On its surface, plagiarism seems pretty straight forward—if you copy someone else’s work and claim it as your own, you’ve plagiarized. At it’s most basic definition, that definitely true. But plagiarism is actually a little more complicated than that. Truth is, if you break it down, there are at least
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Rhetoric is, as Aristotle once put it, the “faculty of observing, in any given case, the available means of persuasion.” What does that mean exactly? Every time we communicate, we have options for how to assemble a message. We can use words, sounds, facial expressions, colors, icons, symbols or any
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If you’re an educator, you’ve probably heard of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Since its original publication in 1956, the now-famous classification system has been used by countless teachers across the globe to help define learning objectives. Unfortunately, most illustrations of the taxonomy are either limited (they cover only one of the three
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If you, your students, or your business has built a website, you’ll want to evaluate how well it’s working. One critical method of evaluation, of course, is to conduct a usability test. You can learn more about how to do that here: How to Conduct Usability Tests. Another important method
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For as long as there have been artifacts of communication—speeches, articles, books, paintings, photographs, ad campaigns, whatever—there have been methods for analyzing their effectiveness. In recent years, high school and college teachers have been developing easy-to-remember acronyms to help students know the components of an artifact they should be evaluating.
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If you’re looking for ways to strengthen your writing right away, one of the best places to start is by using plain language. So…What is Plain Language? “Plain language” is a term often used by professional writers to describe writing that is easily understood by most people the first time
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Punctuation matters. It provides rhythm and cadence to our sentences. It gives our words and phrases rhetorical emphasis, power, and pith. Most importantly, perhaps, punctuation provides clarity; it makes distinctions, separates ideas, and…it gives dramatic pauses. But so many fear the punctuation marks. They only use what’s familiar: the periods,
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With the nearly universal decision coming last week to transition schools and universities to online instruction amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, educators across the globe—myself included—are finding themselves scrambling to convert their otherwise face-to-face courses to online. Some great resources have come out in the last few days to help teachers
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Two years ago, I was sitting in the back of four-seater tuk-tuk (which is basically a two-wheeled cart pulled behind a moped) in Cambodia with three of my online graduate students. If ever there was a time for me to have an ah-hah! pedagogy moment, that was it. I was
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Okay, so I just got done teaching my first-ever college course on how to make money from a blog (it was a short, 4-week May Term course). Let’s get real, though: I’m not the shining example of blogger guru-ness. I’ve learned a few things over the years (mostly what not
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