Author: caitlincholmes

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Teaching Writing Technology

Reblog: Writing Without Really Trying

Male hands using iPhone writing a text message

This satirical article appeared on Nick Carbonne’s blog, Odds and Ends, on December 4, 2014.  Nick is the Director of Teaching and Learning for the Bedford/St. Martin’s imprint of Macmillan Education.  His previous academic affiliations include Colorado State University, Marlboro College, UMass-Amherst, Lyndon State College, and Boston College.

We normally think of writing as a very labor-intensive process.  During busy times, how can we look like effective writers, without actually being effective? In Nick Carbonne’s cheeky post, he discusses tips and tricks for writing to appear effective – and perhaps some tricks that students may try to play on faculty as well.  He notes, “On Tuesday I visited a community college in NYC for a meeting with faculty. On the way to the meeting room, we passed clusters of students waiting outside office doors, trails of students following faculty with beseeching eyes, and heard from later arriving faculty that they were delayed by students wanting last minute help, extra time, and all the fun stuff that comes as a semester winds down.”

So, for their sake and maybe yours too, here’s a list of tips and resources you can share w/ students to help alleviate their stress:

#worthassigning: How to Write Effectively without Really Trying

This is cross-genre advice. Feel free to use these tips when sending memos to your supervisor, e-mailing colleagues, working with an author who needs some help, drafting a personal ad, and other places and times when writing makes a difference but you are really too busy to give it much thought.

  1. E-Mail: End all e-mail with “Sent from my iPhone,” or “Sent from Blackberry.”  Research shows that readers of messages with those auto-added advertisements forgive grammar errors and typos more readily:  collision detection: Why people forgive your bad spelling in email “sent from my iPhone”
  2. Georgia, Georgia, the whole document through, just an old sweet font, keep Georgia on your mind, for better grades.  How typeface influences the way we read and think – The Week
  3. If page length matters . . . Triple Space! Graphics!:  http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail64.html
  4. Extortion, lying, and sudden endings: tips for getting readers to read:  http://workableweb.com/_pages/tips_how_to_write_good.htm
Categories
Modules

VIDEO: Principles for Assignment Design

Mason WAC’s learning module on best practices for writing assignment design in any discipline!

Elaborated Assignment
Unelaborated Assignment
Assignment Design Principles

Categories
Technology

Are Cell Phones the Devil? Techniques for Using Mobile Devices in In-Class Writing

Cell Phones

Gavin Leach is an instructor at the University of New Mexico in the Department of Communication and Journalism.  You can contact him at gleach@unm.edu, or on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Every semester college professors seem to struggle with how to manage effectively students’ use of their cell phones. According to a recent study in The Journal of Behavioral Addictions, over 60% of students reported that they self-identify as being “addicted” to their cell phones, citing that they felt a “great deal of anxiety” when apart from their phones after a short period of time (Park, Kee, & Valenzuela, 2009). How are faculty supposed to teach when their students’ eyeballs are glued – perhaps even unknowingly – to that tiny little screen? Instead of a deep introspective look into why and where a professor might have failed, a better strategy can be to consider how an instructor can leverage the online capabilities of mobile devices to increase and enhance the academic value of their in-class writing assignments. Implementation of these three strategies may encourage academic engagement with their cell phones.

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Reviews

Book Review: Sharing our Intellectual Traces

Sharing Image

By Caitlin Dungan

Caitlin Dungan is a PhD student in Mason’s Writing and Rhetoric PhD Program. Caitlin is a Graduate Research Assistant for Mason’s Writing Across the Curriculum Program, and her current research interests include fanfiction, digital media and rhetoric, online feedback practices, and participatory culture.

Sharing our Intellectual Traces: Narrative Reflections from Administrators of Professional, Technical and Scientific Communication Programs, eds. Tracy Bridgeford, Karla Saari Kitalong, Bill Williamson (Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing, 2014).

Sharing our Intellectual Traces walks a mediatory line between the worlds of technical and professional communication, pedagogy, writing program administration, and writing across the curriculum. Though it may seem difficult to weave these related yet disparate areas together, the unique lenses through which this collection views these fields – narrative and administration – are the key to the success of its message and to its utility. The narrative nature of this collection offers perspectives about complicated institutional dynamics in a manner that is relatable and illuminating.

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Categories
Teaching Writing

Read-Around Groups: Low-Stakes and High-Impact Writing in First-Year Composition

 RAGS

By Caitlin Holmes

Since Dr. José Bowen visited Mason in September 2014, I have been working to implement more of his suggestions for teaching practice into my class. I wrote previously about utilizing one such suggestion: a combination of reading, writing in response, and discussion to understand the rhetorical nature of APA style. More recently, I have experimented with another approach to improving student writing in a low-stakes environment that requires students to show the higher-order thinking skills that Dr. Bowen emphasized: read-around groups. During his workshop at Mason, Bowen reminded us that students respond well to uncertainty, failure, and experimentation, and read-around groups (or RAGs, as they are also known) certainly allow for those conditions to emerge in a productive way.

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