Here’s some excellent analysis of Trump’s latest attack on journalism (I blogged a bit about this in “More Evidence That, to Trump, ‘Fake News’ Means Critical News“). Trump either doesn’t understand or ignores the difference between a story he doesn’t like and one that is not true. He conflates the two for his own political purposes — knowing his base hates the media and is more than ready to believe…
Nothing really new here, just calling attention to how President Trump uses parentheses to demonstrate that by “fake news,” he means “news that is critical of me.”
I wrote my college application essay on how I negotiated social situations by storing up an array of dumb puns on a random general topic. At a social gathering, I would sit around awkwardly until a certain topic came up — shoes (“lace be serious”), or cameras (“lens be serious”) or astronomy (“let’s be Sirius) or entomology (“let’s bee serious”), and I would try to give the impression I was…
A few weeks ago, I had students in my upper-level media class collaborate on a Google Docs study guide for The Name of the Rose. In my freshman writing class yesterday, I did something else with Google Docs… I created a page with three columns, and asked students to type their preliminary thesis statements on the left, and give their peers affirming comments and constructive criticism in the other boxes.The…
I ran into this problem several times in the last set of student papers, so it’s time for another illustration. When you’re talking about making a change, you mean the verb “affect,” and when you’re talking about something that results from a cause, you mean the noun “effect.” It’s rare to encounter “effect” as a verb (meaning “bring about”) and even rarer to encounter “affect” as a noun (used in…
For an article on communicating research findings in poetic verse rather than academic prose, an article in Qualitative Inquiry cites my Top 10 Poetry Tips handout.