November, 2009 Maxims Date : 11-19 20:12: Views: 1793 Comments : 0 Topic :Aphorisms Aphorisms Date : 11-17 13:25: Views: 1017 Comments : 0 Topic :Aphorisms Review of The Lexicographer's Dilemma Date : 11-03 19:51: Views: 5317 Comments : 0 Topic :Books gpullman@gsu.edu | Published: 06-29 2009 Title: Writing to Learn Assignments Topic: Writing Over at the Edge, which appears, based on a quick glance, to be some kind of intellectual electronic zine, there's an article about the "future" of universities. The author of the piece champions something he calls just in time teaching and his example is one of the examples of writing learn assignments that i've been suggesting people here use and why i've been developing and promoting the Online Writing Environment for here at GSU. There are shining examples of interactive education, though. Dr. Maria Terrell, who teaches calculus at Cornell University, used an interactive method that's part of a program called "Good Questions," which is funded by the National Science Foundation.
One strategy being used in this program is called just-in-time teaching; it is a teaching and learning strategy that combines the benefits of Web-based assignments and an active-learner classroom where courses are customized to the particular needs of the class. Warm-up questions, written by the students, are typically due a few hours before class, giving the teacher an opportunity to adjust the lesson "just in time," so that classroom time can be focused on the parts of the assignments that students struggled with. Harvard professor Eric Mazur, who uses this approach in his physics class, puts it this way: "Education is so much more than the mere transfer of information. The information has to be assimilated. Students have to connect the information to what they already know, develop mental models, learn how to apply the new knowledge, and how to adapt this knowledge to new and unfamiliar situations. link Published: 03-25 2009 Title: What students think students are reading Topic: Writing Interesting student (sophomore) rant in the Signal about how students don't read anything challenging anymore. Even more interesting when she says her Eng Profs dont' challenge her either. (link) Published: 03-22 2009 Title: Job Searching Topic: Writing From a NYT interview with the CEO of Xerox: Q. When you’re assessing a job candidate, do you have one or two acid-test questions?
A. They have more to do with behavior and culture than they do with competence and expertise. Generally speaking, the people you talk to have the competence and expertise. That’s how they got to the interview. So then the most important aspect is whether it’s a good fit. And so I always ask the question, why are they choosing us, not so much why we should choose them. I really want to hear about what they could do for the company and why they think it would be a place they could be successful.
It’s a little bit of a test. Have they done their homework? Do they understand the place? Do they aspire to the kind of value system and culture we have here? I’ve learned that it’s probably the biggest success or failure indication, as well, about whether people are a good fit with the culture.
Q. If you had to choose another profession, what would it be? A. I tried to choose another profession. It didn’t work out. My dad was an editor and a writer, and that’s really where I would have liked to have gone. But the genetic link was not intact there, so I wound up going into business. But I love to write still. I’m not a great writer, but I enjoy it. I feel that it’s one of the more satisfying things that I do, and would have loved at some point to have had a profession there. (link) Published: 01-28 2009 Title: No term papers in the real world Topic: Writing Much of what undergraduates learn in college is useless outside of college. Academics love complexity and subtlety and fine-grained distinctions. We love nuance. We love methodology and are fascinated by data. We are unconcerned, for the most part, if what we discover is profitable or not, so long as it's interesting enough to other academics to publish. Students come to university looking to learn only what's necessary to get the degree. They are focused on what we used to call psyching the prof. That is figuring out what she wants us to say (as if she were actually hiding something from us!) and then saying it, regardless of whether or not we agree or even much understand. We learn to write in a jargon-filled way, trying to sound like a professor in the hope that the style and abstractions will paper over the gaps in our knowledge, most of which we don't see clearly anyway. As profs we are often content with well written (structurally sound, grammatically accurate) prose, since by the time we get to something well written we will have read dozens of hasty, error filled, rambling confusions. We certainly don't expect our students to say anything new. So as I put together my next lesson plan, I will ask myself what problem does this information solve? What can a person do outside university life with what I want them to learn today? They need to understand writing as a process of problem solving. So now all I have to do is figure out how to do that. I guess the digital rhetoric exercise about argumentation might have been phrased like this: How do you fit five pages of text onto a single screen? Published: 01-13 2009 Title: Active learning Topic: Writing Nice quotation from an MIT phsyics prof. in an article about turning large lecture classes into small interactive labs: “Just as you can’t become a marathon runner by watching marathons on TV,” Professor Mazur said, “likewise for science, you have to go through the thought processes of doing science and not just watch your instructor do it.” (link) Published: 11-12 2008 Title: WAC Topic: Writing In looking for info on design concepts I came across a piece on "Depth Processing" in a book called Universal Principles of Design. I'm quoting verbatim below. A phenomenon of memory in which information that is analyzed deeply is better recalled than information that is analyzed superficially
Thinking about information improves the likelihood that the information will be recalled at a later time. For example, consider two tasks that involve interacting with and recalling the same information. In the first task, a group of people is asked to locate a keyword in a list and circle it. In the second task, another group of people is asked to locate a keyword in a list, circle it, and then define it. After a brief time, both groups are asked to recall the keywords from the tasks. The group that performed the second task will have better recall of the keywords because they had to analyze the keywords at a deeper level than the group in the first task; they had to think harder about the information
This phenomenon results from the two ways in which information is processed, known as maintenance rehearsal and elaborative rehearsal. Maintenance rehearsal simply repeats the same kinds of analysis that have already been carried out. For example, people often use maintenance rehearsal when they repeat a phone number back to themselves. To help them remember; no additional analysis was performed on the phone number. Elaborative rehearsal involves a deeper, more meaningful analysis of information. For example, people engage in elaborative rehersal when they read a text passage and then have to answer questions about the meaning of the passage; additional analysis as to word and sentence meaning require additional thought. Generally, elaborative rehearsal results recall performance is 2 to 3 times better than maintenance reversal.
The key determining factors as to how deeply information is processed by the distinctiveness of information, the relevance of the information, and the degree to which the information is elaborated. Distinctiveness refers to the uniqueness of information relative to surrounding information and previous experience. Relevance refers to the degree to which the information is perceived to be important in the degree of elaboration refers to how much thought is required to interpret and understand the information. Generally, the processing of information that involves these factors will result in the best possible recall and retention of information.
Consider depth of processing and design contexts where recall and retention of information is important. Use unique presentation and interesting activities to engage people to deeply process information. Use case studies, examples, and other devices to make information relevant to an audience. Note that the processing requires more concentration and effort than mere exposure e.g. classroom lecture, and therefore frequent periods of rest should be incorporated into the presentation and tasks. page 60. Published: 10-19 2008 Title: Higher Education Topic: Writing Here's an excerpt from a piece about working for a paper mill that will make you, make you, I have no idea. Quit maybe. It's not that I never felt a little skeevy writing papers. Mostly it was a game, and a way to subsidize my more interesting writing. Also, I've developed a few ideas of my own over the years. I don't have the academic credentials of composition experts, but I doubt many experts spent most of a decade writing between one and five term papers a day on virtually every subject. I know something they don't know; I know why students don't understand thesis statements, argumentative writing, or proper citations.
It's because students have never read term papers.
Imagine trying to write a novel, for a grade, under a tight deadline, without ever having read a novel. Instead, you meet once or twice a week with someone who is an expert in describing what novels are like. (link) Published: 06-13 2008 Title: Technology and Memory Topic: Writing I'm quoting what I'm about to quote more because it resonates with ideas about writing and reading in decline as a result of technology (which I don't believe entirely) than because of what it says about memory specifically, and also because the source seems to have an axe to grind that might make it a good example for critical reading assignments, which is something else reverberating in the echo chamber of my head these days. We also have to admit that technology removes some of the mental discipline that every generation before us had to practice. We may be weakening ourselves over time because we don't have to do the work of memorizing information, navigating roads or keeping track of upcoming events now that digital devices handle those tasks for us. What evidence do we have? Technology not only affects the way we process information, taken to an extreme it may also diminish memory. (link) Published: 05-15 2008 Title: Writing and time Topic: Writing A quotation from An overview of writing assessment: theory, research, and practice, Willa Walcott with Sue M Legg. NCTE, 1998 For one part of the study, the experimental group of students was given fifty minutes to write on one topic and sixteen minutes on another; the control group of student was allowed sixteen minutes for each of the two topics. Results showed that while students with more time to write on the topic did perform better than their peers in the control group, the difference was not as clear as might have been expected. Interestingly, the better writers, rather than the weaker writers, seemed to benefit more from the additional time (see Applebee et al., 1989, pp 32-34. page 17 Published: 04-11 2008 Title: The Heckling Game Topic: Writing This is a writing to learn assignment i've cribbed from a famous old American book on style, Walker Gibson's Tough, Sweet, Stuffy. 1966 In the second chapter, "Hearing Voices", he quotes a passage from a magazine verbatim and then he re-quotes it with snide comments square bracketed at the end of each sentence: The title of this essay may strike you as a typographical error. [Why no, as a matter of act, that never occurred to me]. You may be saying to yourself that the writer really means required reading [Don't be silly. I would be more surprised to see a title so trite. In fact your title embodies just the sort of cute phrase i have learned to expect from this middlebrow magazine] (22)
Gibson is making a point here, that every text invites a person to become a certain sort of reader, in this case a cheerful, agreeable reader, and Gibson would have us read against the grain; in this case he would have us become a pissy bastard. I don't read him as advocating such a stance [he advises us not to "this mean trick can be worked by anybody against almost anything" and he hopes we won't play it on him], but rather that it's a good idea to resist an invitation as a way of discovering what it really asks of us. We could play the game the other way, to place ingratiating encouragement between the brackets. At any rate, the game of placing dialogic comments between square brackets within sentences strikes me as an interesting way to teach critical thinking. So much of what our students read is text book prose, designed to be swallowed whole and returned intact. We might better encourage them to write between the lines. Rather than asking them to read between the lines, to ask what does she mean really, we should ask them to write between the lines, to take on the author is some fashion, to pwn the text, we might say. One could do a computerized version of this assignment, write a script that would place a link at the end of every sentence that would allow a person to enter their comment on the previous sentence and save the comments and then re-print the original to the screen with the comments embedded: a kind of wicked paidea. ew, sorry. still, not a bad idea. <? $t = "One. Two. Three.";
?> Published: 01-27 2008 Title: Critical thinking as active participation Topic: Writing Convergence Culture: Where old and new media collide. Henry Jenkins. New York, NYUP: 2006 Historically, public education in the United States was a product of the need to distribute the skills and knowledge necessary to train informed citizens. The participation gap becomes much more important as we think about what it would mean to foster the skills and knowledge needed by monitorial citizens: here, the challenge is not simply being able to read and write, but being able to participate in the deliberations over what issues matter, what knowledge counts, and what ways of knowing command authority and respect. . . We need to rethink the goals of media education so that young people can come to think of themselves as cultured producers and participants and not simply as consumers, critical or otherwise 258-9
Not sure how to connect these two quotations yet, other than that I found them on the same day. But the are obviously of a theme. In a review of the electronic book device called Kindle, a writer in the NYT quotes Steven Job's response to it as "when Mr. Jobs was asked two weeks ago at the Macworld Expo what he thought of the Kindle, he heaped scorn on the book industry. “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.” (link) The author goes on to observe that Job's stats aren't quite accurate. And that 27% of Americans read 15 books or more during that same year. Still, that suggests a divide of some kind. If we can't get people to read, will it be easier to get them to write? Or will the cognitive beneftis of composition have to come from learning how to make short films and annotate images? Published: 09-10 2007 Title: Feedback technologies Topic: Writing self-reporting -- on the premise that self-consciousness plays a part in effective articulation, getting someone to describe and evaluate a piece can help them revise it later.
peer-reporting -- on the grounds that watching others improves performance, but having novices critique others is fraught with difficulties : describe, don't evaluate
Prof - reporting -- on the grounds that early participation in the writing process improve final outcomes. Prof's early efforts should be interrogative.
Published: 07-25 2007 Title: Plagiarism Topic: Writing An article over at Hapers on Plagiarism and Art. (link) "The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism" Jonathan Lethem, February 2007 Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.
Any text that has infiltrated the common mind to the extent of Gone With the Wind or Lolita or Ulysses inexorably joins the language of culture. A map-turned-to-landscape, it has moved to a place beyond enclosure or control. The authors and their heirs should consider the subsequent parodies, refractions, quotations, and revisions an honor, or at least the price of a rare success. Published: 04-23 2007 Title: OMG! Topic: Writing Txt speak began in Boston in the summer of 1838. (link) Published: 04-03 2007 Title: university attendance Topic: Writing "In 1900, about 2 percent of the college-age population enrolled in higher education. That number is around 65 percent today. " (link)
Published: 10-24 2006 Title: Video Jug Topic: Writing I wonder if writing is a dying practice? Published: 10-08 2006 Title: History of Composition Topic: Writing A History of Professional Writing Instruction in American Colleges. Katherine H. Adams. Southern Methodist UP: Dallas, 1993 In 1879, for example, A.S. Hill complained of the inattention to writing quality at the upper division: 'the professor, absorbed in a speciality, contented himself with requiring at recitations and examinations knowledge of the subject-matter, however ill-digested and ill-expressed' ('An Answer to the Cry 234). Like other teachers, he recognized that juniors and seniors were doing less written work as larger class sizes, new textbook materials, and lab sessions changed the college class structure. Faculty concerned with research, graduate teaching, and professional training had, as David R. Russell has stated, 'a license to complain about poor student writing but an institutionally sanctioned excuse for not devoting time to their undergraduates writing '(63) (36)
Hill structured his class sessions to evoke a more natural prose: he allowed students to develop their own topics in daily 10-minute in-class sessions, an experiment that he found 'unexpectedly successful': "having no time to be affected, they are simple and natural. Theme-language, which still haunts too many of their longer essays, rarely creeps into the ten-minute papers. Free fron faykts if ibe jubd ir abitger tgese oaoers are not; but the faults are such as would be committed in conversation or in familiar correspondence." [English in Our Colleges 512] (37-8) Published: 10-06 2006 Title: Definition of writing? Topic: Writing Richard K. Wagner and Keith E. Stanovich, in "Expertise in Reading" observe taht some have argued that "the study of reading is comprehension and taht reading is best conceptualized as thinking with a book on one's hand (The Road to Excellence, K. Anders Ericsson, ed. 193) So is writing thinking with a keyboard at your fingertips? Published: 10-06 2006 Title: Road to Excellence Topic: Writing Notes and quotes from The Road to Excellence: The Acquisition of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports and Games. K. Anders Ericsson, Ed. Mahaw, Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996 Based on a review of a century of laboratory studies of
learning and skill acquisition, Ericson, Krampe, and Tesch-Romer (1993)
concluded that the most effective learning requires a well-defined task with an
appropriate difficulty level for the particular individual, informative
feedback, and opportunities for repetition and corrections of errors. Wehn all
these elements are present they used the term deliberate pratice to
characterize training activities. 20-21
Expert musicians with the higher levels performance practiced
alone for about 25 ours per week, three times more than the less accomplished
expert musicians. [while] amateur musicians of the same age practiced less than
2 hours per week [< 10%] (22)
concentration is the most important part of deliberate practice
. . . across a wide range of domains, expert performers only engage in about 4
hours of deliberate practice on a daily basis for extended periods. When this
level is exceeded the quality of practice appears to deteriorate and the
individuals will eventually experience fatigue and exhaustion. (24)
... deliberate practice is not inherently enjoyable, but
individuals engage in it as an instrumental means to improve their performance
to attain the highest levels. (25)
The key problem for a beginner is to identify a sequence of
training tasks with attainable learning goals that will eventually lead to the
desire level of performance. (33)
Perhaps the most important conclusion from this informal
analysis is that expert skill requires the acquisition of refined internal
representations to simultaneously image, execute, and provide feedback about
their produced performance (35)
Benjamin Franklin recounted how he learned to write in a clear
logical fashion by self-study. He would read a passage in a well-written book
and then would try to reproduce the argument in writing from memory. By
comparing his reproduction to the original, he was able to identify differences
and through iteration he learned how to reproduce the original argument. (36)
[they go on to say that good chess players learn very little from playing with
less skilled players because ] their errors and inferior moves cannot be easily
identified nor serve as stimulus for improvement[ and that reading books
describing expert moves is much more instructive ]--so much for peer review
There are intriguing parallels between sight-reading in music
and reading. In both activities the primary mode of experience and practice
consists of engaging in the activity . . the importance of the amount of reading
experience for the improvement of reading skill. It is likely that a more
refined analysis of different types of reading activities will reveal an even
closer connection to increased reading skill. For example, the difficulty level
of the texts an individual reads is important and reading texts well below the
individuals reading level would not elicit problems and appropriate challenges
for skill development. . . For chidren to gain significant benefits frfom
reading aloine, they must be able to monitor word recognition and the
comprehension of the texts by themselves. Because children have limited skills
in monitoring text comprehension . . They will ot always be able to use feedback
to determine the need to reread sentences and passages, and thus the benefits of
reading alone will not be optimal for skill development (38)
Another general type of mechanism mediating expert performance
and its improvement involves actively integrating the expert's knowledge. By
deliberately retrieving many types of relevant knowledge and experiences from
memory, the expert will often discover inconsistencies among them, which in turn
will serve as a stimulus for further analysis and a search for new information
until an acceptable reintegration of the associated knowledge is attained.
(38)
The learning mechanisms available to most experts . . .
required that for effective learning the subject must acquire mechanisms
supporting reasoning, planning, prediction, and expectation in order to generate
feedback and effective error diagnosis with appropriate correction. (39)
The complex and accessible internal represntatio of expert performers stand in direct contrast to the nearly automatic and efforltess mediation of habitual perfomrance in work andleisure activities in everyday life. Whereas the goal for habitual performance iseffortless execdution of already adapted behvior there are two quite different goals for expert performance. the first goal is to contantly improve the given level of performance and the second goals is to echibit the best performance that is attainable given the current skill. 39
Published: 10-05 2006 Title: Are Writers Born or made? Topic: Writing One of the traditional rhetorical dilemmas is the one posed by Isocrates in Antidosis, i think, about which of the three components of performance, practice, art, or talent, is the most important. There's an interesting article over at ScienceCentralNews that suggests that it is focused practice that separates experts from novices, not talent. Locating your weaknesses and single-mindedly strengthening them. "The interesting finding is that experts in any domain seem to share very, very similar attributes," he says, "and they are acquired through extended practices, not just mere experience. They actually are doing a lot of thinking work that would allow them now to acquire the skills that are necessary for superior performance."
Ericsson and Ward say their findings suggest that any novice can become an expert with enough of the right kind of training. "It suggests that anyone with the right kind of practice will be able to dramatically improve their performance and it looks like they would be able to become experts with sufficient practice," Ericsson says.
The ideas here are developed further in another paper: the difference between experts and less skilled subjects is not merely a matter of the amount and complexity of the accumulated knowledge; it also reflects qualitative differences in the organization of knowledge and its representation (Chi, Glaser & Rees, 1982). Experts' knowledge is encoded around key domain-related concepts and solution procedures that allow rapid and reliable retrieval whenever stored information is relevant. Less skilled subjects' knowledge, in contrast, is encoded using everyday concepts that make the retrieval of even their limited relevant knowledge difficult and unreliable. Furthermore, experts have acquired domain-specific memory skills that allow them to rely on long-term memory (Long-Term Working Memory, Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995) to dramatically expand the amount of information that can be kept accessible during planning and during reasoning about alternative courses of action. The superior quality of the experts' mental representations allow them to adapt rapidly to changing circumstances and anticipate future events in advance. The same acquired representations appear to be essential for experts' ability to monitor and evaluate their own performance (Ericsson, 1996; Glaser, 1996) so they can keep improving their own performance by designing their own training and assimilating new knowledge. Published: 08-08 2006 Title: Punctuation from hell Topic: Writing Comma quirk irks RogersIt could be the most costly piece of punctuation in Canada. A grammatical blunder may force Rogers Communications Inc. to pay an extra $2.13-million to use utility poles in the Maritimes after the placement of a comma in a contract permitted the deal's cancellation. (link) Published: 07-13 2006 Title: Academic Professionals and WAC Topic: Writing Harris, Joseph. "Thinking Like a Program." Pedagogy 4.3 (2004): 357-363. (link) Harris asks if making Composition a discipline has improved the working conditions of teachers; it's still TAs and adjuncts who teach first-year composition. He describes "Writing 20," the only course at Duke required of all undergraduates. It is run, not by the English Department, but by the Duke University Writing Program. The classes are taught by "fellows," non-tenure-track teachers, mostly with PhDs, from a wide range of disciplines. Harris says many are young teachers who want to improve their teaching skills before specializing in their fields. The Duke UWP is an interesting model, although of course it wouldnt work everywhere. (Added by Ben Miller on March 14, 2005 | Last Updated on March 14, 2005) Published: 06-12 2006 Title: Utility of peer review Topic: Writing Written Communication, July 2006; Vol. 23, No. 3 Commenting on Writing: Typology and Perceived Helpfulness of Comments from Novice Peer Reviewers and Subject Matter Experts Kwangsu Cho, Christian D. Schunn, and Davida Charney Written Communication 2006;23 260-294 http://wcx.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/23/3/260?etocPublished: 05-30 2006 Title: Powerpoint Presentations Topic: Writing Interesting book about using Aristotelian ideas of story telling to give presentations, and using "education" to sell Microsoft. Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft PowerPoint to Create Presentations that Inform, Motivate, and Inspire by Cliff Atkinson Microsoft Press © 2005 I found it at Books 24/7 It got me thinking about using a dynmaic background, like a wmv of a lightening storm that slowly fades into a clear blue sky as a dramatic underscore for a presentation--cheesey no doubt but it's the idea that i'm wonderin about. MS has an add in for PowerPoint called Producer.
Published: 05-08 2006 Title: Plain English and the SEC Topic: Writing The US Securities and Exchange Commission has a "Plain English Handbook". The Intro has Warren E Buffett saying the following: One unoriginal but useful tip: Write with a specific person in mind. When writing Berkshire Hathaway's annual report, I pretend that I'm talking to my sisters. I have no trouble picturing them: Though highly intelligent, they are not experts in accounting or finance. They will understand plain English, but jargon may puzzle them. My goal is simply to give them the information I would wish them to supply me if our positions were reversed. To succeed, I don't need to be Shakespeare; I must, though, have a sincere desire to inform. Published: 02-10 2006 Title: New motto for wac? Topic: Writing Our WAC program doesn't have a motto, but if it did t would probably be something like, the more you write, the more you think, the better you understand. By having students write before they come to class and after they leave, even for just 15 minutes, you can discover what they've learned, and what they've misconstrued. You can also be certain that they've prepared for the next class, or at least know who has and who hasn't and how well. The problem with pre and post class writing is merely logistical. How do you gather and read all those bits of scribbled notes before the next class? And what if you want to comment on something directly to a student? Get them via email, but then of course you've got to keep track of all that email, and the email alert bell goes off incessantly. The WAC Online writing environment can resolve these logistical issues. Published: 01-29 2006 Title: Writing resumes Topic: Writing "25 words that hurt your resume" Words don't tell potential employers as much as deeds By Laura Morsch, CareerBuilder.com An interesting piece over at CNN about what to put and what not to put in a resume. The main point is show don't tell. Not exactly earth-shattering, but valid. There's also a list of words to avoid, which I find kind of interesting: Instead of ... "Excellent written communication skills"
Try... "Wrote jargon-free User Guide for 11,000 users" And the words you should operationalize rather than use? (link) Published: 12-04 2005 Title: Idea Generators Topic: Writing Writer's block is a real problem for many. Invention, as strategies for coming up with things to say, is the traditional solution, but it is either super abstract, its Aristotelian form, or uncreative in the sense of the sort of boiler plate patterns often given in traditional handbooks. There's a nice collection of other techniques, along with explanations of them at ideagenerationmethods.com Published: 11-18 2005 Title: What I learned about writing from writing computer code Topic: Writing This wouldn't have taken so long if I knew what I was doing The importance of meta comentary -- if you can't comment the code you haven't fully articulated the idea it is possible to write on the edge of understanding--i know what i'm trying to say and i know i'm not saying it but i don't know how to bridge the gap you can write without really being able to read what you've written because the interpretation process is partially machine driven--it does exactly what you told it to do, but you don't always know exactly what that was. whereas with writing you often think you wrote what you meant to write, but you didn't and you won't know right away and possibly never at all. trial and error is effective because instantaneous, unlike writing words whre the process of articulation and response is drawn out and constantly changing so that you can't do the same thing twice or hold a variable constant. how to proof read Published: 10-18 2005 Title: Word salad surgery Topic: Writing I've written a php script that takes input from a textarea and scrambles it sentence by sentence, so that a writer can test the coherence of any given paragraph, ala Plato's claim that a well written discourse has a necessary order. If you scramble the order of sentences in a paragraph and it makes as much sense as it did unscrambled, it doesn't yet make any sense. (link) Published: 10-03 2005 Title: Collaboration software Topic: Writing There's a product called Writerly that offers an online collaboration software package that might be a good thing to using in a writing classroom. Published: 09-28 2005 Title: Digital writing listserv Topic: Writing WRITING-AND-THE-DIGITAL-LIFE@JISCMAIL.AC.UK Published: 05-29 2005 Title: Assessment Topic: Writing An article at College Board that asserts that multiple choice questions about grammar when added to an essay question is a good predictor of success, while the essay question alone is not as good a predictor as the multiple choice test alone. (link) Published: 03-08 2005 Title: Electronic Grading Topic: Writing http://lists.asu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0408&L=wpa-l&O=D&F=&I=-3&S=&P=19466 http://www.ets.org/research/dload/NCME_2004-Attali_B.pdfhttp://lists.asu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0502&L=wpa-l&P=R52367&D=0&I=-3&O=D http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/1999/05/25/computer_grading/ http://www.knowledge-technologies.com/IEA.shtml Marc P. Published: 01-31 2005 Title: Noun phrase detection Topic: Writing I'm building an online style checker as a way of thinking about robotic paper evaluation (a paper michael haynes and marc ross and I are working on for 2005 computers and writing) and have come across an article that briefly discusses noun detection using a regular expression. (link) My own technique is trivial, of course, because I am not a programmer. I just compare what the user puts in to a bunch of known phrases. Not smart, but it works in a way. The larger the comparison base, the more likely it is to catch something a writer might want to rephrase. Here is a site that describes the grammatical anatomy of the different forms of noun phrase. It might be useful if i ever get past literal pattern matching to regular expression matching. Published: 05-03 2004 Title: Electronic literacy Topic: Writing For use at some later date: electronic literacy is a process as well as a skill set. As a skill set it's the capacity to use electronic writing technologies to get work done. as a process it's the ability to learn new technologies and to discover in the process new ways of doing old things and new things to do. Published: 01-19 2004 Title: bullshit generator Topic: Writing Published: 04-25 2003 Title: The latest cry of "students can't write" Topic: Writing CNN.com reports today a study by the National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges that shows highschoolers don't write well and that WAC, though it doesn't use the name, is the cure (link) Input
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