How to Choose a Doctoral Program Over the next several weeks, students will be deciding what doctoral program to attend. This decision follows from months of researching potential programs, talking to faculty, and often visiting the campus. For students who hope to make community engagement a central part of their work, the decision takes on added complexity, as factors beyond curriculum and faculty must be considered. In this short essay, I want to highlight some of those factors.   Existing Partnerships When coursework is taken into account, most graduate students only have about two to three years to engage in a community partnership. Effective partnerships, however, take significant time to develop. For this reason, many students would benefit most from choosing a doctoral program where a project has existed for a significant period of time. Working within this project will allow the student to understand the complexity of such work, witness what collaboration entails, and begin to understand the range of work possible. In the process, they can also learn the skill sets that were used to initiate the project.   It might seem to be a more attractive option to attend a program where you will be “allowed to develop your own project.” Certainly, a lot can be learned from such work, particularly if you also learn how to build a program that will continue after your departure. The graduate program will also benefit from your labor. It is doubtful, however, that such a scenario actually prepares you with the skills/insights necessary to take on such work in your next institution. This can lead to early mistakes which can create long-term issues for junior scholars.   So, while I would never discourage someone from beginning a partnership as a graduate student, I would encourage students whenever possible to learn by attending programs with existing programs that can model the fullest articulation of such work.   Funding Strategies A central part of any community partnership will be resource development/allocation. Within a project, partners will often have to assess what internal resources are available, and what outside resources are required. One of the reasons to attend a program with existing partnerships is to take part in such conversations, to gain a sense of how such planning occurs. Within this context, students can also learn how to develop, apply for, and manage grants.   Learning how to write grants is often portrayed as a mercenary skill. In fact, grants written for community partnerships are a central way of thinking through issues of power, leadership, and collaboration. Grants directly confront who will control the requested funds, how decisions will be made, and how the funds will be distributed to ensure work is achieved by all those involved. To some extent, grants are the mechanism to establish the working patterns of partnerships. For that reason, graduate students interested in community partnerships must engage in such work. In addition to gaining experience in partnership development, the language of grants helps students clarify their own sense of the work. Grants are morally-based enterprises. In writing a grant, you are being asked to consider how your ethics intersect with another institution – often in language that is more direct then academic discourse. As such, they force the writer to make clear his or her beliefs and values. As students begins doctoral work, such clarity will allow them to build projects which they find personally and politically sustaining beyond the specifics of any degree program.   So, when choosing a graduate program, I would explore what opportunities are available for engaging in grant work, what faculty have expertise in such work, and whether other students in the program have gained such experience.   Interdisciplinary/Intercommunity Partnerships Community partnerships are necessarily interdisciplinary. It would be arrogant to assume that our discipline of composition and rhetoric provides all the tools to navigate the dynamics of a neighborhood or community project. For this reason, students should explore whether a doctoral program has aligned faculty from other departments. Students should also consider whether the doctoral program has non-university-based community scholars who can act as advisors as well. Finally, students should inquire whether there is room within the required curriculum to take courses outside of their “home department” and enroll in internships with community partners.   Here I should add that any successful project I have undertaken in the past twenty years has always been informed by Anthropology, Education, Women/Gender Studies, and Geography professors among others. I have worked with religious and labor leaders; block captains and community elders. Without this consistent dialogue among a broad range of faculty, the work would have been inadequately theorized and enacted. For graduate students intending on taking on community partnerships as a central part of their career, Gramsci’s insight that “everyone is an intellectual” needs to be experienced from the beginning of their education.   So, in considering the advisors/faculty within a doctoral program, students should make sure the list includes more than ‘names in our field,’ but also names other disciplines, communities, and individuals as necessary to gain the education required to engage in community partnership work.   One final note: Mentorship While not directly related to community engagement, I recommend asking current students within a doctoral program the following questions: How often do you meet with your advisor? How quickly is work returned to you? A doctoral program can have all the opportunities in the world to engage in community work, but it if fails to take care of the intellectual development of its own community members, then I would not attend.   (My answer to those questions: In-person meetings no more than 8 days apart; written work commented upon and returned within 10 days.) ... View more

For previous posts on teaching The Argonauts, click below: “I now understand her point better”: Reflections on Empty Narratives of Research  What Does Interpretation Look Like? A Play in Three Acts  As we’ve been making our way through The Argonauts, my students and I have encountered words drawn from writers of philosophy, psychoanalysis, queer theory, political history, poetry, manifestos and more. When the students look up the unfamiliar terms that populate Nelson’s text, the online dictionaries only offer them so much assistance in illuminating whatever passage they are struggling with. How, I ask them, can a definition drawn from a normative text like a dictionary be expected to make sense when it is plopped down into Nelson’s queer text? (The same question can be asked of any definition dropped into any text where the writer’s work is interpretive; in this instance, the normative responsibilities of the dictionary simply get thrown into high relief when the destination text is Nelson’s genre-bending memoir.) So, as a corrective, I sent the students off to explore the digital Oxford English Dictionary. I wanted them to watch the word they were researching enter the English language, to track its appearance backwards in time and then forward into the present. I wanted to highlight that the meaning of a word alters over time. And then, once the students had done that work, I wanted them to return to Nelson’s text and write up an account on how Nelson was using the word or phrase they chose to explore. To help the students along, I posted my own response to the assignment on our WordPress site. What I received in response has amazed me. This assignment paid dividends beyond my wildest imagination. I really recommend it! Here’s the example I posted: Before we met, I had spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein's idea that the inexpressible is contained--inexpressibly!--in the expressed. The OED defines the adjectival form of inexpressible to mean: "That cannot be expressed in words; unutterable, unspeakable, indescribable," which isn't terribly surprising. What's interesting is that they credit John Donne, metaphysical poet and Anglican priest, with first putting the word into print in a 1631 sermon delivered on Easter Sunday: "Thou shalt feele the joy of his third birth in thy soul, most inexpressible this day." How can Christ be born three times? First, in the miracle of Mary's virgin birth. Then, when he is resurrected after his crucifixion. And, a third time, when he is re-born in the soul of the Christian believer. When that happens, Donne preaches, the joy the believer feels will be "inexpressible." So, the original context for the term is religious. When the term surfaces in Nelson's prose nearly 400 years later, it is not in relation to a devotion to Christ, but in an idea of Wittgenstein's that Nelson "had spent a lifetime devoted to." The term, in other words, has traveled from the realm of the divine to the secular realm of philosophy. This observation remains true even after I discovered a yet earlier use of the term than the one recorded in the 2nd edition of the OED (published before the digitization of print made global searches of lexical history something anyone could do). It turns out that Donne used "inexpressible" in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, his extended meditation on the meaning of death and sinfulness, composed in 1623 and published in 1624, after he recovered from an unknown illness that almost cost him his life. The context this time is Donne's XIX Expostulation, where he maintains that God is a "direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldst be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all" and, at the same time, a "metaphorical God too," one whose use of metaphors, allegories, and hyperbole is without equal. Addressing his God, Donne rejoices: "O, what words but thine express the inexpressible texture and composition of thy word, in which, to one man, that argument that binds his faith to believe that to be the word of God, is the reverent simplicity of the word, and, to another, the majesty of the word." Here, Donne, Wittgenstein, and Nelson converge: Donne's first use of the term "inexpressible" occurs in a discussion of how God's language, as recorded in the Bible, works its transformative magic; Nelson is not devoted to that God, but to Wittgenstein's idea about language's power to express the inexpressible. Donne and Wittgenstein are struck by the same thing. The difference is that Donne credits the Christian God with the power to make the Bible work as it does while Wittgenstein locates that power in the structure of language itself. * Right next door to "inexpressible," one finds the plural: "inexpressibles," a euphemism for "unmentionables" that arose in the late 1800s. Edward Gibbon, author of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, used the euphemism in a letter to Lord Sheffield on November 11, 1793, in relation to his visit to a surgeon. "Have you never observed," Gibbons writes, "through my inexpressibles, a large prominency which, as it was not at all painful and very little troublesome, I had strangely neglected for many years?" Gibbons went on to report on the surgical efforts to drain the large prominency of the water that was collected in it. These drainings were carried out every fourteen days, because the prominency refilled with water. Gibbons never recovered and died on January 16, 1794. Here, the inexpressibles cover over the unmentionables, placing the discussion of sexual health out of bounds. So, inexpressible goes from the divine to the venal, flipping its meaning during its voyage from the sermon to the mundane. * In this way you can have your empty church with a dirt floor swept clean of dirt and your spectacular stained glass gleaming by the cathedral rafters, both. Because nothing you say can fuck up the space for God. What is this space for God? I think it is the inexpressible. No matter how you choose to use language--to celebrate simplicity or complexity--there's no way to exercise complete control over how words say and mean. Put the profane ("fuck up") right next to the sacred ("God") and the inexpressible space remains. ... View more

I have been talking with my students about the school shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School last month, and we have discussed and debated the rhetoric around the murder of 17 students and educators – how the media represented what occurred, especially the language used to describe the shooter and the students who survived. We could not ignore the vexing question of race. Black student protesters are cast as violent criminals – whether during the Youth March in Birmingham or lifting their voices against police violence in Black Lives Matter – while the white students have been called “actors” (by the most cynical), “victims” and even “heroes.”   In both cases, we have witnessed youth practicing democracy. The composition classroom can and should be a space where we equip students to have a voice, identify the sources of social problems as critical readers and writers, and enter into conversations. Although I think this assumption has motivated many teachers of writing for decades, others lament a civic education gap. Dahlia Lithwick’s point in a recent Slate Magazine article is that schools no longer focus on the arts, civics, and enrichment that once ensured education was rooted in the day-to-day lives of students and their families. However, she also calls attention to the kind of privilege the students at Stoneman Douglas High have experienced. They have access to a system-wide debate program, a forensics program, and an exceptional drama program. Educators there are committed to supporting speech and journalism programs as the means through which to promote student activism. She observes, “These kids aren’t prodigiously gifted. They’ve just had the gift of the kind of education we no longer value.”   The classroom should be a place where students can practice democracy. But it is not enough to argue that democratic values are as important as traditional academic priorities. We must also ask, what kind of democratic values? What political and ideological interests are embedded in or attached to varied conceptions of citizenship? Unfortunately, education reform and economic development have ignored these questions and the very skills and perspectives necessary for building a socially just world in which we want to live.   When my students and I talk about education in general and literacy specifically, it is with the understanding that learning and development cannot be considered apart from social environment. But how should we talk about literacy? Winn and Behizadeh, among others, are right to argue students need to have access to literacies – students’ own creative and cultural literate practices, academic literacy, and critical reading and writing skills. These are tools students need to navigate and transform the world around them, evidenced in the Stoneman Douglas students’ who are speaking out and helping to propel a movement. They have learned the language of power.   However, it is one thing for my students and me to discuss who has access to literacies that promote a questioning, critical frame of mind. It is another to step beyond classroom boundaries into the lives of others where my students can experience worlds quite different from their own – to see firsthand who has access to resources young people need to thrive and who does not.   Using Neuman and Celano’s study of four neighborhoods in Philadelphia as a model, we set out to map the key places and resources in the neighborhoods surrounding our campus. (April Lidinsky and I include an excerpt of their research article in the 4 th edition of From Inquiry to Academic Writing.) Neuman and Celano are particularly interested in the resources and potential disparities in print environments – the likelihood children will find access to books and other resources.   As my students and I begin to map the neighborhood surrounding our campus (an example of which is pictured above), we start to make a list of places where literacy occurs. This list, as it turns out, is limited to the coffee shop where we observe people having conversations and reading material on their computer screens. When we go into a 24-hour convenience store, we spot just a few magazines and the local newspaper, but cannot locate any books for adults or children. Next, we pass a bank where we see several people making transactions, and four slow fast food restaurants where customers look at their phones. No bus stop that might take people to their jobs. No full service grocery store. What do these limited resources tell us about what matters and for whom? It matters a great deal if you are a child who attends a public school just a ¼ mile away that will close at the end of the current school year. The loss of a school exacerbates the persistent inequality that affects mostly children and families of color who look to that school as a source of stability and social capital.   Walking gives us an opportunity to look critically at our environment, to question the decisions that determine who lives in the neighborhoods we observed, and to write about what makes a flourishing community. I want my students to reflect on what makes a neighborhood thrive, develop a critical habit of mind, and use their skills as speakers and writers to move people to action. I want them to see that all children, that everyone, should have the gift of an education that values their voice and equips them to practice democracy. And it can begin in the writing and rhetoric classroom when we honor our own students’ voices and cultivate the kind of citizenship exemplified by the Stoneman Douglas High students. Student Literacy Map Courtesy of Sheila Roohan ... View more

The classroom can and should be a place where students learn to engage critically, and develop the skills necessary to enter nationwide debates as active, democratic citizens. In order to do so, they must understand the rhetoric used by the media, by the government, and by proponents on either side of an argument. The warrants, assumptions, and terminology used in public debate – especially regarding hotly contested issues – often go under-examined.   Case in point, the choice of terminology used in discussing the role of guns in American society reflects the most essential differences between those on different sides of the debate about Americans’ right to own guns. In the aftermath of the most recent school shooting, proponents of restrictions on gun ownership have increasingly used the term “gun safety” rather than the term “gun control” to draw attention to their primary concern. Weighing in on that side of the debate is the emotional appeal provided by Parkland students—and thousands of their counterparts elsewhere—giving a public face to the victims and potential victims of gun violence and voicing their plea for new legislation to prevent similar massacres in the future. Even though it is difficult to argue against gun safety, so far legislators have not been swayed by the terminology or the tactics. Is it simply party loyalty that drives a legislator to vote against restrictions on assault rifles? Is it campaign contributions from the NRA that prevent legislators from voting to increase the age at which an individual can buy guns? Why have some businesses proved more willing to restrict gun sales than our government? If the most basic fear of gun control advocates is that more children and young people will die without more restrictions on guns, the most basic fear of gun control opponents is giving any modicum of control up to the government. Their simplest defense is that the Second Amendment gives Americans the right to bear arms. There is no room in their philosophy for the historical context of that amendment or the consideration of changes in guns that have come about since it became law. Does the right to bear arms mean the same thing in an age of automatic guns and armor-piercing bullets? Does the Second Amendment mean that there can be no restrictions on the type of arms any citizen can bear? What can be more important than keeping schoolchildren safe? The answer has to be keeping American citizens safe from the government. Not just from government restrictions, but from total control by an armed government of an unarmed citizenry. It is the ultimate result of the slippery slope that begins with giving an inch. It is the ultimate extension of the argument by gun owners that they have the right to protect their families. After all, what was “a well regulated Militia” designed to protect our young nation from? What were the Founding Fathers afraid of when they devised this means of protecting “the security of a free State”? The citizenry must be able to protect themselves against enemies from without or enemies from within. Since we have our armed forces to do the first, the only justification for a well-regulated militia is to protect from the latter. This sort of analysis of the warrants or assumptions underlying arguments for and against restrictions on gun ownership can help to clarify, if not resolve, the stalemate regarding any changes in existing laws. Encouraging students to participate in such an analysis not only hones their understanding of argument, but also invites active citizenship. Image Source: "AK-47 Assault Rifle // Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947" by Brian.ch on Flickr 01/19/10 via Creative Commons 2.0 license ... View more

Recently, I had a chance to spend a day with teachers of writing at the University of Texas at Arlington (thank you Justin Lerberg!). I came away impressed with how carefully they have designed their writing assignment sequences for their first and second writing courses and how seriously they were about continuing to analyze and interrogate their assignments and other parts of their curriculum. If the unexamined life is not worth living, it’s my strong opinion that the unexamined curriculum/assignment sequence is not worth teaching.   The first assignment in the first course sequence calls for a discourse community analysis, and they have developed a detailed (four and a half pages!) assignment sheet that guides students through thinking about invention, arrangement, style, and some logistical considerations. They begin by defining discourse community as “a group of people who share common interest, goals, values, assumptions, knowledge of a topic, and . . . discursive patterns, i.e. specialized vocabulary, speech genres, and ways of communicating.” They follow with examples of discourse communities, from fans of a particular sports team to military vets, avid gamers, followers of a TV show or film series, etc.   The major purpose of this assignment, they say is “to demystify the process of entering an academic discourse community . . . and to reflect on and analyze the discursive skills you mastered as an insider in a discourse community.” As they pursue this assignment, of course, first-year college students are also entering, whether they are aware of it or not, the academic discourse community of their particular university. A lot has been written about this process (think of David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University” or, even earlier, Tom Huckin, Carol Berkenkotter, and John Ackerman’s “Conventions, Conversation, and the Writer” – and later articles that asked whether entering the discourse communities these articles describe was a form of manipulation rather than liberation), which I won’t rehearse here and which the UTA students don’t necessarily need to know about. But putting this assignment in the context of this strand of scholarly investigation would be helpful for those teaching it. Indeed, ongoing examination of and work on assignments demands this kind of rhetorical contextualizing—it keeps us honest!   I also wonder if an assignment like this one can go at least a good way toward helping students not only identify their major discourse communities and describe how they became “insiders” in the communities, but also to examine the assumptions and values (most often unstated) of the communities. Where are they coming from, literally and figuratively? What kinds of people do they include—and exclude—and why? What other groups’ values are furthered by this community and how clearly are they articulated? Adding this layer of analysis would, I think, further enable the critical thinking this assignment asks for.   Finally, I wonder if in preparation for this assignment, it might be profitable to lead the class in trying to analyze a discourse community they don’t belong to—so that they may be more open and able to examine it with a tough critical eye. If so, that experience might help them bring the same critical skills to how they became members of their own discourse communities.   Thanks again to colleagues at UTA for such an invigorating visit and thought-provoking discussion of assignments!   Credit: Pixabay Image 593344 by StartupStockPhotos, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

My fiction students came to a unanimous conclusion this semester: writing scenes without abstract language is hard. How are we supposed to make sure the reader understands what the characters are thinking and feeling without explaining everything?   “Trust yourself,” I told them. “Trust yourself to show your characters embodying those emotions. Then trust your reader to know those actions and to know how to interpret those actions.”   I acknowledged with my students there are some instances in writing where abstract language is necessary. However, my students often over-explain the feelings and emotions that their characters are experiencing; or alternatively, my students use an emotion to describe a character’s state of being, but it is unclear how the character acts upon that feeling.   I’ve challenged my students this semester to “show a lot, tell a little, and never explain,” a course concept borrowed from nonfiction writer Phillip Lopate. By this, I ask students to write in action, with clear details and careful observations, as much as possible and to insert external information and backstory only when necessary. If students show and tell well, then they’ll never need to explain how a character is feeling or why a character takes the actions she does. Both will be obvious from the scene.   To help my students practice writing without abstract language, I developed an in-class exercise that asks them to pair emotions with clear, concrete actions. I made a deck of cards with common phrases centered around an emotion that I frequently see in student writing: she felt anxious, he was confused, they were in love, and so on.   We first did an example together as a class with the phrase they were uncomfortable. At the board, my students and I sketched out a scene of a Thanksgiving dinner and a small cast of characters—parents and two children. We decided on a reason for discomfort in the room: both children have announced they wouldn’t be coming home for Christmas.   Then, I asked my students to take on the roles of the characters and act out what their discomfort might look like. Several slouched in their chairs, some played with imaginary forks, or poured themselves an imaginary glass of wine. We discussed how each action reflected discomfort of the characters without ever using the phrase they were uncomfortable.   One student, a mother herself, even took on the role of the mother at the table, choosing to drop her shoulders, roll her eyes to the ceiling, and frown at her shoes. After laughing at her dramatic performance, we all agreed. She was disappointed.   Then it was time for the students to try on their own. I dealt each student a card with a different phrase, and I asked them to put the emotion into a paragraph or two of action and dialogue on the backside of their card. Once the students had completed their writing, I collected the cards and read the action pieces out loud.   Students then shared the emotions they heard in the pieces I read. Some were exactly right in identifying the phrase, such as he was self-conscious. Other peers saw anxiety, worry, and nervousness—all appropriate interpretations of the moment. Together, we discussed the possibility of readers interpreting actions slightly differently and how the creation of a full scene could provide enough context so that readers would understand what was happening. At the conclusion of the exercise, my students expressed their desire to incorporate movement as part of their writing to get the actions of their characters just right.   I was impressed that in such a short time so many of my students successfully captured different emotions and ideas in action without any explanation. When their peers correctly identified the corresponding ideas, they saw concrete ways of showing and telling without explaining, and the power of trusting their readers. ... View more

Shawanda Stewart is an Assistant Professor of English at Huston-Tillotson University and Rhetoric and Professional Communication PhD candidate at New Mexico State University. Her primary research interests include first year composition pedagogy, developmental reading and writing, composition assessment, and language and culture. Shawanda has a genuine interest in research and scholarship that examines and promotes voice and identity authenticity through language in the college composition classroom.  In the same way that the Black Lives Matter movement was not about excluding others’ bodies, but rather, was created in response to the treatment—namely murder—of black bodies, this post is not about the exclusion of non-black lives; rather it is in response to the treatment of black language in the college classroom. It is about stating outright and plainly that the language, language identity, and voices of black students matter, which also extends to language, language identity, and voices of other marginalized populations. In the case of first-year composition, there is a move toward demarginalizing students by recognizing language varieties in our classrooms; accordingly, I propose that doing so requires combatting monolingual ideologies; embracing code-meshing and translanguaging; offering teaching and learning alternatives to practices that support the privileging of Standard English to other English varieties; and providing learning opportunities that connect students to their personal communities and cultures. In Geographies of Writing, Nedra Reynolds (2004) explains the relationship between sociogeographies and identity: “Geographical locations influence our habits, speech pattern style, and values—all of which make it a rhetorical concept or important to rhetoric. For writers, location is an act of inhabiting one’s words; location is a struggle as well as a place, an act of coming into being and taking responsibility” (11). When teaching first-year composition (or any course for that manner), I must question the ways in which I might practice racism in my own classroom, and how I can—even if most of my students look like me-—contribute to the problem. Whether I contribute via my personal actions, my silence, my ignorance, or simply because I am adhering to the system, unless I am aware of the possibilities of me practicing racist writing instruction practices, I cannot work toward creating a classroom that promotes antiracist writing instruction. I want to further expose students to the usefulness of critical consciousness in rhetoric and writing (namely in their own writing) and encourage them to recognize that their words are powerful because of their past and present sociogeographical positions. Their experiences are unique, and this is power. In On Intellectual Activism, Patricia Hill Collins writes that “developing a critical consciousness can position individuals and groups to challenge social injustices. Learning to think for oneself often leads to action” (131). The question at hand is what exactly is our purpose for teaching writing to students? If writing is an act of expression whereby we ask students to think creatively, critically, and rhetorically, what message then are we sending students when we tell them that “good” writing is SWE? Even when we don’t use these words exactly. When we approach standard written English as a writing convention rather than the writing standard in our pedagogy, then we can begin considering seriously the ways by which we can teach students to become better critical thinkers and stronger writers without doing so by taking away their identity. References Hill Collins, P. (2013). On intellectual activism. Philadelphia. PA: Temple University Press. Reynolds, N. (2004). Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ... View more

Your students should use Merriam-Webster.com, for sure. It’s the best dictionary for everyday purposes, and I’ll explain why after I give you a bit of background and do some complaining. Once upon a time, I might have recommended the New Oxford New American Dictionary. But the print edition hasn’t been updated since 2010, and its free online sibling is a bit of a project to find. Click here, and where you see “Dictionary” in white-on-black letters, scroll down to “Dictionary (US).” I definitely would have recommended the American Heritage Dictionary. It’s still good. But once upon a time, it had ample resources and wasn’t shy about offering informed, expert advice. I was thrilled when, years ago, the AHD invited me to become a member of its “usage panel.” But last month, after half a century’s existence, the usage panel was disbanded. And as of this spring, the AHD’s editorial staff will consist of one part-time lexicographer. The AHD ain’t what it used to be. The American Heritage Dictionary was launched in 1969, with the goal of restoring lexicographical standards that many felt had been recklessly abandoned when Merriam-Webster published Webster’s Third Unabridged, in 1961. Web3 did away with usage labels like “colloquial,” “incorrect,” and “humorous.” It lopped 250,000 entries out of its predecessor to make room for 100,000 new words (“unabridged,” eh?). And it was “descriptive,” promising only to inform people about how words are used. If folks said “irregardless,” then “irregardless” was a word worthy of inclusion. (Okay, Web3 does label it “nonstand.”) Its predecessor, Webster’s Second, published in 1934, is widely acknowledged to have been magisterial in its day. It was proudly “prescriptive,” advising people how to use words. According to W2, “irregardless” is “Erron. or Humorous, U. S.” The outrage that, in some quarters, arose when Web2 abdicated in favor of Web3 led to the creation of the AHD. It assembled an impressive hundred-member usage panel (Isaac Asimov! Alistair Cooke! Langston Hughes! Barbara Tuchman!). Their collated opinions about the likes of between you and I were presented as notes beneath the relevant headwords (99 percent of the panel disapproved of between you and I—and I sure wish I knew who the rebel was). As for “irregardless,” it doesn’t look as if the first edition’s lexicographers even bothered to ask for the panel’s opinions. The note beneath the word reads, “Usage: Irregardless, a double negative, is never acceptable except when the intent is clearly humorous.” But the AHD, along with the other major dictionaries, has by now slid some distance down the slippery slope whose bottom Web3 was so eager to reach. Heck, even the incomparable but special-purpose OED now tells you that “literally” can mean “figuratively.” To be sure, descriptivism has qualities that many find appealing. It presents itself as egalitarian, answering “Why should we privilege the locutions of dead white men?” with “We shouldn’t, and we don’t. We tell you how a range of past and present English speakers use words and encourage you to make choices for yourself.” I mistrust that claim, because no doubt all sorts of biases lurk in the underlying data. What’s more, if dictionaries really wanted to help writers and speakers of various English dialects use them more effectively, shouldn’t there be specific dictionaries for many more subsets of English than there are? All the dictionaries I’m discussing purport to cover all dialects. Second, descriptivism is a definable goal that for-profit companies, which publish most dictionaries, can comfortably aim for. Data about word usage is in limitless supply, and it’s cheap and superficially unambiguous, while discernment about usage can be hard to find, costly to engage, and easy to doubt and argue with. Finally, descriptivism feels scientific, like linguistics. And up to a point, it is scientific. Today’s lexicographers have at their command astonishing “corpora”—huge electronic compiled bodies of language, drawn from a wide range of spoken and printed sources—to tease out new information about how the language is used. Big data! Would you, however, consider it a good idea to fold your school’s English composition program into its linguistics department? The two have different purposes and use different methods. The purpose of dictionaries was, until the 1960s, neatly aligned with the purposes of English composition courses: to teach people how to use our common language correctly, clearly, and effectively. Web3 and its successors, including M-W.com, have washed their hands of that responsibility. I’ve even heard lexicographers make fun of the idea that that’s their job. Meanwhile, the rest of us turn to dictionaries in hopes they’ll teach us to use language better. Sorry, that’s not what they do anymore. So why is M-W.com the best dictionary for everyday purposes? Because it’s free, readily available, and easy to use. It has usage notes that give sound guidance. It’s online (as the others are too), so you always see the latest versions of entries. Merriam-Webster itself admits that its .com dictionary is more up to date than the latest edition of its Collegiate. And the Collegiate—and therefore, I have to assume, M-W.com—is in wide use. Stylebooks including The Chicago Manual, and periodicals ranging from The New Yorker to MIT Technology Review, have it as their house dictionary. In descriptivism—as in other things I like better, such as evolution—success breeds success. If the nation’s most widely used dictionary says that the verb “face-palm” is written with a hyphen and “humblebrag” is not, that in itself is bound to skew the words’ spelling toward those choices—until the people who mostly use them decide dictionaries are irrelevant. I’ll write some other time about how to go around dictionaries direct to the sources and be your own lexicographer. Credit: Pixabay Image 1798 by PublicDomainPictures, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

When students are asked to work in groups, they may not know what good teamwork looks like. Like anything in the writing classroom, models can help them understand how to collaborate effectively. The challenge is modeling the process for them. I can demo any number of writing strategies as well as provide step-by-step instructions on technology questions. Modeling group work, however, is not a one-person job. Pop culture to the rescue! The infographic to the right analyzes the teamwork strategies of six pop culture teams. It describes the team, identifies the team members, outlines their strategies, and suggests some debriefing notes. It is long and detailed, so you need to click the image to read the full-sized image or view the original on the Inloox site. As students begin working together in their writing groups, I share the infographic above and ask them to compare their own teams to those in the infographic. I invite them to respond to these discussion questions: How accurate are the characterizations of the teams in the infographic? Would you change them? Does your team match any of those in the infographic? How well does the infographic team compare to your team? Tell us how. How do the characteristics of teams in the infographic relate to those in the readings for this week? After discussing the infographic, I ask students to brainstorm a class list of other pop culture groups that they are familiar with. If they have trouble getting started, I offer some examples of television shows that feature a team of characters that works together to meet a goal, like NCIS, S.W.A.T, or SEAL Team. If students need additional inspiration, I throw out some categories like teams in anime, teams in movies, and teams in literature. With a list compiled, the class can talk about how the various teams compare to those in the infographic and hypothesize why some groups are more successful than others. The ultimate goal is to find teamwork strategies that students can use as they work together, so I close the discussion by asking students to create a list of techniques to use in their own groups. As an extension activity, students can apply their list of strategies by working in groups to choose a team from the class list and collaboratively design an image that presents the team, modeled on the infographic. Do you have an activity to improve student group work? Please share your ideas in a comment below. I’d love to try your strategies in the classroom.   Infographic from InLoox ... View more

I had not planned on writing on this topic as my Bits Blog posting deadline approached. But when a headline in the L.A. Times on February 21st blared that "Conspiracy theories about Florida school shooting survivors have gone mainstream"—and this on a day when America's school children rose up to say "enough is enough" about gun violence—I felt that I ought to say something. What to say, however, is difficult to decide. As I wrote after the Route 91 Harvest music festival massacre in Las Vegas, I am not confident (to put it mildly) that anything meaningful is going to be done—the L.A. Times has a nailed it with a "Handy clip-and-save editorial for America's next gun massacre" and I don't have any solutions that the students now marching for their lives aren't already proposing more effectively than I can. But the whole mess has—thanks to something I've read in the Washington Post—enabled me to crystallize a solution to a critical thinking conundrum that I've been pondering, and that's what this blog will be about.   That conundrum is how to teach our students how to distinguish between reliable and unreliable information on the Internet. It seems like such an easy thing to do: just stick to the facts and you'll be fine. But when the purveyors of conspiracy theories have grown as sophisticated as they have in mimicking the compilation of "factual" evidence and then posting it all over the Internet in such a way as to confuse people into thinking that there is a sufficiency of cross-referenced sources to make their fairy tales believable, it becomes more of a challenge to teach students what's rot and what's not. And as I've also written in this blog, that challenge isn't made any easier by academic attacks on objective factuality on behalf of poststructural theories of the linguistic and/or social construction of reality. So, as I say, the matter isn't as simple as it looks.   Here's where that Washington Post article comes in. For in Paul Waldman's opinion piece, "Why the Parkland students have made pro-gun conservatives so mad," he identifies what can be used as a simple litmus test for cutting through the clutter in an alt-fact world: keep an eye out for ad hominem arguments in political argumentation.   Here's how he puts it: The American right is officially terrified of the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Those students, who rapidly turned themselves into activists and organizers after 17 of their fellow students and teachers were murdered at their school, have become the most visible face of this new phase of  the gun debate, and conservatives are absolutely livid about it. As a consequence, they’re desperately arguing not just that the students are wrong in their suggestions for how gun policy should be changed, but also that they shouldn’t be speaking at all and ought to be ignored. There are two critical reasons the right is having this reaction, one more obvious than the other. The plainer reason is that as people who were personally touched by gun violence and as young people — old enough to be informed and articulate but still children — the students make extremely sympathetic advocates, garnering attention and a respectful hearing for their views. The less obvious reason is that because of that status, the students take away the most critical tool conservatives use to win political arguments: the personal vilification of those who disagree with them. It is the use of "personal vilification of those who disagree" that reliably marks out an evidence-starved argument. Thus, when Richard Muller—once a favorite of the climate change denial crowd—reviewed his data and announced in 2012 that he had changed his mind and concluded that climate change is both real and anthropogenic, his erstwhile cheerleaders simply began to call him names. And you probably don't even want to know about the personal attacks they have been making on Michael Mann. But given the high level of personal vilification that takes place on the Net (the political left can be found doing this too), our students have probably been somewhat desensitized to it, and may even take it for granted that this is the way that legitimate argumentation takes place. This is why it is especially important that we teach them about the ad hominem fallacy, not simply as a part of a list of logical and rhetorical fallacies to memorize but as a stand-alone topic addressing what is probably the most common rhetorical fallacy to be found on the Internet, and political life more generally these days. Now, we can't stop simply with warning our students against ad hominem arguments (we should teach them not to make them either), but we can establish the point as a kind of point of departure: if someone's claims are swathed in personal attacks and accusations, it is likely that there is nothing of substance behind the argument. After all, an ad hominem attack is a kind of changing of the subject, a distraction from the attacker's lack of any relevant evidence. I know this won't change the world, and it is of no use against the sort of people who are now vilifying American school children who have had enough, but at least it's a place to begin for writing and critical thinking instruction. ... View more

I’ve written several posts in the last year about the sad state of our national discourse and about the “echo chamber” that arises when people talk only with those they agree with. In my seven decades, I have not seen such a deep divide, or such hostility of one “side” to the other. These issues are of great concern to teachers of writing, who want student writers to be able to communicate across differences and to reach audiences of all different kinds. So, I have been collecting articles and materials that provide examples of how to communicate more effectively with those you don’t necessarily agree with, along with strategies for helping students develop their own abilities to listen fairly and openly and to engage in productive conversations rather than shouting matches.   A recent article by Arthur C Brooks in the New York Times provided me with another good example to add to my collection. In it, Brooks describes a pro-Trump rally in Washington DC that drew a group of counterprotesters from Black Lives Matter of Greater New York. The scene, Brooks says, was becoming “combustible” as the groups shouted back and forth and began moving toward one another.   But then—something completely unexpected happened. The leader of the pro-Trump group invited the leader of the Black Lives Matter group to speak: “We’re going to give you two minutes of our platform to put your message out,” the pro-Trump leader said. “Whether they disagree or agree with your message is irrelevant. It’s the fact that you have the right to have the message.” The Black Lives Matter leader accepted the invitation and took the stage, saying “I am an American . . . and the beauty of America is that when you see something broke in your country, you can mobilize to fix it.” When someone in the crowd shouted “All lives matter,” he responded with “You’re right, my brother, you’re right. All lives matter, right? But when a black life is lost, we get no justice. That is why we say that black lives matter. If we really want to make America great, we do it together.”   This person-to-person exchange dissipated hostilities and even drew cheers from the other group. Brooks concludes that what he calls “the toxic anonymity of virtual interaction through social media” leads to those echo chambers in which we assume we are good and they are bad, leading to further hatred. But, Brooks says, “on the odd occasion that people are exposed to each other as people, as at the rally in Washington, othering is hard to maintain. And that is the rare moment when human compassion and empathy can break out.”   As teachers of writing, we have an opportunity to help compassion and empathy “break out.” Our fairly small classes allow students to know one another “as people,” and to find ways to connect with them across many kinds of differences. We can also engage students in assignments that allow them to interact with others in empathetic and compassionate ways, using the techniques of invitational rhetoric (which I discuss in all my textbooks).   That rally in Washington shows that it can be done, that opposing sides can listen to one another, and perhaps find common ground. To see for yourself, check out the video of that rally and what happened. And show it to your students! Credit: Pixabay Image 1985863 by rawpixel, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

This week I want to share an additional resource that I’ve written to help students understand how my labor-based grading system works. First, though, I want to review the materials that students already had available. I explain the grading system on the course website, on the Requirements page (from the current semester). To help students understand how they are doing in the course, I have a page that outlines How Grades Are Recorded in the course grade book. I also share two infographics to further the explanation. One describes what happens When Your Grades Are Based on Labor. Another provides a flowchart that shows How Project Feedback Works in a course with unlimited revision. Even with these resources, students have told me in comments on course evaluation forms that the grading system I use can be confusing. To address the ongoing questions, I created the following FAQs that answer the questions directly: Grading System FAQ Why do you use a labor-based system? I believe that a system that allows you to keep working until you get the results that fit the workplace is more humane than a system that punishes you if you aren’t perfect on the first try. I know there are lots of situations in the workplace that require perfection. If you submit a bid to a client that has errors, for instance, you may not get a second chance—but that’s in the workplace. You are still in the classroom. The labor-based system allows you the chance to learn and improve. You can make mistakes and try again. You can take risks, and if they don’t turn out, your grade will still be okay. How does this system relate to the workplace? I have worked in quite a few places, and in none of them did I ever receive a letter grade for the work that I did. Never ever. It just doesn’t work that way. Sure, my writing was read by others I worked with. Sometimes it was good enough to go out to the intended reader right away. Other times it had to be revised first. Grades just weren’t part of the system. In the workplace, you are assessed on how hard you work and what you accomplish. Managers expect you to show up, put in your best effort, and accomplish the goals that your company sets. If you do nothing or the bare minimum, you will be reprimanded or fired. Grades in this course are based on a similar system. You earn your grade based on your labor—on the time and intensity that you put into your writing and collaboration. You are not punished for making mistakes as long as you work to improve throughout the term. What’s the research behind this system I adapted this strategy from Asao Inoue’s work on contract grading, labor-based grading, and anti-racist assessment strategies. You can find additional publications on anti-racist assessment and on grading students’ labor on Inoue’s Academia.edu page. Why is this system better for students? The most important benefits of this system are explained in the When Your Grades Are Based on Labor infographic. To summarize those benefits, a labor-based grading system allows you to Focus on Ideas (Not Mistakes). Write for Yourself (Not for Me). Take Risks (Don’t Play It Safe). Have Do-Overs (No Penalty). This labor-based system allows you to continue working on your projects until your work reaches the level that would be acceptable in the workplace. Your grade is not affected by what you haven’t learned yet, and you are free to try out ideas as you like. Why is there no partial credit? Work in this class is either ready to use in the workplace (and graded Complete) or it’s not ready (and graded Incomplete). Think of it as a binary system. There can only be 1 or 0, Complete or Incomplete. There isn’t any middle ground, so there isn’t partial credit. The thing to remember is that when a project is returned as Incomplete, you can always revise it until you do have a piece that is ready to use in the workplace. There is no punishment in the system if your work isn’t quite ready, but there’s no credit either. How are labor logs part of this system? You document the time you spend on activities and the level of intensity you put into your work in your labor log. You can think of tracking your work in your log as a parallel to tracking billing codes for what you do in the workplace. I have no way of knowing what you are working on or even how much you are working in an online class. In a face-to-face classroom, I would see you working in the classroom. I could tell if you were working intensely, working at an average pace, or not working at all. Since I cannot see your work myself, I need you to tell me what you’re doing. Additionally, you will use your labor log to gather details about your work when you write your final exam. Keeping track of what you do in your log is easier than trying to remember the details of what you did at the end of the term. Why is there so much emphasis on peer feedback in this system? In the workplace, you will find yourself reading and commenting on the projects of your coworkers frequently. The peer feedback activities you complete with your writing group give you the chance to learn more about that process. Writing in the workplace is as much about what you write as it is about how you help others with their writing. Just as importantly, peer feedback helps you improve your own writing in two ways. First, and maybe most obvious, you get advice on your draft that you can use to revise your document. Second, by reading drafts written by your classmates, you can see strategies that will help you improve your own work as well as notice errors that you can later check your own work for. Naturally, you cannot copy other people’s work; however, you can see useful ideas that you can make your own. For instance, you might read a draft that does a great job with headings. When you return to your own draft, those headings will stick with you, and you can use their example as you revise your own draft. So what do you think? I haven’t added any details that are not included elsewhere on the site; but perhaps the question-and-answer format will help students find the information. Do you have any suggestions for clarifying the system? How do you explain your grading system to students? I would love some suggestions from readers. Just leave me a comment below.   Image credits: Screenshot Excerpt of Canvas Grade Book by Traci Gardner on Flickr, used under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license. ... View more

This semester I am teaching a comics and graphic novels course. As I often do when teaching about new media for the first time, I consulted the blog of one of my mentors for meaningful instruction, Henry Jenkins. In addition to posting a sample syllabus, Jenkins discussed the cost of graphic novels in comparison to more traditional print texts and offered a clever solution:  A Word to the Wise: Comics are expensive, and we are going to be reading lots of them in this class, so my recommendation is that you form a buddy or club system, much as you did when you read comics when you were younger. Go in together with 2-3 people and swap off the comics, so you each carry a more reasonable part of the price.    In the spirit of Jenkins’ pragmatism about the needs of cost-conscious students who are already worrying about student loans and the job market, I thought I would compile some other ways to teach about comics while also keeping costs down.   Go Old School Because comics have a long history as a medium, it is possible to take advantage of comics no longer under copyright because over seventy years have elapsed since the author’s death. I am particularly fond of assigning Little Nemo by Winsor McKay as a way to discuss panel design and color choices. Over 400 flippable pages from 1905 to 1914 are available as a digital collection at the Internet Archive. The dirigibles, exotic animals, and vast metropolises in Nemo’s dreamscapes are breathtaking. Classes can also critique the antiquated ideas about race and gender on display. This classic in comics history still feels fresh to students, and you can ask them to illustrate their own dreams as a class project.   See a Museum Now that comics are more likely to be recognized as an art form, museums are mounting exhibitions and may also post some materials from past shows online. For example, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California, mounted Masters of American Comics a few years ago to enthusiastic crowds. The website for the exhibition includes a gallery of images that range from the days of yellow journalism to the millennial work of Chris Ware.   Peer at a Periodical Speaking of Ware, some of his spreads for the New Yorker are available online, which offer opportunities to discuss how a cartoonist depicts everyday life and then chooses to organize scenes from the present moment into building blocks on the page. Ware’s view of the tech world is particularly incisive, whether he is illustrating commentary about specific companies (like Snapchat) or general group behavior at Silicon Valley-style conferences. For comparison, Ware’s New Yorker covers are also on display.   Dig a Digital Library   Many campus libraries have licensed digital collections that can be useful to classes with comics and graphic novels assigned.  When I teach about the comics panic of the fifties over the possible effects of violent horror comics on young people, I love having access to the database for Underground and Independent Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels Series from Alexander Street. Your campus library might already subscribe.   Watch Web Comics Internet comics made available online for free can also be wonderful resources for classes about ways to read images as well as words. For example, Scott McCloud’s The Right Number zooms in through successive windows on the viewer’s screen as a bizarre tale of coincidence and romance unfolds. You can check out more of McCloud’s webcomics and see how he uses the seemingly infinite resource of pixelated space. ... View more

In The Argonauts, the sole text in my writing seminar, Maggie Nelson bids her readers to think about Roland Barthes’ interest in the Argo—which remained the Argo, even after all of the original parts of the ship were swapped out over time. This idea resonates throughout Nelson’s memoir and, as it echoes, one is led to wonder: does it apply to people as well? The name is applied at birth, the child grows into an adult, the cells keep changing the whole time. The Argo remains the Argo, but what about the Argonauts? Do they? Are they, too, interchangeable? Replaceable?   While we’ve been slowly making our way through The Argonauts (it’s week four and we’ve made it to page thirty-two), I wanted my students to directly experience this puzzle at the heart of Nelson’s memoir: what can objects teach us about how language works? The Argo stands in as one such object: take it apart; put it back together; it’s still the Argo. Barthes later explains that this doesn’t work with language. “I love you” does not remain the fresh, thrilling phrase it is when first expressed. For that to happen, the phrase would need to be reinvented every time.   To help my students sneak up on this idea, I asked them, without explanation, to bring an object to class. They would be donating the object to the class and wouldn’t get it back, I told them, so it shouldn’t be worth more than $10 and it should be something portable. (This entire assignment sequence is inspired by Kate McIntosh’s Worktable, which I saw/participated in last fall at the Philly Fringe.) This is what they brought in: It’s an appropriately mixed bag of stuff, some selected with more apparent care than other stuff (I was vexed by the submission of a single paper clip, a pen cap, a single earring), and some stuff provided by me in order to make sure that there was some range of choice for the next part of the performance/exercise.   At the end of class, students were instructed to select one of the objects to take home with them. They then had a week, outside of class, to disassemble or otherwise render unusable their selected objects. They could use hand tools, but I asked that no fire or chemicals be used. And so, the students went to work on this in private, all the while reading five pages or so of Nelson’s book for each session. And then, a week later, this is what they brought back:       What are we looking at, I asked them.   Trash, one student said. Art, another student said.   Some people didn’t follow the instructions, another said.   As the conversation continued, I had the students reflect on the results as evidence of how the act of dismantling was interpreted. Were there patterns?   And what were we to make of the submission of the small piece of paper with the word “her” written on it? What was the original object? (No one could say.) How did the appearance of this gendered pronoun makes sense as an act of dismantling?   * Next step: selected one of the dismantled objects to take home for a week, instructions, as before, to follow. These instructions were even more straightforward: reassemble the object. They could use tape, glue, rubber bands, paper clips, but not blow torches or hammers or other similarly sized hand tools. Another week, more talking about Nelson, how she puts her memoir together, what she chooses to work with, and how she chooses to work with it.   Here’s a sampling of the submissions (I’ll post a collective shot by the end of the week):     The hand juicer.     The Calendar.   "her" reassembled as "them" * The students brought in their reassembled objects and they were on display for a week in the computer lab we’d decamped to for their work on another assignment (more on that one next time).   And then, this week, the quiz asked them to reflect on what they’d learned from the experience of performing in McIntosh’s Worktable. At first, some students thought I’d handed out the wrong quiz. Performance? Worktable? But, when they’d read the entire prompt, they all settled into putting their (perhaps just then forming) reflections down on paper. Here’s one response:   The Worktable is a play about ourselves, in the way that our brains are the actors and the assemblage and disassemblage are the ways the actors are performing. The actors take objects, create creative chaos, then recreate order in different ways (in the way that we all see fit and can bring to our aesthetic, as disassembling an object results in stress and stress relief, and reassembling results in new life and the resolution of stress). The surprise came ultimately from the destruction of the earring to “her,” then the reassembly to “them.” An object, like the Argo, was completely swapped of all parts and left to a singular word to represent it, then the word itself was swapped out, like an Argo of “the Argo.”   That irritating earring? It turns out to have been the catalyst for a number of insights into the creative process. What is “her”? It’s a dissembled version of “them.” What is “her”? It turns out it’s also a palimpsest rubbing converted into an invented Chinese character/gendered stick figure then translated into a gendered pronoun.     In their quiz responses, some students focus on the significance of the original object choice, how it constrains, how it determines what can follow. Others focus on how, at each stage, some members of the class were able to respond to the assignment in some previously unimaginable way. They could well be describing what happens via the act of citation. ... View more

Like millions of other comics fans, I am eagerly anticipating the release of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, starring Chadwick Boseman and a truly all-star cast. In fact, I’ve just been catching up by reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s three-volume Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet, the first volume of which contains a map of Wakanda, an interview with illustrator Brian Stelfreeze, a Black Panther chronology, and other background information. These comics are page-turners for sure, with lots of the usual superhero battles and conflicts but also with lots of meditations on questions of the best kind of governance and the responsibility that those who govern owe to those governed. As someone who has studied collaboration throughout my career, I was especially struck by how the leader(s) and people collaborate to choose the best solution for Wakanda and to make sure that the solution “cannot be written in blood and fire.”   Until the film reaches our little movie theater here on the remote northern California coast, I’m enjoying reading about students’ experiences seeing it. You’ve probably heard of the Black Panther Challenge, launched by New Yorker Frederick Joseph to raise money to take kids from Harlem to see the film. That challenge has spread across the country, and just today a retired teacher friend of mine who mentors young women of color in a high school in Tampa wrote to say that one of her mentees had gone with a group of 30 other students to see Black Panther; she is being joined by thousands of other students having a similar experience and returning to their schools to talk about what the film means and HOW it means.   Which leads me to think about what a very fine teachable moment we have here, all across the U.S. The opportunities for students to do some serious research on the origins of the Black Panther Marvel series as well as on the Black Panther Movement, which began several months after the first Black Panther comic in 1966, are many indeed (and the irony that the series was created by two white men gives further food for thought). Broadening the scope a bit, students can also do research on other Black superheroes (like Icon) and on the history of such heroes, as well as on the evolution of the series, on the evolution of the role women play in the series, and so much more. I can easily imagine an entire first-year course developed around these ideas and texts, one that would challenge students to think deeply not only about the adventures, trials, and tribulations of the hero but also, and more importantly, about the message(s) that he sends to us today.   Ordinarily, I am happy to be retired. But today, I would love nothing better than to design a new version of the research and writing-based comics course I taught for so many years. And I know right where I would begin!   Credit: Pixabay Image 1393153 by emiliefarrisphotos, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more