composition

For the past few weeks, I have been working on my very first article for publication. While I'm super excited about having something in print, I am really struggling through it. I do not typically have a hard time producing papers, but I know that I also care much more about this piece than most things I have written, as it will be put in a collection of essays for other academics to judge. I want it to be well-written, well-researched, and well-argued. The problem is that it took me three weeks to write 14 pages, and I didn't even like the 14 pages I wrote. They seemed disorganized, full of loosely connected ideas. They didn't really seem to focus on anything in particular. I kept trying to rework the piece, to move things around, to add more research, or to rewrite awkward sentences. I was trying to merge narrative with research with other narratives in places where they just didn't mesh. My margins were filled with MS Word comments to myself about answering questions...

photocredit: 1000 Unlucky Days This summer, I'm teaching my first online course. It also happens to be a summer course. It doesn't start until July 9, but I've been trying to figure it out since the middle of the Spring semester. I have created about 4 different syllabi at this point and am not really happy with any of them. I love the idea of teaching writing online, and I think, though different, it's a very feasible thing to do. However, teaching writing online in a time period of just 31 days is beginning to seem borderline impossible. I'm having a hard time figuring out how to include all 8 program learning objectives into such a brief amount of time, especially when I can't explain and interject as I would face-to-face. Most universities offer summer courses these days, and typically, they run more than one "session." At one of the universities I attended, there is a 2 week pre-session, two month-long summer sessions, and a 2 week post-session. I...

image from bettermondays.com It's been a while since I posted a new post, and before that, it was a while before I posted a new post. I am the quintessential summer slacker. Just before summer began, I passed my comprehensive exams, putting me into (what should be) one of the busiest summers of my life, but I'm just find it so hard to get and stay motivated or focused. Living on the Jersey Shore doesn't help. The sun comes out, and all I want to do is be out of doors, doing anything but reading and writing. I'm beginning to feel like an undergrad all over again. I'm supposed to be doing research, reading through my archive of FYW portfolios, studying French, writing an article, and figuring out my dissertation topic. I should be putting together three new syllabi for three new courses I'll be teaching-- one of which begins in July-- but I haven't solidified a single one. I pick a book up, I put it down 10 pages later. I can't remember what I read. I star...

Last Tuesday, I had the wonderful pleasure of watching my younger sister graduate college. The commencement speaker at her graduation ceremony was Newark, NJ's own superstar mayor Cory Booker . His speech was funny and inspiring and his message was positive. It was a call to leadership, one that I hope those of us in the audience (graduates, family and friends, staff, and professors) will answer as we move forward. photocredit: Teaneck Patch During his speech, Booker addressed two themes: what he calls "gratitude as gravity" or "the conspiracy of love" and "finding your way." Booker's idea of gratitude as gravity is simply that we should not imagine that we have succeeded all on our own, but that we have been helped along by those before us, whether we have known them or not.  He calls this "a conspiracy of love, " which he explains as this: You are here because people dared to love so hard in their lives that they loved generations yet u...

Hi everyone. This is my first attempt at a vlog. It was an awkward experience talking to myself for 12 minutes, I admit. Also, I did no editing, so you will see all of my slip-ups (including saying that the "message is the medium" and then having to correct myself to say that the "medium is the message"). This video is just a quick run-down of some of the books I read for my comprehensive exam list on Digital Literacy and New Media Studies: On a completely irrelevant side note, I almost never wear glasses in public, and I rarely wear hoodies, so this is probably a poor representation of "everyday Nicole." haha

Today, in class, I assigned my students the following prompt : What is writing? Why do we write? What makes someone a writer? Do you consider yourself a writer? The following is the response I wrote for my class as part of my class-linked blog, but the ideas were ones I thought were worth sharing and getting responses from a larger audience: I think it’s safe to say that my answers to these questions– what is writing? why do we write? what makes someone a writer? do you consider yourself a writer?– are vital to my role as a Composition professor. They shape the way I teach, the way I think about my students’ writing, and the way that I educate myself. To me, writing is a social transaction; it is used to carry messages from one person to the next, from one generation to the next, or even to a single person from one moment to the next. I used to think it was something that happened when someone sat alone in a room and scribbled until they became a famous author, but I don’t think of it ...

This past weekend, I, along with two colleagues from St. John's University and one from Montclair State University, presented a panel at the Northeast Writing Center Association Conference (NEWCA). For those who have never been, I do recommend it. The atmosphere there is warm, inviting, and unlike other conferences that I have been to, very interactive. This year's theme was the Post 9/11 Writing Center. As soon as we saw the theme published in the fall, our small group started thinking about the policies in our centers that evolved out of 9/11, or at least 9/11 rhetoric. In particular, we were concerned with the terms "diversity" and "tolerance." Some of the questions we were wondering were: What did it mean to be tolerant or to promote diversity?  How did our mission to promote tolerance and show acceptance for diversity play itself out in our sessions?  Was demanding tolerance another form of censorship?  Who gets a voice when "tolerance" is dem...