Writing: February 2006 Archive Page

According to the study, north European women evolved blonde hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males. --Roger Dobson and Abul Taher --Cavegirls were first blondes to have fun (Times Online)

The authors conclude by stating, "A study by the World Health Organisation found that natural blonds are likely to be extinct within 200 years because there are too few people carrying the blond gene. According to the WHO study, the last natural blond is likely to be born in Finland during 2202."

Indeed, in 2002, plenty of media sites carried the story, "Blondes 'to die out in 200 years'." But a few days later, the World Health Organization published the following statement: "WHO wishes to clarify that it has never conducted research on this subject. Nor, to the best of its knowledge, has WHO issued a report predicting that ‘natural blondes are likely to be extinct by 2202’. WHO has no knowledge of how these news reports originated but would like to stress that we have no opinion on the future existence of blondes."

I like the quote from the researcher who said that as a young blonde touring Majorca her bum was sore from all the pinching, but Dobson and Taher, your Journalism 101 instructors are probably pulling out fistfuls of their hair (whatever color it may be). Check your sources!

--Ex 1-4c: A Clever Blank-Verse Entry on Your Blog (Intro to Literary Study (EL150))

I know they're only doing it because
I've made them; still, it thrills me every time
My students write in blank verse on their blogs.

Although Curious George and Brokeback Mountain share many similarities, they also share many differences. Both involve men in hats, but the meaning of the hat changes. --Men in Hats, or, I'm Glad I Don't Teach Composition Anymore ( Confessions of a Community College Dean)

"I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that this kind of behavior is naturally rewarded," cautions Paul Argenti, professor of corporate communication at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. "But it does lead to success in some realms." And those realms can include the legal profession, sales teams, trading floors, entrepreneurial endeavors -- in other words, the corners of the business world where unmitigated gall can be more marketable than galling. "This could be great for [Ms. Abdala's] career if you think about it," he says.

That's because in the rough and tumble of business, bad behavior is sometimes admired, and good behavior isn't necessarily rewarded. Take, for example, corporate whistleblowers, who don't exactly get promoted for their efforts and often have to turn to the law to protect themselves, Prof. Argenti says. --Infamous Email Writers Aren't Always Killing Their Careers After All (Wall Street Journal Online)

I've been part of the "beware what you write" contingent, and I'll continue to deliver that message, because it's usually true.

Sometimes, it does make sense to take a strong stand and defend it, come hell or high water, but one has to pick one's battles.

Found Poetry Exercise: So Rich with Lines I Could Post (Seton Hill University -- Home Page)

I can't remember when I first noticed it, but that's a "Blog!" link on the SHU home page. I'm delighted to see the value of SHU blogging reflected in such a visible way.

While the context suggests that the link will point to a place where prospective students can blog, the link points to the always useful SHU Admissions weblog. Of course, there is a wealth of other blogging going on at SHU, and which might also be of interest to prospective students.

I'm not feeling well enough to do this subject justice, but I can still copy and paste. So, in honor of all the great blogging at Seton Hill University, I present this "found poetry" exercise. Blog on, my friends!

So Rich with Lines I Could Post

First let me say that I am more than excited to finally be reading this story again.
The Bush Administration walks a fine line when it comes to finding out
the wolverine is the big pimp daddy of the animal kingdom.
he seems to be waiting for Ceasar to act and then he will counter-act

"separated" was the box I checked off
In the final pane, Snoopy asks, "Sick doesn't count?"
I have enough boxes for the first fifteen craftsters
our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share

She would rathter be ignorant of the affair
the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool
Upon arriving to campus Tuesday evening, you will meet other sleepover guests
This process continues until all the pieces in the room have been judged five times.

I love the way Cleopatra is described. She is the one who really rules
she is somehow better than he is, as a member of the "secret society"
Last semester, it was OK to uses APA Citation. Now we have to use MLA
do you think that love can work in something like politics?

When Students Count with Fingers in My Class (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The infection that's been toying with me for the last week has finally pounced. I've been idly surfing, looking for a lost CD, rearranging my bedcovers, and just sort of waiting to get tired so that I'll fall alseep asleep.

But what's going through my head is the delightful sight of my students counting off iambic pentameter syllables on their fingers during a brief blank-verse writing exercise in this morning's "Intro to Literary Study" class. A colleague presented on kinesthetic learning in a "Teaching and Learning Forum" today, and seeing students moving their mouths to pronounce words, bobbing their heads to the rhythm of the language they are thinking to themselves, and keeping track of how many syllables they've stressed was such an unusal unusual and delightful sight I won't soon forget it. I do invite my lit survey students to use their bodies when they recite poetry aloud, but I've never seen just how physical the act of creating poetry can be. If I weren't so sick right now, I might try to write a sonnet about the experience.

I'm having my students analyze and spoof a sonnet, so that they can become familiar enough with the form to write their own sonnet for an upcoming "Sonnet Slam." In class, I suggested that we work on a few quatrains on the subject of cold weather, but when one student mentioned blogs, the others thought that was better. I saved the six or seven lines we managed to get through during the 15-minute workshop, but I don't have them with me. They took the occasion to poke fun at me, my love of blogs, and the fanny pack I always wear.

At any rate, students reported that writing the spoof sonnet was harder than they expeted expected. Most seem to have forgotten that sonnets follow a rhyme scheme, perhaps beause because I didn't do a good enough job distinguishing the sonnet from blank verse. (Another reason we're working on iambic pentameter is because we're about to start reading Antony and Cleopatra.)

Since this isn't a course in sonnet-writing, I'll be generous when I eavaluate evaluate their spoofs, but I do plan to ask them to peer-review and revise the sonnets they create on their own, so they'll have two more chances to get that complex rhyme sceme scheme right.

Update, 21 Feb: Yipes, that was a lot of typos. I knew I wasn’t feeling my best when I wrote that, but I had no idea. In class today I came up with a metaphor about the nested stories of Nick and Gatsby as being the same theme in different keys, and I had to interrupt myself to ask the class if that was a good metaphor, because I really had no idea. Whatever part of my brain that I use for evaluating is not functioning very well right now. I usually correct my blog typos quietly, but this time I've just marked them like this in order to remind myself to be very careful the next time I try to blog while sick.

But as with any revolution, we must ask whether we are being sold a naked emperor. Is blogging really an information revolution? Is it about to drive the mainstream news media into oblivion? Or is it just another crock of virtual gold - a meretricious equivalent of all those noisy internet start-ups that were going to build a brave ?new economy? a few years ago?

Shouldn?t we just be a tiny bit sceptical of another information revolution following on so fast from the last one - especially as this time round no one is even pretending to be getting rich? Isn?t the problem of the media right now that we barely have time to read a newspaper, let alone traverse the thoughts of a million bloggers? --Trevor Butterworth --Time for the last post (FT.com)

The point of blogging isn't that you can easily read what other people write. It's that they can easily read what you write. It's not the reading that's a new component of the blogosphere, it's the writing.

The very nature of e-mail (which, along with first cousins IM and text messaging, is an undeniably handy means of chatting) encourages sloppy "penmanship," as it were. Its speed and informality sing a siren song of incompetent communication, a virtual hooker beckoning to the drunken sailor as he staggers along the wharf.

But it's not enough to simply vomit out of your fingers. It's important to say what you mean clearly, correctly and well. It's important to maintain high standards. It's important to think before you write. --Tony Long --Literacy Limps Into the Kill Zone (Wired)

The reason for this is egocentrism, or the difficulty some people have detaching themselves from their own perspective, says Epley. In other words, people aren't that good at imagining how a message might be understood from another person's perspective. --Stephen Leahy --The Secret Cause of Flame Wars (Wired)

The Swing
Robert Louis Stevenson

HOW do you like to go up in a swing,
  Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
  Ever a child can do!

Up in the air and over the wall,
  Till I can see so wide,
Rivers and trees and cattle and all
  Over the countryside?

Till I look down on the garden green,
  Down on the roof so brown?
Up in the air I go flying again,
  Up in the air and down! --Happy, Happy Poetry (Introduction to Literary Study (Seton Hill University))

This is one of several happy poems I've assigned for tomorrow's Intro to Literary Study class.

I've had students who expect all poetry to be like this -- light and snappy and short, with only a single point to make. But happy people who live stable lives just aren't very interesting, artistically. It's the threatened, terrified, and dying people do things worth writing about (and reading about).

On the other hand, art covers the full range of human emotions -- including cheerfulness. While cleverness in poetry will only get you so far, I think that angst-ridden poets who pour their heart, soul, blood, phlegm, and bile into their verses could learn a thing or two from these examples, which demonstrate the potential of poetry to delight.

Why? Well, in part, I want to make up for the depressing selection of poems I asked you to read last time. But budding poets can also learn from this example. If you know really well how poems can delight, then you can focus on creating delight in the reader, rather than simply expressing the feelings inside you.

If you create poems out of a need to express the innermost, deepest feelings that would otherwise go unexpressed, then you'll end up with poems that mean quite a bit to you (because you mention a song that was important to you, the name of a person who invokes strong feelings, or a place that holds emotional significance for you), but leaves your readers scratching their heads.

In addition, once you've mastered delight, you can subvert your newfound talent to make poetry that totally creeps people out. (See Dr. Arnzen's Gorelets.)

--Ten Things About Ten Things About Writing (Paperback Writer)

A top ten list of top-ten lists about writing. (A former student of mine, Kathy Kennedy, wrote "Short Stories: 10 Tips for Novice Creative Writers" as part of a technical writing class.)

As recently as a few years ago, Aftab said the profile of an online victim was a young woman who felt alone, didn't have many friends and craved attention.

Then, in 2002, 13-year-old Christina Long of Danbury was strangled in a Danbury mall parking lot by a 26-year-old man she met on the internet. Long was a popular cheerleader, a good student and an altar girl. The profile went out the window.

Now, Aftab said, it's no surprise that a wealthy state such as Connecticut is seeing a spate of problems. "This is a rich and upper-middle-class problem," Aftab said. "They have too much time, too much technology and their parents aren't around to keep an eye on them." --Teens Reveal Too Much Online (Wired | AP)

I've had a fair share of student bloggers who aren't thinking clearly about the consequences of writing something unintentionally revealing or deliberately offensive, but the real reason I'm blogging this is that very weird sentence, "The profile went out the window."

Huh?

I gather that the author was trying to say that particular profile was unusual or extreme, but I'm not sure how to relate the details ("a popular cheerleader, a good student and an altar girl") with the description "out the window." Perhaps the author intended that to be part of an extended metaphor that was introduced in an earlier paragraph that got edited or cut.

I've blogged before about the cultural value of shallow but deeply-linked social networks.

When I say "shallow" I don't mean the people using it are shallow, but rather the value is in the links themselves. A blog requires writing and responding, and while a social network site can involve writing, part of the reason the system grows so quickly is that using the site means adding yourself to existing lists or creating lists for other people to sign on to. And, for all teenagers like telling the rest of the world that they all want to be independent and do their own thing, most teenagers spend a lot of time and money on the difficult task of conforming to the social expectations of their peer groups.

After 145 years, Western Union has quietly stopped sending telegrams. --Era Ends: Western Union Stops Sending Telegrams (Live Science)

Expiry Date for Courses (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

In my in box today, a question to ponder. What courses from your program should not be accepted for transfer credit after 10 years have passed?

If you started a science major 10 years ago, and took some foundational courses, and then dropped the major, how much of what was then considered cutting-edge knowledge would be obsolete if you went back to school a decade later? At least some of it.

An English student who learned literary theory 10 years ago may not be up on the latest trends, but should ideally have been exposed to research methods that would make it fairly easy to catch up on a level sufficient for undergraduate work. (Besides, plenty of English academics do their job just fine without paying much attention to the developments of the past decade.)

While the culture of journalism and the methods of delivery have changed, the bedrock principles of journalism (the difference between edtitorializing and reporting; the relationship between expected depth and time until deadline; the importance of checking your sources) are pretty stable.

What about writing for the internet? In 1996, when the World Wide Web was young, and graphical browsers were just starting to introduce the internet to large numbers of people who were not computer specialists, Jakob Nielsen wrote Writing Inverted Pyramids in Cyberspace and In Defense of Print. Both of these contain dated information (one so dated that Nielsen added an update), but once again, the principles are still solid. A set of handouts I wrote for the Engineering Writing Centre in 1998 are still pretty accurate. A page I wrote called "Annotate Your Lists of Links" covers most of the basic concepts that I now teach in the context of writing for weblogs.

Since new media genres are constantly emerging and changing, it's likely that the content of the "New Media Projects" course that I'll teach for the first time this fall will look very different from what it will be in 2016, but I suppose I'll still be teaching interactive fiction, and I hope I'm still teaching it in 2026 and beyond.

In all my classes, I'm most interested in teaching process, which changes more slowly than the content.

Yes, the actual steps you take in order to get text onto the internet has changed in the last 10 years, but the process of prototyping, beta-testing, and quality control is still the same.