Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Curricular Materials for Workplace Unit

Date:    Thu, 11 May 2017 10:59:37 -0400
From:    Ashley Kniss <ashley.anne.kniss@GMAIL.COM>
Subject: Readings for Career Unit

Hello All,

I'm in the initial stages of helping put together a pilot unit for my
department's introductory writing course. The unit is called "Writing Your
Career," and the goal is to help students understand the relationship among
education, career, and vocation and to integrate this understanding into
their own personal career goals and values.

We are compiling a broad reading list that will provide instructors with a
wide variety of readings to choose from, some that will be assigned in
class and some that will be available for student research.

Below is a tentative list of possible readings, but I was wondering if
anyone on the list has further suggestions or ideas.

Thanks,
Ashley Kniss

*OpEds*

Mark Edmundson, “Education’s Hungry Hearts”

Alina Tugund, “Vocation or Exploration? Pondering the Purpose of College”

Carlo Rotella, “No, It Doesn’t Matter What You Majored In.”



*Essays/Speeches*

Adrienne Rich: “Claiming an Education”

Paolo Freire: “The Banking Concept of Education”

Alan Lightman: “The Art of Science”

Ellen Gilchrist: “The Middle Way”

Christopher Claussen: “Against Work”

Donald Hall: “Life Work”

Virginia Woolf: “A Room of One’s Own”



*Memoir/autobiography*

Frederick Douglass: “Learning to Read and Write”

Maya Angelou: “Graduation”



*Journalism/nonfiction*

Michael Lewis: “The Curse of Talent”

Atul Gawande: “Big Med”

Burkhard Bilger: “The Egg Men”

William Finnegan, “Dignity”

---

Phillip Levine’s great poems, “What Work Is” and “They Feed They Lion.”

---

Date:    Thu, 11 May 2017 12:52:28 -0400
From:    Kathy Albertson <katalb@GEORGIASOUTHERN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Readings for Career Unit

HI Ashley,
I have my students read "The Learning Curve," a report about graduates' difficulties with adapting to employers' expectations, especially concerning information literacy practices. I think Head is the author, but I'm not near my material at the moment. It contains employer and the student/employee's perspectives, which created rich discussion in class.

Sent from my iPad

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Date:    Thu, 11 May 2017 13:20:10 -0400
From:    Thomas Wright <wrigh428@UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Readings for Career Unit

I haven't assigned it for years, but I still see some value in  "What We
Learn from Writing on the Job," by Lester Faigley and Thomas P.
Miller. *College
English* Vol. 44, No. 6 (Oct., 1982), pp. 557-569. It provides a point of
comparison for more recent studies, and demonstrates that even before email
and similar types of writing, people wrote a lot on the job.

More recently, I've used Elizabeth Wardle's "Identity, Authority, and
Learning to Write in New Workplaces," which you can find here:
http://enculturation.net/5_2/wardle.html.

Thomas

---

Date:    Thu, 11 May 2017 18:48:44 +0000
From:    "Liberatore, Rachel" <rliberatore@ALBRIGHT.EDU>
Subject: Re: Readings for Career Unit

Hi Ashley,

Your topic reminds me of this blog:
“What Do You Want To Be? vs. What Problems Do You Want To Solve? “
https://bayanprofessor.blogspot.com/2015/11/what-do-you-want-to-be-vs-what-problems.html

Happy reading,

Rachel Liberatore
Writing Center Director

Tuesday, June 6, 2017

Books About Getting Writing Done When You Are an Academic/Professor

Professors as writers: A self-help guide to productive writing by Robert Boice

Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success

*The Slow Professor* by Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber

*Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write*, by Helen Sword

Monday, April 24, 2017

What Is a Video Essay?

https://www.adn.com/visual/2017/04/18/video-the-spring-tide/?nl=cooking&em_pos=large&emc=edit_ck_20170424

Friday, March 24, 2017

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

Tuesday, March 21, 2017

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.