See a large collection of writing handouts, including academic writing , creative writing, and business/professional writing.
After marking a set of bibliography exercises, I created this graphic to focus on the kinds of citation errors I found in submissions that students clearly aren’t proofreading. I’m amazed that students don’t correct the capitalization errors (often caused by the keywords the student was searching for) or when they don’t notice that entries repeat…
My years of watching MacGyver definitely paid off. (Not that my GenZ students got the reference.) I’m doing a lot more in-class work with paper, giving students handouts to annotate in class, asking them to write in copybooks. For the midterm I gave students a short academic article, excerpts from a play we haven’t read…
As a grad student at the University of Toronto, I picked up a bit about Marshall McLuhan here, a bit of Harold Innis there… Blogging this so I keep this in mind the next time I teach a course like The History and Future of the Book. (There’s so much out there!) [S]ome media are…
This morning, after students submitted a homework assignment (a 200-word evidence-based argument paragraph), I asked them to annotate a printout of the instructions (including a rubric), had them peer-review their own submission, and then had them write additional annotations on the assignment sheet, in which they stated what changes they now realized they needed to…
I felt like a capitalist, buying in bulk on the cheap and selling individual books for $2 (about a 20-cent profit, per book, but I’m really rounding up so I don’t have to deal with change). Students will spend time in class annotating printouts and writing in their copybooks. They’ll still do online activities but…
In the halls of power at Amazon, busy executives have no time for PowerPoints. At the start of a meeting, everyone gets a printed 6-page memo, and spends 20-25 minutes reading it silently and marking it up. After the discussion, the printouts (typically with detailed hand-written comments) are handed back to the person who called…
When I went off to college to be an English major, my father (who passed last December at 90) told me a story about how his respected professor at Northwestern University spent a whole lecture on the seven levels of symbolism in Melville’s Moby-Dick. Being of an analytical mind and precise mind, my father copied…
When I ask my students to use the library database to find scholarly peer-reviewed journal articles, some students stick with the search methods they’re already familiar with, and they submit works cited lists that include articles written by undergraduate interns, or articles from low-value pay-to-publish ecosystems like “Frontiers.” While I don’t read every article students…
What have my students learned about creative nonfiction writing? During class they are collaborating on a Google Doc that’s coming together very nicely before our eyes. Similar:Midterm Grades Spring 2025: Posted!The Dog and the Oyster (Aesop Fable)MLA Citations: Your attention to detail establishes your credibilityMore than a million people die on roads every year. Meet…
Predatory publications are not concerned with writing quality (or even coherence), and thus also do not care about writing tools (although we could, perhaps, include generative AI as a tool that replaces those used by human authors). The rules change pretty radically as the predatory version does away with nearly all of the rules in…
Touched up and created an infographic for a web page that I first posted in Nov 2000. Similar:Midterm Grades Spring 2025: Posted!MLA Citations: Your attention to detail establishes your credibilityMore than a million people die on roads every year. Meet the man determined to prevent the…Stapler jam during a midterm exam.The Tyranny of Now (Appreciation…
It’s unlikely to be at the forefront of the former president’s mind as he reflects on the verdict, but one immediate consequence is that Trump will probably lose the honorific title of “Mr” in the news pages of the UK’s Daily Telegraph. The Telegraph’s style guide states: “Defendants in criminal court cases … are to be referred…
Rewatching ST:DS9 A nervous Morn sniffs a flower and presents it to a woman who accepts it warmly. At the replimat, Odo and Sisko chat about the forthcoming O’Brien baby and the risks of interspecies love. Worf’s jealously and aloofness is played for laughs against Dax’s open friendliness as they discuss a trip to Risa…
Here’s the underlying problem. We have an operating image of thought, an understanding of what thought is and how to make thought productive of knowledge and truth through the use of various methods. This image and its methods are, of course, products of human history. They change over time, in different cultures, and so on.…
How to Disagree Academically: Using Graham’s “Disagreement Hierarchy” to organize a college term paper. Similar:Midterm Grades Spring 2025: Posted!The Dog and the Oyster (Aesop Fable)MLA Citations: Your attention to detail establishes your credibilityStapler jam during a midterm exam.The Tyranny of Now (Appreciation of Harold Innis)Is AI making us less intelligent?
Gotta love how this reporter worked the spelling variations into the story. Meet Ben F orgers (we wish we were making this up). The founder of the accounting firm hired by Donald Trump’s social media group has used 14 variations of his name in filings with the industry regulator, far more than any other US…
Some 2300 years ago in ancient Greece, Plato wrote a dialogue featuring his mentor Socrates, who argued that the ability to churn out the longest written compositions on trivial topics or the shortest compositions on important topics is a shallow skill that has nothing to do with human understanding, much like demonstrating that you can…
I’ve felt a bit like this guy the last few times I’ve been to in-person academic conferences. I certainly enjoy the panels and the keynotes and seeing the poster presentations, but in between sessions I just drift around and think about what I would be doing right now if I were at home, and missing…
What is a double-entry research journal?
Reading with a highlighter in your hand encourages you to agree with or ignore what you read. That’s a very limited way to engage with a text.
By contrast, double-entry notes are a way of making complex connections between different things that you read.
My students often tell me that when they take good double-entry notes, they get a much better paper when the time comes for them to start actually churning out the paragraphs.
Rewatching ST:DS9 On a bustling morning in Quark’s, Rom sours his brother’s good mood by ordering human cuisine — O’Brien’s favorite breakfast. Bashir commiserates after he accidentally killed the plants Keiko entrusted to O’Brien. Little Molly tells her daddy, “You’re in trouble.” Keiko seems strangely unmoved by the news. “They’re just plants.” When Keiko tells…