I’ve been in Sweden visiting at the University of Orebro, where we talked about gender neutral language in general and gender neutral pronouns in particular. Teachers and scholars there are as concerned with language equity as we are in the U.S. so we traded stories about “singular they” and alternative pronouns. One colleague remembered reading a study that rewrote a passage to use gender neutral language throughout and reported that readers had a harder time understanding and remembering the gender neutral message, which seemed to have lost specificity. I was fascinated by this study—but my Swedish colleague could not remember where she had read it or any further details: if anyone knows of this study, or any others like it, I would be very grateful to have that information.   While I’ve been focusing on gender neutral pronouns and how to advise students to think carefully about their use of pronouns and about preferences those they address may have, I completely missed a book by James W. Pennebaker—though it’s been out nearly a decade. In The Secret Life of Pronouns, Pennebaker, who is Regents Centennial Chair of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and a well-known researcher on the relationship between writing and health, studies low function words (like pronouns and articles) to see what they may reveal about the social and psychological states of speakers who use them. Pennebaker and his team use analytical programs like the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count to analyze very large bodies of text and determine correlations. For example, when pundits criticized President Obama, saying that he was overly-fond of “I words” and suggesting that this signaled self-centeredness, Pennebaker went to work. As he reported, his research showed that Obama used fewer instances of I words than any other modern President. Further, this research revealed that people who are confident and self-assured (like President Obama) generally use fewer I words than insecure speakers, who rely on them much more heavily.   Of special interest to me is Pennebaker’s study of speakers/writers who shift between first and third person pronouns. These people, Pennebaker finds, tend to be able to shift perspectives, looking at an issue from other people’s points of view. This is a very intriguing finding, one scholars in writing studies and writing programs might well pursue. We now have enough large collections of student writing to carry out analyses using Pennebaker’s tools (or ones of our own design). Doing so could give us new information we could share with students about their own pronoun usage—at the very least. So perhaps it’s time to broaden and deepen our interest in pronouns: who knew they had such an exciting secret life?!   Image Credit: Pixabay Image 623167 by nile, used under the Pixabay License ... View more

I am continuing to look at suggestions for working with multilingual students in FYC and IRW co-requisite classrooms. This week, I’d like to consider vocabulary development, an area of struggle for many students in basic writing classrooms, but particularly for multilingual writers. When I poll my students about writing concerns, a lack of vocabulary is often mentioned as a barrier or challenge. My current IRW co-requisite supports a writing-about-writing (WAW) FYC course, which means I am asking my students to tackle some tough reading assignments, and it is in the context of those reading assignments that I first address vocabulary. Before students begin a WAW reading assignment, I provide a reading guide that includes some key vocabulary words. The guide primes students for the text and scaffolds the reading for them, allowing them to work through the content without repeated stops to refer to a dictionary or a translator. But this initial exposure to lexical items is only the start of the learning process; even though students will see the words multiple times within the context of the reading, “acquiring” these words means understanding more than a translation or a definition.   Most linguists or language teachers would include the following as part of “knowing a word”:  pronunciation, spelling, register, part of speech, connotations, and collocations, in addition to the dictionary definitions. And for many words, there are multiple definitions to consider. Within my IRW classes, therefore, I target a set of critical vocabulary throughout the term. I choose words that I know students will encounter more than once in our class readings, words that are critical for discussions of language and writing. I may also choose words that occur on the Academic Word List, which is a list of words and word families that occur across multiple academic disciplines. When I “target” words, I introduce and highlight these words as they occur in context, and I provide focused practice and opportunities for use.  What does that look like? To highlight words in context, consider these strategies: Preview the words before a reading. Highlight the words in a reading by reading paragraphs aloud, emphasizing target words, and discussing the sentences in which they occur. Incorporate the words in lectures and include them on class handouts and assignment instructions, giving students a chance to hear and see them. Ask students open-ended questions that include the words. To provide more focused instruction, consider these ideas: Provide related parts of speech. For example, when students learn the noun “concession,” I also teach the related verb “concede.” Then students practice with both words, using cloze (fill in the blank) and grammatical judgment exercises. The latter type of exercise requires students to determine whether or not something is a possible sentence. For example, students must determine if we can say, “I will concession this point.” If they decide it is not acceptable, then they offer an alternative: we’d have to say “concede this point.” Provide collocations. We can make concessions or offer concessions, but we don’t do concessions. We make a concession on or about a certain issue, and we concede that something is the case; we don’t make concessions to an issue (although we can make a concession to a person), and we don’t concede to do something (with an infinitive). Again, I present this information explicitly (a chart works well to show verb + prepositions combinations), point to it in our readings, and provide practice exercises. I frequently draw the incorrect sentences for these exercises from examples in student writing, and students often seemed relieved to have the clarification. Look at contrasts carefully. As students study words and look at translations, they may encounter similar words with different connotations or nuances. With concession, for example, students may want to understand the difference between a concession and an admission; we discuss those differences explicitly. At times, students ask questions I can’t answer immediately. After all, there are many things about words that I know intuitively but have never been required to articulate. I will think about the question for a day or two, perhaps ask a colleague or consult the OED, and then take an answer back to the class. We also make the fact of tacit knowledge a topic of class discussion, emphasizing that all of us, as language-users, have such knowledge about language. Celebrate attempts to use the words, whether successful or not.   While some of these activities may seem daunting or time-consuming, it actually takes little time to preview words and find ways to emphasize them within the context of other class activities. The focus exercises are not particularly hard to draw up either, and can be implemented in just a few moments at the beginning or the end of a class.   Finally, instructors can let students guide on-going vocabulary study by asking for some basic feedback at the end of a class period or as part of a reflection journal: What are three words from our reading or class discussion that confused you or that you’d like to know more about? For more about vocabulary and multilingual writers, I recommend the work of Paul Nation, Keith Folse, or Michael Lewis. What are your strategies for helping multilingual writers learn and use new vocabulary? ... View more

Andrew Hollinger (nominated by Randall Monty) is pursuing his PhD in Technical Communication and Rhetoric at Texas Tech University, and expects to finish in May 2020. He is the coordinator for first year writing at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. In addition to teaching in the writing program, he also teaches technical communication, and composition theory and pedagogy. His research interests include articulation theory, especially around teachers, students, and Education; writing studies; experience architecture and public rhetoric; and pedagogy. FYW is Liminal We forget, I think, what it’s like to not know how to write, think, study. Or, rather: what it’s like to not know something and also not know how to deal with it. Professional scholars and writers thrive in unknowing and inquiry; perhaps it’s the thrill of discovery and articulation that drives us. At the very least, we’ve acclimated.   Enter first year writing. While trying to become (very poetic and all), students enter our classes where they are confronted with many of the misconceptions they’ve been writing and working and learning under for the last twelve years of their schooling, things like there is one way/method/protocol that anyone can follow to produce “good” writing (that pesky universal discourse that even we have trouble dissuading our peers across campus of), or that getting better at grammar or vocabulary will translate to better writing, or that someone either has it or they don’t (I’m a math person, anyway), and so on. Overcoming the misconceptions is, itself, a daunting task. Add to that our content—writing is an activity and a subject (What does that mean?); “good” writing is contextual and situational (How do I know the situation?); not all composition is alphabetic text on a page (What?!)—and it’s a wonder our students don’t glimpse the syllabus on the first day and walk out.   The assumption, it sometimes seems, is that students and faculty outside of the writing program and rhet/comp  think first year writing is an obligatory course, a hurdle to jump. Show up, writing the essays, get your grade, and move on. The truth is more complex and less poetic.   First year writing is part of the first year experience—whether or not the course formally resides within a university-wide FYE infrastructure. Traditional students are transitioning from high school. Nontraditional students are trying to transition into a school mindset. Many students (even the “good” ones, whatever that means) don’t know what it means to be in college. What does it mean to be a scholar? What does it mean to engage with the genres and media and conventions of a discipline? What does it mean to think and struggle through ideas? Without guidance, many students end up making it through their time in college simply surviving, without really experiencing the full possibilities available to them.   First year writing, then, serves several functions and purposes: the teaching of (multimodal) composition and the larger social project of helping students enter the university (in all senses of “enter”). That is, first year writing is uniquely situated to perform the important work of teaching our course content while also equipping students for success in their other courses, in the jobs, and perhaps even interpersonally (though that’s a blog post for another time) if we, as instructors, can develop assignments that deliberately respond to both the academic and social areas our class is already in.   Assignments Can Be Bridges Enter (again) first year writing and my assignment, Research Three Ways: Becoming an Academic. This project (three separate assignments) is intended for the second course in a two-course first year writing sequence, but could easily be adapted for the first course or a single course. The initial assignment is fairly common, a research paper. My own classes focus on writing as its own subject as well as threshold concepts, so students often write about topics that concern writing, reading, literacy, and learning. However, this assignment should work well with any focus, theme, or writing approach.   The interesting thing about this assignment is what happens during the writing of the research paper. Students are asked to track, color code, and annotate their revisions. (Why not just use “track changes” on Word or Google Drive or Draftback? You could. I like this approach because it slows the process down and requires students to make physical moves that parallel their cognitive maneuvers and rhetorical decisions.) This part of the assignment communicates early to students that We will be drafting and revising; it’s not even possible to write this paper the night before it’s due. Writing happens on purpose. Even when we are incidentally clever, the choice to leave it in constitutes a rhetorical choice and a purposeful composer. Additionally, done this way, the assignment asks students to frame and contextual their revisions.   Working through a research paper like this is like walking through a building with all the scaffolding still up. It’s easier to see how things were constructed, why this beam has to go here or why this wall has windows but this one doesn’t. Not only does the element of the assignment put everything on display (which is a great teaching tool), but it allows us to talk through the kinds of things we do automatically when we write for our own jobs. It goes back to the first year experience: this is what it is like to think through a problem and struggle through its solution. In this moment, we’re teaching students how to write and also how to be successful college students.   The remaining elements of the project, the conference presentation and the public document continue the twin processes of writing instruction and scholarly invitation and cultivation. After completing the research paper, students reframe their work as a presentation and then remix it as a document for a public (and, usually, lay audience). Pedagogically, students are engaging with multimodal composition and revision practices. They are self-editing and recasting their work to fit new and novel scenarios while still maintaining connections to the original research goals and products. For the larger college picture, we are inviting students to be scholars while also demonstrating how to work and think through their other courses.   First year writing is an important course, one with its own content, theory, pedagogy, threshold concepts, and implications. It is also a course that is inherently liminal, interstitial. Our students are moving and becoming. Even our content is constantly evolving. This assignment is one small way that we can help our students lean into the unfamiliar in productive and meaningful ways. To view Andrew's assignment, visit Research Three Ways: Becoming an Academic. To learn more about the Bedford New Scholars advisory board, visit the Bedford New Scholars page on the Macmillan English Community. ... View more

I kicked off Spring semester with some discussion questions meant to work as icebreakers. Two of the prompts are fairly typical: one asks students to talk about an object significant to their careers, and the other asks students to brainstorm characteristics of technical writing based on their experience and observations. As an alternative to those two fairly customary discussion topics, I devised this third, more playful prompt, “Your Career and the Zombie Apocalypse”: Imagine that the Zombie Apocalypse is upon us. The walking dead are bearing down upon your part of the country, and everyone in the world is working to stop them and preserve life in the world as it was before the zombie awakening. As a way to introduce yourself to the class, write a reply that tells us the following:  your major and career goal (i.e., what do you want to be when you graduate?). what one thing people in your career can do right now* to stop the zombies. how that one thing will be effective. *In other words, this one thing needs to be a capability that your career already has. You cannot make up some solution that does not exist. That would be too easy 🙂 I’m delighted to report that the Zombies Discussion has been the most popular by far. Even more significant to me, students’ responses are showing a wonderful level of creative and analytical thinking. For instance, one computer science major suggested creating programs that analyze live video streams, comparing appearance and movements to what zombies look like and the ways that zombies walk in order to determine when zombies are near. Not a bad solution, I think. Even better, however, were the replies . One student asked how the program would tell the difference between zombies and people in zombie costumes. Another wondered how the program would differentiate between zombies and people with mobility issues, like senior citizens or people with injuries or disabilities. Other students have talked about military drone strikes, protecting information systems, security of the water supply, crowdsourcing reports of outbreaks, social media survivor networks, cures and vaccinations, DNA modification, landscape barriers, and more. Zombies aren’t really my thing, but the success of this icebreaker has convinced me that they have a place in this course. I am even wondering about an all-Zombie section of technical writing. Imagine the assignment opportunities: Technical Description of a Zombie Instructions for Trapping a Zombie Directives for Zombie Safety Zombie Sighting Field Report Zombie Incident Reports Recommendation Report on a Zombie Apocalypse Solution There are so many options—and a good bit of fun to be had. I swear I would try this next term if we had a way to advertise a special focus section of technical writing on my campus. Who knew that an icebreaker would be so inspiring? What kinds of icebreakers do you use? More importantly, are there zombies in your writing classroom? Leave me a comment below to tell me about your classes. I’d love to hear from you.   Photo Credit: Zombie Zone by Michel Curi on Flickr, used under a CC-BY 2.0 license. ... View more

This semester, I am teaching a second semester college writing class on writing about literature through a rhetorical understanding of academic writing. The class includes English majors and potential majors in the humanities, as well as students whose interest range from STEM to social sciences. The diversity of majors and the course constraints offer interesting questions for building a syllabus (as explained in a previous post) and for designing assignments. In selecting readings and tasks for the course, I considered the following challenges in critical thinking and motivation: Critical Thinking.: What would encourage students to think outside the box of previous training? Whether students excelled as creative writers in high school, or studied literature for the sole purpose of succeeding in standardized tests, how might students discover new approaches to understanding literature? Motivation. How can the class present students with opportunities to experience for themselves implications of literature for everyday life? How could students observe the persuasive power of language while challenging themselves to grow as writers through rhetorical practice? Inspiration emerged as a keyword for both challenges. Inspiration allows us to think outside the box, while providing connections between the sublime and everyday life. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word inspire has these origins: Middle English enspire, from Old French inspirer, from Latin inspirare 'breathe or blow into' from in- 'into' + spirare 'breathe'. The word was originally used of a divine or supernatural being, in the sense 'impart a truth or idea to someone'. Inspiration as breathing is a powerful metaphor. Considering these roots, I understood that it would be important to choose the readings for our first day with great care. I offered the class this introduction to the course: This section of the course is based on the principle of what the 19th-century poet John Keats called negative capability, inspirational power of beauty. Writing may not be easy, and sometimes writing is not very pretty -- but writing, both process and product, can be a powerful inspiration in our lives. Keats and James Baldwin (who we will read later this semester) believed this-- and so do I. This is the reason I became a writer and this is why I am a teacher. Welcome to this Spring 2019 community of writers! Our next step would be to read and listen to the words of two seemingly different examples: Kendrick Lamar’s i (from the album To Pimp a Butterfly) and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the Marriage of True Minds.”). Yet these readings share a deep sense of the emotional labor of love and love’s connections to inspiration. Kendrick Lamar’s text repeats the refrain, “I love myself,” and his words and body language in performance underscore the hard work involved in honoring this love. Shakespeare’s sonnet, in describing what love is not, address the constant need for discovering what love is. Considered in the same moment, these readings point to literary approaches to questions of love, and the meaning of such questions for everyday life. I imagine that students will offer even more insights into these connections. With these considerations in mind, we will work our way toward beginning the first essay of the semester that will hopefully inspire my students critical thinking and motivation in their writing. Follow these steps to complete Essay #1: Write journal entries that summarize and analyze each of the poems in your own words. Use evidence from the poems and the literary terms to support your ideas. All journal entries are based on your interpretations and opinions using evidence from the readings. Select at least one of the literary terms|key words that interests you. Write a journal entry that applies the literary terms to one of the poems. Refer to previous journal entries to explain your selection. You can write the entry as a poem, or as a conventional journal entry in paragraph form. Refer to previous journal entries to explain your selections. Choose at least one of the poems from the list below as a focus for Essay #1. Write a journal entry that explains your choice. Refer to previous journal entries to explain your choice. Investigate negative capability in the poem, the inspirational power of beauty (Poetry Foundation Website). Write a journal entry that responds to this prompt: Which Literary Terms|Key Words allow you to better understand this inspiration? Why? Offer as many details as possible. Include details from previous journal entries as appropriate. This entry serves as a draft. Revise drafts for a  final essay that showcases your best work on Unit 1. Make a google.doc for your final essay and share it with me. Copy and paste a link to your google.doc in the course management submission portal. Only submissions with shared google.doc links can be evaluated. POEMS: Eight poems spanning more than 400 years of British and American Literature: Sonnet 116: Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds (William Shakespeare 1609) The Tyger (William Blake 1794) Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers (Adrienne Rich 1951) Harlem by Langston (Langston Hughes 1951) kitchenette building (Gwendolyn Brooks 1963) My Brother at 3 A.M. (Natalie Diaz 2012) A Small Needful Fact (Ross Gay 2015) i  (single version)(Kendrick Lamar 2015; performance 2014) LITERARY TERMS: A poem is as intricate as a motherboard and just as complex. Just as there are specific words that can help users to explain a motherboard’s wiring, there also are terms that allow readers and writers to explicate the circuitry of a poem. All of the terms are applicable to your own writing for the course, and can be for rhetorical analysis to better understand the meanings of persuasive language and the impact of this language for the audience (Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric). Here are several of those terms: imagery, irony, personification, tone. ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning and critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy, and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website: Acts of Composition. Overview This multimodal assignment is not original. In fact, I have seen many versions and applications of the idea but it is a great starting place for digital and visual storytellers. It is also popular in a textual form called Six Word Stories, often attributed to Hemingway’s legendary six-word story: For sale: baby shoes, never worn. Authors expand this genre to include other short-short versions such as sudden fiction or flash fiction that constrain conventions based on length and careful selection to achieve a narrative line. Although this idea has been around for a while, it is gaining new life through social media outlets such as Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, and Facebook that now feature this challenge for their users. Students can search for examples and submit their own stories on designated sites such as sixwordstories.net. This exercise asks students to carefully consider the ways that very few words can take the shape of a story and advance a storyline. I like to have students analyze them and try their hand at composing these stories. This helps them begin to understand narrative theory, literary analysis, and the power of carefully selected language. It also is a good exercise for understanding and working with rhetorical constraints (only six words) and genre expectations. When teaching digital storytelling, I use a similar assignment in which I have students compose a Five Image Story. Flickr has an existing group for visual storytellers to engage in this challenge: The Five Image Story. Here students can join the group and analyze examples of Five Image Stories for sequence and narrative line, visual effectiveness, and impact of the story.   They can also join the conversation, respond to others’ stories, and contribute their own. They must submit five images, in sequence without any text, except a title. I have students compose and submit their Five Image Stories to the Flickr conversation and post them on their blogs to share with their classmates.  Background Readings and Resources The St. Martin’s Handbook: 3e, “Organizing Verbal and Visual Information” and Ch. 3f, “Storyboarding”. The Everyday Writer (also available with Exercises😞 Ch. 5d-e: Organizing Information EasyWriter (also available with Exercises): 2d: Planning and Drafting, Storyboarding Steps to the Assignment Open up the conversation about the nature of stories. Have students identify what makes an effective story: engagement, meaning, progression, change, perspective, impact, etc. I usually have them participate in an online conversation about the meaning and shape of stories and then work in small groups in the classroom. We then try to generate a list from these conversations. Here are a few example responses:   Most importantly, stories describe a journey. Stories pass down knowledge and wisdom; offer advice; act as warnings; and serve as a reflection of the culture in which they were created. Humans have been telling stories for thousands of years. It is as innate as the need for companionship and belonging. Stories surround us all the time. I hear stories in music and podcasts; I read stories online, in books, in the news; I live my own story every day.  Stories at their most basic are comprised of a beginning, middle, and end. Stories are everywhere, just waiting to be told.  Next, I introduce the idea of the Six Word Stories and the Five Image Stories and we analyze a couple of examples.  Then, I send students to the Flickr site and have them join the group and look through the posted stories. As a group, they choose ones they like, discuss them, and connect to the features and ideas generated in their Meaning and Shape of stories conversation from earlier. Once they have an idea of the genre, they move to composing their own Five Image Stories. I have them post to Flickr to participate in this public archive and post to their own blogs for our class. In addition to their title, I require them to include a context statement on their blog (as I do for all Multimodal Mondays blog posts). Students then review the Five Image Stories of their classmates. Students present their stories and teammates discuss what makes them effective and engaging. Each team chooses a couple they consider strong and presents them to the full class. Reflection on the Activity This is a great activity to get students thinking about narrative and digital storytelling – an important component of multimodal composition. It challenges them to think conceptually and to begin to understand genre and structure. It teaches students the importance of image composition, curation, selection, arrangement, and constructing narrative lines. I am always interested in the different types of stories they create. Some are stories of progression, such as Sean’s advancing narrative of a kitten to a cat or Lydia’s story of experiences with her friend over a span of years. Some confine their narrative time span to a shorter time, such as Elijah’s story of a single day in his life. Some students reflect back on defining experiences, like Donna who includes images of tickets she has collected over the years. Others, like McKenna, project forward and engage in a predictive story about where she wants to travel in the future. Many students focus on significant objects to reveal something about their individual stories and some students, like Andrew, create conceptual stories that speak to universal ideas.  He captured unstacking nesting dolls to represent the idea of “Together We are Strong.” Follow the links below to view some student examples Lydia’s Five Image Story McKenna’s Five Image Story Andrew's Five Image Story ... View more

Today's featured guest blogger is Lisa DuRose Professor at Inver Hills Community College  On the first day of my Introduction to Literature course, as soon as we’ve finished our introductions and reviewed course policies, I distribute the first assignment, a poetry analysis. Although we’re still just getting to know one another, students are quick to react. “Poetry?” asks the bubbly guy in the corner, who just won a prize for memorizing everyone’s name. And from the look I his face, I can tell he’s not thrilled. He has not selected this course to be enraptured by poetry. This student, and most of his classmates, enter my Introduction to Literature course to fulfill a general education humanities requirement. We’ve just learned, from class introductions, that the room is filled with a wide variety of backgrounds--from high school students to a retired military personnel to retail managers—and an even wider swath of career interests: nursing, finance, neuroscience, teaching, family counseling, physical therapy, etc. Few identify as English majors. Even fewer declare a love for poetry. This setting is ripe with urgency. In their entire college career, this may be the only course where these students read poems, where they get the rare opportunity to be startled by their own humanness and consider, in the words of the late, beloved poet Mary Oliver, “their one wild and precious life” Because of this sense of urgency, I always begin the course with an analysis of a poem, a recently published poem, far from the scope of Shmoop.com and Sparknotes.com study guides. This assignment works as a formative assessment tool, a way to determine how much knowledge of poetry students already possess; however, the assignment also provides me with a chance to slow down the pace of students’ typical reading experiences and ask them to really consider the way a poem works. Designed as a sort of “tell me what you notice about this poem,” the informal assignment gives them a low-stakes chance to practice a skill they will use throughout the course: paying close attention to language. Like the students themselves, the short papers produced from this assignment are varied in knowledge of poetic devices and sophistication of analysis. After this initial assignment on a poem, we devote several weeks to the study of fiction, and after that, we launch into a three week unit on poetry. As such, by the time we delve into poetic devices and look at the contours of a poem’s design, the first poem students encountered in the course is slowly fading from their mind. After the poetry unit, we launch into the study of drama and by then, that first poem is a distant memory. All of this memory loss works perfectly when the course nears completion and that first poem reappears in a portion of the final exam that now asks students to perform a much deeper analysis, apply poetic devices with sophistication, and convincingly demonstrate how a variety of critical approaches could open up the poem to varied and rich meanings. This final summative assignment allows students to return to the poem that may have caused trepidation at the beginning of the course, but this time they are equipped with more tools and experience. The assignment has consistently worked well at demonstrating the confidence and skills students have gained in the course. Many of them are impressed with their evolution as they’ve gone from providing a surface-level description, to conducting a close reading of a poem. In their final reflection of the exam, they often remark on their growth: At first analyzing poetry was definitely not my strong suit at the start of this class, but recognizing the specific diction, syntax, imagery, and audience each poem contained aided me in combining everything I could figure out about each poem in order to find the overall theme and meaning. After this class I feel better prepared for writing essays about literary texts since I was able to develop a better understanding of different techniques. Digging deep into this poem and all the poems we did in this class was enjoyable as it allowed me to be free with my thoughts and build on them as I continued to read. I appreciate that the students feel more confident and less weary of poetry at the end of the course. And though I realize this new found appreciation for poetry will not convert any of them into English majors or, heaven forbid, poets, I do hope that they learn, as Mary Oliver advised that “Poetry, to be understood, must be clear. It mustn’t be fancy.”  ... View more

What with all the hoopla surrounding Gillette's notorious "toxic masculinity" commercial, I feel almost obliged to address it in this blog. The challenge here is to provide a semiotic angle on the ad's significance without getting tangled up in a debate on what it is trying to say about male behavior. Rather, the semiotic question concerns what the ad is telling us about contemporary American society as a whole, which has gotten me thinking more about razor blades than since I stopped shaving in 1979. A shrewd analysis of the ad in the Washington Post has given me a useful opening on the problem, and so I'll begin there. In "What Trump’s fast-food feast and Gillette’s woke razor blades have in common," Sonny Bunch draws a interesting parallel between Donald Trump's fast food spread for the Clemson Tigers and Gillette's ad by arguing that each was choreographed, in effect, to appeal to one side in the current national divide, while aggravating the other. As Bunch puts it, Trump "plays right to his populist strengths, assembling a mélange of foods that every American is familiar with and most Americans have eaten . . . [setting] a perfect trap for his critics, whose sneering at the feast will come off as elitist . . . [and thus playing] up the 'us against them' angle that has formed the heart of his appeal." Gillette, for its part, is playing to "what it hopes to claim as its base: the Ethical Consumer Signaling His Virtue, a valuable subset of customer, as Nike discovered with its Colin Kaepernick campaign." In short, Bunch concludes, "both the Fast Food Feast and Woke Gillette are explicitly designed to inspire mockery and, therefore, implicitly designed to encourage the us-vs.-them dichotomy that defines modern American life." Now, whether or not Gillette harbored any intention to provoke, there is plenty of evidence that its ad certainly did so, as can be seen by a quick Internet search on the topic. Quite predictably, one can find conservative media outlets like Fox News railing against it, while Vox, for its part, is in accord. The polarization is just as Bunch describes it to be.   All this raises a question, then, as to the actual effectiveness of politically provocative advertising in itself. The most common measure of such effectivity, of course, is financial: that is, whether a provocative ad campaign increases sales and stock valuations for the company that creates it. For example, as I've noted in an earlier blog, the big question surrounding Nike's Colin Kaepernick campaign was what would happen to Nike's stock price. When the stock at first drooped, antagonistic pundits declared the campaign to be a failure. When Nike's stock recovered, the ad was declared a success. Similarly, Jack Neff at Ad Age observes that, since Gillette's object in its "toxic masculinity" ad is to attract millennials to its products, "the ultimate test of whether Gillette has turned millennials into believers will be sales."   Neff, of course, is right, just as anyone who argues that Nike's Kaepernick campaign is a success because the company's stock price is currently up is right. After all, increasing profits is what advertising is for. But does commercial success equate to cultural success?  Gillette's claim is that its ad is intended to start a "conversation" about male behavior—presumably to do something about it.  So, is the Gillette ad successful in that sense?   Here the measure of success is much more difficult to determine. Did Coca Cola make the world a better place with its "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing (in Perfect Harmony)" campaign? Have the Benetton Group's United Colors and Unhate campaigns achieved their (noncommercial) goals? Will Gillette really cause a conversation that will make men behave better?   One way to approach this problem is to consider Bunch's contention that the Gillette campaign (and others like it) antagonizes even as it appeals, reproducing the us-vs.-them dichotomy that afflicts the country today. If Bunch is right, Gillette is preaching to a choir, not converting the opposition, and that is hardly likely to improve the situation. Wouldn't a more Rogerian approach be more effective?   Perhaps, but in the current cultural and political climate, a Rogerian ad campaign probably wouldn't get much attention, thus negating the financial and social goals of a socially conscious corporation. Controversy both sells and rallies the troops, and one can hardly blame Gillette for doing what everyone else is doing.   Then there's the whole problem of consumer activism, as a possible oxymoron, to consider. The question here is not unlike that posed by the phenomenon known as "slacktivism"—a derogatory term for social media activism that ends at clicking "like" buttons, signing petitions, and retweeting political tweets (you can read more about this in Brian Dunning's "Slacktivism: Raising Awareness" in the 9th edition of Signs of Life in the USA). That is, purchasing a product because the company that sells it shares your values (or wants you to believe it does) is an act of consumption, not a direct action, even though buying a product for political reasons may feel like doing something meaningful. But is it?   What we have in the end is a powerful signifier of what it means to live in a consumer society. In such a society, consumption, as the measure of all things, is routinely confused with action, whereby wearing the tee shirt is regarded as a substantive political act. This sort of thing can be quite good for the corporate bottom line, but whether it is good for democracy is another question.   Image Credit: Pixabay Image 2202255 by WikimediaImages, used under a Pixabay License ... View more

Most teachers of writing I know are concerned, along with their students, about using inclusive language in (and out of) the classroom, and especially in acknowledging that the traditional male/female binary doesn’t come close to adequately addressing the fluidity and range of human gender and sexuality. These insights have been a long time coming. As a white woman raised in the south, I grew up with that binary firmly fixed and would never have thought of questioning it—until I got to college. I was an avid student and eager to take advantage of every lecture, concert, or other cultural event offered at my state school, so I found myself one evening in a big auditorium to hear a talk by philosopher Alan Watts. I remember that he drew an imaginary line across the stage and then said that it represented human sexuality, and that every point along the line was different, that the range of our ability to experience sex stretched literally from sea to shining sea. I don’t remember much else about the lecture, which occurred over half a century ago. But I do remember sitting in the auditorium at the end of the talk feeling as though I were looking over an abyss and understanding, for the first time, just how much I had to learn about what it meant to be human.   Well, that’s why we go to college—and I hope students everywhere are being led to question their own assumptions and to expand their ways of thinking. So I’ve been a big advocate of the use of gender neutral language. In the latest edition of Everything’s an Argument, we talk about pronoun preferences and quote Peter Smagorinsky: “It may well be that “ze” and “zir” will replace current pronouns over time" (as "Ms." has replaced "Mrs." or "Miss"). And of course the use of singular “they” is now regularly accepted, as in “Jamie called me and so I called them back.” The important point is that writers and speakers need to be sensitive to difference and need to choose terms (like pronouns!) appropriately.   That goes for identity labels as well, and in this regard I was interested to read an essay by Jonathan Rauch called “Don’t Call Me LGBTQ: Why we need a single overarching designation for sexual minorities” in the January/February 2019 issue of The Atlantic. Rauch argues that “LGBTQ is coalitional and inclusive. But no matter how many letters are added, one group is pointedly excluded.” After much thought, he says, he has come to the conclusion that “the alphabet-soup designation for sexual minorities has become a synecdoche for the excesses of identity politics—excesses that have helped empower the likes of Donald Trump.” So Rauch urges us to “retire the term” and replace it with a single letter: Q. . . . the term would be understood to encompass sexual minorities of all stripes. When we speak of ourselves as individuals, we would use gay or lesbian or transgender, or whatever applies. When we need a blanket term, we would simply call ourselves Q. As in: the Q population and Q equality. Q is simple and inclusive, and carries minimal baggage. When we speak of Q equality, we are saying that discrimination against sexual minorities—or for that matter sexual majorities—is not the American way.   As writing teachers, we have an opportunity to engage students in exploring terminologies and labels of all kinds—and to help them to use language in describing others that is inclusive and sensitive to difference. In doing so, we help them become more conscientious and effective communicators. And as always, we stand to learn a great deal from their discussions.   Image Credit: Pixabay Image 3751930 by SharonMcCutcheon, used under the Pixabay License ... View more

Every term, I end up turning in a few students for violations of the Honor Code. It sucks. I don’t like filling out the paperwork. I don’t like the feeling that students try to trick me. The students involved are all definitely unhappy. The most typical violation has been copying passages from sources word-for-word without any citation—without even quotation marks for that matter. When challenged, most students have responded that they didn’t realize citations and quotation marks were required. I certainly understand errors in bibliographic format. That kind of error is easy to make, especially when citation styles change every few years. It concerns me, however, that students can get to Junior and Senior standing at college without understanding how basic documentation of quotations works. Given what I have been seeing, I have stepped up my documentation lessons to take on the issue directly. Students read the information on research and documentation from their textbook. In my case, that includes the following from Markel & Selber’s Technical Communication: Chapter 6: Researching Your Subject Chapter 7: Organizing Your Information Part A: Skimming Your Sources and Taking Notes Part B: Documenting Your Sources I also have students review the resources available on the Virginia Tech Honor System website: Definitions of Academic Misconduct Information for Students FAQs for Students and Families Tips to Prevent Cheating in the Classroom In addition to this basic instruction, I asked students to discuss the intricacies of academic research in the class’s online forum. To get the conversation started, I asked students to read through the questions and answers on the Academic Honesty Quiz from the University of Rochester. After reviewing the quiz, I asked students to consider these questions, noting that they did not need to address every quiz question in their responses: Do your agree with their results? Would you offer a different answer? Are there more options than the quiz suggests? What are they? What would you do if you were the teacher involved? What questions about plagiarism (or other academic dishonesty) do you have that aren’t discussed in the quiz? Some of the situations in the quiz are relatively straightforward, but others led students to question policy and academic responsibility. The questions related to notes falling out from under a desk and failing to log off a computer in particular resulted in engaged conversation. I will definitely use this discussion strategy again next term. I may also add some infographic representations of some of the basic principles that students should follow. The textbook and Honor System readings are long and dense. Highlighting some of those points in a more visual format should help emphasis the concepts. What do you do to help students understand the principles and ethics of academic research? How do you demonstrate and discuss documentation? Tell me about your practices or leave a question in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you!   Image credit: Meme generated on the ICanHasCheezburger site. ... View more

Laura Wagner, writing for the Concourse section of Deadspin, called her post about the Covington High School controversy in Washington “Don’t Doubt What You See with Your Own Eyes.” What we have learned over the last two weeks is exactly the opposite—that we do need to question what we see. The extreme tension that exists in our nation was once again apparent after brief clips went viral showing teenagers from the school, some wearing Make America Great Again hats, seeming to taunt a Native American elder, Nathan Phillips. These clips were quickly followed by longer videos and the argument that there was more to the situation than was immediately apparent from the shorter clips. Some who posted the clips have apologized for taking them out of context. Others stand by their condemnation of the teenagers. Either way, anyone who expresses an opinion about the confrontation on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial should watch more of the most complete video than what was originally aired. In argumentation, context does matter. Even the New York Times had to admit a rush to judgment: “Interviews and additional video footage suggest that an explosive convergence of race, religion and ideological beliefs — against a national backdrop of political tension — set the stage for the viral moment. Early video excerpts from the encounter obscured the larger context, inflaming outrage.” Those who condemn the students say they know taunting and disrespect when they see it. One young man, Nick Sandmann, faced down Phillips in what most consider a rude and rather odd and awkward way. You can read his account of what he was trying to do. His actions have led to his appearance on Today and an invitation to the White House as well as calls for his expulsion and death threats against him and his family. You can also read how Phillips felt threatened by the students, who, after he approached them, encircled him. It may not be relevant that the students largely resisted the temptation to fight back when a small group of African American Israelites yelled all sorts of vulgar and insulting comments at them. This belligerent group turned their attention to the students only after exhausting their insults directed toward Native Americans nearby. They targeted the students because some were wearing the MAGA hats and, seemingly, because the students are Catholic. It is relevant that Phillips approached the students, trying, he says, to defuse what he saw as a volatile situation, instead of their approaching him to disrupt his chanting, as was implied by the early reports. (A typical early headline read, “Teens in MAGA hats taunt Native American elder at Lincoln Memorial.”) The students were shouting school chants—and jumping; Phillips was drumming and chanting. When he approached them, they continued chanting and jumping—and dancing—to his drumbeat. If there were chants of “Build the Wall” or “Trump 2020,” as some have claimed, they are not audible in the video. We have all known obnoxious teenagers. Many of us were probably, at times, obnoxious teenagers ourselves. America saw Nick Sandmann with a smart-aleck smirk on his face and a red MAGA hat on his head—and attacked. When I watch with my own eyes the video of what happened before and during the encounter on the steps of the memorial and when I read what Sandmann and Phillips say about what happened, I can’t judge the honesty of what they say about their reasons for what they did. I can argue, though, that the telling of what happened by the annoying teenager matches more closely the facts of what happened than does the telling by the weathered elder. Photo Credit: “tunnel vision” by André P. Meyer-Vitali on Flickr, 10/22/2011 via a CC BY 2.0 license. ... View more

This blog series is written by Julia Domenicucci, an editor at Macmillan Learning, in conjunction with Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.     Let’s ring in the new year with a blog post that focuses on prepositions in Grammar Girl podcasts.   Podcasts have been around for a while, but their popularity seems to increase every day—and for good reason! They are engaging and creative, and they cover every topic imaginable. They are also great for the classroom: you can use them to maintain student engagement, accommodate different learning styles, and introduce multimodality.   LaunchPad and Achieve products include collections of assignable, ad-free Grammar Girl podcasts, which you can use to support your lessons. You can assign one (or all!) of these suggested podcasts for students to listen to before class. Each podcast also comes with a complete transcript, which is perfect for students who aren’t audio learners or otherwise prefer to read the content. To learn more about digital products and purchasing options, please visit Macmillan's English catalog or speak with your sales representative.  If you are using LaunchPad, refer to the unit “Grammar Girl Podcasts” for instructions on assigning podcasts. You can also find the same information on the support page "Assign Grammar Girl Podcasts." If you are using Achieve, you can find information on assigning Grammar Girl in Achieve on the support page "Add Grammar Girl and shared English content to your course." If your English Achieve product is copyright year 2021 or later, you are able to use a folder of suggested Grammar Girl podcasts in your course; please see “Using Suggested Grammar Girl Podcasts in Achieve for English Products” for more information.   Podcasts about Prepositions Ending a Sentence with a Preposition [5:29] How to Kick Your Preposition Habit [5:45] Choosing the Correct Preposition [7:28] Don't Take Prepositions So Literally! [12:46] Preposition or Adverb? [16:03]   Students can do a lot more with podcasts than simply listen to them. Use one of the following assignments to encourage students to engage further with the Grammar Girl podcasts.   Assignment A: Whether or not you should end a sentence with a preposition is an ongoing debate. Ask students to write a short essay or response analyzing this debate. Have them use at least three outside sources, including the Grammar Girl podcast "Ending a Sentence with a Preposition." As they write, students might consider the following questions: Who feels it’s okay to end a sentence with a preposition? Who does not? How do they use prepositions in their own writing? In speech? Which side of the debate do they agree with? Do they see an argument for both positions?   Assignment B: Have students listen to a podcast on prepositions, such as “Don't Take Prepositions So Literally!”  and then have them write a short response discussing and reflecting on the experience. (All Grammar Girl podcasts come with transcripts in LaunchPad—students can also read the podcast transcript to inform their response.) Have students consider the following questions: How is listening to information about prepositions different from reading about them? How is it the same? What does the host do to connect with the listener? What new information did the student learn about prepositions? Can they pinpoint any element of the podcast that helped them remember this new information?   Assignment C: Ask students to listen to more than one podcast about prepositions, such as "How to Kick Your Preposition Habit" and "Preposition or Adverb?" Have them also read the transcripts. In addition to the questions above, have them write a response considering the following: How do the podcasts compare? Does the information about prepositions overlap, and if so, where? What is different about the coverage of prepositions in each podcast? What content or information is conveyed through audio that does not appear in the transcripts? Is any additional information found in the transcripts that is not apparent from just listening to the podcast?   Have you used any podcasts about prepositions in your class? How did you use them? Let us know in the comments!   Credit: Pixabay Image 1834859 by pexels, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

This week's guest blogger is Pamela Arlov Associate Professor of English at Middle Georgia State University. Metrophobia sounds like it should be the fear of cities, but it is in fact the fear of poetry, and many of my first-year literature and composition students have it. It’s my job to effect a cure.      I have no illusion that this class of mostly non-English-majors will form a poetry circle or a Billy Collins fan club. But I do know that my students need poetry. Like all forms of literature, poetry provides a frame of reference for understanding life, and it does so concisely and memorably. If, at some crucial point in their lives, my students remember a poem, write a poem, or seek out a poem, my job is done.   When I teach poetry, I teach the usual components: terminology, figurative language, and rhyme. I expose my students to a wide range of poetry, dispel the myth that poetry means whatever the reader wants it to mean, and teach them to analyze based on what the poem actually says. But I also try to include extra elements that I hope will make it stick.  Here are my top four:   I let students write a poem, an idea borrowed from a colleague. As we begin poetry, students almost always ask if they will have to write a poem. I make it an extra credit item and do not require any particular form, only originality and the willingness to read the poem aloud in class. Sometimes a handful of students participate, sometimes almost a whole class. Students may not remember Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” but they will remember a poem they wrote. Occasionally, a student tells me that a poem about a family member has been shared and treasured among the family. I let students analyze poetry in groups. When students talk about poetry together, they work out ideas in the poem in a way that they might not do alone or in class discussion. I often start with Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Cory.” This poem used to be a standard, but most of my students are not familiar with it. I divide the class into four groups, and each group reads the poem, discusses it, and takes responsibility for explaining one of the four stanzas to the rest of the class. I always suggest that they have a member of their group read it aloud first. As they reach the end of the poem, I am often treated to audible gasps and exclamations of “What?” as Richard Cory, with his seemingly perfect life, “[goes] home and put[s] a bullet through his head.”  When I hear that reaction, I know that students have gone beyond logical analysis and made an emotional connection with the poem. I use music to make connections. When we read Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death,” students easily see in the first stanza that “me” and “Immortality” are exact rhymes that suggest that the rhyme scheme will continue in the second stanza. But they are always resistant to the idea that “away” and “Civility” in the second stanza are near rhymes, and it doesn’t get any better with “Ring” and Sun” in the third stanza. So I bring up the lyrics video to Magic’s “Rude,” a song my students are familiar with.  We look at the near rhymes suit/you, hand/man, say/family, choice/boys, and by the time we get to away/galaxy, they are sold, partly because the singer pronounces the words in a way that helps the listener understand that the words are meant to rhyme: away/galax-ay rather than away/galax-ee. I also show them how almost all of Emily Dickinson’s poetry is written in ballad stanza and can thus be sung to the theme song of Gilligan’s Island (“The Ballad of Gilligan’s Isle”).  I even have a sing-along, even if it’s mostly me singing while my students laugh. I set aside a day to celebrate poetry. Taking inspiration from the Favorite Poem Project, I ask students to bring in their favorite poem. I direct them to Poets.org,  Poetry Foundation, and to the Poets Laureate page of the Library of Congress for inspiration. I offer extra credit and bring cookies, and we read our favorite poems aloud.   I will never know if my students actually make poetry a part of their lives, but the fun lies in trying to make poetry accessible and memorable. What are your tricks of the trade? Please comment and let me know! ... View more

I’m writing this posting on January 21, MLK day, and so I have been thinking of him and of his legacy as I do every year this time. Of course I remember exactly where I was on Thursday, April 4, 1968: I was still at the school where I was teaching 10 th and 11 th grades, working on plans and reading student work when a colleague knocked and told me King had been shot. I rushed home and, like most of the rest of the country, turned on radio and TV and sat, horrified and weeping, at what I was seeing and hearing. I remember feeling as if our country was close to exploding—so much hatred and violence. And of course I didn’t even know at the time what was coming—more assassinations, more protest, more violence, more hatred.   But King’s legacy has been about love and peace and connecting, not with violence and hatred, and that is one reason for hope, even today when, once again, hatred and racism and violence are on the rise. King’s message rises above all that and offers hope. We need that message now more than ever.   On this day, I am gathering donations for our local food bank, and I expect many of you are offering some service today as well. In addition, I want to recommend two items for teachers of writing everywhere to consider as we think of MLK. The first is a brief video produced by the Annenberg Foundation Trust in partnership with the Gandhi King Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice in honor of Dr. King's 90th birthday. As you’ll see, the video features interviews with civil rights leaders conducted by documentary filmmaker Jesse Dylan. I loved hearing these inspiring voices and the message they bring to us today.     Secondly, I am currently reading The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea by Christopher J. Lebron. It’s not an easy read for me, each chapter leaving me seething with anger at the injustices so thoroughly documented while also admiring Lebron’s scholarly work and especially his use of some of my own personal heroes—Ida B. Wells, Audre Lorde, Zora Neale Hurston, Anna Julia Cooper. In it, Lebron traces not just the history of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag but the ideas and feelings and struggles of a much older, rich tradition preparing for this imperative demand for equal rights—and equal dignity.   White people like me need to ask ourselves if we are among those Lebron refers to as “morally dimwitted,” that is, people who are convinced of the rightness of their own positions yet “whose moral perceptions are so deeply mired in racial privilege that the critical perception and judgment needed to correctly interpret problems is suppressed to the point of motivating asinine observations and assertions.” As an example of such moral dimwittedness, Lebron asks readers to “imagine what it is like to read, as a black person in the wake of Freddie Gray nearly losing his head—literally—while in police custody: well, if he wasn’t doing anything wrong, why did he run? As if being legitimately afraid of the police . . . were reason at all to be practically decapitated by the state.” Have you heard such questions asked after a police killing of a young black male? I certainly have and I expect our students have too. Lebron asks us to face such dim-wittedness head-on, revealing it for what it is and offering a different, and more just, question in its place.   Lebron’s searing history is dark and devastating. But he does see some reason for hope when “three women decided that not one more black person’s life would be taken without America being forced to answer the question that black intellectuals have been asking for more than one-and-a-half centuries: do black lives in America matter or not.” Lebron concludes that we are still waiting for the answer to this question.     Writing programs and writing teachers can continue to ask the question, and can engage their students in looking at various answers to it and examining their own responses. We can ask students to analyze their own assumptions and those nearest to them, to learn to look at issues from other perspectives and to listen to those who hold those other perspectives openly and with respect. There is good work that we can do to help answer the question “do black lives matter” and, in doing so, to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. Image Credit: Pixabay Image 393870 by skeeze, used under the Pixabay License ... View more