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Monthly Archives: April 2012
cautionary tale: overly clever metaphor
“If Oklahoma City is going to become a great team, which is not in any way guaranteed but which is within their field of possibility, they’re going to have to get used to things being weird, and to dealing with … Continue reading
Posted in Prose Style and Substance
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something else is probably going on here
As a mere consumer of journalism, I tend to think that what’s necessary in journalism isn’t just an adversarial attitude but a universally adversarial attitude, that is, skepticism towards all parties in a given dispute. That doesn’t mean that you … Continue reading
Posted in Education, The Discipline
2 Comments
resource on the first person for students
A webtext I wrote for the online journal Writing Commons has survived the peer review process and been published. WC’s webtexts are designed as resources for students to develop their writing and multimedia compositions; mine considers the effective use of … Continue reading
Richard Fulkerson’s Four Axiologies
I’m going to tell you a story, or really, a paraphrase of someone else’s story. Richard Fulkerson, a compositionist and Professor Emeritus in the Texas A&M system, wrote a series of controversial articles (over a span of decades) that traced … Continue reading
quote for the day
“In 1975, Derek Bok, president of Harvard, asked Dean K. Whitla, director of the Office of Students, to verify the widespread belief that undergraduates were leaving Harvard-Radcliffe as writers no better than when they entered. Whitla ran a meticulous study … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
3 Comments
good for Will Wilkinson
I don’t like bloggers much. This might seem odd to you, given that I am a blogger. But that’s not really odd when you consider that I don’t like myself much. Still, category “blogger”: what exactly is that supposed to … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
11 Comments
a validity problem, not a reliability problem
Some people are getting overly worked up about this study, showing a high correlation between machine scoring and human scoring of certain writing tasks. Some of it is glee from people in the university-hating media set; there’s also some rending … Continue reading
Posted in Education, Tech Stuff
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my learning community
I’m excited to say that I’ll be teaching a learning community of first generation college students next semester. (That is, students whose parents did not attend college.) Most people don’t associate that demographic with educational disadvantage the way they do … Continue reading
Posted in Education
3 Comments
the Atlantic‘s war on the university
I could, if I felt like it, take this latest anti-university screed from the Atlantic apart. Laura McKenna’s piece is one of the most tired, cliched articles I’ve read in years, a collection of the classic warmed-over complaints about ivory … Continue reading
Posted in Education, Popular & Digital Writing
4 Comments
hypocrisy goes both ways
So you can file this one away as random, picayune, pointless, of interest to almost no one, etc. Years ago, when it came out, I read the book The Gatekeepers by Jacques Steinberg. The book was an (at the time, … Continue reading
Posted in Popular & Digital Writing
3 Comments
cautionary tale: ultra-cliche
“’I ended up with a dream job,’ he says from behind a desk decorated with a massive grizzly skull and a glass statue of a bear. But the last few months had been more like a nightmare.”– Jessica Grose, in … Continue reading
fan culture and the rage of the enfranchised
Pop culture has become inescapable. I have no historical context with which to compare the current dominance of pop culture in our media, so I will restrict my consideration to its status today. I can only say that, if you … Continue reading
Posted in Popular & Digital Writing
7 Comments
