Feeling Confused?

 

 

Don't let this be you.  Remember, tutors are available to help you with your writing assignments from 9:00 AM-3:00 PM Monday through Thursday and 9:00 AM through 12:00 PM Friday in CT 205.

Image shared from the Facebook page of NBC's Community.

Two Little Liars?

In this short TED-Ed presentation, Marlee Neel illustrates how using the adjectives "good" and "bad" in our writing make liars of us all.  What do you think?  Is she right? If you were on the jury, would you return a guilty verdict?

The Power of Simple Language

This brief video from TED-Ed illustrates why simple language can be more effective than trying too hard to sound "educated" in your writing.

From Grammarly.com.  A timely share given the recent discussion on deadlines.  Don't let this be you. Plan ahead, and if you need help with your writing, see a tutor in the Writers' Room.  Appointments are available from 9:00-3:00 Monday through Thursday and 9:00-12:00 on Friday.  Many students come in for help once they have a draft together, but tutors can also help you if you are having problems getting that first draft together or understanding what your instructor is asking you to do.

Not So Urban Musings, Part 2-Dead End Deadlines

Concerning assignment deadlines Brooks writes, “In high school and college, teachers stress no-negotiation due dates. If you don’t get your paper or assignment in on time, your grade suffers. While this lesson teaches responsibility, it isn’t as applicable to the working world. Deadlines are important, but for the most part they are also flexible. In the professional world, bosses generally prefer you take more time to create a higher-quality product versus rushing to meet an arbitrary deadline.”  Guess what?  I would prefer my students take more time to create a “quality product” as well. In fact, I was quite amazed at the number of my ENGL 101 students who on this past Monday hadn’t yet started their papers which are due Friday. I was amazed to the point of being practically dumb struck again today-two days later--at how many of them still hadn’t even chosen a general topic. I will not name names. Suffice to say, you know who you are, and so do I, even if I don’t call you out publicly on the fact or confront you about it in class.  I do not understand this. Students say they want to do well.  They comment to their peers that they are afraid of failing, and yet…a scant 48 hours before their draft is due, some have yet to even look over the materials they were supposed to have read to prepare to write the draft.  How do I know this, you ask?  Well, besides my prescient powers, I have the aid of the statistics function on Blogger which tells me that 12, yes 12, yes ONLY 12 people have viewed the sample writing piece (“Urban Musings, part 1”) I directed them to read.  That seems about right. Experience tells me that about 15% of the papers I receive on Friday will really be where they should be. And no, that’s not because of the stellar example I provided.  It’s because those same 12 students have been working solidly all along.  Reading, paying attention and taking notes in class, writing and redrafting. Reading the posted example was just one of the many steps they’ve taken toward crafting a solid paper and meeting the expected deadline.

 Additionally, instructors have their own set of “arbitrary” deadlines we have to meet as well.  Grades come due. Semesters end.  At some point we are all accountable to the constraints we have to work within.  In the ivory tower as well as in the world outside of it.  Instructors rarely set deadlines that are as arbitrary as Brooks would have her readers believe.  All of the instructors I know give a good deal of thought into structuring their classes.  It takes a good deal of consideration and planning when trying to figure out how you are going to set up a schedule that gives your students time to produce quality work yet get through everything you are supposed to in sixteen weeks, creates a manageable work load for them as well as you, and meets deadlines imposed upon us.

 She continues her line of argumentation against deadlines by stating, “It is important to approach every project in a professional and responsible manner and part of that is demonstrating respect for your boss’ timeline. However, if you know that you can produce a better piece with a little extra time, that is something you should bring up.” This seems to contradict what she says earlier about how deadlines in the real world are generally flexible.  This seems to say that if you generally have shown a pattern of acting responsibly in completing work on time, your boss or editor might grant you an extension if you talk to him or her in advance about the difficulty you are having.  I can’t speak for other instructors, but I know that in a similar circumstance in my classroom, I’d try to work with the student as well.  In fact, when we discuss logical fallacies, deadlines are often the example I use to illustrate the slippery slope fallacy.  I ask students how many of them have ever heard a teacher refuse to accept an assignment from a student (none of them of course, but their friends or classmates) because it was late and, the instructor says, if she accepts that student’s work, well then she’ll have to accept late work from everyone.  Hands fly into the air. Nothing more than the old slippery slope logic at work, I tell them.  Most of us who teach writing realize it isn’t an exact science.  We work in a community where we understand what it takes for some of our students to even show up each day is incredible. We know, mainly from our own past experiences, that life often fails to follow the most intricately laid out plans you have for it.  There are always exceptions to the rule, but they should be that.  Exceptions.  And they should be warranted.  I don’t think it’s a matter of instructors being heartless or even unyielding so much as what an instructor feels is a warrant for an extension and what a student feels should be one are sometimes two drastically different things, and like it or not, it’s the instructor who gets to decide if an extension is warranted, not the student.

 However, as Brooks admits, deadlines are there to teach responsibility.  Is teaching responsibility really part of my job?  There certainly are days when I wish I could say no.  I’m just there to teach content.  My job would be so much easier if all I had to do was teach content.  My students’ lives would be so much easier if all they had to worry about was learning content. I know that’s not true though. For either of us.  Brooks oversimplifies the issue, though.  Instructors don’t generally set deadlines for the purpose of teaching students responsibility.  However, students often learn lessons associated with responsibility as a result of them.  In the coming days, some of my ENGL 101 students will be learning those lessons. Some will learn (hopefully) not to put off drafting their papers until the night before because they don’t like the experience of having to sit all night in front of a computer instead of doing something more interesting on a Thursday night, or they don’t like the feeling of panic they experience when trying to locate an open lab to print their papers at the last minute because someone used all the ink in their printer at home. Others will come in ten or fifteen minutes late to class and learn that when I said the beginning of class was when I collected assignments, that’s what I meant and their assignment is late.  A few may wake up suddenly in the wee hours of Saturday morning, startled awake by the realization that they forgot to submit their drafts to turnitin.com. Still more will learn a completely different set of lessons.  They will learn that they could get themselves out of a corner they’d backed themselves into.  They’ll learn that even 48 hours ago they sat in class complaining about how hard the assignment was or how confused they were or (insert an appropriate internal struggle here), they survived.  Better yet, they triumphed. They overcame. Still others will learn the invaluable lesson that they belong here.  Many students already know they do.  Many, though, do not. There are likely to be doubters in both camps at this point in the semester.  That’s how it works.  Writing makes doubters of the best of us—but just as assuredly it makes believers of us as well.  Writing teaches us as much about ourselves as it does the world around us. College is often that way, too, and we learn more than we sign up for.  Ironically, so is the real world which Brooks would have you believe is so foreign to your college experience.

If you still need a little more convincing that deadlines matter in the real world, here are some articles you might want to check out about failing to meet deadlines and the ensuing repercussions:

Four Fired-Ohio Elections Chief Misses Deadline 
350 New Jersey School board Members forced to Resign after Failing to Meet Background Check Deadline 
County Circuit Clerk Ordered to Pay 9.5K to Reimburse Law Firm when She Fails to Meet Filing Deadline 
 

Some Not So Urban Musings Part 1

The blog, The Urban Muse, recently published a post titled, “College Writing Lessons You Can Discard in the Real World.” The author, Stephanie Brooks, is a self described education blogger who feels online education is “the future,” and evidently spends her time (according to the accompanying author blurb) researching the top online colleges and universities and handing out advice to online students in her digital version of Lucy Van Pelt.

Given the title of her post, you might think I’m going to take offense, or at least exception, to her underlying premise that there are indeed lessons from your college writing classes that you can simply dismiss once you are in the “real world.”  Believe me, I was more than ready to.  However, reading through her list of insights, I found there really wasn’t much I disagreed with.  At least not at face value.  Here is what she says you can forget:

1. Fill up on jargon.
2. No late passes.
3. Praise the grammar gods.

These points don’t seem to be anything I’d take issue with so much as things to make me wonder when was the last time Brooks was actually in a writing classroom. These all seem to be legitimate concerns of students and discussion topics of instructors on a fairly regular basis.  It would seem that we would agree and leave it at that, but then a funny thing happened…I started thinking about the examples she provides, her logic, tone, and overall characterization of writing classes and instructors…and then I started to try to figure out why she has this attitude…and then, of course, I found myself not only disagreeing with most of what she says but the fact that she’s posted this at all (which we’ll get to...eventually).

In defense of her first point she says, “In business, clear and concise writing is preferred to jargon-filled, intellectual-sounding arguments. In the real world, clarity is king, whether you’re writing an email or a blog post.”  News flash, Ms. Brooks, but in composition classes, we really prefer clear and concise writing as well.  In fact, this is one of the biggest issues I see in freshman writing.  Getting students to understand that everything—every single word, phrase, sentence, etc. in the draft needs to have a clear and specific purpose for being there.  It needs to be there as a result of a concrete choice the student writer has made.  Jargon, filler, and fluff are not hallmarks of good writing.  I don’t know anyone who teaches writing who would say they are.

 

In fact, we just had this discussion in my ENGL 102 class the other day.  My students had read an excerpt from a book on 21^st century literacies and were feeling like I’d pushed them into the deep end of the academic pool. With nary an intellectual lifeguard or floatie in sight.  At the end of our discussion, one student asked which I thought was better, to be clear and to the point, or to go on and on and on as the students felt this author had done. I took the opportunity to turn this into a “teaching moment” and tie the question back to our earlier discussions on how language is used to create and maintain power, that different discourse communities present us with different rhetorical situations which have their own sets of criteria, and that to really be literate in the 21^st century requires us to be able to decode those criteria, move among the different discourse communities we find ourselves in, and operate within their constraints.  Only then can we use language for our own power or resist it being used against us in ways we might not want it to be.  Part of the responsibility for clarity falls to the author, a good part of it, to be sure.  However, part of it also lies within the reader and his or her ability and willingness to navigate a text.  Therefore, I told my students, being clear and to the point is always preferable, but (and this is a big but) what is defined as clear and to the point depends upon the particular rhetorical situation, and academic journal writing and similar types of writing are not going to appear "clear and to the point" for most students who encounter them the first time or even the first 57 times, maybe; however, to people who are fluent in that discourse community, they are. (And it is my sincere hope and belief that as they learn to tread the academic waters, it will become clearer to my students as well.)

This brings me back to Brooks’ point about academic jargon.  One definition of jargon refers to language, particularly vocabulary that’s used by a certain group or profession.  (Discourse communities, anyone?)  In this sense, I would say her point of academics preferring academic jargon is true—when we are discussing work that shows you belong to a particular academic discipline. Yes, that’s what we expect you, as a student, to demonstrate to us through your writing. You understand.  You belong.  You know the verbal equivalents of the secret handshake. (Well, one thing, anyway.) However, what that "preferred academic jargon" consists of depends greatly on the discipline (sciences vs. humanities) and the level of the students’ education (undergrad vs. grad student). I certainly would not expect someone in one of my freshmen composition classes to write on the level of a peer who is writing in an academic journal, or even with the same level of discourse knowledge as a grad student or upper division English major. If I tried to demand that standard, it would be painful for everyone involved. Conversely, though, "hey sup w tht txt idk brd u?" might be clear and to the point if someone is texting or IMing a friend concerning a recent class reading assignment, but isn't really acceptable (or clear) for an in class response to that assignment. That, too, becomes painful for everyone involved.

Contrary to what Brooks implies, this lesson in understanding and using the appropriate jargon to show you belong to a particular community is justified.  Instead of jargon of this nature falling under the other definition of the word (pretentious vocabulary, confusing syntax, vague meaning, gibberish, meaningless discussions) as her logic and tone indicate all academic jargon is, the lesson taught to students by having to navigate the world of academia and learning to use appropriate jargon and rhetoric to be successful in that world underscores the fact that whatever job the student obtains after graduation will require him or her to learn, understand, and use the vocabulary, syntax, etc. that is used in that particular world as well.  

 

Not only do medical professions have their own set of vocabularies that most of us outside of them don't understand, they also have their own syntax or way of which words are arranged to convey a particular meaning.  For example, let's assume Mr. Smith goes into the hospital to receive treatment for a condition.  The treatment doesn't alleviate the condition as Mr. Smith and his doctor expected it would.  Most of us, as medical laymen would describe what occurred with words such as, "The treatment didn't work."  In this construction, it's clear that the treatment was expected to do something that it did not.  However, a note in Mr. Smith's chart would more likely say, "The patient failed to respond to the treatment."  In this case, the responsibility of failure has shifted from the treatment to Mr. Smith, the patient.  All as a result of syntax.  Studies have shown this is common medical lexicon, to shift responsibility from personnel and medical treatment and on to the patient. Whether or not that's good, bad, or otherwise (or why it occurs) is another discussion, but it does happen, and it does illustrate the need to understand how different communities in the real world use language differently.  If Mr. Smith, or a member of his family, stumbles upon this remark in his chart, they may take offense; however, it may be that no one is really "blaming" Mr. Smith so much as the medical personnel doing the charting have just learned this is how writing is done in this field.  There may be no judgement at all involved .

Ironically, too, this same chapter that my students read discussed how academic writing is being reshaped by the concerns of other literacies.  Academic writing is not a stagnate, immutable form mired in the past, irrelevant to and uniformed by other communities as Brooks would have her readers believe.  Nor is her claim that academic writing and jargon is the only type accepted in writing classrooms a valid one.  More and more composition curriculums are including multimodal texts which require students to navigate a variety of rhetorical situations and present their assignments in a variety of formats some far from the traditional essay or “scholarly” paper.  There is a genuine concern on the part of instructors that the students they teach find their discipline and it’s skills applicable beyond the confines of the classroom, and most of us understand the need to help students increase the fluidity with which they move between the academic and non-academic worlds.

Your Professor Tweets More Than You

More proof that truth is stranger than fiction, perhaps...that digital divide between you and your professor may not be as wide as you think...
http://dailyinfographic.com/your-professor-tweets-more-than-you-infographic

The DNA of a Successful Book

http://dailyinfographic.com/the-dna-of-a-successful-book-infographic

Fall 2012 Tutor Hours

Another semester is once again upon us.  The WR is open from now until the last day of regular classes (December 10, 2012).  We are closed for all college holidays and breaks.  Also, if classes are cancelled due to weather or other emergencies, the WR will be closed even though other offices at DACC may be open.  The WR is located on the second floor of Clock Tower toward the east end of the hallway in CT 205 and CT205A.  Along with tutoring services and information about writing, the WR also has a small computer lab that students can use for academic purposes.  The lab is open the same hours that tutors are available.  Your instructors may also ask you to come to the WR to make up a quiz or test.  If you are coming for a make up exam, please be sure to bring a picture ID and to arrive in plenty of time to finish your test before the WR closes.  If you wish to make an appointment or have a question, please contact us at 217-443-8877.  Our hours for the Fall 2012 semester are:

Monday-Thursday     9:00 AM-3:00 PM
Friday     9:00 AM-12:00 PM