A big day for our first year writing students! So much energy in the room!
My Shakespeare students are off peer reviewing their term paper rough drafts. I’m officially guarding their water bottles and key rings.
Burgh to Burg, episode 2.
Burgh to Burg, episode 2.
Daughter doing a thing. Interviewing the Pittsburgh Dance Council’s Randall Miller for Burgh to Burg.
MLA Citations: Citation generators make mistakes. Here’s how to spot 5 errors they often make.
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It’s such a privilege to introduce these young people to Shakespeare’s body of work.
After starting my 200-level “Shakespeare in Context” students on a few sonnets, I assigned Twelfth Night (most had never read a Shakespeare comedy before) and Othello (they loved Iago), and then asked them to sample four different plays — The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, and Jonson’s…
In MLA Style, use the ellipsis only to mark an omission from the middle of a quotation.
If you are writing an academic paper that quotes from an author that uses the ellipsis in a way that differs from MLA style (such as the script of a modern play that uses “…” to indicate when a speaker is interrupted, or a graphic novel that might use “…” to indicate a meaningful silence…
Students tend to zone out during my lectures on proofreading. I time it so I can say “class dismissed“ as soon as I show that last headline.
ChoiceScript tutorial for making casual, phone-friendly, stats-driven storygames. Choice of the Rhetor.
“The author talks about [topic]” is filler. Your professors want your college-level ideas.
I think I smelled a hint of my mint toothpaste just now. Wishful thinking, or another sign of recovering from #COVID19?
For the past 2 weeks I have slept a lot, coughed a lot, and one of my four classes is a week behind where I had hoped to be, but I guess I’ll be okay. Still dealing with some heavy eldercare and other issues that I just don’t have the energy to write about here,…
I just thought of a time before you were born when I should have been kind, but I can’t remember whether I was.
Sometimes when I’m driving along lost in thought, I flinch. If my son or my daughter asks me what’s wrong, I’m rarely able to articulate an accurate response like, “I just thought of a time before you were born when I should have been kind, and I can’t remember whether I was.” So I usually…
UNC student newspaper goes viral for coverage of campus shooting
As Emmy Martin was locked down Monday afternoon on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus, with police searching nearby for an “armed and dangerous person,” she was simultaneously terrified and clear-headed. Her “pulse through the roof,” she already had identified her escape route. But as the editor-in-chief of The Daily Tar Heel, she also was reporting and…
How to Keep Students Writing in the Age of AI Tools
In a writing-intensive class, students need to write extensively to the point that the teacher cannot possibly grade all of it. — Edutopia via NCTE Good advice from an article by Kara Douma, reprinted by NCTE. I need to hear that. The referees don’t score every practice. The coaches don’t give you feedback after…
Goodby big Android… hello little budget iPhone SE 3rd.
I just removed from my syllabus template a digitally altered PR image of our school’s namesake St. Elizabeth Ann Seton holding an iPad, because iPads have not been part of the tuition package for a couple years now. I’ve been an Apple user for about 10 years, since Seton Hill instituted its MacBook plan, and…
PLS York Plays 2025 — Prof. Matthew Sergi’s Call for Theatrical Participants
Very excited to see this project coming together at the University of Toronto. As a grad student, my first scholarly publication was an explanation of my own 2D simulation of the York Corpus Christi pageant. On Saturday, June 7, 2025 (rain date Sunday, June 8, 2025), starting at 6:30am and continuing past midnight, we will…
How do I cite generative AI in MLA style? | MLA Style Center
We ask students to cite encyclopedia articles, dictionaries, news interviews with experts, and in-person conversations. A generative text-generation tool that scrapes published work and uses a statistical model to emulate a response that mimics the way the humans in its database have responded to similar prompts is formally something like a conversation, and the MLA’s…
