“Americans have always been informal, but now the informality of precollege culture is so ubiquitous that many students have no practice in using language in any formal setting at all,” he says. The remedy is “to restore the family dinner table to the teaching of writing – that setting which can be a very rich…
One thing that would improve college teaching immensely would be mandatory drama and speech classes for all new faculty. Forget the expensive technology. Teach them how to use their voices, how to modulate their tones, how to string together an exciting narrative without notes. Teach them to make the passion that is surely inside them…
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set…
I am still trying to sort out how much of the difference with this conference was due to the Hawai’ian setting as opposed to the presence of my kids. Obviously it’s configurational, and in that way it makes little sense to try to distinguish the independent impact of either of those factors in anything except…
Oh blog, me, babe! Don’t miss a word of it! Many a blog has brought love to my door Netted by sparkling poem, or flash of wit – The chatroom kind, of course, and little more. What need of tangled flesh on messy dates The weight of expectation as it starts Its gentle journey southwards,…
OpenOffice.org 2.0 Beta is out and it’s revolutionary: New technology, better interoperability, and even easier to use. But it is still in beta. Tell us what is good and what needs fixing. —Open Office 2.0 Beta I haven’t checked this out, but I’ve been looking for an alternative to MS-Word’s horrible HTML output — something…
Good communication is not necessarily about using an expansive vocabulary. It is about properly using the words and punctuation you already know. —The Commonly Confused Words Test (OK Cupid) It’s a good thing for my sense of professional pride that I scored as an English Genius, though according to the site I got one answer wrong.…
To blend in, I sat at the $10 craps table and started to lose the magazine‘smoney with dispatch. I mean, I had to sit at a table so a Borgata Babe would give me a drink and I could check her out?er, I mean, interview her about the ethical implications of the new weight policy.…
The emergence of cyberbullying has intensified adolescent angst. It allows bullies to unleash put-downs, nasty rumors and humiliating pictures in e-mail and blogs that can strike victims at home and at any time. The damage can be devastating, psychologists say, even as it is not always obvious to parents and teachers. —Jon Swartz —Schoolyard bullies…
Annalee Newitz, a policy analyst at the civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said employees often “don’t realize the First Amendment doesn’t protect their job.” The First Amendment only restricts government control of speech. So private employers are free to fire at will in most states, as long as it’s not discriminatory or in retaliation…
Last week‘sblog on the state of videogame writing, and the possible solution offered by New Games Journalism, attracted plenty of debate, but many of you wanted to see a few more examples of the NGJ style. —Keith Stuart —Ten unmissable examples of New Games Journalism (Gamesblog) I’ve been kicking around an idea for a games-related writing…
1. The Wall Street Journal is read by people who run the country. 2. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country. 3. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country and who are very good at crossword puzzles. 4. USA Today is…
Dozens of parents flooded the Methuen school system with phone calls yesterday after a local newspaper reported that a fourth-grade girl had returned from the February school break requesting to be treated as a boy. The child’s parents told school officials that he had always considered himself a boy, rejecting feminine dress and name, and…
Is anyone else bothered that our primary feedback on our work comes from children? I’m talking, of course, about course evaluations. But if you think about it for a minute, it’s true: most jobs, you complete a project, someone tells you good job (or should). Moreover, the people who observe and evaluate your work are…
“We really shouldn’t be in here…” Saturday afternoons my wife and I have been taking the kids to the local high school for swimming lessons. Carolyn, who turns 3 next month, is in the first class with toddlers, and Peter (who just turned 7) is in the class for older kids. He can swim by…
They avoid books, libraries, and librarians. They love Google. (We love Google.) Why? Maybe it’s the speed of getting thousands of potential answers in a split second (Fig. 11). Maybe it’s the seeming simplicity of the list, or the delight in the reduction of a complex question to a series of puzzle pieces to be…
I recently spent a day shadowing my daughter who is a freshman in a local public high school. The high school that she goes to is considered one of the better high schools within the district (made me cringe to think what must be happening in the schools that are considered bad). An interesting twist…
“We never envisioned that we were going to be playing video game music,” conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya said, drawing appreciative laughter from audience members, many of them in their teens and 20s and decked out in everything from tuxes and gowns to jeans and T-shirts. It was a scene many orchestras would envy at a time…
To many guardians of the knowledge cathedral – librarians, lexicographers, academics – that’s precisely the problem. Who died and made this guy professor? No pedigreed scholars scrutinize his work. No research assistants check his facts. Should we trust an encyclopedia that allows anyone with a pulse and a mousepad to opine about Jackson Pollock’s place…
Although she has dug up information about things like the history of the colon, Truss is so uninterested in the actual rules of punctuation that she even names the ones she flouts–for example, the rule that semicolons cannot be used to set off dependent clauses. (Unless you are using it to disambiguate items in a…