This week's guest blogger is Pamela Arlov, Associate Professor of English at Middle Georgia State University. When students are first asked to write about literature, they often feel like strangers in a strange land. They are expected to analyze a work, incorporate quotations with in-text citations, and finish with a Works Cited list. It’s a tough task and a minefield of new rules.  In a recent post, I speculated that song might be a good starting point for teaching students to integrate quotations into their writing. I put that theory to the test by asking first-year composition students to explore a theme in song, comparing and contrasting two or three songs with similar themes.  When I gave the assignment, I introduced the idea of quoting lyrics. Using Usher’s “Confessions, Part II,” suggested by a class member, I demonstrated and they practiced. Before the next class, students chose a theme, picked songs, and wrote a thesis statement and outline. Together, we looked at a couple of thesis statements, familiar territory for the students by this point in the semester. Then we began Works Cited pages. Because complete information is not always provided on lyrics sites and YouTube videos, students often had to search for the songwriter, producer, release date, and the name of the album. In an era when databases offer perfectly formatted article citations at the click of a mouse, citing a song is hard work. I walked around the classroom helping students search for information and format citations. Students left class with a Works Cited page and returned with completed papers.  This particular class has struggled with the transition to academic writing, and results were mixed. However, every student succeeded to some degree. Certainly, all are much better prepared to tackle the research paper that is their next assignment.  All students identified a unifying theme in the songs they wrote about, and many developed their topics in creative and interesting ways. One student argued that while rap music is often singled out for objectifying women, other genres do the same thing. She used examples from pop and country music to illustrate the point. Another student compared songs that depict or refer to actual incidents of police violence against African Americans. Still another compared Tupac’s “Me and my Girlfriend,” in which the girlfriend is a gun, to a song about a flesh-and-bone girlfriend. Because popular music often contains profanity, we had discussed how to handle the issue within the papers.  I told the class to go ahead and quote the profanity if they thought it was necessary, but I also urged restraint since they were writing an academic analysis. Restraint is exactly what I got. From music rife with ear-scorching profanity, my students culled the poetic and the profound, using profanity sparingly, if at all. My students also amazed me with letter-perfect rendering of artists’ names. Every semester, I read at least one paper referencing “Hemmingway” or “Steinback,” but in writing about the artists they listen to every day, students had no spelling problems. I was the one who had to double-check to make sure that there was really no third e in The Weeknd, no apostrophe in Lil Jon, and no er at the end of Uncle Murda. My students were right every time. What I was really looking for in these papers, however, was the successful integration of quotations, and students did well with this task. Only two papers contained “floating quotations” that were completely unattached to any sentence.  In all other papers, lyrics were introduced with a signal phrase, or better yet, embedded in the writer’s sentence. I had also shown students how to quote lyrics in the same way that they will, in future classes, quote poetry, with virgules marking the space between lines, and verb tense or pronoun form changed within brackets, if necessary, to make the lyric flow smoothly into the sentence. Only a couple of students did these higher-level tasks with complete success, but these tasks are also difficult for students in the next-level class, Literature and Composition. Letting students write about popular music only sounds fluffy and easy. In fact, this assignment requires high-level skills and a bit of grit, but students are willing to put in extra effort because it’s a topic they value. Just last week, I pre-checked the Works Cited pages that students had prepared for their research papers. Those pages exceeded my expectations. For my students, music proved to be an accessible entry point to quoting and citing, and I will make this assignment a permanent part of my first-year composition class. ... View more

If you haven’t heard of the Listen First Project, check them out! Devoted to mending “the frayed fabric of America by bridging divides one conversation at a time,” this project is currently celebrating its fifth year of work: We believe in the power of starting new conversations that move from 'us vs. them' to 'me and you’ to turn the tide of rising rancor and deepening division. Listen First Project creates opportunities and teaches skills for conversations that tip the scales toward a stronger and more equitable future for our nation and better relationships in our daily lives. You can read about Pearce Godwin, who founded Listen First in 2013 after six months in Africa taught him the crucial importance of listening to understand, and about Listen First’s team of leaders on their website. With over 150 partners in the Listen First Coalition, the Listen First Essay Series, and the National Conversation Project (which has grown out of the National Week of Conversation started in 2018), the Project now reaches hundreds of thousands of people across the United States and beyond.     Their message is simple but profound: if we want to move beyond the divisions that are tearing at the foundations of our democratic society, we must learn to listen. Here are the strategies the Project suggests: Listen First to understand rather than to reply Listen First before rejecting a conversation Listen First before dismissing alternative ideas Listen First before launching attacks Listen First to more effectively advocate your position If this sounds a lot like what Krista Ratcliffe calls “rhetorical listening,” and it certainly does, it gives teachers of writing one more good reason to base their courses on rhetorical principles and to spend time in class introducing and discussing them with students. Rhetoric is founded on the concept of dialogism, of give and take, of two or more people working through issues together. The importance of audience in rhetorical theory and practice relates directly to this concept. I like to begin each course I teach with such fundamentals and with exploring how they are at work in our everyday lives. But these discussions need to inform every class that follows, as we practice what it means to attend carefully to an audience and what it means to practice “listening first.”   Fortunately, we now have sites like Listen First and resources like the essays and books of Krista Ratcliffe and others to help us do so. As we near the end of 2018, it’s time to invite our students to join the Listen First Project, to take the pledge to “listen first” and to spread the word about the National Conversation Project. As I am writing this post, I am also reading the new U.S. Climate Report, with its blunt and stern warnings of what is happening to our earth this very moment. Never have we needed the ability to listen to understand more than we do right now. So much of our students’ future depends on it. Image Credit: Pixabay Image 2275202 by Couleur, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

In a recent guest post, Sara Heaser wrote about the metaphors she uses in teaching first-year composition. Her observations have been lurking in the back of my mind since then, and in preparing for our final weeks of class, I’ve been taking a critical look at my own metaphors, specifically those I use when talking to students about their drafts, especially drafts composed early in the writing process.  For example, when I read a piece that seems to lack focus, I may ask students to imagine those devices that are set up in science museums and malls—contraptions in which a penny or nickel is released at the top of a wide funnel, and the coin circles around and around, at times careening in wide loops and at times spiraling smoothly, until it reaches the bottom and falls through the narrow opening into a small container.  Sometimes finding a thesis that will control the paper is like that—we have to go through the careening and spiraling until we finally settle into a workable proposition to anchor the paper. It’s normal and helpful, and not at all a failure.   When I’m working with students in later stages of the revising process, perhaps when they need to think about cohesion and what they themselves characterize as “flow,” I might invoke the image of myself trying to learn to drive a vehicle with a manual transmission – with jerks and stops and whiplash-inducing lurches. That sort of metaphor can encourage students to think about a reader’s experience of working through the meaning emerging in a text.   Or perhaps I have a student who is developing a complicated argument but who seems to drop the ball just at the end. Living and teaching in a football culture, I might say that the conclusion to the paper feels like a punt on third down, or a Hail-Mary pass thrown when there is plenty of time on the clock to run a full set of downs and get the ball over the goal line.   But I’ve realized that, more often than not, my metaphors for talking to students about writing are metaphors for problems, for struggles, for what might be seen as inadequacies or error—even though I work diligently to characterize writing as a recursive process, not a failed outcome. Still, I rarely use metaphors to describe what works—only what doesn’t.   In my advanced grammar class—more like an introduction to syntax for English majors—there are a number of students who want to become teachers. In our text (Doing Grammar), author Max Morenberg makes a point of encouraging novice teachers to put grammar skills to work in recognizing not just what student writers do poorly but what they do well—the strong use of a modifier, a cleft-sentence that gives a sentence a rhythmic punch, an existential-there construction that works in context. My students in that class have practiced just such a recognition of rhetorical and syntactic dexterity in their analyses of 50+ word sentences from authors they admire, and in their papers, many have articulated analogies and metaphors to capture their sense of awe at a writer’s craftsmanship or prowess.   I see a two-fold lesson for myself in these reflections: first, in all student papers—whether from freshman writers in a co-requisite section or advanced writers in the major—I want to point out and praise sentences that work, sentences that sing, sentences that sail into the end-zone, punctuated with a ball-spike and celebration dance. Second, I want to develop metaphors for describing those successful sentences, word pictures that will help students understand how a reader experiences their words and why a given sentence carries the weight that it does.     What metaphors do you use to celebrate powerful student writing? ... View more

During the last presidential campaign, many of us made the mistake of trusting what we read on social media. It was easy to pick up on a quote or a meme that said just exactly what we wished we had said and to pass it along to those friends and family members whom we had not already blocked due to irreconcilable political differences. Facebook and Twitter and other media have made it easy to pass along misinformation with the click of a button. We were too naïve initially to recognize the forces at work to shape our opinions. We should have known, given how quickly Facebook picks up on any search we do and plies us with ads for just that product or service. Go to cars.com, and you are hit from all sides by car ads. Start planning a trip to New York, and it is ads for flights and hotels. How could we not have known how closely our interests – including our political ones – were being digitized and studied? More importantly, how could we not have questioned the sources of political news that seemed too good to be true—or too appropriately demeaning to our opponents to resist? It’s a simple truth of print journalism that articles do not have to be documented in the way that academic research has to be. Yes, we read direct quotes that we hope are correctly attributed to the specific speaker identified, but we also have that “source close to the White House” or that staff member who wishes to remain anonymous. It is easy to fall into the trap of trusting everything in print. Even the best journalistic writing does not come with notes and a list of works cited. Maybe that is why documentation seems such a foreign concept to students. However, good journalists, in print or on air, know the power of proper attribution. They know that statistics from the State Department about the number of American tourists killed in foreign countries are likely to be trustworthy and trusted. A report by the Department of Transportation, identified as such, about the number of accidents caused by distracted driving bears the weight of authority. We have all learned pretty quickly as the researched essays we assign increasingly draw on electronic sources that students do the digital equivalent of trusting anything in print. They tend to assume anything that came up in a search is just as good as any other source. After all, they found it on the Internet! Of course, Wikipedia is the first source that pops up in many searches, and we have to remind our students that some of the people writing for Wikipedia are no more qualified to write about the subject than they are. A Wikipedia article can be a quick source for facts, but its author is not guaranteed to be a specialist on the subject. Somewhere along the way students must learn how to evaluate online sources. As they incorporate those sources into their writing, in support of their arguments, they often have to be reminded to take advantage of the weight of authority. There is a reason to avoid “floating quotations,” those that appear with no lead-in or no identification of where or whom they came from. Sentence. “Quotation.” Sentence. The value of using sources is that another author can lend authority on a subject of his or her expertise that the writer does not have. If that source is identified only on a works cited page and in parenthesis by last name and page number, the claim of authority is lost. One of the most useful skills for documented essays that our students can learn is to work into their own sentences the claim to authority of the author they are quoting or paraphrasing. A very different claim to authority is becoming more and more apparent in some of the political battles going on right now. Personal experience and anecdotal evidence can be one of the most powerful types of support because of the emotional impact it adds to the mix. This is the basis for the impact of the #MeToo movement. It is also the reason that survivors of the tragic shootings at the Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, were able to lead a march of hundreds of thousands of supporters of gun control and school safety reform. There are few types of authority greater, on an individual basis, than the ability to state, “I know it is true because it happened to me.”   Photo Credit: “Emma Gonzalez imagery at Minnesota March for Our Lives” by Fibonacci Blue on Flickr 3/24/18 via CC BY 2.0 License ... View more

I am here in Northern California, where there are 80 dead and 1,000 unaccounted for in the worst wildfire of the state’s history. Air quality is bad; people are wearing masks. And coughing. Yet people are also giving thanks that, in this time of cataclysmic climate change, the loss of life and property was not even worse. Grace under pressure, as Hemingway once defined courage.   Many people this Thanksgiving week are working to bring food and clothing and shelter to those in need; food banks are reporting record numbers of donations and record numbers of people seeking aid. In my small village, our food bank distributed 58 turkeys and as many hams, along with staples and fresh vegetables—and a few treats for kids.   As always, I am grateful for family and friends. And as always, I am most thankful for students, for young people everywhere who give me—every single day—reason to hope. Here’s a poem of thanks for them, and for all of you: “When Giving Is All We Have” by Alberto Ríos.   Happy Thanksgiving to all.   Image Credit: Pixabay Image 1768857 by Sabrina_Ripke_Fotografie, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

While many of us are hurtling toward the end of the semester, we are also pressed to decide next semester’s book orders and ancillary readings. So, I want to celebrate how many of you are blogging about assignments that place marginalized voices at the center of the classroom. (The photo to the right is from a recent New York Times article with rich images you might consider for classes around the upcoming holiday.) For example, Susan Naomi Bernstein recently described a redesigned assignment drawing on the film Black Panther. I also appreciate the insights about the politics of citation and authority in Dara Liling’s “Source Credibility as a Matter of Social Justice.” Many more of you, of course, are sharing inspirational texts for the rest of us to consider in our classrooms as we work hard to ensure our classrooms are inclusive, challenging, and aware of the politics of the academy and our historical moment.   My title for this post comes from bell hooks’ 1984 text, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, which has influenced my teaching for decades. hooks has been on my mind since I had the great good fortune to gather with thousands of feminist scholars and instructors at the 2018 National Women’s Studies Association conference in Atlanta just after the midterm elections. Conversation fizzed and popped about the implications of expanded representation – political and academic — by women and people of color. The plenary sessions, too, amplified the potential tectonic shifts happening in scholarship and our classrooms. For example, the conference launched with a richly textured discussion between celebrated poet Elizabeth Alexander and sociologist Alondra Nelson, author of The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome (2016). That conversation — interdisciplinary, intersectional, political, and delightfully personal (Alexander and Nelson are longtime friends) — was a reminder of how crucial it is that we invite students into these conversations, so they understand that knowledge production is a human effort, shaped by power in myriad ways, but also a shaper of power. Another evening featured Alice Walker, who spoke with quiet intensity to a packed ballroom about the transformational experience of learning from Howard Zinn during his time as a professor at Spelman College. Yet another plenary brought together activists who reflected on lessons we could learn from social movements of 1968, and I could hardly scribble notes fast enough to capture the sparking conversation between Angela Davis, Bernadine Dohrn, Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, Ericka Huggins of the Black Panther Party, and Madonna Thunder Hawk. Thunder Hawk’s leadership in the Red Power movement is featured in the new documentary Warrior Women, which I plan to teach next semester.   My co-author, Stuart Greene, has blogged recently on the empathy we try to inspire through our work in From Inquiry to Academic Writing. We have worked hard, with each edition, to include voices that speak to the pressing issues of our time, from perspectives that often bring insights from the margin to the center, as hooks might say. It is work that never ends – for which I am thankful. Like you, we are always listening hard for new voices to invite our students into new conversations.   What are you most excited to teach? What can you recommend?   Photo Credit: April Lidinsky ... 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.  Writing teachers have always valued research and critical thinking as a primary part of our mission, but research in our world today is a completely new game where we have access to thousands of sources at the click of a mouse.  Before, we could engage easily with digital sources, with much of our instruction focused on the location of sources and long hours through the library stacks. Now, teachers shift attention to the selection and critical evaluation of sources and repurposing of information for new rhetorical situations. Student researchers also now consume information and shape perspectives through multimodal sources such as images, videos, podcasts, and other digital texts. We hope that students learn to select and evaluate these sources as well as represent their ideas through multimodal formats. Over the years, I have included infographics in my classes in a variety of ways. I have used them to help students examine their collaborative processes, generate discussion, compare perspectives, and present complex information to others through visual representation. The human brain processes visual information with alarming speed, which makes infographics a powerful way to communicate information and concepts. Infographics do not have to replace traditional research writing. Instead, they can enhance research practices and challenge students to remix and represent information in new ways. When students follow paths of inquiry they must select, analyze, and synthesize information for their own purposes. The infographic assignment amplifies these skills and draws upon multimodal texts and visual communication. Background Readings and Resources The St. Martin’s Handbook: Ch. 11: Conducting Research; Ch.16: Design for Print and Digital Writing The Everyday Writer(also available with Exercises😞 Ch.12: Preparing for a Research Project; Ch. 22: Making Design Decisions EasyWriter (also available with Exercises😞 Ch. 13: Conducting Research; Ch.3: Making Design Decisions Steps of the Assignment Have students choose a research subject or question of their own interest. Ask them to locate at least 3 purposeful sources on their subject. This is a good time to review how to find and evaluate sources along with citation and documentation practices. Students can write up their research, paying close attention to how they are locating themselves in their collected perspectives. Take these writings through whatever drafting and peer response you would normally require for this kind of assignment. Next, introduce the genre of the infographic. Students can access an abundance of examples through a quick image search and discuss the ways they visually represent information. They can work in small groups to compare, generate ideas, and list conventions and variations in the genre. Challenge students to create their own infographics to represent their research. They have to review the information and sources they collected from their generated research and choose what is most important to represent. They also need to consider the impact of their information to understand how they might emphasize certain ideas through information hierarchy and design through size, position, color, contrast, and other forms of visual rhetoric. This assignment asks them to explore the relationship between form and content as they choose particular shapes and backgrounds that further communicate their meanings. Although students can design their infographics from scratch, I generally recommend that they use available digital infographic generators such as Piktochart, Canva or other free software. These programs offer students a multitude of choices to express their ideas and allow for easy visual representation of information such as charts, graphs and a slew of images from which to select. Once they create their infographics, assemble students into peer response groups to generate feedback towards revision. Have students compose their own criteria for response based on their earlier discussion about conventions of the genre. Include rhetorical and visual components and information hierarchy as part of their discussion. Remind them to include source information through proper documentation practices. Students can insert these revised infographics into their research papers or present them to the class (or both) to explain their research. They can also act as stand-alone artifacts. I usually ask students compose a reflective statement to articulate their rhetorical and design choices. Jordan Sloan's infographic Resources: What can you do with an English major? | Roosevelt University  Reflections on the Activity I am always intrigued with the ways students compose this assignment. Students take on a multitude of subjects, rhetorical stances and approaches. For example, Jordan explored a relevant question regarding career opportunities for English majors. Ari, who is interested in the “inked arts” researched how tattoos are viewed in the workplace and Zach created an historical perspective related to the chronological development of cyberpunk. Follow the links below to view these student examples: Jordan's infographic    Ari's infographic Zach's infographic ... View more

Macmillan Author Program event at UCSD The Muir College Writing Program at University of California, San Diego, uses Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices from the Internet Underground, by Emily Parker, and recently had the pleasure of hosting her on campus for a talk with students. Over 400 students filled the auditorium to listen to Emily and take part in lively question and answer exchanges throughout the presentation. The Muir College Writing Program uses A Writer's Reference, by Diana Hacker and Nancy Sommers, alongside Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices from the Internet Underground, by Emily Parker, as part of the Macmillan Author Program. The Macmillan Author Program brings together the best of Bedford/St. Martin's textbooks, the expertise of our custom publishing team, and award-winning titles from our trade imprints, including St. Martin’s Press and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Emily Parker, author of Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices from the Internet Underground, holding up her book in front of UCSD students who came to hear her talk about the book.  Students read the book as part of the Muir College Writing Program.  Students lining up to get their book signed by author, Emily Parker.  The signing continued for a half hour after the talk! Emily Parker, author of Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices from the Internet Underground, preparing to speak to a room of more than 400 Muir College Writing Program students at UCSD! ... 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.     This month’s post is a week early because of the holiday next Thursday. Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate!   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 Quotation Marks How to Use Quotation Marks [7:51] Quotation Marks and Punctuation [5:02] Punctuating Questions [7:07] Single Quotation Marks versus Double Quotation Marks [6:13]   Students can do a lot more with podcasts than simply listen to them. Choose one or both of the following assignments for students to complete using the suggested Grammar Girl podcasts.   Assignment A: Ask students, either individually or in small groups, to write a script for their own podcast on a grammar topic. Students should consider the following questions as they develop their script: What topic do they want to focus on? How long do they want the podcast to be? (As with an essay, broader topics tend to result in longer podcasts. You may also want to set time limits.) What do they already know about their chosen topic? What other questions do they still have about their topic? What will they need to research? If the students are working in groups, how will they structure the podcast to accommodate the different narrators?   After drafting, ask students to submit their scripts. Each script should include a title and the expected duration. You may also want them to include a separate paragraph reflecting on the script writing process.   Assignment B: Have students record their podcast from Assignment A and share the files with their classmates. Reflect on the process and results as a group. Which parts of the project were easiest? Which were most difficult? Did they have to adjust their scripts at all during recording?   Recording podcasts can take a lot of time and sometimes involves a steep learning curve. If recording podcasts is not feasible for your class, have each student read their script aloud to their peers.   Do you have other suggestions for using podcasts in lessons? Let us know what they are in the comments!   Credit: Pixabay Image 1375858 by 905513, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

  You've heard about it before: someone perches on the edge of a rooftop, or a waterfall, or a granite outcropping, to take a vertiginous photo of the drop off, hundreds—perhaps thousands—of feet below. Or reclines on a railway line to take a quick selfie as a locomotive looms in the background. Or does one thing or another that is exceptionally dangerous in order to get an eye-popping image that might capture a crowd on Instagram. . .and, sometimes, perishes in the act, as recently happened with a husband-and-wife team of travel bloggers in Yosemite National Park.   As I say, there's nothing new about this, and there are plenty of articles scattered all over the Internet detailing the phenomenon, often containing academic commentary on the meaning of it all, as does this article in Vice from 2017. So, given the familiarity of what might be called "Fatal Selfie Syndrome," and, more importantly, the fact that your students are likely to be part of the audience to which such photos are directed, this is a popular cultural topic that calls for semiotic analysis.   Let's start with the basics. The fundamental goal behind dangerous Instagram photos (or YouTube videos, etc.) is to get attention. While the most daring of the bunch also tend to be thrill seekers, thrill seeking is not the primary motivation for the simple reason that the chosen poses are designed for publicity, not for a privately enjoyed experience. But this elementary explanation then raises the question of what all this attention getting signifies.   Here we can go back to the early days of the Net. The advent of the personal web log and/or web page in the 1990s signified the emergence of a democratizing challenge to the hierarchical structures of traditional mass media, offering a way for ordinary people to make themselves seen and heard. MySpace—a kind of pre-packaged personal web site with audio and images—took the process a step further, widening the breach in the wall (in Pink Floyd's sense of the word) of mass cultural anonymity, while opening up new opportunities for commercial self-promotion.   The Instagram daredevils – and increased competitive stakes – are a consequence of what happens when democratic opportunity collides with a mass scramble for individual distinction. With so many people publicizing themselves on social media, it becomes harder and harder to get anyone to notice. This is especially problematic for those who exploit the Internet as a source of personal income, seeking to attract advertising dollars by attracting large numbers of views. So much money is at stake now that a sort of arms race of ever-more-daring stunts has ensued, effectively creating a new Internet hierarchy of online Evel Knievels contending with each other to make the cut.   The semiotic upshot of all this is that social media are not merely addictive, they are expressions (and extensions) of a hypercapitalistic society so taken up with monetizing every corner of human existence that personal experience itself is now for sale—in fact, one might say that personal experience is being sought for the sake of a sale.   Behind the scenes of this dramatic interplay between risk-entrepreneurs and their followers is the advertising that pays for it all. James Twitchell has called America an "advertising culture" (or "adcult"), and the Instagram economy can be said to signify an adcult in overdrive, careening through a consumer marketplace so splintered into niches and sub-niches that those with goods and services to sell are ever on the lookout for new ways of reaching anyone who is likely to buy their stuff. So if you can survive your latest, rather literal, peek into the abyss and get it up onto the Net, you may be able—thanks to all those advertisers who want to reach the kind of people who want to see you do it— to shudder all the way to the bank.     Image Credit: Pixabay Image 2034239 by Alexas_Fotos,used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

This week's featured guest blogger is Joseph Couch, Professor at Montgomery College. “It’s only a movie.” I will never forget that response from a student during a class discussion. While watching a film can be the most passive engagement with a literary text, I realized during that class why helping students become more active in the process needed to be more of a priority in my teaching. Creating a single exercise that would change perhaps a lifetime’s habit of passive watching into the active viewing and close reading of films would of course be too impractical. What I instead developed was a classroom activity to introduce, or, perhaps more accurately, more closely examine the three basic elements of film form: shot, take, and editing.  In my classes, a felt pen or two and a whiteboard are the only materials I use to draw some basic storyboards. The storyboards do not have to look like they are ready to pitch to a Hollywood mogul to teach the elements. They just need to get the basic content across and let the students fill in the rest with their own movie-watching imaginations. One thing that helps accomplish this goal is to keep the frames all roughly the same size to imitate viewing a screen. The steps in the activity are as follows: The exercise begins with a long shot to establish a setting, just as many films do, particularly if the setting is new in the film. I usually make it of a city because I find tall buildings fast and easy to draw, but any setting is fine if an instructor is comfortable drawing it.  To establish a scene, the next step is to draw a couple of quick medium shots to settle in on a single location within the larger setting. In my classes, this is usually a park depicted as an area with some trees and a few quick figures in a couple of frames. The next step is to focus on a figure or two to establish the characters in the scene also in a medium shot. Drawing balloons with a line or two in comic-book or comic-strip fashion can introduce dialogue, which often occurs after establishing setting, scene, and characters. The last frames I draw are close-ups to show the complete the sequence of long to medium to close-up shots and also to discuss how close-ups also represent building intensity in a scene. I also draw an extreme close-up just of a character’s bloodshot eye and a bead of sweat (this is the quickest to draw) to show extreme intensity. Two regular close-ups can also work, and it can be useful to discuss how editing one close-up after another suggests the height of dramatic tension. On that note, discussing the length of takes while working through the shots can help explain their role in the narrative. Establishing shots, for example, tend to be much longer takes than close-ups, which reflect and underscore the building and rising of dramatic tension. For those not inclined to draw the frames themselves is the option of using a page or two from a comic or graphic novel, both of which use storyboarding with balloons for dialogue, on an overhead. The frames vary in size, making the visual effect slightly different from film, but if Fellini thought enough of it to spend hours chatting with comic writers and artists, these examples should work fine. An option for the technologically adventurous instructor is the use of free Storyborder software for a dazzling presentation. Of course an instructor could of course use scenes from a film on DVD or streaming video. The key is to use whatever makes the instructor comfortable with illustrating the three elements. After using this activity, I refer back to its frames/shots while discussing a later film in a course and/or prepping students for an exam.  It seems to be a good idea to provide a little extra reinforcement of the concepts of shot, take, and editing for a reminder to view films closely rather than watch them passively. One advantage of the software or comic approach is ready access to the exercise if instructors suspect their students are engaging in a little too much escapism and not enough analysis. Over the years, I have found students performing more of the latter and less of the former with the help of these steps and a couple of felt tip pens.         ... View more

Last week I had an opportunity to visit with colleagues and students at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. It has been some years since I was last there and I was amazed to see how the campus has grown—up to 65,000 students! As a kid growing up in Florida, I had only the U of Florida and Florida State to choose from (and Florida State was just moving to co-ed!), so seeing all the new campuses that have grown up over the decades is impressive indeed. I was glad to see the Department of Writing and Rhetoric (no longer part of English) thriving and met some grad and undergrad students who told me the Department’s mission resonated with them: Everyday life in the 21st century involves composing and understanding complex messages in multiple media and in varied contexts. In order to address challenges related to composing, rhetoric, and literacy in school, workplace, civic, and community settings, Department of Writing and Rhetoric (DWR) faculty engage in innovative research and teaching, often collaborating with students as well as community and campus partners to undertake this work. Additionally, as a department, we provide academic and public leadership on writing-related issues. Students in our undergraduate and graduate programs receive a comprehensive education in writing and rhetoric that enables them to communicate effectively, persuasively, and ethically across a range of civic, professional, and educational contexts. The Department offers a BA in Writing and Rhetoric and an MA in Rhetoric and Composition as well as a Professional Writing Certificate—and oversees the First Year Composition Program and The University Writing Center. I was on campus to address the Department faculty and students, and the person who brought me to campus thoughtfully let me out right at the door to the new building the Department occupies. I was to wait for her to return from parking, but once inside I spotted The Writing Center and made straight for the entry. The young woman at the reception desk welcomed me and introduced me to grad student tutors and gave me a tour of the light and airy—and spacious—Center. Throughout this post are a few photos of the Center. From the Center, I got to tour the Department offices and take a look at the curriculum. I was particularly impressed with their outcomes statement and with their assignments for both Writing 1101 and 1102, especially when I got to read examples of student work. For the first course, I read essays that had been published in their Stylus: A Journal of First-Year Writing, notably Julie Wan’s “Chinks in My Armor: Reclaiming One’s Voice”; Shravan Yandra’s “Note-Taking Involving Native and Modern Languages: A Detailed Analysis of My Code-Meshing”; and Jaydelle Celestine’s “Did I Create the Process? Or Did the Process Create Me?” These essays engaged me thoroughly—they were well thought-out, well written, and managed to balance traditional research with personal experience offered as (powerful) evidence. Students I spoke with were enthusiastic about the courses they were taking, which is always refreshing when those courses happen to be required. Writing about the program, one student said The writing program is really a journey into the art and science of communication. I thought I knew what to expect, but I was utterly and pleasantly surprised. This isn’t your mother’s comp program—this is ‘take it to the real world’ stuff. The day I visited UCF was November 6, mid-term election day. I spoke with students about their writing and how they hoped it could help them get their voices heard. Some had managed to vote on campus, but others who came from out of state had not voted: they promised to look into absentee voting in the future (!). But what an uplifting experience it was to visit yet another outstanding writing program, to know that in the face of so much negativity and division and, yes, even hate, that writing teachers are keeping faith, continuing to engage and inspire writers to write honestly, think critically, and speak their own truths. Image Credit: Andrea Lunsford ... View more

In Memory of Stan Lee (1922-2018) Writing workshop for our Black Panther synthesis project. The words printed in black ink are: Most important: If it seems too hard, WRITE ABOUT  IT ANYWAY. I was reminded of the power of listening to students when student input led me to revise our second writing project for this fall semester. The original project would be an analysis of a multimedia storytelling artifact, chosen by the student: either a music video or a TED talk. The end goal was to create a synthesis of three texts: two course readings and the storytelling artifact. To introduce the idea of a storytelling artifact, I played a music video that initially appeared to be a suitable subject for analysis. My students began a heated discussion about how the video portrayed race, class, and privilege. While the students seemed thoroughly engaged by the discussion, they were not inspired by the transparency of the video’s message and they did not admire the lack of complexity in its composition. It was clear that while the assignment I had envisioned prompted discussion, students felt that it was neither inclusive enough, nor addressing suitable cultural and technological complexities. As the discussion about the video was coming to a close, a student and I began a side conversation about the film Black Panther, which is now available on Netflix. I had not initially considered Black Panther for two reasons. The first was, as much support as I could offer for synthesizing the film with more academic texts, I know next to nothing about the Marvel Universe. But my student argued that, even without knowledge of the Marvel Universe, the film is culturally relevant and accessible to a very wide audience, nationally and internationally. While the first reason was reconcilable by relying on my students’ knowledge of this subject, the second reason was the one that gave me most pause. In the anonymity of the movie theater, I had wept openly for the entire second half of Black Panther. I worried about the impact that my emotions would have on my ability to teach this film as an objective text for practicing synthesis. But my student, yet again, re-framed my emotional response as an asset, reminding me that many people had very emotional reactions to Black Panther. My emotional response to the film thus became a teachable moment regarding the appeal to pathos. Indeed, given the ongoing discord of our current world, recent events outside the classroom had disturbed students profoundly. If I wanted this classroom were to become a safer space, I needed to remember my utopian goal: achieving classroom community through shared experiences and common aims. What to do? Revising the assignment at this late date to explore not storytelling artifacts but Black Panther – which was clearly speaking to my students in a way music videos and TED talks were not – would require significant shifts in lesson plans, and we would lose time to watching the film together as a class. However, could I re-envision lost time as time regained? I became a writing teacher because I love to write, and to share the passion, power, and beauty of good writing. Black Panther as a film had the potential to offer the kind of shared experience that most compels my work as a writer and a teacher of writing, and that would fulfill the aims and goals of practicing synthesis. Perhaps most significantly, sharing a film that we knew and loved would allow us to do our best work together. And so it was decided. I would revise the assignment and we would watch and write about Black Panther together. There were so many different pieces to this assignment that it was difficult to choose just one for this blog post. However, the activity that follows gave me a chance to share my thought processes with students, and allowed us to work together to take on the problem of creating clear and precise writing from strong feelings and seemingly inexplicable emotions. ... View more

In my first-year writing courses this fall, I’ve asked my students to explore James Gee’s concept of Discourse as a means of interpreting their previous literacy experiences. A common theme in their first essays is a sense that prior schooling often suffocated their voices, leaving them with little interest or personal investment in classroom writing. They “know” they shouldn’t write in the first person or use textisms, emoji, contractions, or “I think” statements.    For their course projects, students select and explore one of the Bad Ideas about Writing—some of which are written in first person. They seek out blogs, TED talks, newspaper articles, peer-reviewed journal articles, and a range of other online and print sources related to their chosen “bad idea”—and to their own experiences, majors, and career choices.  As they work with sources, I ask them to consider how the various writers represent themselves in the texts. Do the students hear a voice there?  Where?  What gives the readers a sense of that voice?   To help students recognize multiple ways of expressing voice within academic contexts, I have them read Ken Hyland’s “Disciplinary Voices: Interactions in Research Writing,” which approaches voice from a disciplinary perspective. Hyland says,   “Writers have to display a competence as disciplinary insiders to be persuasive and this is, at least in part, achieved through a writer-reader dialogue which situates both their research and themselves. This means adopting a disciplinary voice; using language which establishes relationships between people, and between people and ideas…. All this is done within the broad constraints of disciplinary discourses” (7).     Specifically, writers position themselves using “stance” markers, and they connect with readers using “engagement” strategies. My students look for ways their source texts demonstrate both stance and engagement, noting how these concepts are instantiated differently according to the context and purpose of the piece.   The course project builds throughout the semester; shortly after mid-term, students have found, evaluated, and summarized four sources, and they have matched quotes or paraphrases to show how sources confirm, expand, complicate, or contradict each other (and their own experiences). As we move into the home stretch of the project, students need at least one additional text or audio source, as well as an interview.  But many of the students hit a snag at this point: they struggle to find an additional source that fits smoothly into the conversation that is taking shape among themselves and their sources.   To address their concerns on a practical level and to reiterate our on-going discussion of voice, during one recent session I asked students to think about hashtags in social media contexts. What is the purpose of hashtagging a post on Twitter or on other social media platforms? How do hashtags express stance? Engagement?    I have just over 40 students in two sections, all of whom are working on the Bad Ideas about Writing project. After our hashtag discussion, students posted the citations for their first four sources on a shared Google doc, and for each one, they added four to eight hashtags to represent both their reaction to the source and the shared purposes of the classroom.  Their hashtags thus demonstrate both stance and engagement, as these examples from our document suggest: #scholarly, #wedontalllearnthesame, #lengthy, #Teachersneedbettertraining #Easyread, #longggggggg, #getadreamjournal, #goodread, #notaboutwritingbutstillgood, #literacyinstruction, #realworldexamples, #teacherPOV, #findyourvoice, #videoincluded, #fingeredspeech, #conventionalphrases, #howto, #followthesteps, #don’tbesohardonyoself, #followurownrules, #researchbased, #textingislikeasecondlanguage, #shortandsweet, #thanksPerelman,  #downwiththeessay, #outdated, #PurposeOfRevision.   The shared Google Doc, when complete, contained nearly 150 citations and accompanying hashtags, giving students a number of choices (vetted by classmates) for their fifth source. First drafts of annotated bibliography entries for these sources came in last week, and many students commented on the value of “shared legwork” on their research, while others noted how helpful the information packed into the hashtags was.   Do you use hashtags in your classrooms?  Do you teach voice, stance, or engagement? I would love to hear what is working for you. ... View more

Today's featured Bedford New Scholar is Dara Liling, who completed her MA in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of Maryland-College Park, where she also taught First-Year Writing and worked as an administrator in the Writing Center. Her thesis investigated contemporary multilingual activism rhetoric, particularly visual rhetoric including lawn signs and public art, and touched on issues of cultural citizenship, identification, and linguistic landscapes. She now works as an editor at NAFSA: Association of International Educators.   Most rhetoric and composition instructors are well-acquainted with debates of social justice that intersect with our work. Some main considerations we must grapple with on a daily basis include whether our expectations of good writing align with hegemonic constructs and the latent implications (racial, gendered, linguistic, etc.) that our assessments convey to students. While we may be used to contemplating these issues on societal, institutional, or programmatic levels, it is just as necessary to zoom in on social justice issues in writing pedagogy and assessment for individual writing assignments. For me, teaching and grading the annotated bibliography assignment has brought to light the necessity of paying deep attention to how we discuss and evaluate credibility, as well as the underlying messages about good scholarship that we perpetuate.   I suspect that the annotated bibliography assignment first-year writing instructors teach at the University of Maryland–College Park is pretty standard. This assignment is the first in a semester-long series of writing projects that each student completes on a topic of his or her choosing, culminating in a final 8- to 10-page research paper. The annotated bibliography entries are graded based on the degree to which students effectively address four criteria: summary of the source source use in upcoming assignments author bias credibility  It is the final criterion that gives me pause when considering whether my assessments are socially just.   While credibility may initially seem like a straightforward criterion that a source either has or does not have, scholarship and personal experience complicates this assumption. In this past, I had taught my students (as instructors had taught me) that there are a few qualities a source can display that deem it credible: Is it published in an esteemed, usually peer reviewed, publication? Does it cite other credible sources? Does the author have reputable qualifications, such as an advanced degree in the field or a history of publications and conference presentations? While I still agree that these are positive qualities for a source to have, and that it is valuable to teach students how to identify these qualities, I have also come to realize that equally valuable resources get lost (or even silenced) when we hold these stipulations as immutable markers of useable works.      Many before me have grappled with these lines of thought, questioning what forms of knowledge are vital for wholistic understandings and where these knowledge forms are present or absent. Much of this contemplation occurs in the realms of feminist rhetoric, public memory studies, and cultural rhetorics (to name a few). For example, Jones Brayboy and Bryan McKinley (2005) propose storytelling as an indispensable method for introducing marginalized experiences into canons of study, while lamenting that its validity is largely dismissed. Clare Hemmings (2005) proclaims that women and people of color have been excluded from big-name journals. And Nana Oesi-Kofi et al. (2010) acknowledge the lack of validity subjugated knowledge generally hold in academia. Together, this scholarship illuminates two premises: traditionally nonacademic forms of knowledge can be quite valuable to the learning and writing in which our students engage, but it is quite possible that such sources will not meet hegemonic definitions of credibility.   These issues transitioned beyond theoretical considerations for me when I was conferencing with a student during the annotated bibliography unit. He was inspired by personal experiences within his Filipino-American community to center his semester-long research on the lingering effects of colonialism on Filipino-American culture. He planned to investigate debates prevalent within the community about reclaiming traditional, pre-colonial culture versus creating a new culture that may abandon traditional cultural elements. (What an interesting topic!) However, some of his sources strayed beyond the credibility criteria. They appeared in publications that were outside of mainstream academia (and therefore cited in fewer academic articles than other sources); they pulled evidence from personal and community experiences, rather than academic sources. Did this mean, the student wanted to know, that these sources were not credible and unusable for the assignment?   Of course not. They capture viewpoints necessary for entering the key debates and responsibly representing multiple sides of the issue. So what could I do moving forward to better communicate these notions to my students? What could be done to improve my first-year writing pedagogy?   First, is to examine issues of public memory, situated knowledge, and exclusion early in the annotated bibliography unit. Encourage students to question and redevelop their own notions of credibility. How do they choose when a source they encounter in their personal lives is worthwhile to read or discuss with friends?   Second, is to revisit source use and expand on the purpose of this consideration. When is a traditionally credible source most appropriate? When is personal experience or other forms of situated knowledge most appropriate? What are the different effects of using one versus the other?   These are just two starting points for this social justice work, but hopefully promising places to push against hegemonic, limiting constructs of credibility.  ... View more