composition

Between lesson plans, handouts, and multiple drafts of assignments, the reams of paper can really pile up. Not only is that bad for Mama Earth, but it's ergonomically unwise for professors and students to be carrying so much weight. So, trying to do my part to save the world (and to seem cool and up-to-date), I've been experimenting with ways to go paperless. For those of us who use PDF files, I really don't think I can say enough good things about Barnes and Noble's NOOKstudy software-- not to be confused with the NOOK eReader. It's a FREE download that only requires the student to make an account with BarnesandNoble.com. NOOKstudy allows students to read eTextbooks, ePub files, and PDFs on their computers. Unlike reading the file in Adobe Reader, however, NOOKstudy allows you to: take notes and even add tags to those notes  highlight passages in multiple colors easily flip from page to page enlarge the size of the page so that it can be easily read look up words i...

Though I don't claim to be an expert in the field of composition, my experiences as a writing center tutor, as a student, and now as a professor have lead me to see trends in education, not all of which are good. One trend I find particularly unsettling is a seemingly new-found student obsession with grammar. Working as a tutor, I see students come to sessions all the time claiming that they need to work on their grammar. Even worse, sometimes they demand that I ignore their content and only address their grammar. This doesn't just happen in writing centers, though. After asking my Composition course students what they thought made good writing and what they thought were their writing weaknesses, I found that grammar was reiterated over and over again. When I asked them to define revision, there was almost no mention of anything idea-related or content-based. Nearly every revision step they suggested was related to editing and proofreading, in other words, looking for grammar e...