Nov 28
tengrrlBedford Bits, composition, Literature
Catch up on your reading with this round-up of posts from last week on teaching composition and rhetoric from Bedford Bits, on teaching English language arts at the secondary level in High School Bits, and on teaching literature and creative writing from Bedford Lit Bits.
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Nov 21
tengrrlBedford Bits, composition, Literature, research
Catch up on your reading with this round-up of posts from last week on teaching composition and rhetoric from Bedford Bits, on teaching English language arts at the secondary level in High School Bits, and on teaching literature and creative writing from Bedford Lit Bits.
A Few Extra Links
For regular updates from Bedford Bits, be sure to sign up for the Ink’d In newsletter (and other resources), like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.
Cross-posted as a Note on Bedford/St. Martin’s page on Facebook.
Nov 06
tengrrlBedford Bits, composition, Literature
Here’s the round-up of posts from last week on teaching composition and rhetoric from Bedford Bits, on teaching English language arts at the secondary level in High School Bits, and on teaching literature and creative writing from Bedford Lit Bits. I hope you find something you can use in the classroom or your research!
A Few Extra Links
For regular updates from Bedford Bits, be sure to sign up for the Ink’d In newsletter (and other resources), like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.
Cross-posted as a
Note on Bedford/St. Martin’s page on Facebook.
Oct 01
tengrrlcomposition
Here’s an interesting tip, related to exercise, but with a much wider application:
Throw away the bathing suit you wore in high school… and the memory too. It’s normal to have a mental image of yourself when you last exercised like a fiend. But if that image is from high school, you could be in big trouble. Even if it’s from last year, forget it. Remember as little as possible of what you used to look like. Starting today, make new memories. (from 14 Tips for Starting and Sticking with a Workout Routine)
What I’m wondering is how that tip applies to things other than exercise—like writing. Throw away those writing practices you used in high school (5 paragraph theme anyone?). Find new ways to write! What old things could you throw away to stop dwelling on the past and build new ways of working?
[Photo: Bathing Beauty in vintage Vogue by uppityrib, on Flickr
Aug 01
tengrrlcomposition, professional communications, social media headline, presentations, subject lines, title
If you want your work to be read, you need a strong headline, title, or subject line for the text you’re writing. Readers expect a title to give them a short description of the contents in a way that piques their interest in the topic. When a title doesn’t, it’s possible that you won’t people won’t read any further. They’ll just skip on to something that is interesting.
It’s important, then, to teach students how to write strong headlines, titles, and subject lines—and I have a great technique you can use, based on an observation Guy Kawasaki shared on Google+.
Kawasaki posted a screenshot from his blog indexing site, Alltop.com, and observed, “You can see who the good headline creators are when you see them side by side.” Indeed, you can.
Try the technique yourself by clicking on the screenshot above. It shows headlines from four blogs on the Writing page on Alltop. Even with the limited number of titles in the screenshot, you can see that some headlines are better at catching your attention than others. I want to go read The Other N-Words, for instance.
The blogs at the top of an Alltop page tend to be stronger, so there’s not an obvious dud in the image. If you visit the Writing page on Alltop though, you’re likely to find some headlines that don’t work. On the current page, for example, I’m uninterested in Exercise 9, 10, 11, or 12 from Aldys Fiction. Aldys Fiction may be a great site, but based on those headlines alone, there’s nothing to convince me to go read anything.
To show students how to write strong headlines, titles and subject lines, just customize this activity a bit. Here’s a basic outline of what to do:
- Choose a page on Alltop that focuses on a topic that students are familiar with. Alltop has pages for hundreds of topics, ranging from American Idol to Zombies, and from Anthropology to Zoology. Nearly any topic students are exploring can be found on Alltop. (That makes the site great for research too, but I’ll save that for a later post.) Be sure to review the page you choose to ensure the blog titles are all appropriate for the classroom.
- Print the Alltop page. You can work on the live website, but when you mouse over a blog title, more information from the post will pop up. Since you want students to focus on the titles alone, the live site isn’t the best option. Further, Alltop is updated hourly, so an inappropriate blog title may appear. Printing the pages avoids both of these problems. If you want a paper-free option, print to PDFs and work from the files rather than the live site.
- Pass out the Alltop page, and ask students to mark 10–15 blog posts that they want to read. Encourage students to move quickly through the options. The point is to make fast decisions. Give them two or three minutes.
- Next ask students to identify 5 blog posts that they would not read. Again, ask them to work quickly, as if they were scrolling down the list on a computer screen.
- In small groups, have students share their selections and note posts chosen by more than one person. Have them create a group list of approximately 15 blogs the group would read.
- Ask group members to compare the 15 blog titles and identify what makes the titles compelling. Encourage students to look for similarities. You might work through an example title to demonstrate features that typically make a headline stand out.
- Have students use the similarities to create guidelines for strong titles. Students can consider the 5 posts they each said they would not read to see how they violate their guidelines as well.
- Compile all the group guidelines into a class list. Groups can share their lists with the class. As a group shares its guidelines, note new ideas on the board. Work to group related ideas as the groups present their lists. Once all groups have shared, review the class list together and make any revisions.
- Talk about how to apply the headline guidelines to paper titles and subject lines. Add suggestions on how to adjust the information for different rhetorical situations.
- For homework, ask students to strengthen the titles on their texts by using the guidelines that the class has created. If desired, students can submit a before and after version of their titles that you review during the next class session.
As you go through the activity, you may find the opportunity to review the rules for using capital letters in titles. You can point to the guidelines in your class text. For a thorough review, point students to the details on Capitalizing Titles from Grammar Girl. For a bit of fun, you can try out the SongCase – the song title capitalizer.
So there you have it. It’s fairly simple, but it should influence the headlines, titles, and subject lines that you see after the class completes it. Do you have any tricks for teaching students about headlines, titles, and subject lines? Leave me a comment!
Jul 31
tengrrlBedford Bits, composition, Literature Bulwer-Lytton
One day, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton sat down and wrote what have become one of the most infamous opening lines of his novel Paul Clifford (1830): “It was a dark and stormy night.”
Bulwer-Lytton wrote other memorable lines. He penned “the pen is mightier than the sword” too, but chances are that if you know his name, it’s because of “It was a dark and stormy night.” Part of that sentence’s familiarity is thanks to Snoopy, who works so hard on that first sentence of his novels. If you’ve never quite understood the problem with that sentence, it’s likely that you’ve never read the full thing:
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
Quite the sentence, isn’t it? Since 1983, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest has honored that epic sentence with a competition to write an equally spectacular sentence. This year’s winner, Sue Fondrie, teaches at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. The Guardian has more details, including the award-winning sentence which compares memories to wind turbines and sparrows and a groaner of a winner from the Fantasy category.
This post is the introduction from the Bits Flashback for July 31. Read the rest of the post on Facebook.
[Photo: Stormy night by Andrew J. Sutherland, on Flickr]
Jul 12
tengrrlclassroom activity, composition, ReadWriteThink, visual rhetoric tagxedo, word clouds, wordle
You probably would have guessed that raven was one of the most frequently used words in Poe’s “The Raven,” but the Wordle word cloud on the right makes the impact of that word visually obvious. Wordle is a free tool that can make a word cloud out of any text that is pasted into a form or by using the text on a webpage. It includes some choices for formatting, so that you can change the color and layout of the words. You can also omit commonly used words. The final cloud can be printed or saved.
Last week, Edutopia shared some ideas for using Wordle in the classroom, as part of their New Teacher Boot Camp. In addition to checking out the Edutopia resources, take a look at these blog posts for more ideas on using word clouds for reading and writing activities in the classroom:
This post is the introduction from “July 11 to 16 on ReadWriteThink.” Read the rest of the post on Facebook.
Jul 03
tengrrlBedford Bits, classroom activity, composition collaboration, community, google docs, microsoft word, teamwork
This week in Inside Higher Ed, Joshua Kim asserts, “The world is divided into two types of people: those who prefer Track Changes in Word and those who prefer to write collaboratively in Google Docs.” Kim’s explanation of the two ways of working with text sparked conversation on the TechRhet discussion list. Some spoke to Kim’s explicit question: “Which one are you?” while others extended the focus to consider different ways to write HTML texts.
Naturally, there’s no correct answer to Kim’s question, and the situation is not as binary as it is presented in his article. That ambiguous quality makes the article and its overarching question perfect for a class discussion of collaboration and teamwork. Students can share their own alignment, and then move on to talk about how Kim’s article is defining writing and collaboration. They can widen the discussion of writing and collaboration to include more tools and kinds of composing. With that groundwork in place, they can then talk about their own teamwork in class. Focus their conversation on how different kinds of collaboration suit different projects and ask them to brainstorm strategies for working together when you have different preferences.
Kim’s article is short, but it touches on how software, teamwork, and how people collaborate—all valuable topics for the classroom.
This post is the introduction from the Bits Flashback for July 3. Read the rest of the post on Facebook.
[Photo: Google Docs by BobChao, on Flickr]
Jun 26
tengrrlBedford Bits, classroom activity, composition, Literature assignments, food writing
Alyssa Rosenberg wrote about Food in Fiction and How Cooking Brings You Closer to Characters this week in The Atlantic. The article asks readers to think about how cooking and eating the same foods as fictional characters strengthens the connection between reader and the text.
Rosenberg describes some lemon cakes she made as a connection to Sansa, a character the books by George R.R. Martin that are the basis of HBO’s Game of Throne:
The cakes weren’t anything like I’d imagined from reading about them in the book—they were spongier and less sweet, and hard to imagine as a dreamed-of delicacy. But they were delicious, a powerful visceral connection to the people on screen and the world in which they live.
Such connections between reader and text reminded me of the potential writing about food has in the composition classroom. Jay Dolmage has written two entries this year that include assignments and discussion ideas. Take a look back at Writing About Food and Food Rules for ways you can connect with students just as Rosenberg connects with those fictional characters.
This post is the introduction from the Bits Flashback for June 26. Read the rest of the post on Facebook.
[Photo: Lemon Cake by Charles Haynes, on Flickr]
Jun 20
tengrrlBedford Bits, composition, social media collaboration, digital writing, poetry, QR codes, transmedia
Just published last week, Troy Hicks’ collection on Reading and Writing Transmedia on the National Writing Project’s Digital Is site explores how digital writing is evolving.
The collection of texts “primarily authored by Laura Fleming represents one educator’s vision of what transmedia is, and what it can be, for teachers and students learning to read and write in a digital age.” You’ll find an explanation and history of transmedia as well as example texts and pedagogical reflections.
Also out last week are these posts from Bedford Bits posts:
A Few Extra Links
For regular updates from Bedford Bits, be sure to like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Have a great week!
—Traci Gardner
[Photo: Gunter Somerfeld, Transmedia Development & The New World Model by Gulltaggen, on Flickr]
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