Dear Young Writers, I'm writing from Strum Hall at the University of Denver, after a day of attending lots of cool--or at least cool to me--presentations on how to create community writing projects that are reciprocal, meaningful, and promote a better, more just world. View of University of Denver campus from Strum Hall (my photo) In between sessions, I started reading your summaries of the articles, stories, and TedTalks you'll be writing about in your first blog posts. And I quickly realized that despite your uncanny ability to quickly and fairly summarize events in your life, movies, and TikToks, when you are asked to write a summary of an article, or a TedTalk in the context of a school assignment, your writing muscles inevitably tense up, and your writing becomes as stiff as my forty-four year old right knee. It's not your fault. You've been conditioned to do what you are told in school, and so your problem-solving skills are a bit rusty. The summary is but one p...
Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash Over the last few weeks, I've been thinking about your (student) feedback, and how it's affected me personally, and my teaching over the last decade or so. I have, let's say, mixed feelings about your feedback, ranging from anger to anxiety to guilt to shame to...well, you get it. Mixed, strong feelings about your feedback. For sure. When I started teaching in 2006, the end-of-semester student evaluations mainly triggered feelings of inadequacy and anxiety. I vividly recall one student who confidently claimed that I favored Hispanic students or something to that effect. I went into total panic mode when I read that comment. I remember I emailed my program's director asking her if she thought I should send a mass email to the entire class explaining how this was not true, and how much I appreciated and valued every single student, not just those who shared my Hispanic heritage. I had taken, I told her, special care to never use ...
I just finished reading Joe's " The Marriage Blog: I put a ring on it" where he reflects on the memories of his recent wedding and how social media is changing the way he remembers--the ways ALL OF US remember. I found this blog especially relevant to the (sometimes tense) discussions we've been having about identifying and exploring rhetorical problems through research, reflection and writing. Honestly, any problem that prompts us to think about the ways we communicate, is a rhetorical problem. Any problem or question that can withstand the embrace of Rhetoric , is a rhetorical problem. In this case, I'm talking about Rhetoric as a field of study , just like Math, or Chemistry, or Archaeology Think about it this way, if your Math professor asked you to identify a mathematical problem that interests you and try to solve it, what would you do? In this case, I'm asking you to identify a rhetorical problem, explore it through research, write a...
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