Sometime in mid-June 1977, I queued up with a whole lot of others in the Ohio State Stadium to receive my Ph.D. I had my first post-Ph.D. job—at the University of British Columbia—and the summer ahead to pack, move across the country, and relax. But first, I had a bit of catch-up reading to do, like the May issue of College Composition and Communication, featuring Janet Emig’s “Writing as a Mode of Learning.” It’s a short article, and I remember reading it straight through and then straight through again. I knew Emig’s work, of course, and admired it (and her) tremendously. But this brief essay summed up so succinctly and so well the powerful connection between writing and learning that it practically took my breath away. In Emig’s view, writing “involves the fullest possible functioning of the brain.” With writing, she says, “all three ways of dealing with actuality are simultaneously or almost simultaneously deployed” (10). Those three ways, “enactive,” (learning by doing), “iconic,” (learning through images), and “representational or symbolic,” (restating in words) encapsulate the active, participatory, originary, collaborative view of writing that we celebrate today. But Emig wrote this almost forty years ago. I’ve gone back to that essay a number of times over the years, particularly to rethink what she says about speaking and listening. But as for writing and its deep interconnection with learning: she nailed it. Much more recently, I’ve read with great interest Paul Anderson, Chris Anson, Robert Gonyea, and Charles Paine’s report on “The Contributions of Writing to Learning and Development,” a study conducted in collaboration with the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA) and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). This study draws on data collected from some 30,000 frosh and 40,000 seniors at 80 U.S. undergraduate institutions. These individuals responded to special questions added to the NSSE survey, questions about writing and about learning, based on twenty-seven effective writing practices identified by a panel of WPA members. In analyzing the student responses, the research team confirmed many of Emig’s insights, eventually naming three factors that are particularly related to higher-order, integrative learning: interactive writing practices, meaning-making writing tasks, and clear writing expectations. “Interactive writing practices” reflect the participatory, give-and-take ways of learning that the students in the Stanford Study of Writing identified as THE most important factor in their development as thinkers and writers. So learning by doing, as Emig noted, is crucial. In the recent study, writing assignments turn out to be crucial as well: those that call for rote response or for a paint-by-the-numbers approach do not forward student development in the ways that those asking them to make meanings of their own do. Another echo of Emig. I don’t remember Janet talking about clear expectations explicitly, but the protocols she used with the twelfth grade writers certainly embodied such expectations. Teachers of writing will immediately recognize the importance of the factors identified in “The Contributions of Writing to Learning and Development.” Some may, along with me, hear echoes of earlier work, including that of Janet Emig. But what the current research team has done is to provide “hard” empirical evidence for the relationship between these factors and student learning, evidence that is extremely useful to all of higher education but especially to those who are struggling to build and sustain rigorous writing programs in a time of huge pressure to slash budgets. So I am very grateful for the work of Anderson, Anson, Gonyea, and Paine, and look forward to their ongoing work. If you haven’t already read it, check it out! ... View more

Today's guest blogger is Jason Dockter​, who teaches first-year composition at Lincoln Land Community College. He completed his Ph.D. in English Studies at Illinois State University. His research focus is primarily on rhetoric/composition, with specific interests in online writing instruction and multimodal composition. I primarily teach online writing courses, and for the first time in four years, I am teaching a face-to-face (f2f) class.. Returning to the physical classroom, I realize that the students I’ll have in class are far different than the students I worked with four years ago. They have different expectations, different needs, and different experiences that they’ll all bring to the classroom. These thoughts bring me back to the document that helps to communicate the teacher’s vision of the class to the students: the syllabus. As I prep for the beginning of the spring semester, I keep coming back to a gripe that I hear from my colleagues who teach f2f: students don’t read the syllabus, or if they do read it, they don’t refer back to it for answers to their questions. However, I don’t think the format for a traditional, print-based syllabus goes far enough in creating a text that helps students to comprehend and retain the information presented within a syllabus. As Traci Gardner pointed out in her blog post on redesigning a course syllabus with a graphic, students not reading or retaining information on a syllabus is very much a rhetorical problem. In fact, even if students have read the syllabus and retain the info, there’s a realistic possibility that the meaning students made from the syllabus doesn’t align with the meaning the teacher intended. Many online teachers are creating alternatives to a print-based syllabus; do a YouTube search for “video syllabus”, and you’ll see what I mean.  This semester, I am designing a multimodal syllabus that is designed to utilize the affordances that a web text can provide in hopes that the syllabus will better communicate with my students, helping them to more accurately make meaning that is similar to my intended meaning. Also, I want to start the semester off by challenging the existing notions that students have of what a text is—what writing is—to demonstrate that writing, and the writing they can expect to do, can look differently from what we’re all used to seeing. Context for a Syllabus While a traditional syllabus is developed to function within the very specific context of a f2f class, the teacher presenting that syllabus is an embedded part of that text in that situation. The teacher’s delivery of the syllabus is a crucial component and a unique aspect of the text that helps students to shape a particular meaning from the syllabus. Within the moment, a teacher and student collaborate to develop a shared understanding of the course syllabus. Creating and emphasizing this context is one reason why an unofficial “syllabus day” exists at the beginning of many courses. A usual moment during this “syllabus day” is the refrain to review the syllabus later that night or over the next few days. However, if students revisit the syllabus on their own, the teacher is no longer a part of that text, and students are left to reinterpret the syllabus alone, developing their own understanding of the complexities of assignments and policies. A syllabus that embraces a web-based design and emphasizes modes beyond the linguistic and spatial can better help to communicate course information to students. Not only is the text design more accessible because of the familiarity students have with web-based texts, but the additional modalities will provide additional ways through which meaning can be made. An additional bonus for me, within the context of my first-year composition course, is that I can demonstrate for students the idea of remixing texts. My multimodal syllabus can be compared to a traditional, print-based syllabus, providing the impetus for a beginning discussion about multiple modes, design, remix, rhetoric, rhetorical choice, and even genres of writing.  The Multimodal Syllabus The multimodal syllabus can take on many different forms, but the key aspect of this format is to avoid relying primarily on a single modality as the communicator of information. For me, moving beyond a paper-based syllabus provides opportunities to create something that lives where most of today’s information is shared: online. My syllabus is presented through the blog medium, as that’s a format that I am familiar with (but a multimodal syllabus could be designed through a variety of technologies such as Prezi, Thinglink, Softchalk, ExplainEverything). Perhaps other publishing formats would work better or provide greater opportunity to emphasize additional modalities, but my own and my students’ familiarity with blogs, essentially basic websites, requires little explanation about how to navigate the site. This familiarity will be helpful for students, allowing them to concentrate on the information. Familiarity with blogs makes the navigation obvious, but this can also be introduced to students through a post that quickly explains the text and its design. Within my multimodal syllabus​, I am using the same headings that I would within my paper-bound syllabus: Instructor Info and Contact Info, Course Info, Course Assignments, Grading Breakdown, Class Policies, and a Course Schedule. The blog platform works especially well because I can categorize the content areas of the syllabus by assigning each a unique category name and subsequent tag, such as Instructor Information, Class Policies, etc. These categories create specific links to unique areas of the text, which will be convenient for students who might want to review a specific policy without having to search through the entire syllabus to locate it. Or, the use of tags lets me tie multiple components of the syllabus together with a common tag. This easily lets students find everything associated with a specific tag or category, so they do not have to search through the entire text.  Perhaps most excitingly, the blog format enables me to easily integrate other technologies, such as video, audio, and image elements into each post. Through this variety of media, my syllabus embraces a variety of communication modalities. I opt to incorporate alphanumeric text in addition to a video because students have the choice of reading the info or watching and hearing it. While both information media communicate the same info, the choice is the student’s in terms of how they want to be presented with the information and how they want to engage with it. Through this choice, students might gain knowledge of the instructor or the course that is unintended, but quite valuable. For instance, students may learn more about the instructor based upon the background of any videos recorded and shared (for instance, learning that an instructor enjoys working from a local coffee shop or a bit about an instructor’s interests based upon pictures that might hang in the background of her office). A student might not easily recall a specific policy from a cursory read of alphanumeric text, but that same student might recall how a teacher spoke of a policy from a familiar coffee shop on campus, prompting a recollection of the policy. The richness of multiple modes offers possibilities for students, and through these communicative possibilities, reading and retention of course information is more likely.      To see my syllabus, follow this link​.      Here are the first two videos featured in the syllabus, which introduce me to students and explain how the blog syllabus works: ... View more

I’ve been reading and hearing podcasts lately about how storytelling is being used to help students—and especially multilingual students—learn to read and write and speak English. Of course I’ve known about TPRS—teaching proficiency through reading and storytelling—for a long time, with its three-step method. But lately I’ve been reading about other methods, some of which just simply call for students to tell stories—like a couple of pieces on Edutopia by Matthew J. Friday. Here’s what he says in “Why Storytelling in the Classroom Matters”: Whether in caves or in cities, storytelling remains the most innate and important form of communication. All of us tell stories. The story of your day, the story of your life, workplace gossip, the horrors on the news. Our brains are hard-wired to think and express in terms of a beginning, middle and end. It's how we understand the world. Friday is absolutely right, and reading him reminded me of Celia Genishi and Anne Dyson’s 1994 The Need for Story, a book that elaborates on and illuminates Friday’s claim. I taught that book for years: it helped to reconfirm my commitment to story as being at the heart of our discipline as well as the heart of our culture—and many, many other cultures. So I was excited when I read about Friday’s insight that “storytelling is the oldest form of teaching,” and about his work with third graders at an international school in China where 97% of the students are English learners. Friday begins by telling stories himself, and he does so with style: he moves around the room, acting out the story, pausing to ask questions and using physical humor to keep his students captivated. He’d been using storytelling for quite some time, but in this particular circumstance, he says, he got a surprise: Firstly, a German student who was in the listening phase of language acquisition began spontaneously writing her own fairy tales and requested to tell them--the first student storyteller. . . . Within a month, I had a list of students wanting to tell stories, and this continued for the rest of the year, right up to the very last day of term. Those first EAL storytellers went on to make rapid progress in the wider curriculum, with writing and telling fiction remaining their favourite activity. Friday goes on to reflect on the enormous power of storytelling, deciding that stories are innately “a form of human experience” and that while not all cultures have writing systems, all do have stories. So he establishes an open and friendly atmosphere in his classes as he tells story after story, sometimes dressing up in funny hats or costumes—and then the students take over. He and the class give positive responses, which also helps build self-confidence, and he doesn’t worry about spelling, punctuation, etc.: rather, he encourages “the freedom to take risks and make mistakes,” knowing that the surface issues will work themselves out with practice. Friday and the other storytelling teachers I’ve read about are working with young students, but I think we can take a lesson from them in terms of our college students, especially those learning English as a second, third, or sixth language. I know from my own experience with The Stanford Storytelling Project that undergraduates are as excited by and devoted to storytelling as Friday’s third graders and then some. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to include a storytelling component in all of our classes: my bet is that it would soon become students’ favorite part of the course! ... View more

During the years I and my research team were collecting the 15,000+ pieces of student writing that went into the Stanford Study of Writing, we had a running joke that the most “closeted” group on campus were poets. Because as the texts rolled in, we found poetry coming from everywhere: engineers, pre-med students, computer scientists, athletes—poetry, poetry, poetry. Now some of it was pretty bad poetry, but it was ubiquitous in our study, and heartfelt. In fact, I had asked students to submit all the writing they wanted to—not just that prepared for a class—without much thought. But that “other” writing turned out to be the most interesting to us as researchers, as it showed us what our students cared about when they weren’t working on assigned writing tasks. And one thing they cared about was poetry. So I was not surprised when I read a few weeks ago about “Instapoets” on the web. If you didn’t see this piece in the New York Times, check out Alexandra Alter’s “Web Poets’ Society: New Breed Succeeds in Taking Verse Viral.” The article opens with a brief profile of web poet Tyler Knott Gregson: Seven years ago, Mr. Gregson, 34, was scraping by as a freelance copywriter, churning out descriptions of exercise equipment, hair products and medical imaging devices. Now, thanks to his 560,000 Instagram and Tumblr followers, he has become the literary equivalent of a unicorn: a best-selling celebrity poet. Gregson’s first book, Chasers of the Light, has sold well over 100,000 copies, a figure the author of the essay compares to Louise Gluck’s Faithful and Virtuous Night. Gluck’s book, which won the National Book Award for Poetry last year, has sold only 20,000 copies. And Gregson’s latest book, All the Words are Yours, had an opening print run of 100,000 and, at the time I write this, is number 3 on Nielsen’s top 10 bestselling poetry titles. One of Gregson’s daily haikus from his Instagram feed: http://www.instagram.com/tylerknott/ Gregson is just one of many young authors who are publishing their poetry on the web: Alter cites numerous examples from around the globe to support her claim that “Instapoets” are everywhere. And while the Instapoets are not winning major literary awards (yet), they do suggest that the American habit of turning away from poetry may be changing: the 440,000 subscribers to YouTube’s Button Poetry channel suggests that readers/listeners are responding to poetry in powerfully positive ways. In this regard, the web has opened up a space for creativity that had been pretty much sealed off to all but a few poets able to publish their work through traditional means. This opening up of publication to ordinary folks is one of the hallmarks of the democratizing potential of the web, and one that seems to be working for poets. Teachers of writing have argued for the creative potential of all writing and have been at the forefront of keeping a focus on creativity even in the face of the national craze for standardized testing. Of course the Common Core puts emphasis on creativity—and even China seems to have realized that its approach to rote learning has left its students unable to compete in the creative arena, leading its education policymakers to introduce goals for “creativity” into their national curricula. In this country, we see “creative writing” courses in greater demand than ever—and an outpouring of creativity in both poetry and other forms of discourse on the Internet. Certainly this outpouring of poetry online offers great opportunities for our classrooms and students, both in terms of reading the work of others and of getting their own work out there for others to share. I’m hoping to do a small informal survey of the first-year writing classes at Stanford, asking how many students in them are putting their poetry online. I expect I’ll find a number of these students to be Instapoets and I hope that I can read and learn from what they are doing. Poetry to the People!! ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn (see end of post for bio).   With all of my multimodal teaching, I do admit that I still hold on to the idea of paper assessment for multimodal projects.  Part of this is due to the fear that when it comes time for grading I will not be able to access students’ work on their blogs. The other is the affirming experience (for students and teachers) of collecting tangible evidence that they have completed their work.  I have come to feel comfort in the ritual of collecting student folders at the end of the term and looking them in the eye and asking, “Is everything here... to the best of your knowledge?  They answer with an accomplished, “yes.” I even ritualistically break out my rolling suitcase for the occasion to drag them all home.   In one of my earlier blog posts I discussed the use of academic blogs, and I have come to use them in almost all of my classes.  Students’ shape multimodal compositions for multiple audiences and purposes and include deep links, detailed context and connections that don’t often come across on the printed page.  In the past I had students print out screen captures of their home page and media content and make document copies of their blog posts.   Lately students vocally resist printing (many of them don’t even own printers anymore).   I have plenty of theories regarding their resistance to printing but I realized that in their world, as digital natives, this is the norm and that they were perfectly comfortable with electronic submission and online evaluation.   I am listening . . . and examined my own resistance to this shift (as a digital immigrant) and decided to try to restructure my evaluation models to be more multimodal.     I still believe that it is important for students to be held accountable in a physical world for some things.  This also keeps the agency where it belongs – with the students—to check, articulate and organize their work over a semester.  I use a couple of tools and assignments that help me maintain this agency and provide structure and overview when reviewing multimodal student work.    1. Revising the blogs Near the end of the semester, I ask students to return to the work they have completed over the term.  This assignment asks students to move from a series of isolated blog posts to a larger collection with patterns and connections.  It helps them understand the blurred line between classroom and public spaces for writing and teaches them deep revising practices beyond textual editing.  I ask them to return their posts and revise them for engaging writing, audience awareness embedded links, proper citation and a rhetorical awareness of their digital identity go back and examine and craft the online identity for their blog and incorporate ideas and images from their work in the class revise their About page they created in the beginning of the term and re-see their purposes and authorial personae through the eyes of their purposes and journey through the course.  When students composed their original posts, their classmates were their primary audience.  This revision should take into account the shift towards a more public audience in which the blog stands on its own in a digital space.  This includes reshaping titles, adding captions to images, embedding links, and perhaps defining terms that are specific to the classroom discourse community.  See my assignment,  Revising Your Blog Guidelines (Kim Haimes-Korn) for guidelines and criteria.   2. Reflective Narrative I modified a reflective narrative assignment to act as both a final reflection on their work for the class and as a final post in their course blogs. Students read back through their posts from the semester and create a closure (or continuation) piece for their blogs for a public audience. I ask them to closely examine the subject matter and the connections they made in the class and explore how they are reading across the texts in their blog and connecting the concepts of the class in their writing and thinking.    I instruct them to draw upon and quote from their own writings and ideas and write a detailed account of the ways they have explored their ideas in the class through textual referencing. In this post, they must intentionally cross link to their earlier blog posts.   They can think of this reflection as an overview of what is included in their blogand write it as an extended introduction to the entries that follow or as a closure post in which they look back on what they have done.    3. Annotated Bibliography and Abstract This part of the assignment is very helpful when evaluating student work on their blogs.  Since I encourage students to give their blog posts engaging titles, this list identifies the assignment number, title and give a short abstract/summary of the work.  Not only does it help me in grading but it teaches them the form of the Annotated Bibliography and online citation practices and prepares them to create short abstracts of their work for metadata and other academic purposes.   4. Statement of Self-Evaluation This statement should NOT appear on students’ blogs. I am the only audience – teacher as evaluator – for this writing.  Students write an evaluation of their work and performance and in the class. They create a detailed portrait of themselves as  working writers and evaluate their progress with justification from their writings (by citing particular movements in their texts, style, etc.).   Students also need to complete the student evaluation (SE) portions of the rubric for a "Portfolio Evaluation" Sheet by returning to the criteria introduced in the class.. These holistic marks should be reflected in this Statement of Self Evaluation.   5. Rubric of Blog Contents and Description When students complete the course, they must go through the checksheet on Rubric for Multimodal Assessment (Kim Haimes-Korn) and confirm submission on all of their blog posts and assignments. I also include evaluation criteria to help them define what constitutes strong work in this digital environment.     Reflections on the Activities: Although I don’t collect all of their work, I ask students to complete the rubric checksheet, print the reflective narrative, Annotated Bibliography and Abstracts, and their Statement of Self-Evaluation.  I refer to their online documents and respond, in writing (either on the text or through electronic commentary for online submission) to the documents and fill out the teacher evaluation portion of the rubric while holistically marking it for assignment criteria to justify the grade. This gives students a way to remain accountable for their work and  teachers  a space to interact with their multimodal projects.   We are still in the process of understanding what it means to teach in multimodal classrooms.  As teachers, we need to consider the ways this changes our pedagogical approaches and student-teacher relationships.  It is important that we consider new approaches to assessment and evaluation that honor this shift and allow us to expand our definitions and practices. . . and to leave the rolling suitcases at home.   Guest blogger Kim Haimes-Korn is a Professor in the Digital Writing and Media Arts (DWMA) 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 Compositio ... View more

One of my family’s traditions at Thanksgiving was to work our way around the table, with each of us saying what we were most grateful for. I remember one year, during the doldrums of being thirteen, when I snarkily remarked that I didn’t have anything at all to be thankful for, and stared down, or tried to stare down, my aggrieved parents. How wrong I was, of course—and in my heart of hearts I knew it: even during the darkest days of my life filled with grief and loss, I have known I had much to be thankful for. So Thanksgiving is a favorite holiday for me. I like to send cards or notes to people I’m especially thankful for, I contribute to Thanksgiving dinners for those in need (and deliver whenever I can), and I try to find some quiet time that day to reflect. This year I’ve been looking back to some of my earliest years in the profession—the mid-1970s—and to three people I was grateful for then, and now. One was my teacher and mentor, Edward P. J. Corbett, who taught me about rhetoric (or the received notion of rhetorical history at the time) and about composition (by a huge stroke of luck, I was in grad school when Ed was serving as the editor of CCC, and I read every submission along with him and helped put the issues together). But I am grateful for much more I learned from Ed: his enormous curiosity, generosity of spirit, sheer decency, and wry wit made a lasting impression on me, as did his devotion to students. Two others I am thinking about this year, with thanks, are Mina Shaughnessy and Geneva Smitherman. I was incredibly fortunate to be introduced to their work and to meet both of them during those years. In fact, I read Talkin' and Testifyin' and Errors and Expectations​ practically back to back, and I was electrified by what they—especially read together—had to teach me. It was their work that led to my study of “basic” writing and writers and to my dissertation. I often think of what more Mina could have contributed to our knowledge had she not left us so early (she died in 1978). Geneva—Dr. G, as I’ve heard students call her for years—is still teaching me lessons every year. My gratitude to both these scholars runs very deep. But this Thanksgiving, as always, I give thanks for my family and friends—and especially the students I’ve had the privilege of knowing over the course of nearly 50 years of teaching. As I have often said, students in all their vivid differences, their rich histories, and their willingness to learn along with me—these have been the gifts of a lifetime. For them I will always be giving thanks. So Happy Thanksgiving to all—and here’s wishing your day is deeply satisfying. ... View more

Collin College’s Third Annual Trends in Teaching Composition Conference brought teachers of writing from neighboring campuses together in late October, and I had the honor of spending a day with them. My visit actually began the day before, when I attended a graduate seminar in composition theory at Texas Christian and, following the class, a reading group discussion/potluck dinner. I’ve always enjoyed and benefitted from such occasions (and held many at my home over the years), but since I’ve “retired,” I especially savor these times, full of camaraderie, good will, fellowship, and talk about teaching and about students: Teachers enjoying and sharing and learning from one another. These sessions took me back to some of my earliest experiences in teaching graduate courses to new teachers, when I had an opportunity to build an intellectual and personal community that nurtured and shared ideas. Looking back over the years, I can see that these communities inspired a great deal of good research and scholarship as well as lasting friendships. I also see that such communities seem particularly characteristic of the field of rhetoric and writing studies. So now when I get to join one of these groups, even for a day, it feels very much like going home. At the reading group, I soaked up the atmosphere (as well as the great food!), and listened to the ebb and flow of conversation (we were talking about an essay I had co-written about students in the Stanford Study of Writing) swirling around me about research in pursuit of better teaching and learning. Indeed, it felt like home. Joining the conference at Collin College the next day continued a celebration of the best goals of our field. The conference’s theme was on argument, and I got to share my thoughts on the subject (and you know I have LOTS of them!) and then join in a large-group discussion of how best to teach argument today—and, indeed, why we need to teach it. For me, helping students engage successfully in the world of argument—that is to say, in the world we currently inhabit—offers them a way to become active and productive participants in that world, to learn to listen to and respect other viewpoints, to see that their voices are always in response to the voices of others, and to enter the global and endless conversation of humankind. I view argument not as a form or even a genre, but rather as a way of being in the world. We argue to learn what we think and believe, to understand our relationship to other people as well as to ideas, to make the best decisions we can about inevitably complex and difficult issues, and to build and sustain networks of exploration and understanding. We teach argument so that students can and will pursue these same goals. And what a feast of exchanges the conference provided. In a panel on Teaching Comics, scholars talked about how to argue for the inclusion of comics in our curricula and presented brilliant activities and assignments used in their own classes. In another panel, students and faculty from Texas State explored “Strategies for Teaching Argument and Persuasion in Relation to Latin@ Literary and Cultural Spheres,” reminding us that modes and ways of arguing differ from culture to culture and that we still have a lot to learn by paying very close attention to the writing and reading strategies of all our students, including those who attend Hispanic serving colleges and universities. So it’s true: I love writing teachers and being with such teachers. With teachers learning from and sharing their wisdom and successes, their missteps and failures, with each other. Yes, I know that higher education is under attack from all sides, that working conditions for teachers of writing are in many places disgraceful, and that the work we do can be bone-wearying. But I also know that we have been meeting these challenges for longer than I can remember, and doing so with grace and good will and persistence. ... View more

Guest blogger Amanda Gaddam​ is an adjunct instructor in the First-Year Writing Program and the School for New Learning at DePaul University. She holds a B.A. in English with a concentration in Literary Studies and a M.A. in Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse with a concentration in Teaching Writing and Language from DePaul, and her research interests include first-year composition, adult and non-traditional students, and writing center pedagogies. In my first-ever, first-year composition class, I posed the question “What blogs do you read?” to my class, which I felt confident would yield numerous responses and a fruitful discussion.  Instead, my question was met with silence and blinking.  It turns out that my students then—and most of my first-year composition students now—did and do read blogs, but they didn’t and don’t know that they’re reading them.  Fashion blogs, health and fitness blogs, music blogs, tech blogs, and even microblogs like Tumblr—all of these make appearances during students’ daily rounds on the internet, but they aren’t necessarily aware of the fascinating and specific rhetorical choices in arrangement and tone, nor can they identify (right away) the particular conventions that govern these texts.   As Miller and Shepherd note in their 2011 article, “Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog,” blogs make for interesting genre analysis discussions; because they rely so heavily on hypertextual, visual, and audio elements, they also provide for a unique multimodal assignment.  The following project and accompanying activities are designed as a low-stakes way to get students asking the right questions about the material they see everyday and recreating appropriate rhetorical choices in multimodal environments for themselves.  Low-stakes projects are particularly important for multimodal composing because most students, despite the technological proficiency that they might have, tend to be apprehensive about writing in unfamiliar genres and need the safety of a low-pressure composing environment to experiment with non-textual elements like video or audio. ASSIGNMENT Step One I introduce the definition, concept, and purpose of genre analysis in a short lecture. Step Two Students complete an in-class, small-group genre analysis activity using the complaint letter as an example genre. Students consider four sample complaint letters using questions adapted from Bawarshi and Reiff’s Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy (all handouts available here).  As a follow-up discussion, students use what they have learned about the contextual factors and features of the genre to theorize their own approach to writing a complaint letter. Step Three I divide students into groups of four or five and assign each group a sub-genre of blogs.  Here are some examples of blogs I’ve assigned in the past: Students then use the questions from the in-class genre analysis activity to research the given example blogs and find one additional blog example from the Internet that fits within their assigned sub-genre.  One of their homework assignments is to bring their notes on these blogs to class in preparation for group work. Step Four Students share their findings from this inquiry with their group in order to come to a consensus about the common features, content, audiences, and contexts of their assigned sub-genre.  They use this information to plan a concept for a blog of their own. Step Five In cooperation with their groups, students create their blog and each compose individual blog posts that purposefully incorporate multimedia elements, like images, video, audio, and links to other content.  All rhetorical choices about content, arrangement, and style belong to the students. Because first-year writing students at DePaul use Digication for their final ePortfolios, I require that the groups use Digication for this blog project and that they purposefully incorporate multimedia elements like images, video, audio, and links to other web content.  The opportunity to learn the various features of Digication without fear of compromising their grade and the chance to practice the skills of multimodal composing on this platform make for thoughtful and well integrated multimodal final assignments. However, this project could easily be completed using free platforms such as Wordpress or Wix. Step Six Students showcase their group blogs and individual blog posts and justify their rhetorical choices to the class in informal presentations.  Neither the blogs nor the presentations are graded at this time; the presentations serve as an opportunity for peer feedback and review before revising the project, and, if they choose, submitting it for a grade in their final ePortfolio. I ask students to write a short analysis reflecting on the rhetorical choices they made for both the blog as a whole and their individual posts, and if they choose to submit the project for a grade, they present these analyses in their final ePortfolio.  I also find that they like to discuss this project in their end-of-term reflection letters, and they note that the collaboration, experimentation, and creativity of the assignment make it their favorite project of the quarter. REFLECTION Fortunately, I have found that students’ engagement with this assignment does not necessarily correspond to their technological acumen; rather, they use both the low-stakes occasion for experimentation and the collaboration with their peers as opportunities to learn something new about the more technical aspects of multimodal composing.  The fact that this assignment is low-pressure doesn’t mean that they don’t try.  In fact, without the stress of a grade, students are more likely to try new rhetorical strategies—and sometimes fail to use these strategies effectively—but their trials and errors show that they’re genuinely working through the best ways to approximate the genre. STUDENT WORK Check out some examples of what some of my students have created for their blogs in the past: The students assigned to tech blogs used the information they collected about the most common features and content to create this title, concept, and header image for their blog.  Their analyses indicate that they put a great deal of thought and conversation into selecting the colors, typeface, and imagery they deemed rhetorically appropriate. The students assigned to create a political blog noted that one of the most important features of blogs is the interactivity between readers and bloggers.  They approximated this element in their own blog by providing comments on each other's individual blog posts. This student recreated a common rhetorical choice in blog arrangement: the use of a lede accompanied by a hyperlink from the blog's homepage, which redirects readers to the full-length blog post.  In his analysis and in the informal presentation, the student and his group theorized that this choice forced readers to click further into the blog, exposing them to more content, and, in the case of for-profit blogs, more advertisements.   Click here for more examples, handouts, and descriptions of the assignment and associated activities.  Want to collaborate with Andrea on a Multimodal Monday assignment or be a guest blogger? Send ideas to leah.rang@macmillan.com for possible inclusion in a future post. ... View more

Now that I am at least semi-retired, I am taking advantage of every chance to visit new places and to reacquaint myself with places I’ve been before. Recently, I had a chance to spend ten days in London with three friends: we rented a place on Horsemongers Mews Lane and set about visiting old haunts like the British Museum and British Library, the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery, the Tate Modern and Tate Britain, and the Globe. We took in two plays, walked some 90 miles all told, and rode endless other miles on the Tube. One highlight of this visit, however, was completely new to me. Under the tutelage of claymaker and artist Julia and archaeologist Mike, we took a walk along the Thames foreshore, at a very low tide. What a wonder awaited us! Mike and Julia sent us off in different directions, telling us simply to gather up anything that “looked interesting” to us. So we fanned out, with our plastic bags, and some 30 or 40 minutes later came together again with our treasures. Mike explained that the Thames is indeed a treasure trove of history, offering up fragments from 2000+ years ago on one shore and from Roman times forward on the other (well, that’s an oversimplification, but we were on the “Roman” side, where so much has been excavated over the centuries). Between the two of them, Mike and Julia identified everything we found, from a tiny Japanese kewpie doll that was “probably made last week” to pipe stems and bowls from the 18 th century, lots of glazed pottery from the medieval period, and tiles used in Roman buildings. Here are a few of the pieces I collected: I couldn’t help wishing that I had a group of my writing students with me to join in the fun, and I wondered what local sites might hold historical artifacts, ones I could engage students in gathering and studying and writing about. There was something magical and powerful about holding a tile that had once decorated a Roman home, or part of a teacup used in Chaucer’s time, something that pulled me back through history and connected me to it in a very visceral way. And it occurred to me that students might even be able to do archaeological “digs” in their own homes, writing about artifacts from their childhoods, or from their parents’ or grandparents’ time. Such connections with the past seem especially important in our throw-away, dash-from-one-thing-to-the-next world. Our students can benefit from making these connections, writing about them, and speculating on what artifacts our civilization will leave behind for someone a thousand years from now to happen upon. ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Jeanne Bohannon (see end of post for bio). Since Traci Gardner’s insightful post in the Community about Bringing Up Accessibility, I have been thinking about ways to integrate discussions of writing for user-friendliness into my Functional Grammar course.  Most students in this course are technical communication majors, so they need to not only be aware of accessibility issues in multimodal composition but also be able to produce digital content that meets the 1973 Rehabilitation Act’s Section 508 requirements. For many of us, myself included, Section 508 is new territory in our teaching praxis.  What this means is that I am learning along with my students how and why digital writers apply the conventions of accessible texts across multiple platforms.  After participating in interactive lectures about accessible textual production, our class community decided that we would compose public blog posts that describe and apply Section 508 content for student and faculty audiences leveraging the opportunity to learn and teach in the same moments.  I have posted our process and products, which I hope you and your students will find useful. Multimodal Writing Context Students design blog posts that describe and embody foundational Section 508 requirements for digital texts.  I recommend either Edublogs or WordPress as easy introduction spaces for blogging; students majoring in technical communication at my university design content in their own web domains, which gives them greater creative and analytics control.  Either way, students compose public, digital texts with multimodal elements that serve to make informational writing both clear and interesting to read.   Measurable Learning Objectives Create digital documents that embody and explain Section 508 Criteria Synthesize content-meaning through public writing Summarize key elements of Section 508 relevant to technical writers Background Reading for Students and Instructors The St. Martin's Handbook​: Ch. 16, Design for Print and Digital Writing, including Considering Disabilities box: "Color for Contrast" Writer's Help 2.0 for Lunsford Handbooks: “Considering Disabilities” The Everyday Writer: Section 3a: Plan online assignments, including At a Glance box: “Guidelines for Creating an Online Text” Writing in Action: Section 6a: Plan online assignments, including Checklist box: “Guidelines for Creating an Online Text” EasyWriter: Section 4a: Planning online assignments, including Checklist box: “Guidelines for Creating an Online Text” Writing and Designing In our course communities, students and I crowdsource our writing assignments to make sure we meet the specific academic and professional needs of the group.  Here is what we came up with for the Section 508 blogging assignment: Process through and write a 500+ word blog post that includes at least one of each multimodal element (image, audio, video) based on your research into 508 requirements and our class discussions about alt-text, live captioning, and color considerations. Use at least three tags per post.  Read the posts of at least three coursemates.  Comment on their blogs in approximately 100 words, using the rhetorical analysis tools you have gained so far this semester. Submit the following in our Discussion Forum for the week, folding your critique into the week's topic.  If you get to a blog that already has at least two comments, go the next blog. Finally, reflect on your and others’ work for both our digital and in-class talks. Be ready to provide dialogic feedback to your peers. Our writing goal for this assignment is to provide well-researched, compelling blog posts that inform an audience of students, faculty, and professional content creators about key components of Section 508.  Our design goal is to construct digital pages that comply with Section 508 accessibility. Student Exemplars: Celia Fisher: "How Accessibility Benefits Your Site" ​ Eddie Khiara: Considering Disability (First Choice Tutors) ​ Jason Figueroa: 508 Access ​ Reflections on the Assignment – Students: The assignment got me thinking about how Section 508 compliance could become more commonplace; with so many 'rules', it seems unlikely that the average content creator would bother adhering to them all. In my blog post, I wrote about how making a site accessible has the potential to lead to more views through search engines' metadata crawls, because people want to know how this is a best practice impacts their web traffic. – Celia While learning about section 508 I was amazed at the amount of thought that went into the requirements and regulations. I see how having this requirement will open up your work to a wider audience. I personally use closed captions not because I have trouble hearing however, I use it more so I can have a lower volume so I won’t wake my two kids. Going through the different regulations I can see how enforcing them will actually affect other groups then the intended audience. - Jason My Reflection My goal as a writing teacher is to work with students to determine their academic and professional needs and then work alongside them as they construct texts that are relevant to them. The 508 blogging opportunity “counts” for me, in terms of multimodal composition, because it allows students to create interesting and informative digital content for a specific audience that appeals to a diversity of readers while also teaching student writers necessary requirements as they grow into professional writers. Jeanne Law Bohannon is an Assistant Professor in the Digital Writing and Media Arts (DWMA) department 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 pedagogies; performing feminist rhetorical recoveries; and growing informed and empowered student scholars. Reach Jeanne at: jeanne_bohannon@kennesaw.edu and www.rhetoricmatters.org Want to collaborate with Andrea on a Multimodal Monday assignment or be a guest blogger? Send ideas to leah.rang@macmillan.com for possible inclusion in a future post. ... View more

A week or so ago, I got an email message from a former student who had been in one of my classes at Ohio State some 25 years ago. That was enough of a treat in and of itself. But the message went on to describe how much this former student now writes in his position as a city planner, and also to remark on what he most remembered about our class. He wrote: “I remember what I think was our second day of class. You came in and went straight to the white board and drew a thick black line from one end of it to the other. On one end you wrote, in big capital letters, WRITE. On the other end you wrote WRITTEN. Then you talked to us about the choices we were going to have to make to figure out whether we were going to WRITE, that is take action on our own and with some authority, or whether we were going to be WRITTEN by people outside of us. I remember writing those two words down in my notebook and looking at them every so often during the rest of that year. I wanted to WRITE. Looking back, I can see that I have often been able to WRITE but that I’ve also been WRITTEN, especially by my job and by some groups I belong to. I guess I’ve ended up somewhere in the middle of that line, but I hope just a little more toward WRITE.” I’ve started many of my classes over the years with this same strategy and I’ve always found that students are very interested in this binary and how it applies to their lives. They don’t need to read Foucault (though that wouldn’t be a bad thing) to know they occupy various subject positions, nor do they need a lot of postructuralist theory to alert them to the fact that key elements in their lives—their families, their religious institutions, their schools, and more—are powerful shapers of their lives. In fact, these institutions are often set on writing them—making them into the ideal child, the ideal worshipper, the ideal student, and so on. They feel these pressures keenly. And while they may at first blush and claim that they have a lot of agency, not too far into our discussion they begin to see that what they thought were their own decisions were ones that had been made at least partially for them by others. We often spend some time making similes or metaphors for what it feels like to write or be written. Usually we draw pictures as well, then use these materials to write what amount to brief essays on rhetorical agency and how available it is to us. This is of course a huge question today, when many feel at the mercy of huge economic and political forces it’s hard to understand, much less control. But for that very reason, it seems more important than ever to engage students in grappling with the subject agency and of looking for ways to enhance it in their everyday lives. We often put ourselves somewhere along the continuum and then chart how we feel about that placement during the course of the term. Like all binaries, this one is over-simple, which students come to see. But it is a useful concept for them as they begin their college journeys. And for some—like my former student—it’s germane even 25 years later! ​ Andrea Lunsford and student Jelani Lynch talk about the power of writing in Video Link : 1233a video in the Macmillan Community. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Or share it with others and start a conversation? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

In this series of posts, I’m thinking about ways to teach the Syrian refugee crisis using readings from Emerging.  Infographics offer a unique way for students to think about the crisis while also engaging metaissues of visual design and data presentation.  I would start by searching the web for these infographics, which are fairly easy to find using the search terms “infographic Syrian refugee.” (The example on the right comes from Visually.)   You might even ask students to locate these sources, allowing them to select infographics they find particularly useful or compelling. The introduction to Emerging has material on reading visual texts that can be useful in approaching infographics but there are some readings from the text you might bring into play as well. There’s a full portfolio of infographics contained in Emerging’s online content: Drake Martinet’s “Stacy Green, Will You Marry Me?,” Buckfire & Buckfire’s “Student Bullying,” and carinsurancecomparison.org’s “The Real Effects of Drunken Driving.” These online  selections (e-Pages) are useful for introducing students to the genre of the infographic and giving them a sense of the range of work it can do in terms of both rhetoric and composition.  Elizabeth Dickinson’s “The Future of Food”—contained in Emerging—is a fuller use of this genre. Dickinson’s work could be described as an infographic essay about world hunger.  Dickinson offers students additional tools for considering the rhetorical decisions involved in crafting a compelling infographic, particularly when thinking about what text to use, how to use statistics, and how to design the graphic. I think it would also be useful to have students read the selections from PostSecret in Emerging.  Though also a visual genre, PostSecret looks and acts differently than an inforgraphic. Having that contextual contrast might be a useful way into talking more about rhetoric and design. Using all of these readings together, I think it would be interesting to have students compose their own infographics about either the refugee crisis or some other compelling issue.  Such an assignment would broaden students’ understanding of composition and argument while offering them a chance for advocacy. If you have any assignments or suggestions for creating infographics, feel free link to and share in the comments below. 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

[[This blog post originally appeared on February 1, 2013.]] Dramatic writers aim to capture the way that people speak:  Therefore, grammatical correctness is not necessarily important in the text of a play or script.  What is unacceptable in academic prose is often quite desirable in drama. Unfortunately, students sometimes take drama’s emphasis on performance and the spoken word as a license for sloppy writing.  Dramatic writing, though often non-grammatical, must never be haphazard. Frequently, I encounter in beginning playwrights a lack of attention to punctuation.  Perhaps they believe that, because punctuation is for the eye, it is unnecessary to writing that addresses itself to the ear.  However, such a belief ignores punctuation’s significance as a means of suggesting vocal techniques of expression—specifically, the pause—which are readily understood to the listener but hard to convey to the reader.  Because punctuation captures the rhythms of spoken speech, it’s essential that playwrights employ punctuation to its fullest potential. While everyone is familiar with basic punctuation marks—such as the period, comma, exclamation point, etc.—there are others that beginning playwrights tend to neglect.  Here are some of my favorites.  (Similar lists can be found in textbooks such as Buzz McLaughlin’s The Playwright’s Process.) The ellipsis (. . .) indicates a trailing off, whether within or at the end of a speech.  It suggests confusion or a wandering of the mind, rather than an abrupt change of thought. The dash (—) indicates an interruption, whether within or at the end of a speech.  Characters interrupt themselves as their thoughts change in quick succession or as they make hasty additions to their statements.  Dashes are used, also, when characters are interrupted by other characters. The semicolon (;) links related thoughts. The colon (:) links related thoughts more closely than the semi-colon.  The colon is used for assertions that hinge on one another, suggesting a stronger—perhaps causal—relationship. The question mark followed by the uncapitalized question—e.g., “What do you think I am? a dog?”  This form suggests a subsidiary question that continues the first, rather than a wholly new question asked in succession.  This punctuation device can greatly affect an actor’s inflection. Consider working with punctuation in class.  For instance, you might have students come up with sample lines of dialogue in which they use these conventions.  Such exercises can help encourage greater precision in writing. To commit speeches to paper, dramatic writers should take advantage of all devices at their disposal—including italics, all caps, and the formatting of text as verse.  After all, playwrights have the difficult task of converting a complex medium (the spoken word) to another medium (the written word) and of doing so in such a way as to suggest delivery to actors. How do you teach punctuation in the scriptwriting classroom?  How do you discuss micro-concerns like the line, as opposed to larger concerns like plotting or character building? ... View more

I may be the last person in the country to have heard about Anand Giridharadas’s The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas, but I spotted the striking cover when I was walking through an airport a week or so ago and immediately went over to check it out. The first part of the title caught my attention because for years I had intense discussions with students in my writing classes about how to define an “American.” We’d read what Alexis de Tocqueville had to say by way of defining the people he met when he visited the country in 1831—along with several later attempts at definitions and then eventually our own try at this task. Along the way we were learning about the characteristics of good definitions, but the conversations over this particular definition were always beyond lively, often continuing far after the class discussion closed. Of course, the second part of the title is also arresting, so I grabbed the book from the shelf and took it with me onto the plane. The opening is as riveting a piece of writing as I’ve read in quite a while, and it’s based on a true story. It begins ten days after 9/11, when Mark Stroman, a tough guy covered with tattoos, enters a Dallas mini-mart, marches up to the counter, and asks the brown-skinned man behind, “Where are you from?” Raisuddin Bhuiyan, a well-educated immigrant from Bangladesh who has come to the U.S. in pursuit of his own American dream, sees that the man holds a gun and expects a robbery. But the question startles him and before he can find an answer, Stroman shoots him in the face. As he lies in a pool of his own blood, he thinks that if Allah spares his life, he will dedicate what he has left of it to serving others. The rest of the book explores the road that brought each man to this particular spot on this particular day, moving back and forth between the two and bringing both into remarkable focus. Bhuiyan doesn’t die, though he loses an eye and has many surgeries. Stroman is caught, tried, and convicted of this and two other assaults, including a death, and sent to death row. So far, a remarkable pairing of stories. But Giridharadas goes far beyond any simple linking of good and evil. With grace and great insight, based on hundreds of hours of interviews with both men and their families, he paints a more and more complex picture of what motivated and continues to motivate each man. Eventually, Bhuiyan not only forgives Stroman but mounts a campaign to save him from the death penalty; Stroman for his part undergoes a transformation that leaves him remorseful—and connected to Bhuiyan in several ways. I won’t say more because I really hope that teachers everywhere read this book. What I think you will find is a subtly nuanced as well as gripping tale that raises questions about just what a “true American” is and that refuses to provide any simple answers. I can imagine using this book as a key text in a course that invites students to do research on a whole range of issues related to “murder and mercy” and the American psyche. I’m so glad for that chance find in an airport bookshop and for an extremely rewarding summer read. Check it out to see if you agree. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community (it’s free, quick, and easy) to get involved! ... View more

I’ve been spending some time with the 14-year-old grandson of a good friend, who is visiting. He came out to California fired up about learning to play golf and intent on keeping up with baseball (he’s a Cubs fan but checks other box scores daily). He’s also been glad to help out with gardening and other chores. What he has NOT been excited about is READING. Listening to him complain took me back to an encounter with my nephew, then in middle school. It was summer time and he had a big reading assignment: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. He was reading it, but very reluctantly, and with a certain amount of disdain. I remember his saying, voice dripping sarcasm: “I don’t know why people say this is a great novel. The girl that wrote it is sure wordy.” I did wonder about that choice of text, certainly not one I would have thought would have great appeal for middle schoolers! Well, at least my friend’s grandson isn’t assigned to read Frankenstein. Instead, his obligatory summer reading is of Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies. I looked up the book and found out that it’s YA novel set in a society where everyone gets extreme cosmetic surgery at 16 to become “pretty.” You can imagine the complications and tensions (and triumphs?) this premise leads to, and I read a few pages, enough to see I could easily read more. But not my young friend. He declared it endlessly boring and not what he wanted to be doing during his summer holidays. So—is it the fact that it is required reading that makes this task so objectionable? In this case, that seems to definitely be part of the problem. I have seen the same kind of resistance in Stanford students, who are assigned three books to read before they arrive on campus for their frosh year. When I had an opportunity to choose the three books, I selected Lynda Barry’s 100 Demons!, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and ZZ Packer’s Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. But I and the other faculty members who have chosen these books have a good ace in the hole: the authors of the books come to campus during orientation for interviews and Q & A with the frosh. The year I chose the books, some of the first year students confessed that they hadn’t read the books during the summer. But the session with the authors was so riveting that they all rushed back to their dorms to read them after the fact. So. If we want kids to be reading books during the summer, it would seem like a good idea to provide some hooks. One might be to let them choose the books they want to read. That’s worked well with my grandniece Audrey, now 11 and reading away this summer at five books of her choice. Another might be to engage the students with the authors in some way, most likely online. Still another might be to assign a graphic novel or narrative, or a book along with a movie version. There are probably lots of other good reading programs out there, along with hooks to get students engaged in reading. If you know one, please write! 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