Several years ago, I developed a revision plan assignment, based on information I first found on Kristin Arola’s website and that is also discussed in Writer/Designer, the textbook I was using for a multimodal composing course I was teaching at the time. In my version of the activity, students wrote a revision plan for their websites instead of rewriting the sites. I certainly believe students benefit from rewriting and revising, but there are situations where it’s not practical or even possible to have students revise a project. This week, I want to discuss using this strategy to ask students to evaluate their online identity and make a plan to improve it. Why Plan Instead of Revise? In the case of online identities, students won’t have time to demonstrate concrete improvements to their online identity beyond simple and cursory changes. It takes a while to remove problematic photos, eliminate troublesome websites, and delete questionable social media accounts. The Internet has a long memory unfortunately. Further, cleaning up your online identity requires an ongoing process, so students need to develop a plan to continue monitoring their online identities so that they can take action when necessary. Creating a long-term plan will be more useful than making a few short-term fixes. Why Does Online Identity Matter? Chances are that students already know that their online identity matters. If students completed the project to research a public figure’s online identity, they have already had a chance to think about how what they post online and what others post online about them shapes what people think about them. You can use the infographic (full-size version) on the right, from kbsd, to review the importance of establishing a strong, positive online identity. Sections 1, 2, and 3 directly address why online identity matters and how it can affect a person’s career. Once students understand the goal for the revision plan, they’re ready for the assignment. The Online Identity Revision Plan Assignment Ask students to begin by assessing their online identities. If they mapped their online identities, they can return to their maps as a starting place. Have students explore their identities by using the tips in the “Stay on Top of Things” category of Section 4 of the infographic. The class can brainstorm additional online spaces to check. Encourage students to gather all evidence they find—the good, the bad, and the neutral. Everything they find will contribute to the plan they make. Provide the following brainstorming questions to help students gather ideas for their revision plans: What are the strengths of your online identity that you want to be sure to keep? What aspects of your online identity are problematic, and how can you change them to improve your reputation? What is the balance among good, bad, and neutral information about your identity? What can you do to ensure there is always more good information than bad? How secure are your accounts? Do you need to make changes? What personal information is online about you that shouldn’t be? What positive achievements have you made that you can add to your online identity? How much is your online identity affected by family and friends? Do you need to work with others to improve your identity? Once students have assessed their online identity and worked through the questions above, ask them to write a revision plan that outlines how they will work to improve and/or maintain their online identity. Discuss possible organization structures as a class to help students get started, such as the following: Go site by site (e.g., Facebook, then Twitter, then Instagram). Arrange the plan chronologically, focusing on immediate plans, short-term plans, long-term plans, and so forth. Organize the plan by kinds of information, like factual information on profiles, images, and subjective information in blog posts and status updates. Share expectations for the project with students to ensure they understand the project. Students are probably more familiar with actually revising projects than with creating revision plans. Emphasize these ideas: Students are writing a revision plan memo. They are NOT actually revising their online identity (though obviously, you should encourage them to take that next step in their own time). The best submissions will go beyond providing a cursory answer to the brainstorming questions. They will show a concerted effort to rethink their online identities and improve them. The best responses will talk not only about what changes are needed, but specifically how to change things. Students can include whatever makes sense for their revision plans (e.g., mock-ups, a revised online profile, a chart showing a new design or structure). Any Ideas to Add? How do you address online identity? What concerns do students share? Do you have activities to encourage students to pay attention to how they are represented online? Please leave me a comment below with the details. I’d love to hear from you! Image credit: Infographic created by kbsd on the Visually site. Embed code and larger image available on Visually. ... View more

I’m using Maggie Nelson’s award-winning memoir, The Argonauts, as the central text in an essay course I’m teaching this semester. We’re reading five to ten pages a week, moving slowly through Nelson’s genre-bending reflections on gender-bending relationships. The ostensible subject of the memoir is Nelson’s evolving relationship with Harry Dodge, an artist undergoing gender reassignment, but The Argonauts is actually a 140-page meditation on language and whether “words are good enough” to capture the complexities and the impermanence of human experience.   So far, it’s safe to say that the students are baffled by Nelson’s prose and by the practice of reading I’m asking them to try. They are used to reading assignments that are much longer; they know how to find credible online summaries; they’re good enough at the gist. But reading five pages twice? Three times? Five times? Tracking down what Nelson’s referring to when she describes her ambivalent response to Prop. 8; going from her citations back to the original sources; trying to make sense of her use of italics—which sometimes signify a direct quotation from a published work, sometimes a rough gloss of what was said, sometimes a passing remark by an artist or friend: these are not ways of reading familiar to my students. Indeed, one of them has already declared—twice!—that Nelson’s not a good writer.   It’s a little early to come to that decision, I say. And besides, this isn’t a course about whether or not Nelson is a good writer; this is a course in learning how to use writing to have a big thought.   I’m starting each class with a quiz. Right out of the gate, I made a mistake. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say I made the mistake teachers are prone to make when teaching a new group of students: I made unwarranted assumptions about what the students knew how to do as readers. If I told you these were honors students, what assumptions would you make?   The first quiz, composed on the assumption that the students had read and re-read the first eight-page assignment with care and that they’d stopped to look up unfamiliar terms, figures, authors, and texts, was a bust. Most hadn’t paused to find out about Wittgenstein or Barthes or to track down Dodge’s film, By Hook or By Crook, or to look up Catherine Opie’s Self-Portrait/Cutting, or to seek out definitions of unfamiliar terms. Those who did no meaningful research had no credible way of describing what their research illuminated and so they defaulted to some variation of this empty claim: “I now understand her point better.”   Clearly not.   “It is idle to fault a net for having holes, my encyclopedia notes.”   So says Nelson.   I’ve searched in vain for the source of this quote. There’s something about it that just seems, well, fishy to me. Nelson doesn’t tell her readers which encyclopedia she’s using. And it’s hard to imagine under what entry these words appear. Snappy aphorisms? Sayings found in fortune cookies?   This quote or “quote” appears on the first page of The Argonauts. Is Nelson telling us language is a net with holes? Is she showing us how her mind works? I’ll have to get back to you on this. For the moment, I’m stuck. I haven’t figured out the right question to ask that will take me to Nelson’s source. (I thought—The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy! But, no.)   Not one student had a tale of research that led to a dead end or research that confounded things, making Nelson harder to understand than before. Even though these, surely, are the experiences at the center of curiosity-driven research.   Because of the quiz, I’ve got a better idea, now, of what my students don’t know how to do as readers or as writers. I know because you can’t fake intellectual experiences you haven’t had. So, the quiz, though technically a failure, has helped me to see how to start over tomorrow, which is what writers do. ... View more

In earlier posts, I’ve mentioned an assignment I frequently use that asks students to translate, or to repurpose, an academic text (in this case, a scholarly journal article) for a public audience. One of the overarching aims of the assignment is to help students see how - even when the topic discussed and information shared are pretty much the same - a text changes according to the needs of its audience and an author’s purpose for writing it. I want students to see how rhetorical situations shape a writer’s decision-making. In this post, I wanted to share a related lesson I use in my first-year writing class to reinforce students’ understanding of the rhetorical nature of texts. This one involves tracing the journey of an academic article as it makes its way from an “insider” audience of other academics to a wider, more popular audience. I refer to this journey as an article’s “publication trajectory.” Of course, not all academic articles will make this journey, so article selection is key to the lesson’s success. But the results of this lesson have been pretty inspiring so far. Months after the lesson, I’ve had students tell me that they continue to investigate the relationships between news articles they encounter and the academic sources on which they are sometimes based, and students have repeatedly shared their excitement with me when they’ve stumbled upon the academic source for a news article. Stage 1: Academic Article First, we explore an academic article. Depending on where we are in the semester, the article could originate from any number of fields of study. But here’s an example from natural science: Frogs use a viscoelastic tongue and non-Newtonian saliva to catch prey Alexis C. Noel, Hao-Yuan Guo, Mark Mandica, David L. Hu Published 1 February 2017. DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2016.0764   No doubt, students tend to read for content, and the article has much to teach them about frog tongues. However, students’ engagement with the article at the level of content is also an opportunity to teach them something about how communication is fashioned within the community of scholars for which the article was written. As we explore the article, I try to help students identify conventional moves and other features typical of this form of communication among scholars in the sciences. We may explore the article’s organizational design, its reliance on passive voice constructions in particular sections, or the ways sources are documented, just to name a few. Stage 2: Press Release In my experience, this stage really piques students’ interests. In it, I share a press release linked to the academic study we’ve just discussed.  A press release written to accompany the publication of the study on frog tongues, for example, can be found in the News Center at Georgia Tech University’s website:  Reversible Saliva Allows Frogs to Hang on to Next Meal   Having read the study on which a press release is based, students are generally pretty eager to see how the writers of a press release refashion the presentation of scholarly research in light of a new audience of journalists. Very quickly, they notice the visual elements of the press release, along with the additional videos and links provided as a part of it. They also see, for example, how the structure of the content shifts to move the reporting of research conclusions to the beginning of the press release, along with how careful the authors of the press release are to define jargon for the new audience. Noticing these changes is an important step in their own developing rhetorical sensitivity, I believe. Stage 3: The News Article The research is published, and the press release is out. So what’s next? In the ideal situation, you’re able to continue to trace the publication trajectory of an academic article’s journey to show students how the press release itself is repurposed (or at least how it influences) the productions of a news article, written for an even more general readership. The research on frog tongues was translated for a number of popular audiences, for instance. News articles on the research appeared online in The Atlantic, Popular Science, NPR, and Smithsonian.com, where the headlines read as follows: Why Frog Tongues Are So Sticky Frogs use elastic tongues and reversible spit to catch prey To Catch Prey, Frogs Turn To Sticky Spit Inside Every Frog’s Mouth Is a Sticky, Grabby Bullet Obviously, there are many ways to go about fostering students’ growing rhetorical awareness, but I’ve never encountered students more enthusiastic about conducting research for themselves than when I have asked them trace the publication trajectory of ideas in a research article that have made their way to a news article. And I’ve never seen my students more able to analyze their rhetorical situations and craft well-conceived texts in response to them. 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

Since the publication of the first edition of Signs of Life in the U.S.A in 1994, semiotics has become a popular instrument in promoting critical thinking skills in composition classrooms. With such a broad variety of semiotic methodologies to choose from, however, I find it useful from time to time to clarify the precise semiotic approach that is presented and modeled in Signs of Life: hence, the title and topic of this blog.   To begin with, the methodology of Signs of Life reflects a synthesis of some of the most effective elements to be found within the broad history of semiotic theory. To describe that synthesis, I need to briefly sketch out just what history I am referring to. It begins, then, with Roman Jakobson.   Arguably the most commonly known approach to technical semiotics, Jakobson's ADDRESSER – MESSAGE – ADDRESSEE schema has constituted a foundation for generations of semioticians. A fundamentally formalistic approach to communications theory as a whole, Jakobson's model was modified by Stuart Hall, who introduced a political dimension into the equation with his notion of "dominant," "negotiated," and "oppositional" readings of cultural texts (like television programs)—readings that either completely accept, partially accept, or completely challenge the intended message of the addresser. In essence, both Jakobson's and Hall's views are involved in the Signs of Life synthesis.   Before getting to a more precise description of that synthesis, however, I need to describe the role of three other major pioneers of semiotic thinking. The first of these figures is Ferdinand de Saussure, whose description of the constitutional role of difference within semiological systems underlies the fundamental principle in Signs of Life that the "essential approach to interpreting signs of popular culture is to situate signs within systems of related semiotic phenomena with which they can be associated and differentiated" (13; n.b.: the principle of association is not explicit in Saussure, but is implicit in his notion of the conceptual "signified").   The second pioneer is Roland Barthes, whose notion of semiotic mythologies underpins the ideological component of cultural semiotic analysis that Signs of Life explores and teaches.   The third essential figure in the synthesis is C.S. Peirce, whose sense of the historicity of signs, along with his philosophical realism, has provided me with an antidote to the tendency towards ahistorical formalism that the tradition of Saussure has fostered. And it was also Peirce who introduced the principle of abduction (i.e., the search for the most likely interpretation in the course of a semiotic analysis) that is critical to the methodology that is described and modeled in Signs of Life.   I will now introduce into the mix two new terms which, to the best of my knowledge, are my own, and are to be found in the 9th edition of Signs of Life. These are "micro-semiotics" and "macro-semiotics." The first of these terms describes what we do when we set out to decode any given popular cultural phenomenon—like an advertisement or a television program. In this we more or less follow Jakobson, analyzing the addresser's message as it was intended to be decoded. The macro-semiotic dimension, on the other hand, builds on the micro-semiotic reading to take it into the realm of cultural semiotics, where Hall, Saussure, Barthes, and Peirce all come into play, with Hall and Barthes leading the way to oppositional (and even subversive) re-codings of cultural texts, while Saussure and Peirce give us the tools for doing so, as briefly described above in this blog.   Now, if you are unfamiliar with Signs of Life in the U.S.A. all this may sound rather too complicated for a first-year writing textbook, and I can attest to the fact that when its first edition was in development, the folks at what was then simply called Bedford Books were plenty nervous about the whole thing. But while there are a few technical points directly introduced in the book in the interest of clarifying as clearly as possible exactly how a semiotic interpretation is performed, the text is not inaccessible—as the existence of nine editions, to date, demonstrates. The point, for the purpose of this blog, is that the semiotic method, as synthesized in Signs of Life, has a solid and diverse pedigree—which is something that you could always explain to any student who may wonder where all this stuff came from. ... View more

A friend whose daughter is in seventh grade told me recently that her class was known to be very “rowdy” and difficult to control (his daughter is not part of the difficult group!). So, the teacher has instituted a system of punishment: when several students misbehave, the entire class has to write something like “I will never do X again” one hundred times. The whole class. One hundred times. Writing as punishment. Where have we heard this story before?   Research over the last fifty years has repeatedly shown that writing is affected by prior experience—in fact, that’s one of composition’s threshold concepts. My own informal research bears this out: for some twenty years, I asked every group I spoke with to call out their earliest memories of writing. And for twenty years, those early associations were very often about punishment: being made to write “I will never X again” over and over, being made to sit on their left hands if they were left-handed so they’d be forced to write “right,” or being ridiculed for something they had (or had not) written. For others, many people’s first memory of writing is learning to write their names—there’s something about seeing that name—YOU—inscribed on paper or a board or a stone that brings a sense of agency. Yet many of these memories are also marked by feeling that parents or grown-ups laughed (no doubt often kindly but not so to the child at the time) at these early attempts. So for many people, prior experience with writing had been negative, and this attitude and these feelings went with them as they went on in life so that they dreaded writing or felt inadequate when they had to write.   Fortunately, such prior experiences and associations can be mitigated, and that often happens as writers become more confident or encounter more positive experiences with writing, though the early experiences linger on. I believe that many of our students arrive with such negative prior experiences and that it’s in our classrooms that they can begin to move beyond these experiences and to build more positive associations, and hence gain more agency. And I know that many writing teachers talk with students about these issues, drawing them out on their early experiences and systematically helping them construct more successful encounters with writing.   How I wish I could speak with that seventh grade teacher and share the research evidence with her, that I could explain that writing should be used for celebration, for self-expression, and for creating knowledge—not for punishment. But I don’t have an opportunity to do that, and right now what I know is that my friend complained to the teacher about the assignment and especially about making students who were not misbehaving in any way share in the punishment. In response, the teacher said that this was a “tried and true method that works.” Tried for sure. But true? I doubt it. And while it may “work,” it works toward negative ends.   What I can and will do is spend some time with my friend’s seventh grade daughter, which will be a big treat for me. We will do some storytelling and writing together and I’ll do what I can to show her that writing is fun and meaningful, that it’s a way for her to voice her thoughts and share them with others. And I will be grateful for all the writing teachers across the country who are working with students and with other children they know to experience the gifts writing can bring.   Credit: Pixaby Image 2290628 by purpleshorts, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

One of the most common complaints I hear in my undergraduate courses is how depressing literature is. And in my creative writing classes this translates to: Why do we have to write literature that is so depressing? Doesn’t anybody get a happy ending?    The challenge, most of the time, is that the writing we’re doing—essays, short stories, poems—is, by definition, short. And all, or almost all, of it has to start with conflict to get a reader’s attention. So how, in a short space, do you believably get from conflict to happiness?   In my classes, I like to use “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin as an example. The short story follows two brothers, an unnamed narrator and his younger brother Sonny, who are in conflict most of their lives, but in the last scene have a believable moment of connection. So how does Baldwin pull it off?   Baldwin creates an achievable goal—not that the brothers get along generally, but that the narrator learn to listen to Sonny. He creates two characters capable of change—who want change. He covers a long period of time during which movement towards change can occur. He shows the brothers trying repeatedly—and failing—to change. He has each character first go through a major life event—the kind of thing that might trigger other changes. It’s not a huge change, and is, therefore, a plausible one. There is no happily ever after—there is merely a moment of understanding that bodes well for the future.   Now key to his success is Baldwin’s amazing manipulation of time (well documented in Joan Silber’s The Art of Time in Fiction), but still, at least we see it can be done.   So maybe literature doesn’t have to be so depressing after all? ... View more

Today's guest blogger is Daniel Lambert‌, an educator, writer, editor, proofreader, and photographer. He teaches English courses at California State University, Los Angeles and East Los Angeles College as well as an online Literature course for Colorado Technical University. He was nominated for the Distinguished Faculty of the Year Award in 2017 from CTU and is the recipient of The Shakespeare Award for poetry from the City of Torrance, California." “Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.” This quotation is from Stephen King’s 1999 book, On Writing:  A Memoir of the Craft. I recommend On Writing to my composition students, despite the fact that it is written by a fiction writer. Throughout their educational and professional careers, my students will be called upon to write essays, memoranda, and reports: all examples of nonfiction writing. So, what can students learn from a fiction writer? What can writers like King teach us about writing nonfiction?   The answer is simple: “plenty.” Concepts such as process, structure, tone, style, and description are as important (if not more important) to fiction writers as they are to nonfiction writers. King covers these concepts (and more) in On Writing. Even better, he uses examples from his vast library of published novels. These novels are widely-available sources that students can use as examples when reading King’s book.   Have I ever assigned On Writing in a composition class? The answer is “not yet.” However, I often refer to King’s book in my lectures. In fact, King’s quotation from the beginning of this post appears at the beginning of my freshman composition syllabus. I routinely ask students on the first day of class to interpret this quote. Their answers vary, but they always lead us to a discussion of the importance of writing. New college students need to reflect on the everyday presence of writing as a communications tool: they already use writing to communicate on a daily basis before they set foot in my class.   King likens a writer’s skills – essentials like grammar and style – to the contents of a toolbox. By way of an analogy, he recalls as a boy accompanying his uncle to fix a broken screen. King’s uncle brought a giant of a toolbox with him to do the job. King asked why his uncle would lug such a heavy toolbox to complete a simple screen-mending: “It’s best to have your tools with you,” King’s uncle replied. “If you don’t, you’re apt to find something you didn’t expect and get discouraged.” This is a useful analogy for composition instructors to ponder: one of our tasks as instructors is to provide our students with the tools they require to write college-level essays.    On Writing is a breath of fresh air in a sea of writing manuals that students often struggle with. This book proves what King’s readers have known for years: the man is about much more than horror fiction. On Writing not only helped me hone my craft, but caused me to reflect upon the writing tools I share with my students.   Do you have any writers that have inspired you as you teach? Or any go-to writers or advice on writing you share with students? ... View more

Collaboration is a key theme in the second edition of Understanding Rhetoric, and we devote an entirely new chapter to this important topic. So it was exciting to travel to Kennesaw State University in Georgia to see students in college composition class demonstrating many of the best practices we’ve identified.   As the academic year was getting off to a busy start, I noticed an email in my inbox from a person with an unfamiliar name: Matthew Tikhonovsky. Dear Professor Losh,   My name is Matthew Tikhonovsky, and I am a student at Kennesaw State University. I am contacting you to inquire if there is a student committee that makes recommendations and suggestions for your textbook Understanding Rhetoric. Your wonderful textbook has been welcomed with open arms on the campus of KSU and is currently required reading in many first year English classes! Nevertheless, many students, myself included, believe that a student committee that offers students' perspective on rhetoric would be an invaluable resource for Understanding Rhetoric. I look forward to hearing back from you!   Sincerely, Matthew Tikhonovsky Rhetorically this student was doing everything right in addressing a stranger at another institution!  The email was brief and to the point, adopted an appropriate tone, provided context, and made a reasonable request. I responded positively and expressed my enthusiasm for meeting with a student committee.   A few weeks later I found myself at Kennesaw State meeting with an amazing delegation of students. They were all from the project-based learning class of writer Christopher Martin in a course that encouraged them to use writing to change real-world conditions close to their own lives.    Although Martin was the instructor, the students were clearly in charge of the session with me. They collaboratively authored a PowerPoint and matching handout and used graphic design to amplify their messages. The team presentation was fluent and professional, perfect for communicating effectively with a guest author. I was impressed to see how tasks had been divided up to capitalize on every student’s expertise. Each student volunteer tackled a specific aspect of the textbook and offered practical suggestions for ways to make the third edition even more student-centered.   In addition to a flawless demonstration of the power of joining forces, the students modeled all of the advice we offer in Understanding Rhetoric about reading critically, using evidence to support an interpretation, getting beyond confrontational styles of argumentation, actively embracing revision, and making information more dynamic with visual appeals. The student journalists who attended also gave the exchange a rave review.   With company representatives available to answer questions about the publishing process, the students also learned a lot about how ideas get into print and about how much revision went into the first two editions of the book. I was happy to see that their overall evaluation of the book was quite positive.   I look forward to keeping in touch with this great group of writers and communicators. Just before Winter Break Matthew came to my campus to present his findings at the William and Mary Writing Resources Center on the campus where I teach. Using empirical methods, he is now conducting undergraduate research with a faculty mentor in psychology to examine his research question about how words alone and words with related visuals compare when it comes to retaining information about principles for good writing. Matthew’s experiment also uses a control sample with words and unrelated visuals.  Now he’s a great exemplar for the research chapter too!    ... View more

Today's guest blogger is ‌, a Senior Lecturer of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. In May 2017, a colleague and I attended the Digital Media and Composition (DMAC) Institute at The Ohio State University: a weeklong workshop designed to help bring digital media tools and assignments into composition classes. Over the week, we had an intense crash course on multimodal projects that we could use in our classes. We learned about projects that people had recently completed in their classes and how well those projects worked, what kinks they encountered, and how to possibly resolve the kinks. We also completed our own projects. It was extremely informative and tons of work, but also a lot of fun.   The first project we completed at DMAC was an infographic. I'd always wanted to assign infographics, so I was quite excited at the prospect of this. I was less thrilled when the beginning of our infographic was purposely designed to be in analog form. We were asked to use arts and crafts supplies to first make an infographic by hand, then later make one digitally. We were offered all sorts of supplies: construction paper, markers, tape, colored pom poms, crayons, rolls of string, scissors, ribbon, etc. Making an infographic by hand seemed completely antithetical to an Institute with the word digital in its name. Initially, we laughed and rolled our eyes at the childlike assignment for a room of adults. As we worked, however, the value in the analog infographic took shape: it was designed to get us to slow down, cherish, and invest in the creation and design process. I hope to get my students to do the same and to help fellow colleagues and peers to see this, as well as to help them move into multimodality.   For our project, we chose to create an infographic that mirrored the purpose of creating the analog infographic in the first place: the multimodal composition process. In order to get students and apprehensive instructors to see that the multimodal process isn’t anything to fear or scoff at, we wanted them to see how the multimodal creation process mirrors the writing process. The writing process is like muscle memory for comp instructors. But for luddite-leaning instructors who are suddenly faced with becoming multimodal and teaching multimodality to students who might not always see the value in multimodality in a composition class, sometimes they all need to be reminded that the process is the same. If the instructors can see the similarities, then they can teach this new world to their students using a world (writing process) that they are very comfortable in. Slowing down the process helps with that. Looking back, I now realize the same doubtful reaction I had to the analog infographic project is the same reaction students often gave me when I told them we’d be using social media or other digital platforms to reconfigure their text-only arguments. They doubted the validity and purpose until the project was done, and then they realized it was and could be another form and medium for arguments.   So, we set out to design an analog infographic that demystified the multimodal composition process. We used terms that are common in the writing process to describe the multimodal process, such as brainstorm, research, edit, revise, etc. Feedback is so important to any type of composing process, so that term was centralized and linked to all other points of the process. We added related terms to each part of the process to help students and instructors understand what steps would be taken with each part. Creating this infographic in analog helped us create a map of what we wanted to do digitally. This would be similar to outlining for a text.   Shifting to the digital version of the infographic, we used Piktochart, but the Institute also showed us how to use Powerpoint and Canva to design digital infographics. Once we digitally recreated the infographic, we could see more options that we hadn’t considered in the analog mode. For instance, we could select images of shapes from templates rather than cutting them by hand, easily edit and revise any content, and even potentially add hyperlinks to the steps of the process. Slowing down the process and creating by hand forced us to appreciate the digital options and conveniences we have all the more.   All that I learned and experienced at DMAC translates into an infographic assignment for my students. Their infographic is designed to work with and accompany their researched argument essay. So, as they are forming their argumentative ideas from their research, they will also be forming the ideas for their infographics. In class, we will discuss how ideas, bits of data, images, tips of awareness, pie charts or bar graphs within their sources can all be turned into infographics for their arguments. I want them to slow down the multimodal composing process but also have it align and mirror the writing process. Just like they will plan, outline, and design their argumentative claims, they will also plan, outline, and design their multimodal infographics. Hopefully, they will see the value and beauty in creating in analog and digitally. ... View more

When applying the elements of argument to today’s headlines, once a claim is clear, a second critical step is to consider the support available for that claim. Support can take the form of factual evidence, or it can take instead the form of appeals to needs and values. Most often, in a strong argument, it does both. The growing amount of fake news, however, has made it more necessary than ever to consider the source and validity of support for an argumentative claim. We now know something of the extent to which news posted on social media from Russian accounts shaped the presidential election of 2016. One recent article in Newsweek was revealingly entitled “If You Shared One of These Tweets During the 2016 Election Then You Were Duped by Russian Fake News.” One example was a tweet that said, erroneously, that in the 22 days following Colin Kaepernick’s protest of the National Anthem, 68 people had been killed by police officers. It was the same sort of impetus that made some people believe that Hillary Clinton was involved in a child-sex ring being run out of pizza parlor in Washington. In the Newsweek article, Twitter is said to have just last week updated its reporting to say that “more than 50,000 Russian-linked accounts had used its service to post automated propaganda designed to exacerbate U.S. divisions.” Twitter has been told to inform “677,775 Americans that they may have liked, retweeted or followed a Russian government-backed account during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” Testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee in November, Facebook officials reaffirmed that “Russian trolls spent $100,000 to promote ads on Facebook during the 2016 election, and . . . that posts created by these trolls reached 126 million Americans—more than a third of the US population.” At that hearing, it was made clear also that the number and type of Facebook ads varied with the state being targeted. We realized some time ago that we must teach our students to analyze the validity of the sources that they use in their writing. Some of those who were tricked into believing and passing on “news” manufactured by the Russians—or others—were older Americans relatively new to social media who were never taught to think critically about electronic media. We all like to see our opinions reinforced in print or online, and it’s easy to send along the “dirt” on a candidate we don’t like without considering it too critically, but the very ease with which an idea can permeate social media led to a proliferation of fake news like never before. Too often we passed along what we wanted to think was true. If a “troll factory” in St. Petersburg controlled the propaganda appearing on our computer screens, American consumers controlled what was done with that propaganda.  The Russians must have been thrilled at Americans’ willingness to fall right in line with their plans to influence the course of American history. Apathy led millions of Americans to not even vote; gullibility led those who did to too often vote based on flawed or totally false information. When we construct our own arguments in support of what we believe, we bear the burden of providing legitimate support for the claims that we advance. We take the easy way out when we too readily believe anything that flashes across our screens. Getting at the truth can be hard work. Getting others to accept the truth has become even harder than ever in a society where the term “fake news” has become, ironically, code for “anything I don’t want people to believe.” Image Source: "Fake News - Person Reading Fake News Article" by Mike MacKenzie on Flickr 8/22/16 via Creative Commons 2.0 license. ... View more

In the recent season of gift giving, I concentrated on the young people in my life and on presents I could find that I think are worthy of them. But of course I received some gifts too, and this year brought a very special book my way. It’s called The Song and the Silence: A Story about Family, Race, and What Was Revealed in a Small Town in the Mississippi Delta While Searching for Booker Wright.   The book’s author is Booker Wright’s granddaughter, Yvette Johnson, and I found out about her and her work through Sherry Rankins-Robertson, who was Johnson’s teacher at the University of Arkansas. In fact, I think Johnson began work on this project in Sherry’s class. Whatever the case, it is a book that I will cherish and that you will want to read because Johnson’s journey to recover her grandfather is so compelling: honest, fresh, passionate, and based on over six years of intense research.   I’ll admit to being an “opening sentence” nut: I always go to the first sentence in any book or article and mull it over, read it aloud, see how it feels in my mouth, and determine whether it gets a thumbs up. This first sentence—“Booker Wright was a difficult man to know”—definitely got a thumbs up. Short, direct, and slightly mysterious, the sentence impels me forward into Johnson’s (and Wright’s) story. We learn that her research started when she discovered that her grandfather had been in a hotly controversial NBC News program in 1966, where he talked openly about racist encounters he had faced during his years of waiting tables at a “whites only” restaurant. As Johnson says, her grandfather “did the unthinkable,” which was to describe what life was like for a black man in Mississippi in the Sixties.   But who was this grandfather, who waited tables in one part of town at Lusco’s, ran his own business called Booker’s Place in the Black neighborhood, appeared on TV, became an icon of the civil rights movement—and was murdered by a drunk customer in 1973?   Johnson takes a long, hard, unflinching, and loving look at the many selves of Booker and especially at the town of Greenwood, deep in the Mississippi Delta. Her depiction of the town is rich in detail, stinging in its reflection of the racial tension and deep-seated bigotry of the white community and the struggles and constant humiliations of the Black community. We see Greenwood through both Johnson’s and Booker Wright’s eyes, a small town of enormous complexity. We learn of Wright’s search for his mother, whom he believed had never wanted him, and of the complicated relationship between Johnson and her own parents. And we see her come to terms with them, and with Booker, and with Greenwood. It’s a cliché to say this, but it’s also true: once I started reading, I could not stop until I turned the last page.   Today, Yvette Johnson is a filmmaker, public speaker, and director of the Booker Wright Literacy Project, a foundation aimed at supporting literacy efforts in the Mississippi Delta and beyond. But her work on The Song and the Silence began in a writing class with a teacher who cared about her and her subject, and who supported her research and her steps toward publication. When we enter out writing classes, we always need to know that there is likely an Yvette Johnson there, just waiting for the gift of “coming to voice” that writing classes provide for so many students. So, as always, bravo, brava, to writing teachers everywhere. ... View more

Today's featured guest blogger is Colleen Kolba, Digital Teaching Fellow at University of South Florida  Each semester, I teach an Introduction to Literature course for non-English majors. One of my goals in this course is to break down an idea they tend to bring with them from their high school English courses: there is one right way to interpret a text. We talk about our personal frame of reference for seeing and understanding the world and the role that this plays in how the meaning of a text is constructed. However, it’s easy for undergraduates to fall down the slippery slope of “we can each understand this work differently” to “literature means anything” or “any interpretation is correct.”   To reach a middle ground in the way my students understand interpretation, I turned to concept artist Sol LeWitt. Starting in the late Sixties, LeWitt created instruction-based Wall Drawings. He would write instructions for a piece of art and then a group of artists would execute the actual drawing. I’ve always found LeWitt’s Wall Drawings compelling since the instructions, while fairly simple and clear, can be interpreted differently, depending on the reader, and inevitably yield a different result reliant on the group executing the drawing. These drawings felt like a wonderful visual metaphor for literary interpretation.   On the second day of my literature class, I bring in a large roll of paper. I write the instructions for one of LeWitt’s Wall Drawings on the whiteboard. As students file in, I cut large squares from the paper. I usually get a few apprehensive glances. Class starts and I put students into groups of three or four. I ask them to: read the instructions on the board and write them down take one sheet of large paper for their group find a hard surface in the classroom or hallway to execute the instructions   Students disseminate with their groups and paper. On their way out of the classroom, some usually ask me to clarify a sentence or two in LeWitt’s instructions. I answer by telling them to give the instructions a close read, break them down part by part and examine the relationships between the sentences, and work together as a group to make sense of them.   I wander between my students. They chat happily, debating interpretations of the instructions and how to best execute their drawing. Students come alive when tasked at creating something in the classroom, especially creating in collaboration (which means the activity serves a secondary purpose as an ice breaker in the first week of school).   As each group presents me with their finished product, I tape them up in the classroom, side-by-side. Then, students free write in response to three discussion questions: What do you notice about the drawings in front of you? Who is the artist of the drawings? Who can claim ownership over the creation of these drawings? What does this activity have to do with literature?   The class discusses their answers to the three questions. Virtually all my students come to the consensus that there are many similarities between the drawings, due to the fact that parts of the instructions are more objectively understood. However, they point to differences in the way some more complex parts of the instructions are interpreted by each group. There are some facts we can agree on in the instructions, but other areas required interpretation. Thus, it’s not surprising that my students then slide into a discussion of the way that our interpretations of literature can be grounded in facts, but influenced by the way we read and construct meaning.   As a bonus, the second discussion question prompts my students to debate the roles of writer/artist and reader, raising questions about authorial intent, how much space a reader is given in co-constructing meaning, and how these dynamics impact our interpretation of a text.   Sol LeWitt not only serves as a way to introduce my students to the questions that literature raises and to think about interpretation, but it also gives the class a memorable touch-point for the rest of the semester. Students reference our “LeWitt activity” discussion as we interpret new works. And when my students start to say that “this poem can mean literally anything” I can remind my students of their drawings and the way they constructed their interpretations.  ... View more

Jimisha Relerford is a Master Instructor in the Department of English at Howard University. She serves as director of The Writing Center and is currently a student in the PhD program. Her research interests include early 20 th -century African American literature, archival studies, and composition pedagogy.    Yes, we’ve come a long way, but, as I write in March of 2003, I see that we’ve still got a long way to go, especially if we’re going to exploit the full teaching potential of the Internet. -Teresa Redd Much has changed since Teresa Redd, then a Howard University professor, published these words fifteen years ago in Computers and Composition. Whereas Dr. Redd’s Howard University students and fellow composition professors were limited to accessing the internet primarily through wired connections in dormitories and computer labs, virtually anyone on campus now enjoys hi-speed wifi throughout the campus. Many students and faculty did not yet own home computers in 2003, and few could boast advanced computer skills. Current composition instructors at Howard are, in general, highly computer literate, and the vast majority of our students are high-level digital content consumers, many of them also skilled content creators. Most students own a laptop computer, and many also own tablets and high-performing smart phones. Indeed, it isn’t uncommon to walk into a classroom and see not bright, eager young faces, but students hidden behind rows upon rows of open digital devices. But in many ways, Dr. Redd’s words still apply to the experience of teaching with technology at HBCUs, specifically at Howard. We still have a long way to go before we harness the full potential of digital technology for teaching and learning in composition classrooms.   In the years since its publication, a robust body of research on technology use at HBCUs has joined Dr. Redd’s article, and much of it reiterates challenges that persist. Rather than offer a lengthy recap of those challenges here, I instead examine three “scenes” from my own experiences with using technology in my current roles at Howard: composition instructor, graduate student, and Writing Center director. (The use of “scenes” as an organizational metaphor is adapted from Jacqueline Jones Royster’s “When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own.” Jones explains that the scenes are singular in terms of their being narratives of one individual’s experiences, but they are also plural in that they constitute data that can yield conclusions that are applicable to many.) These experiences illuminate the complicated relationship between students and faculty on the one hand and digital tech on the other. Taken together, the scenes show that while the conversation about technology use at HBCUs may not be an easy one, it remains as necessary now as it was in 2003.   Scene 1: Misadventures in Teaching with Technology When I started teaching my first composition course as a new lecturer at Howard in 2015, I was excited to find that the department required at least one multimodal assignment for all first-year composition courses. With lofty goals in mind, I envisioned and planned a multimedia essay assignment, which tasked my students with developing an-all digital composition that included video, image, sound, and text elements. I’d developed the idea for this assignment after a conversation with a former colleague at Georgia State University who had used a similar video essay effectively in her composition classes. Unfortunately, I soon learned that my goals might have been somewhat ambitious. Several students required more assistance with video editing than I was knowledgeable enough to give; my colleague had assured me that she did not have to teach her students video editing for the assignment, as they relied on existing knowledge and on-campus resources.Not all of my classrooms were equipped with Smart projectors that semester, so I was limited in my ability to work through problems with students in class; my colleague always taught in a room equipped with Smart technology. Most of my students brought their own laptops or tablets to class, but a few of them didn’t own either, and at least one of them vocally bemoaned the possibly of having to spend late nights in the computer lab to complete the assignment; my colleague’s students – their entire freshman class, in fact – had all been assigned iPads by their university. Suffice it to say that I learned quickly how difficult it is to adapt an all-digital assignment from one classroom setting to another, particularly when the one doesn’t have access to the same technological resources as the other. Even in the thick of the digital age, when personal computing devices seem virtually ubiquitous, the issues that Redd raised concerning access and skill level (“the digital divide”) remain relevant for many HBCU composition students.   Scene 2: Digital Humanities…Yes, We Do That Here My role as a doctoral student in the English program affords me yet another perspective on the relationship between technology and learning at Howard. Recently, I was prompted to consider this relationship during a conversation with a fellow graduate student about our research interests. When I mentioned that I’m interested in exploring the digital humanities for both my research and my pedagogy, my classmate’s response was, “Digital humanities? Do we even do that here?” In retrospect, I wish I had prompted her to elaborate on what she obviously perceives to be a disconnect between the program in English at Howard and the digital humanities, but at the time I was too surprised by her response to pursue it further. Later, I tried to reconcile what I know about Howard’s English department with my classmate’s words. I know that in the summer of 2016, the department hosted “Seshat: A Digital Humanities Initiative,” a 2-week program funded by an NEH HBCU Humanities Initiative Grant. The program exposed literary studies scholars to theories, methodologies, and tools related to digital humanities, culminating in scholars’ redesign of four existing humanities courses at Howard University. I know that at least one recent graduate of the doctoral program, Tyechia Lynn Thompson, undertook digital humanities research for her dissertation, an innovative study that used geospatial mapping tools to examine depictions of post-1960’s Paris in the writings of African American authors James Baldwin, James Emanuel, and Jake Lamar. And I know that in 2015, David Green, director of the composition program, implemented a full-scale revision of the first-year writing course sequence, developing courses that emphasize (alongside traditional academic essay-writing) multimodal composition, digital content creation, and web design. These developments suggest that Howard’s department of English has indeed demonstrated some investment into harnessing the potential of the digital humanities for faculty, emerging scholars, and undergraduates.   Scene 3: To Print or Not to Print… As the director of Howard’s Writing Center, I collaborate with graduate and undergraduate student tutors at the beginning of each academic year to review and update our policies and tutorial procedures. One of our long-standing policies, which has persisted after vigorous debate among the tutors and myself, is that we prefer students bring hardcopies of their papers for tutorial sessions. The general consensus among the tutors is that reviewing a printed document during a face-to-face session with a student is more efficient and effective than attempting to conduct a tutorial session while scrolling through a digital document on a computer screen. However, last semester a student took issue with this policy, insisting that students shouldn’t be expected to bring hardcopies of their papers since “nobody prints anything out anymore.” A graduate tutor responded incredulously – surely the student prints essays and papers for her professors? The student insisted that all her assignments were submitted through email or Blackboard. This exchange is unsurprising considering that the young woman, a “digital native,” is accustomed to developing documents that are intended solely for digital consumption. Composing, revising, and sharing documents completely online is now standard practice, and, for her at least, printing paper is beyond passé. The exchange serves as a reminder that in spite of the challenges faced by HBCUs with regard to technology use, the vast majority of our students have wholly adopted the digital as a way of life. It is now up to us – scholars, instructors, departments, institutions – to decide if we will do what is necessary to catch up.               Redd, Teresa M. "‘Tryin to Make a Dolla Outa Fifteen Cent’: Teaching Composition with the Internet at an HBCU." Computers and Composition, vol. 20, no., 2003, pp. 359-373. Royster, Jacqueline Jones. "When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own." College Composition and Communication, vol. 47, no. 1, 1996, pp. 29-40. Thompson, Tyechia L. “Mapping City Limits: Post-1960s Paris and the Writings of James Baldwin, James Emanuel, and Jake Lamar.” Howard University, 2016. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. ... View more

A few weeks ago, I posted some tips for fostering reading across the curriculum.  That post recognized that no matter what we do to improve instruction in an integrated reading and writing (IRW) developmental or ALP course, students will need on-going support in reading as they encounter challenging texts in disciplines outside of English.  After writing that post, I took some time to read the latest issue of Teaching English in the Two-Year College, and I found a relevant and (quite frankly) disturbing article by Annie del Principe and Rachel Ihara, “A Long Look at Reading in the Community College: A Longitudinal Analysis of Student Reading Experiences.”  The authors (English professors at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY) interviewed a cohort of students through their reading experiences across multiple semesters at the college.    They state the bottom line early in the article: In brief, we found that by the end of their time in our CC, all of our student subjects had learned the lesson that reading isn’t truly “required” in their classes and that it’s very possible to “get by,” and even succeed, in coursework without doing much, or even any, assigned reading. (183)   The authors recognize that theirs was a small sample and thus conclusions must be drawn carefully; unfortunately, their experience echoes what I have frequently heard from my students.  Students often say they don’t need to read:  in many classes, they are only tested on what is covered in lectures.  When I have tried to make the case that reading ahead of time can help lectures and class activities make more sense (after all, readers build connections and points of knowledge that they can connect to what they hear and do later), students shrug.  They tell me that reading the PowerPoint posted online after class is just as good.   I remember encountering Janet Emig’s “Writing as a Mode of Learning” as a graduate teaching assistant.  It was the first time I had thought about the affordances of writing as a method of learning—not just reporting what had been learned before.  Reading as a mode of learning, however, was a given.  I didn’t need a theoretical account of how deep and extended reading increased vocabulary, content knowledge, critical thinking, or the ability to craft sentences with syntactic complexity and nuance.  Learning by reading seemed self-evident, much as the rationale for integrating reading and writing instruction seems obvious to me.   But perhaps the time for the theoretical rationale has come, as more and more college classrooms appear to be abandoning reading as a mode of learning.  If integrated reading and writing instructors are going to partner with professors across the disciplines to enhance reading practices, we may first need to make the case that reading can and should be an integral part of a student’s learning in the college classroom.  And we must also celebrate and emulate instructors who are helping students read texts (and making the investment in a textbook worthwhile).   One such instructor is my colleague Curtis Morgan, a professor of history.  Morgan could rely solely on lecture (my ESL students have rated him a top guest speaker), but he has chosen to make reading a significant part of the learning in his courses.  Students in his introductory classes write up analyses of documents in their textbook (an exercise which requires reading not only the target document but also related background material in the text).  In addition, they are required to read 500 pages of material that they find on their own, with summaries of 50-page increments to be submitted regularly.  Morgan invites students to “specialize,” using the reading to develop an initial expertise in a particular area of history – thus giving them a stronger base for developing responses in papers and exams (I cannot help but think here of the paradox of the freshman year, where students must be both novices and experts, as detailed by Sommers and Saltz, 2004.  Morgan’s approach helps students navigate that dichotomy).   In more advanced classes (at my institution, these are sophomore level courses), Morgan requires students to present written reports on assigned texts, and he creates what he calls “book clubs” in his classroom to give students a platform for discussion and debate about these readings.  He also assigns a research essay, which of course requires reading.  Many of my developmental, ESL, and ALP writers tell me that an 8-page reading is “too long,” and that they did not read in their high school courses.  When I can point to examples of courses such as Professor Morgan’s, I can show them that reading is not merely one more in a succession of meaningless hoops required for college success; it is a means to learning (and, in some cases, a rush of pleasure in newfound understanding).   The more I think about it, I would say that conspiring with colleagues across the disciplines to make reading meaningful may be the most important professional development for my work as an integrated reading and writing instructor.    And now I need to get back to the stack of articles awaiting me.  There’s still so much to learn.             Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... 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I have always considered myself to be a “professional writing” teacher.   I have, however, almost never taught a course called “professional writing.”   I would argue, though, that in any community partnership course, there is a significant amount of writing that replicates the work of the traditional professional writing course. For instance, through community partnerships over the past year, my students have worked with local Syracuse residents as well recent immigrants to Syracuse. They have corresponded with individuals and students in Algeria, Tunisia, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. Collectively, they have produced dialogues concerning women’s rights, educational access, and global conflicts. While doing this work, they have also produced the following documents: Business Letters Executive Summaries Strategic Proposals Budget Proposals Grant Proposals Partnership Agreements Power Point Presentations Book Manuscripts Author Permission Letters Workshops The list could go on.   The point is that community partnerships necessarily draw students into the genres which are the typical focus of a professional writing course. Yet to some extent, professional writing courses are considered distinct from the field’s focus on community as well as community literacy. Nor have community writing/partnerships courses readily adopted professional writing as an informing and important source for their work.     My own sense for this seeming divide has to do with the politics associated with each set of classrooms. While community literacy might be critiqued for its noblisse oblige, such courses are often seen as being on a “progressive” side of our field. And while professional writing has deep roots in the non-profit world, I would argue it is too often seen in the service of corporate interests – too often, that is, its emergence in the field is seen as a sign of the corporatization of the university. Each characterization is necessarily a caricature, but one that carries weight in our field. And similar to our current political debate, there seems little space to draw these opposites into a constructive dialogue.   Ultimately, I would argue, this lack of dialogue, this disciplinary divide, hurts how our students understand the possibilities of writing – in all its forms – to inform and enable active public debate focused on real change.   With the hope of enabling conversations that allow greater nuance and alignment across courses, I suggest the following practices:   Archive of Community Writing While community literacy projects often produce quite a bit of writing, this writing also seems to vanish at the end of the term. With that in mind, departments might consider creating a digital archive of student work. Rather than be organized by project (“after-school literacy program”), the work might be divided by professional writing genre (“strategic proposal”). Such an archive has two immediate benefits. First, teachers are able to see the types of common writing that occur across their specific community projects. Second, professional writing teachers will have examples to their students of how “professional writing” can emerge in community projects. And perhaps more importantly, all teachers will begin to see how their work might both intersect and mutually support each other.   Common Project Among Courses One common feature of community projects is that they exist within a particular teacher’s classroom. As a result, most community projects fail to take full advantage of the resources within an entire department. It might be useful, then, to consider how one particular project might be integrated across a series of classrooms, such as a professional writing and advanced literacy course. Elements of the project could be divided among the classes, with several group meetings designed to show how seemingly different writing “genres” and “writing theories” when brought together enable a stronger set of work to be produced. If the first suggestion, the archive, was to highlight to teachers the ways their work might intersect, this suggestion is to help students see how the emphases of their coursework intersects.   Forums of Community “Business Writers” Public events can also be used to work against a perception that professional and community writing are two different enterprises. Invite individuals who do work in community-based issues – such as gentrification, education, and the environment – to share all the ways in which they engage in “public writing.” Here the idea is to show that the work being assigned by teachers has a “real life” purpose that can support students’ civic or communal values. As with the other examples, the goal is to show that what are often seen as oppositional forces within a minor, major, or discipline have common ground that speaks to important public purposes.   Of course, I recognize that in the current political moment, fraught with divisive racist rhetoric and economic disparity, finding common ground between two courses, two elements of a field, might not seem the most important of tasks. Yet if we imagine such work as demonstrating to students how seemingly rigid boundaries can be brought together through nuanced engagement, then, perhaps, they might be able to transfer such work to the civic space, which is clearly in need of such lessons. ... View more