composition

Using the iSearch Model to Improve a Previously Dreadful 5-week Online Comp Course #TeacherFail Last year, I taught my very first online class. I thought I"d be awesome at it, seeing as I'm so connected to social media and constantly using the internet. Gosh, was I wrong! The whole class felt like a trainwreck to me. It was hard to keep students motivated. I realized I was not always as clear as I thought I was being, and I didn't get final projects that demonstrated the kind of in-depth thinking and writing improvement that I was used to seeing in my 15-week face-to-face classes. Changes had to be made. The problem with my first summer online course was that I was unwilling to try something I hadn't done before. While I was up for trying new technologies, I was sticking closely to what I had done in my face-to-face classes, simply trying to reshape time frames and assignments. Online is not the same thing as face-to-face, and a 5-week class is not the same thing as a ...

Today, my Facebook newsfeed was covered with stories about government-mandated oppression and silencing across the world. At least 94 protestors were killed in Egypt by state security forces. A US woman was deported from Bahrain  after writing articles and comments on social media that the Bahraini government decided  "incited hatred against the government."  As I read these headlines, I was also moved by an email I received: a student could not participate in my course because the government of the nation where this student resided blocked access to many sites. The student could not perform unbiased research-- or perform research at all, in some cases-- so the student was forced to withdraw, hoping to take the course again when back in the U.S. This made me think hard about the globalization that many universities aim to promote. In my online summer course, for example, I have several international students, and they are taking the course from their home country. While ...

High School and Higher Ed. Writing Instructors Come Together This Monday, I attended a great event, Across the Divide, a writing forum that connected high school writing instructors from multiple disciplines with college writing instructors (mostly FYW). The forum took place in the form of a 2-hour roundtable talk that was based around organic discussion. It was held in a beautiful conference room at Biotechnology High School in Freehold, NJ, where several of the high school teachers were currently teaching.  The conversations were insightful, constructive, and fun. You can watch the conversation and check out the  live-tweet feed  to see for yourself! Just a quick aside: I found out about this event from my twitter pal, @ ReadyWriting . I was immediately interested because I don't think there are nearly enough opportunities for high school and college educators to collaborate. Plus, I am an alumna of the school district that was hosting the event and still live...

Cover Letters and the Consequences of Lacking Rhetorical Awareness As I wrote about in my last post, I've been working part-time at an IT company as a technical writer for the summer. One of the tasks that have been entrusted to me as part of the technical writing team is to filter through applications for a full-time entry-level technical writer. I thought that choosing between the qualified candidates would be a difficult task. Instead, finding a qualified individual has been the harder job. It's shocking how many people claim "excellence in written communication," yet fail miserably at effectively communicating. There are several composing models that I could use to think about these issues. I could consider Flower and Hayes' thoughts on defining a rhetorical problem-- better writers see more layers. I could consider Lloyd Bitzer's theories on about exigences, audiences, and constraints. These applications are ineffective because they seem to only consider ...

image from techwhirl.com For the past few weeks, I've been working part-time at an IT consulting & network integration firm in downtown Manhattan as part of the technical writing team (which is really just me & the existing technical writer). The thing is, even though I’m (somewhat) proficient at writing for academic purposes, technical writing is a whole new ball game. While my writing is clean and easy to read, I don’t always have the knowledge to write what needs to be written. It’s a bit confidence-shaking. I’m feeling like an intern rather than someone whose specialty is writing. Feeling like a beginner isn't easy, especially when you've devoted your entire adult life thus far to studying English and Communications, and even more so when as a writing instructor and writing consultant, I’m supposed to be an expert writer. It’s true that I can write for many contexts. Heck, I can even teach writing in the disciplines! But writing in the professional domain about ...

Even though I spent my early years in a bilingual household-- my grandparents, aunt, father and their friends all spoke Greek and English-- I lost my connection to the Greek language when we moved from the duplex my family shared with my grandparents to our own single-family home in New Jersey just before my 5th birthday. While I may still know a few words here and there, I am by no means fluent. I don't know what it's like to know two languages, let alone use them interchangeably. Which is why I'm fascinated by my boyfriend's 3-year-old sister (aside from being one of the coolest little kids I know). My boyfriend and his family are Brazilian-- not of Brazilian descent, but actually from Brazil. His sister, though, was born and raised in America. Dear BF is completely fluent in English (even more so than some English-speaking people I know I'd say), and his mother speaks enough to get by, though she is more comfortable with and prefers to speak in Portuguese. His li...

My longtime readers already know that when I began my doctoral program, my intention was today study Victorian literature, specifically Children's literature of the Victorian age. A little less than a semester in, however, I decided to flip to the dark side of Comp/Rhet, and I've loved every minute of it. The problem is that I began my doctoral program with a background in British literature and Children's literature, and because I already had a M.A., I was fast-tracked in my residency requirements. This meant that while I normally would have had three years of full-time classes, I was cut down to one-- nice for my wallet, not so nice for my brain. Now that I'm at the dissertation phase, I'm struggling. I picked three areas of interest for my comprehensive exams that were somewhat useful, but not directly applicable to my dissertation. So at the moment, I'm forced to play catch up with all of the readings that I missed over two years of lost residency and to fig...