ENGL 505B

Next year, I will be bidding farewell to 106 and teaching 106i, the composition course designed for international undergraduates. Although 106 and 106i fulfill the same requirements, there are a few differences between the two. Among them:

* Students have access to laptops during every class.
* There are more conferences.
* Students choose one topic and explore it throughout the semester through five (?) different genres of papers.

This link has a cool example of the visual rhetoric strategy "accumulation." The artist photographed young girls and boys in their bedrooms surrounded by all of their pink and blue toys, respectively. In my class, this led to a nice discussion of color and gender, as well as consumerism.

http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2008/02/08/the-pink-and-blue-project-by...

Lately I've been trying to think of activities I could do with my students to hone their "netiquette," particularly in regard to the writing of emails.

First, I tracked down an interesting article I'd read in the New York Times about professors who feel their students are (ab)using email by bombarding them with questions/requests that they feel are inane or too demanding. That led me to a summary of a study that found that people misinterpret the intended tone of emails approximately 50% of the time. Here are the links:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/02/70179/

Hey guys,

This is a computer lab activity I did early in the semester to familiarize students with Purdue's world famous OWL. The other point of the activity was to teach students about the structure of the paragraph and essay without, you know, actually having to teach it. The first time I assigned it, I had it available on my class web site, students opened it, and they typed their answers in. In the future, I might print it out. While this wastes papers, that will help me avoid students simply copying and pasting their answers into the blanks.

Crissy

Christensen writes, "I cannot conceive any useful transactions between teacher and students unless they have in common a language for talking in sentences" (251). As the focus of high school writing courses moves further and further away from grammar and mechanics, rare is the first year university student who is completely comfortable using such grammatical terms as 'modifier', 'relative clause' and 'subordinate clause'. And, as someone who has taught undergraduate linguistics courses, getting them up to date is no small task.

For very early, very late or just very lazy classes, I have found it beneficial to start the hour off by an activity that gets the students up out of their seats and gets their blood flowing. I introduced two such activities last week.

As I read Harris' article, it was interesting comparing her observations of peer response and tutoring with my own, most recently as an ESL instructor and as a student in a rhetoric class long ago and far away.