Even able writers who try their best to “be clear” may fail miserably. A couple of months ago, I was reminded of how subtle clarity can be—and how greatly it can matter. In March the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Maine, handed down a controversial decision—one I heard about the same way you probably did, in coverage by the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, and other news outlets. The court reversed a lower court decision in a Maine labor law case to rule in favor of the plaintiffs, dairy-truck drivers, on the grounds that the absence of a comma in a state law made it ambiguous. The law says that the usual regulations mandating extra pay for overtime do not apply to the following categories of work: “The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution” of perishable foods. Because no comma appears in that series after “shipment”—because the series lacks a serial, or Oxford, comma—about 75 drivers are entitled to four-plus years of back overtime, the court decreed. That overtime is worth millions. As the Times explained the Court of Appeals’ reasoning, “The phrase could mean that ‘packing for shipment or distribution’ was exempted, but not distribution itself.” So, arguably, people who distribute perishable food do not belong to an exempt category, and they do therefore deserve overtime pay. My first thought when I read this was, No, sorry—nothing against truck drivers, but the law does not say that. If what was exempt from overtime was packing for either of two purposes (shipping or distribution), the phrase should have ended, “… marketing, storing OR packing for shipment or distribution.” The missing “or” is the clincher, not the serial comma, which would unimportantly appear, or not, after “storing.” As written, the single “or” can’t, correctly, be part of the phrase “shipment or distribution” because it’s busy tying together the series as a whole. The two distinct work categories of packing and distribution are being declared exempt. But then I stepped back from the grammar and thought, The higher court found the law ambiguous! If the justices couldn’t agree on what the law means, what more do we need to know? And I noticed that the sentence does contain a bit more evidence pointing toward ambiguity: canning, processing, … and packing are all -ing forms of verbs, specifically gerunds, whereas shipment and distribution are not. The form of these two nouns subtly encourages us to think of them as different from the gerunds in the series. Might they be a pair of objects of the preposition for? Further, let’s acknowledge that not every law on the books is well written or even up to code grammatically. So never mind that the manual for drafting laws in Maine, according to the Times, advises against using serial commas. (The manual is said to give “trailers, semitrailers, and pole trailers” as a don’t-do-it example, and “trailers, semitrailers and pole trailers” as one to emulate.) It’s crazy that the meaning of this section of the law in question depends so heavily on one optional comma. To me, this episode demonstrates why we should all routinely use serial commas. “The canning, processing, packing for shipment, or distribution” of perishable foods—that’s clear, no? But it also contains a broader lesson about looking out for readers. I doubt that any of us can write anything worth reading if we’re constantly considering possible misreadings and ambiguities in sentences as we draft them. So we need to take that step after drafting and read our work over with sharp, skeptical eyes. I think of it as pretending I’ve never before seen what I just wrote. When I have time to put the work aside overnight, or at least while I go out for a walk, I do it. It makes the little trick of imagination I’m playing easier. Alternatively—or usually also—I ask someone to weigh in who really has never before seen what I wrote and who understands that I’m not just seeking praise. While looking out for our readers, we must also give them credit as critical thinkers; we don’t need to tell them things over and over. Trying to see through their eyes what we’ve written doesn’t have to lead to dull repetition. Rather, the idea is to meet readers more than halfway. Looking out for readers may not be worth millions to them—let alone to us—but still it’s worth a lot.   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 @me.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. ... View more

I spent last weekend at the 2017 Computers and Writing Conference in Findlay, Ohio, where I found that many of my colleagues hadn’t found the new home of the TechRhet discussion list. This week I want to share details on what the list is and how you can join the conversation and connect with colleagues who are doing cool things with digital technology in the classroom. What Is TechRhet? TechRhet is an online discussion list, managed through Google Groups. If you want to join discussions about using digital technology to teach and research composition, rhetoric, literature, and other topics, TechRhet is the place for you. The genealogy of TechRhet began with Megabyte University (MBU-L), started by Fred Kemp at Texas Tech University about 1990. MBU-L morphed into the discussion forum for the Alliance of Computers and Writing (ACW-L) and in mid-2005 Kathy Fitch created TechRhet on the Interversity site. When the Interversity went dark in 2016, I created this new home on Google Groups to allow us to continue our conversations. Ugh, Google Groups. Really? Yes, Google Groups is free and easily has the bandwidth to manage anything we might come up with. If I hosted a list on my own server, we’d find ourselves constantly bumping up against server load issues. Google Groups comes with a web-based archive of all messages as well, which allows us to return to conversations whenever we like. More importantly, those of you who want to keep these conversations out of your email inbox can. But just as importantly, those of you who want email messages because you do not want another site to remember to visit can do that, too. It is a very flexible tool that can do everything we need as a community. How Do I Use TechRhet on the Web? How Do I Get to the Archives? After you join the group, go to https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/techrhet, the group homepage. You can scroll through the messages if you'd like to browse. Use the Search box near the top of the page to search the archives. How Do I Sent TechRhet to My Email Inbox? After you join the group, go to the My Groups page. Be sure that you are logged into the account that you used to join the list. On the My Groups page, you’ll see a list of all the groups you belong to. Find TechRhet on the list, and choose the way you want your messages to be sent to you from the pull-down list (highlighted in yellow in the image below). The changes are saved automatically. Any rules? The rules for this discussion list are simple: Be collegial. Be thoughtful. Don't be a jerk. Spammers will be removed without warning. With those basic guidelines in mind, jump in and join the conversation. Don't be shy!  ... View more

There have been reports that President Trump’s staff are intentionally keeping the President so busy during his nine-day trip abroad that he has not had time to tweet. His Twitter account has, indeed, been uncharacteristically inactive. During the first portion of the trip, the President did not speak very much publicly either. Perhaps for that reason, but also perhaps because of the need to fill up the twenty-four-hour news cycle, the visual rhetoric of key moments on the trip has kept pundits and average citizens alike busy. It's been called the "slap heard 'round the world." At least one video captured the second or two on the red carpet in which Trump reached back to take his wife’s hand only to have her slap his hand away. Some pictures the next day caught the couple holding hands, but once again, clips showed Mrs. Trump reaching up to smooth her hair when her husband tried to take her hand as they left Air Force One. In addition to speculation about what their body language meant, there seemed to be mixed feelings about Mrs. Trump’s decision not to cover her head in Saudi Arabia, but the Saudi press applauded her conservative outfits—and the fact that she walked behind her husband in a subservient position. With little to report while the Trumps later awaited their audience with the Pope, talk turned to the fact that Mrs. Trump had appropriately covered her head for the occasion. Critics had to have something to say, though, so they attacked her for honoring the Christian faith by covering her head at the Vatican but disrespecting Islam by not doing so in Saudi Arabia. Hackles were raised again when she appeared sleeveless at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial museum. Trump’s ratings back home went up after he visited the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem, the first sitting U. S. President ever to do so. Images of him standing solemnly at the wall wearing a yarmulke flashed around the world. Those who were so inclined welcomed such images as signs of faith and respect; others imagined Trump wondering how Israel got Mexico to pay for the wall. If body language is any indication, the other NATO members had plenty to say as they stood at NATO headquarters in Brussels and listened to Trump chastise them for not paying their fair share of defense funding. A panel on CNN made much of the visual image of Trump’s speech. To his left was a memorial to those who died on September 11 th , a portion of the north wall of one of the Twin Towers and a reminder that September 11 th was the only time that the nations of the world have come together in support of one member nation under attack, as set out in Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, NATO’s founding treaty. Clearly visual rhetoric makes the argument that the viewer wants to see, and the Trumps’ trip abroad proves that people read into images what they want to see. Credit: President Trump's Trip Abroad on Flickr (Public Domain)   ... View more

I’ve written before about my complete and utter surprise when, nearly eight years ago, Stanford’s Vice Provost appeared at our annual Oral Presentation of Research Awards ceremony (where one award is given, every term, for the best research/presentation in our second-year writing/oral presentation course) and announced that the award would henceforth be the LUNSFORD award. (He went on to say that this was the first undergraduate award to be named for someone still alive, which sounded—and still sounds—so funny to me!)   Alive I still am, and so I was delighted to attend the 7 th annual award ceremony, held in the presentation space in the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking. We had a good crowd—and a hungry one, who fell with gusto upon a table laden with goodies, from tiny crab cakes to cheeses, fruits, and sweets. Faculty Director Adam Banks presided, making eloquent and inspirational remarks about the importance of writing and about the mission of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric and the Hume Center, and asking all those nominated for awards to stand and be recognized. Then each term’s winners were introduced by their instructors (who also deserved warm congratulations on their teaching), who spoke about the excellent research/writing/speaking their students had done and then presented each winner with a pretty nice check, a certificate, and several books that the instructors had chosen especially for them.   This is “awards season” across the country, so I expect you may have been attending similar events and congratulating undergraduate students on their work. I love this time of year and try to attend as many such sessions as possible, though I’ll admit this is my favorite. We capped the afternoon off with two student winners reprising their presentations. Juliana Chang led off with “Heritage Language Loss in Second Generation East-Asian Americans,” which opened with the following slide, showing Juliana and her grandmother and a photo of Juliana presenting: As Juliana went on to explain, she can no longer talk with her much-loved grandmother because she came to this country as a toddler and lost her ability to speak and understand Mandarin. Her research on language loss among this particular community was compelling, as she sorted out the reasons why so many Chinese and Taiwanese young people fail to retain their native language and reflected on the implications of this situation. She ended her presentation with a poem she had written to her grandmother, but one she still cannot speak to her in Mandarin. It was a bittersweet and memorable presentation.   The second presentation featured David Slater, here receiving his award from his instructor, Dr. Kathleen Tarr: David’s presentation, “Cracking the Keyless Lock,” focused on current encryption practices, which he explored in depth, exploring the arguments on all sides of this very fraught issue. He looked especially hard at the issue of end-to-end encryption, and coming to what, for many, was a surprising but fully-reasoned conclusion. Big applause all around for Chang and Slater, and then more food and fun.   You can check out both of these presentations, as well as a number of others, at The Lunsford Award Presentations page on the Stanford University site. Take a look! Credit: Photos by Andrea Lunsford ... View more

Aught aught seven.  You already know what the topic of this blog is going to be on the basis of this simple combination of numbers: who else but James Bond, spy fiction's most popular secret agent, whose cinematic franchise could make even Batman green with envy.  And you also have probably already guessed the occasion for this blog: Sir Roger Moore, that most prolific of the Bond avatars, has finally gone to that special operations room in the sky. But this blog isn't a eulogy; it's a semiotic analysis—not of the undying Bond himself, but of the way he has been portrayed through the years.  So many actors have played Bond since his appearance in the guise of Sean Connery in 1962 (forever my personal favorite, and only, Bond: but that's not semiotics) that it would take quite an essay to analyze all of them.  But I'm only concerned here with two of them: Roger Moore and Daniel Craig, whose portrayals of the master spy offer a perfect object lesson in the way that a semiotic analysis works. Here's how:  as I cannot note often enough, a semiotic analysis involves the situating of your topic in a system of associations and differences—that is, with those phenomena with which it bears a relationship of both similarity and contrast.  As portrayers of the same fictional character, then, Roger Moore and Daniel Craig belong to such a system, and they have, of course, a lot in common: good looks, suavity, fearlessness, and a certain essential (hard to define) Britishness (which is why, I suppose, David Niven—that most British of Brit actors—was cast, in a spoof of what is already a spoof, as Sir James Bond in 1967).  But there is also a striking, and critical, difference:  Moore played Bond with a creamy smoothness, as well as a sort of Brechtean "don't take any of this too seriously" inflection; Craig, in contrast, gets down and dirty, a bit worn out, a lot more mortal.  Taken by itself, of course, this might only signify the difference between two thespian interpretations of the same character, and thus nothing of much cultural significance at all.  But if we enlarge the system in which James Bond signifies, a larger meaning appears after all. So let's now look at some other entertainment franchises involving superheroes (and James Bond has a lot of superhero DNA in him).  Start with Batman, and Adam West.  In his own way, West was to Batman—as Don Adams was to James Bond, and James Bond was to, well, real British secret agents in the post-World War II era—which is to say, all spoof.  Indeed,  West's take on the Caped Crusader  was so devastating that it wasn't until 1989 that he returned to the silver screen in Tim Burton's Batman, which completely rewrote the script to present the Frank Miller-inspired sturm-und-drang Batman that has provided the foundation for all of the Batmen we have seen ever since. Then there's Superman, and the matchup between George Reeves and Henry Cavill.  Here the suit alone tells the story: from Reeves's sky blue costume to Cavill's blue-black armor, something has changed.  The mood is much darker, more violent, and the Man of Steel himself is no longer a simple champion of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. The critical difference between Bonds, Batmen, and Supermen can be interpreted in three ways.  First, of course, the shift reveals the way that our cultural mood has darkened considerably over the years (Deadpool really makes the point), and our cartoon heroes (both literally and figuratively) have taken on the emotional coloration of our times.  Audiences have no interest in chirpy superheroes, nor in petty crimes and restrained violence: it's all Armageddon and Apocalypse Now.  Similarly, disillusioned (not to say, cynical) viewers will no longer accept pristine-pure heroes: the Man of Steel must have Feet of Clay; the Dark Knight must have Dark Nights.  But, perhaps most profoundly, what has also changed is the social status of the superhero (or super spy) himself, from a minor, rather marginal character who isn't intended to be taken very seriously, to a fully-fledged tragic hero who must bear the burden of our doubts and disillusionments on his well-sculpted shoulders.  Move over Hamlet, here comes Batman. The Marxist cultural critic Lucien Goldmann once proposed that a society can be known by its "high" art.  Perhaps this was once true, but no longer.  To know ourselves we have to look at our popular culture.  Daniel Craig has it right:  we're getting a bit worn out; we're beginning to lose; the smooth road has gotten rather rough.  James Bond is us.   ... View more

As a community college English instructor, I face an ongoing challenge of interrogating and dismantling stereotypes about our students and our curriculum.  Yes, a number of our students are pursuing applied or technical degrees or certificates, with a goal of entering the workforce as soon as possible. But an equally large number of our students plan to transfer to four-year institutions (and many want to pursue advanced degrees).  Neither target outcome should entail a lowering of expectations or a reduction in opportunities for learning.  We aren’t grade 13, the easy way out, bottom tier, or just a check in the box—or we shouldn’t be.   Writing about writing (WAW) pedagogy is, to me, a perfect match for the community college. It treats writing—and language in general—as an object of investigation. Students can focus their investigations in relevant and meaningful ways, writing about the very sorts of writing and language-related issues that will shape their academic and professional careers.   Over the past four years, I have explored a WAW syllabus for my second semester freshman composition course (and I’ve written about this in previous posts, here, here, and here). As part of that course, in the spring semester, I have encouraged my students to participate in our Humanities and Social Sciences Research Symposium, a juried poster session. We began the Symposium as part of a previous quality enhancement plan (QEP), and as it has continued, we have refined and improved the structure and parameters of the event with a goal of raising the bar, bit by bit, so that our students experience authentic academic conversations with judges, students, and college community members. At the Symposium, we want content—not a grade—to be king.   Raising the bar (and thus defying stereotypes about our students and their potential) has required some significant introspection on the part of our faculty, particularly as we developed the cross-disciplinary rubric used by judges at the Symposium. What do we value in academic research? How do we assess the quality of sources used by students? What do we value in primary research? How familiar should students be with scholarship on their topic? How much weight should we place on presentation? How can we capture what we value so that we can communicate it to students and judges alike?   For my students, I have required the symposium as one component for earning honors course credit, and I have also offered extra credit. But that extra credit comes with a contract of sorts: I don’t want students to show up with paragraphs from the papers taped onto a board. Instead, I present the Symposium as a rhetorical challenge. Students must discuss with me the affordances and potential drawbacks of the poster format, as well as the needs of the possible audiences at the Symposium (which could include a professor, the Title IX Coordinator, an administrator, students, or a member of the community).  They need to think about words, arrangement, images, colors, size, and copyright.   I am not convinced that we have fully achieved our goals for the Symposium. But we have made a great deal of progress. As coordinator, I have watched as students have interacted with judges, hesitantly at first, and then with growing excitement and confidence. Often, there is a single moment of epiphany: “This person thinks my topic is just as interesting as I do!” Voices rise in pitch, and hands begin to move in the air, highlighting the power of dialogue—of sharing and of thinking in the moment. More than once, I have had a student say to me, “I didn’t know it would be like this. I want to do it again.” Yes. Real learning—and real scholarship—is like that.   This year, two of my students took home prizes in the Symposium: a project on the viability of West African pidgin as an official language for West African nations, and a project on the history and structure of American Sign Language (with a focus on whether ASL should be used to fulfill a foreign language requirement). Both projects came out of my adapted Writing about Writing (and language) second semester freshman course. The students were honored at the college-wide awards ceremony at the end of the term, where their winning projects were displayed again for all college award recipients and their families.   Can first and second year students at community colleges engage in authentic—albeit novice—scholarly work? Certainly. WAW approaches to composition encourage this sort of scholarly initiation, and a Symposium validates their efforts; they aren’t just eavesdropping on the conversation but joining in. With the variety of people walking through, they may even find themselves in a position of relative expertise. That sense of knowing is powerful.   I am very grateful for an administration that supports our Symposium, with dollars and with attendance, and who support faculty scholarship and innovation as much as they can. I am also grateful for colleagues who resist the insertion of that insidious “just”: we are a community college, not “just a community college.”    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

Last week’s Chronicle article “Why We Dread Disability Myths” reminded me that I need to think about accessibility as I pursue my goal of improving online discussion. Slack’s iOS and Android apps are accessible, and the company is working to build further support into the tool. As an example, a company blog post explains how to change the tool’s settings to better support those with color blindness.   There’s more to accessibility than just having tools that are accessible, however. As I have written about in a previous post, Tara Wood and Shannon Madden’s “Suggested Practices for Syllabus Accessibility Statements” on the Kairos PraxisWiki explains how much more can be done to provide students equal access. Following their ideas, I need to foreground accessibility information for Slack on the assignments and course website, much as I did when I worked on Improving My Accessibility Policy on my syllabus.   The Help with Slack page that I designed for my course doesn’t even mention accessibility. It should be readily available at the top of the page. As I revise the page for the next time I teach, I’ll add the information on using the iOS and Android apps for best accessibility, as well as the information on changing settings as needed to improve visibility on the site.   In addition, I want to create an Accessibility Statement for the website, which explains the accessibility goals for the site and how to contact me. There is even an Accessibility Statement Generator to make the process simple and easy.   Finally, I want to create an Accessibility Guide for the entire course, which includes details on Slack as well as the rest of the resources we use in the course. Inspired by the CCCC Conference Accessibility Guides (like this one from the 2017 conference), I will create a document that treats the course website and the tools that we use as places, explaining how to navigate and use the resources. I’m thinking more of something that explains how to walk through the resources, find what you might need, and locate the access aids that are available. I imagine that creating the document will be a lot of work at the outset, but it should be easy to maintain unless something major changes (like the campus CMS).   Overall, these are challenging goals, but they’re critical to making sure that everyone can take best advantage of the course. In fact, I hope that these changes will help all students. It can’t hurt for everyone to know how the different portions of the sites and tools that we will use work. What do you do to make sure that the resources in your courses are accessible? I would love to hear from you in the comments below.     Credit: A screen for the fingers by Quinn Dombrowski on Flickr, used under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license ... View more

In a previous blog post, I talked about the availability of Exercise Central quizzes in all English LaunchPad and LaunchPad Solo products published after summer 2016. This post covers additional banks of questions available in LaunchPad Solo for Readers and Writers and Writer's Help 2.0. Beginning fall 2016, we began publishing banks of reading comprehension quizzes for a number of Bedford/St. Martin's reader or rhetoric titles. These banks are available in LaunchPad Solo for Readers and Writers or Writer's Help 2.0, allowing instructors who package one of these products with a reader or rhetoric to access quizzes specific to their textbook. You can add these quizzes to your LaunchPad Solo for Reader and Writers or Writer's Help 2.0 course in order to: Integrate content from your reader or rhetoric into your digital product, creating a useful connection between text and technology. Create additional opportunities to assess students' reading comprehension as you plan follow-up assignments and class discussion. Help students understand where they may be struggling with reading material assigned in the course. Reading quizzes are already available for the following titles: Axelrod, Reading Critically, Writing Well 11e Barnet, Current Issues and Enduring Questions 11e Cohen, 50 Essays 5e Eschholz, Subject and Strategy 14e Kennedy, The Bedford Guide for College Writers 11e Kennedy, The Bedford Reader 13e Kirszner, Practical Argument 3e Palmquist, Joining the Conversation 3e The following titles will have reading quizzes available when they are published this fall: Axelrod, The Concise St. Martin's Guide to Writing 8e Braziller, The Bedford Book of Genres 2e Greene, From Inquiry to Academic Writing 4e Kirszner, Patterns for College Writing 14e Maasik, Signs of Life in the USA 9e McWhorter, Successful College Writing 7e McQuade, The Writer's Presence 9e Rosa, Models for Writers 13e Here are the steps to find and add these quizzes to your course: 1. Add a quiz from the LaunchPad course home. 2. Give your quiz a title. 3. Use the filter Reading Comprehension Quiz to search questions for this reading. 4. Search for the reading you want and select "Apply Filter" to see the questions. 4. Add the questions for this reading to your quiz. 5. Adjust the assignment settings for the quiz, add a due date, and assign your quiz! ... View more

Ever since the 2016 election results rolled in, I’ve been talking with teachers and students about how polarized we are in the United States today—and, more specifically, what teachers of writing can do about it. I and plenty of others have written about the importance of listening, of being open to a wide range of opinions, and on working to establish common ground with those you may not agree with.   Enter Henry Tsai, now about to graduate from Harvard’s MBA program, who I’ve known since he was a member of my course on graphic memoirs when he was a sophomore at Stanford. Henry has been working to bring people together for good causes since his high school days: a talented artist as well as a strong and vivid writer, he wrote a senior thesis at Stanford that provided an illustrated study of Vietnamese community members who ended up in Houston (Henry’s home town) after Katrina. For this study, Henry interviewed a number of these people, who were doubly—sometimes triply—displaced, learned of their stories, and raised awareness about their current situation.   After the election this past fall, Henry didn’t just wring his hands over the state of the country and its deep divisions. Instead, he and his friend Yasyf (described by Henry as “a computer whiz”) created an app called Hi From The Other Side. As you’ll see, this app aims to bring together pairs of people from different political sides (e.g., Trump, Clinton) to talk with and listen to one another. Anyone can sign up and answer some questions designed to weed out trolls or just troublemakers and then eventually be paired with someone from “the other side.” Participants are encouraged to meet in person if possible or by phone—in other words in real time and real life. The app provides guidelines for getting conversations started and sustaining them; it definitely does not have an ax to grind! As Henry puts it, “This wasn't an initiative from a political organization or anything, just people who care about being better listeners.”   You can read testimonials from people who have said “hi from the other side” on the link above, and you can sign up to receive their newsletter. And you can let your students know about this new app, one that may help them be better listeners and to talk productively with people on the “other side.”   Credit: Pixaby Image 1549399 by klimkin, used under a CC0 Public Domain License   ... View more

One of the most common truisms about writing that circulates in culture is that you should always “write about what you know.”  Setting aside any problematic aspects of the saying (of which there are more than a few), the fact that FYC students bring this idea into the writing classroom, even if it’s just buried in their subconscious, presents another challenge to helping students generate writing.   This idea gets back to the question of authority I was discussing in an earlier post and I feel like it relates to the challenges I’ve seen students struggle with in relation to peer review, as well.  Students don’t feel like they know about the readings in the class, or about writing, or about how to offer good feedback.  So I have been thinking about how to help students know what they know.   One approach I often use is to bring the readings back to students’ lives.  For example, one of the advantages of using Graeme Wood’s “Reinventing College,” or any of the other essays in Emerging about higher education, is that—by definition—they are experts in being in college.  While this example is perhaps a bit “on the nose,” I find that most of the readings in Emerging have entryways to connect to students’ experiences and, thus, their knowledges.   Group work is also a great confidence builder, for while no one student may really “know” a reading, I find that having them pool their knowledge and skills helps them realize how much they do know collectively.  And that collective understanding travels back with students once they leave the classroom.  Building knowledge expands the base of what students know and thus empowers them to write about an essay.   One final strategy I use is getting students to write about what they know they don’t know.  I ask students to come into a class with a specific quotation or passage from the reading that they just don’t understand.  Working alone or in groups, they break these down into smaller bits and build an understanding.  Not only do students leave with a better working knowledge of the reading, but they also come to know they they know what to do when they know they don’t know.   So, write about what you know?  I guess. Thing is, in the writing classroom you’re always learning more and so always knowing more.   ... View more

What is the most important thing for the success of online discussions? Students need something engaging to talk about. I have spent the last month talking about my Goal to Improve Online Discussions. I have talked about providing more preparation, increasing low-stakes discussions, and getting more involved in the discussions myself. None of those strategies will work, however, if I don’t have strong discussion prompts and assignments. So, this week, I’m going to think through an assignment.   Purpose of the Assignment The goal for this discussion is to talk about audience analysis and the impact of the choices writers make when they compose messages. I am designing the activity for students in technical and business writing courses, but it can easily be adapted for any course, which I will address at the end of this post.   Underlying Theory for the Approach Students are language experts who have great skills at communicating. CCCC’s resolution on Students’ Right to Their Own Language (1974, reaffirmed in 2003) outlines the expertise that students bring to the classroom, including the details on the dialects and language variation that make their communication unique. In this activity, students explain their understanding and use of language and then work to align that understanding with communication in new settings and uses.   Specifically, smartphone-toting students love emoji, sometimes sending entire messages consisting of the images. They are experts in this visual language. In this activity, students talk about how they use emoji and then consider how the visual language works in other settings.   Background Readings for Students Prior to the discussion, students will read about audience analysis, purpose, and emoji. For technical and business writing students, the chapter in the course textbook on audience and purpose is the obvious choice. Online resources are also available, such as the Purdue OWL Audience Analysis Overview.   Additionally, students read some resources about the use of emoji in professional settings, such as the following: 5 Etiquette Rules for Using Emojis at Work (article) Think Emoticons are NSFW? Think Again. (infographic) Why Emoji Are Suddenly Acceptable at Work (Except the eggplant) (article) Emojis and Emoticons Often Clarify Messages (article)   Discussion Prompts For this activity, students will begin with a very specific use of emoji in the workplace. After this discussion, they will react to one another’s opinions and then create some guidelines for using (or not using) emoji in professional communication. Students will begin with this prompt:   Share an audience analysis of an emoji. Choose an emoji that no one else in your group has written about, and explain what the emoji means and how it is used. Consider the ideas about emoji in the workplace from this week’s readings as you make your selection. If you have trouble, think about how you use the emoji and how someone older might use it. Have some fun with this, but keep the explanations polite.   Go to the Slack channel for your group. Choose an emoji that shows up in Slack (See emoji help in Slack). Write a post that includes the emoji and explains how different audiences might interpret it. Provide some examples. Discuss whether you would use the emoji in the workplace, explaining what audiences and situations it would be appropriate for as well as when it would be inappropriate. Once you post your analysis, read through the posts by others in your group and add responses to at least three. You can write replies and/or use emoji   As I am by no means an emoji expert, I should easily be able to enter the discussion (in line with my goal to get more involved myself) by asking for clarification on the explanations that I don’t understand. To prepare for my interaction in the conversation, I have brainstormed some potential questions and responses that I can use. Here are some examples, which use “[insert emoji]” to indicate where I would add the emoji that the student was discussing:   I wouldn’t have guessed [insert emoji] had that definition. How do you think that meaning evolved? Are there any nuances to using [insert emoji]? Is it always okay [or wrong]? Would there be circumstances when you would use [insert emoji] differently? What would you do if you used [insert emoji] in the wrong context or the reader didn’t understand? It looks as if [insert emoji] and [insert another emoji] mean the same thing. What’s the difference?   I would also have some general questions ready to share, such as these:   How often do you string together emoji to express an idea? Are there any rules to using more than one? When are they used? What can you do to make sure that everyone on your team understands the emoji you want to use in a message? How does connotation work into what an emoji means? What ethical considerations must you consider before using emoji in your communication? How do global and intercultural issues influence decisions about using emoji?   Once the first round of discussion is over, I’ll ask students to collaborate on group guidelines for emoji use. At this point, the discussion will become turn to analysis of the conversation, synthesis of the ideas, and logistical considerations of the writing task.   Create guidelines for the use of emoji in professional discussions. As a group, write a single document that outlines the following information: when to use emoji (and when not to) what emoji to use what emoji not to use and why how emoji work in special contexts, such as with clients and customers or with international audiences what to do if emoji use goes wrong any additional tips or advice The document that your group composes will guide your use of emoji in this course, so consider the students in this course as your audience for the guidelines. For examples of what your document can look like, see these resources from “the government’s internal design agency, 18F, about how they use emoji in Slack, including one on how they use emoji to document shared knowledge” (From the Profhacker post, Getting More Done with Emoji).   As students work on their documents in groups, I will take the role of coach in the writing groups, by providing encouragement, responding to questions, and suggesting ways to improve the document. This part of the discussion activity is parallel to the conversations what would happen in the classroom as students collaborate on a document. The discussion activities will conclude when students share their documents with the other groups in the course.   Customizing the Activity for Other Courses To use this activity for other courses, just change the focus on business and technical writing to an area appropriate for your course. The simplest solution is to change the references to workplace writing to academic writing, asking students to think specifically about the use of emoji in the course throughout the discussion. Other options will depend upon the course. For instance, in a course on managing social media, students can focus the discussion on emoji that are appropriate for public social status updates. Assessment and Final Thoughts As students work in these discussions, I will rely primarily on public comments that praise good ideas. These remarks should become models for others in the course. To help students who need to work on their ideas more, I will use the same kinds of comments that I would in face-to-face discussions, asking questions such as “Can you add some examples here?” and adding requests such as “Tell me more about this idea.” If I notice any students who are struggling or need extra help, I will send private messages.   I hope that by building on a topic students already know about, this activity will give them much to talk about. Furthermore, the activity allows everyone to build some a shared understanding of what is appropriate in our online discussions. If I’m lucky, I hope I will learn a bit more about emoji myself from the discussion. I would love to hear what you think about this topic. Please share your comments or advice below. I’d love to hear from you.   Credit: emoji on iPod touch by choo chin nian, on Flickr, used under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license ... View more

It could be argued that the biggest popular cultural phenomenon of our era has been the advent of digital technology and the Internet—a techo-cultural intervention at least as profound as television, in its time, and cinema.  To adapt the old McCluhan phrase from the pre-digital age, here the medium is indeed both message and massage, and there is no limit to the number of analyses of just what that message is.  But there is one angle on the significance of the Net that, while not entirely ignored, could use some deeper exploration, and that is the effect that it has had on the socio-economic and political situation in America today. Timothy B. Lee's article, "Pokemon Go is Everything that is Wrong with Capitalism" (which will appear in the 9th edition of Signs of Life in the U.S.A.), does a good job of showing how the economics of the digital explosion have redistributed American wealth into a small number of prosperous enclaves—like California's Silicon Valley and Silicon Beach, along with Seattle and Boston-Cambridge—at the expense of much of the rest of the country.  Languishing at the margins of the new economy, such regions (which comprise most of the Midwest and the South) have stagnated—an entirely unintended postindustrial consequence that goes a long way towards explaining the popularity of Donald Trump in regions that were once considered safely Democratic strongholds, like Michigan and Wisconsin.  And so it is especially ironic that Donald Trump himself makes such use of digital social media (especially Twitter, of course) to build and maintain his power base. But there has been another, related effect, that has received rather less attention.  This is the socio-economic effect that the digital era has had on those places where the new economy has taken hold.  I am particularly sensitive to this because I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and now live in Southern California.  The inflation that has been experienced in such areas—especially with respect to housing—is rendering it increasingly impossible for anyone but high income people to live there (this isn't whining: I purchased my present home 28 years ago and live in the sort of setting I prefer, but I would hate to be house hunting in my area today).  The result can be seen in the way that traditionally low income neighborhoods in, say, San Francisco and Venice, are being transformed, as young software engineers who want to live in the city and bicycle to work, move into the last areas where rents are affordable, thus driving up the rents astronomically, so that soon they will no longer be low income neighborhoods.   It is important for me to say that none of this was intended, and no individuals should be blamed (though a lot of such people are being blamed).  Young men and women who have worked hard to get their technological training—and simply want to live decent lives in which they can demonstrate their dedication to sustainability by choosing to live where they will not have to rely on their cars to get to work—are not culpable.  But the fact is that, whether we are looking at urban, suburban, or exurban neighborhoods anywhere in the vicinity of the great digital economic hubs, there is no place anymore for anyone but the upper-middle class, or those who already own there or are protected by rent control (an idea whose day is passing, by the way, under the same inflationary pressures).   It is also important for me to say that I cannot think of any solution to the problem.  To use that rather dismal verbal shoulder shrug, it is what it is.  If I had children of my own (I don't) I would feel compelled (with great reluctance) to tell them that if they want to live in a reasonably secure and pleasant manner, they are going to have to make plans to pursue high paying careers—not to be rich but simply to be able live in the middle class.  And that means, in all probability, STEM-related careers (including medicine), now that the Law (that economic mainstay of my generation of Humanities majors) has ceased to be a reliable escape hatch into the upper-middle class.    That isn't the fault of the digital era, but it is a consequence of it, and we musn't try to conceal that fact.   ... View more

In 2001-2002, with a “getting started” gift from Leslie and George Hume, we opened the Stanford Writing Center. The grand opening was near Halloween, and the deans, the vice provost, the provost, and the president of Stanford all attended: we took out a page ad in the Stanford Daily announcing “A new Stanford tradition: the Stanford Writing Center.” If you build it, they will come—and come they did. So many students appeared for the Center’s first workshop that we had an overflow out into the hallway and barely managed to pull it off. Still, with all of us working to get the word out, we conducted only about 800 tutorials during the remaining terms of that year. We were tucked away into a basement (naturally), and while the space was really nice (completely renovated), students had a hard time finding us.   On May 11 of this year, the renamed Hume Center for Writing and Speaking celebrated fifteen years of building and sustaining a culture of writing at Stanford. As of year, the Center will have tutored over 12,000 students, provided hundreds of workshops, and sponsored special events such as Writer’s Nights, Tea Parties for multilingual students, performances, and presentations. Now out of the basement, the Center has its own building on the campus quad: easy-to-find prime real estate, with a lounge/performance space, two classrooms, separate tutoring rooms, rooms for practicing presentations—even a kitchen. To celebrate the occasion, Interim Director Sarah Pit tock and her Hume Center team organized a panel about the Center, chaired by Wendy Goldberg (along with John Tinker, whom we miss every day, Wendy was first Co-Director of the Center) and featuring talks by people involved in the Center, past and present. Best of all, Zandra Jordan, who is joining Stanford this fall as Director of the Hume Center, was on hand for the occasion so that we all got to spend a bit of time with her and soak up some of her energy.    I said a few words and told the audience, as I have told many others, that building the Center was the most fun and exciting thing I was able to do in my very long career. Designing the original space, establishing a staffing pattern that included our brilliant Program in Writing and Rhetoric lecturers along with undergrad and grad tutors, building outreach to the rest of the campus and far beyond, and spending time in the Center tutoring and working with tutors—that’s a good definition of “joy” to me.   After the panel, we all trooped across the street to the Center itself, where a grand buffet and anniversary cake were waiting, along with a program: The opening by Everyday People, one of Stanford’s stellar acapella groups, left us breathless, as did spoken word poetry performed by Mark Otuteye (a very early tutor in the Center and the founder of Stanford’s now legendary Spoken Word Collective) and Edan Armas (a current member of the Collective), just back from Nationals. Founded in 2001, the year we opened the Center, the Collective has met every week in the Center for the fifteen years of its existence, though their performances are now such hot items that we don’t have a space big enough to accommodate the hundreds of students who want to attend their performances. We also heard from former and current tutors, some of whom wrote in with special greetings and reminiscences. And we were inspired by Adam Banks, now Faculty Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, who spoke eloquently about the role of writing in a 21 st century university, and by Harry Elam, Vice President for the Arts and Senior Vice Provost for Education. Harry, whose field is drama and theater, was especially helpful in bringing Stanford’s speaking program into the Center, so that we are now prepared to tutor students on presentations and performances, whether spoken or written.   I left campus positively glowing with energy and excitement and a sense of hope, which is in short supply in these dark days of the Trump debacle. As always, I am inspired and moved by the strength and commitment and brilliance of college students, who make me glad and grateful, every single day, that I have been able to spend my life among them.   Happy Anniversary, Hume Center, and greetings to all those who work to support writing centers across this country and far beyond. Good work. Ethical work. Necessary work. Keep it up!   Credit: Photos by Andrea Lunsford ... View more

When I was younger—a twenty-something graduate student working on a creative dissertation and teaching intro-level creative writing classes—I considered myself something of a creative nonfiction purist.  I knew, of course, that trying to write absolute, Capital-T “Truth” that everyone could recognize was impossible.  Our perceptions are inherently subjective, and language—useful as it is—is sometimes insufficient when it comes to capturing reality’s complexity.  Nevertheless, I thought, we essay. I took it as something of a personal insult when a best-selling memoirist turned out to have deliberately embellished his experiences with addiction and incarceration, or when another supposed nonfiction writer turned out to have invented her criminal background for the sake of drama.  “Here I am,” I thought, “struggling to find those conflicts and contradictions that shape my life, that inform who I am, that make me me—and I’m trying to write it well, without fabrication, so that others will find this work worth reading.  And then there are these people.  They cheated.” It was an issue of ethics, I thought.  Phillip Lopate wrote in the introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay that, in an essay, “a contract between writer and reader has been drawn up: the essayist must then make good on it by delivering, or discovering, as much honesty as possible.”  I believed then—and, frankly, believe even now—that the same could be said for other nonfiction forms, including memoir and literary journalism.  The fraudulent nonfiction writer, I reckoned when I was obsessed with a type of “artistic integrity” that bordered on narcissistic contempt for those who disagreed with me, was a threat to serious literature (and thus, a threat to humanity in general).  And I used to make this point clear to the students in my workshops. I wasn’t completely wrong, but I probably didn’t need to be quite so pompous about it.  Lopate also reminds us that “[t]he enemy of the personal essay is self-righteousness”–   such smug self-regard discourages honest and nuanced reflection about our own lives and minds.  And make no mistake, I was smug when it came to discussing—and writing about– the perceived ethical shortcomings of other writers, when I probably should have been using that time to work on my own flaws as a writer. I still prefer to not read the works of dishonest nonfiction writers—those who have been caught lying and publicly shamed, as well as those who are still believed to be credible but whose books caused me to roll my eyes and proclaim (to myself, to my wife, to my cats—whoever happens to be around) “There’s no way this happened.  Not like this.”  I think I can tell when someone is lying in a work of nonfiction.  Joan Didion tells us that, for a while at least, “We live entirely… by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”  A writer of Didion’s caliber, of course, isn’t satisfied with a simple story, a narrative line that is too neat or convenient; she  reexamines, she calls into question, she complicates.  A less honest writer, though, keeps things tidy, simple, and uncomplicated.  The work winds up too perfectly shaped—the result of having the narrative line imposed rather than having disparate strands of thought presented together and explored without an attempt to force them into a structure that resembles an inverted checkmark.  When things in a memoir or essay seem too neat—or too familiar, or too predictable—I tend to feel that the work has failed on an important level. Keep in mind, I’ve never had a problem with writers who employ exaggeration or sarcasm for comedic effect—there’s a difference between joking and lying, after all.  And I’m not talking about writers who try to expand nonfiction’s horizons—those writers like Ander Monson, Steven Church, and Lauren Slater who experiment with these forms in order to see just what they can do, and how we might use these forms to explore complicated, personal truths.  No, I’m talking about the writers who adopt manufactured identities and describe experiences that didn’t happen in an attempt to mythologize themselves.  I still tell my students to avoid these writers, but not necessarily because I feel like a dishonest memoir will inevitably lead to the fall of western civilization.  Instead, I simply point out that it’s been my experience that such books—with their tendency for the formulaic and clichéd– almost always represent a failure not of ethics, but of aesthetics. But, as I said, I try not to be a jerk about it.  These days. [[This post originally appeared on LitBits on 12/1/11]] ... View more

I say “Assessment” and you say . . . what? Did you involuntarily wince or utter a furtive moan? Like many of my colleagues, I often find the assessments required of us to be a waste of time and, on occasion, an insult to our professionalism; my colleagues and I are continually assessing, evaluating, refining, and improving what we know about writing and how we can best teach it. Our ongoing “assessments,” both formal and informal, reveal how complicated, nuanced, and messy the development of writing skills can be, and we resist mandated assessments that reduce that messiness to check boxes and quantities. We may feel “imposed upon,” as Suzanne Buffamanti, Denise David, and Robert Morris, articulated in a 2006 article in TETYC.  At a recent scoring workshop for a college-wide critical thinking and writing assessment, however, my colleagues showed me how the imposition can become a boon of sorts, as it did for Buffamanti and her colleagues at SUNY.  At my college, a small group of cross-disciplinary faculty spent a full day scoring student performance on the Critical-thinking Assessment Test, a short-answer test developed through a National Science Foundation Grant at Tennessee Technological University.  The test probes students’ ability to read information and graphs, describe that information, interpret it without drawing unsupported conclusions, and consider additional evidence needed to clarify initial interpretations. My college began to offer this test several years ago as part of a Quality Enhancement Plan on critical thinking, and we have continued biannually since then. The test is given to a sample of students in sections of ENG 112, our second semester FYC course, and it is scored by faculty according to a carefully structured rubric designed by the test developers (those who lead the scoring workshop must complete training before conducting a scoring session).  Scoring takes a full day, depending on the number of faculty raters and total number of tests. If you are feeling a bit of repulsion, don’t stop reading. What was a mandate, an imposition, just one more “to-do” before vacation can really commence evolved into professional development of the very best sort: open-ended discussions of what we value and how the knowledge and skills we are trying to inculcate can be repurposed and applied in other courses that our students take. How did this happen? Quite simply, twelve faculty from various disciplines (including biology, EMS certification, business, education, history, and English) examined student writing together.  When we looked at how students read and interpreted graphs, for example, we talked about similar assignments and skills in our own courses, and we discussed the extent to which our instruction transferred from one context to the next. The test provided clear data to inform that discussion: skills taught in ENG 112 should apply readily to the context of the assessment instrument, and yet we saw time and again little evidence that students were actually transferring the skills practiced in class.  Examples of failure to apply target skills were discussed, analyzed, and (truthfully) occasionally used for some comic relief.  Conversely, rare instances of success were also shared, analyzed, and celebrated.   Eventually discussion turned to how we as instructors in different areas can encourage our students to apply, to re-purpose, to connect. We delved into word choice, style, and clarity, along with awareness of audience and purpose. And in the context of those discussions, the value of this assessment was clear – not for what it told us about our students, but for the opportunity to talk rhetoric, language, transfer, and assignment design with instructors across the curriculum.  Our shared vocabulary may not have sounded much like a “Teaching for Transfer” or “Writing about Writing” session at the 4Cs, but the conceptual focus was similar. Community college faculty rarely have the occasion to work across disciplines on substantive issues of pedagogy or theory; dedicated time to this sort of collaboration seems to me to be the best possible outcome for mandated assessments. And if the institution can offer a small stipend, a comfortable room, lots of coffee, and an amazing barbecue lunch as well, so much the better.     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