Literacy: November 2003 Archive Page

It's a peculiarity of scholarly life that everyone is expected to be able to deliver a lecture well, but almost no one is trained to do it....If you put your bulleted ideas up on slides, your audience will look at the slides, not at you. You'll also be teaching them that What You Have to Say Can Be Summarized in a Few Words. Can it? --William Germano --The Scholarly Lecture: How to Stand and Deliver  (Chronicle)

Here's one of my suggestions for organizing oral presentations... plan in advance what you will cut if you run short of time. I've attended far too many lectures in which the speaker has prepared three examples, but the whole audience got the speaker's point after the second example. Save time for the conclusion, and if your first or second example runs long, cut it out altoghether. And don't announce, "I'm going to cut my third example," just don't mention it, and launch right into your conclusion.

He was giving away Zippos for answering a survey.... So, even though I don't smoke, I took the survey. He asked what I smoked, and I answered "Marlboro Lights." Divine inspiration. Then he asked the tough question. "Hard or soft?" Well, I had no idea cigarettes could hard or soft. I was pretty sure they were one consistency -- rolled up stuff.... I'm a horrible story-maker-upper. He gave me the lighter anyway, even though I am a fake. --Julie Young --Buy 3 & $ave (Work in Progress)

Yet another reason why you shouldn't trust surveys. Fakers like Julie lie for trinkets, and the results are published somewhere in a magazine.

[Nothing to quote -- which is ironic, considering the page is about literacy.] --America's Most Literate Cities (U Wisconsin, Whitewater)

An interesting find, from my student Julie Young. The website itself is an abomination -- all these words are images, so you can't copy and paste, a search engine won't be able to find it because search engines don't read images, and a blind person will get no useful information by sending this page through a screen reader. The full paper is available, but only as a PDF. A sad example of print design that misunderstands the power of the Internet. Use text, people.

How can both neuroscience and literature bear on the question of what makes writers not only able, but want, even need, to write? How can we understand the outpouring of authors like Joyce Carol Oates or Stephen King? Why does John Updike see a blank sheet of paper as radiant, the sun rising in the morning? (As William Pritchard said of him, "He must have had an unpublished thought, but you couldn't tell it.") This seems -- and is -- an unbelievably complex psychological trait. --Alice Weaver Flaherty --Writing Like Crazy: a Word on the Brain (Chronicle)

It's hard to tell from the title, but this article examines the writing urge and writer's block (whoops -- I typed "blog") as physiological as well as psychological phenomena, such as suggesting that the November/December creativity slump may be casued by a latent hibernation instinct brought about by shorter days. The article also refers casually to Freud in a way that I find maddening... Freud may be extremely useful as we attempt to understand the modern mindeset, but I think it is naive to refer to him now, when we have so many more scientifically accurate models for describing and affecting human behavior. (But see Mike Arnzen's defense of Freud [in the comments].)

High schools no longer prepare most students to express ideas coherently or follow accepted English, let alone carry on serious intellectual work..... The task falls to me -- in courses ostensibly about specified topics, not composition -- to patch up these leaky vessels.... I hold that a university education ought to include a significant writing component, that student writing deserves substantial professorial comment, that every student can become a better writer with practice, and that this is the last effective chance for them to get practice and feedback. If not us, who? --Max Clio

--Grading on My Nerves (Chronicle)

I suppose you could say that the subhead trend bothers me because I'm a writer and I try desperately to perfect antiquated stuff.

Transitions and Flow

Like transitions and flow, and because I think writing, like most everything else good in life, revolves around flow and rhythm. But the truth is, subheads bug me even more as a reader. Some of the best editors I've ever had have justified subheads to me, explaining that they are necessary "eye candy" and "reader guides" imperative to "reader friendliness."

I'm with Stupid

All I know is that whenever I read a column or story that's been broken up by subheads, especially a syndicated story that appeared somewhere else first without any subheads, my inner reader feels violated.--Jim Walsh

--Commence Skimming: Start reading. Now. Or. Whatever. (City Pages)

Note the way the imaginary copy-editor inserting the subheads starts arguing with the writer.

Great Stuff

This is great stuff, though I shudder to think

what

Amanda

will

say

about

it.

Found on A & L Daily.

Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Communication, and Culture (LCC) will offer a Ph.D. in Digital Media, starting fall 2004. The program, one of the first of its kind worldwide, is aimed at educating research-oriented theorist/practitioners who will bring the traditions of the humanities and arts to the design of digital media. Graduates of the program will be prepared to work in industry, public service, and universities, where they will help to shape the emerging digital genres and to expand our understanding and mastery of the representational power of the computer. --PhD in Digital Media (Ga Tech)

Janet Murray is launching this program, which sounds absolutely wonderful. Found on GTA.

By presenting us with colourful screens and buttons for us to click on, Microsoft encourages us to believe that we can force computers to adapt entirely to our preferences for visual images, without having to adapt ourselves to their preference for text. | But not only does this prevent people from getting inside the machine and keep them in a state of blissful ignorance, it also proves to be a deceit, for in the end the user still has to adapt to the machine anyway. --Dylan Evans --Smash the Windows (Guardian)

c:>print "I love the command-line interface"

A while back Michael Lesk wrote a paper called ?How Much Information is There in the World?? That work has now been updated by a team led by Peter Lyman and Hal Varian: ?How Much Information 2003?? --How Much Information? (Via MGK)

Professors today often believe erroneously that they are already teaching critical thinking in their courses and that students are absorbing it... "[College seinors] say, 'Look how open-minded I am.' But when pressed to say, 'What do you think about this? What suggestions would you make and what are they based on?' - that's when the process falls apart. They are unable to reach or defend a conclusion that's most reasonable and consistent with the facts." -- Patricia King, quoted in an article by Mark Clayton --Rethinking Thinking (Christian Science Monitor)