Writing: October 2008 Archive Page

A researcher who studies World of Warcraft likens leading in-game raiding parties to teaching a class.

Raiding has taught me that being a good teacher requires laying down strict guidelines while simultaneously demonstrating real care for your students. The stronger the ties of trust and respect between teacher and student, the more weight they will bear. In the past I've cringed when my raid leaders cheerfully announced that we would spend the next four hours dying over, and over, and over again to a boss who seemed impossible to defeat. But I've trusted them, done my job, and ultimately we have triumphed because they insisted on perseverance. The visiting raid leader who took us through the Kael raid lacked that history with us -- he was too much of a stranger to ask us to dig deep and give big.

A willingness to take risks can also be shored up by commitment and drive. Our guest leader drove my guildies nuts, but impressed me with his professionalism. Does this mean that after graduate school even generous doses of sadism seem unremarkable? Perhaps. But it also indicates that I was willing to work hard to see Kael dead, even if it meant catching some flack. For them, it was a game, and when it stopped being fun they lost interest.

What I learned that night was that I believe in the power of fear and humiliation as teaching methods. Obviously, I don't think they are teaching methods that should be used often, or be at the heart of our pedagogy. But I do think that there are occasions when it is appropriate to let people know that there is no safety net. There are times -- not all the time, or most of the time, but occasionally and inevitably -- when you have to tell people to shut up and do their job. I'm not happy to discover that I believe this, and in some ways I wish I didn't. But Warcraft has taught me that I there is a place for "sink or swim" methods in teaching. (Alex Golub, Inside Higher Ed)

The headline immediately caught my attention.  I went to Catholic high school, and while most of my teachers were laypeople (that is, not nuns or priests), my freshman year I had an octogenarian Latin teacher who would threaten to throw erasers at us -- but always with a twinkle in his eye.  He was actually very patient and charming, but he used the eraser threat as if he were parodying the stereotype of a strict teacher. 

My Algebra II / Trigonometry teacher was not a parody, she was serious. Usually, the only praise she ever gave was moving on to the next student after you'd survived your grilling. After a quiz, she would say "Everyone who got an A, bring your paper up.  Now everyone who got a B, bring your paper up.  Now, all the rest of you."  That was a sort of reverse humiliation, since the rest of us saw that someone was able to earn an A. She called us "Sir Jerz" or "Lady Ryan," which I suppose was vaguely appropriate, since our mascot was a knight, but I'm sure her goal was to take us down a peg or two and remind us who was really in charge.  If we answered her question with a "yes," she'd say "Yes, what?" And we'd say, "Yes, sister." 

I've had plenty of other teachers who were more personable, and made me feel happier while I was in the classroom, but she really stands out in my memory. But boy, she really made me want to study.

One of my freshmen recently submitted a paper about how to overcome writer's block.  It reminded me of this story, which I came across many years ago and was able to find again fairly quickly with Google. Fun stuff.

The purpose of this sentence (which can also serve as a paragraph) is to speculate that if the Declaration of Independence had been worded and structured as lackadaisically and incoherently as this story has been so far, there's no telling what kind of warped libertine society we'd be living in now or to what depths of decadence the inhabitants of this country might have sunk, even to the point of deranged and debased writers constructing irritatingly cumbersome and needlessly prolix sentences that sometimes possess the questionable if not downright undesirable quality of referring to themselves and they sometimes even become run-on sentences or exhibit other signs of inexcusably sloppy grammar like unneeded superfluous redundancies that almost certainly would have insidious effects on the lifestyle and morals of our impressionable youth, leading them to commit incest or even murder and maybe that's why Billy is strangling his mother, because of sentences just like this one, which have no discernible goals or perspicuous purpose and just end up anywhere, even in mid

Bizarre. A sentence fragment. Another fragment. Twelve years old. This is a sentence that. Fragmented. And strangling his mother. Sorry, sorry. Bizarre. This. More fragments. This is it. Fragments. The title of this story, which. Blond. Sorry, sorry. Fragment after frag- ment. Harder. This is a sentence that. Fragments. Damn good device.

The purpose of this sentence is threefold: (1) to apologize for the unfortunate and inexplicable lapse exhibited by the preceding paragraph; (2) to assure you, the reader, that it will not happen again; and (3) to reiterate the point that these are uncertain and difficult times and that aspects of language, even seemingly stable and deeply rooted ones such as syntax and meaning, do break down. This sentence adds nothing substantial to the sentiments of the preceding sentence but merely provides a concluding sentence to this paragraph, which otherwise might not have one.

This sentence, in a sudden and courageous burst of altruism, tries to abandon the self-referential mode but fails. This sentence tries again, but the attempt is doomed from the start.-- David Moser

Jim  Munroe, a Toronto indie new media author whose work I've been following for some time, recently published this useful article on building an audience. Of course he mentions self-published print zines and blogs, but he also mentions another subject I've been introducing my students to this term...

6. TEXT ADVENTURE VIDEOGAMES
Anyone out there play Zork as a kid? Or any text adventure games? Go west, Take sword? They were a type of videogame that was entirely text, and is also known as interactive fiction. IF is an amazing thing: a videogame you can make without programming or graphics skills.

Quick Tips:
-there's a community of people who write and play these games, and they have a competition each year that often attracts more than 50 new games (one's happening now! Download and vote!)
-and thanks to this community, there are now tools that make it possible for non-programmers to write these games, one in particular is called Inform 7
-the audience for text games is small but intense
-it's kind of like poetry in that there's no money in it, and the audience for it is small, but if you were affected by it in your youth you keep coming back to it -- some people had a slim volume of poetry and I had The Lurking Horror

A few weeks ago, my editors were bummed when I pointed out that an unusually large number of typos had slipped through the proofreading net and popped up in the headlines.  For the most recent issue, the headlines were fine, but I found three typos in bylines.

So the student paper isn't perfect. Even Homer nods, and sometimes, so does The Gray Lady.

In this NYT article, the focus is on Cindy McCain's relationship to congress, not her wealth, so shouldn't that be "Capitol"?
I asked the student editor not to try to place the blame on any one person, but rather to work towards a culture where more people take responsibility for checking the paper for errors. 

We've added an extra issue each semester, so the students are under more pressure, yet the quality of their journalism has remained high. 

I'll just keep asking them to work on polish and AP style. (We'll be fine.)

http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html

I'd like to be able to link to specific details on the map, but I don't think it's possible.

I'd never heard of the "Argument Slide" before.  The "concept visualization" cluster is probably most useful for teaching my freshman writing students.  I'm taking a quick break from marking midterms, and I only glanced at this. Filing it for later. (Via Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, where Lisa Spiro also introduces me to the term "slow blogging").

Beautiful, beautiful 1980s introduction to "sophisticated word-processor" technology.

A journalism student at NYU published a Generation Y-ney piece on PBS's MediaShift.

The first thing I notice when I walk into the class is that there are 14 girls and two boys. Already NYU is dominated by females, but the journalism department is exceptionally estrogen-infested. Professor Quigley begins by explaining how blogs are becoming more imprtant and asks if any of us have a blog.

One hand slowly rises. It's mine. (Alana Taylor)

It's certainly... interesting to have a student publicly evaluate a class in this manner, after the class has been in session for a few weeks.   While she is careful to distance her essay from a personal attack on her professor, she complains about the old-media stance of the course, and the program as a whole. Based on the scarcity of student bloggers in this particular classroom, it seems to me that the professor is pitching the class at the right level -- though the generic term "blog" is far less familiar to today's teens than branded bloglike entities "Facebook" or "MySpace." 

My former student, Amanda Cochran, now a grad student at NYU, reacts to Taylor's piece.

Like Taylor, I am one of the only bloggers in my graduate school class, and I'm looked upon as a novelty. As many of my readers know, blogging was an important part of my undergrad experience. We were on the cutting edge of journalism (and still are) at Seton Hill -- as it would seem in light of this report. I know about blogging. I know what I need to do to write a good blog. This ability has enhanced my resume and, more importantly, my understanding of online media and its direction. However, it is true that few other students do know about blogging and its ramifications on their future careers.

Okay, so Taylor made a point. So what? She has done much more harm than good to her career by this stunt. Taylor, looking oh-so-Facebookish in the picture posted with the piece, did invade her classroom, as cited by NYU professor Quigley. However, more importantly, no matter if she isn't a traditional journalist or not, she violated a journalistic tenet of disclosure to her subjects for a completely unworthy assignment. If I were an employer, I would think twice before hiring her -- and that's enough in this competitive business to stay unemployed. (Amanda Cochran)

Taylor had planned to write a follow-up for MediaShift, but editor Mark Glaser did so instead.