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:U Michigan's North Quad Complex: A Media CathedralThe North Quad Residential Complex at th…Academia‘Because’ has…

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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Tonight’s Supermoon.

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My parents doing their daily crossword.

I’m spending a few days visiting my parents in Northern Virginia. Similar:Seeing the premiere of a play based on the life of a Holocaust survivor who ended up as a …PersonalI have a daughter who does things. If demon curses and buckets of stage blood are your thi…I have a daughter who does things. If…

Consciousness: Where Are Words?

Words, words, words. With the advent of the stream of consciousness in twentieth-century literature, it has come to seem that the self is very much a thing made of words, a verbal construction forever narrating itself and reconstituting itself in language. In line with the dominant, internalist view of consciousness, it is assumed that this…

Merry Christmas 2017

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Mentoring skills, communication/listening, empathy, critical thinking define successful employees in Google self-study. (STEM knowlege? Not as important.)

A Google self-study found that its own most successful employees had soft skills, such as mentoring ability, empathy, and critical thinking and problem-solving. “Those traits sound more like what one gains as an English or theater major than as a programmer,” according to the Washington Post. [A]mong the eight most important qualities of Google’s top…

“Dammit Mom, I’m a daughter, not a theoretician!”

“Dammit Mom, I’m a daughter, not a theoretician!” — the girl, responding to a pointed rhetorical question. Know Your Meme Similar:First steps towards reconstructing a 30-year-old simulation. Marking the locations of the …First steps towards reconstructing a 30-…AestheticsYes, Duolingo is free and I’ve learned a lot. No, I don’t like the psychological manipulat…Yes, Duolingo is…