One of my undergrad lit papers. Dot-matrix printed, with hand-written instructor annotations, c. 1988.

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Socrates envisaged a time when we would forget how to remember.

From Daisy Dunn’s review of Puchner’s The Written World: Socrates envisaged a time when we would forget how to remember. The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Indian epic Ramayanahad been preserved through an oral tradition that seemed destined to perish through overreliance on papyrus. Akhmatova remembered because she had to but Socrates simply chose to. He…

You come very close to successfully combining argument and explication here…

I recently came across a box of old writing, including a binder where I had saved some undergraduate papers.   When returning a Beowulf paper for a Brit Lit survey, my instructor had stapled a page of hand-written notes that began, “You come very close to successfully combining argument and explication here, much closer than…

Details from the author’s life are not the magic ticket to “correct” interpretations in literature class

Students who are new to college literature classes often value literary biography very highly, expecting that one of their tasks is to spot one-to-one relationships between the literary texts and the personal lives of the authors. For instance, from the two Sylvia Plath poems that use Nazi imagery to describe troubled relationships with paternal figures,…

My schedule every Friday this term. (Payback for teaching a course over Christmas break.)

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AmLit Rescue — Scratch Game

A student in my “American Literature: 1915-Present” class used the medium of a 2D graphic adventure game to deliver her multimodal final project. (Students also wrote a traditional term paper.) You are the cameraman of a new TV show based on Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth.” But things quickly go downhill when a…

Updating a handout I originally wrote in 1998. #tech #writing

A mechanism description analyzes (that is, subdivides into components for further scrutiny) an object in space. When you try to organize your major subsections, if no other obvious pattern seems appropriate, you can always fall back on the more-important-to-less-important strategy. Don’t sell the object. A technical writer is not required to persuade the reader that the object is wonderful,…

Getting to the Point in Academic Writing

Don’t spend three pages establishing that some people burn to death, some people freeze to death, and some people drown. Start by saying what we need to do now that the iceberg we are stranded on has caught fire.   Similar:Academic study concludes that teaching kids to touch-type can make them better writersImproving students’ handwriting…

Playing a well-dressed bad guy.

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Father-daughter bonding between takes.

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Younger friends, can you write or read cursive? I’m curious.

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When we play Star Trek Monopoly, I am the Captain’s chair.

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