Composing Focus: Shaping Temporal, Social, Media, Social Media, and Attentional Environments

Abstract: Writers must learn to control factors that influence the ability to focus, especially in what some call a culture of distraction. In our efforts to promote metacognition and flexible writing processes, writing teachers need to engage students in study and discussion of factors in our temporal, social, media, social media, and attentional environments that influence focus while composing. This article examines these facets of our contemporary scenes of writing by reviewing recent research in composition studies and psychology about writing and attention, discussing the results of a survey of undergraduate writers’ composing practices, and sharing insights from assignments that help writers notice important elements of their environments. The article recommends assignments and questions to encourage reflection on writers’ interactions with these elements in order both to find focus and to promote process-related transfer and adaptability in our ever-changing scenes of writing.

Composing Focus: Shaping Temporal, Social, Media, Social Media, and Attentional Environments

Decoding the Disciplines Project

http://www.iub.edu/~hlp/decodingthedisciplines.html

For the last decade the Indiana University Freshman Learning Project has taken faculty through a two-week seminar designed to help the participants find new ways to increase learning in their undergraduate courses. This “decoding the disciplines” process allows professionals in departments from across the university to develop ways to identify the kinds of operations that are required for success in their fields and to more effectively initiate students into these ways of thinking.

Error in Professional Writing

Let me provide the list of references I share with those teaching business/technical writing:

 1.  Hairston. (1981). Not All Errors Are Created Equal: Nonacademic Readers in the Professions Respond to Lapses in Usage. College English<http://www.ncte.org/journals/ce>, 43, 794-806.
 2.  Connors & Lunsford. (1988). Frequency of Formal Errors in Current College Writing, or Ma and Pa Kettle Do Research. College Composition and Communication<http://www.ncte.org/cccc/ccc>, 39, 395-409.
 3.  Leonard & Gilsdorf. (1990). Language in Change: Academics’ and Executives’ Perceptions of Usage Errors. Journal of Business Communication<http://job.sagepub.com/>, 27, 137-158.
 4.  Seshadri & Theye. (2000). Professionals and Professors: Substance or Style? Business Communication Quarterly<http://bcq.sagepub.com/>, 64, 9-23.
 5.  Beason. (2001). Ethos and Error: How Business People React to Errors. College Composition and Communication<http://www.ncte.org/cccc/ccc>, 53, 33-64.
 6.  Lunsford & Lunsford. (2008). Mistakes Are a Fact of Life: A National Comparative Study.College Composition and Communication<http://www.ncte.org/cccc/ccc>, 59, 781-806.

What Can You Do With An English Major? (Special Topics Course)

What would it include?

A Writing Course with research on the affective elements of writing at the center

Beyond Knowledge and Skills: Writing Transfer and the Role of Student Dispositions

States, Traits, and Dispositions: The Impact of Emotion on Writing Development and Writing Transfer Across College Courses and Beyond

My Elevator Speech

For me it’s finding a way to reconcile those binaries and think more about the world we live in now. It’s thinking not about who to replace (where we’ve been) but who to bring in (where are we going). We don’t have a forward vision. Our vision is rooted in the past. We spend all our time coming to terms with the past. Part of the problem is that because so few of us participate in larger disciplinary discussions or have a sense of where things are moving, we defer to Maureen and her accounting is not without bias. First new person we should hire is a technical writing specialist. That needs to become a more prevelent part of our major and our colleagues in other departments are interested in this area and in collaborating with us there. Second is a multi-media/digital writing specialist--our students are interested in this area--smart students, too. Karen Rubino’s daughter, who took a few courses with me but was a COMM major, just got into grad school at BU for digital stuff. COMM is going to own that part of literacy work if we don’t grab it and then we’ll be left out. These are the places language and literacy are going in the broader culture, we need to think about how we respond to these shifts and changes and not impose our needs and agendas all the time.

The problem is, we are all tenured in and we’re not going anywhere. It’s like 2008 and Obama has to help GM completely rebuild itself, but GM says--you have to do it with the existing workforce and their skills cause we can’t fire them (and they’re not willing to go in for retraining). What a challenge!