Writing Program

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The Twitter conversation between Nick Fury, Agent Barney Stohls, and Baron Wolfgang von Strucker is actually a half-way decent tool for teaching some punctuation conventions.

"That message seems to echo a recent report that executives value liberal-arts graduates, almost without regard to discipline, but that those graduates are seldom hired unless they can get past the screening processes of human-resources offices dealing with large numbers of applicants. At the entry level, most employers are looking for specific skills and experiences that many liberal-arts graduates do not possess, or are not well prepared to articulate, though they could be acquired relatively easily in comparison with more-elusive qualities, such as creativity and critical thinking. Employers are, of course, expecting that some training will be necessary on the job, but they are obviously less open to graduates who seem completely "raw," unprofessional, undisciplined, or unwilling to work within an institutional culture. In addition to web design (including repeated mentions of WordPress, Drupal, Dreamweaver, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, though this list is sure to change quickly), there seems to be a consensus about what's most needed to enhance the marketability of liberal-arts graduates. Evidence of teamwork—the ability to work collaboratively on large projects with different kinds of people—is extremely important, along with time management and the skill to juggle multiple tasks. Employers also want people who can work with data and statistics and are able to make lucid arguments, using spreadsheets and visualizations, that are grounded in quantitative ways of thinking. (One employer said she was "tired of graduates with only half of a mind.") They want employees who can give compelling presentations in a variety forms and contexts, from elevator speeches to lectures before large public audiences. Rather than mere assertions of ability, employers want concrete examples of how job candidates have demonstrated those skills."

Open Access explained by PhD Comics.

Lunsford, Andrea A., Jenn Fishman, and Warren M. Liew. “College Writing, Identification, and the Production of Intellectual Property: Voices from the Stanford Study of Writing.” College English 75.5 (May 2013): 470-92.

http://www.educause.edu/library/resources/ecar-study-undergraduate-students-and-information-technology-2013

Further studies suggest that 40 percent of student writing occurs outside of the classroom, "everything from penning TV recaps to long e-mail conversations to arguments on discussion boards." When schools encourage students to blog, the hobby can have a powerful effect on verbal test scores; social feedback motivates students to finesse their rhetorical skills. And nobody had no trouble discerning the relative appropriateness of emoticons.

In fact, there’s powerful evidence that digital tools are helping young people write and think far better than in the past.

The thing about blogging is that it forces you to stop throat-clearing, its chatty, provisional nature mandates simplicity and clarity, and it punishes long-winded guff. I’ve found that the writing skills of interns improve much faster with blogging than they did with old media writing

Domain of One's Own gif

-- Bruce Ballenger

THIS, from Liz Wardle; > So when I say that we use literacy narratives here, I am using that term as a shorthand, really. About THIS, from Maja: > how I get around the problem of what to call the blasted paper seems to me to be not just at the root of the undead literacy narrative crisis, but of a lot of other crises. I forget who else in the thread asked, "But what section of the textbook would it go under?" (Liz Bryant?) which also crystallizes the issue. After all, if you can't give it a one- or two-word textbook-chapter name, How Could Anyone Possibly Assign It As Writing?? or even, How Can It Possibly Still Be Live Writing??? I used to think it was just The Comparison-Contrast Paper that was my nemisis. (Well, it still holds a very, very special place on my intellectual dartboard.) But more and more I think it's The ____ Paper.   All those names are "shorthand" to us, but the rest of the world, including very much our student population, may be reading them more as absolutes. Just as one offshoot problem: how will students glimpse the route toward transfer of what they're learning if the Papers are never again named by the same Word? (Gwen G's recent research suggests this is a significant barrier.) My vote is for writing projects or writing problems titled like those 19th-century book chapters, In Which Meredith and Tom Discover What Is Living Under the Jamison House and Have to Compose a Response. Who wants to take the pledge with me for fall? No more shorthand "Paper" names, but Project #2 descriptions that lay out the rhetorical scene as clearly as we can describe it, under the assumption that our students are ready to be thinking like rhetoricians from the very moment they imagine starting work on a composition, rather than only at some point later on? So they're not writing a Thing, but they're Writing?