While I am a fierce advocate for revision in all my classes, showing students over and over again how much good, strong revision can improve their writing—can even make it “sing”—I will admit that I HATE to revise. For me, the excitement of writing that first draft, of seeing my ideas take shape on the screen or the paper, pales when it comes to the tedium of looking at every word, every sentence, and trying to improve. I’d rather move on to the next exciting research or project, feeling that my draft should be good enough. BUT IT NEVER IS. And so I bite the bullet and revise away, hating almost every minute of it. Still, when the job is done, I always know that the revising has been worth it, that it is necessary, absolutely necessary. Ironically enough, I was working on revising a long essay when I ran across Jill Lepore’s “The Speech,” an article on presidential inaugural addresses that appeared on January 12, 2009. She writes that the president’s inaugural address wasn’t a given, wasn’t mentioned in the Constitution. But after his inauguration, George Washington went to Congress and delivered a speech, as did Jefferson in 1801. In 1817, James Monroe delivered his post-inauguration speech outdoors, but only because the Capitol was undergoing renovations. Slowly, however, the tradition of addressing not the Congress but the American people took hold, and by 1829, 20,000 people turned up to attend Andrew Jackson’s address. Lepore passes judgment on a number of inaugural addresses, judging some much better, some much worse, but the most interesting part of the essay to me came in her discussion of revision, where she shows how even the best of inaugural address drafters were improved by revision, sometimes revision by someone else. Then she comes to Lincoln’s first inaugural address, the draft of which Lincoln turned over to William Seward for response. Seward, in turn, “scribbled out a new ending, offering an olive branch to seceding Southern States”: I close. We are not, we must not, be aliens or enemies, but fellow-countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained our bonds of affection too hardly, they must not, I am sure they will not, be broken. The mystic chords which proceeding from so many battlefields and so many patriot graves, pass through all the hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent of ours will yet harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angels of the nation. But then Lincoln took up his own revising pen, and wrote the passage that we remember, honor, and admire today: I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the union, when again touched as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. Lincoln’s revision is masterful, his stylistic sense strong and sure, and his address has inspired many presidents since, including most notably Barack Obama. We know that Obama worked hard on revising both his first and second inaugurals, and many believe they will go down as among the most powerful in U.S. history, right alongside Lincoln’s. Donald J. Trump’s inaugural address was of a different nature—very brief, very dark, and very much aimed at his base rather than all Americans. Columnist George Will called it “the most dreadful inaugural address in history.” I don’t have a good basis for comparison, but I can say that this was the least memorable inaugural address I can remember. In a recent essay, John McWhorter helps to explain why when he describes Trump’s inaugural address as more like casual talking and less like “speaking”: The issue is talking versus “speaking,” a more crucial distinction than we have reason to think about until someone as linguistically unpolished as Trump brings talking into an arena usually reserved for at least an attempt at speaking. . . . McWhorter goes on to point out that many capable and intelligent people talk the way Trump does in everyday discourse, or over a beer or two. But most public officials and leaders have tried to move up the linguistic ladder, creating more coherent and memorable and carefully crafted public speeches. McWhorter says we should have seen this coming (perhaps with George W. Bush and Sarah Palin), as social media-speak moved into the White House. So, he says in his article, we may need a new way of listening for this kind of talk. I’m not so sure that a new way of listening will help very much. While I have been a strong advocate for the vernacular throughout my career, and indeed have posted about this issue on several occasions, what Trump is doing does not seem to me to represent a triumph for but rather a diminishment of vernacular English or “talk,” which can have a strong power and beauty of its own. So for me and many other teachers of writing, Trump’s inaugural address demonstrates the need not for a new way of listening but some good old-fashioned revision: perhaps he did seek and receive advice from his trusted advisers about a draft of his speech; perhaps he did revise. If so, all I can say is that more and better revision was called for. ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Jeanne Bohannon (see end of post for bio).   It's here, readers. January and the first few weeks of spring semester are upon us. As I planned my syllabus, recent pivotal events got me thinking about communities and what we mean when we say we're part of one. I wanted to share with you this week an emerging idea about community learning with which my student-scholars and I experimented and provide you with opportunities to create your own sense of class community right in your syllabus as a contracted statement.   Context for Assignment The best time to work through a community statement is usually after the first week of drop-add, when students have settled into class and enrollment numbers have been relatively balanced. My notion is that students have also become acquainted with each other and me, while they also have glimpsed a bit of my teaching style. This is a good time to introduce community-learning precepts.   This writing assignment is an in-class, crowd-sourced opportunity that can serve as a framework for class discussions and a baseline for creating common ground among different student groups. Measurable Learning Objectives for the Assignment Synthesize peers' writing styles into a communal product Apply impromptu peer feedback as recursive writing process Create a crowd-sourced public document Background Reading for Students and Instructors Acts of reading and viewing visual texts are ongoing processes for attaining learning goals in dialogic, digital writing assignments. Below, I have listed a few foundational texts. You will no doubt have your own to enrich this list. The St. Martin’s Handbook: Ch. 6, “Working with Others”; Ch. 28, “Language that Builds Common Ground”; Ch. 4, “Reviewing, Revising, Editing, and Reflecting” The Everyday Writer: Ch. 27, “Language that Builds Common Ground”; Ch. 7, “Reviewing, Revising, and Editing” Writing in Action: Ch. 18, “Language that Builds Common Ground”; Ch. 5, “Exploring, Planning, and Drafting” EasyWriter: Ch. 1i, “Collaborating”; Ch. 18, “Language that Builds Common Ground”; Ch. 4, “Reviewing, Revising, and Editing” In-Class Work You will need a few supplies for this assignment. Bring a selection of sticky notes to class. After students have arrived, begin the class session by providing a definition of community writing/learning and why collaboration is important for writers across disciplines and professions. I use Andrea's Principles to emphasize that writing itself is inherently collaborative, whether we think of it in terms of digital or face-to-face interactions with various audiences and co-authors or as a kairotic moment to bring people together. After you have completed this activity once or twice, you will have a starting point for future iterations of your community statement. After students have worked through an understanding of both the base meaning and the value of community writing, pass out the sticky notes, giving each student one or more. Ask students to generate a word or simple phrase that exemplifies their personal understanding of what community writing will denote in your class, then place their sticky notes on the wall -- no particular order necessary. Next, invite students to offer reasons for their word choice. Encourage them to discuss what communities they are or have been part of and why collaboration is key in both academic and professional environments. The University of Connecticut Writing Center offers some good collaborative writing tips that may help you here. As an extension, you may also arrange words in topical order, before you start typing up your community writing statement in your chosen format. I have had equal success with handwritten (use document camera) and electronic versions. I have also asked students to volunteer to lead the group composing with limited success. After you work through this assignment a couple of times, you will have a relevant and rhetorical document that you can include in your syllabus and use as an icebreaker as well. This assignment lends itself to digital, democratic writing and unique contributions across types of classes because students choose their methods of composition, reflect on their process, and have the opportunity to present their work to their peers and publics.   Community Contract Example Below is an example that came from my past two semesters of course communities and large group processing of this crowd-sourced, in-class writing opportunity. We decided to phrase our statement as more of a "you-driven" manifesto. What comes out of your experiences might be similar or completely different. Please try out this assignment and leave comments to let us know how your experience went!   Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! If you have ideas for Multimodal Mondays or would like to write a guest post, contact ‌.   Jeanne Bohannon is an Assistant Professor of English in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Kennesaw State University. She believes in creating democratic learning spaces, where students become stakeholders in their own rhetorical growth though authentic engagement in class communities. Her research interests include evaluating digital literacies and critical engagement pedagogies; performing feminist rhetorical recoveries; and growing informed and empowered student scholars. Reach Jeanne at: jeanne_bohannon@kennesaw.edu and www.rhetoricmatters.org.   ... View more

If the Golden Globe awards are anything to go by, La La Land is the greatest motion picture ever made.  Or something like that.   If we go by the most recent box office totals, it isn't half bad, either—but the Oscars haven't weighed in yet and that verdict could do a lot to boost the bottom line even further.   But if we look at La La Land semiotically, a different picture emerges, revealing not its quality or ultimate profitability, but rather what it says about America today.  Not surprisingly, that turns out to be a rather mixed message.   Let's start at the beginning, which, in a semiotic analysis, usually begins with a determination of the immediate system, or context, in which our topic appears.  In this case, that system is the history of Hollywood musicals, romantic drama division (the studio calls it a "comedy-drama," but the "comedy" part of the categorization has been questioned).  This simple act of situating La La Land within its most immediate context takes us right to our first signification, because the era of the Hollywood musical (evoking any number of cinema classics, with Singing in the Rain taking honors as the most cited of La La Land's predecessors) has long since passed, and so the appearance of a musical now marks a difference.  And that difference means something.   I see a number of significations here.  The first might be called the "when the going gets tough, America goes for uplifting distractions" precept.  Especially prominent during the Great Depression (which, not coincidentally, coincided with the true Golden Age of Hollywood), feel-good movies have always provided a distraction from the slings and arrows of outrageous reality, and nothing can beat a musical—especially a romantic musical—for making people feel good.  So it should come as no surprise, as we wallow in the wake of a Great Recession from which only a small portion of America has really emerged, that Hollywood gave the green light to a nostalgic film like La La Land, and that audiences, if not quite in blockbuster numbers, have been lining up to see it.    But if audience nostalgia accounts for a good deal of La La Land's success, there is also the enthusiasm emanating from the Hollywood community itself to consider.  The nostalgia of a movie like La La Land is very much an insider's emotion, an evocation of memories of the sort that those fortunate few who really did emerge from the madding crowd to reach the heights of the gaudiest version of the American dream can experience as their own.  For them (especially for La La Land star Emma Stone) the movie is scarcely fiction at all.  No wonder Hollywood loves it.     A less sunny side to Hollywood's self-celebration in La La Land, however, can be found in the film's use of jazz, a multicultural art form that (as a number of critics have noted) La La Land effectively whitewashes.  There is something of a Mad Men effect going on here, as if part of the film's nostalgia is for the days when the racial politics of filmmaking were more easily swept under the red carpet and white actors could be smoothly inserted into what many regard as black roles. After all, The Jazz Singer is also part of La La Land's genealogy.   Finally, to discover what may be the most profound signification of La La Land, we need to return to the fact that ordinary people are watching it and giving it high marks on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb in an era when much darker movies (e.g., anything with Batman in it, but don't forget Deadpool) are really breaking the box office.  Sure, a lot of this popularity is probably coming from viewers who are profoundly grateful for a movie that isn't some sort of superhero or sci-fi fantasy, but the fact remains that La La Land—for all of the much- ballyhooed "realism" entailed by its protagonists' less-than-professional dance chops—is a fantasy too for the vast majority of its viewers.  Which is to say that its starry-eyed "message" about "pursuing your dreams" is completely out of touch with the reality faced by Americans today.   Because (you knew I'd get to Donald Trump eventually, didn't you?) one of the indelible takeaways of the 2016 presidential election is that a substantial number of Americans have begun to lose faith in that American exceptionalist belief that America is the place where dreams do come true, where everything does turn out the way you want it to in the end if you only show enough grit and determination.  This essential optimism—what Barbara Ehrenreich calls American "bright-sidedness" (look for her in the 9th edition of Signs of Life in the USA on just this topic)—is badly fraying at the edges as the American dream falls further and further out of reach for most of us non-one-percenters.  And while this new reality is not something that the Hollywood dream machine wants to reveal in the nation's movie theaters, it certainly is showing up at the polls.   Which is to say that La La Land's success is a reflection of an America that is passing.  Its follow-your-dreams faith may have worked for Damien Chazelle, but the odds aren't favorable for the rest of us.  Guns N' Roses was certainly closer to the mark for those who do succeed in Hollywood with "Welcome to the Jungle," but the words of a Raymond Carver character (whose family has lost everything) from a short story called "The Bridle" are probably a lot more relevant for much of the rest of America: "Dreams," she says, "are what you wake up from." ... 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Four years ago in the Bronx, I taught Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” in a first-year writing course. New York City was still emerging from the impact of Hurricane Sandy, and the trauma of unanticipated change was very much on all of our minds that spring. “Allegory” was a required text in this student cohort’s Introduction to Liberal Arts class, as well as in our writing course. In our course, the program required that we read a novel from a preselected list. That was how I came to teach The House on Mango Street with “The Allegory of the Cave.” Our focus, growing organically out of students’ writing and class discussions, became the significance of education, and the development of resilience in difficult times. Four years later, “Allegory” seems equally relevant, and brings back memories of studying this text as a first-year student many years ago. My first-year liberal arts education did not include a first-year writing course. Instead, I wrote weekly papers for Introduction to Philosophy, gaining an understanding in basic concepts of theory and rhetoric that has kept me grounded both in and out of the academy.  As a result, I remain convinced of the value of a liberal arts education for all students, across majors and disciplines. From that experience of education emerged a key question that still holds value for a first-year students: “What is truth?” Because students enrolled in our institution’s Stretch program have the benefit of having the same teacher and cohort across two semesters, I already had an awareness of students’ concerns with growing as writers. Indeed, as I read students’ reflective writing after the election this past November, I began to brainstorm readings for the spring semester. My goal was to begin in January with a reading that would take up the themes of change and transitions with the question of “What is truth?” In the fall, we had briefly discussed Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize, and over break I listened again and again to Patti Smith’s rendition of Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” which she performed in Oslo as part of the Nobel ceremonies. “Hard Rain” is the story of a prodigal son who has returned to his community to tell the truth of his experiences. “Allegory” is the story of leaving the Cave for the light outside. When a person returns to the Cave, the Cave’s inhabitants do not believe the truth of the world in the light outside. Different experiences, different truths: How does the audience for “Allegory” make sense of these differences? In other words, “What is Truth?” remains both a contemporary issue and an ancient rhetorical question. In teaching and learning Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” or any difficult text, an important strategy is not to abandon the text at the first signs of students’ struggles. Indeed, those struggles can become significant points for discussion and close re-reading. At the same time, it can be helpful to pair the text with more contemporary and accessible sources so that the students can synthesize rhetorical and thematic relationships across time and place. Those sources may be required by our writing programs, open for us to choose, or selected by students in collaboration and on their own. In any case, the search for truth continues and I look forward to why and how we will address this subject in class this semester. Activity With these thoughts in mind, we completed the follow activity on the first day of the course, in preparation for taking on the first writing project of the semester: Consider the meaning of this following passage from Plato's "The Allegory of the Cave."   And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent. You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners. Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave? True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads? (Plato) Then consider the connections to these two interpretations of the song "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" by Bob Dylan. The first interpretation is sung by Bob Dylan in 1963. The second interpretation is sung by Patti Smith in 2016. What connections do you find between “Allegory” and the two interpretations of “Hard Rain”? Make a list of those connections, offering specific examples to support your ideas. Use this list as your study guide for your first reading of “Allegory.” When you reach a difficult place in the text, consult the list. We will discuss and write about “Allegory” in our next class.   Image source: By Veldkamp, Gabriele and Maurer, Markus [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

Recently I read (but can no longer find!) an article discussing the rise of social media in terms of its relationship to orality. The writer made the point that much of what we read on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites is conversational, deeply inflected by the conventions of speech and oral culture (with more and more emojis offering substitutes for emphasis, tone, etc.). I’ve written before about Walter Ong’s notion of secondary orality and its influence in our hyper-mediated society, and I’ve described what we might call “secondary literacy,” which is literacy infused with orality—as we see today on social media. It’s writing, all right, but writing that aims to be very much like speech. Like many other teachers of writing, I’m pondering what such shifts mean for our classrooms, for what we teach and how we teach it. In a course on the history of writing, I always began with the struggle for the vernacular in medieval Europe . . . tracing the eventual downfall of Latin and Greek and the rise of indigenous languages/vernaculars. Think of early writers of vernacular languages (Chaucer, e.g.) and you will think of some of the world’s great literature. So hooray for vernaculars! But it’s seemed to me for some time that social media brings a new sense of “vernacular,” or everyday speech, and its rise has been swift and pervasive. Challenging traditional notions of decorum or civility as well as conventional norms of all kinds, social media writing crests like a huge wave over us, bringing with it experimental uses of language that seem downright magical and innovative as well as threatening (hate-based messages especially). I have only begun to scratch the surface of this issue, to which I hope to return soon. But right now, I am concerned that in our writing classes we look closely at this “return of the oral” and its implications for how we lead our lives, especially online. Bakhtin writes of “the ability to respond” or “respondability” being key to discourse exchange, and I agree: all of what we write and speak responds in some way to what others have written and said. And we need to take advantage of this ability to respond, to get our voices out there with the messages we care most deeply about. But we also need to talk with our students about responsibility, the ability to be accountable for what we write and speak, to present credible and detailed evidence in support, and to accept consequences attendant upon our words, whether spoken or written. In a time when very powerful people want to “shut down” parts of the Internet, to move away from “net neutrality” and otherwise police the Net, and when very powerful others want absolutely no curbs on what is posted, then we badly need writing teachers and students everywhere to search for some middle ground that will encourage and reward personal responsibility and to put that responsibility to work in social media writing. [Photo by Johan Larsson on Flickr] ... View more

I recently had the pleasure of visiting the Writing Program and Writing Center at Wake Forest University and, as always, I wanted a full tour: it is endlessly fascinating to me to see what goes on in writing centers and programs and I especially love looking at what’s posted on the walls. In this case, I had a chance to meet with undergrad tutors, who were eloquent and thoughtful and deeply into their work. They told me that they’d learned how to get students to look beyond editing for surface errors, to concentrate on the substance and structure of what they wanted to say, to know when to offer friendly sympathy and when to push a little harder, to listen “between the lines” to students, and to ask open-ended questions that can lead to genuine dialogue. I was inspired, as I always am, by how seriously these students took their work but also by their great good humor. Some of the tutors had declared a new interdisciplinary writing minor, which will provide students… with opportunities to practice, refine, and extend their skills as academic, professional, and creative writers. The curriculum, composed of new and existing courses in rhetoric and writing, as well as writing-enhanced courses across the disciplines, prepares students to participate in various writing situations both inside and outside the academy. Because writing enhances reflection, reinforces learning, and improves critical thinking, the Writing Minor will provide students with the skills they need to excel in their majors, their professions, and their lives as engaged citizens. Writing minors (and majors) are springing up all over the country, and it’s encouraging to see the innovative approaches being taken. In this case, I was impressed with the inclusion of creative writing; the students I spoke with spoke passionately about wanting to experience a full range of writing, from poems to press releases, and such programs promise to offer that range. With 18 units of required coursework, students with this minor should get a strong sense of themselves as writers—and several students told me they intended to take substantially more than 18 units in the minor if they could find a way to do so. As I left the Center, I overheard a tutor and student talking animatedly about an assignment in progress. The student said he was “beginning to see what my main argument should be here,” and “huh . . . this is really helping me think.” That’s a line every writing center tutor or consultant loves to hear, and in this writing center it was echoed on a bulletin board where students had been invited to finish the sentence “I write because . . .” ... View more

I grew up seeing sensational stories teased in commercials for the National Enquirer and similar tabloids on television. The claims about UFO invaders, scandalous affairs, and celebrity drama taught me long ago not to believe everything that I read. Like most writing teachers, whenever I teach research skills, I cover the importance of evaluating your sources before including the information they present in research projects. I have even written a lesson plan on how to conduct Inquiry on the Internet. I was a little surprised, then, when fake news became such big news after the presidential election. A simple search yields stories covering the influence of fake news like these: The Hoaxes, Fake News and Misinformation We Saw on Election Day (The New York Times) Facebook’s failure: did fake news and polarized politics get Trump elected? (The Guardian) Google and Facebook Take Aim at Fake News Sites (The New York Times) Click and elect: how fake news helped Donald Trump win a real election (The Guardian) Fake news goes beyond politics. This ‘wannabe weatherman’ allegedly lit fires for views. (The Washington Post) Predictably, these stories and the circumstances that inspired them led to suggestions on how to tell the difference between news and fake news. The NBC News story “How to Outsmart Fake News” (below) features Massachusetts professor Melissa Zimbdar explaining how to identify and avoid questionable news stories: Video Link : 1886 Zimbdar’s handout on False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and/or Satirical “News” Sources includes the full list of tips. The Washington Post’s “The Fact Checker’s guide for detecting fake news” offers a similar list of suggestions. Students can use these tips to consider the validity of news sources, but I want them to think about why people believe these stories in the first place by exploring questions like these: What persuasive strategies make fake news seem to be true? What topics are likely to be the focus of fake news? Why are some topics better than others? What makes a topic a good choice for fake news? What kind of details need to be included? What kind of details would probably be left out? What audiences are likely to believe a fake news story? What circumstances would make a fake news story more believable? How does cultural background effect whether an audience believes fake news? What personal experiences could effect whether an audience believes fake news? Before using these questions, I would ask the class to discuss some historical situations where fake news had an impact. Fake news has a long history. If you include opinion columns in your discussion, you can point back to Swift’s Modest Proposal and then jump to contemporary pieces. If you want to explore the difference between satire and misinformation, Swift is a strong starting point. Once students think about the situation that led to Swift’s satirical commentary, you might talk about The Borowitz Report, The Onion, and The Daily Show. I like to start with the hysteria caused by Mercury Theatre production of The War of the Worlds from October 30, 1938 (MP3 recording and broadcast script). For the purposes of classroom discussion, the Wikipedia article on Public Reaction to the broadcast provides adequate details on the extent and causes of the panic that ensued in response to the fake new updates of a Martian landing in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. Because of the distance students have from the events, they usually quickly understand how personal experiences and world events misled listeners who believed the updates were true. Once students explore The War of the Worlds broadcast, I ask them to think about the extent and causes behind the current fake news stories, using the ten questions to get discussion started. Class discussion can also take up the recent Wall Street Journal article, “Most Students Don’t Know When News Is Fake, Stanford Study Finds.” After considering the reasons that people believe fake news stories, students can have a strong conversation on whether they accept the findings of the Stanford study that the article discusses. With such articles appearing in the press, it’s an important topic for students to explore. Are you talking about fake news in the classroom? How are students responding? Do you have strategies to share? Please leave me a comment and let me know what you’re doing.   Credit: Quality Journalism Means an Informed Citizenry, by Mike Licht, on Flickr, used under a CC-BY 2.0 License ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Jeanne Bohannon (see end of post for bio).   As many of my colleagues and student-scholars, I have spent the past few weeks ruminating on the culmination of our country's presidential election cycle. No matter where we live on a political continuum, I think we all agree that we need to provide spaces for and mentor all of our students to take their feelings and turn them into scholarly action. Today, I want to invite readers to checkout and contribute to an assignment series that engages students as public, digital researchers with a topic connected to civil or human rights.   Context for Assignment Our students depend on us, no matter what happens, to provide mentoring and writing that helps them engage at a point of need. By researching historical civil rights movements and then developing digital content curating the rhetorical activities within these movements, students gain a deeper understanding of human struggles and are able to insert their own voices into recovering and analyzing them for 21st century contexts. Measurable Learning Objectives for the Assignment Investigate a civil or human rights campaign Apply peer review as recursive writing process Create digital texts in a blogging genre for public audiences Background Reading for Students and Instructors Acts of reading and viewing visual texts are ongoing processes for attaining learning goals in dialogic, digital writing assignments. Below, I have listed a few foundational texts. You will no doubt have your own to enrich this list. The St. Martin’s Handbook: Ch. 27, “Writing to the World”; Ch. 28, “Language that Builds Common Ground” The Everyday Writer: Ch. 26, “Writing to the World”; Ch. 27, “Language that Builds Common Ground” Writing in Action: Ch. 17, “Writing to the World”; Ch. 18, “Language that Builds Common Ground” EasyWriter: Ch. 17, “Writing across Cultures”; Ch. 18, “Language that Builds Common Ground”   Digital Deliverables for Classroom Use Sample Feedback Criteria/Rubric Blogging Guidelines Multimodal Elements for Students In-Class/Out-of-Class Work Students watch excerpts from a Civil Rights History video to introduce them to some key people and places connected to the 1960s movement. As a class group, students then choose two topics connected to the movement. Our class chose the Rich's Department Store sit-ins in Atlanta. Then, students divide into groups to craft two blog posts per group on people and places connected to your civil rights topic, using the Blogging Guidelines. Drafting blog content can occur outside of class, but revision and editing are best-completed in-class. Use a Feedback Checklist to maximize effective peer time. If you can't get a computer lab (a frequent occurrence on my campus), host a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) day. Some of my students' best revisions are made on their tablets and phones! Budget at least one revision and two editing sessions, where students collaborate to research and insert tags, refine their conversational tones, design multimodal elements, check for accessibility and even integrate SEO analytics.  This assignment lends itself to digital, democratic learning and unique contributions across types of classes because students choose their methods of composition, reflect on their process, and have the opportunity to present their work to their peers and publics.   Student Blog Examples   The Atlanta Student Movement -- Nick Pasley Women in the Movement -- Shiloh Gill Dr. Martin Luther King and Reidsville Prison -- Joseph Kimsey   Check More Out...  Our class took these blogs a bit further and curated everyone's blogs into a website: Anyone Sitting Here. Please also view a sample page: The Rhetorical Activism of Lonnie King. If your students have more content to add to our website, send it along, and we'll help get it published!   Our Reflections Our class community engaged authentically with this assignment, writing and designing texts both before and after the recent election, which motivated us to continue our public work of civil rights recovery. The work brought all twenty of us together as a group, each person contributing expertise and learning from everyone else. We were even able to bring Lonnie King to campus to help us start a student organization dedicated to this work. As Andrea Lunsford has taught us: our writing is valuable when we share it with the world.   Try this assignment and get in touch with us to contribute to our academic website!   Jeanne Law Bohannon is an Assistant Professor of English in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Kennesaw State University. She believes in creating democratic learning spaces, where students become stakeholders in their own rhetorical growth though authentic engagement in class communities. Her research interests include evaluating digital literacies and critical engagement pedagogies; performing feminist rhetorical recoveries; and growing informed and empowered student scholars. Reach Jeanne at: jeanne_bohannon@kennesaw.edu and www.rhetoricmatters.org. ... View more

Some forty-five years ago now, I began my college teaching career at Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, Florida, where I learned in just a few short months what I did NOT know about how to teach writing. I had an excuse, of course; I had never taken a writing course (exempted, stupidly) and had only figured out how to write papers for my college classes by a kind of osmosis. Still, that first year was one long series of lessons in humility. My students were wonderful; they deserved a teacher who could guide them. Instead, they had me. But I didn’t give up easily, and with their help I began to understand what I needed to do: analyze their writing carefully, systematically, and listen intently to what they wanted to write about, and why they wanted to write about it. By the time I left Tampa to return to school for a Ph.D. (and to learn more about writing and about rhetoric!), I had found some footing, again thanks to my students. Together, we improved. Today, roughly half of students in college began their work at a two-year school. Yet these institutions get much less funding than their four-year counterparts and hence have fewer resources: year after year, decade after decade, they are asked to do more with less. Yet in my travels around the country, I am regularly inspired and heartened by colleagues teaching at community and junior colleges. They often seem to know their students better, more deeply, than at four-year state colleges, and they care deeply about them. I wish that all those state funders, all those legislators, could visit the schools I visit, talk with the faculty and meet with the students I meet. I think they would be heartened and inspired too. Maybe even enough to make some changes in their state’s funding formula. Recently I visited Northeast Junior College in Sterling, Colorado, where I met with faculty from across the disciplines to talk about students and about writing. As always, I came away impressed: with the philosophy teacher who had started five or six extracurricular clubs for students and who challenged his in-class students with forward-looking assignments; with the agriculture teacher who started every class with some writing; with the nursing faculty who asked piercingly insightful questions about how to help their students improve as writers and thinkers; with the English teacher who had started a writing center from scratch and made it part of the campus Comprehensive Learning Center. In this small northern Colorado community, this college felt very much like where the rubber meets the road, a no-nonsense, let’s get to work right now kind of place. I came away wondering how I could make more connections with two-year colleges and how much we would all have to gain if four-year and two-year college teachers of writing made opportunities to work together. I know that some states, such as Oregon, encourage such collaboration, but more often than not, such encouragement comes without any support or funding. But today’s technologies may offer ways for colleagues to work across boundaries with minimum expense: webinars, google hangouts, and other ways of meeting up now abound. Do you teach at a two-year college or at a four-year college? If so, what ways can you imagine sharing, partnering up, and maybe even fostering some on-line exchanges between students? How can you imagine breaking down the walls between institutions? In the meantime, here are some photos I took at NJC: what a happy day I had there! Student writing displayed in the Center. One room in the Center. It's always snack time! ... View more

Drew Cameron joined the Army in 2000, right out of high school, and served as a Sergeant in Iraq. In an interview, he says he realized fairly early on that what was happening in Iraq was all wrong and that “we shouldn’t be here,” but he served his tour of duty anyway. When he came home in 2006, he sought ways to express his experiences, without success, until one day, he said, he put on his uniform and then began cutting it off his body. Thus was born his Combat Paper Project. As Cameron puts it, “Language to articulate the complex associations and memories wrapped up in military service can be a mountainous task. Starting with a non-verbal activity, with the intention of exploring those places, is a phenomenally empowering act.” An artist and paper maker, Cameron took his cut up uniform and began transforming it into handmade paper, which he then painted or drew or wrote on. Slowly, he began to contact other veterans who wanted to take part in this process, who were interested in fiber art and in how “we might transform [materials] into a narrative that illustrates our collective stories.” I first met Cameron a year or so ago in Chicago, where he was exhibiting his work in connection with the world premiere of composer Jonathan Berger’s “My Lai,” which tells the story of Hugh Thompson, the helicopter pilot who tried to stop the My Lai Massacre, who was reviled and ostracized for his actions and only 30 years after the fact recognized with a Soldier’s Medal for bravery. Sung by Rinde Eckert (with lush and moving libretto by Harriet Chessman) and performed by The Kronos Quartet, “My Lai” is one of the most gripping and memorable musical works I have ever heard. It was after the haunting performance that I met Cameron, along with one of the two 18-year-old crew members who was with him during March 16, 1968 (the second young soldier died in battle three weeks later). I believe that this work will be touring the country for the 50 th anniversary of this tragedy: if you and your students can possibly see it, do so. Recently I encountered Cameron again, this time at UCLA where he was leading papermaking workshops with first-year undergraduates (and others). Students were bringing in all kinds of materials: some, of course, were veterans themselves, with uniforms and other materials from their service; others had relatives who had given them articles, like the young woman whose grandfather had given her parachute cloth. Together, they were learning to create a remix, a mashup, as they turned the cloth into pulpy fiber and then learned to make sheets of handmade paper with it. What struck me during this encounter was how Cameron spoke about the stories that these artifacts tell, and about the stories that they elicit from the people who work with them. Somehow, he says, this process of unmaking and remaking seems to release the words necessary to share experiences further, as a visual art leads to a verbal one and back again. Some of the paper makers have gone on to write blogs, articles, essays, even books. And continue to make visual art as well. I left wishing that every college in the country could have a visit from Drew Cameron and his Combat Paper Project. He has conducted them from coast to coast and is currently engaged in teaching others to carry out similar projects. The college frosh who either drop in or sign up for these workshops may never have heard of My Lai, may have thought very little about war, about the way war is inscribed on the bodies of those who are caught in its vice. But they leave with new knowledge, as well as with the experience of having made something good and strong and real out of the materials of war. You can read more about Combat Paper on PBS News hour’s “The Rundown” from April 30, 2012.  ... View more

I’ve been reading Xiaoye You’s Writing in the Devil’s Tongue: A History of English Composition in China and, as you might imagine, learning a lot in the process. In the past, I often taught a course on “The History of Writing,” but it focused primarily on Western systems of writing, since those were the ones I knew best. But during those years I did learn something about the origins of writing in different cultures: for example, whereas writing in ancient Greece was associated from very early on with practical matters of trade, early Chinese writing systems were importantly linked to rituals that led to the way (dao). My interest in feminism led me to Enheduanna, Sumerian high priestess who wrote in Cuneiform and whose texts in praise of the Goddess Inanna date to the 23 rd century BCE. And I was thrilled when I read Damian Baca’s Mestiz@ Scripts, which traces early pictographs back as far as 50,000 BCE, and when I learned more about the Mayan glyphs, the earliest (some say the only) writing system developed in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. And now in You’s fascinating book, I am learning more about writing in ancient China and, later, in schools which required writing in English. You notes that learning to write in China came with “heavy ethical burdens.” Confucius stresses over and over again how “gentlemen” will develop through following traditional rituals that will “align them with symbolic act that reflect the true spirit of the Way” (18): as Confucius puts it, Let a man be first incited by the Songs, then given a firm footing by the study of ritual, and finally perfected by music” (Analects 134). Eventually, this educational plan was institutionalized in the Chinese Civil Service exams, which held sway from the early 7 th to the beginning of the 20 th century. The preparation and the exams themselves “instilled in students unique rhetorical sensibilities with a Confucian conscience,” according to You’s analysis (21). Reading You’s work and revisiting Baca’s has made me think a lot about how much, if anything, we teach our students about the history of our subject, writing, and especially about writing systems in other cultures and the values embedded in those systems. In our multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural country, even with its ongoing tolerance for “English only,” writing teachers can and should take the lead in making sure our students understand that writing itself is a serious subject of study, that writing systems differ dramatically and thus carry differing value structures, and that pluralistic approaches to and understandings of writing seem necessary in the 21 st century. [Image: Confucius Temple in Taipei by edwin.11 on Flickr] ... View more

Today's guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn‌. (See end of post for bio.) We often think about multimodality in terms of the end result – the products that students can produce through multimodal composition. But I have found interesting ways to use multimodal composition for invention as well. Images are great for brainstorming and getting students to see things in different ways than they have seen them before. For example, I often ask students to use key words to conduct image searches that expand their ideas on a subject or brainstorm on research projects.   Recently, I was teaching a unit on digital stories. (The full assignment is explained in detail in one of my earlier posts on Digital Storytelling where I provide the theoretical framework for the overall assignment.) In this post, however, I concentrate on a new, earlier step in this assignment that engages students in multimodality as part of the process. This early assignment gives students practice in composing through images and digital rhetoric and provides invention space where they can try out and select their best possible story ideas before fully engaging in the assignment. It is at this time that students are coming to understand the genre of the digital story and trying to figure out exactly what story they want to tell. Objectives To teach composing skills with images and the ways visual, rhetorical choices impact communicated meaning. To introduce invention strategies to engage students in a full range of composing processes. To practice skills such as selection, abstraction and summary. To understand audience awareness and engagement through peer response. Resources The Everyday Writer: Ch. 3: Rhetorical Situations, Ch. 4: Exploring Ideas, and Ch. 5e: A Storyboard 7 Elements in 4 Minutes – Paul Iwancio, YouTube, 2010 Seven Steps of Digital Storytelling – Joe Lambert Prezi, Center for Digital Storytelling, 2010 16+ Storyboard Templates – Sample Templates Assignment Steps Step 1: Have students read the resources on Digital Storytelling. Discuss purpose and which stories are worth telling and which stories they want to tell. I encourage them to look around their environment and lives to find stories. I offer the following prompts: think about things that you have noticed in your everyday life think about your own past and ideas that have stuck with you think about the ways people behave, think about your ideas and worldviews think about your relationships to others think about things that are confusing think about things that feel clear think about how things relate to other things think about people you know think about what you imagine think about what you know and believe let the stories find you Step 2: Next, students create a brainstorm list of at least 10 ideas for stories that incorporate the expectations discussed in the video: 7 Elements in 4 Minutes. I refer them to composing techniques to create 10 interesting, representative images that match their brainstorm list –each representing a different story idea. They don’t have to tell the whole story but should suggest something about its direction – a preview or peek into the idea or ideas. Step 3: Then, they choose their top 5 story/image/ideas to post on a gallery page to share with their classmates. They give each one a working title and a short paragraph -- that gives readers an idea of the story and possible perspectives. I have them include why they think this is a story that needs to be told and the point of view they are considering. Step 4: Students share story/images with classmates for peer response. Students use this session to talk with a potential audience about what might engage them and to select a story that their audience might want to hear. Audience members also pose questions that give authors opportunities to elaborate and expand their ideas in purposeful ways. I use Lambert’s first three points (the others come later) that encourage students to engage in 1) point of view, 2) dramatic question and 3) emotional content. Step 5: Once students choose story (with the help of their peers) they move to a storyboarding phase. I supply a blank storyboarding template that engages them in the planning and arranging their chosen story. Step 6: After students complete the full draft of the digital stories, they embed them in their blogs along with a purposeful context statement that includes links to their invention stories and storyboards Reflection When I first came up with this activity, I thought it would just act as an invention piece that might not be part of the project. In some ways, it turned out to be interesting in and of itself. Students liked the broad sweep that showed several stories, defining moments and ideas that were part of their identity and worldview. As I reviewed through them, I also found them engaging, and I realized that I would like to incorporate this as part of their final projects as well.  This gives their audience a sense of their processes should they follow the links and reveals an interesting series of story possibilities. In addition this activity teaches students how to use images to brainstorm and how to create representative images. It also teaches the valuable skills of summary, selection and abstraction. The peer response early on in the process allows authors to gage audience engagement before they enter the production phase of this multimodal project. This is just one of the many ways we might consider using multimodal composition as invention – for both process and product. Check out some student samples of this assignment: Madison’s Story Ideas Charlie’s Story Ideas Samantha’s Story Ideas Austin’s Story Ideas Cydney’s Story Ideas 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 at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website Acts of Composition. ... View more

Don’t be afraid.   These are the words I’ve been telling myself often this semester. You’d think after twenty years of teaching first-year writing I’d find a way to reduce my anxiety in and out of the classroom, but it still hits me every day. I envy teachers brimming with confidence and enthusiasm. I really do. I marvel at the layers of skill that my colleagues who teach have mastered. I think I’ve gotten okay. Maybe even pretty good. But there is still a deep and nearly omnipresent fear that every lesson plan, every classroom exchange, every attempt to motivate students toward authentic and original thought could go terribly wrong.   I’m beginning this semester with a literacy narrative, a genre I’ve come to appreciate fairly late in the game as first-year writing faculty. I guess I should nod in the context of this blog post to the fact that the literacy narrative is one of the projects we discuss in An Insider’s Guide to Academic Writing (p. 14). I can’t know how many of you have taught this genre, and that frustrates me, so I would just like to talk about how I’ve overcome my fears so far this semester teaching such a beautiful, delicate, vulnerability-inducing genre and how I think it contributes to shaping me as a teacher and the students who teach me every day.   The diversity of students I teach at the University of Arizona are unlike anywhere else I’ve taught: Navajo, Apache, Latino, Black, White, affluent, poor, middle class, West Coast, East Coast, Midwest, Southwest, Southeast, Northwest, International students.   Building relationships and trust in order to create a safe space wherein students can reflect on and articulate the experiences that shape their identities in front of total strangers who look only alike in age has proven awkward and at times shocking.   But reflect and articulate they have. Stories of abandonment. Stories of having a paper torn in half by a high school teacher and thrown in a trashcan. Stories of drive-by shootings and murder. Of parents and families on the brink of collapse. Drug addiction. Abuse. Neglect. Previous teachers who don’t really care seems to be a common theme in FYW literacy narratives.   It’s a lot to process.   There’s a tendency to see students as “students.” Like some generic group of automatons who write papers for us to grade and correct and believe we somehow improve with our degrees and experience and comments in the one-inch margins surrounding their text. But it’s too bureaucratic, if you see it that way.   Students learn best when the agency of knowledge comes from within. I’ve always mistrusted “authority” figures and mistrusted even more systems where authority is rigidly structured.   I suspect, if you’re reading this blog post, you likely believe that writing has the power to improve your life. In the classroom, this only works if students believe you care about them, are sensitive to their experiences and identities, and are willing to embrace the awkward, painful, and uncomfortable moments in a classroom with compassion, openness, professionalism, and enough humility to learn from the very people we are supposedly teaching.   I love the literacy narrative because it sets the stage for the rest of the semester. It reveals character and truth, and if done well, encourages students to be courageous, open, curious, willing to learn, motivated, reflective, metacognitive. It teaches them about who they are, why they are here, and how they can move optimally forward in a complicated world.   What follows is a set of activities I employ to teach the literacy narrative.   We begin the semester by talking about our student learning outcomes. I think it’s good practice that students know 1) we have goals for achievement in this class, 2) what those goals are, and 3) where they come from.   A table in the preface of An Insider’s Guide to Academic Writing illustrates how the book aligns with the WPA Outcomes Statement. The FYW course goals at the University of Arizona arise from the WPA Outcomes Statement and the Framework for Success, so I think it’s wise to acknowledge that with my students.   Activity 1 – Generating Ideas for a Literacy Narrative One process-oriented group activity I use in the class to connect our outcomes to the literacy narrative is cluster mapping.   Students select one of our four outcomes and put it in the center of the cluster map on the white board in our room. They branch out and make a list of subtopics that include activities, genres, processes, or past writing projects that may have contributed to their development with that outcome.   One of our course goals is the development of reflection and revision processes.     The point is to get them thinking about our goals and the kinds of writing they’ve done in the past in order to generate ideas for what they might write about in their literacy narratives.   Activity 2 – Analyzing Sample Literacy Narratives I usually follow this activity by introducing the project assignment sheet for the literacy narrative. I provide students with at least four samples of a literacy narrative. I prioritize developing group dynamics, and so one activity I’ll use is to ask students to read one of the sample literacy narratives, and then as a group they use a grading rubric to assess the sample. They have to negotiate the point values they would assign to all the criteria, and they present their sample literacy narrative and discuss how they graded it.   Activity 3 – Brainstorming and Drafting a Scene It’s at this point that I try to highlight the unique features of a literacy narrative and point out how different it is as a genre than a research paper or a thesis-driven argumentative paper. This semester I’ve asked students to develop three scenes using sensory detail that follow a narrative arc representing a beginning, middle, and end to their narratives. We spend a day brainstorming potential scenes from their past experiences as writers and students, and then I ask them to draft one scene using sensory detail.   I give them a prompt I call “When I walked into the room I saw ________” and I ask to make use of at least three different sensory descriptions (sight, sound, touch, smell, taste) in writing five to seven sentences that describe their scene.   Generally students love this kind of writing. It’s creative and reflective and often a new genre for them. That said, a good number of students fall back on summarizing too heavily, and so I’ll use the drafts (usually done in an online discussion board) to point out the differences between effective use of sensory detail and summarizing events.   Activity 4 – Developing Dialogue in a Literacy Narrative We spend a day on dialogue. I point out the unique features of dialogue attribution, paragraph breaks for each new speaker’s line, punctuation around dialogue, and stylistic nuances regarding effective dialogue.   I’ll ask students to draft a dialogue-rich continuation from the sensory detail scene they composed the previous day, and then I’ll ask them to act as directors and choose actors to perform their written dialogue. Some students love to act. Moreover they generally find it exciting to hear their dialogue come to life in a performance by their peers.   Activity 5 – Five Objects, Mood, and the Final Scene Near the end of the unit, I ask the students to brainstorm a list of potential final scenes with which they might conclude their literacy narratives. Once they have three to choose from, I ask them to select one. For that one scene, I ask them to write down the setting (time and location), characters featured in the scene, and the main idea or insight they want readers to understand about them by reading their literacy narratives.   We discuss these points. I offer feedback. Then I ask them to make a list of five objects that appear in the scene and to describe the mood they want to convey.   A student might write: library bookshelves, the table, my notebook, the clock on the wall, and flashcards. The student may write about the mood she wants to communicate. She may say she wants to convey the stress she felt or the anticipation of her final high school exam.   We discuss this stuff. I push them to explain how the mood of their final scene aligns with the main idea or insight they want readers to understand about them by reading their literacy narratives.   Then I ask them to write their final scenes using the setting, the characters, the five objects, and the mood they’re trying to convey. I would love to hear back from y’all on this one. What activities or strategies have you used to teach the literacy narrative? What has been most helpful in the classroom?   As always, please like and share this post, if you found it meaningful. Thanks so much, everybody! Peace. ... View more

The students in my technical writing course have just submitted their coursework proposals, which outline the projects that they will complete for the rest of the term. This assignment is a crucial part of my plan to increase the role of choice for students this term. As I discussed last week, one of my goals for the new school year is to give students more choice in their assignments. Two previous activities have built up to the coursework proposals. First, I asked students to conduct an investigation of writing in their field, reporting their findings in a table that listed the kinds of writing and their key characteristics. Based on that investigation, I asked them to choose writing superlatives for their fields. In their coursework proposals, students reflect on the information they have gathered about writing in their fields and propose up to three projects that they will complete during the remainder of the term. Specifically, I have offered them these choices for their three projects: Open Projects Chosen from Your Analysis Table (up to three) Genre Analysis Report (counts as two projects, as it is a longer project) Midterm Exam on Readings The coursework proposal assignment itself follows a customary proposal format, asking students to explain their proposed plan, provide justification for their choices, and suggest a schedule for completing the projects. The proposal gives students the chance to customize the second half of the course to focus on projects that specifically meet the needs of someone in their fields. Let me provide an example. A student in computer science has explored the kinds of writing that she will likely do as an Android developer. While she has completed an internship and three years of coursework, there are kinds of writing in her field that she has had little practice in doing. She has written internal documentation in the code that she has developed, for instance, but she has never tried creating external user documentation. For one of her three projects, she wants to write a short user manual on how to install an Android app and customize its settings. My goal with this course structure is to ask students to focus on projects that will make a difference in their future, rather than random assignments that may not connect to them at all. The projects that are right for the Android developer simply aren’t right for everyone in the class. A student in environmental science, for example, may not need to write user documentation, so that student chooses a different path, proposing to write two reports on an environmental study she has conducted—one for other scientists, and one for the public. As promising as this free-form approach is, there are challenges. In particular, asking students to demonstrate such a high level of agency in their coursework leads to some confusion. Students rarely have much input in what they study in a course, so they have questions about how to proceed. Some students wonder if this structure is some kind of trick on my part, asking me if they can really write what they want to. I realized how much of a challenge this system was for them when about a third emailed me or posted in the course forums for clarification. Now that students have submitted their proposals, I look forward to seeing how they took advantage of the choices that the assignment offered. I know I will find other challenges to address as read students’ submissions, and I am already thinking of changes to make when I teach the course again. I’ll share more on what I find as I read their work in my next post. In the meantime, if you have a question or suggestion, please leave me a comment below. I look forward to hearing from you.     [Photo Credit: Choices by Jason Taellious, on Flickr, used under CC-BY-SA 2.0 license] ... View more

Last week, I wrote about my goal to increase participation by having students track their contributions to discussions and in small group work. My hope is that by making the participation assessment more transparent, students will be more likely to engage in class discussions and activities. Another of my goals for the new school year is to improve students’ communication with me. Too often on our campus, we hear stories from students in online courses who are surprised that there are real people behind the courses. They’re so used to automated modules and robograding that they are shocked when a real person responds to their questions. I decided to try something that would let them know that I’m real from the first days of the course. I had already emailed them a “welcome to the course” message, and I included biographical details on the course website to tell them about myself. I’m not sure any of them ever read that information, though. I wanted something catchier, something more engaging. I decided to add an AMA discussion forum in the CMS. AMA stands for “Ask Me Anything,” a kind of discussion popular on Reddit. Typically a celebrity or an unusual or interesting person hosts the AMA session. Readers post questions, and the host replies. It’s something like a personal interview conducted by the public. To introduce the discussion on our course CMS, I shared this list of ten things about myself with the basic instructions for the discussion: Inspired by the AMAs on Reddit, I'm here to answer any questions you have. Since we are in Canvas instead of Reddit, this discussion forum will be open through Monday, August 29. If you see a question from someone else that you want me to answer, click on the Like button. I'll answer your questions (within reason, of course). This forum isn't graded, but it counts toward your participation grade. To get started, let me tell you a bit about myself. I graduated from Virginia Tech with a B.A. and an M.A. in English. I worked at a small educational software company in Austin, Texas, doing documentation, tech support, and software design. I next worked as a website manager, coding and writing content for sites used by English teachers. I blog about teaching and writing on my own sites and in a textbook publisher's online community. The first computer programs I wrote used punch cards.  When I was in high school, we had a computer in the math classroom with a telephone modem, and when we finished our work we could log on and play 21 against the computer. I like to make handmade cards and study how technical writing works among cardmakers and scrapbookers. I am a life-long Girl Scout and have been working locally with the nut and candy sale in the fall and the cookie sale in the winter/spring. Since I was 7 years old, my family has always had at least one poodle. We currently have three. I love stickers and washi tape. I chose the facts that I shared purposefully. I wanted to share details from my work experience that demonstrate my qualifications to teach technical writing, as well as my experience with technology. The idea was to create some shared experiences with the class. I ended the list with some personal information unrelated to the class or technical writing. About a third of my students asked me a question in the forum. Some questions were meant to clarify or expand upon the information I had shared. For instance, I was asked how many poodles we had had overall and what technical writing had to do with scrapbooking. I was also asked questions about what I like to read, restaurants I like, and how campus had changed since I was a student. By the end of the discussion, I felt that I had engaged students in a way that I hadn’t in previous courses, and I knew I had found a strategy that I would use again. How do you connect with students so that they see beyond their stereotypes and assumptions about English teachers? How do you demonstrate that you are more than a robograder? I would love to hear your strategies. Please leave me a comment below!   Credit: Question Mark Sign by Colin Kinner, on Flickr, used under CC-BY 2.0 license ... View more