Category: Interviews

Technology Access and Use in Writing Intensive Courses

Post author By caitlincholmes
Post date June 14, 2017

By Bree McGregor, December 17, 2015

Part 1: Introduction

The National Council of Teachers of English describes digital literacy as “proficiency and fluency with the tools of technology” (The NCTE definition, 2013), which include utilizing a networked, social approach to designing, sharing, analyzing, and synthesizing information, and the application of ethical considerations that such complex environments require. At George Mason University, we strive to embody an innovative spirit at institutional and programmatic levels:

Tags classroom technology, digital literacy, George Mason University, technology, WAC, Writing, Writing Across the Curriculum, writing intensive courses

Faculty Writing Graduate Students Interviews Undergraduate Perspectives

Announcing Writers of Mason!

Post author By clarelmoore
Post date February 16, 2017

At heart, all university campuses are communities of writers.

In Mason’s Writing Across the Curriculum Program, we work with a diverse array of writers. Mason’s students write in multiple contexts, with different styles, and for a variety of purposes. Our faculty teach writing in classrooms, seminars, and as part of their local and global field projects. Students and faculty alike contribute to the literature of their scholarly, research, creative, and professional communities.

Tags George Mason University, humans of new york, profile, project, WAC, writers of mason, Writing, Writing Across the Curriculum

Interviews Modules

How to Be a Better Writer – 6 Tips from Harvard’s Steven Pinker

Post author By caitedungan
Post date November 17, 2014

Though writing is certainly one of the most complex acts humans engage in, sometimes it helps to boil the crafting of writing down to its most basic elements. When it comes to good writing, the essentials go beyond process and repetition and into the realm of psychology. Time’s Eric Barker interviewed Steven Pinker, of Harvard’s Department of Psychology, on what he considers to be the best tips for better writing. These helpful strategies are deceptively simple: things like “Don’t assume your reader knows what you already know.”

“…another bit of cognitive science that is highly relevant is a phenomenon called ‘the curse of knowledge.’ Namely, the inability that we all have in imagining what it’s like not to know something that we do know. And that has been studied in various guises in the psychological literature. People assume that the words that they know are common knowledge. That the facts that they know are universally known… the writer doesn’t stop to think what the reader doesn’t know.”

How to Be a Better Writer: 6 Tips from Harvard’s Steven Pinker