What would happen if we rethought the ways that we think and talk about writing and the writing process to use the kind of language and thinking that people use when they play games? That’s the question I’ve been pondering…
Category: Teaching Composition
Bits Week in Review for November 28
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…
Bits Week in Review for November 6
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.…
Get Rid of Old Writing Practices
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…
Award-Winning Sentences
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…
Software, Teamwork, & Collaboration
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…
Reading, Writing, Eating
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…
Another Trauma Narrative: Bits Flashback for May 8
On Saturday, Black College Wire posted an article on a composition assignment that had consequences the teacher never expected. The teacher, Lisa Carl, asked students to write “either a first-person autobiographical account of a significant event in their lives or…
March Madness! Bits Flashback for March 20
It’s the time of year for basketball and brackets, underdogs and dream teams, last-second miracles and heartbreaking losses. In the classroom, why not try a March Madness Poetry Tournament? It’s an activity you can easily customize for your class. Don’t…
38 Ways to Write about Writing
The second National Day on Writing is nearly upon us. Wednesday, October 20, is the day established by the National Council of Teachers of English to celebrate the many kinds of writing that people everywhere do. Chances are that the…