For those of you currently negotiating the transition from teaching in Rhetoric to English, and for those of us just beginning to think about this transition, I wanted to offer a Weighty Question (and two CWRL books to help address it):

What kinds of writing should we ask of our students in English courses, and what is the purpose of this writing?

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Gerald Graff wrote a really interesting column in the MLA newsletter this month, which pointed out that many undergraduate papers are asked to interpret a text in a vacuum.

I know that's true of my undergraduate experience. Most of the time, I was specifically told not to cite criticism in my papers. No wonder I am struggling to "enter the conversation" to this day. For much of my academic career, no professor explained to me the importance of answering the "so what?" question or finding someone who disagreed with me.

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Normally, I shy away from talking about reproductive rights in the rhetoric classroom, even though I study reproductive rights discourse in my research. The reasons are several: first and foremost, I want to guard students’ privacy; second, it’s a topic I have fairly strong feelings about myself and I don’t want to get myself in an uncomfortable situation with students who feel differently; and third, I just don’t see many opportunities for stasis in the values-based, divisive discourse surrounding abortion.

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There are many ways to compose an effective resume. There are tons of books, online aids, and tutorials out there. With such a wealth of information, it can be difficult to know how to start.

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The University of Texas, of course, has fantastic online writing resources available through the UWC, but other university writing centers also offer sites worth a look. Undergraduates might find The Writer’s Handbook for the Writing Center of the University of Wisconsin, Madison (http://www.wisc.edu/writing/Handbook/index.html) particularly useful.

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If you use your class website a lot, you might wan to take a look at the Topoi page that Mark Marino has put together for the USC writing program (www.pageflakes.com/markcmarino) This page is full of interactive tools for pre-writing. The widgets are meant to be copied and used on your own site to help your students. Here is Marino's post discussing the Topoi page: http://writerresponsetheory.org/wordpress/2008/08/23/widget-based-education/

The Topoi - www.pageflakes.com/markcmarino
Writer Response Theory (Marino's blog)- http://writerresponsetheory.org/wordpress/

This week I've been taking a look at printed grammar handbooks available for free online. One of the best I've come across so far is William J. Strunk's The Elements of Style, available from Bartleby.com.

http://www.bartleby.com/141/index.html

I’ve known many professors who think highly of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. This is actually an earlier version (before E.B. White got involved), but students can get the full text for free. Though definitely dated, the handbook provides basic writing information still essential for students today.

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Whatever our politics, whether we had a good election or a bad last week, that we had an election to get excited about at all is due in large part to the millions who have served in our nation's Armed Forces. We honor the 653,000 who have given their lives in defense of our country on Memorial Day. Today, Veteran's Day, is our day to honor the nearly 24 million who came home to us alive: our nation's Veterans.

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The Living Newspaper Project Meets Multimedia Technology

For those of you looking to invite students to interact with different media, you might consider adopting and adapting the lesson plans conveniently provided as part of the Humanities Institute’s Living Newspaper Project. In this case, the four kinds of media are printed news reports, play script, oral reading, and theater performance.

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I'm trying a new grading strategy this year. I use a table with two columns. The first column lists the grading criteria and how much each aspect of the paper is worth, for example:

1. Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the evidence in the essay (this may include a discussion of statistics). 25 points.

2. Write a concise, relevant introduction. 5 points.

The second column includes my comments on that aspect of the paper as well as the total points the student received.

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I'm looking for suggestions from my fellow teachers, regarding encouraging a risk-averse student to make mistakes. Read on for full details ...

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In my search for useful grammar websites, I've also explored those not specifically designed for classroom use.

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I've been reviewing various grammar websites for the CWRL Pedagogy group, and I've discovered that English Club offers a very useful site for ESL students struggling with grammar issues an instructor may not have time to address in class.

http://www.englishclub.com/grammar/index.htm

The web contains numerous sites directed at ESL students, but English Club’s page is one of the most comprehensive and complete. It provides clear and correct information in a straight-forward, easily accessible manner to students at various stages of English mastery.

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A colleague and I are developing a training workshop for teachers (GTAs) at our university interested in teaching our Composition classes online. We have each taught online ourselves, with the benefit of the College's brief introductory training in my case, and we feel that additional preparation is utterly crucial. To get there from here, we need to secure funding, and to get the funding we need information from other institutions/programs.

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The London Times Higher Education Supplement has an editorial up on the practice of marginal annotation in paper grading. Here's the link:

Margins Aren't Meant to be Written In

My comments after the break ...

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A couple of years ago, my CWRL project group set out to determine how Second Life could be used in the rhetoric classroom. Starting with the tool, we tried to imagine an assignment that would fit--somehow--into our curriculum. Only one person in the group tried the assignment we developed. It was irrelevant to the rest of our courses.

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As writers, we often have to be versatile and flexible in order to gain new clients - or to keep old ones. Good writers are seldom one-dimensional; we often wear many hats, functioning now as a feature writer, then as a publicist, and at another time as a sort of media communications specialist. We are sometimes called on to write ad copy; at others times we are needed to write biographies or brochures. We are asked to edit or proofread academic essays, and at other times we are summoned to write a speech for a local politician.

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Thanks to a tip from someone over at the Blogora, I've started testing out a new tool called Annotate (check out their website for a 30 day trial). Annotate is an add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 (a version for Word 2003 is forthcoming) that gives you many more options for commenting on student work. There are a lot of stock comments for things like comma splices or transitions.

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If you are going to be teaching video in any of your classes this year, you might be interested in this article on Roger Ebert’s blog:

“How to read a movie”

Now what do I mean by "positive" or "negative?" I mean that these are tendencies within the composition. They are not absolutes. But in general terms, in a two-shot, the person on the right will "seem" dominant over the person on the left. Does this apply even to films from cultures that read right to left or top to bottom? From my treks through many Asian films, yes, it seems to.

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