Tag: Writing

Reblog: Writing Without Really Trying

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.

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”
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
If page length matters . . . Triple Space! Graphics!: http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail64.html
Extortion, lying, and sudden endings: tips for getting readers to read: http://workableweb.com/_pages/tips_how_to_write_good.htm

VIDEO: Principles for Assignment Design

Responding to Student Writing/Writers

Teaching and Learning in Higher Ed. highlights some of the best practices from Nancy Sommers’ new book, Responding to Student Writers. One of the most helpful insights is the ability to recognize that our comments to students may be contradictory, misleading, or vague, and that the real purpose of offering feedback to students is to “teach one lesson at a time.”

“We should ‘ask ourselves: What single lesson do I want to convey to students through comments? And how will I teach this lesson?'”

Blast From the Past – Revisiting WAC Concepts Twelve Years Later

As the conversations about Writing Across the Curriculum continue to evolve and march forward, it is always helpful to look back and see how far the program has come, both nationally and close to home. Today, we are linking back to a Mason WAC Newsletter from Fall of 2002 that highlights the strengths and challenges of digital writing. Lesley Smith and James Young offer insights into the benefits of digital writing in e-portfolios, and Ruth Fischer shares the credentials she and her colleagues created for the necessary IT skills of first-year composition students. The methods for implementing digital writing in the classroom have certainly progressed in the last twelve years, but the core pedagogical concepts remain the same.

“In an electronic space,” Smith and Young write, “those who perhaps struggle with words but excel with images might combine the two, and access a richness of perception previously denied both to them as writers and to their faculty members as assessors.”

WAC Newsletter – Fall 2002

Write Nerdy to Me: Utilizing Fanfiction in WAC/WID Courses

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.

It’s interesting, perplexing, and – I think – exciting that geek culture has emerged as mainstream. Realms previously reserved for a few indoctrinated fans are now open for participation to the many. One of the side effects of this growth in fandoms is the increasing number of emergent writers embracing fanfiction as a creative outlet. As young fans pursue this unique composition practice and post their works on online forums like fanfiction.net or Archive of Our Own, how much of this self-sponsored writing is informing their writing practice in the classroom?