Happy New Semester! I hope you are all ready for the new school term. Today is the first day of classes for me, so I have been busy getting new resources online and revising those that I want to use again. I am teaching four sections of Technical Writing, all completely online. Before I return to the series of posts on digital literacy that I started last month, I want to share the one big new thing I’m trying this semester. Every term, I try to improve everything about my courses. It’s a nice goal, but it’s next to impossible to achieve. With four sections of student to respond to, it’s hard to rethink and rewrite everything at the same time. I certainly want to improve my courses, but I need to be realistic about how I do it. That’s where my idea of one big new thing came from. Starting this semester, I am going to stick to just one change so I can make improvements while still keeping my workload manageable. My one big thing this semester is to change how groups are set up in an effort to improve participation during the term. A big challenge with writing groups in an online course is time management and scheduling. Since there is no class meeting time, students have no shared time slot when they are all available to collaborate. Here’s what usually happens: Student A shares a draft with the group early on the day the project is assigned. Student B shares a draft late in the evening on the day before the project is due. Student C shares a draft just before lunch on the day the project is due. Student D shares her draft a few hours before the project’s midnight submission deadline. With no overlap among their schedules, students have difficulty giving and getting feedback. They need to keep checking back in the course CMS to see if anyone has submitted a draft or left them feedback. I’ve tried different strategies to address the problem. Setting strict deadlines for peer feedback hasn’t worked. Scheduling in extra time to allow for the time management issues hasn’t worked either. No matter what I try, students still work on their own schedules. Worse, students who need extra time, get sick, or have a conflict may not be able to meet the requirements of the stricter schedules or systems. I also tried creating groups that were based on majors. I grouped all the computer science majors together, all the environmentally-focused majors together, and so on. I hoped their shared interests and overlap in other classes would help collaborate. That idea backfired as students dealt with due dates in other classes. When there was a big project due in the senior-level civil engineering course, the civil engineers group couldn’t collaborate successfully. Everyone in the group was burdened in the same way, so there was no one with a light load to help pick up the slack. I have been asking everyone for advice as I’ve tried to improve online group work. In a meeting with colleagues last month, we may have come up with a solution, one that seems so obvious in hindsight. Instead of fighting the underlying challenges that complicate online group work, the solution is to take advantage of them, to turn that constraint into an affordance. Specifically, on this first day of classes, students will complete a survey that tells me about their time management and work preferences. It includes questions and multiple choice answers like these: Which of the following best describes when you like to do work for your classes? I'm an early bird. I am up and working first thing in the morning. I'm a morning person, but I won't be up and working before dawn. I'm a midday person. You'll find me working any time from 10am to 2pm. I'm an afternoon person. I'm likely to work any time from noon to 6pm. I'm an early evening person. You'll find me working from 6pm to 10pm. I'm a late evening person. I do most of my work from 9pm to midnight. I'm a night owl. You'll find me working late into the night and sometimes in the wee hours of the morning. Which scenario best describes how you work or how you prefer to work on projects? I dive in immediately and prefer to finish as early as I can. I hate being rushed. I usually work exactly to the project's schedule. If the schedule allows a week, I work during the whole week. I like to be close to finished a day or so ahead of the due date. I usually wait until work is due. I like the pressure of a deadline. It’s complicated. The way I work depends upon the other things going on at the time (classes, work, student organizations, etc.). As you have probably guessed, the idea is to arrange groups so that the early birds are all together in one group while the night owls are in another group. I expect it to be complicated to arrange, but I hope the similar work preferences will allow students to collaborate more easily. Here’s the explanation that I’m sharing with students: The information you share in this survey will help me set up writing groups, where you will share drafts and give one another feedback. One of the big challenges of writing groups is the different schedules and ways of working we all have. My plan is to create groups of people with similar working patterns, rather than a random mix. For instance, I will make a group of people who prefer to work in the evening. That way, the group members are more likely to be online at the same time. Likewise, I will try to pay attention to how people work, sorting those who like to finish early into a different group from those who work best at the last minute, under the pressure of a deadline. Please know that I am not judging your answers in any way. I don't care how you work. I'm a night owl myself. This system will only work if you answer the questions honestly so that I can setup groups that have a better chance of working together smoothly than a random distribution sorted by the computer. I want to stress that last paragraph to students in particular. This system won’t work if they choose the answers that they THINK a teacher wants to hear instead of giving me honest responses. That’s my one big new thing for this term. I will report on how it works later in the semester. If you have feedback or suggestions, I would love to hear from you in the comments below—and come back next week for the return of my series on digital literacy assignments. Have a great week, everyone!   Photo credit: The Early Birds by Kristin Klein, on Flickr, used under a CC-BY 2.0 license ... View more

There is, I know, a vast amount of privilege that comes from making an imperfect rectangle on the first day of class. The chairs and the tables have to be moveable, not nailed down to the floor. We—the students and I—have to be situated in the same room, face-to-face. It helps that there is natural light streaming through windows that face the sky. But having taught in windowless classrooms, in damp basements and old-fashioned science labs with sinks and immovable tables, I no longer take for granted any of these seemingly mundane details. Indeed, even our presence together in a face-to-face classroom seems an immense luxury. The first week of class, the classroom computer and projector did not work, so we created a “slow” classroom dependent on analog technologies, including paper, handwriting, and the dry erase board. I invited students to write letters to me, first on what motivates them in their work, then on their expectations for the course. I answered questions about the course and about myself. For me, one of the highlight of the week was an icebreaker that invited students to find three things that they shared in common. These three things needed to go beyond the mundane. For instance, the groups could not say that they were all students, all studying at the same university, and all enrolled in this writing class. After several minutes in groups of 2-4 students, the smaller groups were asked to join with another group, and to repeat the exercise, this time finding five common attributes among them. I participated in this activity in a community diversity discussion group at our local public library. Unlike the library group, which included high school students and retirees, most of my students are the same age and are beginning their second semester on our university’s largest campus. But at the same time, similar to the diversity group, the students are diverse in ethnic, language, racial, and social class backgrounds. The similarities they found ranged from having dogs in their lives, having traveled out of the country, and liking to cook—especially grilled cheese sandwiches. The icebreaker is an introduction to the idea of synthesis, finding commonalities beneath the surface of obvious differences. We live in a moment when synthesis is not much practiced in our lives outside the classroom. It seems as if we are in the midst of composing an ongoing comparison/contrast essay, focusing on what divides us, what separates us, what makes us deeply different and isolated from each other. In a sense, comparison/contrast is an easy approach because these differences seem obvious, on the surface, readily available. The similarities are more difficult to find, but perhaps not as uncommon as we have been led to believe. The imperfect rectangle allowed us to slow down to find these connections. In the past in that classroom building, the students sat in rows, all pointed toward the teacher, the computer, and the screen as the centers of attention. Many students sat in the back row, and saw only the backs of their classmates as well. The imperfect rectangle shifted that center. Like Socratic dialogue in high school, a student remarked.   The winter desert sunlight played on the tabletops. A new semester had begun. Key words: #first day activity #icebreaker #first-year writing #synthesis #community ... View more

Many students these days are Bio Med, Finance, Marketing, or Nursing majors to name a few. These students are accustomed to 200-person classrooms where watching long PowerPoints and taking notes for the upcoming exam are common pratices.  Writing classes, however, are often hugely different. With a cap of 22 students per class, we, as writing instructors, are able to learn our students’ names, and create a more engaging classroom environment by utilizing participatory techniques. I’m almost positively sure that my students do not want to hear me lecture every class for an hour and fifteen minutes. By 2 P.M., if I were to do this, they’d be falling asleep while sitting up. Enter: The Think-Pair-Share—a teaching technique I learned in a previous practicum course where students are asked to think individually about a set of questions, then exchange ideas with their peers, all before coming back to discuss together as a class. More specifically, it works like this: My students read a brief piece of writing in class and are then given a one page set of about five questions. They are given 10-15 minutes to quietly write their own answers before they pair up with a classmate sitting next to them to exchange each other’s ideas. When this happens, the classroom breaks from quiet study hall to nervous laughter, smiling, and the exchanging of names. This is often how they meet one another for the first time. Then, after discussing their answers with their peers, we come back together as a class and I ask different groups to answer the initial questions handed out.   The Think-Pair-Share works well for many reasons. It puts the onus on the students to articulate responses to in-class texts and allows for an interesting way of using class time (versus a one hour and fifteen minute lecture). It allows students to think both individually about their answers and also allows them to collaborate or exchange ideas after they’ve answered questions on their own. Instead of cold-calling on students, this method allows students time and preparation to thoughtfully articulate well-developed answers and gain the confidence they need to answer in front of the whole class. It allows them to have fun. They meet their neighbors, talk to their classmates, and while they are engaging with the text, questions, and answers at hand, they are also forming classroom relationships and rapport with their peers, breaking the pattern of staring into phone glows and computer screens.   In addition to lecturing, Think-Pair-Shares have revitalized my classrooms, have given students agency, power, and room to speak, and have strengthened the rapport between my students, and with me, their instructor. Because of the many positive outcomes associated with Think-Pair-Shares, these exercises have become, and will remain, mainstays in my writing classrooms. ... View more

For 30-some years I’ve worked as a line editor of newspaper, magazine, and journal articles and professional reports. Much of what I edit is also reviewed by a professional fact checker, or else I check it as I go along. So, I get to see what’s incorrect in final drafts as well as what’s ungrammatical or infelicitous. The authors of virtually everything I work on have bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees, and often even Ph.D.’s, yet everyone goofs up in their writing sometimes. Allow me to share some common kinds of goofs. When I see them, it lowers my opinion of the writer. Hopefully we can motivate students by reminding them that these goofs reflect poorly on them in the eyes of prospective employers and other readers. Professional fact checkers, in particular, know that writers are not always careful with factual details—that’s why checkers have jobs. Working alongside them, I’ve occasionally found startling differences between the manuscript the writer turned in and the galleys once the checkers have done their work. The memorable “oldest human settlement in North America,” for example, might become a ho-hum “long-inhabited place.” Often, a writer’s most compelling assertions are what need to be toned down. It is much easier to overstate one’s case than to present a nuanced truth that will lead readers to a similar conclusion. But if the truth is nuanced, so must be the writing about it. Carelessness is also endemic in footnotes and endnotes, by the way. I’ve hardly ever fact-checked a piece with notes in which they all were accurate and consistently formatted. Notes in journal articles and reports that have multiple authors tend to be especially haphazard. Collaborators should agree in advance about what format to use, or assign one person at the editing stage to make the formats consistent, or both. Inexperienced writers are prone to overcapitalizing. For instance, according to a graduate student’s self-description, he had worked at “a Startup that uses Artificial Intelligence.” The temptation to overcapitalize is especially strong with phrases that are often turned into acronyms—as “artificial intelligence” is with “AI.” But unless the thing is an official entity or officially designated kind of entity, there’s no reason to cap it. The NIH is the National Institutes of Health, a federal agency; a PCMH is a patient-centered medical home. The former phrase is a proper noun, while the latter is just jargon, or a so-called term of art. The reasons not to cap such things are that doing so ascribes undue importance, and in aggregate it can look forbidding and start to make English look like German. My texting app is pretty good at distinguishing between “it’s” and “its”—but I can say that with confidence only because I know the difference. The more texts one writes, the more likely it becomes that one will have trouble deciding which form is correct in other writing. The English language didn’t make it any easier on us when it mandated that “the book’s cover” should have an apostrophe but “its cover” should not. All I can say is that good writers have been able to reliably distinguish between “its” and “it’s” for centuries. Its (just kidding!) not complicated. Young professionals sometimes are unclear on when to hyphenate. They may hyphenate after “-ly” adverbs—as in “a strongly-voiced objection” and “a fully-fledged alternative”—even though the rule against doing that would seem to be straightforward. Those phrases don’t misread without hyphens, so the hyphens serve no purpose. Young people also tend to multiply hyphens in phrases, writing things like “return-on-investment” and “an arrival on-time.” “On-time arrival” uses a hyphen so that “on-time” will be read as a unit. The need for that hyphen tempts people to write “arrival on-time”—and from there, I guess, “return-on-investment” isn’t much of a stretch. However, hyphens are much less often needed in modifiers that come after what they modify than in modifiers that come before. A “well-thought-out” argument is “well thought out.” Dictionaries, unfortunately, don’t reinforce this point. Merriam-Webster online says that “well-thought-out” is an adjective, defines it, and leaves it at that. Type “well thought out” into its search bar, and the site will hyphenate it for you and take you to that entry. As is usually the case, technological tools cannot take the place of good classroom instruction. If you don’t teach your students the difference, they may never find it out. Some of these shortcomings have to do with fine points of writing, which won’t make or break, say, a résumé or a professional report the way sloppy thinking or shoddy research will. All the same, the problems I’ve described can for the most part be solved quickly, simply, and definitively. Getting things like these wrong signals a lack of mastery loud and clear—so it can’t hurt to teach your students to get them right. Do you have questions about language or grammar, or are there topics you would like me to address? If so, please email me at bwallraff@mac.com.   Barbara Wallraff is a professional writer and editor. She spent 25 years at the Atlantic Monthly, where she was the language columnist and an editor. The author of three books on language and style—the national bestseller Word Court, Your Own Words, and Word Fugitives—Wallraff has lectured at the Columbia School of Journalism, the Council of Science Editors, Microsoft, the International Education of Students organization, and the Radcliffe Publishing Program. Her writing about English usage has appeared in national publications including the American Scholar, the Wilson Quarterly, the Harvard Business Review blog, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times Magazine. She is coauthor of In Conversation: A Writer's Guidebook, which will be published in December 2017.   Credit:  Pixaby Image 1870721 by 3844328, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

As another semester begins, I offer praise for a "less is more" approach in the classroom. In particular, teaching fewer readings than you might usually assign, and teaching them slowly, can allow students to practice close reading and “close writing" in transformational ways. Think of it as "slow reading” and "slow writing” — which, let's face it, is how practiced readers and writers actually work. I offer poet and essayist Claudia Rankine’s work as exemplary texts for this approach. Andrea Lunsford has blogged about Rankine’s edge-of-the-seat keynote at the 11th biennial meeting of the Feminisms and Rhetorics conference. Lunsford followed up with a post on teaching Rankine’s book-length poem, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014). Both entries reminded me why my co-author, Stuart Greene, and I include Rankine in the 4th edition of our book, From Inquiry to Academic Writing. We chose Rankine’s essay, “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning,” as a text to slow-read on the topic of race in the U.S.   In this densely woven but accessibly brief essay, Rankine threads back and forth in history to provide a context for her incisive claim: “Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black” (458). Rankine’s essay title comes from a friend, the mother of a black son, who captures this brutal truth: “The condition of black life is one of mourning” (458). Rankine stitches this observation to an almost identical lament in 1955, from Mamie Till Mobley, who insisted the mutilated body of her son, Emmett Till, be placed in public view: “Let people see what I see …. I believe that the whole United States is mourning with me” (460). As Rankine argues, “[Mamie Till Mobley’s] desire to make mourning enter our day-to-day world was a new kind of logic” (460). Imagine inviting students to read those sentences aloud, and to explore what it means to call this violence "a new kind of logic."   Perhaps because she is also a poet, the rhythm and economy of Rankine’s sentences beg us to slow down and ponder the word choices. What could happen if you give your students the space and time in class to consider (on paper, in pairs, in small groups, or in a large group) the implications for the following claim: “We live in a country where Americans assimilate corpses into their daily comings and goings. Dead blacks are a part of normal life here” (459)? What insights might emerge as your students connect these words — shimmering with feeling — with other reading in your course about the media, identity, education, or any number of topics we often teach in composition classes? Imagine returning to Rankine’s rich text as a touchstone, throughout your semester, to see what emerges in the context of other texts — a practice that can become a transformational tactic for lifelong readers.   Rankine’s poetic prose implores us to slow down. These thick and weighty words remind us how wrong-headed the advice is that novice close-readers often receive: “Read between the lines.” No. Instead, we should urge students: Read the lines. Read the words themselves, slowly. Read them aloud. Read them in the context of another writer's ideas, and then again in the context of yet another writer. Read them, certainly, in the context of their own lives, too. See how close reading — slow reading — invites a proliferation of interpretations. That challenge, and that pleasure, is the heart of our courses, and that takes time. Give yourself and your students that gift. ... View more

In "The Myth of Superman," the late Umberto Eco's pioneering essay on the semiotics of superheroes, a useful distinction is drawn between the heroes of myth and those of the traditional novel. What Eco points out is the way that mythic heroes are never "used up" by their experiences in the way that novelistic heroes are. The narrator, say, of Great Expectations is a different man at the end of his story than he was at the beginning (this, of course is Dickens' point), and if a sequel were to be written, the Pip of that novel would have to show the effects of time and experience that we see in the original tale. Superman, on the other hand (and the mythic heroes like Hercules that he resembles) is the same person from adventure to adventure, not taking up where he left off but simply reappearing in new story lines that can be multiplied indefinitely.   As I contemplate the appearance of yet another installment in the endless Star Wars franchise (along with the equally endless stream of superhero sagas that dominate the American cinematic box office), however, I can detect a certain difference that calls for a readjustment of Eco's still-useful distinction. And since differences are the key to semiotic understanding, this one is worth investigating.   All we have to do to see this difference is to consider the casting of Mark Hamill and the late Carrie Fisher in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Of course, part of the reason for this was simply marketing: nostalgia is a highly effective ticket seller. But when we associate this movie with other action-adventure films whose heroes can be seen to be aging in ways that they have not done so before (the Batman and James Bond franchises are especially salient in this regard), another, much more profound significance emerges. This is the fact that while the characters in today's most popular designed-to-be-sequelized movies are coming to resemble the characters of conventional novels (as Eco describes them), the situations they find themselves in remain more or less the same. Quite simply, they are forever at war.   To see the significance of this, consider the plot trajectory of the traditional war story. Such stories, even if it takes a while for them to come to a conclusion, do eventually end. From the Homeric tradition that gives us the ten years of the Trojan War (with another ten years tacked on for Odysseus to get home) to The Lord of the Rings, the great wars of the story-telling tradition have a teleology: a beginning, a middle, and an end, as Aristotle would put it. But when we look at the Star Wars saga (especially now that Lucas has sold the franchise to Disney), or the Justice League tales, or (for that matter) The Walking Dead, we can find provisional, but never final, victories. Someone (or something) somewhere, will be forever threatening the world of the hero, and the end is never in sight. It is violent conflict itself that is never "used up."   There are a number of ways of interpreting this phenomenon. One must begin with the commercial motivation behind it: killing off the war would be tantamount to killing the golden geese of fan demand, and no one holding onto a valuable movie franchise is going to want to do that.   But while this explanation is certainly a cogent one, it raises another question: namely, why are movie fans satisfied with tales of never-ending war? In the past, it was the promise of a final victory that would carry audiences through the awful violence that served as the means to the happy ending that would redeem all the suffering that preceded it. The popularity of today's never-ending war stories indicates that the mass audience no longer requires that. The violence appears to be self-justifying.   Perhaps this receptiveness to tales of never-ending war simply reflects a sophisticated recognition on the part of current audiences that wars, in reality, never really do end. World War I—the "war to end all wars"—led to World War II, which led to the Korean War, and then to Vietnam. And America has been effectively at war in Afghanistan since 2001, with no end in sight. And, of course, the "war on terror" is as open-ended as any Justice League enterprise. So maybe Hollywood's visions of endless wars are simply responding to a certain historical reality.   I would find it difficult to argue against such an interpretation. But somehow I don't think that it goes deep enough. I say this because, after all, the purpose of popular entertainment is to be entertaining, and entertainment—especially when it comes to the genres of fantasy and action-adventure story telling—often serves as a distraction from the dismal realities of everyday life. And so, just as during the Great Depression movie-goers flocked to glamorous and romantic films that were far removed from the poverty and deprivation of that difficult era, one might expect war movies today that offered visions of final victory—a fantasy end to war in an era of endless conflict.   So the successful box office formula of endless war suggests to me that audiences are entertained, not repelled, by sagas of wars without end. Interchangeable visions of heroes (I use the word in a gender neutral sense) running across desert landscapes and down starship corridors with explosions bursting behind them, simply promise more such scenes in the next installment as violence is packaged as excitement for its own sake: war as video game.   Which may help explain why we tolerate (and basically ignore) such endless wars as that which we are still fighting in Afghanistan.   Credit: Pixaby Image 2214290 by tunechick83, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

On January 15, I attended a celebration of the life and work of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., as I try to do every year. Held in our community center, the event draws a full house of people from the Mendonoma coastal communities, from little ones to oldsters like me, all who want to remember King and to be inspired, again, by his words and deeds. Local supermarkets and bakeries donate food and drink (including a very large birthday cake) to sample as we listen to local musicians, singers, poets, and speakers. This year I was particularly struck by a poet who read a piece called “Strapless Dresses.” In it, she tells about being a clerk in a department store in the South in the days of segregation and struggles against it. In vivid and terse language, she paints a picture of two African Americans who come in to the store, much to the disapproval and disregard of most of the staff. The poet steps up, though, encouraging them to look at dresses and to try them on. This they refused to do, but they did indeed buy one of the dresses, which the poet saw as an act of true courage, one she still remembers well over fifty years later. During a brief break, I walked around the room, looking at photos of King and some of his closest associates and reading passages from his speeches, the words ringing in my ears from memory. But I didn’t need to depend on memory for very long, since one of the presenters, Peggy Berryhill, founder of the Native Media Resource Center and General Manager of our local public radio station (KGUA), spoke about her own connection to King and his legacy, as well as her work in support of indigenous people and languages, racial harmony, and cross-cultural understanding. More to the point, she introduced us to drummer, singer, activist, and artist Sheila E. and her August 2017 song/video “Funky National Anthem: Message 2 America,” which was filmed in San Francisco’s Mission District and directed by her brother. According to Gail Mitchell in Billboard, Sheila E. was granted the right to use King’s likeness and his words in the video, along with those of other past leaders. In Sheila E’s words, We are living within a web of deceit and lies, but the essence of America still remains… It’s time to take a stand for the freedom we speak of, for all Americans and the world. A time to embrace those ideas and words that have come from great voices of guidance to us in other turbulent times. Voices of our past, which can still lead us to a better future. Then we watched the video, most of us rising to our feet as the momentum built, as we were carried along by words and images that took us back fifty years to King’s time—and pulled us forward to work that must be done today. It was one of those moments of group solidarity that people experience in communities all the time, but what struck me so powerfully was the thoroughly multimodal nature of the experience: the video with images and music and voices; the room we were in with posters, quotations, flyers, challenges ranging around the walls; and our own voices joining in with those in the video. So, two points to make here: first, if you haven’t seen "Funky National Anthem," do so right now! But second, think of this performance and think again of why our students want to create such multimodal projects; why they not only want but demand to develop and produce them: because they reach audiences in ways that go so far beyond what a traditional print text can do. Perhaps most important, such multimodal productions can feature real people’s spoken voices, in all their richness and diversity, along with images that remain in viewers’ minds and memories for a very long time, and that can bring events from fifty years ago alive again to instruct, challenge, and inspire us. Credit: Pixabay Image 516061 by jensjunge, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

David F. Green Jr. is an assistant professor of English at Howard University. He is the director of First-Year Writing, and his research interests include African american and hip hop rhetoric, as well as critical language awareness and composition pedagogy.    In 2014 I taught an introduction to a rhetorical theory class at my respective university. It was a course that hadn’t been taught in so long that many of my colleagues assumed it was a special topics course I had created for the students. I was not surprised given the relative silence around rhetoric at many HBCUs in previous years. But the class was special to me for a variety of other reasons. The students were energetic for the most part, and willing to work with difficult texts. I was finally able to teach engage students in conversations about Hip Hop and rhetoric, and African American rhetoric in ways that privileged their own vernacular voices. One particular moment that stays with me from the class was a request for a recommendation letter from a student. He was a young, vibrant, black male student from New York City, not far from my home in Newark, New Jersey. Most requests for recommendation letters are for graduate or law programs, this one was instead for a judge, and I was asked to speak to the character of a student. The details of the student’s incident are not necessary to share beyond the fact that he had rolled with the wrong crew and had succumbed to bad decision making as many of us have from time to time. The student had been a welcomed voice in my class that semester, one among a mixed group of inquisitive students grappling with a variety of rhetorical concepts and texts. He’d come into his own making sense of Kermit Campbell’s Gettin' Our Groove On and was able to apply much of Campbell’s discussion of vernacular voice, rap as rhetoric, and gangsta ethos to John Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers and produce a pretty good final paper exploring the ways a gangsta ethos is constructed to define individuals rather than describe particular positions taken by orators. Given his participation in the course and our talks in the office, I felt obliged to write the letter. He was given probation and allowed to return to school in the fall. I mention this sequence for two reasons. First, the student request coincided with the 2014 HBCUs and Composition conference at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (North Carolina A&T University) in which a group of composition specialists at HBCUs met to discuss our pedagogy, our students, and our goals over a two-day period (see A Spark Ignited: What’s Going On with Composition and the HBCU). And second, the student’s request reminded me of a short essay by Keith Gilyard entitled, “The Social Responsibility that Is Writing—and Writing Instruction Too.” In the essay, Gilyard makes a convincing argument about the need to recognize one’s writing and literacies as relevant to the social stances one might take and the political values revealed through one’s acts of composing. Of import to me is Gilyard’s observation that without careful examination of the what, how, and whom one teaches, literacy becomes an equally powerful tool in reinforcing inequality rather than ameliorating it (23). Now I’m not making the case that my reference letter for my student enacted a type of social justice, rather I am suggesting that the choices we make as instructors have material effects on the broader social world, as well as the imaginative possibilities we consider for students. The social responsibility that is writing instruction has been an indelible theme of composition and rhetoric at most HBCUs. Jelani Cobb’s recent editorial on Howard University, “Under Trump, a Hard Test for Howard University: A Historically Black Institution Confronts a New Era of Politics,” highlights this theme of social responsibility that continues to shape the legacies and relevance of HBCUs. Part of what came out of the 2014 HBCUs and Composition conference at the prestigious North Carolina A&T University has been an overt concern with how one educates learners of color in spaces designed for them. I think such a move contributes to broader efforts within academe to place anti-racist scholarship and teaching, and culturally sustaining work at the center of critical pedagogy and rhetorical studies. The press, from my perspective, has been the need to meet rising questions by youth and public culture about issues around race, state violence, and community. In the case of the 2018 HBCUs and Composition conference, the desire has been to provide more workshops, roundtables, and panel presentations that acknowledge the complex identities and critical intellectual work done at these institutions and build on them. While much of the conversation about HBCUs has been about the lack of resources and the heavy teaching loads, enduring realities that remain rising hurdles for scholars in these spaces, it is important to recognize the research that continues to occur in these spaces as well. I am thinking about the important research on Hip Hop that Shawanda Stewart is doing at Huston-Tillotson, or the interesting research into writing studios that Karen Keaton-Jackson is completing at North Carolina Central University. This work takes on added value within HBCU spaces because of the way such work attends to the nuances of a predominantly Black and minority audience and their reception of these strategies. Such work begs for further scrutiny and asks us to consider:  Who is the learner of color in the 21st century and in what ways are we working to understand rather than flatten differences that exist among these learners? How do particular cultural traditions and techniques influence these learners and their views on the fiduciary and social responsibilities they must take up? These are the questions that animate me at the moment, and questions that remain at the center of our recent push to build on the important conference at North Carolina A&T University.  Professional responsibility demands that we expand the ways we think and discuss writing and rhetoric at the modern HBCU. For, it’s never merely about where you’re from but where you are at. Campbell, Kermit. Gettin' Our Groove On: Rhetoric, Language, and Literacy for a Hip Hop Generation. Wayne State UP, 2005. Gilyard, Keith. Let’s Flip the Script: An African American Discourse on Language, Literature, and Learning. Wayne State UP, 1996. Wideman, John. Brothers and Keepers. Houghton Mifflin, 1984.   ... View more

As a new year and a new term begin, it’s time to look at the basic terminology of argumentation and how it relates to today’s headlines. A claim is a statement that your argument supports—the thesis statement of your argumentative essay. A claim of fact drawn from the headlines may or may not need to be supported. The statement that a bomb cyclone hit the Eastern coast of the United States on January 4, 2018, does not need to be proven. It is simply a fact verifiable by a number of different sources, although you might need to define the key term “bomb cyclone.” A claim worded as though it is a fact may need proof if it is open to interpretation or can be verified only at some point in the future: Flood damage along the East Coast from the high tides of January 4, 2018, will run into the millions. A claim of value goes beyond fact to make a statement of relative worth. Because estimation of worth is subjective, a claim of value may be relatively more difficult to defend. Claims of value most often deal with aesthetics or morality. The thesis of a movie or book review, for example, is a claim of value: Star Wars: The Last Jedi was a disappointment to some long-term fans. Gary Oldman’s portrayal of Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour is Oscar worthy. Other judgmental statements are also claims of value: Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury is an unbiased report of what those inside the White House think of President Trump. Fire and Fury is a self-serving and unsupported attack on the Trump presidency. A claim of policy is future oriented. It states what should or should not be done. It is the most difficult thesis to support because it requires proving that a problem exists and that a proposed solution is a feasible and desirable solution to the problem. President Trump should be impeached for obstruction of justice. Robert Mueller should be fired as special counsel to the investigation of Russian interference into the 2016 US presidential election. When you seek support for your argumentative claim, you will most often be looking for a blend of factual support, which appeals to an audience’s reason, and appeal to needs and values, which appeals to the audience’s emotions. The more controversial the issue at hand, the harder to overcome a reader or hearer’s emotional investment in the matter. Over the last two years, we have realized as never before the extent to which the “news” has become biased. News networks that are on the air twenty-four hours a day no longer even try to clarify the line between reporting the news and commenting on it. Add to that the fact that the “news” on our Facebook feed during the campaign was being influenced by Russia, and we have to be more cautious than ever about what sources we trust for reliable information. We also must be aware of what assumptions underlie our arguments. We cannot construct an effective argument if we cannot understand our own biases and the biases of those with whom we disagree. Abortion is such a very difficult issue to discuss because those who believe a child is a human being from conception may be trying to talk or write to those who do not define a fetus in the same way. Those who voted for Trump primarily because of his ability to influence Supreme Court decisions for decades, including those regarding abortion, were willing to dismiss what others saw as disqualifying flaws in their candidate. The basic question that can help a writer or speaker get to the heart of underlying assumptions is, what do I have to believe in order to accept that claim? What do I assume about the electoral process or same-sex marriage or the legalization of marijuana that shapes my argument? What does my opponent believe? Claim, support, assumption—these are the elements that shape all arguments and that will be our means of approaching the issues that appear daily in the local, national, and international news. Image Source: "Newspapers B&W (4)" by Jon S on Flickr 8/11/11 via Creative Commons 2.0 license. ... View more

As I gear up for the new semester, I’m finalizing my course syllabus, and again, as before every semester, I find myself curious about the best strategies to balance my desires to convey important information to my students and to create an engaging document that students will read. This school year, I’ve focused on two components of the syllabus: the content/structure of the syllabus and the use of the syllabus after the first day of class. Inspired by strategies David Gooblar presents in “Your Syllabus Doesn’t Have to Look Like a Contract,” I carefully consider the visual choices I make in presenting syllabus content. Depending on the course, I model the writing and structure of documents that I expect my students to create throughout the semester. Then, I provide other necessary course information. In my fiction workshop I ask my students to write letters responding to their peers’ work as well as their own, and so my syllabus for the course begins with a letter from me to my students. In the brief letter, I outline the three units of the course, provide an overview of our workshop structure, and make the final portfolio requirement clear. On the other hand, in my professional writing course, my students create professional documents, from emails to grant proposals to memos, and so I open the syllabus with a memo to my students. The memo format models the genre conventions of memo writing, and it clearly and succinctly conveys introductory information, including course structure, contact information, and office hours. Many of my students have been under the impression that the syllabus is a single-use document, forgotten or discarded after the first day of class. To counter this, I make clear, both verbally and in writing, my expectation that the syllabus be a guiding document—a road map—to follow throughout the semester. I ask my students to bring their copies of the syllabus to each class and each class I return to it. Specifically, I speak to the course goals and student learning outcomes, sections I include in every syllabus I write, regardless of course. (Many instructors, I’m sure, are required to include similar sections.) I find each is useful in helping students see the expectations I have for their learning and the tangible work we will do to achieve those expectations. For example, when introducing or reminding my fiction students of their reading responses, I’ll ask them to return to the syllabus with me and recall the established goal of “understand[ing] primary and advanced tools of engaging creative writing.” Then I guide them to the corresponding learning outcome: “craft thoughtful responses to assigned readings, identifying the tools used in each.” I find this practice useful near the end of the class when I ask students to review what they’ve learned and I remind them about their homework. I find the regular use of the syllabus serves several purposes. When I encourage students to use the syllabus as a functioning, working document in class, I find they turn to the syllabus for questions they might have about the course—my office hours, major assignment deadlines, etc.—before asking me. Students also return to the letter and the memo when looking for examples of document structure and design. Finally, since we continue to use the syllabus and reiterate course goals throughout the semester, when I ask students to identify what they’ve learned at the end of the course, they are able to, with specific examples. With these approaches to the syllabus, it lives throughout the semester as useful and important as it was on the first day of class. ... View more

Bedford Bits and Grammar Girl are no strangers to each other. In fact, check out all of these posts that incorporate Grammar Girl into their teaching tips: Barclay Barrios, Ask Grammar Girl  Andrea Lunsford and Jeanne Law Bohannon, Multimodal Mondays: Re/Mixing Traditional Academic Essays As YouTube Videos  Traci Gardner, Document Design Scavenger Hunt  Traci Gardner, A Fun Look at Exclamation Point Abuse!!!  Now Bedford/St. Martin's and Grammar Girl have teamed up even more. Grammar Girl podcasts are now available in LaunchPads and Writer's Help 2.0 for new English titles. Students can access these podcasts on grammar, usage, and style on the go as an accessory to learning in their writing courses. Click on the links below to see walk-throughs of the media offerings for the following titles, which all include the Grammar Girl podcasts. Axelrod, Cooper, Concise St. Martin's Guide to Writing, 8e  Greene/Lidinsky, From Inquiry to Academic Writing, 4e  Hacker/Sommers, LaunchPad Solo for Hacker Handbooks  Hacker, Sommers, A Writer's Reference, 9e  Kirszner/Mandell, Patterns for College Writing, 14e  Lunsford, LaunchPad Solo for Lunsford Handbooks  Markel/Selber, Technical Communication, 12e  Palmquist, LaunchPad Solo for Research and Reference  Rosa and Eschholz, Models for Writers, 13e  Writer's Help 2.0, Hacker Version  Writer's Help 2.0, Lunsford Version  In addition to podcasts, the Grammar Girl blog makes a great accessory to the podcasts and textbook. Assign the content to your students when it supports an assignment, or have them analyze the website design or rhetorical strategy Mignon Fogarty (aka Grammar Girl) uses in these posts to educate writers.  The following blog post on writing a case study could work well if you're taking a writing in the disciplines or writing across the curriculum approach, if students will be writing papers for the social sciences. Or, perhaps you're teaching illustration or exemplification. Or primary research. Maybe all of the above. How to Write a Case Study in 5 Steps Five simple steps designed to take you from your pre-writing preparation all the way through to submitting your case study By Varsity Tutors, as read by Mignon Fogarty, Grammar Girl  Writing a case study for a college course can be a challenge. Although there are different types of case studies, you can count on two things to remain the same—they require analytical thinking skills and a great deal of research. When composing a case study, you’ll likely be asked to explain a problem or situation and to then illustrate a potential or implemented solution. You should generally include these basic elements: An explanation of the problem or situation being analyzed. A description of the solution (or proposed solution) and its implementation. A summary of the results and an analysis of the effectiveness of the solution. The five steps that appear below are designed to take you from your pre-writing preparation all the way through to submitting your case study. How Do You Write a Case Study? Conduct Research Begin By Summarizing the Situation and Why It Is Important Detail the Solution That Was Implemented Analyze the Results of the Solution Cite Any Source Material 1. Conduct Research A case study is analytical in nature and can require plenty of research. This means that a large portion of the work is done before you start writing your study. Your case study should tell the story of your case from beginning to end, so you will need a thorough understanding of the different factors at play. Say you plan to write about a city that was successful in reducing excess waste, specifically through recycling. Your first step will be to gather relevant information about the situation. For example, you may investigate the following topics: What are the laws or policies related to this scenario, and when were they put in place? Have they affected the situation positively or negatively? What are the important data points in both current and historical terms? What have city officials and other influential figures said about the situation? Depending on how in-depth your assignment is, you might rely on articles, other case studies, or even interviews with people. Gathering as much information as you can will help you analyze why the solution worked or did not work. 2. Begin Your Case Study By Summarizing the Situation and Why It Is Important What are the conflicts or risks in the given scenario? Ensure you clearly lay out the basic facts of the problem or situation being addressed so the reader will understand why the solution was needed. This is where the statistics you gathered will help supplement your explanation, and you can describe the context of the situation either historically or in comparison to other similar situations. 3. Detail the Solution That Was Implemented Describe changes in strategy or the laws of the city or state that aimed to reduce the problem. Include context for when and how the changes occurred: what was the process, and who were the main players? Also make sure to include information on the time or cost involved in implementing the solution. And, if there were complicating factors, don’t leave those out. Explaining how unexpected complications were handled can also be important. 4. Analyze the Results of the Solution Did it have the intended effect on the situation? If the solution could be a model for similar cases, explain the wider usefulness of understanding its impact. If the results were mixed or created results different from what was expected, what were the factors affecting that outcome? How could a more effective solution be found? 5. Cite Any Source Material In a reference list at the end of your case study, it is vital to cite any source material you used in your writing. This includes articles, books, other case studies referenced, or any people you may have interviewed to gather information. Keep track throughout the research and writing process of all resources used—you will thank yourself later. Lora Wegman is a contributing writer for Varsity Tutors, a live learning platform that connects students with personalized instruction to accelerate academic achievement. SOURCE: The original post for Grammar Girl can be found at Quick and Dirty Tips: How to Write a Case Study in 5 Easy Steps  Do you like seeing this Grammar Girl post on Bits? If so, "Like" this post and/or let us know what you think in the comments. ... View more

The following post first appeared as a talk at the 2018 MLA Annual Convention. In 1983, Lisa Ede and I asked what we thought at the time was a simple question: Why write together? In a series of articles, and later in a nation-wide study of writers in seven professional organizations, we aimed to demonstrate that people write together because–well, because that’s the way writing works. The more we thought about it and the more we observed writers, the more we realized that writing is social and collaborative, through and through.   But not so fast! What Lisa and I intuited, and later demonstrated through research, was not accepted by our peers or our institutions, including MLA, who held to the notion of what we called “radical individualism” and of authorship as decidedly singular.   Fast forward thirty-five years. Aided by the technological revolution, which both revealed and enabled extensive collaboration, and by decades of research by scholars in rhetoric and writing studies (along with some important feminist literary scholars), the social/collaborative nature of writing is firmly established, in theory if not yet in practice (think of the MA thesis and doctoral dissertation requirements for “original scholarship” that is, of course, done individually to see how the singular author paradigm holds on, and on).   It seems important to think about collaboration not as a stable or fixed entity but as a series of at least three continua: of degree, attitude, and control or agency. In terms of degree, forms of collaboration stretch from the “single author” who collaborates with a web of sources and voices to the kind of whole-group collaboration increasingly enabled by technology (think a crowd-sourced piece on Wikipedia, e.g.). In terms of attitude, think of the range between the loving, mutually composed wedding vow to the tough-as-nails agreement worked out through warlike negotiations. And in terms of control or agency, think of the range between writers who have control over not only content but forms of publication to the almost total lack of control characteristic of much online writing.   So the collaborative nature of writing today is highly complex and fraught, much more so than Lisa and I could have imagined 35 years ago. Thus the need for ongoing research into how, when, where, and why writers collaborate to create meaning. Perhaps more important is the need for a robust ethics of collaboration. So to the three continua mentioned above, I would add a fourth—responsibility. Bakhtin alerts us to the multiple meanings of this term: literally the ability to respond (who gets to respond and who doesn’t), the recognition that response inevitably invokes audiences both known and unknown, and the need to take responsibility for what is written or spoken. This continuum runs from the text painstakingly crafted and held to the highest standards of evidence and truth-telling to the thoughtless retweets of unverified rumor, misinformation, or lies. Indeed, the deeply collaborative nature of writing in a digital age calls into question earlier distinctions between “singular” or collaborative writers and between writers and audiences (when consumers of information can suddenly become producers, for example, it makes it increasingly difficult to tell the writer from the audience, the dancer from the dance).   Such shifting and expanding understandings of writing, of collaboration, and of the way writers today interact with, address, invoke, become, and create audiences raise serious new questions about the ethics of various communicative acts. They also call for pedagogies that involve students in critically examining their own role(s) as effective AND ethical communicators who understand the complexity of such acts as well as their personal and collective responsibility for them.   Credit: Pixabay Image 593341 by StartupStockPhotos, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

This past October, I travelled to Boulder, Colorado for the Conference on Community Writing (CCW). The tone at the conference was celebratory, seeming to announce that community writing/partnership practices had “arrived” as an important element in Composition and Rhetoric programs. Indeed, during the conference, there were numerous panels where speakers discussed how they had transformed their upper division writing courses into sites of community inquiry and investigation.   I wondered, however, what about the community writing/partnership work being done in First-Year writing? Does “community” only belong in the upper division? Placed within a special niche separate from our historical role in supporting marginalized/non-traditional students?   I would argue just the opposite.   I have always believed that “community” should be a central focus in any required freshman writing course. One of the central elements of a community writing course is an investigation of how ‘academic’ and ‘everyday’ knowledges both rely upon argumentation, sources, and persuasion. Community writing focused courses enable students to understand the affordances (and limitations) of each individually, and ask them to find ways the two can be brought together for greater insight and effect.   Moreover, in such a classroom, students come to understand academic knowledge itself as a community literacy. That is, academic writing is the name of a particular community literacy, with a history, a set of practices, and participants. By putting academic and everyday communities into dialogue within a classroom, students learn, hopefully, the power of such communities when joined together. And in the process, students come to understand the potential value of their home community’s literacies in their own college education.   Yet too often, students are immediately asked to imagine themselves as “in the academy,” either entering with a deficit and needing ‘skills’ or being asked to take on the role of a historian or other discipline-specific identity. In both situations, their home literacies and knowledges are too often framed as unimportant for the educational journey that lies ahead. And in such scenarios, it is too often the literacies of marginalized students, from differing heritages and legal statuses, that are ushered out of the classroom. Too often, that is, the dismissal of community leads to a re-instantiation of standards which benefit white, middle-class students. If we want to remain true to the legacy of open access education, of advocating for all literacies and languages, then I would argue that freshman writing is one of the most important places in which to invest in a community literacy/partnership framework. And I would further argue that such an investment does not necessarily mean the creation of actual community partnerships – work which while important is not always possible given the often burdensome-workload placed on first year teachers.   As one way to begin such work in our classrooms, I might suggest the following:   Assign students a short essay where they discuss the intellectuals in their own communities. Ask them to not just describe the individuals, but to describe these individuals’ sense of how the world works – what justice means to them, why there is injustice, how their community attempts to foster equality. Consider how these essays might provide some key terms from which to understand subsequent academic readings. After reading a scholarly essay, ask the students to identify the key research questions addressed. Break them into small groups focused on answering how those questions would change if located in their home communities. Ask them to revise the research questions accordingly. Use these questions to enable students to see how “community-based research” might provide a way to value academic-based research. Before writing an academic response to an assigned scholarly essay, ask students to imagine themselves as someone from their community who they consider to be an “intellectual.” Have them write a short essay about how this person might respond to both the writing and content of the essay. Use these essays to discuss any limitations in the academic essay, particularly in how it imagines its reader as well as the “community” to which it is speaking. What might a writing that brings these two community insights together look like?   Clearly these examples are not exhaustive. (See Writing Communities for other such assignments). And without too much effort, a community partnership could be embedded within each assignment. For instance, a meeting might occur in a neighborhood-location where community intellectuals engage with students on a topic previously studied through an academic essay.   The most important point is that through investigating the relationship between community and academic practices, students are simultaneously thinking about how knowledge is produced in each community, how “facts” are deployed to convince their specific audiences, and why certain ways of speaking are being used. In short, students are learning about the nature of research communities and what it means to join in their work. Which is, to my thinking, one of the primary goals of freshman writing.   It is time, therefore, to see community literacy/partnership as existing within (and supporting) the historical legacy and current ambitions of freshman writing courses. Such an integration of insights and efforts would truly be a cause for celebration. ... View more

In the era of Trump double- (and triple-) speak, it may seem that words are cheap, that the whole notion of truth has been called into question. In such a time, it’s more important than ever that teachers of writing work hard to show that words matter and that they have power—often very great power—for good or for evil. The barrage of Russian bots that spread misinformation and outright lies during and after the 2016 election is a good case in point of how words can work very effectively—for ill.   I often like to open the second term with a meditation on words, going back to the ancient Greeks and Romans and their views on how words can be actions, can do things, and can make things happen. And that brings us, often, to the word of the year. For 2017, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg chooses “tribe,” “tribal,” and “tribalism” as his word(s) of the year: There's virtually no phenomenon in public life that someone hasn't tried to discredit as tribal. A writer in National Review blames left tribalism for creating the myth of "rape culture"; Sen. Jeff Flake says it's political tribalism for Republicans to support Roy Moore. Business consultants argue that it's the tribalism of corporate white males that keeps women and minorities out of the executive suite, but Andrew Sullivan sees feminist tribalism behind Google's efforts to hire more women engineers. The Guardian's John Abraham writes that the Republicans' tribalism has led them to deny human-caused climate change. But according to The Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins, it's the tribalism of progressives that leads them to refuse to debate the question. Nunberg goes on to say that this series of back-and-forth accusations is “maddening,” and a symbol of the deep fragmentations of our society which refuse to recognize the other side’s validity: “That's what it means to say that America has become tribal in the first place, and one sign of that is that we can't agree on how to use the word.” It’s also a sign that the word “tribal” is exerting serious power in our world, no matter who uses it.   Dictionary.com dubs “complicit” its word of the year due to the huge number of lookups of the word between March and October 2017. Many looked it up because they wanted to understand what it meant when SNL featured a spoof on so-called Complicit perfume or when Ivanka Trump insisted that she didn’t “know what it meant to be complicit.”   Merriam Webster chose “feminism,” saying that this word was its top lookup of 2017 and citing the Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration and the debate over whether it was a “feminist” march or not. They also cited the huge influence of the #MeToo movement and the critical and cultural success of the television version of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and the movie version of Wonder Woman starring Gal Gadot.   Finally, the Oxford English Dictionary went back to a term coined by Vogue editor Diana Vreeland in 1965: “youthquake,” which they define as “a significant cultural, political, or social change arising from actions or influences of young people.” Citing the youth-driven elections in New Zealand and the UK along with the #MeToo movement as evidence of youthquakes, Oxford also considered “antifa,” “broflake,” “newsjacking,” “Maybot,” and “Bitcoin.”   The American Dialect Society has yet to release its word of the year, and there are no doubt many others out there for the finding. All of these words and their definitions—and conflict over those definitions—make for excellent discussion in the classroom in preparation for students to determine their own words of the year. I often ask students to come up with their own personal word of the year and write a brief definition of the word along with evidence that supports their choice. Inevitably, some students choose the same word while others bring in outliers, words no one else thought of as “word of the year” material. We can then move to an analysis of what makes a word worthy of this notation, drawing up criteria and debating them rigorously. Eventually, we try for consensus: our class’s word of the year. A couple of times we have had such enthusiastic discussions that the class decided to write an editorial for the student newspaper putting forward their word of the year for the campus to consider. That’s one more way to demonstrate to students that their words matter!   What is your word of the year? Leave a comment below!   Credit: Pixaby Image 1615793 by Wokandapix, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

Today's guest blogger is Meghan Kelsey, who is completing the MFA program in poetry at Arizona State University. An experienced teacher and zine artist, she has just finished her first semester of teaching in ASU’s Stretch First-Year Writing Program.  On beginning my first semester teaching Basic Writing, I created my syllabus by choosing a handful of essays from my textbook and created projects centered on text response and argumentative writing. It was flat and I could feel its depersonalizing effects during the first week of school; I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to really connect with my students because it felt too structured, not even close to approaching learning in a more viable, alive, and humanistic way.   When I got to know my students better, I learned quite a few of them were enrolled in the School of Business with a focus in Sustainability. They began making connections from some of the assigned readings like Gandhi’s On Moral and Economic Progress to conversations about how their own lives fit into the political and economic equation, and how sustainability was factored in. For most of my students, this was their first semester at the university, living in a dorm away from home; we also explored the social and cultural implications of this lifestyle during discussions.   Organically, my projects began to take shape and were re-written into the syllabus. The new accompanying readings were strange and different on purpose, taking after a Surrealist tradition I now know as Ostranenie, or defamiliarization. I gave them poems ranging from contemporary American to Italian Futurist, we looked at photo essays written by young adults from the suburbs of LA, and I made them participate in Autopilot, an activity in which writers deconstruct an automatic movement or thought of their day and become an active participant in changing that routine. My idea was that if I wanted students to arrest their current thought patterns and learned formulaic ways of writing, they needed to be exposed to unique and non-traditional texts and writing activities.   With this idea in mind, for the first writing project of the semester, I invited students to explore space using only primary research (see project description below). This was at first challenging for the students, as they seemed to be more comfortable using outside research to say something about the world instead of drawing on their own experiences. My hope for this project was that once students began seriously deconstructing the physical spaces they embodied in the university, they would become more adept at breaking open the vastly creative interior spaces that perhaps had been stifled or ignored. The French writer Robert Escarpit once said, “Place is an object under the assault of your imagination and little by little, it changes its form, without entirely dissolving, and reveals unknown dimensions.”   As a poet, I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of space: cosmological space and its influence on our small world, architectural space and how it dictates our lives, the blank space in poems between words that represent caesuras of the unknown, the possibilities of what could exist on the page, ideograms, languages and their infinite combinations and connections.   Project One: Investigation of Space What constitutes the memory of a place? Who decides what places hold specific meanings and uses? Often we drift through spaces unconscious of their meaning, purpose, and history. Your goal for this project is to help your audience see a public place differently from how they might otherwise through primary research only (evidence you gather on your own, rather than evidence gathered through books, research articles, or online sources.)  This analysis will offer the reader a cultural observation of a public space in or around ASU that will raise questions of social relevance. For this project, you will write a four page, double-spaced essay examining, by observation, your space. Your goal will be to develop effective primary research methods in order to study and closely examine your chosen space, take careful notes based on your own observations and analysis, and ultimately defend your personal interpretation of this space and its implicit or explicit arguments and values. You might ask:   What activities does this space encourage or discourage? Who uses this space—why this group of people, and not another group? What features of this space strike me; how do they make me feel? Why is this space arranged or constructed in this way? What planning might have gone into this arrangement? What are the historical influences of this place/area and how does that affect people today?   The students’ response was enlightening. They seemed to have liked writing from their own experience. They discovered something about themselves, their peers, or the university—both positive and negative. The project gave them the space to explore their own feelings and opinions about their daily lives which often can fall by the wayside with such a large educational institution serving as their backdrop. ... View more