Double Entry Journals: Your Scholarly Research Notes for College-level Critical Thinking

What is a double-entry research journal?

Reading with a highlighter in your hand encourages you to agree with or ignore what you read. That’s a very limited way to engage with a text.

By contrast, double-entry notes are a way of making complex connections between different things that you read.

My students often tell me that when they take good double-entry notes, they get a much better paper when the time comes for them to start actually churning out the paragraphs.

The Assignment #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 5) Keiko is not herself after a trip to Bajor’s haunted Fire Caves; Rom hopes to impress O’Brien

Rewatching ST:DS9 On a bustling morning in Quark’s, Rom sours his brother’s good mood by ordering human cuisine — O’Brien’s favorite breakfast.  Bashir commiserates after he accidentally killed the plants Keiko entrusted to O’Brien. Little Molly tells her daddy, “You’re in trouble.” Keiko seems strangely unmoved by the news. “They’re just plants.” When Keiko tells…

What Deathbed Visions Teach Us About Living

This is not only powerful material for thought, it’s also compelling storytelling. At the time, only a handful of published medical studies had documented deathbed visions, and they largely relied on secondhand reports from doctors and other caregivers rather than accounts from patients themselves. On a flight home from a conference, Kerr outlined a study…

MLA In-text citations: Writing that got you through high school won’t do in college.

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Nor the Battle to the Strong #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 4) Jake Sisko, cub reporter, tests his belief in courage under fire

Rewatching ST:DS9 On an assignment to write a profile on Bashir, budding writer Jake tags along to a medical conference, and nothing really surprising happens. Their casual, character-based banter is not interrupted by a distress call from a colony in desperate need of medical assistance, and no side-quest, custom-tailored to appeal to the people who…

Persuasion: Logos, Pathos, Ethos and Kairos

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Traces of Scribes

Book historian Irene O’Daly notes that the passage crossed out in a medieval manuscript matches where the scribe accidentally turned two pages while copying out a printed book, showing that manuscript culture continued to exist even after the printing press was introduced.  (It’s the third of three examples she uses.) Similar:The Missing Will, by Agatha…

Jack Rollins-Frosty the Snowman

I voiced Jack Rollins, writer of the popular holiday songs “Frosty the Snowman” and “Here Comes Peter Cottontail,” in another “Whispers of the Past” documentary focused on Scottdale, Pa.   Similar:'Most Transparent’ White House In History Keeps Majority Of Trump’s Remarks SecretMicrosoft Publishes Garbled AI Article Calling Tragically Deceased NBA Player "Useless"The Big Boy GraveyardA…

MLA in-text citations: avoid these common errors

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A big day for our first year writing students! So much energy in the room!

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My Shakespeare students are off peer reviewing their term paper rough drafts. I’m officially guarding their water bottles and key rings.

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MLA Citations: Citation generators make mistakes. Here’s how to spot 5 errors they often make.

Overview Animated GIFIndividual SlidesComprehensive Overview Similar:Microsoft Publishes Garbled AI Article Calling Tragically Deceased NBA Player "Useless"This 1960s teenager knew the neighborhood that inspired August Wilson’s playsHad a great time with AmLit students at the August Wilson block partyNotes on Teaching August Wilson's Pittsburgh CycleMidterm Grades Spring 2025: Posted!The Dog and the Oyster (Aesop Fable)

It’s such a privilege to introduce these young people to Shakespeare’s body of work.

After starting my 200-level “Shakespeare in Context” students on a few sonnets, I assigned Twelfth Night (most had never read a Shakespeare comedy before) and Othello (they loved Iago), and then asked them to sample four different plays — The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, and Jonson’s…