As I head into the summer recess for my Bits blogs, I find myself contemplating the cultural significance of the rise and apparent fall of Theranos, the troubled biotech startup that was once heralded as a disruptive force that would revolutionize the blood testing industry, and, not so incidentally, produce a new generation of high-tech entrepreneurs to rank with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. On the face of it, of course, this would not appear to be a topic for popular cultural analysis, but bear with me for a moment, for when it comes to the new technologies, everything relates in some way or another to the manifold currents of everyday life that popular culture expresses.   What has drawn my attention to Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos saga is the publication of a book by the Wall Street Journal writer who first blew the whistle on the company in 2015: John Carreyrou's BAD BLOOD: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. A brief synopsis of that book appeared in Wired just as it was being released, and it was a single sentence in that synopsis that really got me thinking. It appears in Carreyrou's narrative at the point when things at Theranos were beginning to unravel and various high-ranking employees were abandoning ship. In the wake of such resignations, Elizabeth Holmes allegedly summoned every remaining employee to an all-hands-on-deck meeting to demand loyalty from them. But she didn't call it loyalty: according to Carreyrou "Holmes told the gathered employees that she was building a religion. If there were any among them who didn’t believe, they should leave."   Building a religion: Holmes was telling a truth that was deeper than she realized. For when we situate the story of Theranos in the larger system of post-industrial America, we can see that our entire culture has been building a religion around what Fredric Jameson has called America's postmodern mode of production. On the face of it, the object of worship in this system is technology itself, which is viewed as a kind of all-purpose savior that will solve all of our problems if we are just patient enough. Steven Pinker's new book, Enlightenment Now, makes this point explicitly, but it is implicit every time some new tech startup promises to "fix" higher education, clean up all the trash in the ocean, and use architecture to save the natural environment (see, for example, Wade Graham's "Are We Greening Our Cities, or Just Greenwashing Them?", which provides both a survey and a critique of the eco-city movement: you can find it in the 9th edition of Signs of Life in the USA). The religion of technology also produces its own demi-gods, like Elon Musk, who can announce yet another delay (or change of plans) in his money-losing product line and still see his Tesla stock rise due to the unwavering adoration of his flock.   Oddly enough, as I was writing the first draft of this blog I came across an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education that examines a related angle on this phenomenon. There, in a take-down of the "design thinking" movement (an ecstatic amalgamation of a Stanford University product design program and the Esalen Institute that promises to transform higher education into a factory for producing entrepreneurially inclined "change agents"), Lee Vinsel compares the whole thing, overtly, to a religious cult, acidly remarking that the movement "has many of the features of classic cult indoctrination, including intense emotional highs, a special lingo barely recognizable to outsiders, and a nigh-salvific sense of election" —concluding that "In the end, design thinking is not about design. It’s not about the liberal arts. It’s not about innovation in any meaningful sense. It’s certainly not about 'social innovation' if that means significant social change. It’s about commercialization. It’s about making education a superficial form of business training."   Thus, I think that Vinsel would agree with my contention that behind the religion of technology is something larger, older, and more universal. This is, quite simply, the religion of money worship. Minting instant billionaires and driving an ever-deeper wedge between a technology-fostered one percent and everyone else, the post-industrial economy dazzles most through the glitter of gold, which overcomes every other moral value, from Facebook's willingness to allow its platform to be exploited for the purposes of overt political manipulation to Theranos's performing a million blood tests with a technology so flawed that the tests have had to be invalidated, at who knows what cost to the patients (one should say, victims) involved.   And what does America do in response? It makes movies, like Aaron Sorkin's The Social Network, and John Carreyrou's own Bad Blood, a film said to be starring Jennifer Lawrence, and due out in 2019, thus turning social anomie into entertainment, and promising even more offerings on the altars of extreme affluence.   Image Credit: Pixabay Image 1761832 by kropekk_pl, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

In 1994, Anne Haas Dyson and Celia Genishi published a collection that made a big impression on me. The Need for Story: Cultural Diversity in Classroom and Community demonstrated how important stories are in helping us to understand the world and ourselves in it—a need that, they argued convincingly, is universal. At the time, I was very glad to see that the old traditional “modes of discourse” (argumentation, exposition, description, and narration) had been displaced in writing curricula, especially since they “bled” into each other constantly. Moreover, I thought then, and do even more so today, that narrative can play a part in all discourse, from memoirs to business reports. And I began tracking the use of narrative in discourses that had traditionally been thought of as outside the “academic” discourse taught in most writing classes, particularly those of African American, Latinx, and Native American traditions. So I’ve been thinking about narrative, and the power of narrative, for a long time. But in the last 18 months or so, I’ve grown more and more concerned about the use of stories to spread misinformation, distortions, and even lies. In a 2009 Ted Talk, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie pointed out “The Danger of a Single Story”—what happens when whole groups of rich, complex people are reduced to a single narrative. Adichie says that it’s fairly simple to create such a single story: just “show people as one thing and one thing only, over and over again, and that is what they will become.” Adichie notes that stories are enmeshed in structures of power, that how they are told, when they are told, how many are told are all dependent on power, and “the ultimate power is to tell the story of another person—but to make it THE definitive story of that person.” And I would add “of that people” or “of that culture.” Such stories surround us today: “immigrants are rapists and animals”; “guns don’t kill people”; “climate change is a hoax.” You can fill in the blanks with dozens of other stories that are repeated with stunning and mind-numbing regularity, even though they are demonstrably untrue. So when I had the amazing opportunity to address the Rhetoric Society of America on its 50 th anniversary last week in Minneapolis, I spoke of the need to examine and challenge narratives and stories that crush dreams, choke freedoms, and leave people voiceless and instead to pursue what I am calling narrative justice, because it occurs to me that our efforts to achieve social justice cannot advance when people are trapped, silenced, and demeaned by stories that simply will never allow for it. I believe that teachers of writing are in a perfect position to foster the work of narrative justice, first by guiding students in identifying and understanding dangerous “single stories,” then analyzing and critiquing them. And we can go the next step as well, guiding students in creating alternative narratives that do justice to the truths of lived experience and that reflect their deepest values, their best sense of self, their vision of a just society. That’s a tall order for sure, but it’s also one that writing teachers are already working to fill. In this time which some call “post-truth” and others “a tower of lies,” doing so is our privilege and our responsibility. I’m hoping to make my talk available on the web soon, for anyone interested. Image Credit: Pixabay Image 1245690 by Free-Photos, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

Cato is generally credited with defining an orator as a good man skilled in speaking. A successful speech, by classical standards, was based on reason but was also strengthened by the knowledge that the person speaking was moral. As I write that, it amazes and depresses me that I have to use past tense and include the qualifying prepositional phrase. There was—and, yes, still is—an art to presenting oneself in such a way as to be trusted and believed. The term sophist was used in Cato’s time for a teacher of rhetoric in general, but eventually came to be associated with a man who presented what seemed to be a logical argument but was actually fallacious or specious. Thus the derogatory term sophistry.    Donald Trump has long used the term fake news for much of the negative press that he receives. In doing so, he provides an interesting twist on rhetorical strategies used to present one’s self as an ethical speaker. A comment that he made to Lesley Stahl in passing when she interviewed him during the 2016 presidential campaign has attracted attention lately because of what it reveals about his alternative rhetorical strategy. Speaking to fellow journalists recently, Stahl reported that she asked Trump about his constant attacks on journalists. She told him, “You know, that is getting tired. Why are you doing this? You’re doing it over and over. It’s boring, and it’s time to end that.” His response: “You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”   We’ve long since passed the point where news was simply news. If news was as objective as it should be, it wouldn’t matter if we got it from Fox or CNN, but we all know how much it does matter. The line between news reporting and commentary on the news has become so blurred that it doesn’t even exist anymore. And we are all aware how easily news reports can be slanted based simply on what is included and what is left out. Even our entertainment reflects this understanding. The Newsroom was a television show that ran 2012-14. One viewer explained its premise in this way: “A news team attempts to create a news show that reports the news in an ethical and reasonable way. They take real, newsworthy events from our world as they're happening (such as bin Laden's justified killing, NSA spying, etc) and report on them as if they were an actual news station that followed rational and moral guidelines, in a biting criticism of our popular press and a clever blurring of art and reality.” Unfortunately, the reality of how news is handled these days comes closer to what happens in the 1997 movie Wag the Dog, summarized in this way by a viewer: “After being caught in a scandalous situation days before the election, the president does not seem to have much of a chance of being re-elected. One of his advisers contacts a top Hollywood producer in order to manufacture a war in Albania that the president can heroically end, all through mass media.”   News as manufactured truth is not news. More importantly, it’s not truth. There have always been sophists. What we need now is a term for those willing to accept manufactured truth.    Image Source: “truth” by Jason Eppink on Flickr 10/4/05 via Creative Commons 2.0 license ... View more

I’ve been thinking about African American discourse and African American rhetoric (along with other indigenous rhetorics) since 1973, when members of CCCC were debating what would become the resolution known as "Students' Right to Their Own Language," eventually passed in 1974. That debate helped me think long and hard about the hegemonic status of "standard" English, about the home dialects and languages of my students, and about my own home dialect of the Appalachian mountain south, a language I grew up with, inhabited with ease, and loved, but which I seldom used as an adult in speaking, and never in writing.   At the time, I hoped that most other teachers of writing and reading would welcome this resolution, take its message to heart, and adjust their attitudes toward what counts as "proper" language use. Alas. Twenty-five years after the resolution, the debate still goes on, though "standard edited American English" has been challenged, seriously and serially, for decades now, from those who advocated during the Ebonics controversy to those who advocated for code switching and now to those who argue for code meshing and for "translingual" dispositions to language use.   As I travel around the country, visit schools, and go to conferences, I don’t see agreement across these lines of argument. Far from it. But I do see movement toward more progressive attitudes toward language variety and language use. And I also see very encouraging scholarly work addressing these issues, from Jerry Won Lee’s wonderfully insightful The Politics of Translingualism: After Englishes (Routledge, 2017) to Bonnie J. Williams-Farrier’s "'Talkin' Bout Good & Bad' Pedagogies: Code-Switching vs. Comparative Rhetorical Approaches" (a must-read essay in the December 2017 issue of College Composition and Communication), to the hot-off-the-presses On African-American Rhetoric by Keith Gilyard and Adam J. Banks (Routledge, 2018). I could name a number of others, but let’s stick with these three for a start: if you have not read them, you are in for a treat. I’ve learned so much from each of these texts, and as a result feel I can understand and embrace what Lee calls "translingual dispositions," and I am becoming more familiar with the moves and strategies of African-American rhetoric, thanks to Gilyard and Banks, as well as with the tropes, schemes, and syntactic moves of what Williams-Farrier calls African American Vernacular Tradition. I will write more, and more specifically, about what I’m learning soon, but in the meantime, if you’ve read any or all of these texts, I’d love to hear what you have learned!   Image Credit: Pixabay Image 2667529 by StarzySpringer, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

Today's guest blogger is Tiffany Mitchell, a Senior Lecturer of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Assessing multimodal compositions can often be challenging because the form and design vary so widely, whether because of the assignment parameters you establish or because of students’ stylistic choices. There are a few key categories by which most multimodal assignments can be assessed. Within each category, it can be helpful to work backwards by first considering what you envision students’ final projects should look like, then developing a rubric or list of expectations for the project. No matter your expectations, it’s important to remain flexible in assessing because creativity comes in many forms. Consider the following categories when developing assessment guidelines/rubrics for multimodal compositions:   Color choices When assessing the color composition of a multimodal assignment, it’s best to consider how appropriate the color choices are for the topic as well as the project design. I jokingly tell students that if their color choices make their viewers jump back from shock or squint from blinding colors, then they should consider alternatives. However, even this has exceptions. Flexibility is especially important in this category; the same color choices can succeed or fail depending on topic and design differences. For instance, neon colors work really well for psychedelic or hallucinogenic related topics, but would not work well for human rights related topics. Directing students to use Adobe’s Color Wheel can help them make wiser color selections.   To assess color choices, consider if the colors are complementary or contrasting to one another. How well do the colors align with the topic and overall design? Do the colors work well together to express and evoke effective intended meaning for the project?   Spatial design/White space Balanced spatial design can be crucial to the overall aesthetics of the multimodal project. Like résumés and other textual documents, multimodal creations need a good balance between text and whitespace--even if the background isn’t actually white. Showing students sample projects that have with good spatial design can help guide their whitespace considerations. As seen in the two sample assignments, balanced white space will vary from project to project, so stay flexible when assessing.   To assess spatial design, determine whether the project seems too crowded or if there’s a good balance throughout. Have they filled the available space with quality content or left gaps of blank space? Is there a good spatial balance between text and images/videos? Does the font properly fit the space?   Font options The efficacy of multimodal assignments can be strongly affected by the font types students use. Similar to the color choices, the font choices should align with the topic as well as the overall design of the project. Students don’t always realize that the font they use can evoke different meanings and that it’s important to select the appropriate font; therefore, it’s important to stress to them that font choice matters. Assigning the students to read Purdue OWL’s Using Fonts with Purpose pages can help.   To assess, consider whether the font matches the topic of the multimodal project. Does the font align with the selected color scheme? Does it match the overall design of the project? Does it help evoke the intended meanings?   Images/Video/Audio Use Images, video, and audio can be used in many different ways. These forms of media also come in all shapes, sizes, and types: artwork, memes, clipart, photographs, online and/or user-created audio or video, and even Creative Commons content. Assessing this category becomes more about what they used and where they used it in the text. It’s important to offer students specific directions on what types of media are allowed, how many of each may be used, and how they should cite these media sources. Whether or not the images fit with the content is also quite important, especially if the topic can be controversial, as seen in the magazine sample assignment. Again, remain flexible—possibly setting aside your personal perspectives if images fit the project.   To assess, determine if their projects used the images, video, and/or audio in the manners you stated they could. Then consider whether the media relates to and enhances the subject, color, and design.   Source Use and Citing Hyperlinking, citations on a separate page, scrolling citations on a video, full citations in small font, in-sentence references: citing can happen in many ways in multimodal projects, so we have to be open to them all. Because students often forget that multimodal projects need citations too, assessing this part of the project is often more about did they cite than how they cited. It’s helpful to show students many ways to cite in their projects and to remind them that multimodal compositions need citations too--even for images, video, and audio sources.   To assess, determine if citations are present within the multimodal project in a manner acceptable to you.   These categories of assessment work best with multimodal projects that students create on their own, such as magazines, brochures, slide shows, infographics, etc. While some of these categories could apply to multimodal projects created in social media platforms, categories such as font, color, and spatial design are not adjustable in most social media. This is not an exhaustive list of assessment categories for multimodal assignments, but hopefully, this will get you started. And above all, stay flexible when assessing. SAMPLE RUBRICS AND PROJECTS Magazine Sample (click to open) Brochure Sample (click to open) ... View more

One of my all-time favorite readings from past editions of Signs of Life in the USA is Andy Medhurst's "Batman, Deviance, and Camp." In that analysis of how the original muscle-man clone of Superman morphed into "Fred MacMurray from My Three Sons" in the wake of Fredric Wertham's notorious accusation in 1955 that Batman and Robin were like "a wish dream of two homosexuals living together," only to be transformed into the Camped Crusader of the 1966 TV series Batman, and then revised once more into the Dark Knight of the 1980s and beyond, Medhurst reveals how cartoon superheroes change with the times, reflecting and mediating the cross currents of cultural history. So as I ponder the rampant success of the second Deadpool film in this emergent franchise, I find myself wondering what this new entrant into the superhero sweepstakes may signify. Surely this is a topic for semiotic exploration.   What particularly strikes me here is the difference between the gloomy and humorless Batman of the Miller/Burton/Nolan (et al.) era, and the non-stop wisecracking of Deadpool. It isn't that Deadpool doesn't have a dark backstory of his own, as grim as anything to be found in Bruce Wayne's CV. And, surely, the Deadpool ecosystem is even more violent than the Batworld. No, it's a matter of tone, of attitude, rather than content.   Now, if Deadpool were the only currently popular superhero who cracked wise all the time, there really wouldn't be very much to go on here, semiotically speaking. But Deadpool isn't the only wise acre among the men in spandex: various Avengers (especially Thor), along with the latest incarnation of Spiderman, have also taken to joking around in the midst of the most murderous mayhem. If the Dark Knight soared to superstar status on the wings of melancholy, a lot of rising contenders for the super-crown appear to be taking their cue from Comedy Central. Something's going on here. The question is, what?   I'm thrown back on what might be called "deductive abduction" here: that is, moving from a general condition to a particular situation as the most likely explanation. The general condition lies in the way that wise-cracking humor has been used in numerous instances in which a movie whose traditional audience would be restricted to children and adolescents (think Shrek) has broken through to generational cross-over status by employing lots of self-reflexive, topically allusive, and winking dialogue to send a message to post-adolescent viewers that no one involved in the film is really taking all this fantasy stuff seriously, and so it's safe, even hip, for grown-up viewers to watch it (of course, this is also part of the formula behind the phenomenal success of The Simpsons). Stop for a moment to think about the profound silliness of the Avengers movies: who (over a certain age) could take this stuff seriously? Well, the wise cracks—which are generally aimed at those who happen to be over a certain age—are there to provide reassurance that it isn't supposed to be taken seriously. Just sit back, be cool, and enjoy.   So, given the R-rating of the Deadpool movies, I would deduce that the almost excessive (if not actually excessive) self-reflexive, topically allusive, and winking dialogue to be found in them works to reassure an over-seventeen audience that the whole thing is just a big joke. No one is taking any of this seriously, and so it is perfectly safe to be spotted at the local cineplex watching it. Hey, there's even a postmodern inflection to Deadpool's fourth-wall dissolving monologues: what could be more hip?   Since most cultural phenomena are quite over-determined in their significance, I do not mean to preclude any other possible interpretations of the super wiseass phenomenon, but the interpretation I've posted here is one I feel confident of. At any rate, the topic could make for a very lively class discussion and an interesting essay assignment. Image Credit: Pixabay Image 2688068 by pabloengels, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License.  ... View more

This time every year, I look forward to meeting students who have won awards for their work in first and second year Program in Writing and Rhetoric classes at Stanford, and this year brought a very special treat. On May 16, the eighth annual Lunsford Oral Presentation of Research Award ceremony was held in the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking, and the presentations I heard there literally took my breath away. Every term, instructors nominate their students’ best presentations, and two are chosen to receive an award during this spring ceremony. Of course, I’m very much interested and invested in these awards, and every year I look forward to meeting students and learning about the kind of research these sophomores are doing. I’ve always come away impressed with the quality of student work. But, as I noted, this year I was more than impressed, for two main reasons. First, the nature of the research undergraduates are undertaking seems to have deepened exponentially as they tackle more and more serious and complex issues. Second, the student award winners this year had done original, primary research.   Won Gi Jung, for example, in his “A Tale of Two Cities,” studied how the colonial contexts of Korea under Japanese rule had affected the Korean detective novel, and thus the culture. In addition to deploying post-colonial theory and close reading to outstanding effect, he had used quantitative mapping methods to track every site appearing in the novels of the 1930s, and compared his findings to a map of Seoul of the time. This analysis led to strikingly original discussion of the rhetorical situation of that particular time and place.   For a presentation on the Death Café Movement, Michelle Chang (pictured, left, with her instructor Selby Schwartz) carried out extensive field research, using ethnographic and autoethnographic techniques to show how this movement responds to the medicalized experience of death and dying, with its accompanying lack of agency, solitude, and artificial divisions. As a result of this research, Chang hosted a “mobile death café” across the U.S., bringing this resource to rural and more remote communities.   Still another student, Swetha Revanur, not only studied the sex trafficking taking place on sites such as Backpage.com, but she also used artificial intelligence to analyze data derived from the site to help understand geographic trends, to study the use of emojis that send special nonverbal messages, and to begin tracking telephone numbers associated with the site. And more: she also developed an “intelligent algorithm” that detects sex trafficking attempts with 80% accuracy. In her second year of college, thank you very much!   These writers/rhetors are using sophisticated research methods to explore difficult and important issues: research at a very high level indeed! I was truly thrilled to be a witness to their work.   Finally, the student presenters this year were the most polished I have seen in the eight years the award has been given: they knew their material cold and they were poised; easy on their feet; eloquent; accessible; and, to me and the audience assembled at the Hume Center, captivating. So bravo and brava to undergrad researchers and presenters everywhere. And double congratulations to their instructors!   Image Credit: Andrea Lunsford ... View more

As a general rule, anyone who did not vote for Donald Trump for president wants to know why anyone else did. Along those lines, I was thinking about the way I introduce motivation when discussing argumentation, in terms of needs and values. In Elements of Argument, we explain an argument’s appeal to needs by citing Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy, explained in his 1943 “Theory of Motivation.” The most basic needs that motivate a human being are physiological: the need for food, water, sex, etc. Next comes the need for safety—security of one’s person, the family, health, property. It is difficult to focus on any other needs if one is hungry or lives in fear. Later Maslow revised his theory to explain that people’s needs on one level do not have to be completely met before they can concern themselves with the higher levels. Still, it is, as Maslow theorized, a hierarchy of needs. Only when physiological and safety needs have largely been met can people worry about the need for love/belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. A surprising number of authors have applied Maslow’s Hierarchy to the 2016 presidential election. Jamie Beckland does so in this way: “The biggest lesson for any political candidate is that they must speak to the lowest common denominator need on Maslow’s hierarchy that a majority of the electorate will relate to. A political campaign that helps people believe that they can become self-actualized, and achieve their highest and best dreams, can only win if the majority of the electorate believes they are safe; that they belong; and that they have self-worth. On the other hand, if the majority of the electorate does not feel confident in having food, clothing, and shelter, then a campaign focused on self-actualization is doomed.” Beckland writes about how Clinton “spoke to building a sense of community – of being Stronger Together. This appeals to our need for ‘Love and Belonging,’ and many people voted for Clinton because she represented this need. The need for Love and Belonging manifests itself in ideas like: The need for safe spaces, where minorities and historically oppressed groups can express their perspectives without fear of persecution. The need for women to have a voice in the political establishment, and to believe that any qualified person would be judged on their qualifications for the presidency, and not by their gender. The need to see yourself as part of the great American experiment, where people of different creeds and colors assemble under a shared vision of freedom and opportunity.” Beckland argues that Clinton lost because Trump appealed to more basic needs, to which voters responded more strongly. The fact that the Trump campaign understood the lesson Maslow had to teach is evidenced by its emphasis on job security, affordable healthcare, and security from threats posed by illegal aliens. Phil Fragasso explains, “At its most basic level, Trump’s harsh rhetoric appeals to the bottommost layers of Maslow’s hierarchy - physiological and safety needs. He’s going to deliver more jobs at higher pay, make ‘winning’ so common it becomes boring, and ensure that Americans are protected against terrorists domestic and foreign, can shout ‘Merry Christmas’ from the highest rooftops, and stop Mexicans from taking the jobs that Americans don’t want.” Fragasso differs from some other analysts in arguing that the next two levels on the hierarchy “best explain Trump’s core character and his continuing support: esteem and love/belonging.” Fragasso’s own bias is clear as he goes on, “Most tellingly, Trump provided his loyal supporters with something they rarely experience: the very same esteem and love/belonging [that Trump himself experiences]. Trump voters tend to reside on the fringes where they are often afraid to voice their politically incorrect (and often abhorrently [sic]) beliefs and opinions.” For Trump, as for any president, success and continued support from those who voted for him depend on whether or not he is able to fill the needs to which he appealed when he won their votes. Image Source: “Louvre Pyramid - Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs” by pshegubj on Flickr 6/30/12 via Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 license. ... View more

In response to a posting I wrote a week or two ago, Steven Kapica shared an image on Twitter of one of his students’ writing spaces. I’m wondering if other readers have images of writing spaces, and if so, if they would share them with us.   I’m asking particularly because I’ve just read a very interesting and provocative article in the February issue of College Composition and Communication, Hannah Rule’s “Writing’s Rooms” (402-432). I was first attracted by the title, which gives writing the agency: writing’s rooms, thus suggesting—indeed arguing—that writing is embodied in spaces, that it shapes as well as is shaped by spaces, and that it is always, in her words, “emplaced.”   Rule’s essay reviews three studies that focus on writing’s rooms: one by Susan Wyche, who asks students to respond to detailed questions about where, how, and with whom they write and then interviews them about their thoughts on these questions. A second study by Paul Prior and Jody Shipka focuses on writing room practices, asking participants to draw pictures of these spaces which, in Rule’s view, “shows how non-alphabetic modes capture the constructedness and lived experiences of writing’s rooms.” In the third study, an ethnography of undergraduates, Brian McNely, Paul Gestwicki, Bridget Gelms, and Ann Burke use “visual ethnography methods”—photographs—to reveal more about writing’s rooms and writing practices. These photos show “the ‘extra stuff’ around and involved in the inventional, compositional action the researchers were studying, and their accrual “delivers a sense of these students’ ‘theatre of composition.” Finally, Rule reports on a study she and her graduate students did, in which the students first made two drawings of their writing processes and wrote about what was shown there. Then they video recorded several sessions of writing, which, along with the drawings, provided material for follow-up structured interviews. Rule’s descriptions of this study are vivid and fascinating, and they support her conclusion that such multimodal methods are “especially useful for writers in our classrooms”: To pursue writing’s rooms is to continually uncover the inhabited ‘theaters’ of composing processes: the emplaced embodied movements, the unintentional and accidental interactions that exceed awareness, the ineluctable and myriad ways that writing always (and all ways) takes place. (430)   I appreciate Rule’s careful review of previous research, her elegant account of her own study, and her call for composition researchers to continue a focus on the places, the spaces, the rooms (and automobiles, buses, benches, other nooks and crannies) where writing happens.   If you have other examples of student writing spaces/rooms, please share in the comments below or on social media!   Image Credit: Pixabay Image 828911 by Free-Photos, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

Quick quiz: In the biblical story, what was Jonah swallowed by? How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark? Did you answer “whale” to the first question and “two” to the second? Most people do … even though they’re well aware that it was Noah, not Moses who built the ark in the biblical story. So wrote Lisa Fazio, an assistant professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, in a recent article titled “Why You Stink at Fact-Checking.” Fazio’s article was published in the very cool and credible online magazine The Conversation and republished last month in The Washington Post. Fazio says that psychologists call the relevant phenomenon the Moses Illusion. But not long after I read her article, I heard a non-Moses-related variant on NPR. It went something like this: “A humorous story is a …”                                                                               “… joke.” “Where there’s fire, there’s often …”                                                                               “… smoke.” “Another word for ‘people’ is …”                                                                                       “… folk.”       “The white part of an egg is called the …”                                                                                       “[???].”   Right. The Conversation article, based on a sizable body of research that Fazio and colleagues have conducted, demonstrates how easy and normal it is for all of us to unwittingly absorb—and share—false information. What’s more, the “negative effects of reading false information occur even when the incorrect information directly contradicts people’s prior knowledge.” Participants in Fazio’s studies accepted false information even if they’d been “warned that some of the questions would have something wrong with them.” They did so when the factual errors turned up in questions related to their field of expertise. They did so even when the “critical information” was highlighted in red and they were told to pay particular attention to it! If you’re concerned about your students’ ability to separate information from disinformation when they’re writing papers, I highly recommend you assign them to read Fazio’s article.   Writers beware too The article got me thinking, indirectly, about “indirection.” Most good nonfiction writers I know consider indirection a fault, whether or not they know that name for it. (I’ve never heard another one.) I learned about indirection from the legendary Eleanor Gould of The New Yorker, but just now I was surprised to find that among half a dozen or so of my go-to writing and editing guides, only The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage discusses it:   indirection is what Harold Ross of The New Yorker called the quirk of sidling into facts as if the reader already knew them. An example is this sentence, in a profile of a college athlete: The 19-year-old also plays the piccolo. The reader pauses to wonder whether the 19-year-old is the athlete or someone else.   The most straightforward remedy is, of course, to get the athlete’s name in there. For example, “Wilson, 19 years old, also plays the piccolo.” Indirection tends not to raise the hackles of readers who haven’t been trained to look for it—possibly because it’s common and accepted in fiction. For instance, take this opening sentence of a short story that appeared in The Atlantic: “It was Saturday and the house was full of flies again.” I’ve remembered that sentence for decades (although unfortunately I can’t remember or find online the title of the story or the author). It hooked me exactly because it sidles into the situation in a way that made me want to know more. However, in nonfiction, avoiding indirection strikes me as important in two ways: (1) Good ol’ clarity. I often advise writers who are trying to make an argument that the goal is to lead readers along step by logical step to their document’s conclusion—which, by the time readers reach it, will preferably seem inevitable. Firmly connecting the content of one sentence to that of the next underpins this step-by-step technique. Not “Wilson is an exceptional athlete. The 19-year-old also plays the piccolo” but “Wilson, at 19 years old, is an exceptional athlete. She also plays the piccolo.” Doesn’t the latter version feel much more grounded and authoritative? (2) Fighting against the Moses Illusion. Note that both examples of the phenomenon I’ve given in this post present the false information indirectly. They don’t say, “Moses took two animals of each kind aboard the Ark. True or false?” and “The white part of an egg is called the yolk. True or false?” I’ll bet that most readers would catch the falsehoods here. Allowing ourselves indirection can also lure us into making mistakes we’re not even aware of. The Conversation article concludes: Detecting and correcting false information is difficult work and requires fighting against the ways our brains like to process information. Critical thinking alone won’t save us. Our psychological quirks put us at risk of falling for misinformation, disinformation and propaganda.   This applies to the psychology of writers as well as readers, I have no doubt. Caveat scriptor.  Image Credit: Pixabay Image 1351629 by quinntheislander, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

In my last post, I looked at the value of dedicating time for students to notice grammatical and lexical features in a text they are reading. Students can make their noticing tangible by annotating: circling, highlighting, and underlining. But what follows? A well-marked text signals visible noticing—but without activities to prompt students to hypothesize about the functions of the features they have annotated, the noticing may soon be forgotten.   Hypothesis formation and testing is at the heart of inductive grammatical exploration, but in my experience, formulating a “testable” hypothesis about the purpose or rhetorical force of a selected word or grammatical form can challenge students, especially those who are uncertain of their own intuitions in the reading process (or their own vocabulary for articulating intuitions). Students may offer vague responses at first: “Well, he did this to emphasize his point,” or “It sounds good.” When I probe further—how so?—the students often seem befuddled.    One tool for helping students verbalize and refine a hypothesis about grammar is to use the principle of contrast: contrasts in grammar or lexis illustrate the consequences of the choices we make. Putting contrasting variations of sentences side by side can help students discover those consequences and, in turn, find useful principles to apply in their own writing (given time, of course – I am not claiming that a few rounds of contrast-based activities will suddenly “fix” all issues of grammar and style!).   Here’s a simple example, taken from an essay by Steven Pinker that I use in introductory writing classes to illustrate elements of argument. In this first example, I might ask students to think about the purpose of the commas:   When comic books were accused of turning juveniles into delinquents in the 1950s, crime was falling to record lows, just as the denunciations of video games in the 1990s coincided with the great American crime decline.   The introductory comma (such as the one after “the 1950s”) is one my students very rarely use, so this example works well for them. To create a contrast, I simply remove the commas:   When comic books were accused of turning juveniles into delinquents in the 1950s crime was falling to record lows just as the denunciations of video games in the 1990s coincided with the great American crime decline.   What are the potential misreadings that might occur without the commas? A casual reader, for example, might see “1950s crime” as a single unit, not separating “crime” as the subject of the next clause. While advanced readers will correct the problem easily, that simple misreading could slow or stump readers the first time through. Similarly, without the second comma, readers might assume that the “just as” is a time clause describing when “crime was falling to record lows.” But “just as” actually introduces a comparison, and the comma helps the reader separate the clauses.    Granted, students might not frame these contrasts as I have. But they do (usually) see the difference in the two versions and understand the value of the comma in each case.    Consider the following example, from the same article:   Yet discoveries are multiplying like fruit flies, and progress is dizzying.   Here, I might want to illustrate verb tenses with my students. Having asked them to notice uses of the present continuous (or progressive) form of the verb, I might then have them consider what happens when we substitute the simple present (conversion to the simple present is also a good time to practice subject-verb agreement):   Yet discoveries multiply like fruit flies, and progress dizzies.   Once again, I might ask students a simple question: what differences do these changes in tense make? Do discoveries always multiply in this way? Are we always dizzied by scientific progress? Students usually see that the focus here is on the immediate present: this generalization applies NOW, in this moment. And that time reference is critical for Pinker’s argument that technology (rapidly changing now) is not an impediment to innovative or deep thought. Astute students will often ask at this point why we call the simple present “the present” if it doesn’t really refer to the present (or at least exclusively to the present time). This question can lead to some interesting discussions about grammar terminology (and whether or not knowledge of it is necessary for effective communication).   So in working with readings and grammar, I begin by having students notice and annotate what they see. From there, we can use contrasts to explore what I would call the “so what” related to the target grammar. When these activities work well—and I give them the time needed—students also build confidence in their abilities and the value of their linguistic intuitions. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post?  Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

This weekend, I have been exploring the capabilities of the online tool Lumen5, a web-based tool that you can use to convert any written text to a video. Lumen5 offers to “Transform articles into videos in minutes” on their company website. The end result, Lumen5 explains, is “Social videos made easy.” How Lumen5 Works To use Lumen5, you create a project and then begin producing your video. Lumen5 gives you three choices, shown in the screenshot below: As the image shows, the interface is clean and easy to understand. You add the required information by clicking on one of the three options: You can use an article or blog post by pasting in the link to the document. You can copy and paste text from any document you have access to. You can start with an empty video and add text and resources as you go along. For this post, I am going to focus on what happens when you choose the first or second option. Whether you have pasted in a link or the text for your video, Lumen5 next adds your content to a series of video panes, similar to slides in a slide deck. Each sentence in your content is displayed on a pane. If your sentence is long, it is divided into two panes. In addition to sorting the text onto the panes, Lumen5 pairs the content with an image (either in public domain or free to use) based on the keywords it finds in the text. For example, if the text talks about writing a paper, Lumen5 will add a photo that shows something related to writing. It might be a photo of a person writing, an image of hands on a keyboard, or a picture of a notebook and pen on a table. Once the first draft of your video is auto-generated, you can spend time editing the draft by changing the text on the panes and choosing a different image, video, or icon to represent the content. To change the text, you just click on the pane and type. For the images, you choose the media tab, and then you can either search the libraries available in Lumen5 for an image or you can upload media of your own. You can also choose from one of the free-to-use soundtracks or upload your own. Once you are happy with your video, you click the Render button and wait about ten minutes for the video to process. Once the video is ready, you download the MP4 file and upload it wherever you’d like to share it with your students. Lumen5 even provides a help page on downloading and sharing your video to a various social networks. A Sample Lumen5 Video I decided to experiment with a digital handout on my course website that explains the labor-based grading system to students (See Inoue, 2014), paired with a tip-filled infographic on how to do well in the course. The result of my project is the following video: Video Link : 2249 All in all, I’m quite happy with the results. I spent about three hours on the video, most of which was spent being overly picky about images and the background music. Constraints of Lumen5 There are some limitations in Lumen5. I used the free version of the tool, which allows you to create an unlimited number of videos in 480p video quality. The free videos do have a Lumen5 logo at the end. If you want to remove that logo or record in a higher resolution, you have to pay a hefty fee of $49/month. For the work that I would do, the free version will likely suffice. Lumen5 does not allow for voice-over, only the soundtracks as background music. Since the finished video is downloaded as an MP4 file, it is easy enough to open the downloaded file in another program, like Camtasia, if you want to add a voice-over. As there is no voice-over, you do not need to add a closed caption file. All of the text is already on the screen. Students with visual impairments do need a transcript of the text of the video however. The text in the video is not readable by a screen reader. I created a transcript for my video by copying the text out of Lumen5 and pasting it into a Word document. After applying formatting to make the file easy for a screen reader to navigate, I saved it as a PDF and uploaded it to my own website. Making the transcript took me less than ten minutes overall. There are some other minor limitations. You have little control over the color of the content on the screen, for example, and it’s difficult to deal with awkward line breaks. Given that the slick tool is free, however, I find these constraints quite bearable. Final Thoughts on Lumen5 If you are interested in adding some simple videos to your course, I encourage you to experiment with Lumen5. It was a simple enough tool that I would use it with students as well, if you are working on a video assignment. Go visit the Lumen5 website and give it a try; then, please come back and tell me what you think. I’m eager to hear your thoughts about this exciting tool! ... View more

So many of my students love being students. They enjoy reading and writing and researching. They are often good students and have been good students their whole lives. As a result, while graduation grows ever closer, those who are not pursuing graduate programs are concerned about their opportunities in the workplace. How do they find jobs that allow them to keep writing? How do they find jobs that allow them to be creative? How do they find jobs, period?   Here I outline my process for talking with students both in the classroom and in individual meetings. While I’m focusing on creative writing students, I have employed similar strategies with students across the disciplines, especially in the humanities. I recognize that the backgrounds of my students vary widely—from students who’ve never held a job to students transitioning from careers of twenty years or more—and I adjust my advising accordingly.   To first identify the fields they see themselves entering, I challenge my students to closely observe their own experiences the way they study texts in class. What recurring themes do they see in their interests, habits, and hobbies? Where are the turns, or moments of change and growth, in their personal narratives? What details or anecdotes exemplify their characters?   Often, students feel uncomfortable or flustered at the process of turning close observation onto themselves, so I draw from a variety of questions to guide our dialogue:             What is one of your favorite projects you’ve done?             What are your favorite classes? What do you like about them?             Where do you best complete your work?             What do you like to do outside of schoolwork?             What’s your favorite job you’ve ever had? Just as with our creative writing texts, I ask my students to notice what they notice. Through these questions, I hope students can identify for themselves the type of work they like to do, the spaces they work best in, and the meaningful experiences they’ve had.   Next, I show them how to research and compile lists of jobs that demand the work and skills they value. I direct them to the university’s career services website, and I encourage them to schedule appointments with counselors there. I also show them job ads and resources from LinkedIn, Poets & Writers, and AWP.  If my students have time before graduation, I suggest they take on an internship in a field of interest. Above all, I encourage students to conduct informational interviews; they need to call someone who has the job they’re interested in having and ask interview questions about that job.   Some of my students say they “just want to write” or they want to be novelists or poets. I encourage them in their pursuit of paths that allow them to write full time, but I am honest with them about the difficulties they may encounter. Their research assignment, then, becomes one of tracking the paths of their favorite writers and identifying the work those writers did that allowed them to write full time.   Once students find positions they’re interested in, the next step is articulating their skill sets and translating their skills into language that matches the job ads for those positions. For this translation process, I encourage more close reading and research. First, students have to break down the language of the ad and highlight key verbs and requirements. Then, they review the syllabi from their classes and examine the course goals and student learning outcomes, which often have clear verbs. I also encourage them to write out stories of their experiences and pay attention to the language they use when talking about themselves. Are the verbs in the ad the same or synonyms of words in the syllabi and personal stories? Are the experiences the job requires not exactly the same as what the students have, but similar?   Finally, I tell students to lean into their storytelling and argumentation skills. When putting together a resume and cover letter, and later preparing for interviews, I remind my students that they are experts in their own experiences. They need to familiarize their audience, potential employers, with those experiences in a compelling way. They can use story structures we employ in class—rising action, climax, falling action—to succinctly describe how they have successfully navigated workplace or workplace-adjacent situations.   By offering a structure for entering the job search process and reiterating the value of their skill sets, I’ve seen my students grow more confident and excited at the prospect of graduation. The strength of their searches rest on their abilities to re-see themselves in new, professional perspectives—a process that mirrors the way they return to their favorite texts and discover key elements they may have never noticed before. No matter what career path they pursue, I remind my students that if they desire to write they will find ways to do so, if not in the workplace itself, then certainly outside of it. ... View more

Jeanne Law Bohannon is a newly-minted Associate Professor of English in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Kennesaw State University. She believes in creating democratic learning spaces, where students become stakeholders in their own rhetorical growth though authentic engagement in class communities. Her research interests include evaluating digital literacies and critical engagement pedagogies; performing feminist rhetorical recoveries; and growing informed and empowered student scholars. Reach Jeanne at: jeanne_bohannon@kennesaw.edu and www.rhetoricmatters.org Metacognition, reflection, self-understanding, even self-monitored learning. As compositionists, we’ve all noted and looked up these terms as we participate in pedagogy workshops and professional development. In today’s post, I want to talk not about the “what” but about the “how”—not the term but the application—because I believe that reflection (my preferred term but maybe not yours) is a viable tool for every writer’s toolbox. As our students enter our classrooms as writers already and as they emerge from our courses having grown in those roles, we as instructors may want to focus our end-of-class activities on this application of metacognition.   I offer a self-reflection assignment this week as one means of attaining a sense of writerly self-awareness. This assignment also doubles as an assessment vehicle for our English Department’s writing-intensive (WI) courses at Kennesaw State. Although developed for a writing-intensive course, this self-reflection assignment can work across learning levels and environments. Today’s templates come courtesy of our Director of the B.A. degree, Dr. Chris Palmer, who coordinated our WI initiative this year and the Kennesaw State University English Department Writing Intensive Program.   In our writing intensive courses, students develop their skills in a diversity of ways, culminating in a research paper, where they use a memo template to reflect on their work, providing us with information on how we’re doing in teaching these elements: A 10-12 page research-based essay The final reflective piece (see Guidelines document: KSU 2018 Reflective memo assignment) At least one other reflective activity Frequent low-stakes writing throughout the semester An assignment that requires students to evaluate sources (Examples: an annotated bibliography, a review of a critical essay, a research proposal that involves evaluation of sources, etc.) Regular writing instruction that focuses on the writing process Sequenced assignments (proposals, discovery drafts, I-search essays, annotated bibliographies, or progress reports) that build towards the final essay At least two peer reviews Writing Center Outreach (either the general outreach visit or one of the specific workshops) Assignment Students are asked to write a memo to the English Department assessment committee, reflecting on what they have learned through writing their documented research essay, which is the culminating assignment for the course. We think about this assignment in terms of multimodality, because it asks students to re-mix their work in a different genre with a specific visuality. Format (also available as a Word Doc) for memos include the following three subheadings (sections):   1. Context and Goals Write a paragraph that provides context for your argument (thesis) and reflects on its effectiveness: What were your goals for the essay? To what extent did you accomplish them? 2. First Paragraph Containing Argument (Thesis) Copy, paste, and block indent the paragraph that first presents your argument (thesis). Underline the sentence(s) that state(s) your argument (thesis). Then restate the argument in one or two sentences. 3. Second Paragraph Illustrating Use of Sources a. Copy, paste, and block indent a paragraph that contains a strong supporting claim or topic sentence, and showcases your use of sources. b. Next, explain how the supporting claim or topic sentence develops your argument (thesis) and why it is a good representation of your ability to: Remember to use appropriate sources purposefully to support your argument (thesis) and  incorporate sources into your own text Length should be at least 500 and up to 750 words, not including the paragraphs you quote from your essay, single-spacing with double spacing between paragraphs, 12-point Times New Roman font. Hand in one hard copy for grading and submit one electronic document, without identifying marks, such as your name or your professor’s, for the purposes of anonymous program Background Reading for Students and Instructors The St. Martin’s Handbook: 4m, “Reflecting on Your Writing,” 12e “Reading and Interpreting Sources,” 12f “Synthesizing Sources” The Everyday Writer (also available with Exercises😞 11b “Reflect,” 14a “Understand the Purpose of Sources,” 14d “Read Critically and Interpret Sources,” 14e “Synthesize Sources” EasyWriter (also available with Exercises😞 5b, “Reflecting on Your Own Work,” 14b “Reading and Interpreting Sources,” 14c” Synthesizing Sources”   Assignment Learning Objectives Students will be able to remix their work into a different genre Students will be able to explain how supporting claims or topic sentences develop an argument Students will be able to evaluate their own effectiveness in source use for academic writing   Reflection and Templates for Your Use We believe that the reflective memo counts as multimodal communication, because it re-mixes the genre for students to assess their own work and adds a template-based visual component that requires students to synthesize assignment parameters and create their reflection based on them. We use a rubric (KSU 2018 Reflective Memo Rubric) to help us with a more consistent assessment of the writing intensive courses; you may have a more holistic approach, so feel free to download and edit ours. We would also like to hear your feedback on how this assignment, or a similar one, works for your students, as they emerge from our classes as writers with a more diverse multimodal toolbox. ... View more

Revised September 2016 Kennesaw State University Reflective Memo Assignment. See Multimodal Mondays: Inserting a Reflective Assignment into a Culminating Semester Assessment (with Templates!) by Jeanne Bohannon. Credit: KSU English Department Writing Intensive Program ... View more