As I write, pictures of the flooded streets of Houston are leading news broadcasts throughout the twenty-four-hour news cycle, and more rain is predicted. The power of visual rhetoric is clear as certain photos go viral on social media: a fireman carrying two small children to safety through waist-high water, another catching a few minutes of sleep with his boots still on, water covering portions of the first floor of the world-famous M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, people carrying their pets as they wade through the flooded streets of their neighborhoods. There is scene after scene of people helping people—first responders of all sorts, the National Guard, the “Cajun Navy.” One photo shows private vehicles towing boats lined up to go to work helping rescue the stranded. A television station loses power, and a lone reporter keeps broadcasting from the street outside, taking time to direct first responders to a man trapped in his truck nearby.   At this point, the flooding is catastrophic, but we seem to have learned some things from Katrina because the rescue efforts seem to be more organized. An iconic picture from that disaster showed seventy-four-year-old Edgar Hollingsworth, a black man, being carried from his home fourteen days after the hurricane, aided by rescuers male and female, white and Hispanic. An iconic pair of pictures that appeared in an earlier edition of Elements of Argument showed a young black man carrying food through the flood after “looting a grocery store,” while another showed a young white couple doing the same after “finding bread and soda from a local grocery store.” Yahoo!News had to issue an apology for the suggested racial bias.  Today I saw on Facebook the first photo of looters taking advantage of the opportunity offered by Harvey. I am reminded of Guy-Uriel Charles’s essay “Stop Calling Quake Victims Looters,” written in response to a recent earthquake in Haiti. A Haitian American, Charles questions our right to define as looters those who following a natural disaster take needed food from a store when there is no one there to pay even if the banks were open to get money. Contrast the man whose picture I use to illustrate that essay, who is carrying a large carton of infant formula, with those in the picture I saw today taking armloads of clothes still on hangers. (Crudely painted signs following Katrina read, “U Loot, We Shoot.”)   I’m sure that the stress that comes with days of no electricity and the loss of homes and property will bring out more of the negative side of human nature, but as Texas cities and towns—and maybe some in Louisiana—begin coping with the catastrophe that is Hurricane Harvey, images of people of all ages and races and vocations helping each other has been an encouraging contrast to all of the recent ones of Americans facing off in anger and violence across political barriers. Credit to Lt. Zachary West of the Texas Military Department posted on Flickr 8/27/17 via Creative Commons ... View more

by Heather Sellers‌ This post first appeared on the blog on Jan 29, 2016. How do we meet our writing goals and help our students meet writing goals in the midst of other demands?   My favorite recent book on this topic is Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. It’s a portable encyclopedia of the daily schedules of artists, psychologists, theologians, and authors.   Toni Morrison (single mother of two with a full time job as an editor at Random House) explains that “it does seem hectic,” but she doesn’t do “anything else.” She avoids cocktail parties and evening events because that is when she works. And, “When I sit down to write I never brood….. I can’t afford it.”  She makes it clear that there’s really not likely going to be, for most of us, a regular time to write. She grabbed weekends, evenings, predawn time.   Haruki Murakami wakes at 4 am and writes until 9 am or 10 am. He also turns down invitations.   What I notice, reading Currey’s charming, delicious compendium, is that creating a writing life is actually less about a cushy life filled with luxurious writing hours and more about saying no to almost everything else.   And, reading the lives of artists while thinking about students as our semesters get underway, I see that it’s more than a bit challenging to be 20 years old and newly free in in the world, and then, if one would like to become a writer, tasked with saying no to all of your friends, parties, weekend getaways, football games, laying out in the sun.   I asked three of my colleagues, graduate students in the MFA program at the University of South Florida, to address the question: how do you get your writing done while teaching? Annalise Mabe said she writes best when she has a deadline for class. Carmella Guiol recently got rid of the internet at home, and for her, hours and hours of writing time opened up.  Chelsea Dingman, prolific writer and mother of two boys, gets up monstrously early, and writes in any spare hour during the day.   These three writers get their creative work done by saying no to a lot and they can do that because they love the work and they have been rewarded by long hours of practice with visible, measurable proof of improvement.    Can we help our students experience more deeply how rewarding practice is? (The recent film Seymour provides a terrific discussion of the delicious rewards of pure practice.) I’m not sure. I know when they are required to spend more time on a piece (writing a sonnet, for example), they learn more as writers, produce better work, and they are often surprised at the correlation between time spent on writing and the success of the piece.   This semester, I’m working on creating assignment sequences that are meaningful and challenging. I’m trying to do a better job of explaining to my students why we’re doing this work, and what they’ll be able to do at the end of the semester, and showing them, along the way, exactly what is happening in terms of skill development and knowledge acquisition.    I’m modeling a working writing life for them by sharing my triumphs and failures I’ve met my new year’s writing goals four days out of 24 so far this year, but at least I’m aware of what I want and where I am. Heather Sellers (PhD, Florida State University) is professor of English at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate creative writing in children's literature, poetry, and non-fiction. She won the student-chosen professor of the year award at Hope College, where she gave the commencement address. Her textbook for the multi-genre course is The Practice of Creative Writing, which will appear next year in its third edition. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Fiction, she's published two books on creating an inspiring and happy writing life, Page after Page and Chapter after Chapter, as well as a children's book, two books of poetry and three chapbooks, along with Georgia Under Water, a collection of short stories. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The London Daily Telegraph, Reader’s Digest, Good Housekeeping, O,the Oprah Magazine, and The Sun, as well as Prairie Schooner and Alaska Quarterly Review. She's currently at work on a new manuscript of poems and a novel for younger readers, set in Florida, her home state. She’s an avid cyclist and kayaker. ... View more

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

I have been lucky since I have been teaching professional writing courses: students typically come to the course with knowledge of how writing works. They already know that there is information gathering and research at the beginning. They understand that there is revision and proofreading work for their drafts, though they sometimes focus more on small editorial changes rather than substantive revision. Since I am using a labor-based assessment system (Inoue, 2014), I ask students to continue working on their projects until they reach the level that would be used in the workplace. I have told them, “If it’s not ready to send out in the workplace, it’s not finished for the purposes of our class.” Relying on the grading options in Canvas (our LMS), I assigned the pieces either a Complete (when they were done) or an Incomplete (when they were not). The system worked well during submission and the first round of revision and resubmission. When I returned some of the resubmitted drafts still earning an Incomplete however, individual students began emailing me with questions. Apparently I blew students’ minds with my belief that more than one round of revision is sometimes needed. That confusion about revision showed me that students don’t really understand the revision process at all. Despite all their experience in summer jobs, internships and work-study positions, most of the class had not encountered the multiple rounds of revision and rewriting that a document can go through in the workplace (or, apparently, in college courses). As a result of this realization, I am adding some resources and discussion of revision in the workplace early in the course schedule. My first thought was to write a narrative explanation of revision, using a kind of case study that reports my own experience in the workplace. I worried, though, that they might only skim the piece and not change their understanding of revision in any concrete ways. I have had a good bit of success with videos in the course, but so close to the beginning of the fall term, I don’t have time to produce a video with subtitles and a transcript. I think an infographic will provide the information quickly and efficiently. By simply following the rounds of revision in a visual representation, students will be able to see that one round of revision is the exception. Several rounds are far more likely. I’m not sure if I’ll use a flowchart, timeline, or journey-style map, but once I develop my new resource, I will share it with all of you. In the meantime, what do you do to help students understand the many and varied cycles of revision? Do you have useful resources you can share? Please add a comment below to let me know.   Credit: Brainstorming by Kevin Dooley on Flickr, used under a CC-BY 2.0 license ... View more

I have never felt adept at Tumblr. I just don’t get it. Enough people like it for me to believe that there must be something there; but whatever it is, I don’t quite connect with it. To look for answers, I attended that Computers and Writing workshop, “When You Find a Great Meme to Post for Your Assignment: Tumblr as a Multimodal Writing and Community Space in the Composition Classroom.” I gained some pointers, but honestly, I still couldn’t understand what Tumblr offers that wasn’t already available with tools I already used.   As I was preparing for my presentation on social media for the Council of Writing Program Administrators Conference (#CWPA2017) earlier this month, I was looking for a way to share example sites that met several goals:   Hosted on a trustworthy site (and not one I owned) Has no cost Incorporates screenshot images easily Publishes entries easily (since I would have many) Allows a system of tagging or similar option to sort entries on various criteria   I was essentially thinking of a simple database, but I didn’t want to program or host it. I went through a number of tools, but everything had some problem—until I came to Tumblr.   Tumblr met all my goals. I remembered, as I was testing it, that the workshop leaders, Meg McGuire and Jen England, had mentioned that one of the things people liked most about Tumblr was its rich tagging system. I quickly began gathering examples of the online presence of writing programs and writing centers for my #CWPA2017 presentation in my own Tumblr blog, Social Media for WPAs.   The homepage of Social Media for WPAs felt a little busy to me, with its Pinterest-style grid layout. To provide a simpler organization, I created a Categories page, which lists my folksonomic tags under a few headers. Clicking on any of the tags on the Categories page takes you to a page that shows only the entries that demonstrate that particular tag. For example, if you click the Instagram tag, you get a page showing examples of writing programs or centers that use Instagram.   As I worked on my Social Media for WPAs site, I realized how valuable Tumblr would be in the writing classroom. I could use a similar system of tagging to organize online examples or readings for students. If I was teaching students about blogging, for instance, I could gather examples of different kinds of entries and collect them on a Tumblr blog. Likewise, students doing online research could do the same thing, tracking what they find in a Tumblr blog.   Using Tumblr, it turned out, was easy, and it provided exactly what I needed. Perhaps I finally get Tumblr. Do you? If you have ideas to share for using Tumblr, I would love to hear from you in the comments.     Photo Credit: Workshop on Tumblr in the classroom by tengrrl ... 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

Even able writers who try their best to “be clear” may fail miserably. A couple of months ago, I was reminded of how subtle clarity can be—and how greatly it can matter. In March the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Maine, handed down a controversial decision—one I heard about the same way you probably did, in coverage by the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, and other news outlets. The court reversed a lower court decision in a Maine labor law case to rule in favor of the plaintiffs, dairy-truck drivers, on the grounds that the absence of a comma in a state law made it ambiguous. The law says that the usual regulations mandating extra pay for overtime do not apply to the following categories of work: “The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution” of perishable foods. Because no comma appears in that series after “shipment”—because the series lacks a serial, or Oxford, comma—about 75 drivers are entitled to four-plus years of back overtime, the court decreed. That overtime is worth millions. As the Times explained the Court of Appeals’ reasoning, “The phrase could mean that ‘packing for shipment or distribution’ was exempted, but not distribution itself.” So, arguably, people who distribute perishable food do not belong to an exempt category, and they do therefore deserve overtime pay. My first thought when I read this was, No, sorry—nothing against truck drivers, but the law does not say that. If what was exempt from overtime was packing for either of two purposes (shipping or distribution), the phrase should have ended, “… marketing, storing OR packing for shipment or distribution.” The missing “or” is the clincher, not the serial comma, which would unimportantly appear, or not, after “storing.” As written, the single “or” can’t, correctly, be part of the phrase “shipment or distribution” because it’s busy tying together the series as a whole. The two distinct work categories of packing and distribution are being declared exempt. But then I stepped back from the grammar and thought, The higher court found the law ambiguous! If the justices couldn’t agree on what the law means, what more do we need to know? And I noticed that the sentence does contain a bit more evidence pointing toward ambiguity: canning, processing, … and packing are all -ing forms of verbs, specifically gerunds, whereas shipment and distribution are not. The form of these two nouns subtly encourages us to think of them as different from the gerunds in the series. Might they be a pair of objects of the preposition for? Further, let’s acknowledge that not every law on the books is well written or even up to code grammatically. So never mind that the manual for drafting laws in Maine, according to the Times, advises against using serial commas. (The manual is said to give “trailers, semitrailers, and pole trailers” as a don’t-do-it example, and “trailers, semitrailers and pole trailers” as one to emulate.) It’s crazy that the meaning of this section of the law in question depends so heavily on one optional comma. To me, this episode demonstrates why we should all routinely use serial commas. “The canning, processing, packing for shipment, or distribution” of perishable foods—that’s clear, no? But it also contains a broader lesson about looking out for readers. I doubt that any of us can write anything worth reading if we’re constantly considering possible misreadings and ambiguities in sentences as we draft them. So we need to take that step after drafting and read our work over with sharp, skeptical eyes. I think of it as pretending I’ve never before seen what I just wrote. When I have time to put the work aside overnight, or at least while I go out for a walk, I do it. It makes the little trick of imagination I’m playing easier. Alternatively—or usually also—I ask someone to weigh in who really has never before seen what I wrote and who understands that I’m not just seeking praise. While looking out for our readers, we must also give them credit as critical thinkers; we don’t need to tell them things over and over. Trying to see through their eyes what we’ve written doesn’t have to lead to dull repetition. Rather, the idea is to meet readers more than halfway. Looking out for readers may not be worth millions to them—let alone to us—but still it’s worth a lot.   Do you have questions about language or grammar, or are there topics you would like me to address? If so, please email me at bwallraff @me.com. Barbara Wallraff is a professional writer and editor. She spent 25 years at the Atlantic Monthly, where she was the language columnist and an editor. The author of three books on language and style—the national bestseller Word Court, Your Own Words, and Word Fugitives—Wallraff has lectured at the Columbia School of Journalism, the Council of Science Editors, Microsoft, the International Education of Students organization, and the Radcliffe Publishing Program. Her writing about English usage has appeared in national publications including the American Scholar, the Wilson Quarterly, the Harvard Business Review blog, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times Magazine. She is coauthor of In Conversation: A Writer's Guidebook, which will be published in December 2017. ... 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

I say “Assessment” and you say . . . what? Did you involuntarily wince or utter a furtive moan? Like many of my colleagues, I often find the assessments required of us to be a waste of time and, on occasion, an insult to our professionalism; my colleagues and I are continually assessing, evaluating, refining, and improving what we know about writing and how we can best teach it. Our ongoing “assessments,” both formal and informal, reveal how complicated, nuanced, and messy the development of writing skills can be, and we resist mandated assessments that reduce that messiness to check boxes and quantities. We may feel “imposed upon,” as Suzanne Buffamanti, Denise David, and Robert Morris, articulated in a 2006 article in TETYC.  At a recent scoring workshop for a college-wide critical thinking and writing assessment, however, my colleagues showed me how the imposition can become a boon of sorts, as it did for Buffamanti and her colleagues at SUNY.  At my college, a small group of cross-disciplinary faculty spent a full day scoring student performance on the Critical-thinking Assessment Test, a short-answer test developed through a National Science Foundation Grant at Tennessee Technological University.  The test probes students’ ability to read information and graphs, describe that information, interpret it without drawing unsupported conclusions, and consider additional evidence needed to clarify initial interpretations. My college began to offer this test several years ago as part of a Quality Enhancement Plan on critical thinking, and we have continued biannually since then. The test is given to a sample of students in sections of ENG 112, our second semester FYC course, and it is scored by faculty according to a carefully structured rubric designed by the test developers (those who lead the scoring workshop must complete training before conducting a scoring session).  Scoring takes a full day, depending on the number of faculty raters and total number of tests. If you are feeling a bit of repulsion, don’t stop reading. What was a mandate, an imposition, just one more “to-do” before vacation can really commence evolved into professional development of the very best sort: open-ended discussions of what we value and how the knowledge and skills we are trying to inculcate can be repurposed and applied in other courses that our students take. How did this happen? Quite simply, twelve faculty from various disciplines (including biology, EMS certification, business, education, history, and English) examined student writing together.  When we looked at how students read and interpreted graphs, for example, we talked about similar assignments and skills in our own courses, and we discussed the extent to which our instruction transferred from one context to the next. The test provided clear data to inform that discussion: skills taught in ENG 112 should apply readily to the context of the assessment instrument, and yet we saw time and again little evidence that students were actually transferring the skills practiced in class.  Examples of failure to apply target skills were discussed, analyzed, and (truthfully) occasionally used for some comic relief.  Conversely, rare instances of success were also shared, analyzed, and celebrated.   Eventually discussion turned to how we as instructors in different areas can encourage our students to apply, to re-purpose, to connect. We delved into word choice, style, and clarity, along with awareness of audience and purpose. And in the context of those discussions, the value of this assessment was clear – not for what it told us about our students, but for the opportunity to talk rhetoric, language, transfer, and assignment design with instructors across the curriculum.  Our shared vocabulary may not have sounded much like a “Teaching for Transfer” or “Writing about Writing” session at the 4Cs, but the conceptual focus was similar. Community college faculty rarely have the occasion to work across disciplines on substantive issues of pedagogy or theory; dedicated time to this sort of collaboration seems to me to be the best possible outcome for mandated assessments. And if the institution can offer a small stipend, a comfortable room, lots of coffee, and an amazing barbecue lunch as well, so much the better.     Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

Now that the semester is over for me, I can put more energy into my work to improve discussions in my online classes. As I have discussed in earlier posts, I plan to spend more time preparing students for discussion, and I intend to increase low-stakes discussions in an effort to encourage more conversation. This week, I want to consider what I need to do myself to improve students’ discussion.   Each week, I asked students to discuss various topics. Sometimes, they responded to webpages or infographics. Other times, they shared drafts and gave one another feedback. Just as I would do in the face-to-face classroom, I checked on all of the groups. Since the class was 100% online, I skimmed through their discussions, paying attention to who contributed and noting any questions that came up. Occasionally, I answered a specific question or left some emoji thumbs-up feedback.   At the end of the week, students reported on their work by completing a weekly checklist that provided links to their Slack posts and replies. I used my spot checks of the discussions and the weekly checklists to gauge the success of the discussions. I hoped that feedback on the previous week’s contributions would improve the conversations during the next week. Unfortunately, discussion stayed rather flat, with students completing only the bare minimum to meet the requirements.   During the last weeks of the course, students were working on a large group project. There should have been a lot of discussion in Slack to coordinate drafting, feedback, and revision. I decided to ask them directly, using a version of this question in each team’s channel: How are things going with your project? I see several of you have posted recently, but I know there are 11 people in the group. I'd like to hear from all of you so I can tell that you’re on track! Students began responding almost immediately, telling me what they had accomplished, asking questions about their work, and sharing plans for finishing their project. The Slack channels were alive with conversation for a few days that week, and I suddenly realized my own failure in making our online discussions successful.   In the face-to-face classroom, students know you are there watching them. Although I was constantly reviewing what students were posting in my online classes, they had no idea that I was there. While I answered questions and added some happy-face feedback, I wasn’t doing enough. I needed to engage students with questions, feedback, and encouragement more frequently. In retrospect, it seems completely obvious. I wasn’t talking to students. Why would they talk to each other?   Going forward, I realize that I need to get much more involved. The best option is to add comments frequently that respond to students. Those comments will depend upon the context of the discussions, so it is hard to guess the exact comments to add in advance. To prepare, I have gathered some potential discussion starters that I can customize when the time comes:   Ask students to check in and tell me how their work is going Respond to a specific student (e.g., What do the rest of you think of Pat’s analysis?) Request details on current projects (e.g., What questions do you have about the assignment? Anyone need help?) Ask for clarification and explanation (e.g., Can you explain this idea more?) Call for examples (e.g., What are some examples from the document? Can you show me what you’re talking about?) Request synthesis after students share ideas (e.g., Okay, how can we tie all these ideas together? What’s the take-away?)   There are more discussion starters in the article “50 Questions To Help Students Think About What They Thinkhttp://www.teachthought.com/critical-thinking/questioning/metacognition-50-questions-help-students-think-think/.” While the article focuses on younger students, the questions can work for any level. To prepare even further, I want to take all these discussion starters and organize them into potential scenarios (like questions for peer feedback or questions for responding to an infographic). That project is on tap for another week. For now, I feel like I’m making good progress. I would love to know what you think. Please leave me a comment on how you engage students or what you use as discussion starters.     Credit: Preparing for presentation by Bill So, on Flickr, used under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license ... View more