Full circle

Like most compositionists, I taught writing for the first time as a graduate student. Like many, I taught a common syllabus that the course director had designed. Like many, I learned how to teach from that syllabus; from the textbooks chosen for the course; and from the weekly staff development meetings run by the director. That was in the 80s, when one-on-one conferencing was new and when the Diederich scale was still commonly used for evaluating students’ written texts. Lots has changed... [Read more]

New article, new journal

I’m happy to say that an article that Patricia Serviss, Tanya Rodrigue, and I wrote has just been accepted at the new journal Writing and Pedagogy. They’re going to be publishing a special issue on plagiarism. Our article, titled “Writing from Sources, Writing from Sentences,” isn’t actually about plagiarism. Rather, it’s about some of the challenges that students have with source-based writing—challenges that can easily lead to plagiarism but that are important... [Read more]

Tweeting grammar

Demonstrating yet another use of social networking, the Twitter feed thatwhichmatter dishes up a steady diet of all things grammatical: guidelines and rules interspersed with links to online news about grammatical events. I’ve just found this site and haven’t had time to reflect on it, but it seems to me that if you’re wanting to involve your students in social media, this is surely a rich site. Example: a recurring assignment that asks students to critique and respond to a single... [Read more]

Of multiple blogs and singular authorship

Those of you who have been following the comings and goings of Schenectady Synecdoche may be wondering about the fate of that blog, now that Writing Conversations has appeared. Schenectady will continue as a space for blogging about a variety of topics. This space is more specialized; it’s where I’ll be talking about writing, the teaching of writing, and my experiences as a textbook author. If things work out right, it will also be a place where some of the people involved in Writing... [Read more]

Here comes the fall term!

In just a month, classes will start, so I’m thinking now about how to structure my first-year writing course (FYC). I’ve always taught summary as part of my writing courses–in everything from first-year writing to graduate courses. It’s important, I think, because it’s a way of thinking critically about a text. If you can summarize it, you understand it. And if you can summarize it in fresh words, not just “patchwriting” (plugging in a few synonyms or making... [Read more]

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