symposium, visit the https://community.macmillan.com/community/the-english-community/hbcu-forum?sr=search&searchId=8a6ebc3f-57df-495a-93f4-68af7459b4af&searchIndex=0‌. ... View more

Today's guest blogger is Amanda Gaddam, an adjunct instructor in the First-Year Writing Program and the School for New Learning at DePaul University. She holds a B.A. in English with a concentration in Literary Studies and a M.A. in Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse with a concentration in Teaching Writing and Language from DePaul, and her research interests include first-year composition, adult and non-traditional students, and writing center pedagogies. I think I’ve been doing multimodality wrong—or at least, I’ve been doing it the same way that I’ve always done it since I began teaching years ago. When creating opportunities for multimodality in the classroom, I have focused primarily on the outcome and how students can fulfill an assignment objective by incorporating multiple or alternate media in their final product.  It only recently occurred to me, during a conversation with a student about her writing process and the challenges of stagnation, that multimodality might also be effectively integrated as part of the writing process, even if the final product looks like a traditional academic essay.   If creating multimodal texts helps communicate ideas in rhetorical ways tailored for particular audiences, then multimodal prewriting and revision activities may also help tailor the writing process for a writer’s individual needs, challenges, and strengths. The goal of the follow suggested multimodal writing activities is to encourage students to embrace the constructive value of multimodality during the drafting and revision processes, instead of just in its expressive value in an end product.   Background Reading The St. Martin’s Handbook Chapter 3: Exploring, Planning, and Drafting Chapter 4: Reviewing, Revising, Editing, and Reflecting The Everyday Writer (also available with Exercises) Chapter 8: Reflecting Chapter 22: Making Design Decisions EasyWriter (also available with Exercises) Chapter 6: Learning from Low-Stakes Writing Chapter 11: Creating Presentations   The Activities The following activities are merely suggestions to get you and your students thinking about how to incorporate multimodal writing into the writing process. There are countless options out there to which students may respond, and those options may also depend on your classroom, your schedule, and your assignments. I recommend that you follow up on these activities with a post-writing reflection component to encourage students to evaluate the effects of multimodal drafting and revision on their work.   Free vlogging For a multimodal twist on free writing, challenge students to set a ten minute timer and record themselves talking through their early ideas, questions, and/or issues related to their writing topic. As in written free writing, they should try to continue talking for the entire ten minutes—even if they run out of things to say or veer off topic. Not every minute of the video will be useful once they review the footage; however, by first verbalizing their ideas and subsequently evaluating them, students will gain a better perspective on where they’re at in the writing process, where the roadblocks and questions remain, and what they need to do to forge ahead. In the reflection component, you might ask students to compare their experiences with traditional free writing and free vlogging: In what ways are each effective for you? Ineffective or challenging? How might you incorporate this activity in future writing projects?   Interactive outlining Many students are tied, for better or for worse, to traditional outlining because it was required in high school or middle school composition courses. Fans of the traditional outline might consider using Prezi to create an interactive outline that highlights the relationships between ideas through movement and visual connections. For reflection, consider asking students to comment on the idea of “flow,” a buzzword often used in relation to writing and revision, but rarely defined. Interactive outlining may help students more clearly conceptualize what they mean by “flow” and how they might revise and reorganize their work to more effectively incorporate it into their final essay.   Reflexting One of my greatest challenges as an instructor is not knowing what students do with or think about my written comments on their work. Part of the issue, I think, is that sometimes students don’t know what the comments mean or don’t take the time to adequately engage with the feedback before revising their work and submitting it.   Ask students to use a free, online text message conversation generator like https://ifaketextmessage.com/ to create a conversation between your written comments and their reactions, questions, and plans for revision, all texted from their phones. Encourage them to embrace the genre by using emojis, gifs, and discourse-specific language rules to create their responses. Doing so will force students to engage with each and every comment, better equipping them to create a plan for revision. In the post-writing reflection, ask students to think about the degree to which they incorporated your comments compared to previous feedback experiences.      Reflection The activities suggested here and the countless other opportunities out there for incorporating multimodality into the drafting and revision processes are easy to fit into your existing course structure because they can complement nearly any scheduled writing assignment. Instead of just giving students time to draft, encouraging (okay—requiring) them to try something new and different might help them adopt practices that actually work, rather than those which are merely familiar. Perhaps most importantly, utilizing multimodal composing in this way allows both you and your students to expand preexisting definitions of pre”writing” and create essays with more depth and creativity. ... View more

  We’re at that point in the semester when students are hitting Maximum Anxiety about Grades. The corollary for instructors is Maximum Anxiety about Grading All The Things. Here’s a cure for both ills: sharing the responsibility for evaluation with students. I’d argue there’s no better measure of whether students understand your assignments and course goals than giving them the meta-cognitive opportunity to evaluate their own work with the tools you use as an instructor. After all, our hope is that long after students leave our classrooms, they will still be able to evaluate and strengthen their own work.  I’ll suggest two strategies I use to structure student self-evaluation in my classes, and I hope you’ll share your own strategies in the comments.   Strategy One: Cover Letters In our chapter on effective peer review of drafts in From Inquiry to Academic Writing, my co-author, Stuart Greene, and I recommend asking students to write cover letters for drafts of their papers for two reasons: It provides a chance for a writer to reflect on their perceptions of strengths and weaknesses of that particular draft, and it offers a conversation guide to others in their peer workshops. We offer this model for an early draft, which could be adapted for your purposes.  What is your question (or assignment)? What is the issue motivating you to write? How have published writers addressed the issue you discuss? What is your working thesis? Who is your audience, and how do you want them to respond? What do you think is working best? What specific aspect of the essay are you least satisfied with at this time? What kind of feedback do you especially want today? (p. 355) This line of questioning moves students from the disempowered position of “hoping to figure out what the instructor wants” to the empowered position of evaluating what they are achieving in their writing, with real readers in mind. Our experience is that these cover letters tell us as much about students as writers as the drafts themselves. Later drafts might call for cover letters shaped by general writing concerns of the course (integration of quotations, organization, addressing counterarguments, etc.).  Polished drafts might call for exactly the kind of self-reflection that all thoughtful writers should consider: What is your unique perspective on your issue? To what extent do the words and phrases you use reflect on who you believe your readers are? Does your style of citation reflect accepted conventions for academic writing? What do you think is working best? What specific aspect of the essay are you least satisfied with at this time? (p. 363)   Additionally, I ask students to explain what they are trying that is new in a draft, as a reminder that as writers, we all ought to keep stretching. (I reward risk-taking — even if the results are less than stellar — provided students can name and evaluate the strategy.) Students are sometimes nervous that pointing out their own weaknesses will steer me to problems I might have missed on my own. However, I remind them that their ability to point out where they need to grow is a significant goal of the course.                                                                                                                   Strategy Two: Using your rubric for self-grading and comments Our second strategy is a simple one: Hand your grading rubrics to your students and give them the opportunity not just to evaluate and comment on their writing, but to grade it as well.  If you have ever tried empowering students to grade themselves, you know there might be a few outliers who claim their work is stronger than it is, but by far the majority of students are either on target or low-ball their own grades.  Once students have a chance to take ownership and weigh in on their work, the context is laid for you as the instructor to agree with them, or to point out strengths that they might have missed. I don’t know a single instructor who looks forward to grading All The Things.  Empowering students to share ownership in the evaluation process helps them approach their writing from a strengths perspective rather than a deficit one, which is more clearly linked to what we know — that learning to write is a process. Our institutions may require us to enter a column of grades at the end of a semester, but if we invite students to share in the evaluation conversation, they will see that the letter grade is a mere stand-in for the much richer process of learning to write. Meme generated at imgflip.com, original drawing by Allie Brosh. ... View more

Teaching basic writing involves imagining more accessible classrooms for students that account for hearing losses of all kinds. That is, the loss of audible sound, and the signs of loss or trauma that may be inaudible and invisible for us, but not necessarily for our students. What if the seemingly glazed look, the head on the desk, the fingers busily at work on phone screens do not signify boredom or disrespect?  What if we, as teachers, learned to read “inappropriate behaviors” as part of a system of cognitive dissonance, a frustration with the incongruity of home, school, and working lives? What would it mean to think of hearing loss as the absence of audible sound, and also as listening to loss as expressed through audible and inaudible actions of our students? HEARING LOSS: Several years ago  I began to notice the benefits of universal design at conferences that I attended. For instance, I watched emotions unfold on the faces of the sign language interpreters at general sessions and discovered a dimension to language that I had not imagined before. At a meeting of the CCCC Committee on Disability Issues, I learned about CART and felt more relaxed reading the captions. I added closed captions to videos we watched in classes, as well as at home and in the office. Then I noticed in class that the steady hum from the projector seemed to muffle sound in the classroom. Students’ voices grew softer. I wondered if the changes were issues with auditory processing, a difference that can be associated with depression. But rather than self-diagnose, I visited an audiologist who confirmed moderate hearing loss. Universal design and the consciousness around accessibility gleaned from Disability Studies helped to ease the way.  Indeed, this is the purpose of accessibility, to create inclusiveness, to transform the stigma of difference. In a more accessible world, seamless transition is precisely the point. LISTENING TO LOSS: The writing process may involve dealing with emotional self-disclosures that students will rightfully not wish to reveal to teachers or classmates. This semester I am attempting to honor this wish while still offering students access to emotion through other means. In reading and writing about the works of Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, and Terry Tempest Williams, students can identify with the emotions of loss and resilience without having to write about such events in their own lives. At the same time, if students do make the choice to disclose their experiences, they are offered a resonant perspective for comparison and exploration. In practice, writing about “difficult times” often appears as writing that needs more development, specific details, and extended analysis. After reading through a recent round of rough drafts, I composed a letter to students that offered suggestions for riding out the storm. Here is a key recommendation: Be as specific as possible throughout the essay. Rather than saying “times are difficult,” mention specific events that SHOW your perspective on why times are difficult. Here are some examples (insert your own experience or opinion in place of these statements, and of course, as ever, only what you feel comfortable sharing): Tornado drills and school lockdowns made me feel unsafe in the classroom. The startling differences between the troubles of Oakland, California, and the fantastic beauty of the uncolonized nation of Wakanda, moved me to tears. Throughout the second half of Black Panther, I wept openly. The #metoo movement helped me to better understand my own situation because so many people openly discussed pain that had once been silenced. I invited students to consider my “English teacher” style as an example and not as a model, further suggesting that students explore their own styles of academic writing. In discovering how our style grows and changes over time and through particular genres, we also can gain access to hearing our own loss. By hearing the losses of others, we bear compassionate witness to experience in the lives of students and colleagues, no matter how different those lives may seem from our own. In recognizing hearing loss, I gain new perspective on the lives I encounter, moving closer to softer voices, and learning along with students to be as specific as possible to carry the weight of difficult times. ... View more

As readers of this blog know, I have long been a faculty member at Middlebury College’s famed Bread Loaf School of English, a MA program in English (language, literature, writing, rhetoric) aimed primarily at high school teachers. Over the decades, it’s been a huge privilege to work with teachers from all over the country (and some from beyond our shores), and especially to be associated with the Bread Loaf Teachers’ Network (BLTN), launched 25 years ago by the inimitable Dixie Goswami. I believe this is the first electronic teacher network, and it works to support teachers and their students, to provide resources, to encourage research and publication, and to hold meetings at the state and local level.   In turn, BLTN helped to launch the Next Generation Leadership Network, made up of middle and high school students at various sites around the country (I wrote about this exciting initiative in The Next Generation Leadership Network). One of these sites is on the Navajo Nation, and in late March, with funding from the Ford Foundation, Rex Lee Jim, Ceci Lewis, and their colleagues hosted the Hazhó’ó Hólne’ writing conference in Window Rock, AZ. (As Rex explained to me, the Navajo title translates to something like careful, purposeful, intentional, and beautifully crafted talk.) The conference’s subtitle, “Food for the Body, Mind, and Spirit: Creative Juices for Creative Expressions,” described the conference well: for two and a half days, we wrote, talked, sang, chanted, and performed. I came away exhilarated, instructed, and humbled (as I so often am) by the wisdom and grace of these young people.   In addition to the Navajo Nation group, students (and teachers) came from Atlanta, Georgia; Middlebury, Vermont; Louisville, Kentucky; Lawrence, Massachusetts; and Aiken, South Carolina. All were fiercely and passionately engaged; all were articulate; all were highly aware of the needs of their own communities—and all had plans for how to meet those needs. During our time together, we did workshops on graphic design, on writing effective op-ed pieces, on poetry, on blogging, on food metaphors and their meanings, on the crucial importance of water, on nature writing, on performance, and on the “lost art” of letter writing (students brainstormed about very important letters, including MLK’s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Phyllis Wheatley’s letter to George Washington, Paul’s Epistles, the Declaration of Independence, and the human letter of Henry “Box” Brown, who literally mailed himself to freedom in a wooden crate). We also listened to and explored traditional Navajo stories, songs, and prayers, presented by Rex Lee Jim.   Outside of our sessions, we talked together about environmental and social issues, such as the need to substitute water for sugary sodas, the need to plant and maintain gardens of fresh vegetables and fruit, and the need to act locally to elect officials responsive to such needs. As we concluded, everyone wrote a brief paragraph about what each had gained/learned during the weekend. Reading these when I got home not only brought the conference back to the center of my attention; it also electrified me, filled me with hope for a future led by these brilliant, engaged, and wise young people.   And that’s really the greatest gift of teaching in general and teaching writing in particular: working with and learning from brilliant, engaged, and wise young people.   Credit: Pixabay Image 1986107 by rawpixel, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

I had the privilege of presenting as part of a CCCC panel on “Writing about Writing at the Community College” a couple of weeks ago in Kansas City (along with Elizabeth Johnston and Angelique Johnston of Monroe Community College in Rochester, NY). One theme reiterated throughout the panel is that implementation of writing about writing pedagogy needs to be rooted in the “community” of the community college – the local context and culture. In my case, the context is teaching writing about writing in a sheltered ESL first-year composition course with an IRW co-requisite. I use six “anchor” texts that introduce my students to writing about writing (WAW) during the term, and students write about these (multiple times) in connection with other essays drawn from our departmentally selected reader. The first assignment for students is a literacy narrative; they connect their own experiences to those of other writers and to the concept of Discourse (from the work of James Gee, our first anchor text). The literacy narrative has revealed a lot about the language, reading, and writing experiences of my students. This semester I decided I wanted more information about my students’ reading habits and strategies, beyond the stories they had chosen to tell in their first assignment. Mid-term, I gave students an anonymous survey to gauge how they were working through our anchor texts, by far the most challenging of the reading assignments in the course. I queried them about the amount of time spent on these, the number of times each text was read, and the strategies they used—as well as the areas that caused the most trouble and the suggestions they had for me to facilitate their reading efforts. Some of the findings were expected: students were reading the challenging selections less than 3 times, on average, and spending an average of 3-4 hours (total) with each one, despite my recommendations to revisit them multiple times. Students also reported that the vocabulary was the primary impediment to reading, and they requested reading and vocabulary guides in advance of the readings. Given the experiences they have described in previous English language instruction, these findings were not surprising. Fifty percent of my current students also asked for more time to discuss the readings in class, and many commented that they don’t feel comfortable with the readings until after class discussion. Again, given their accounts of previous education experiences (in which there was no need to do assigned reading in advance because instructors would “go over it” in the next class) these comments were expected. But when I asked students what strategies they were using when reading outside of class, I noticed something I had not seen before: while almost all students reported annotating texts (as we have taught them to do) and using dictionaries or translators, only one student reported talking to another student about the text, and none reported talking to an instructor about the text outside of class. Also, students said they did not use graphs, charts, or pictures to organize their thinking about the readings, even though we frequently create such charts, graphs, outlines, and pictures (as well as paraphrases and responses) in class.   These results led to an epiphany about my students’ reading process: this particular group views “text-talking” and making visual representations of assigned texts as teacher-directed, in-class processes. Their literacy narratives suggest that they engage in text-talk easily enough when it comes to self-selected reading, but that practice has not transferred as a strategy for approaching academic texts. So this is my next IRW challenge: how can I foster text-talk and visual representations of texts outside of the classroom as reading strategies? Of course, I could assign an out-of-class discussion, require students to stop by my office and chat, or work with a team to build a graphic presentation before class. But will these activities transfer beyond my class as effective strategies for reading complicated texts? I can’t answer that yet. I will need to keep experimenting. What are you doing to get your students engaged in “text-talk,” especially for challenging academic readings? Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post?  Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

  Today's featured guest blogger is Lisa DuRose, Professor at Inver Hills Community College “These characters and what they represent are things that I normally don’t read about, but these stories compel me to look at the reality that some women face.”   My student, quoted above, echoes what many others tell me about the works we read in my Introduction to Literature course: these selections are not their usual reading material and these characters have little in common with the protagonists they’ve encountered in some of their favorite works. At this point in the semester, students have been unsettled by characters who face poverty, mental illness, and death. This week, however, we venture into a terrain that is even more emotionally challenging. We are reading a collection of short stories by contemporary author Bonnie Jo Campbell entitled Mothers, Tell Your Daughters. Campbell’s stories often feature strong working class women who mitigate dangerous terrain—troubled relationships, economic hardships, and addiction. Campbell’s first person narrators, however, often present the greatest opportunity for critical analysis. In some instances, these narrators are processing through sexual assault and molestation, and readers are drawn into each woman’s effort to sort out the traumatic details of these violations.  Although we know that posts about sexual assault and harassment swarm students'Twitter feeds, we may be reluctant to engage students in substantial discussions about these highly charged topics for fear that we are ill-prepared to deal with the emotional impact they may have. However, those of us who teach literature understand that the tools of our discipline provide a framework for such discussions. Through the lens of literary devices and critical approaches, we can create a space that allows for both analytical understanding and social empathy, even as we venture through the most emotionally vulnerable themes.  In the case of Campbell’s stories, I ask students to consider how the author’s choice of narration allows readers to glimpse the thoughts of protagonists who have suffered through sexual assault. To aid in their analysis, I provide students with ample background information: my video interview Interview with Bonnie Jo Campbell: Difficult Topics in Literature, a critical essay I’ve written about Bonnie Jo Campbell's Sources of Inspiration, and several reviews of the short story collection. These resources coupled with Campbell’s writing style—which is both lyrical and plain spoken—move my students toward a critical space that invites exploration rather than judgment. Applying literary techniques to Campbell’s story “Playhouse” has led to complex discussions about the roots of sexual violence and the often complicit social responses they prompt, especially among family members. In this piece, Janie, the narrator, gradually discovers that she was gang raped three weeks earlier during a party at her brother’s house. She “feels sick and weird” (15) and her brother hasn’t returned her phone calls. The story opens with Janie returning to her brother’s house and learning that her brother, who recalls more about that night than Janie, is inclined to chastise his sister’s behavior and excuse the actions of his friends, one of whom he calls “a decent guy” (31). As Janie struggles to piece together her memories of that evening, the reader glimpses the emotional nuances of her discovery—experiencing first confusion, doubt, guilt, and then a sort of sickening knowledge. However, even as the events of that night become more lucid, she still struggles to identify the violation. After she tells her brother that she thinks she’s been raped, she second guesses herself: “The word raped feels all wrong, and my heart pounds in a sickening way” (31). When she says the word again, “it feels even more off-kilter, like I really am a drama queen, creating from thin air a victim and perpetrators and accessories” (31). Students are quick to comment about how upsetting this story is, but I’ve noticed that when they are asked to frame their responses around questions of literary techniques, they are able to articulate a deeper understanding of the stories and the theme. When students are asked to apply a range of critical responses—including feminist, Marxist, and reader-response—their interpretations are even more enhanced. Since many of Campbell’s protagonists live in poverty, students learn about the connection between sexual assault and poverty through Callie Marie Rennison’s New York Times article “Who Suffers the Most From Rape and Sexual Assault in America,” which explores how “women in the lowest income bracket are sexually victimized at about six times the rate of women in the highest income bracket (households earning $75,000 or more annually).”  For some students, these topics are highly personal; a few will identify themselves as victims of sexual violence, often commenting about the realistic depictions in these stories. In every case, these revelations have enhanced the level of respect and community in the classroom. These are difficult topics to discuss, but such conversations are already happening outside of the classroom. When we include them in a literature classroom, we can provide a framework that not only enriches our students’ knowledge but stretches their capacity for empathy. ... 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Today's guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn‌, a Professor in the English Department at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning, 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. Multimodal composition relies heavily on the relationship between text and image. As teachers in this context we can emphasize to students that composing images takes the same kind of thought and energy as composing written texts. We consider our audience, purpose, subject matter, and context and make rhetorical choices that communicate meaning. Of course, students can just snap pictures and capture strong images by happenstance, but I try to get them to understand that composing images involves rhetorical strategies and an understanding of visual rhetoric. Kenneth Louis Smith in the Handbook of Visual Communications (Routledge, 2005), helps make that distinction.  Not every visual object is visual rhetoric. What turns a visual object into a communicative artifact--a symbol that communicates and can be studied as rhetoric--is the presence of three characteristics. . . . The image must be symbolic, involve human intervention, and be presented to an audience for the purpose of communicating with that audience. This definition is a good place to start our conversation. How do we symbolize? What is the difference between literal and representative images? How can we use visuals to move beyond pretty pictures and create persuasive communication? I use this and other sources to introduce students to the idea of image rhetorics and discuss particular rhetorical strategies to consider while composing visuals. I find it useful for students to think about metaphors and their relationship to designing visual content. Thoughtco.com and other online sources offer glossaries and definitions for rhetorical devices and visual metaphors. I also use Sean Morey’s discussion of Image Rhetorics (The Digital Writer) to investigate terms and to help initiate students into learning the language of visual composition. He discusses the following rhetorical lenses and image categories: Analogy, Metaphor, Metonomy, Synecdoche, Enthymeme and provides detailed visual examples of each. Morey also talks about the importance of text and image relationships and suggests terms like Anchorage and Relay, Juxtaposition and the distinction between Denotation and Connotation. Students learn the language of visual composition and start to see ways to change and enhance their visual composing practices through this assignment.  Background Resources: The St. Martin’s Handbook: Ch. 16, Design for Print and Digital Writing; Ch. 17, Presentations The Everyday Writer (also available with exercises😞 Ch.22, Making Design Decisions; Ch. 23, Presentations  EasyWriter (also available with exercises😞 Ch.3, Making Design Decisions; Ch. 11, Creating Presentations Steps of the assignment: Have students study and learn image rhetoric terms and strategies. Look online for examples that demonstrate the principles of visual rhetoric. Gather students into teams and have each team compose a collaborative Image Rhetoric Slide show through Google Slides. Each student is responsible for a single slide that features a different rhetorical term in which they 1) Define the term, 2) Compose an original visual example, and 3) Provide an explanation of the meaning they are trying to communicate (and what makes it effective). Students present the slide shows in class and discuss examples. Reflection: It is one thing to understand a definition and repeat its characteristics on a test. It is another to apply that knowledge through this kind of exercise. Students found interesting connections and creative ways of presenting persuasive visual communication. Students come to see larger connections between cultural concepts and learn how images can bring complicated ideas together in impactful ways. For example, Aiden’s slide provides an analysis of metaphors, creatively combines two concepts, and draws a “comparison between unhealthy fried foods known to be carcinogenic like fries and tobacco products.” This assignment helps students understand that many of the messages around them are composed through these lenses and that they can actively compose persuasive visual images of their own.  I have included two of the team presentations below: Team 1 – Image Rhetorics Presentation Team 2 – Image Rhetorics Presentation Let me know what you think in the comments. ... View more