Grammar/Usage books ...for me?

Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:33:08 -0500
From: Emily Isaacs
Subject: Favorite big, fat grammar and usage reference book -- for yourself, not students

Folks,

Do you have a favorite grammar and usage reference book for your own use? I am perfectly happy with any number of the handbooks for use in class, but I'm finally read to own a big, fat grammar book that will give me lots of explanations and discussion.

Emily

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_Breaking the Rules_ by Ed Schuster

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Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:17:48 -0600
From: Quinn Warnick
Subject: Re: Favorite big, fat grammar and usage reference book -- for yourself, not students

Emily,

I like _Garner's Modern American Usage_ (Bryan A. Garner, Oxford), for precisely the reasons you mentioned: it is LONG on explanation and discussion, without being over pedantic. In fact, Garner begins the book with an essay called "Making Peace in the Language Wars," in which he tries to find some common ground between the "prescribers" and the "describers." I have the 2nd edition, but a 3rd edition just came out:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195382757/

I first read about Garner's guide in a wonderful essay by David Foster Wallace, "Tense Present." If you're interested, you can download a PDF version of that essay on this page:

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003557

Good luck finding a guide that works for you!

- Quinn

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An old one, but not as old as I, is
Quirk, Randolph and Sidney Greenbaum. *A Concise Grammar of Contemporary
English*. New York: Harcourt. 1973. Print.
It is a revision of an even older book *A Grammar of Contemporary
English*.

Huddleston and Pullum's Cambridge Grammar of the English Language is equally big and fat (and useful).

Ron Cowan has written The Teacher's Grammar of English.

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention Martha Kolln's Understanding English Grammar.

In addition to Chuck Schuster's fabulous Breaking the Rules, I would recommend Steven Pinker's Words and Rules.

Sequencing Assignments

Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 11:29:31 -0500
From: Paula Mathieu
Subject: articles on sequencing, inquiry or cohesion of a writing course

Hello colleagues and happy new year.

I hope the question I have is not too vague:

For the graduate course I am teaching (to prepare new teaching fellows to teach the first-year writing course) I am looking for an essay(s) or book that addresses issues of having an overarching inquiry or structure holding a composition course and the assignments together. I'm not talking about a 'topic' per se, although a topic could be one form of inquiry. I'm trying to help students construct syllabi that connect writing genres with a purpose and audience and construct assignments with some sense of deliberate sequence. Typically, our graduate students draft syllabi that are a collection of four or five unrelated assignments in no particular order. I'm hoping to engage them in thinking about the logic of a course overall, with issues and questions that get explored throughout the semester.

I have had success helping students think on the assignment level, but less so in having them think about the goals and issues keeping the course together more broadly. Can any recommend possible readings to address this?

Many thanks for your help.

All the best,
Paula

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Ideas for English 101, ed. Richard Ohmann and W. B.
Coley (NCTE, 1975). Articles by Elbow, Coles, Bruffee, Winterrowd et al.

David Jolliffe's book, Inquiry and Genre (Allyn & Bacon 1999)

[Chris Anson: David's book is terrific for its wedding of theory and practice. Its most important contribution is to show how wrongheaded we are to assign new domains or topics for students' writing every couple of weeks--as if they can write authoritatively about something they haven't had nearly enough time to investigate. David's pedagogy in this book (which didn't get the attention it deserves) argues that students become more authoritative, confident, and successful writers in relation to their immersion, over time, in a specific area of inquiry (duh).]

Kenneth Dowst's "The Epistemic Approach," in Donovan and McClelland's Eight
Approaches to Teaching Composition, in which Dowst refers to several
assignment sequences and principles for constructing them.

The chapter "Designing Writing Courses" in Erika Lindemann's A Rhetoric for
Writing Teachers gives some attention to sequencing.

Betty Pytlik's piece on sequencing: "Sequencing Writing Assignments to Foster Critical Thinking." In The Critical Writing Workshop: Designing Writing Assignments to Foster Critical Thinking. Ed. Toni- Lee Capossela. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook/Heinemann, 1993. 71-93.

New Media titles

Suppose you wanted students to do a multimedia project. Well, those don't just grow on trees. They might need a script and a storyboard, probably a planning document for where their various resources are coming from. If they're shooting any video, some plans for that. The various components of the text itself, and the writing together of those components -- it's a lot of small projects coming together to one big one. I would look in the literature on teaching multimodality
for tons of other project ideas -- a particularly rich book for this is Wysocki, Johnson-Eilola, Selfe, and Sirc's book from USU press, Writing New Media (ISBN 0-87421-575-7).

Doug Downs, WPA-L, 1/6/2010

SofM Faculty Development

Please click here for the URL for our google doc.

Notes on Teaching Writing Online (Warnock)

What have I found useful about this book?

• The three specific rationales for teaching online writing courses ("I specifically find online writing instruction promising because I believe--and this is a core premise of this book--that online writing instruction provides the opportunity for not just a different approach, but a progressive approach to the way teachers teach writing--an evolution of sorts in writing instruction" [xi])
• Chickering and Zelda Gamson's seven principles for undergraduate teaching (p. xiv)
• Icebreakers (p. 6-8)
• The idea, throughout the book, that students should use a specific subject line when sending me emails. For example, Section 15: Homework Question. I've never done this before. This, along with teaching them how to write an email to a professor, is a good idea. Then, set up Smart Folders in Apple Mail to accommodate these different kinds of emails.
• Helping students decide whether an online course is the right one for them--have them fill out a learning style survey (p. 43)
• Escape Clauses (giving students info on how to drop the class without penalty, etc.) (p. 43)
• Does BB9 have "pop up" reminders? ("scheduling reminders are often embedded in course documents") (p. 57)
• Rather than give students the PDFS, give them the citation information and have them go to the library page and download the documents themselves. This gets them at least a bit of exposure to the library website and learning a bit about how databases work and where academics publish their work. (p. 62)
• Quizzes (p. 64-65)

Chapter 8 is very useful--it's all about online discussion.

• Useful language on p. 79-81 for how to talk with students about online posting
• Primary and Secondary (follow-up) posts, how to grade them and language to explain all this to the students 83-84.
• Offering multiple prompts instead of just one per week.
• Student generated prompts (87)
• Having students use Discussion Board posts in their coursework (88-89)

Who is A Writer (Video)

This featured video, "Who Is a Writer: What Writers Tell Us " was NCoW's inaugural project.

Compiled from footage gathered from across the U.S., the writers in this video tell compelling stories that demonstrate that everyone is a writer, contrary to what we might read or hear in the media.

Join the conversation. Learn about the various ways you can contribute by making video or audio recordings of your own interviews, by sharing writers' work, or by contributing lessons or ideas for using NCoW in your teaching or other work.

Learn more about the NCoW and the WPA Network for Media Action by following the links above.

What is Composition/Rhetoric, Rhetoric/Composition, Writing Studies?

From What Direction for Rhet-Comp?

Composition/Rhetoric scholars are also very busy doing the following: teaching writing to college students--including analytical and expository writing, writing for social change, business writing, technical writing, writing for the web, literary journalism, creative non-fiction; teaching future teachers how to teach writing; helping their fellow professors incorporate writing into their own classrooms more effectively; making connections in the community (with schools, neighborhood centers, literacy organizations); developing curriculum for first-year composition and many other courses; hiring, supporting, and advocating for better working conditions for instructors of first-year composition (including part-timers, grad students, and non-tenure-line full-time faculty).

Oh, and they also do research! They research how writing and reading actually function in people's daily lives; how writing has been taught down through the ages; how people learn to write; how various technologies affect writing, reading, and learning; how the teaching and learning of writing are affected by multi-cultural societies, immigration, racism, class differences, family background, and other factors; how we can best evaluate people's writing abilities and what they actually learn in writing classes; whether what students learn in first-year composition transfers to other courses; and yes, the rhetorical strategies used by Presidents and CEOs and advertisers and bloggers.

What Rhet/Comp Folk Really Do
Posted by Steve Fox , Director of Writing at IUPUI on December 30, 2009 at 7:15pm EST