The heir to the throne of Gondor and and a scruffy looking nerf herder are handing out candy.

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Another chess tournament with the boy.

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About the Sinkhole in the Adjunct Faculty Lounge, and Other Mid-Semester Announcements

I recently spoke with the Sarah Sutton, General Manager of the Walmart on Victory Boulevard, and she’d like me to express to you all that while she’s still willing to permit any adjunct faculty members in need of shelter to sleep in the loading bay behind the store, trapping and consuming the seagulls that flock…

If you want to work with words, then journalism courses are very practical options.

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A student just booked an appointment to discuss picking up journalism as a second major. Excellent choice!

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Rediscovering History’s Lost First Female Video Game Designer

RCA’s console never rivaled the impact of Atari’s VCS, Magnavox’s Odyssey, or Mattel’s Intellivision, and few people remember it today. But the true story behind it is fascinating. Its underlying technology began in 1969 as a personal computer developed at home by one man with a vision, Joseph Weisbecker. His daughter, Joyce, ended up being…

Equus. Powerful theatre.

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My undergraduate connects the Leontes/Polixenes conflict in The Winter’s Tale to a pro wrestling “heel turn”

Today’s class on The Winter’s Tale was very much the kind of class that I hoped for when I was an undergraduate thinking, “Maybe I’d like to be an English professor.” Leontes and Polyxines in “The Winter’s Tale” grew up together, but for no good reason other than it sets the plot in motion, Leontes…

Why The Athletic Wants to Pillage Newspapers – The New York Times

By the time you finish reading this article, the upstart sports news outlet called The Athletic probably will have hired another well-known sportswriter from your local newspaper. In a couple of years, once The Athletic has completed its breakneck expansion, perhaps that newspaper’s sports section will no longer exist. —The New York Times Similar:Travel trouble,…

Pict Classic Theatre Romeo and Juliet.

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The girl got picked for an audience participation bit as the muse of comedy in Xanadu. Great fun.

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A new study shows that students learn way more effectively from print textbooks than screens

Saving this for next term’s “History and Future of the Book” course. Students said they preferred and performed better when reading on screens. But their actual performance tended to suffer. For example, from our review of research done since 1992, we found that students were able to better comprehend information in print for texts that were…

Writing a news story calls on different skills than writing a traditional essay.

Updated an older instructional handout with a bunch of new examples and some fancy red/green color coding. To write a news story, you’ll use many of the skills that help you write good personal essays; however, the two kinds of writing have important differences, so what counts as “good writing” is also different. English Essay:…

The Digital-Humanities Bust

Dinosaurs evolved into birds. Not all of them, of course. Birds are so much a part of our environment that we barely notice them. I’ve said the same about weblogs. Monetized and platformized and app-ified, the basic functions of blogging live on — a reverse-sorted stream of posts, a mechanism to engage with visitors to…

Talk with us about books! English as a minor or second major @setonhilluniversity

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Russian troll factory paid US activists to help fund protests during election

Russian trolls posing as Americans made payments to genuine activists in the US to help fund protest movements on socially divisive issues, according to a new investigation by a respected Russian media outlet. On Tuesday, the newspaper RBC published a major investigation into the work of a so-called Russian “troll factory” since 2015, including during…

Feeling Like an Impostor at 49

I reminded my Shakespeare students that I’m a full-time generalist and a part-time Shakespeare professor, and that I’m constantly comparing my own classroom performance with the brilliant well-planned lectures my professors delivered to classes of 100 or 400 students.

Journalists Prefer “Said”

Journalists prefer the neutral “said” to attribute a source’s statements, opinions, and emotions. Using “claimed” generates doubt. Using “explained” confers trust. Flowery alternatives compete with the unbiased reporting of facts.

About to DM a journalism class role-playing exercise. Surprises coming!

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Journalists write to inform, not to impress.

Sometimes when I find myself putting more than a usual amount of creativity into a comment on a student paper, I take a break from churning through papers to make another meme.