composition

photocredit: tiffersniffer.blogspot.com So, summer is nearly at an end, and for whatever reason, this particular summer seems to have gone faster than any other of record in my lifetime. Whew! What a whirlwind! It's been a wonderful few months, though. I've really learned a lot. I taught an online Composition course that was just 4 1/2 weeks because it was a summer class. I also taught a 3-week academic reading course for incoming students. I worked on my dissertation, though I still haven't hammered out what I want to say. I started to try translating French to prep for my language exam. I prepared a syllabus for a Composition course that reorganized my class for a non-wireless classroom and managed to incorporate an additional project. I even put together a syllabus for another class I've never taught before, Writing in the Disciplines, which I can't wait to teach! And if you're wondering about my personal life, I managed to have my very first summer fling, se...

image from Big Ten Science In a recent blog post on GOOD Education called "' Wat up wit u': Yep, Texting is Killing Students' Grammar Skills ," Liz Dwyer explores the claim that texting is destroying writing and cites the findings of a recent study on 10-14 year old texters. Researchers found that the more texting a 10-14-year-old did, the more grammar errors they made in non-texting writing. Ultimately, Dwyer claims that this is not simply because kids are texting, but because they are not given adequate opportunities to practice the formal academic concepts of grammar in school due to the focus on high-stakes testing and quick-to-grade non-writing-intensive assignments from overwhelmed instructors. While I think Dwyer is accurate in claiming that better writing instruction is needed, I don't buy it all. "Grammar" is, of course, one of those concepts that fascinates me. Grammar seems to be a blanket statement for everything sentence-level-related. T...