I haven’t taught a technical writing course in a while… I was thinking of offering it again sometime soon, so I was happy to see the recommendations on the rhet-comp making list, Rhonda McCafferty: There are also good excerpts in David R. Russell’s *Writing in the Academic Disciplines: A Curricular History*. The second edition was published…
Even though both sides share their point-of-views, they agreed on a common ground to help beautify the James River Park System. —NBC12.com A typical TV-news style “send them into the laundry detergent commercial feeling happy” story conclusion, designed to train the viewer to think of TV news as a valuable provider of wisdom and establisher…
A couple weeks before my high school production of Arsenic and Old Lace, I got into a batch of poison ivy at a mandatory class retreat. I was playing the lead, and there were a couple of stage kisses, so rehearsals were quite awkward with my bandaged hands. A couple days ago I (finally) mowed…
NASA’s rover Curiosity touched down deep in a Martian crater early Monday after a picture-perfect descent and landing, beginning what promises to be the most ambitious planetary mission in history. via NASA mission to Mars: Rover Curiosity touches down – The Washington Post. Similar:The new marshmallow test: Resisting the temptations of the webThe Stanford marshmallow…
According to the data, when men (but not women) watched a defector get punished, they showed additional activation in reward related areas of the brain, such as the ventral striatum and nucleus accumbens. These are essential elements of the dopamine reward pathway, that same highway of nerves that also gets titillated by sex, drugs and…
The real problem is timing — they had called me for the second week of classes. I wouldn’t mind sharing this civic responsibility so much when I’m not so busy, but the first couple weeks of term are crazy enough. Similar:How Not to Be a Jackass at Your Next Academic ConferenceOkay, I confess, I was…
I have no problem with baby pictures, but thought this was an amusing write up (by a former student). But really, who doesn’t love a baby photo? I do. It’s the perfect way to share in the cuteness of a child, but not actually clean up after one. I’ve followed the lives of some of…
Matthew Gordon, a linguist at the University of Missouri, says that with the advent of the Internet “a new wrinkle has been added to the complaint tradition.” In the pre-digital era, he says, “most texts we read came from published works — books, newspapers, journals, et cetera. This means they represented the variety of English…
Friday night, my daughter will be playing the lead in the Stage Right! musical version of “The Princess and the Pea” — her first starring role. After rehearsal today, she jumped at the chance to get messy by painting with Mark, our set designer. Similar:Poetry Writing: 10 Tips for Writing PoemsIf you are writing a…
Grammar signifies more than just a person’s ability to remember high school English. I’ve found that people who make fewer mistakes on a grammar test also make fewer mistakes when they are doing something completely unrelated to writing — like stocking shelves or labeling parts. In the same vein, programmers who pay attention to how…
Yes, I got a chuckle over this, but if we present this as evidence of a link between grammar and class / morality / character, that requires a bit of circular thinking. First of all, the substitution of “u” for “you” has nothing to do with grammar, it’s just a shortcut often made by people…
Dickens is so brilliant a stylist, his vision of the world so idiosyncratic and yet so telling, that one might say that his subject is his unique rendering of his subject, in an echo of Mark Rothko’s statement, “The subject of the painting is the painting”—except of course, Dickens’s great subject was nothing so subjective…
Fantastic series of photos, showing sci-fi spaceships digitally inserted into photos that appear to have been taken at real airshows. To be more believable, we probably need to see more poorly-framed, snapshot-style “here’s my kid standing in front of a Moonbase Alpha Eagle,” but this was still a lot of fun. Sci-Fi Airshow: Guided Tour.…
Fascinating… asking test subjects to think more globally (in terms of the relationships between the parts that make the whole) reduced the bias that makes people think of women as body parts. People were also better at discerning women’s individual body parts than they were at men’s individual body parts, further confirming the local processing,…
Focusing on the materiality of writing, this page offers a brief but fascinating overview of how design and culture affect the act of writing (and vice-versa). Just as we find laptops essential for writing, researching, and storing valuable information, the Victorians found their writing desks indispensable for storing writing materials; valuables, including money and jewelry;…
As tablets, smartphones, and microportables of various sorts become more common, this is not a surprise. It’s really only a question of when. Newsweek will eventually transition to an online publication, owner IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI) said today, marking the beginning of the end for the magazine’s 79-year run as a print weekly. —Bloomberg. Similar:New book: basic…
Sal Khan has done something remarkable in creating such a vast and varied library, and he deserves to be recognized. His commitment to making the site free is a rare and selfless act, and he deserves to be praised. Sal Khan is a good guy with a good mission. What he’s not, though, is a…
The other day, my wife suggested a Carnegie Science Center-related post. Only once before — in 2003 — has she volunteered a topic like that, so I took her up on the offer. I’ve noticed that, on every trip to the CSC, my wife slips away to browse the museum store while I’m watching the…
I love the WordPress Social plugin, which grabs Twitter and Facebook responses to a WordPress post, and compiles them as comments along with the original post. But I get plenty of social media attention on the stand-alone pages on my site — that is, instructional handouts that I use year after year, so it’s posted…
SomethingSoSam. Similar:Beowimp (spoof I wrote for my high school lit magazine c. 1985)I got an email this morning from someone…AmusingAt Computers and Writing #cwcon for the weekend.Am I wise now? At an event for encouragi…AcademiaSAT essay section: Problems with grading, instruction, and prompts.In my freshman writing courses I work ha…AcademiaCopper Destroys Viruses and Bacteria. Why…