Flash Presentation: Using Screen Capture Software to Communicate Ideas in the Drafting Process – WRITE Center (Guest Post)

My use of the Flash Presentation assignment encourages students to take their oral communicative competence and make it a part of the writing process itself. In other words, it “flips the script” on the common experience of presenting on finalized texts.

Zombie Paradigms in the Classroom: Assuaging the Problems of Current-Traditionalism

The field of writing studies has been arguing for decades about disposing of current-traditionalism (CT). Scholars, professional groups, graduate students, and even deans now advocate for teaching written communication in other ways. These new paradigms, collectively known as post-process, have shown considerably better student outcomes and improved teaching experience. Yet, the fact remains that they …

The Language of Puthis: Dubhashi and the Bengali Muslims

Muslims in the region of Bengal, like other Muslims in the Northwest of India, viewed that different languages in the space social space was natural and by God's design. This was the way it always was after all, and pointed to Qur'anic ayats, such as the one above , to argue that the wise person had to know and communicate in many languages. It also means sometimes people would mix different languages as they saw fit for their pupose in single utterances. This view can be seen in the way the puthi genres made use of dubhashi (a language made up of Bangla, Hindustani, Farsi, and Arabic). Their writers and performances only thought about ways to best communicate Islamic ideas and views, not whether what the language they used was proper or not.

Intellectual Communities in the Time of Pandemic: A Case for Meetup.com

Furthermore, I've also been able to talk with people I would never have in any detail because of (if I'm to keep it 100!) differences of age and race. These groups have provided me long interactions with a type of "older, genteel Conservatives," persons whose views on tradition, social status quo, and economic liberalism mean I would have never mixed with them in any other context. We would be so different because of our lived experiences that they would only be an Other for me, and I an other for them. Sometimes, in these meetings, and this is not meant as snippy as it sounds, it feels like I'm talking to David Brooks.

Learning to Teach Reading

It seems almost too simple to consider, but sometimes the reason students do not do the reading for class is because they don’t know how to do it. This is not to say that they do not possess the actual ability to read texts at the college level, more so that they are unable to read skillfully – effectively and efficiently for college purposes.

A Burning: Good Books Are Hard to Read

Stylistically speaking, A Burning is compulsively readable. It is told in short chapters, written in economic prose, alternating perspectives and foci on characters. Majumdar seems to be a skilled writer who knows our short attention spans intimately and recognizes the need to move briskly to appeal to our constraints.

Workshopping Workshops

The efficacy of asking people to attend workshops so often is debatable. In my own opinion, it is actually counterproductive to what we want to do. With so much information being channeled to people on so many different digital platforms, most of it, I think, cannot be take up and absorbed. It mostly becomes exercises …

Talking of Rhet-Com in Bangladesh

Speaking about Aristotle might be necessary because of the overwhelming impact he has had on so many academic fields, I will give you that. But I find it hard to rationalize speaking about Cicero or St. Augustine to a Bangladeshi audience. And if such ancient figures are bad enough - they at least have the comparative benefit of being on the written record as opposed to contemporaries in other parts of the word - talking about 20th century figures of rhetorical education as Kenneth Burke s simply inexcusable because they operate in a Western liberal, democratic principle that are not organic to the societies of the Global South. Furthermore, there are extant rhetorical figures and examples readily available for 20th century postcolonial contexts.

City Eyes

I wanted to tell him that I read those words in a novel for class. In it the speaker - in one of many equivocating asides - expounded on how living in a city in India makes everyone develop a type of cataracts. Beggars, in all their motley shapes and forms, are so natural to our cities that they have become invisible. The are the unsubstantial beings, cloaked like poltergeists or djinns, that our minds filter out as we navigate the city.

Designing Online Courses: Balancing Content and Community

Online courses can easily become too overwhelming to understand. This has less to do with the learning materials and activities and more about how the information and instruction has to be delivered through writing in the online format.