Monthly Archive for October, 2006

The Specifics of Generality

Published
by
Anthony
on October 12, 2006
in Pedagogy
. 0 Comments

One issue I often encounter in student writers is a tendency to waste time on generalities. You know what I mean: “Different people have various ways of dealing with difficult situations”; “Fiction is a very powerful thing,” to cite two examples from recent papers. In my comments on such passages I try to encourage students to be more specific, to claim something with some real arguing-power. I’ve recently started wondering, though, how I could become more specific myself in such commenting. How do you get students to get at the essence of something interesting and fruitful?

I may have stumbled upon an answer. A recent issue of The New Yorker (Oct. 9, 2006) contains some fascinating observations by Milan Kundera, under the title “What Is a Novelist?: How Great Writers Are Made.” I quote from the opening section, entitled “To Understand, We Must Compare”:

When the great Austrian novelist Hermann Broch wanted to block out a character, he first seized on the character’s essential position and then progressed to his more individual traits. From the abstract, he moved to the concrete. Esch is the protagonist of the second novel of Broch’s trilogy “The Sleepwalkers” (1931-32). In essence, Broch says, he is a rebel. What is a rebel? The best way to understand the phenomenon, Broch goes on to say, is by comparison. Broch compares the rebel to the criminal. What is a criminal? A conservative, who relies on the present order and wants to join it, who considers his thefts and his frauds to be a professional activity that will make him a citizen like everyone else. The rebel, by contrast, fights the established order to bring it under his own domination. Esch is not a criminal. Esch is a rebel. A rebel like Martin Luther, Broch says.

I’m not necessarily trying to produce great writers (or great novelists) in my composition classes, but I wonder if this technique of developing understanding through comparison might help students move toward better development of their own essential positions. Has anyone out there tried anything like this?

Audio Responses to Student Writing

Published
by
Mikhail
on October 10, 2006
in Feedback and Technology
. 0 Comments

A long while back, Cristina put up a post entitled “Digital Audio Comments in the Age of iPod” on audio commentary on student writing and linked to this article on using mp3s as a means of delivering feedback. This is something we’ve been talking about trying here at the Institute for a while.

I just came across this detailed report on precisely this sort of thing in Susan Sipple’s English Composiution I course at the U of Cincinatti. Take a look. Interesting stuff.

For what it’s worth, Chris Anson, whom Sipple cites in her report, is slated to speak at our upcoming Symposium in April.

Visual Thesaurus

Published
by
Yana
on October 7, 2006
in Resources and Technology
. 4 Comments

A friend of mine recently e-mailed me a link to this really cool site I’d like to share with you all. It’s called Visual Thesaurus. From the name of it you might think that it’s a type of picture dictionary, but it’s visual in a different way. It visualizes for us the links of the word networks, by showing us a word with its “relatives” all around it, distributed according to the closeness of their relation. This thesaurus not only gives you a word definition, it also shows word maps, gives examples of the word’s usage and even its pronunciation. I think it might help students, especially those for whom English is not the first language, develop a better vocabulary and get a better grasp on the way words are used.

And this is not all. There is more to that site than just a thesaurus. It also has interviews with writers and bloggers, and links to useful linguistic resources, as well as links to blogs related to teaching, corporate communications, writing, grammar, kids books, lexicography. I haven’t looked through every corner of that site, but I think that every one of us can find something interesting there.

Diagnostics - Beyond the Numbers?

Published
by
Ryan
on October 6, 2006
in Communication Intensive Courses (CICs)
. 0 Comments

As I’ve been coding diagnostic writing samples I’ve been thinking that there is some really interesting information here well beyond the quantitative data we focus on. For instance, students’ “post” samples in English lit classes like 2850 seem very often more in-depth, more thoughtful than their “pre” samples. Many of them admit to having been sceptical at the beginning of class (”This has nothing to do with business” etc) but then go on to describe how they feel that through a seemingly unrelated (required) class they have improved their analytical skills, changed their outlook on the world, stopped being intimidated by poetry, learned about enriching their understanding of literature via an author’s biography and historical context, and so on.

Perhaps I’ve just come across classes with really good professors. I’d like to think though that what we really see in such cases is proof of the necessity of the humanities — and not only for their own sake — and qualitiative support for the importance of CIC-type classes overall.

Also, on a slightly less rosy note, it seems to me that there are several courses that are technically CICs but that really demand a fairly paltry amount of intensive communication over the course of the semester. I’m not volunteering for this, but it might be interesting if someone explored the general qualitative content of “post” samples against the syllabi and writing/speaking/reading demands of the courses.