Last Spring I left off in this blog with an exploration of what I called “The Uses of Objectivity.” That essay probed the inadvertent relationships between poststructural theory and the current climate of “alternative facts” and “post-truth” claims.  Since then I’ve run across an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education that could have been written in response to mine, and while it actually wasn't, I'd like to continue the discussion a bit here.   The Chronicle essay I’m referring to here is Andrew J. Perrin’s “Stop Blaming Postmodernism for Post-Truth Politics.” That's an easy request to honor: certainly the supporters 0f such alt-fact politicians as Donald Trump can hardly be expected to have been influenced by —much less, have read—the texts of contemporary postmodern theory.  So by all means let's take postmodernism off the hook in this regard.  The question is not how postmodernism has affected what is often referred to as the "populist" politics of Trumpism; the question is how educators can best contest, in the classroom, the contentions of the post-truth world.  My position on this question is that educators who wish to do so would do well not to deconstruct, in a postmodern fashion, the fundamental grounds for things like scientific consensus, while Perrin, for his part, feels that we need more postmodernism in the face of the post-truth era because of the way that it exposes the ways in which "all claims, beliefs, and symbols are tied up with the structures of power and representation that give rise to them."    Now, the originator of this postmodern approach to power/knowledge was, of course, Michel Foucault.  It is central to his entire notion of "discourse," which itself descended from his essentially poststructural (poststructuralism is an academic species of the larger cultural genus postmodernism) adaptation of the structuralist position that reality (and the knowledge thereof) is constructed by systems of signs.  That is to say, the signified, in the structuralist view, is not something detected outside the sign system: it is constituted by the sign system.  From here it is not a very large step to the poststructural position that whoever controls the sign system controls what counts as "reality," as "truth" itself.    There is certainly no shortage of historical instances in which this vision of power/knowledge has indeed been played out.  The Third Reich, for example, rejected relativity theory as "Jewish physics," and that was that as far as Germany was concerned.  George Orwell, for his part, gave dramatic expression to this sort of thing in 1984: 2+2=5 if Big Brother says so.   Thus, it comes down to a simple question.   What is a more effective response to the post-truth claim, for example, that climate science is hoax: the position that all scientific claims are expressions of power/knowledge, or the position that concrete empirical evidence gets us closer to the truth of climate change than do the claims of power?  This is not a rhetorical question, because I do not suppose that everyone will agree with my own answer to it, which happens to be as simple as the question itself:  I prefer to oppose power/knowledge with objectively measurable data.  For me, reality is not subject to a referendum.   Interestingly, the late Edward Said—who helped put Foucault on the American literary-critical map in his book Beginnings—came to identify another problem that arises with respect to postmodern power theory when he criticized Foucault for effectively denying the element of human responsibility in power relations by treating power as a nebulous "formation" that is expressed socially and historically rather than being wielded by empowered individuals (which happens to be a poststructural view on power that parallels the structuralist position on the relationship between langue and parole).  Such a view could provide support for the many voters who did not vote in the 2016 presidential election due to their belief that both major parties expressed the same neoliberal and capitalist power formations.  I think that the aftermath of that election makes it pretty plain that individuals do wield power and in different ways, no matter what the current larger power/knowledge formation may be.   And just as interestingly, as I was putting the finishing touches on this blog, an essay by Mark Lilla appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education saying substantially the same thing: i.e., if students accept "the mystical idea that anonymous forces of power shape everything in life," they "will be perfectly justified in withdrawing from democratic politics and casting an ironic eye on it."  Now, two Humanities professors in agreement doth not a movement make, but it's heartening to see that my thoughts are shared by someone else. ... View more

For the first time since starting this blog five years ago, I took a bit of a break for part of July. I’ve had a very busy writing summer, and, like many other teachers, I also like to spend some time trying to get caught up on reading books and journals. So I’m writing today to say I hope all of you have had a good summer, thus far, and I hope that the coming school year will bring some joy amid the anxiety we are all feeling about health care, education, and the state of our country. I also come with a recommendation: a review essay in the March 2017 issue of College English. “Literacy Hope and the Violence of Literacy: A Bind that Ties Us,” by Kirk Branch, is definitely worth a read.   Branch’s provocative and thoughtful review addresses four books: Paul Feigenbaum’s Collaborative Imagination: Earing Activism through Literacy Education; Michael Harker’s The Lure of Literacy: A Critical Reception of the Compulsory Composition Debate, Todd Ruecker’s Transiciones: Pathways of Latinas and Latinos Writing in High School and College, and Amy Wan’s Producing Good Citizens: Literacy Training in Anxious Times. While Branch ends up discussing each book in some detail, he sets the entire discussion in the context of the bind all literacy teachers and scholars face—between what Harvey Graff calls the “literacy myth,” of hope and faith in the power of literacy to liberate and to solve many ills, including social inequality; and what Elspeth Stuckey calls “the violence of literacy,” its power to oppress, punish, and subjugate.   I read Stuckey’s book when it came out twenty-five years ago, and I still remember literally reeling from my encounter with her rage against a system that has not only withheld literacy but also used literacy to punish people. I still remember, in this same vein, hearing an African American textile worker from South Carolina tell of being beaten in middle school when she misspelled names of bones in the body: when she told her mother what had happened, her mother said “I can’t go complain to those white people, but you don’t ever have to go to that school again.” I’m here using deliberately stark terms to illustrate the “bind,” as Branch describes, to make the point that all teachers of writing will inevitably encounter the poles of this divide. But of course, such binaries are never simple, never easy, and this one is no different. Issues surrounding literacy and our relationship to literacy are deeply complex; they are also intertwined with ideology and with the stories we tell about education in the United States. Beyond complex, really. But recognizing this complexity and resisting either pole long enough to look closely at our own goals, and to see how they are implicated in institutional systems that almost certainly work against those goals, is a necessary step in coming to grips with both “literacy hope” and “the violence of literacy.”   Branch finds admirable things in each of these books, but in the end Feigenbaum’s seems most fascinating to him:   In the end, what I find so compelling about Feigenbaum’s book is that he wholly engages the contradictions at the heart of literacy education, that he understands the ways his own teaching is implicated in the sort of violence at the heart of Stuckey’s analysis, that the necessary impossibility of achieving the goals he attaches to progressive literacy education does not mean that it will fail. (420) As we begin a new school year (and with a Secretary of Education who is no friend to public education or to progressive literacy education), it seems especially important to reflect on the “binds” that tie us—sometimes into knots (!), sometimes into productive and useful and meaningful work with young writers. As Branch puts it, we can at least hope that these binds “tie us together, that they allow us to work with others within and outside our disciplines to understand and continually to reimagine the potential of literacy education in anxious times.” Credit: Pixaby Image 2482275 by cocoparisienne, used under a CC0 Public Domain License ... View more

When I teach annotated bibliography, I have the class do a "talk show" activity. I ask students to imagine that they are producers of a morning talk show, and I give each small group their topic for the day. To one group, I say your show is going to be on whether to continue music instruction as part of the public school curriculum, to another group I say, your show is going to tackle how to protect the American drinking water supply, and so forth. The job of the producers is to think about who they're going to invite to be a guest on their show. What experts do they need? What angles should they explore? What statistics would be helpful? We talk about how dull it would be to have 7 different guests who all say that music ed is a waste of taxpayer money or how people would turn the show off if they heard only a bunch of data about water quality. We also talk about the value of having leading thinkers on our talk show. While an occasional regular consumer or parent is fine, audiences generally respond better to scientists, researchers, doctors, and psychologists. The class activity is for each group of producers to compose and present a proposal to the class (acting as the talk show executives). They have to present a guest list and rationale for each guest. The activity gets students to think actively about gathering sources and thinking through the roles that they need their sources to play in a project. Too often students hunt for sources that are all in "the same lane," as I say in class; they all sort of line up with the student's own thesis. The activity also goes along nicely with our reading, sections R1 and R3 in A Writer's Reference, especially the subsections on search strategy and thinking about the variety of ways in which sources contribute to a project (as support, as counterargument, as data, as definition, and so on).  Are there activities that you find useful as you prepare to teach annotated bibliography? ... View more

Admittedly, I am guilty of using too many exclamation points in my personal emails and text messages. I do try to avoid them in the email messages that I write to students and my colleagues, however. I have been even more self-conscious about exclamation points since my summer school class had a discussion about what you should and shouldn’t do in email messages at work. Turns out, there are some pretty strong feelings about whether to use exclamation points at all, where to use them if you must, who you can use them with, and exactly how to use them. I thought it might be fun this week to share some of the resources the class explored as background readings for the discussion: Exclamation Points, by Mignon Fogarty (Grammar Girl) offers an excerpt from David Crystal’s Making a Point How Many Exclamation Points Do Great Writers Use?! by Elmore Leonard, on The Atlantic website What Overusing Exclamation Points Says about You, from the BBC website After Years Of Restraint, A Linguist Says ‘Yes!’ To The Exclamation Point, from Fresh Air Do You Really Need That Exclamation Point? from Hubspot Avoiding Exclamation Point Overuse, from the Grammarly blog Everyone’s favorite was the Hubspot piece. It ends with a somewhat satirical flowchart that suggests you definitely shouldn’t use exclamation points. It’s a fun flowchart, so I want to share it. Click here to see the full-size version. I particularly like the alternative suggestions included in the flowchart. It goes beyond just telling readers to avoid the exclamation point by telling them what they can do instead. It doesn’t hurt that students found it humorous but truthful as well. Do you have any fun resources for talking about punctuation in the classroom? Please share them in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you!—exclamation point intended 🙂     Credit: Grumpy Cat meme from Meme Generator ... View more

On a visit to see my beloved grandnieces Audrey (now 13!) and Lila (9), we had lots of time to talk about the school year, review accomplishments, and discuss plans for next year (when Audrey will be in 8 th and Lila in 4 th grade). They were both upbeat about their EOGs (end-of-grade tests, a new term to me) and, in fact, Audrey even won a medal following the results of her French exam, and Lila had made great progress in math (her nemesis). Lots of excitement about summer camps: two leadership camps, a sleepover singing camp at UNC Greensboro, a two-week farm camp with lots of time to learn about and play with animals, and a couple of others—a busy summer, I thought.   But then Lila said, “but don’t forget reading and writing!” Indeed, she is already signed up for her local library reading program and is busily choosing the books (lots of animal books!) she will read as she competes for points and prizes. But then there’s writing! During my visit, Lila had mentioned (over and over!) that she wanted a particular kind of journal, which she described in great detail. We went to Target, where she thought her friend had seen it, and looked at every journal in the huge store, dozens and dozens of them. We pointed out any number of attractive journals, but without luck: Lila wanted this very particular journal and nothing else would do. I’ll admit to being a little exasperated—a journal is a journal, or so I thought. But Lila insisted this one was different: “it has plans in it,” she said, “and it gives you ideas.” Back to the drawing board . . . and online to search.   Eventually we found it: Your Diary: Your Own Unique Reality. And sure enough, it did have plans in it, and a lot of prompts: You can see the “heavenly” jacket Lila drew along with her “perfect backpack” and the beginning of her discussion of what made her day so “incredible.” What surprised me was how invested in this journal Lila was: she began working on it as soon as we got it and practically had to be separated from it by force at bedtime. The next day she was back at it again, having such fun writing stories, making up jokes, drawing pictures, and recording details of her life. Before I left, she said, with a huge smile on her face, “I’m going to go to college and major in writing.”   Now that’s music to any writing teacher’s ears! I look forward to following along as Lila writes in her journal throughout the summer and as she reads through the stack of books she has accumulated. It occurs to me that there couldn’t be much better preparation for 4 th grade, or for life, than reading and writing for pleasure over the summer. And I say “bravo, brava” to all the libraries running reading programs and for all those publishers creating journals that captivate young minds!   Credit: Photos by Andrea Lunsford ... View more

In every writing assignment, I ask students to use what they know about layout and design to create a project that is clear and easy to read. The work that they turn in tells me that I need to incorporate more support to help them understand new document and online design work. Students seem able to copy the models that I share, but they tend to be lost when there are no models or when their content doesn’t fit the model precisely. It’s time to reflect and rethink. What I Have Been Doing I always spend a week on assignments related to design. Students read the chapter(s) in our textbook and I ask them to discuss various examples. I particularly like Robin Williams’ discussion of the use of contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity (2014), so I add resources that include those ideas. Most recently, I have used Lynda.com tutorials that demonstrate the ideas, as students have free access to the videos at Virginia Tech. In addition, I share these infographics, which repeat and demonstrate the principles:  Elements of Design Quick Reference Principles of Design Quick Reference The 50 Most Important Rules of Document Design: Color CRAYON-TIP Method We discuss these principles in our online forums, and I ask students to apply the principles to some of the documents in the course. I ask students to apply the principles to the infographics themselves, for instance, to give them some experience in paying attention to visual design. Finally, I ask them to apply the ideas to their projects specifically by mentioning it in peer review guidelines, revision checklists, and project rubrics. As it stands now, I think students do not get enough practice in actually working through design principles. They analyze design, but their actual work is limited to applying that information to their projects. Additionally, I think students are trying to do too many new things at once. Because they focus on the content and requirements for their projects, design becomes a secondary concern, and, thus, it doesn’t get adequate attention. New Strategies to Try Here are a number of ideas that I have brainstormed (in no particular order) to give students more practice with design. In each, I have given students existing content so that they can focus their effort on design. For these particular activities, I am excluding video and audio projects. Plain to Formatted. Students will take a plain chunk of text, about one page long, and use the principles of contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity to make the text more readable. The original and the formatted version must designed to be printed with a printer that only has black ink (e.g., no colors). They can use any basic typography (fonts, size, and so forth) as well as any layout strategies. They may revise the text to fit their new design, but for this particular activity they are limited to typography and layout. They may not add images, photos, clipart, or shapes. Highlight Your Inspiration/Beliefs. Choose an inspirational or important quotation related to your professional goals. The author of the quotation might be a business leader, a well-known scientist, or a relevant historical figure. Aim for a quotation that is no more than 10 to 12 words. Use document design to create an 8.5" by 11" poster that features the quotation. Use the principles of contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity to make the key ideas stand out. Use color, images, photos, and/or shapes to complement your message. Your design should be something you would be willing to print out and hang up in your office at work. Increase the Wow Factor. Visit the Campus News site and choose a story that would be of interest to students at the university. Use the content from the news story to create a one-page, single-sided 8.5" by 11" poster that could be posted on the many bulletin boards in the hallways of buildings on campus. Sticking to the facts of the original news story, create a poster that will catch the attention of students casually walking down the hall. You can use any document design elements, and you can revise the text of the story, as long as you do not change the facts or add misleading information. Revise to Solve a Problem. Find a short document (no more than one 8.5" by 11" page) that violates one or more of the principles of contrast, repetition, alignment, and/or proximity. Use the document to create a how-to explanation on how to improve the design in order to increase readability and interest. Your how-to should show the original document and a revised, improved version (a before and after). Focus on Headings. Choose a page from the Historical Digest pages for any Virginia Tech President. These pages are basic text, broken into paragraphs. Copy the historical information to your word processor, and add headings that provide information-rich signposts to the document. Once your headings have been added, a reader should be able to scan down the page and see the key achievements or events relevant to the particular president. Convert the Table. Review the content from the table on the Virginia Tech Enrollments page. While the information is clearly arranged, because there are over 100 lines in the table, you may find that it is hard to do more than scroll up and down the page. Use what you know about document design to present the information in a better way that will be more readable for visitors to the site. You can use any document design elements, but do not change the facts or change the layout or design in ways that would mislead readers. Pin It! [Part One] Find three images online that demonstrate each of the principles of contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity (for a total of 12 images). Copy and paste the images into a word processor document, and add a description that explains which principle the image illustrates and explains how the image demonstrates the principle. Alternately, if you have a Pinterest Account, you can make a Document Design board, and pin the images you find to that board. Be sure that you include the description. [Part Two] Once you have gathered your 12 images from online documents, go through your own work and find two more examples for each design principle (for a total of 8 more). Take screenshots or photos of your work, crop the images to focus on the use of the design principles and add them to your word processor document or Pinterest board. Syllabus Redesign. Take a section from a syllabus from another course that you are taking, and use the document design principles to revise the information to make it more readable. A student who looks at the syllabus after your revision should have an easier time finding information in the section and understanding the details related to the course. Turn in your "before" and "after" versions of the syllabus section with a description of what you changed and how the changes reflect better document design. For the purposes of this assignment, you may not use any syllabus or course documents that the instructor has written. Slideshow Redesign. Choose either a slideshow that you have created for another course OR a slideshow that someone else has created. Find a slide in the slideshow that can be improved by applying document design principles. Revise the slide to improve its readability, paying attention to how the slide will be projected onto a screen. Think in particular about the size of fonts needed for the audience to read the information. If needed, you can convert your one slide into more than one slide to make it more readable. Turn in your "before" and "after" versions of the slide with a description of what you changed and how the changes reflect better document design. For the purposes of this assignment, you may not use any slideshows that the instructor has written. Show Your Style. Create a style guide for yourself, your company, or an organization you belong to that outlines the key elements of document design that you will follow, including typography, color, contrast, and layout. The goal is to create document design guidelines that will give the work you compose unity and coherence. The guidelines should help set a document design brand for you, your company, or your organization. Once you have established your guidelines, apply them to a short piece that you have written recently. Incorporate the "before" and "after" versions in your guidelines to demonstrate how the principles should be applied. What activities do you use in your classes to teach students document design principles? I would love to hear from you in the comments below.  Credit: Alphabet 1 by Brenda Clarke, on Flickr, used under a CC-BY 2.0 license ... View more

I recently had a chance to join Susan Thomas, Alyssa O’Brien, and students in the University of Sydney’s beginning writing class (to be renamed “Introduction to Academic Writing” in 2018) via Skype to talk about the role writing should (will!) play in their lives. I met the students in an auditorium (there are nearly 200 enrolled in the class) during their once-a-week, one-hour “lecture,” which is augmented by another hour spent in tutorial groups of 25 and a third hour of online writing activities.  Susan is working to include more tutorial time next year, as data gathered from students indicates that they would prefer that, as would Susan. In describing the course, she goes on to say:   While WRIT1000 is a first-year course, students can take it at any time, including summer and winter school. It's not unusual for third and fourth year students to enroll just prior to graduation, to brush up on writing skills for job applications, etc. In fact, in one of my tutorials this semester, not a single student is a first-year!   There are five short assignments in the class, with each building on/towards the others in a portfolio style. We have a sentence task, a paragraph task, a research task, a peer review task, and a final reflection task. Each person teaching the course does the grading for her tutorials. We focus on sentences and paragraphs and the analysis of these, with the idea being that students leave WRIT1000 ready to write essays in WRIT1002, our advanced writing course; and we have two 2000-level courses focusing more on rhetorical analysis. We have two 3000-level courses, one focusing on workplace writing and the other on rhetorical theory. We have five graduate courses on professional writing and editing, ESL/EAL, and thesis (dissertation) writing.   These courses are all part of the Writing Minor in the Department of Writing Studies, which will launch in 2018. In addition, some years ago Susan founded the "Writing Hub" at U Sydney, which is their writing center and which will also be part of the new Department. All very exciting!   During the hour I spent with the WRIT1000 class, I was delighted to find the Australian students (who were majoring in a wide variety of disciplines) engaged as well as very engaging. I spoke for perhaps 15 or 20 minutes, sharing the findings of some major research studies that link the ability to communicate effectively, in both writing and speaking, to success in many fields—from astronomy to zoology and everywhere in between. Since Susan had told me that many of her students take a fairly dim view of collaboration (which seems to fly in the face of the importance their culture places on self-reliance, at best, and might be a form of cheating, at worst), I took some time to talk about how much we know about the value of being able to work (and write) effectively with others, an ability highly valued by many professions and absolutely necessary in an age when it is increasingly difficult (or impossible) for a single researcher working alone to solve the kinds of complex problems facing many organizations and companies today. Noting the Stanford Study of Writing finding that “dialogic interaction” was key to major learning experiences in the college years, I asked how many had collaborated with others, in learning or in writing. A few hands went up, and I hope to follow up on this question with Susan as the term progresses.   During the Q and A session that followed, students stepped up with alacrity, asking important and substantive questions—from intellectual property conventions in terms of collaboration, in general, and collaborative writing, in particular; to why conventions shift from discipline to discipline (such as the use of first person or the passive voice); to tips for revision for both monolingual and multilingual writers.   Any worries I had that the hour might be filled with awkward silences proved completely unfounded, and at the end of our time together I only wished to extend it further. I’m hoping some of the students might take up my invitation to write to me: I have a lot of questions I’d love to ask them about their experiences with writing in and out of class at Sydney—as well as about how they define writing and what they think writing is most useful for. So bravo and brava Aussie writers!   Credit: Pixaby Image 2093745 by Wokandapix, used under a CC0 Public Domain License ... View more

What is the most important thing for the success of online discussions? Students need something engaging to talk about. I have spent the last month talking about my Goal to Improve Online Discussions. I have talked about providing more preparation, increasing low-stakes discussions, and getting more involved in the discussions myself. None of those strategies will work, however, if I don’t have strong discussion prompts and assignments. So, this week, I’m going to think through an assignment.   Purpose of the Assignment The goal for this discussion is to talk about audience analysis and the impact of the choices writers make when they compose messages. I am designing the activity for students in technical and business writing courses, but it can easily be adapted for any course, which I will address at the end of this post.   Underlying Theory for the Approach Students are language experts who have great skills at communicating. CCCC’s resolution on Students’ Right to Their Own Language (1974, reaffirmed in 2003) outlines the expertise that students bring to the classroom, including the details on the dialects and language variation that make their communication unique. In this activity, students explain their understanding and use of language and then work to align that understanding with communication in new settings and uses.   Specifically, smartphone-toting students love emoji, sometimes sending entire messages consisting of the images. They are experts in this visual language. In this activity, students talk about how they use emoji and then consider how the visual language works in other settings.   Background Readings for Students Prior to the discussion, students will read about audience analysis, purpose, and emoji. For technical and business writing students, the chapter in the course textbook on audience and purpose is the obvious choice. Online resources are also available, such as the Purdue OWL Audience Analysis Overview.   Additionally, students read some resources about the use of emoji in professional settings, such as the following: 5 Etiquette Rules for Using Emojis at Work (article) Think Emoticons are NSFW? Think Again. (infographic) Why Emoji Are Suddenly Acceptable at Work (Except the eggplant) (article) Emojis and Emoticons Often Clarify Messages (article)   Discussion Prompts For this activity, students will begin with a very specific use of emoji in the workplace. After this discussion, they will react to one another’s opinions and then create some guidelines for using (or not using) emoji in professional communication. Students will begin with this prompt:   Share an audience analysis of an emoji. Choose an emoji that no one else in your group has written about, and explain what the emoji means and how it is used. Consider the ideas about emoji in the workplace from this week’s readings as you make your selection. If you have trouble, think about how you use the emoji and how someone older might use it. Have some fun with this, but keep the explanations polite.   Go to the Slack channel for your group. Choose an emoji that shows up in Slack (See emoji help in Slack). Write a post that includes the emoji and explains how different audiences might interpret it. Provide some examples. Discuss whether you would use the emoji in the workplace, explaining what audiences and situations it would be appropriate for as well as when it would be inappropriate. Once you post your analysis, read through the posts by others in your group and add responses to at least three. You can write replies and/or use emoji   As I am by no means an emoji expert, I should easily be able to enter the discussion (in line with my goal to get more involved myself) by asking for clarification on the explanations that I don’t understand. To prepare for my interaction in the conversation, I have brainstormed some potential questions and responses that I can use. Here are some examples, which use “[insert emoji]” to indicate where I would add the emoji that the student was discussing:   I wouldn’t have guessed [insert emoji] had that definition. How do you think that meaning evolved? Are there any nuances to using [insert emoji]? Is it always okay [or wrong]? Would there be circumstances when you would use [insert emoji] differently? What would you do if you used [insert emoji] in the wrong context or the reader didn’t understand? It looks as if [insert emoji] and [insert another emoji] mean the same thing. What’s the difference?   I would also have some general questions ready to share, such as these:   How often do you string together emoji to express an idea? Are there any rules to using more than one? When are they used? What can you do to make sure that everyone on your team understands the emoji you want to use in a message? How does connotation work into what an emoji means? What ethical considerations must you consider before using emoji in your communication? How do global and intercultural issues influence decisions about using emoji?   Once the first round of discussion is over, I’ll ask students to collaborate on group guidelines for emoji use. At this point, the discussion will become turn to analysis of the conversation, synthesis of the ideas, and logistical considerations of the writing task.   Create guidelines for the use of emoji in professional discussions. As a group, write a single document that outlines the following information: when to use emoji (and when not to) what emoji to use what emoji not to use and why how emoji work in special contexts, such as with clients and customers or with international audiences what to do if emoji use goes wrong any additional tips or advice The document that your group composes will guide your use of emoji in this course, so consider the students in this course as your audience for the guidelines. For examples of what your document can look like, see these resources from “the government’s internal design agency, 18F, about how they use emoji in Slack, including one on how they use emoji to document shared knowledge” (From the Profhacker post, Getting More Done with Emoji).   As students work on their documents in groups, I will take the role of coach in the writing groups, by providing encouragement, responding to questions, and suggesting ways to improve the document. This part of the discussion activity is parallel to the conversations what would happen in the classroom as students collaborate on a document. The discussion activities will conclude when students share their documents with the other groups in the course.   Customizing the Activity for Other Courses To use this activity for other courses, just change the focus on business and technical writing to an area appropriate for your course. The simplest solution is to change the references to workplace writing to academic writing, asking students to think specifically about the use of emoji in the course throughout the discussion. Other options will depend upon the course. For instance, in a course on managing social media, students can focus the discussion on emoji that are appropriate for public social status updates. Assessment and Final Thoughts As students work in these discussions, I will rely primarily on public comments that praise good ideas. These remarks should become models for others in the course. To help students who need to work on their ideas more, I will use the same kinds of comments that I would in face-to-face discussions, asking questions such as “Can you add some examples here?” and adding requests such as “Tell me more about this idea.” If I notice any students who are struggling or need extra help, I will send private messages.   I hope that by building on a topic students already know about, this activity will give them much to talk about. Furthermore, the activity allows everyone to build some a shared understanding of what is appropriate in our online discussions. If I’m lucky, I hope I will learn a bit more about emoji myself from the discussion. I would love to hear what you think about this topic. Please share your comments or advice below. I’d love to hear from you.   Credit: emoji on iPod touch by choo chin nian, on Flickr, used under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license ... View more

At this year’s CCCC meeting in Portland, I held a workshop/discussion with a group of about 15 teachers on how best to teach students in a world of fake news and radical distortion of “facts.” We were all concerned with the sheer amount of misinformation—and even outright lies—bombarding students every day, especially from social media sites like YouTube and Facebook and Twitter, sites where any kind of traditional vetting or fact-checking is missing. Participants in the workshop came from across the country and from many different types of institutions, from high schools to research universities and community colleges: all saw a crucial need for increased attention to careful reading, fact-checking, and “crap detection,” and all agreed that our major writing assignments need to engage students in these practices.   In addition, we agreed that we can help students by encouraging them to make a point of listening carefully and openly to those with whom they don’t agree, of practicing what Krista Ratcliffe calls rhetorical listening, rather than staying only in the safe circles with those who hold very similar views. I came away very impressed with the thoughtfulness of colleagues in this workshop and inspired by the writing assignments they shared.   After the conference, several of us posted our assignments at to a public Google Drive folder in order to share them with each other, and with you. Please check them out, and let me know what you think of them!   Credit: Pixaby Image 336378 by Unsplash, used under a CC0 Public Domain License ... View more

Just returned from eight days in Paris with my grandnieces, Audrey (almost 13, about which enough said) and Lila (9), and oh, what a treat to see the city of light through their eyes. Of course we did lots of touristy things, first among which was a trip to the top of the Tour Eiffel, full of ooohs and aaahs and gasps, and games of trying to identify sites from that height. A boat ride down the Seine let us see famous buildings from a new perspective, and long walks around our neighborhood in Montmartre (just around the corner from Sacré-Cœur) introduced them to the 18 th arrondissement and to street life there. Audio bus tour—check. Portraits at Painters’ Place—check. Chocolate tour—check. Notre Dame and Sainte-Chapelle—check.   But what I enjoyed most were the art museums. Both girls draw and are interested in art, and they were, of course, most eager to see the Louvre. We made the obligatory climb to see the Mona Lisa (“Oh, but it’s so small! Oh isn’t she beautiful . . . and look at her eyes. . . .”) But what fascinated Audrey most were the Egyptian and Greek antiquities, which we explored for hours, taking notes so that we could do some more investigating when we got back to our apartment. She loved the Caryatides, and the Venus de Milo—and got down on hands and knees to touch some of the original foundation of the building. All the statues and the huge paintings of battle scenes freaked Lila out, however, and she declared she was “scared of museums.” A problem.   Still, we persevered, and convinced her to go with us to see Monet’s water lily paintings at l’Orangerie. Lucky for us we were there on a light day, so we had plenty of time and space to sit and soak up the peace and quiet and beauty of those magnificent paintings. Lila decided that she was no longer scared of museums, and Audrey was, to say the very least, overcome: she went from one huge curved painting to the next, examining brush strokes and color combinations, saying over and over she wished she could stay there forever. We read about Monet’s gift of the gallery and the paintings to the people of France after World War I, a gift of peacefulness and quiet. Audrey said this must have been the “best gift ever.”   The Musée d’Orsay offered other treats—we saw a lot more of Monet as well as other impressionists, and took notes on several Manet paintings that seemed mysterious to us. Later we read about them on Wikipedia and listened to short lectures about them on YouTube.   What struck me then (as it so often does when I am with young people) is how perceptive they are, how intellectually curious, and how eager to open up to new experiences and new ways of looking at the world, as presented to us by so many wonderful artists. Audrey said she thinks all paintings tell stories, and, though the stories can sometimes seem different from viewer to viewer, they also bring people together in sharing them. As we sat holding hands and immersing ourselves in Monet’s “Green Reflections,” I thought how very right she is.   Over the decades, I’ve had opportunities to take students to many artistic events, from exhibitions and lectures to musical performances, plays, and films. These engagements with art enrich their lives and their understanding of the world; if every child in the U.S. could have even two or three such experiences, I am certain they would benefit, both from seeing art and then producing it themselves. Yet our government wants to radically cut funding for the arts in America, even eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts. If you have had experiences like mine with young people and engagements with art (and I know you have!) I also know you will join in doing everything in our power to eliminate these cuts. Please join in supporting the arts in America! Credit: Photos by Andrea Lunsford ... View more

I have been working this year to shift my assessment practices toward grading students less on error and more on the labor that they bring to their writing for the courses that I teach. Ever since I heard Asao Inoue’s plenary on “Racism in Writing Programs and the CWPA” at the Council of Writing Program Administrators Conference last summer in Raleigh, North Carolina, I knew that I wanted to give the strategy another try. What is Labor-Based Grading? It is a pedagogical tactic that I have been developing on and off since my first year of teaching. At this point, I am in an in-between place: I am currently blending in some of practices that Inoue describes, and I am developing resources for a more complete conversion by the fall. Recently, I have been focusing on that ways that the grading system is discussed. The contract that Inoue used at Fresno State is long and, well, contractual. It’s a three-page document that outlines everything about how the work in the course is assessed, beginning with the approach and ending with details on requirements and logistics. As you would expect of a syllabus-style discussion of course requirements, it is explicit and detailed. Approaches for Students to Consider for Labor-Based Grading Remind students that your course is based on your labor - which is the time and intensity that they put into their writing. Students will not be punished for making mistakes as long as they improve throughout the term.  This grading system will not be what they are used to, so you can share the following guidelines on how they should approach their assignments: Focus on Ideas Focus on your ideas and what you are trying to say. Forget about the pressure to be perfect. Focusing on perfection can distract writers from developing their ideas. Because students are graded on labor, mistakes won’t undermine the grade.  Write for Yourself  You’re studying the kinds of writing that are important in your field and developing a sense of what makes that writing effective. Don’t worry about impressing me (the instructor). Write what will make you successful in the workplace.  Take Risks Try kinds of writing that stretch your abilities to help you learn new things. There’s no need to play it safe. After all, the safe, easy route doesn’t push you to improve your writing.  Have a Do-Over If you take a risk and it doesn’t turn out, you can always try again. Just as in a game, you have unlimited do-overs. Making mistakes is part of the learning process. As long as you are trying to improve your work, you can’t fail.  Put In the Effort You will write, rewrite, start over, and try again. All this work counts, as long as you listen to feedback, incorporate what you hear, and reflect on how to improve.  Wrap Up & Additional Resources on Labor-Based Writing Obviously, courses need this kind of document, but I wanted to break the explanation up into a series of shorter pieces. To begin, I wrote When Your Grades Are Based on Labor, a webpage that introduces the key aspects of the system from a student’s perspective. As I explained last month, I have been using Infographics as Readings in an effort to align course materials with students’ reading styles, so I also created the infographic on the right to present the ideas. My goal is to list the basic details in the infographic, with additional information explained on the webpage. I would love to get some feedback on whether I’ve succeeded in the comments below. Additionally, if you would like to know more about this assessment strategy, read Inoue’s publications on anti-racist assessment and on grading students’ labor on his Academia.edu page. Credits: Infographic was created on canva.com. Icons are all from The Noun Project, used under a CC-BY 3.0 license: report by Lil Squid, Fluorescent Light Bulb by Matt Brooks, analytics by Wilson Joseph, aim by Gilbert Bages, Switch Controller by Daniel, and Gym by Sathish Selladurai. ... View more

 Today’s guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn (see end of post for bio).   This week I have an important assignment for multimodal composers. When we have students work in digital spaces as content creators, there are often questions about ethical citation and usage practices and how to share content. Although we have many great resources, these notions are complicated when students share content, post images, and embed links on blogs or within other projects. Digital writing involves remixing and sharing content, but it complicates issues of plagiarism and ethical use. Even when you look for examples, you will notice that there is disparity and a great variety of possibilities. It is by no means an exact science. I like the idea of having students create a Style Guide for Digital Citation and Usage that becomes the class reference for these practices. In addition to their handbook, I start them with some readings that address the subject. I also show them sites like Creative Commons and other ways to find copyright-free images that are in the public domain or labeled for reuse. It is also important to show them that large blogging sites have usage guidelines that are specific to their situation. In order to be a good digital writer you have to have the knowledge and motivation to dig a little deeper. For example, the site Hubspot has plenty of content to share and is happy to have people use it according to their Content Usage Guidelines. These guidelines explain usage and permission rights along with expectations defined by the group. It also gets complicated when you want to share data or ideas that have been repurposed multiple times. It is important for students to critically read these sources to try to get to the original source rather than citing the last place they found it. In the worlds of digital writers there is a term, newsjacking (coined by David Meerman Scott), in which authors pull stories trending in the news and add them to their own sites for marketability. Basically, it is a way to draw on the Kairos of an existing situation to boost and enhance your own content. The Assignment Images are essential to successful online content. Students need to know not just how to cite them but where to find them. This exercise asks students to share copyright-free image sites and other strategies for understanding the usage guidelines. For example, when you conduct a Google Image search, you can go to the tools menu for a drop down list of usage rights where student can choose from a list of suggestions. When they choose, “labeled for reuse,” Google filters those images that fit the category. The internet has a lot of information on these topics, such as this infographic created by the Visual Communication Guy, Can I Use that Picture, which provides a visual representation of these concepts. It is useful to have students go to these different types of sources (textual and visual) to try to make sense of and enter the conversation. This assignment helps them to think critically about the choices they make as content creators. Have students read and review online sources (articles, infographics, blogs) for citation practices and usage guidelines. Put them in small groups to discuss what they found, looking for overlaps and distinctions. Discuss the ways these definitions are communally constructed. Ask each student to summarize a source on a presentation slide and present it to the group. As a group, assimilate the information and create a collaborative style guide slide that simplifies and defines the citation and usage practices for the particular classroom context from the summarized sources. Place this slide at the front of the presentation for easy future access. Share the presentation with the class – revise and shape through feedback. Publish the style guide in a place where students can access it for reference for future writings in the class. Reflections on the Activity It is always easier for students to remember information when it is communally constructed on their own terms. This exercise allows students to critically explore these issues in relation to their own real needs and expectations. The assignment defines a consistent methodology for these practices within a single classroom but also makes students aware that these practices are fluid and constantly changing. The class style guide invites them into the conversation and makes them aware of their ethical responsibilities as digital writers. Guest blogger Kim Haimes-Korn is 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 atkhaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website Acts of Composition. ... View more

I’m a bit behind on my journal reading, but I finally got around to the December 2016 issue of CCC. It’s a good issue—with Joyce Carter’s powerful 2016 CCCC Chair’s address on “Making, Disrupting, Innovating”—but one article especially stood out to me: Jerry Won Lee and Christopher Jenks’s “Doing Translingual Dispositions.” This essay builds on Horner, Lu, Royster, and Trimbur’s “Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach” (College English, 2011, 303-21), which defines translingual disposition as one distinguished by “a general openness toward language and language differences.” Lee and Jenks go on to say This disposition allows individuals to move beyond preconceived, limited notions of standardness and correctness, and it therefore facilitates interactions involving different Englishes. Considering the historical marginalization of ‘nonstandard’ varieties and dialects of English in various social and institutional contexts, translingual dispositions are essential for all users of English in a globalized society, regardless of whether they are ‘native’ or ‘nonnative’ speakers of English. (319) I see the lively conversation around translingualism as one very positive outgrowth of the work done forty-five years ago by the group of scholars working on "Students’ Right to Their Own Language," first as a resolution and later as an NCTE publication, with full documentation. It’s worth remembering this resolution, voted on in 1972: We affirm the students' right to their own patterns and varieties of language -- the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style. Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity. The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another. Such a claim leads to false advice for speakers and writers, and immoral advice for humans. A nation proud of its diverse heritage and its cultural and racial variety will preserve its heritage of dialects. We affirm strongly that teachers must have the experiences and training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their own language. The last sentence in the resolution touches on what I have always thought of as “attitude,” that is, the attitude of teachers of English toward varieties of English as well as toward other languages. Often it’s easier to pass a resolution (though this one was vehemently oppose d by some members at the time) than it is to change attitudes. And in spite of this resolution and the research and scholarship that supported it, attitudes changed slowly: teachers of writing could and did talk the talk but didn’t yet come close to walking the walk. But we kept working at it: I can remember taking a cold, hard look at my syllabi, at the readings I chose, at my assignments, and noting the many many ways that attitudes regarding “proper” English were there inscribed. So I kept trying to make what I felt were my attitudes toward language variety (all upbeat and favorable) show forth more clearly in my classroom. And roughly twenty years ago, I wrote a new chapter for one of my reference books, on “Varieties of Language,” the first such chapter to appear in a composition handbook and one that argued for the validity of all varieties of English and of all languages.   So I’ve been thinking about these issues for most of my professional life, and I am encouraged by recent developments to recognize and nurture “translingual dispositions.” What I especially like about Lee and Jenks’s essay is that they see clearly that our field hasn’t yet worked out a strong pedagogy for teaching translingual dispositions, much less for teaching what Suresh Canagarajah and others call code meshing. But they persist in paving the way for such a pedagogy, showing that “even students who can be considered monolingual in the most traditional sense of the term have the capacities to develop translingual competence and do translingual disposition” by sharing research that demonstrates some students beginning to make the move toward such new dispositions.   Lee and Jenks are also clear-sighted about the role that teachers of writing must play in developing such dispositions: it won’t be enough for us to embrace this concept intellectually. Rather, as their title suggests, we have to DO translingual dispositions. I’d say that nearly fifty years on from the Students’ Right resolution, it’s time we take that step. And thanks to Lee and Jenks for moving us in the right direction. Credit: Pixaby Image 705667 by wilhei, used under a CC0 Public Domain License ... View more

This blog was originally posted on November 6, 2014.   I can still remember where I was when I opened my copy of College Composition and Communication (the May 1977 issue) and turned to Janet Emig’s “Writing as a Mode of Learning.” I had recently submitted my dissertation and was in that grad student’s limbo, waking every morning with the panicky thought that “I’ve GOT to finish my dissertation” only to realize that I had, indeed, done so, and preparing to move from the university that had been my home for five years to a new and scary “first Ph.D. job” in Vancouver, Canada. I was sitting on the floor in my tiny bedroom in Columbus, Ohio, where I had written a lot of the dissertation, and I’d taken a break from sorting through stacks of sources and files to read the new CCC.   I read Emig’s article straight through twice before putting it down. I knew her work, of course, and respected it (and her) enormously, but I knew when I read this essay that I was learning to think in a new way about writing. Indeed, at that time, Emig taught many of us to think about writing in a new way.   I am still grateful for all of Emig’s work, and particularly for this piece, so I recently went back to take another look at it. It is much as I remember: clear, straightforward, bold in its claims, scrupulous in its presentation of evidence in support of those claims. And while Emig is careful not to essentialize either writing OR speaking, she is very clear on the differences between them and on the importance of teachers of writing recognizing those differences. Here are the ones she outlined almost forty years ago:         (1) Writing is learned behavior; talking is natural, even irrepressible, behavior.       (2) Writing then is an artificial process; talking is not.       (3) Writing is a technological device, not the wheel, but early enough to qualify as primary technology; talking is organic,             natural, earlier.       (4) Most writing is slower than most talking.       (5) Writing is stark, barren, even naked as a medium; talking is rich, luxuriant, inherently redundant.       (6) Talk leans on the environment; writing must provide its own context.       (7) With writing, the audience is usually absent; with talking, the listener is usually present.       (8) Writing usually results in a visible graphic product; talking usually does not.       (9) Perhaps because there is a product involved, writing tends to be a more responsible and committed act than talking.       (10) It can even be said that throughout history, an aura, an ambience, a mystique has usually encircled the written             word; the spoken word has for the most part proved ephemeral and treated mundanely.       (11) Because writing is often our representation of the world made visible, embodying both process and product, writing             is more readily a form and source of learning than talking. Janet Emig, “Writing as a Mode of Learning,” CCC 28.2 (1977): 122-28.   In the full article, Emig nuances many of these points, but what interests me today in re-reading her work is how changes in technology and especially the rise of “new” media practically beg for us to reconsider these distinctions. While I could talk about each one of the distinctions Emig raises, I’ll concentrate here on four of them: 5, 7, 8, and 9.   “Writing is stark, barren, even naked as a medium; talking is rich, luxuriant, inherently redundant” gives me special pause. Today, with so much multimodal writing that is full of sound, still and moving images, color (and more), the medium of writing seems far from stark or barren—and so more rich and luxuriant than it was in 1977. Talk still seems to me to have those qualities along with inherent redundancy. But writing today is also redundant: we have only to think of retweets to see just how much so.   “With writing, the audience is usually absent; with talking, the listener is usually present.” This is a distinction Walter Ong makes as well, but today I would say—yes and no. Audiences for writing are virtually present and often immediately so, while with talking an audience can be as present as the person next to you, or as distant as listeners to radio or a podcast. In fact, the whole concept of audience is in flux today, as we try to think not only of the “audience addressed” and “audience invoked” that Lisa Ede and I described decades ago, but of the vast unknown audiences that may receive our messages and the ways we can best conceptualize and understand them. Audiences today, it seems, are both present and absent.   “Writing usually results in a visible graphic product; talking usually does not” likewise raises a number of questions. Writing online certainly results in a visible product, but it is digital, not graphic; talking, on the other hand, is often made visible through transcripts or text that accompanies the talk.   “Perhaps because there is a product involved, writing tends to be a more responsible and committed act than talking” strikes me as perhaps the most problematic of the points Emig makes. As noted above, talking now often results in “products” and would therefore seem to have the same opportunity to be “responsible and committed.” But writing—especially on social media sites and other online discourses but also in a lot of print journalism—now seems decidedly irresponsible. You may have heard the story earlier this year about a California teacher who caused an uproar for remarks she made about students on Twitter (“I already wanna stab some kids” for example), remarks she claims were not meant seriously at all. Is it because they are “visible” that she has been taken to task for them? Would it have made a difference if she had voiced the remarks in public? Are these remarks “written” or “spoken”?   Re-reading Emig’s seminal article raises these and other questions for teachers of writing today, questions that many are attempting to answer (see, e.g., Cindy Selfe’s wonderful essay on aurality and the need for attention to it—“The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing” in the CCC June 2009). As always, I want to engage students in discussing and debating these questions. So I’m planning to ask students I regularly correspond with to write to me about their current understandings of the differences, and similarities, between speaking and writing. I wish others would do the same, so we could compare notes.   Credit: Pixaby Image 620817 by FirmBee, used under a CC0 Public Domain License ... View more

Thirty-four years ago, Lisa Ede and I published a brief essay in Rhetoric Review called “Why Write . . . Together.” In response to that question, we offered a number of strong reasons for writing collaboratively, including the ability to mount larger research projects and answer more complex questions. And we embarked on a research study of collaborative writing across seven fields, which we reported on in a number of articles and a book, Singular Texts / Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing (1990, SIUP).   Our persistent calls for collaborative writing and our insistence that most work in the academy is done collaboratively, whether we recognize it or not, fell on many deaf ears—until the digital revolution made it abundantly clear that collaboration is the new normal, with Wikipedia being one prime example. In addition, the research I did for the longitudinal Stanford Study of Writing showed that our students are happily collaborating on everything imaginable outside of class—and that they are increasingly collaborating on course assignments as well. And of course, scholars in STEM disciplines have been collaborating on their work, almost by definition. Perhaps, we thought, the tide has turned.   But maybe not, as evidenced by a recent report in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which asks “Is Collaboration Worth It?” in regard to a panel at the 131 st meeting of the American Historical Association. This report suggests that the tide has not yet turned in the Humanities, where the single-authored monograph is still the gold standard and the sine qua non for tenure and promotion.       A panel here Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association explored the pros and cons of co-authorship in what some argued should be a particularly collaborative field (uncovering and interpreting the past is not a one-person job), but isn’t. Asked to answer the session’s titular question – “Is Collaboration Worth It?” – panelists offered a lukewarm but hopeful consensus: it may not count, but it is, in some sense, worthwhile.    By “crass” accounting, collaboration is “absolutely not” worth it, said Ben Wright, an assistant professor of historical studies at the University of Texas at Dallas who helps lead a free, online, collaboratively built American history textbook effort called American Yawp. Though the project takes up much of Wright’s time, it will nevertheless be an ancillary piece of his tenure file, he said. “I’m not going to hinge my career on this project.”   The encouraging note in this article is that the young scholars quoted all recognize the importance of collaboration for their own intellectual and personal and professional growth, even when it is not recognized by their departments. So I continue to hope that as these scholars mature they will begin to change the tenure and promotion policies in their department. But such change is amazingly slow: 35 years is a long time to have made so little progress!   In the meantime, I see a special opportunity, and an obligation, for writing teachers not only to provide assignments that call for meaningful collaboration and collaborative writing but also to introduce students to the very large body of research that supports the efficacy of such practices. It is a commonplace now for employers, from Main Street to Wall Street to Silicon Valley, to hire those who are good collaborators, good members of teams. And writing teachers know that good members of teams are not “yes” people, but rather those who look at problems from every angle, arguing out all possibilities and listening to varying viewpoints, and who know when and how to compromise without forgoing sound principles. These are abilities that teachers of writing know how to develop in students, just as we know how to create assignments that call for these abilities and that engage students in co-authorship.   So I’m encouraged that we teach students who will become history majors—and many other majors as well. We have an opportunity to send then into their majors with a strong understanding of the need for collaboration—and the knowledge of how to work and write collaboratively. Those are gifts that I hope will keep on giving and that will eventually lead to the kind of change that will make the question “Is collaboration worth it?” not even worth asking.   Image from PIXELS with CC0 License ... View more