Writing in the Presence of Others

By Jennifer Fletcher As a graduate student, I remember one of my advisors telling me that we’re all just adding our bricks to the wall. At the time, I couldn’t help hearing echoes of Pink Floyd, and I perhaps didn’t fully appreciate my advisor’s point about the collaborative nature of intellectual labor. After a couple …

Using Technology to Build a Better Relationship with Students

Dave Monahan is an award-winning filmmaker, professor at University of North Carolina Wilmington, and coauthor of Looking at Movies, an introduction to film text. As part of his work on the book, he has created dozens of videos illustrating cinematic concepts and techniques. In this blog post, Monahan reflects on how multimedia learning and adaptive quizzing created a positive change in his introduction to film classes.    Dave MonahanImage Credit: …

understanding academic writing – starting the PhD

Writing is a crucial aspect of doctoral work – indeed all the scholarly work you will undertake from now on. Writing is integral to scholarship. Whether you are in or out of higher education, if you are researching, you are writing. Writing and its associated activities reading and talking, are the major ways in which …

Toward Antiracist First-Year Composition Goals

We are finally ready to offer the FYC goals statement that my colleagues and I worked on. If you are unfamiliar with the history of how this document came to be, you can read about it in my past blog posts on the subject: "Why I Left The CWPA (Council of Writing Program Administrators)," Apr 18,…Toward …

https://twitter.com/biblioracle/status/1427652920389033992?s=09

Writing Thesis Statements as Enthymemes

By Jennifer Fletcher In my new book Writing Rhetorically, I share one of my favorite quotations from rhetoricians Edward P.J. Corbett and Rosa A. Eberly: “Reasoning, by itself, will not get the potatoes peeled” (1). It takes humans in communication with other humans to accomplish real work in the world. When we reason rhetorically, we …

Strategies for Writing a Thesis by Publication: Book Review

By Cally Guerin Book Review: Lynn P. Nygaard & Kristin Solli (2021) Strategies for writing a thesis by publication in the social sciences and humanities. Insider Guides to Success in Academia Series. Routledge. I was delighted to come across Lynn Nygaard and Kristin Solli’s Strategies for writing a thesis by publication in the social sciences …

Audience Created

The concept of audience is a key composition concept. I love the series of Lunsford & Ede articles on audience and have been known to teach them as an example of how a concept in the field keeps being revised and re-examined. I think it’s time to re-look at “audience” again. Lundsford & Ede’s concept …

Composition and the Irrational: Some Lacanian Concepts

Note: The picture above represents an internet meme called “Doge.” This is related to the LOL Cats meme, but Doge must feature a picture of a shiba inu dog (a Japanese dog, very active and smart, I have known one), several ungrammatical phrases, usually two words, starting with “very,” “so,” “much,” “many,” or “such,” rendered …

So You’re Going to Teach Composition

I wrote this originally for the composition TAs I am supervising, but the questions are relevant to anyone designing a university-level reading/writing course. In subsequent posts, I will expand on many of these ideas. These posts will be listed on the page, “Teaching First-Year Composition.” When I taught my first composition course, more than 30 …