This week's guest blogger is Pamela Arlov, Associate Professor of English at Middle Georgia State University. This summer, teaching a hybrid literature and composition class, I developed a lesson in carpe diem poetry that was close to pedagogical perfection. Because it worked (and because not everything does), I share it with you. The lesson incorporates poetry and song lyrics and requires students to read, watch, listen, and write. The first part of the lesson presents a definition of carpe diem along with a clip from the film Dead Poets Society. Mr. Keating (Robin Williams) shows his students pictures of long-dead students and advises his own students to “Seize the day, boys . . . make your lives extraordinary.”  After viewing the introductory film clip, students move to two classic carpe diem poems: Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” and Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.” I ask students to look at the formal structure of the speaker’s argument in Marvell’s poem and to contrast the formal structure with the intimate nature of the poem, in which the speaker argues that a specific “coy mistress” should make love to him. I also point out the more general, advice-giving nature of Herrick’s poem, in which the speaker cautions young women (“virgins”) to marry before they are past their expiration date. Next, students listen to four contemporary songs and decide which two are carpe diem songs. I specify that a carpe diem song (1) alludes to the idea that life is short, and (2) names a specific thing that should be done because life is short. The songs students choose should contain both elements. For the lesson, I chose songs I had heard in Zumba class or on Sirius XM’s Chill radio during my morning commute.  I had planned to link to music videos on YouTube, but on one video, I was stopped by a “potentially offensive” YouTube warning. Mindful of my still-in-high-school dual enrollment students, I decided that I would link the audio version of that song and let students find the video themselves if they wished.  Another dilemma arose when I discovered that the song that had given me the idea for the lesson had no clean version available. I took the problem to my students and asked them if profanity in music offended them. They reacted just as I might have if an adult had asked my teenage self if I was offended by Mick Jagger’s onstage gyrations.  I included the song, prefaced with a warning that I had not been able to find a clean version. I then asked myself if this issue was the same as that of the video with the YouTube warning and decided that it was not. Some of the works of literature assigned in class also contain profanity, so these lyrics add no new element. I have listed and linked my song choices below, but the assignment is endlessly adaptable to your own musical tastes and preferences.  “Bad, Bad News” by Leon Bridges, a song about seizing the opportunity to make “a good, good thing out of bad, bad news.” “Give Me Everything” by Pitbull featuring Ne-Yo, Afrojack, and Nayer, a song that riffs on the theme of Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.” This is the song with the YouTube community warning; judge for yourself.  “Havana” by Camila Cabello featuring Young Thug, a song about a heart divided, chosen because of its wildly entertaining video. “Dead Soon” by Autograf, featuring Lils and Bonsai Mammal, a song that justifies seizing the moment with the lyric “If we don’t see another light / Then at least we had tonight.” My students responded well to this assignment; all accurately identified the carpe diem lyrics (songs 2 and 4). When I asked myself if a 100 percent success rate meant the exercise was too easy, my answer was “not in this case.” Carpe diem is a fairly easy concept to grasp, recognize, and remember.  What really sold me on the assignment was not the success rate, but the ease with which students quoted song lyrics. My students find it challenging to make a point about literature and support that point with a concise quotation from the text itself. But doing the exact same thing with song lyrics seemed to be easy for them, perhaps because song lyrics are woven through their lives in a way that literature is not.  This accidental discovery suggests that one good way of helping students understand how to integrate quotations into their papers is to let them start with song lyrics. While I should probably seize the day and get to work on that, it’s a task for another day. ... View more

Much published work on transfer tells us that students must practice reflection to develop metacognitive awareness and encourage application of knowledge and concepts from one context to another (see Writing Across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing, by Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak for an overview). To emphasize reflection in my courses, I’ve usually focused on assignments with a reflection component—journals, process narratives, or discussion board posts. But I was challenged this week to consider weaving reflective practice throughout writing (and also integrated reading and writing, or IRW) courses—using conversations, feedback, classroom tools. I suspect, in fact, that this weaving process establishes reflection as a part of the fabric of the course itself, not just a decorative embellishment.    For example, I use Google Docs for drafting work in my courses; I invite students to respond to my comments, to draft their own comments and tag me in them for additional feedback. We also use the platform for peer-based discussion and collaborative writing. But does this particular writing tool promote reflection? I am not sure I have exploited the possibilities very well. I have had students use the record of comments for a reflective assignment, but I am wondering how I might build an on-going reflective process with Google Docs – not just an after-the-fact review. For example, questions such as the following might encourage reflective practice—and transfer—during drafting and revision:   Why did you make this statement here? Were you applying something you learned in a previous writing course? What makes this context a little different? How does this observation from your classmate support or complicate what you’ve learned about __________? Look back at the comments from the last paper. Is there something there that might help you solve this writing problem? You’ve tagged me in three questions related to ______________. Why do you think _______________ is a challenge for you in this paper? How does the context of this assignment differ from the last one, in which __________ didn’t seem to be an issue for you? You have said here that this section “doesn’t feel right.” What have you done in the past when you’ve had that sensation? You’ve pointed out a problem with this sentence. Can you describe that problem in general terms? Have you seen it before in your paper?   In a sense, these comments turn the drafting process into an exercise in critical reading. When I assign readings, I ask students to make connections between texts and other texts or between texts and their prior experiences. Similarly, these questions invite students to zoom in to focus on particulars of their developing text and also to zoom out to see their work as it connects to a broader picture.   The advantages of Google Docs for file sharing, keeping a record of comments, and working collaboratively are many. But like all technologies that involve targeted feedback—whether online or on paper—students risk seeing problems and solutions only in terms of the specific context. If they do generalize, they may assert “rules” that cannot and should not be applied broadly (as indicated in some of the Bad Ideas About Writing | Open Access Textbooks | WVU Libraries). Reflective connections during all phases of the writing process might help students avoid the perils of two pervasive writing myths: assignments within and across courses are unrelated, and there is a single form of writing appropriate to all academic writing contexts.   I’ve also been exploring one other means for weaving reflection into my classes. After we have completed a significant writing project, I’ve asked students to complete an anonymous survey, usually using an online tool such as Google Forms. I craft just one or two questions, such as these:   Did your experience writing this paper confirm, contradict, expand, complicate, or confuse what you’ve learned in previous writing experiences? (Check all that apply). Can you give me one example that illustrates your answer? What is the biggest writing problem you encountered in this project? Had you ever encountered it before? What made it different this time? What is one thing you wish you had known before tackling this project? What is one question you wish you had asked before starting this project? Did you have an “aha” moment in this project? What led to it? Did you get the feedback you needed to complete the project successfully? If not, why not?   I don’t ask all the questions each time, and in an IRW course, I can adapt them to address the reading process as well as writing. These anonymous questions allow students to vent frustrations, especially in a course that often asks them to approach writing with different strategies than those used in high school. But the questions may also promote reflection: students consider projects in context and in the arc of their overall writing experience. But perhaps more importantly, their responses become a source for my own reflection about teaching: how did this class respond differently than previous classes? What did I do that helped or hindered their learning? How can I change that?   Finally, I am learning to share some of my reflective process with them: if I make changes or reconsider my language use based on their collective comments, I tell them about such changes. I want to model reflection as well as provide ample opportunities for practice.    How are you building reflection into your FYC, basic writing, and IRW classrooms?  ... View more

This week I am sharing the third writing assignment in the series of assignments I designed for my technical writing course. The series focuses on tasks related to a fictional business incubator, the Ut Prosim Incubator. In this week’s assignment (which is a revision of an activity I shared in the past), the fictional companies students have been working with are participating in a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education initiative. At this point in the course, students have established a company and given it an identity by designing visual and writing guidelines for the ways that their companies use the different kinds of correspondence. This week’s assignment asks students to turn to a short document that focuses directly on a technical task, describing an object, mechanism, or process for an audience of middle- and high-school students. The assignment below has some minor changes to remove specific information that is relevant only to the students in my classes. References to “Markel & Selber” in the assignment refer to chapters in the class textbook Technical Communication by Mike Markel & Selber and Stuart Selber. Technical Description Assignment Background You will write a technical description related to your field (such as of a tool that is typically used or a process that is part of your industry). The description will be part of a diversity initiative to interest local students in STEM careers (STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). The description will relate to a task that local middle and high school students will complete as they shadow someone in your company. You will also write the user document that students will use in the diversity initiative described above. You will provide step-by-step details on how to complete a simple and appropriate task that will help local students learn more about what someone in your career does. The Scenario Note: We will use this scenario for two projects: Technical Descriptions (this week) and User Documents (next week). This week, you received the following memo, explaining your responsibilities for the Incubator’s annual Try-It-Out Day:  Ut Prosim Incubator    1872 Inventors Way, Blacksburg, Virginia 24060      Interoffice Memo   To: All Incubator Companies From: Traci Gardner, Ut Prosim Director Subject: Preparing for Try-It-Out Day Date: September 10, 2018   On Try-It-Out Day, students from Montgomery, Giles, Pulaski, and Floyd Counties will spend most of the day working one-on-one with employees from every company in the Incubator to learn about what careers in STEM involve. We will match students with the company that fits their interests, and then you will determine the employees who will work with those students. What Happens on Try-It-Out Day? Try-It-Out Day will take place on Wednesday, September 26, from 8AM to 4PM. Students will arrive at the Incubator at 8AM and spend the entire day with their assigned company, following this general schedule: Time Activity 8:00 AM Welcome assembly for all students and company representatives 8:30 AM Students tour their assigned company, learning about what the company does and how it works 9:00 AM Students pair off with employees, who tell the students about their specific careers 10:00 AM Refreshments in the Incubator Atrium 10:30 AM Students learn to complete an activity that their employee-hosts do in the normal course of work 12:30 PM Lunch in the Incubator Cafeteria 1:30 PM STEM Challenge (a competition, students and employees collaborate in teams based on the schools students attend) 3:30 PM Refreshments in the Incubator Atrium and Closing Comments 4:00 PM Students board buses to return home What Do You Need to Do to Prepare? From 10:30 to 12:30, employees from your company will teach students about some activities that they do in the normal course of their work. To prepare for this portion of the day, please choose a specific activity that students can safely complete in 15–30 minutes. Ideally, choose an activity that students can complete more than once, such as examining and sorting specimens as shown in the image above. Once you have chosen an activity, create two documents that students can take home and share when they return to their schools: A technical description of an object, mechanism, or process that relates to the activity students will complete. A user document that includes instructions the student can follow to complete the activity. Any Questions? If you need any help with this project, please let me know or contact my assistant, Leslie Crow <lcrow@utprosimincubator.org>. You can also talk with Incubator members who participated in the event last year. Relevant Details Note: These details apply to all of the projects you include in your portfolio. Your company’s address is [Your Company Name], Ut Prosim Incubator, 1872 Inventors Way, Suite #[you choose a number], Blacksburg, Virginia 24060. Your company’s phone number is 540-555-5555. You may create a fictional Internet domain for your company, and use that domain for a web page address and your email addresses. If you’d like, you may create other information (including a logo) for your company as appropriate. Be sure that you use the information that you create consistently across all of your projects. The Project Assignment Step 1: Decide on the focus for your two projects (this week’s Technical Description and next week’s User Document). Your focus will be to talk about a simple task that someone in your career field would complete. As you decide on your focus, think about activities that will meet these goals: give the students an idea of what someone in your career does. excite the students about the prospects of a career like yours. Try to limit yourself to topics with which you have some expertise (or at least some experience). Since middle and high school students will be following the instructions, choose something that they could believably complete and that will not place them in a dangerous situation. Step 2: Analyze the audiences for your two projects. You will write a technical description and user document that middle and high school students can use as they complete an activity on Try-It-Out Day. Use the information from Markel & Selber, Chapter 5 to decide how the characteristics of the audiences will influence your writing. Consider the questions in Figure 5.2: Audience Profile Sheet and/or the Writer’s Checklist at the end of the chapter to guide your analysis. Step 3: Examine the information about technical descriptions in Markel & Selber. The textbook provides step-by-step details on how to write a technical description. Follow the textbook as you work on your project. In particular, be sure that you do the following: Incorporate definitions for unfamiliar terms and ideas, following the “GUIDELINES: Writing Effective Sentence Definitions” (on page 539 of Markel & Selber) and the related information in the textbook. Use the questions in “TABLE 20.1: Questions To Answer in Introducing a Description” (on page 550 of Markel & Selber) to gather the relevant details for your description. Follow the “GUIDELINES: Providing Appropriate Detail in Descriptions” (on page 551 of Markel & Selber) to ensure you include the proper level of specific information. Explore the examples in Markel & Selber to see some of the options for layout and formatting: Figure 20.4: Inside Asimo Figure 20.5: How Our Solar Electric System Works Figure 20.6: Drivetrains Figure 20.8: Turning Biomass into Fuel Step 4: Write the technical description for students. Compose your description, as requested in The Scenario above, with all the details you have gathered and created. Review the assessment guidelines below to ensure you have met all the requirements for the description. As you work, also keep the following points in mind: Use plain language to make the ideas easy to find and read. Refer to the resources from Module 2 as needed. Follow all relevant ethical guidelines as you work using the Writer’s Checklist at the end of Chapter 2 (on page 40 of Markel & Selber). Follow the suggestions for emphasizing important information, using the Writer’s Checklist for Chapter 9 (on page 211 of Markel & Selber) to check your work. Use the Writer’s Checklist for Chapter 11 (on page 288 of Markel & Selber) to ensure that your document takes advantage of design principles to make it reader-friendly. Make a good impression with accuracy and correctness. Your document should be polished and professional. Step 5: Check your draft against the Writer’s Checklist. Be sure that you include the required features for technical description. Review your project, using the Writer's Checklist for Chapter 20 (on page 576 of Markel & Selber) and the Assessment Criteria below. Step 6: Review your draft for design and basic writing errors. Everything you write should use accurate/appropriate image editing, grammar, spelling, punctuation, mechanics, linking, and formatting. These are important basic writing skills that you should have developed in high school. Review your project using the Writer’s Checklist at the end of Markel & Selber, Chapter 10 (on page 242 of Markel & Selber). You can also consult the information on “Sentence-Level Issues” in Markel & Selber, “Appendix, Part 😧 Guidelines for Multilingual Writers (ESL)” (on page 683 of Markel & Selber). While the section is labeled for multilingual writers, it is useful for everyone. It includes explanations and examples for many common mistakes writers make. Step 7: Submit your draft to your Writing Group in Canvas. Post a rough draft of your technical description to your Writing Group in Canvas in the 09/13 Draft Feedback Discussion in Canvas. Additional instructions are in the Discussion. Post a draft of your technical description by September 13. If you are late submitting a draft, your group may not have time to provide feedback. Step 8: Provide feedback to your Writing Group in Canvas. Provide feedback to the members of your writing group in the 09/13 Draft Feedback Discussion in Canvas, by September 17 (end of the grace period). Use the information on the Writing Groups page to provide constructive feedback that will help your group members make concrete improvements to their drafts.  Step 9: Revise your draft. Use the feedback that you receive from your group members to revise and improve your document. You can share your draft again with your Writing Group, if you desire. As you revise, keep in mind the advice in the steps above, as well as the Assessment Criteria below. Step 10: Include a polished version of your project in Project Portfolio 1, due October 1. Have your Technical Description Project finished and ready for submission in your Project Portfolio 1, which is due Monday, October 1. The grace period for Project Portfolio 1 ends at 11:59PM on Thursday, October 4. Assessment Criteria For All Technical Writing Projects All technical writing projects should meet the following general criteria: Makes a good first impression as a polished and professional document. Meets the needs of the intended audience. Demonstrates how to emphasize important information. Uses layout and formatting that makes information easy for readers to find and read, and that follows the standards you have set for your company. Is written in plain language, which communicates the ideas clearly. Follows all relevant ethical guidelines. Uses accurate/appropriate grammar, spelling, punctuation, mechanics, linking, and formatting. For a Description of an Object or Mechanism Your project should meet the following criteria for effective technical descriptions, based on the checklist at the end of Chapter 20 of Markel & Selber: Indicates the nature and scope of the technical description clearly. Opens with an introduction that explains these major components: what the item is. how it functions. what it looks like. what its parts are. Includes a graphic in the introduction that identifies the principal parts. Uses an appropriate organizational principle. Includes a graphic for each of the major components. Summarizes the major points in the part-by-part description in the conclusion. Includes (if appropriate) a description of the item performing its function. For a Description of a Process Your project should meet the following criteria for effective technical descriptions, based on the checklist at the end of Chapter 20 of Markel & Selber: Indicates the nature and scope of the technical description clearly. Opens with an introduction that explains the following: what the process is. how it functions. where and when it takes place. who or what performs it. how it works. what its principal steps are. Includes a graphic in the introduction that identifies the principal steps. Discusses the steps in chronological order or some other logical sequence). Makes the causal relationships among the steps clear. Includes graphics for each of the principal steps. Summarizes the major points in the step-by-step description in the conclusion. Discusses, if appropriate, the importance or implications of the process.   Image Credit from Memo: RDECOM Scientist and Engineers bring their special skills and enthusiasm to STEM Night at Fallston Middle School by U.S. Army RDECOM on Flickr, used under a CC-BY 2.0 license   In addition to this assignment, I shared information on readability statistics with students. While I believe such statistics have definite limitations, tools such as the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level help students determine if they are writing too far above or too far below their audiences’ comprehension level. The second part of this assignment focuses on writing the instructions that the middle and high school students will follow on Try-It-Out Day. I’ll share that activity next week. Until then, if you have any questions or comments about the assignment, please leave me a comment below. I’d love to hear from you.     Photo credit: U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman Ethan Morgan, from “Summer hire program offers students multiple benefits” on the Royal Air Force Mildenhall website, used under public domain. ... View more

A recent discussion of the Writing Program Administrators listserv asks the questions, “How many of us have asked students their voter registration status?” Respondents submitted practices based on their varying perspectives and teaching locations. Some respondents offer their students extra credit opportunities to register to vote. Others bring registration forms to class or show voter registration websites. Additional respondents believed that offering extra credit was coercive, while others stated that extra credit for registering to vote would not be equitably available to all students because of immigration status or status in the criminal justice system, and still others suggested alternative extra credit options, noting that voter education plays a vital role in rhetorical education.   Here is my experience. Many years ago, in the months leading up to a presidential primary, I brought to class a stack of voter registration forms procured from a table in the lobby of our classroom building. I presented the cards in what felt like a neutral, non-partisan manner, discussing the history of voting rights, the importance of voting no matter one’s political affiliation, and so on.   My students listened patiently. A few students politely pocketed the cards. But by far, the majority of students in the class said: “Dr. Bernstein, I am not a US citizen.”   In that moment, I experienced a sense of humility that I have carried with me to this day. That moment is held with other sacred memories of voting-- and not voting: accompanying my mother into the voting booth as a preschooler and watching her flip the little levers of the old-fashioned voting machine; registering to vote for the first time at eighteen; voting for president for the first time absentee as a first-year college student far from home (and watching the debates for that election on television at night in the student union).   Yet the memory of my students, disenfranchised even as they paid taxes, troubles me still. As recently as 2016, some of us in the county where I was living-- myself and my colleagues included-- were denied the right to vote in the presidential primary because our voter registrations were misfiled as “independent,” rather than with a specific political party needed to vote in that state’s closed primary system. At the same time, in that same county, other citizens found themselves waiting to vote for many hours. The county government had drastically reduced the number of polling places. Poor communities of color were especially hard hit with the reduction of polling places.   All of these experiences have helped me to consider the necessity, and the difficulty, of addressing the intersections of political and rhetorical education in the classroom. Given the speed with which events cycle in and out of the news, my inclination is to return to my training in close reading gleaned from rhetorical history and comparative literature, and to share practices of textual explication with students. We first apply these practices to Civil Rights Movement readings, and texts that are densely packed, such as speeches by James Baldwin, or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Then I invite students to apply those same practices of persuasion and analysis to their own writing.   Currently in my classes, students are nearing the completion of their first writing projects, a culmination of a series of assignments that have unfolded over the last six weeks. The process looks something like this:   Reading: Read not only for main idea and supporting evidence, but also at the sentence level and for word choice and repetition.   Writing: Write the body paragraphs first, and summarize the text, not only in terms of thesis and support, but again, for how the text is constructed, and the role of construction in effective persuasion of the reader.   Revising: Divide long paragraphs into shorter ones, and make sure that each new paragraph has an introductory and concluding sentence to help with transitions between them, adding additional citations from the text as needed for evidence.   Reframing: Add an introduction that dives directly into the main idea of your own essay. Offer a conclusion that presents the main idea as powerfully as possible, so that the reader is persuaded to accept, or at least to consider, the significance of the main idea.   These steps then become the grading criteria for the essay.   In fast-paced times, this work can feel slow, difficult, and painstaking. Yet the aim of this work is that students will learn not only to analyze dense material through reading and writing, but also that, through reading and writing, they will learn to explore the possibilities of imagining in challenging historical moments, with Baldwin or King and others a more hopeful and productive future. ... View more

David Leonhardt, opinion writer for the New York Times, recently wrote an editorial entitled “The Supreme Court Is Coming Apart.” That’s a claim, or the thesis for an argument. The more precise and less colloquial claim that Leonhardt goes on to support effectively is that “over the long term, the court risks a crisis of legitimacy.” Leonhardt offers two reasons for this potential crisis: the partisanship of the court and the radicalness of the Republicans on the court. Whether you agree with Leonhardt or not, it is possible to look at his argument as argument and to look at the wider range of arguments about the court that have become increasingly heated in recent years. There are factual claims about the court that are easy to support. If you look at the voting margins by which each court nominee has been confirmed, for example, it is easy to see that there was a time when a nominee of either political party was elected by a near-unanimous vote of the Senate. A well-qualified candidate appealed to both parties. Votes have increasingly come to be divided along party lines. That’s the sort of claim that can easily be verified. What about this part of Leonhardt’s argument: “There are no more Republican moderates. With Anthony Kennedy gone, every Republican justice is on the far end of the spectrum — among the most conservative since World War II”? That would certainly take more proof than a tallying of votes for confirmation, but an analysis of the voting record of Republican justices could be made in support of Leonhardt’s statement. The assumption is that the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh would tighten Republican control over every decision of the Supreme Court. Three days of questioning by the Senate did little to confirm or refute that assumption. Kavanaugh for the most part declined to take a stand on specific real cases but also declined to predict how he would vote on hypothetical ones. He essentially spent much of his testimony saying, “I can’t answer that.” The assumption, whether fair or not, is that he would vote as a conservative Republican. The problem, of course, is that our Founding Fathers did not plan for Supreme Court justices to vote along party lines. Making their appointments for life was seen as a way to avoid such partisanship. That clearly is not working. So what of claims of policy and the Supreme Court? Should the number of justices be increased, which would enable a Democratic-majority Congress, should one be elected, to even the playing field? That again advances partisanship, even though it lets Democrats “get even” for the Republicans’ blocking of President Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court. Is there any way to recapture the idealism behind the creation of the court? The Founding Fathers were prescient enough to build in a federal balance of powers. They built in compromises between slave and free states that still affect our government. They created a constitution that has had relatively few amendments considering how long ago it was written. What they couldn’t foresee was the America of 2018.   Image Source: “Supreme Court” by angela n. on Flickr 5/3/17 via Creative Commons 2.0 License ... View more

In the wake of Donald Trump’s statement, while visiting England, that he didn’t take questions from CNN because “CNN is ‘fake news,’” Dr. Joshua Habgood-Coote wrote an opinion piece in The Conversation arguing that we should delete the term from our vocabulary: It’s easy to think that everyone knows what “fake news” means—it was Collins Dictionary’s word of the year in 2017, after all. But to think it stops there is mistaken—and politically dangerous. Not only do different people have opposing views about the meaning of “fake news”, in practice the term undermines the intellectual values of democracy—and there is a real possibility that it means nothing. We would be better off if we stopped using it. Habgood-Coote goes on to offer a number of examples of uses of the term to demonstrate that it means wildly different things to different people in different circumstances, so much so that the term is now essentially meaningless. Yet we continue to hear it used daily across a wide range of media and even in college courses that try to deal with the contemporary phenomenon. I’m inclined to agree that the term is no longer helpful in that it has no clear meaning or referent. For my part, I’d rather use “misinformation,” defined as false or incorrect information intended to deceive. This broad definition allows for other subcategories—disinformation, clickbait, propaganda, perhaps even “fake news” if it earns a clear definition. But almost as soon as I wrote these words I said, “Wait a minute: why not just the word ‘lie,’” which the OED defines as “a false statement made with the intent to deceive.” Sounds a lot like the definition of misinformation I’ve come across in many sources. What’s up with that? By coincidence, I happened to hear a piece on NPR that addressed this very issue. When a reporter for NPR called several statements Donald Trump made on his first day in office “not true” or “false,” she said her inbox “exploded” with people asking her why she didn’t just call a lie a lie. Apparently the folks at NPR had discussed this very question and decided that the word “intent” was key: since the reporter could not read Trump’s mind (what a thought!), she could not say anything about his intent but rather about his words. So NPR rarely if ever uses the word “lie” in such situations, preferring to stick with “untrue” or “false.” But that still leaves me with a question about “misinformation.” Turning again to the OED, I find this by-now familiar definition of misinformation: “False or inaccurate information, especially that which is deliberately intended to deceive.” Sounds a lot like a lie, right? And indeed, the OED gives as first definition of the noun lie, “an intentionally false statement.” So now I’m wondering whether “misinformation” is simply a euphemism for “lie,” which term to use in what instances, and especially how best to engage students in making such distinctions and in making sure that they are using such terms with precision. If you have thoughts on dealing with this terminological thicket, please send them along! Image Credit: Pixabay Image 2355686 by Wokandapix, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

Today's featured guest blogger is Bill Leach‌,  Liberal Arts Program Chair and Assistant Professor of English at Florida Institute of Technology What do alien abductions, cops chasing robbers, and binge drinking zombies have in common? They’ve all been subjects of one-act plays written by student groups in my introduction to literature classes over the years.   I’ve always been a fan of introducing creative writing opportunities to students as a method of reinforcing the elements of short fiction, poetry, and drama.  Many of my ideas are not really mine at all. Our university uses The Bedford Introduction to Literature, edited by Michael Meyer, and there are gems of writing ideas embedded in the text just waiting to be mined. These ‘Creative Responses” are sprinkled throughout, such as writing your own 55 word short story or writing a three minute phone call or email conversation between two characters based on the brief play Reprimand. These ideas can be incorporated as journal entries, test questions, and group activities.   I introduce group work early in the semester, which allows group members to get to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses and provide a sense of commitment to the group for completing the tasks assigned. Toward the end of the semester, I introduce the groups to the project of writing a script for their own one-act plays. Years ago, I started this activity by asking the groups to write an alternate ending to the play Am I Blue by Beth Henley, which deals with many issues young adults face today. This activity also works in writing an alternate ending to Death of a Salesman. Studying original plays and writing in groups takes up a good chunk of classroom time, so I searched for shorter activities because of the premium associated with classroom time.   That's when I stumbled across the website 10-Minute-Plays.com. The site not only provides multiple examples of short plays, but it also provides students easy to follow directions on how to compose their play, which reinforces the concepts of plot structure.  Here’s an example of directions from the site:   Page 1:  Set up the world of your main characters (exposition) Page 2:  Something happens to throw your characters’ world out of balance Page 3-4:  Your characters struggle to restore order Page 5:  Just when your characters are about to restore order, something happens to complicate matters     Page 6:  Your characters either succeed or fail to restore order   The brevity of the 10 minute play allows students to work with the structure of drama, introducing conflict and providing a resolution just as longer, traditional plays do. In addition, the shortened format saves on group and classroom time, allowing for more in-depth discussions of other genres such as short fiction and poetry.   The students really enjoy the activity and work well together writing the scripts and even acting out the parts. It is a fun way to end the semester, and student feedback shows it to be something they learn from and remember.   As a caution, though, instructors need to be involved in the brainstorming part of the process, guiding students toward appropriate topics. If not, you may find yourself in the middle of many dramatic renderings describing drunken zombies fighting aliens! ... View more

A week ago, I would have cringed, ducked (and maybe even shrieked) at the image on the left, captured recently by a skillful neighbor.   This fall, though, I’m a brand-new student in an evening Master Naturalist course, and so I find myself leaning into such sights, empowered by the fresh knowledge that this is a harmless, even dazzling, yellow garden spider. Not only that, I can see details I would have missed a few days ago. I can discern the telling zipper pattern on the body, and with a quick glance at my notes, I can even confirm the Latin name, Argiope aurantia, and show off my knowledge that the webbed zigzag of silk is called a stabilimentum. What I used to ignore or avoid has now come into focus with fascinating clarity. How have I been missing these details all these years? What more can I learn?   In her essay, “The Language of Discretion,” Amy Tan captures this exhilarating experience concisely: “Once I added ‘mauve” to my vocabulary I began to see it everywhere.”   This is a good time to reflect on both the fear and fascination of learning, since our writing students are also shuttling between fear (“Every assignment still feels like a risk!”) and a bit of growing confidence (“Hey! I can understand at least parts of this difficult reading … and I have something to say about it, too!”).   In my last post, I wrote about inviting students to self-reflect on their reading and writing process in journals. (Their insights are often hilarious, and they are slowly doodling some magnificent covers. I’ll share more in a future post.)   Now, I want to reflect on how challenging these academic “habits of mind” are, as we guide our students to practice them, however tentatively, in our writing classrooms. My co-author, Stuart Greene, and I, open From Inquiry to Academic Writing with the “habits of mind” of academic writers, starting with:   Inquiry — through observation, asking questions, and examining alternatives Seeking and valuing complexity — through reflection, examining issues from multiple points of view, and asking issue-based questions.   Let’s remind ourselves how rare these activities are in our culture. They may have been rare, too, in some of the classrooms in which our students either thrived or failed. After all, in an age of information-overload, people often prize (and are praised for) simplistic summaries that enable them to make a confident-sounding pronouncement, and move on to the next topic. In contrast, the “habits of mind” we ask our students to develop involve seeking more questions than answers, and opening up complex possibilities that include and value their experiences. These habits call for what José Antonio Bowen calls “slow thinking.” Our task is to model for our students the pleasures of what sounds like frustrating work. (Why lean in to peer at that spider? Because a web of meaning becomes visible when we do.)   Here’s an accessible Practice Sequence of activities you could use, or adapt, to demonstrate the value of these habits of mind:   Inquiry — through observation, asking questions, and examining alternatives: Find out through  searching what the most popular majors are on your campus. Is there anything that surprises or puzzles you? Write down any questions you have, including: Why are things the way they are? What alternative explanations can you provide to account for differences in the popularity of the subjects students major in?   Seeking and valuing complexity — through reflection, examining issues from multiple points of view, and asking issue-based questions: Imagine other perspectives on the data you found on the most popular majors on your campus. How might other students, or parents, explain your findings? What explanation might faculty members offer, both those who teach in those majors and those who do not? (You could seed this conversation with any number of recent sources on the workplace value of the humanities.)   Exercises like these can help students “see” aspects of their own campus and community for the first time, and set them to wondering: Why? The answers are multi-faceted, will raise additional questions, and will reveal the way their own experiences and decisions are woven into this new knowledge. And … they’re off and running, if not toward delight, at least toward interest in what had been invisible.   What adult learning experiences have shaped your own teaching? What webs of meaning fascinate your students right now? Photo credit: Anne Brown ... View more

As American popular culture gets more and more entangled in the political divisions that are rending our country, it may appear to be increasingly difficult to teach cultural analysis without risking painful classroom conflict. Take the current controversy over Nike's Colin Kaepernick campaign: it simply begs for semiotic attention, but how can it be accomplished without having the whole thing blow up into yet another headline on Inside Higher Education, or any other national news outlet?   I wouldn't be writing this blog if I thought that the thing couldn't be done or if my best advice would be to steer clear of the whole matter and anything like it. No, if you have adopted a semiotics-based methodology for your class, you have to engage with the full range of popular culture. And if you stick to the fundamental semiotic axiom that, while a personal opinion can be built upon the foundations of a semiotic analysis, semiotics itself is not an expression of an opinion, the thing can be done.   So, to begin, let's start with the obvious significations of the Nike/Kaepernick campaign and the reaction to it. The first is the way that it joins an ever-growing list of signifiers revealing a widening political gap in America, especially when it comes to anything having to do with race. This one is so apparent that it doesn't require any further explanation, but it does merit recognition.   The second (also quite obvious) signification is that symbols matter. Whether the symbol involved is the American flag or "Silent Sam," deep emotional attitudes towards objects can be just as passionate as attitudes towards people or policies. This too is so obvious that it doesn't require any further explanation, but does need to be mentioned.   The third is that the traditional (and constitutional) right to free speech in America is a shield protecting social protest, until it isn't. On the one hand, juridical rulings on free speech grant to individuals the right to say almost anything short of shouting "fire" in a crowded theater (remember the successful ACLU defense of the Nazi marchers in Skokie?), while, on the other, the courts have allowed employer retaliation against employees who break the speech codes in their places of employment. Such a lack of clarity is a contributing factor in the Nike controversy.   But let's step away from the most obvious significations and get into some more subtle ones. The first I'd like to consider is one that I have seen very ably explored in a Washington Post opinion piece by Michael Serazio, who argues that the Nike campaign isn't a gesture on behalf of social justice; it's simply another expression of the hypercapitalistic nature of America's consumer culture. Here's how Serazio puts it: "At one point in human history, products were bought and sold for their utility. Now, because of the massive and unchecked expansion of corporate power—in terms of not just market share but mind share—products must represent values, lifestyles and, in the age of President Trump, political ideologies." In short, the Nike campaign can be seen as a signifier of the hegemony of consumption in a consumer society.   But Serazio is hardly the only cultural analyst trying to parse the Nike affair. Consider the following two articles, also from the Washington Post. First, there's Megan McArdle's Nike bet that politics would sell. Looks like it was wrong, an op-ed that cites public opinion polls from all sides of the controversy to conclude that Americans are not responding favorably to the Nike/Kaepernick campaign, while arguing that this is a good thing because "as America has divided into distinct camps—geographic, demographic, political—more companies have started chasing explicitly political identities. Starbucks's leftward lean has famously roused conservative ire, but many on the left still haven't forgiven Chick-fil-A owner Dan Cathy's remarks opposing same-sex marriage a few years ago. The result is a world in which every decision, even what kind of fast food to buy, has taken on a political aspect. That's not healthy for America, which needs more points that people have in common, not more ways to divide into separate teams."   But then there's Amy Kittelstrom's counter-argument, which comes to a very different conclusion. Noting that by "[b]urning shoes and snipping swooshes, some white Americans think they are punishing Nike for re-signing Colin Kaepernick, the unemployed quarterback known for quietly kneeling during the national anthem to draw attention to anti-black police brutality. In reality, Nike will profit. The more these angry consumers attack the company, the more attractive they make Nike in the far bigger global market—which is a vital part of why Nike launched the campaign that centers on Kaepernick."   Now, the interesting thing about these articles is that each, in effect, jumps the gun on the future by asserting long-term outcomes that are by no means as certain as their authors argue they are. You may say that Trump started it with his exultant tweet about Nike's stock price decline at the opening of the campaign (Nike stock has, as I write this, fully made up the drop), but, whoever engages in such predictions, making them at all always runs the risk of speaking too soon, of letting one's desires (i.e., the way one wants things to turn out) supersede the available facts.   I'm reminded here of an editorial in the Richmond Examiner from July 7th, 1863 that predicted inevitable victory for the Army of Northern Virginia in its invasion of the North—published three days after Lee's defeat at Gettysburg but two days before news of that defeat reached Richmond. But then again, in 1861 there was a lot of "On to Richmond" confidence in the Union press as well. In the end, as Lincoln sublimely noted in his second inaugural address, neither side got what it expected out of the war, which grimly contradicted that American tendency (which rises to the level of a cultural mythology) to expect that everything will always go the way we want it to—a fundamental cultural optimism that Barbara Ehrenreich calls "bright-sidedness" (you can find her exploration of this peculiarly American tendency in chapter 7 of the 9th edition of Signs of Life in the U.S.A.).   And so, in McArdle's and Kittelstrom's dueling certainties about an uncertain future I find a signifier of something that is profoundly American; but unfortunately, when a divided people are equally certain that everything will go their way, everyone, in the end, loses.     Image Credit: Pixabay Image 1840619 by Pexels, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

I was struck a week or so ago when I read Benjamin Hoffman and Tayla Minsberg’s article, “The Deafening Silence of Colin Kaepernick” in The New York Times. My interest was heightened because I had recently re-read some of Cheryl Glenn’s important work on silence, and especially on the difference between silence, which can be powerfully positive, and being silenced, which cannot. And also because I had seen Nike’s powerful new  ad, narrated by Kaepernick and featuring him along with a wide range of other athletes, both disabled and able-bodied, each one showing just how completely they can “do it.”   Most importantly, though, I began thinking about silence because we so seldom encounter it today, with the cacophonous 24/7 newsfeeds, livestreams, social media dumps, and all the other very noisy voices and messages coming at us almost to the point of harassment. At least I sometimes feel harassed, and I need to turn everything off. Everything. And enjoy the peace of silence.   I’m thinking, then, of asking students to engage in some purposeful silence, and to monitor it, its effects on others, and their responses to it. Doing so will make, I believe, for an important class discussion on the uses and importance of silence. I’d also like to ask students to read the Times article on Kaepernick and outline the ways he has used silence strategically, and how he has alternated silence with occasional live appearances, written statements. or speeches (such as his speech in accepting Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience Award).             What do they take away from the article on Kaeperick? Does Kaepernick use silence in different ways for different occasions? How effective do they find his use of silence? What other examples of purposeful silence can they come up with and how do they work, rhetorically?   So I think it’s time for a little attention to silence in this most unquiet time. It’s probably a good idea, too, to turn back to Glenn’s Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence for the many lessons it has to teach us today. Image Credit: Pixabay Image 2355859 by kassarcreative, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

Ann Charters‌ is the author of The Story and Its Writer. I’ve been a Kerouac fan since 1958, when I read his just-published novel The Dharma Bums.  In the 1950s, the overwhelming majority of Beat Generation authors were men who rarely wrote about women as independent, equally talented individuals or even as equal partners.  Ironically, in the next generation, the discovery of the freedom of Kerouac’s spontaneous prose style helped some of the women who read his books gain the confidence to become experimental writers themselves. The tenth edition of The Story and Its Writer includes Kerouac’s experimental prose narrative “October in the Railroad Earth,” his story about his daily life in California in the autumn of 1952. It is considered the best short example of what Kerouac called “Spontaneous Prose.” He wrote the story in San Francisco while he lived in a skid row hotel and worked as a brakeman-in-training for the Southern Pacific Railroad.  In his commentary “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” (also included in the tenth edition of The Story and Its Writer), he described his highly personal method of writing.  In his approach, Kerouac tried to write his mind into a text as directly, honestly, and completely as possible, hoping to capture the free, spontaneous flow of his thoughts and feelings at the moment of putting words down on paper.   Kerouac composed “October in the Railroad Earth” eighteen months after he created his most famous novel On the Road during an inspired three weeks in April 1951, though he’d tried unsuccessfully for years to write it.  His novel, now considered an American classic, took nearly seven years to be published in 1957, but only after it had been first rejected and then completely revised into conventional prose by his editors.  The 1951 original so-called “scroll manuscript” of On the Road, unpublished for a half-century until 2007, reads much more like spontaneous prose. As Kerouac once told an interviewer, “I agree with Joyce, as Joyce said to Ezra Pound in the 1920s, ‘Don’t bother me with politics, the only thing that interests me is style.’” Kerouac knew what he was doing. At the time he wrote to his friend Allen Ginsberg that he was “originating. . . a new way of writing about life, no fiction, no craft, no revising afterthoughts.” Later the English critic Michael Horowitz understood that at midcentury Kerouac’s style –“That ingenuous art of spilling the beans – all that’s remembered laced with all that chimes in from the senses at the instant of writing, emptying consciousness as per action painter and jazzman’s delivery” – was to change the direction of American prose. The woman author I have in mind who was influenced by Kerouac’s writing is the novelist and biographer Chris Kraus.  In 1997 she published her second novel I Love Dick, which elicited heated controversy at the time though recently it has become the basis of a successful American television series released on Amazon Video.  Like Kerouac, Kraus used what was happening in her own life as the basis for her fiction.  As a critic noted on the back jacket of I Love Dick, by “tearing away the veil that separates fiction from reality and privacy from self-expression . . . Kraus forged a manifesto for a new kind of feminism that isn’t afraid to burn through itself to embrace the whole world.” I Love Dick is full of references to Beat-era writers, not only Kerouac but also less famous figures such as Lew Welch, John Wieners, Ron Padgett and Paul Blackburn —all males.  As Kraus writes in I Love Dick about the married painters Elaine and Willem de Kooning, the 1950s was a period “that believed in the utter worthlessness of Women.” [sic]  It was a time when the commercial success of women authors, even extremely talented writers like Flannery O’Connor who wrote in a conventional prose style, was the exception, not the rule.  The example of Kerouac’s courage creating his autobiographical, spontaneous prose method and following it despite the repeated rejection of his writing by established publishers, inspired Kraus to find her own voice as a writer.  Kerouac’s story encouraged her to create highly original autobiographical fiction in which she too expressed herself as openly, honestly, and freely as she could. ... View more

Note from Miriam: During Fall 2018, I am sharing the “Real Teaching” blog with colleagues from around the country who will be sharing what works in their writing classrooms.   Guest blogger Melissa Adamo is currently the College Liaison for the Dodge Poetry Festival and an Adjunct Instructor at Montclair State University and Rutgers University-Newark. She primarily teaches composition courses at both institutions but has also taught creative writing and literature courses at Ramapo College of New Jersey. Readers can connect with her on Twitter Melissa Adamo (@mel_adamo) | Twitter .    Students often come into second-level composition or literature courses describing poetry as hard to understand or too abstract. In high school, many students feel forced to “overanalyze” poems, leading to fears of finding “the right answer”; this seems only natural for those accustomed to standardized tests. My desire to reframe poetry as a topic of discussion rather than a place of correct answers led me to Twitter.   In creating this lesson plan, I took inspiration from the book 101 Exercises for the College Classroom in which Jacquelyn Ardam has students pare down a text to six words. My version of this assignment used Twitter, a platform with a 140-character limit. I asked students to Tweet a creative response to a poem and then present their Tweet to the class, supporting their choices by directly connecting the Tweet to lines in the poem.   I wanted to fulfill similar objectives from Ardam whose assignment built “close-reading skills” through examining the author’s style or diction “as deliberate” choices. I wanted to help further these skills as well as analytical thinking through writing, collaboration, and presentation. Another aim for the activity was to decenter my authority on the poem in order to promote more confidence in students.   First, I broke the class into small groups to select a poem from that day’s assigned reading. Next, I instructed them to re-read their poem together, breaking up its parts: What is it about? How is it structured? What effect is produced? What was your reaction to the poem?   I then asked students to create a Tweet based on their group’s understanding of the poem. Students could write as the speaker of the poem to highlight its message, as the author to directly comment on literary choices, or as readers to show their experience of the poem. They could also choose to compose as they actually would on such a platform, modernizing language from the poem or, if writing from the reader perspective, revealing their interpretation through slang. Here, students became the experts in the room, for example, defining what “af” or “savage” meant, thus giving them more agency over vocabulary in an academic setting.   Like most social media platforms, Twitter also uses multimodality through memes, GIFs, and emojis. I encouraged students to play with these modes to practice analytical reading skills, not only on traditional texts but also on visual texts. I also pushed them to see how much they can include in such a small space; because of Twitter’s character limit (currently at 280), students must pare down the text to avoid unnecessary summary and convey more information with less words. Although most Tweets look rather simplistic, the more layers added (e.g. hashtags, pictures, text), the more conversation a group can generate.   After each group created their Tweet, students would present it to the class. Presentation requirements included students explaining their text and images from the Tweet as well as how it directly connects to a line of the poem or the poet’s writing strategy. This presentation component required students to support claims and thus assessed their ability to communicate their reasoning.   After each group presented, the rest of the class was invited to ask the group questions about the Tweet. This larger discussion promoted an even more in-depth analysis of each poem. For example, in one group, students debated characteristics of a GIF’s subject and compared it to the poem’s speaker, drawing parallels between popular culture present in the image and the literary text assigned. Not all students saw connections between the image and poem at first, but in our collective conversation we all built toward it.   Such discussions allowed an opportunity for me to read and learn alongside my students. Because I don’t always know the reference nor do I know how the students will create their tweet, we are all on equal footing. It offered the chance to model that “good” readers do not simply know all the answers, but rather they are comfortable asking questions or reviewing a text together.   Bringing Twitter and its memes, GIFs, and hashtags into the classroom resulted in a class atmosphere that was inviting and playful, rather than inaccessible, meeting my original objective. Seeing the confidence this lesson helped build in students was key in the process of not only reframing their view on poetry but also furthering their critical reading skills. It even prompted students to analyze popular culture and visual media, which they often do not look at with a critical eye.   Changing such perspectives about reading and analysis could apply to more than just poetry, of course. I would be eager to try this with other texts in the composition classroom, hoping to find the same level of student engagement and analytical thinking. ... View more

Today's featured Bedford New Scholar is Kristin vanEyk‌, a student in the Joint PhD program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. Kristin taught high school English for nine years before beginning her PhD in the fall of 2016. She expects to complete her degree in 2021. Kristin teaches first year writing at the university, and is especially interested in the ways students blend register and genre to create meaning. Kristin's research interests include translingual theory and practice, critical race theory and whiteness theory, and critical feminism.   A few weeks ago Leah Rang blogged here about the latest group of Bedford New Scholars (BNS) and promised (or perhaps warned?) that the BNS “notable newcomers” would soon be writing for this space. As one of the BNS cohort, I’m delighted to have this opportunity to ask a few questions and learn from you all. I first started reading the Bits blog in May of 2018, the week Andrea A. Lunsford wrote about “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” and the ongoing efforts for more generous attitudes towards our students’ home languages (see her post African American Rhetoric and Other Englishes). Lunsford recommended Jerry Won Lee’s book titled The Politics of Translingualism: After Englishes (Routledge, 2017), which I had just finished reading, and she concluded her post with an invitation to continue the conversation about translingualism, an orientation where the theory and pedagogy sometimes miss one another. As we head into a new semester, it seems like a good time to revisit this conversation.  Lee’s book helpfully clarified some of my confusion over the need for a distinction between multilingualism and translingualism, and why this matters in a writing classroom. Lee argues that “by focusing on and drawing attention to the simultaneous presence of multiple language resources in a particular utterance, moment, or space, we risk simultaneously gesturing to and reaffirming the disciplinarian linguistic ideologies that have aspired and perhaps conspired to keep such language resources in isolation from one another” (p. 9). My conception of the translingual orientation had been too narrow: code-switching vs. code-meshing or multilingual (parallel monolingualism) vs. translingual (through and beyond linguistic borders). Such stunted views of the translingual turn belied my own stunted imagination about what “counts” in academic writing and what rhetorical magic our students can muster if we convince them that we genuinely want to see what they can do. I’ve been thinking a lot about how translingual theory and anti-racist pedagogy can come together in meaningful and rigorous classroom practice. During my first semester of graduate school, I enrolled in a seminar taught by Anne Gere called “What Makes Writing Good,” which focused on justice-oriented pedagogy and anti-racist writing assessment practices. At the same time, I was working with linguist Anne Curzan on challenging deficit language ideologies in writing classrooms. These courses greatly shaped my approach to translingualism by bringing linguists and compositionists into conversation about the teaching of languaging. I do worry about how my students will fare when they leave the safety of my classroom. As Deborah Cameron and Rosina Lippi-Green and others have demonstrated, there are many who insist on standard varieties of English as a litmus test for intelligence. If people in their lives will require conventions of a so-called “standard” variety of English, what does that mean for a composition teacher with a translingual orientation? How do I reconcile a conviction that I ought to teach beyond linguistic and other borders when I also believe that borders will hem my students in? It seems very practical to ask students to answer these kinds of questions for themselves, to have students write about their own linguistic ideologies and to practice having conversations with people who use standards as a basis of judgement. It seems like part of my job, as a teacher of languaging, to help students find the language they want to use to correct the misinformation they will encounter about language. So that’s where my semester is moving: towards challenging students to think about how cultural language preferences are developed, how they are reinforced (and by whom!), and how they as informed students want to respond when they witness the perpetuation of hegemony. One of my favorite writing assignments to teach is the Literacy Narrative. We read a few example texts in class, like Sherman Alexie’s “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me,” and then I ask my students to think about the literacy experiences that have shaped their own linguistic ideologies. Often they discover that reading and writing have played a more critical role in the development of their identities than they realized, and they appreciate the challenge of writing an argument about literacy and identity in a university writing course. As students peer review and share these essays they also expand their understandings of how language and identity are intertwined, and hopefully we all become more compassionate and courageous individuals. If you have insights into how we can guide our students’ thinking about linguistic ideologies or how they can practice standing up for their developing beliefs, I certainly welcome the discussion. To view Kristin's assignment, visit Literacy Narrative Assignment Sheet. To learn more about the Bedford New Scholars advisory board, visit the the Bedford New Scholars page on the Macmillan English Community. ... View more

In my last post, I described my plan to organize a series of assignments for my technical writing course around a fictional business incubator. This week, I have the first of those assignments to share with you. For the series to work, I need students to choose a company that they will focus on for the assignments they will write. The first assignment asks students to share the basic information about their company in a memo. In the scenario, their information will be combined with that of other new companies that are joining the incubator for a presentation at the first meeting of all the members of the incubator. The assignment below has some minor changes to remove specific information that is relevant only to the students in my classes. References to “Markel” in the assignment refer to chapters in the class textbook Technical Communication by Mike Markel and Stuart Selber. Incubator Info Sheet Background All of the projects will relate to your membership in a fictional business incubator, the Ut Prosim Incubator. The projects you will complete for your portfolios will be documents that you create as a member of this incubator. You will create a business and then write the pieces for your portfolio from the perspective as a starting business owner. You will collaborate with other members of the incubator and contribute materials to the endeavors that the incubator undertakes. You can read more about the incubator and how the projects connect on the Writing Projects Overview page. The Scenario During your first week as an Ut Prosim Incubator member, you receive the following memo:  Ut Prosim Incubator    1872 Inventors Way, Blacksburg, Virginia 24060      Interoffice Memo To: CEOs of New Incubator Companies From: Traci Gardner, Ut Prosim Director Subject: Your Company Info Sheet Date: August 27, 2018 Welcome to the Ut Prosim Incubator! We are all so happy to have you join the Fall 2018 class of entrepreneurs. I know you are still settling into your office, so our first all-company meeting will not take place for a few weeks. At this meeting, you will introduce your company to the other members of the Incubator. The meeting will be informal, but we do want to prepare handouts and slides to share with attendees. We will also post the basic information that you provide on the Incubator website, for the possible research partners on campus, potential investors, and the public. Please send the following information to me by September 7: Your Company Name Your Company CEO (use the name you want to appear in official documentation) Your Company Mission Statement (a statement of your company’s goals and values) Your Company Overview (explain what you company does, including whatever research you do, products your create, or services you provide) Your Company’s Target Audience (who are the customers you serve or hope to serve) Do not worry about formatting or design in your response. We will format the information for all the companies according to the Incubator’s branding and style guidelines. We will send out a meeting announcement once a place and time have been confirmed. In the mean time, if you need any help settling in, please let me know or contact my assistant, Leslie Crow <lcrow@utprosimincubator.org>. The Project Assignment Step 1: Decide on the focus for your business. Decide what your company will do—will you focus on products or services? You will focus on the company that you imagine for the entire term, so choose something that you know well. Sure, you can be creative, but create something doable that you have experience with (or at least strong knowledge of). Additionally, your focus must directly relate to your major. As long as you comply with those two stipulations, you can focus on anything you want to. You have capital, staff, and resources to do whatever you set your mind to. Step 2: Analyze the audiences for your memo. Review the memo above and decide who the audience is for the memo you have to write and for the information that you have to gather. Use the information from Markel, Chapter 5 to decide how the characteristics of the audiences will influence the writing that you do. Consider the questions in Figure 5.2: Audience Profile Sheet and/or the Writer’s Checklist at the end of the chapter to guide your analysis. Step 3: Determine the information that the memo requests. Work through the memo above and find the information that you have to provide in your response. Once you find the list of requested information, decide on your responses. You are creating your business, so you get to create the answers for all the requested information. Don’t get stuck on perfectionism at this point. Compile your ideas, but know you can always come back to revise. Step 4: Write a memo to me with the details. Compose your memo, as requested in The Scenario above, with all the details you have gathered and created. As you work, keep the following points in mind: Even though sophisticated formatting is not required, ensure that your answers are easy to find and read. Check your draft for the use of plain language. Ensure that you follow all relevant ethical guidelines as you create your responses, using the Writer’s Checklist at the end of Markel, Chapter 2. Be sure that your memo makes a good impression with accuracy and correctness. It should be polished and professional. Step 5: Check your draft for correct use of memo format. Be sure that you include the memo headings (To, From, Subject, and Date). For more details on memo format, consult Chapter 14 of Markel. Step 6. Review your draft for design and basic writing errors. Everything you write should use accurate/appropriate image editing, grammar, spelling, punctuation, mechanics, linking, and formatting. These are important basic writing skills that you should have developed in high school. Review your project, using the Writer’s Checklist at the end of Markel, Chapter 10. You can also consult the information on “Sentence-Level Issues” in Markel, Appendix, Part 😧 Guidelines for Multilingual Writers (ESL). While the section is labeled for multilingual writers, it is useful for everyone. It includes explanations and examples for many common mistakes writers make. Step 7: Submit your draft to your Writing Group in Canvas. Post a rough draft of your info sheet to your Writing Group in Canvas in the 08/29 Peer Feedback Discussion in Canvas. Additional instructions are in the Discussion. Post a draft of your memo by August 30. If you are late submitting a draft, your group may not have time to provide feedback. Step 8: Provide feedback to your Writing Group in Canvas. Provide feedback to the members of your writing group by September 4 (end of the grace period). Use the information on the Writing Groups page to provide constructive feedback that will help your group members make concrete improvements to their drafts.  Step 9: Revise your draft. Use the feedback that you receive from your group members to revise and improve your document. You can share your draft again with your Writing Group, if you desire. As you revise, keep in mind the advice in Steps 4, 5, and 6 above, as well as the Assessment Criteria below. Step 10: Include a polished version of your response in Project Portfolio 1, due October 1. Have your Info Sheet memo finished and ready for submission in your Project Portfolio 1, which is due Monday, October 1. The grace period for Project Portfolio 1 ends at 11:59PM on Thursday, October 4. Assessment Criteria Your project should meet the following criteria: Makes a good first impression as a polished and professional document. Uses memo format with the appropriate headers. Meets the needs of the intended audience. Uses layout and formatting that makes information easy for readers to find and read. Is written in plain language, which communicates the ideas clearly. Follows all relevant ethical guidelines. Uses accurate/appropriate grammar, spelling, punctuation, mechanics, linking, and formatting.   Credit: Ut Prosim Incubator logo created with “Incubator” by lastspark from the Noun Project, used under a CC-BY 3.0 license. So far the assignment has gone well. The biggest challenge I have had to deal with (other than the typical questions about due dates and the like) has been ill-chosen companies that do not actually relate to the student’s major. Many of the students are new to the memo format, but the peer feedback activity and the revision time they have should take care of any issues that come up. In my next post, I will share a correspondence assignment that is the next step in the course. In the meantime if you have any comments to share on this assignment of the series in general, I would love to hear from you in the comments below.   Photo: Typer by Caleb Roenigk on Flickr, used under a CC-BY 2.0 license ... View more

The recent decision by the Opinion Desk of the New York Times to publish anonymously an op-ed essay about the Trump presidency by a senior White House official was an unusual one. Readers were invited to submit questions about the essay or the vetting process. Two days later, 23,000 of them had.   The essay, of course, started a media frenzy. Speculation continues to run rampant as to who the anonymous official is. CNN listed thirteen possible authors; by the next day, at least sixteen had denied they wrote it. The author has been called everything from heroic to gutless—but the reactions don’t divide neatly or predictably along party lines.   As is often the case with today’s headlines, the reactions to the op-ed essay can be used to teach the basics of argumentation. A statement of opinion about the writer would be a claim of value. Clear statements of policy have also grown out of the controversy: The writer should identify himself or herself. The writer should resign. The Department of Justice should investigate the authorship in the name of national security. The 25 th Amendment should be invoked.   As is usually the case, it is easier to recognize the claim of an argument than to recognize the assumption underlying it. Given a specific claim, what assumptions does a reader have to accept in order to accept the claim? First, what about those who consider the author of the essay to be heroic? What assumption underlies that judgement? Something like this: It is heroic to work behind the scenes to safeguard our democracy against an incompetent president. That assumption is only valid, of course, if the president is indeed incompetent. It is reassuring for some to know, as the author puts it, that “there are adults in the room.” The author also writes, “We are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.” Assumption: It is a good thing for someone to do what’s right when the President won’t. That assumption is only valid, however, if the writer—and those who agree with him that the president needs someone working behind the scenes in the White House to keep him in check—is a better judge of what is right than the President.   That’s where those on the other side come in. Donald Trump is our duly elected President. Does anyone have the right to take over any of his duties without a mandate from the people? Even former President Obama argued, “That’s not how our democracy is supposed to work.” The 25 th Amendment provides the process for removing a president from office, but for anyone to work behind the scenes against the President in the name of defending the Constitution is to circumvent due process. Can it be applauded as a heroic act? Obviously, it can be by some. Even some of Trump’s harshest critics, however, feel that to undermine the president from within is not a valid solution.   Is the author of the op-ed essay guilty of treason? No, not by the official definition of treason, which can be committed only in time of war. Those who feel that the author should make himself or herself known to the public may assume that a public servant should not continue to work for an administration as flawed as the writer judges Trump’s to be, or that the person could do more good if he or she came out from behind the mask of anonymity. Even better would be for all those the writer claims hold similar views to speak out publicly.   There are complex arguments at work here. Our students need to see the issue from all sides and recognize it for its potential to shape the future of our country.   Image Source: “16114_355136441248988_1333868535_n” by A M on Flickr 12/12/12 via Creative Commons 2.0 License ... View more