1,379 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2018
    1. As with all of the arts, literature was once upon a time entirely made possible through patrons. This goes at least as far back as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. They were able to write because their patrons provided them financial support. And this was of course true of all of the other arts. Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, however, literature and commerce got mixed.

      In some sense, there is a link between these areas of art/writing and funding and what we see in social media influencers who in some sense are trying to create an "art" for which they get paid. Sadly, most are not making art and worse, most of them are being paid even worse.

    1. like you kind of hide yourself in school but when you’re outside of school, it’s like you open yourself up. You unfold everything.

      Despite the fact this makes me sad, etc., to hear, it is beautifully said!

  2. Nov 2018
    1. by 2009, the rate for men was 61% higher than the rate for women.

      Careful, you're cherry-picking data here to make the results seem more dramatic. This appears to be just a fluctuation between 2007 and 2009, not an overall trend worth reporting.

    2. TBI-related death rates decreased from 2001 to 2010 from 5.2 to 4.3 deaths per 100,000 children aged four and younger, from 3.2 to 1.9 deaths per 100,000 adolescents aged five to 14, from 23.4 to 15.6 deaths per 100,000 individuals aged 15 to 24, and from 17.6 to 14.6 deaths per 100,000 adults aged 25 to 44.

      Again, you don't need to write this out.

    3. increased in individuals 65 years and older.

      This is interesting, and readers will want to know the leading theories. Deaths went down for all other age groups but went up among the elderly. Why? Ask a geriatric specialist for thoughts on this. I know you didn't have time for that sort of thing, but you should try to follow up and make this even stronger for your portfolio.

    4. TBI-related emergency department visits increased from a rate in 2001 of 420.6 per 100,000 people to 715.7 per 100,000 people in 2010. TBI-related hospitalizations increased from 2001 to 2010 from 82.7 per 100,000 people to 92.7 per 100,000 people. TBI-related deaths decreased from 2001 to 2010 from a rate of 18.5 deaths per 100,000 people to 17.1 deaths per 100,000 people.

      You don't need to write all of this out. That's what the chart is for -- it shows us all of this. And the title of the chart is awkward and confusing because of the commas ('ER Department, Hospitalizations, and Deaths...'). I think your missing the word 'visits.'

    1. Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? Your next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter? Your next ball of fact. You select what goes in and you decide what stays out. At base you have only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in—if not, it stays out. That’s a crude way to assess things, but it’s all you’ve got. Forget market research. Never market-research your writing. Write on subjects in which you have enough interest on your own to see you through all the stops, starts, hesitations, and other impediments along the way.

      This one is reminiscent of W. Zinsser's notes in On Writing Well. He makes the argument that one has to first trim out as much as possible, before considering adding back embellishments.

  3. Oct 2018
  4. libros.leyvitando.synology.me libros.leyvitando.synology.me
    1. (cf. Neal et al. 2012; Painter et al. 2002; Hearn et al. 1998).

      Potentially interesting further reading for blog post?

    2. Unfortunately, David Allen’s technique cannot simply be transferred to the task of insightful writing. The first reason is that GTD relies on clearly defined objectives, whereas insight cannot be predetermined by definition.

      Potentially interesting for blog post on process. How to apply GTD to writing?

    3. regularly check if our tasks still fit into the bigger picture

      Essential part of the PhD and research process in general.

    4. breaking down the amorphous task of “writing a paper” into small and clearly separated tasks

      That's it! One of the most difficult things about the PhD is that it is definitely an amorphous task!

    5. Planners are also unlikely to continue with their studies after they finish their examinations. They are rather glad it is over. Experts, on the other hand, would not even consider voluntarily giving up what has already proved to be rewarding and fun:

      This could be a hint for instructional design/approaching teaching?

    1. “One cannot think without writing.”

      This is important to take into account. Furthermore, connect with Austin Kleon's 'Share your work' in thinking about the process, not the product.

  5. Sep 2018
  6. Aug 2018
    1. In all these cases, the notion of temporal structuring through ongoing practices helps us understand and bridge the temporal oppositions underlying the research litera­ture. We tum now to an empirical example to demonstrate how this perspective can offer a new understanding of the temporal conditions and consequences of organizational life.

      Succint summation of previous section and transition.

    2. While adopting one side or the other of this dichotomy may offer re­searchers analytic advantages in their temporal studies of organizations, difficulties arise when these positions are treated-not as conceptual tools-but as inherent prop­erties of time. Focusing on one side or the other misses seeing how temporal structures emerge from and are em­bedded in the varied and ongoing social practices of peo­ple in different communities and historical periods, and at the same time how such temporal structures powerfully shape those practices in turn. By focusing on what or­ganizational members actually do, our practice-based per­spective on temporal structuring may offer new insights into how people construct and reconstruct the temporal conditions that shape their lives.

      Nice summation of how practice-based experiences of time are not well-served by treating the objective-subjective dichotomy as properties of time.

      Need for a different perspective to explore other emergent ways people engage with or experience time.

    3. Our purpose in this paper is to develop the basic out­lines of an alternative perspective on time in organiza­tions that is centered on people's recurrent practices that shape (and are shaped by) a set of temporal structures. We see this emphasis on human practices (as distinct from external force or subjective construction) as bridg­ing the current opposition between objective and subjec­tive conceptualizations of time, and thus as making pos­sible a new understanding of the temporal conditions and consequences of organizational life. By grounding our perspective in the dynamic capacities of human agency we believe we gain unique insights into the creation, use, and influence of time in organizations.

      Strong why does this matter section -- 3 sentences.

    4. In this paper we explicitly integrate the notion of social practices from this literature with that of enacted struc­tures drawn from the theory of structuration (Giddens 1984 ), arguing that the combination can be valuable for the study of organizations in general and of time in or­ganizations in particular. With respect to the latter, we have obtained important insights into how temporality is both produced in situated practices and reproduced through the influence of institutionalized norms.

      Turns of phrase:

      "We explicitly integrate the notion of social practices from this literature ..."

      "We have obtained important insights ..."

    5. We contribute to this discussion within organizational re­search by offering an alternative third view-that time is experienced in organizational life through a process of temporal structuring that characterizes people's everyday engagement in the world. As part of this engagement, people produce and reproduce what can be seen to be temporal structures to guide, orient, and coordinate their ongoing activities.

      How the concept of temporal structures fits in the literature.

    6. researchers explore the embodied. embedded. and mate­rial aspects of human agency in constituting particular social orders (Hutchins 1995, Lave 1988, Suchman 1987).

      Nice succinct high-level summary of DCog, LPP, and situated learning.

    1. You don't understand: You a jazz musician by default. And that just opened me up.

      I adore this, b/c this is one powerful aspect of literacy IN ACTION. The writer (artist, performer, singer, etc.) is doing something, feels it intuitively. Then a teacher, or peer or fellow collaborator helps them to name what they are doing. Call it author's craft, or technique, or approach. But it invites the learner/actor to do deeper into their craft and join the discourse of actors before them.

    2. And when you like a sound or an instrumental, you want to approach it the right way. So you sit on it.

      Every writer should read this paragraph. Sometimes you need to sit on it, give it time to marinate. So many ways to approach sitting on it, of course, but that's just glorious detail.

    3. It starts there first, before I even heard any type of melody or lyric. That's just DNA

      This is flat out a paen to absorbing literacies through the early experiences with our families and communities, but especially, especially our parents. Kendrick says it himself, his parents sharing their culture made his glorious unfolding possible.

    1. tossing white hair like a Pentateuchal prophet.

      Not only does the hairstyle imply age but his use of Pentateuchal provides a biblical reference to prophets that lived over 100 years.

    2. vaulting mode.

      Imagery of acceleration along with elevation and excitement.

    3. feeling squeezed in the form

      shows how he was forced to write in a certain way at The New Yorker Imagery of discomfort

    4. eliminating apocrypha

      Biblical reference here. Pretty clever

    5. That is no way to start a writing project, let me tell you. You begin with a subject, gather material, and work your way to structure from there. You pile up volumes of notes and then figure out what you are going to do with them, not the other way around

      He uses a personal anecdote about his writing experience to provide personal insight

    6. the busty Swede they expected turned into a short and bearded man.

      The verbiage in this portion also adds to the humor as the use of 'turned into' is unconventional

    7. the busty Swede

      Colloquial and keeps with the humorous writing already prevalent in the intro

    8. they didn’t give sex.

      Spontaneousness adds to the humor and is a creative way to begin to talk about such a subject.

    9. They massaged everything from college football players to arthritic ancients

      The use of everything instead of everyone dehumanizes their patients, both football players and arthritic ancients. Also, it adds humor to the statement in being so unconventional.

  7. Jul 2018
    1. We’re asking faculty to play “Icky Thump” when they haven’t mastered “Love Me Do.” We’re asking them to knit complex cables when they haven’t even combined knits and purls. We’re asking them to bomb down a black diamond run when they haven’t figured out how to stay upright on the green run.

      This is a grand, grand, grand piece of writing. Perhaps somewhere there's an open educator - rocker - knitter - skier who's not thrown by any of these terms, but for the rest of us at least one of these examples should be disorienting.

    1. Can't annotate stupid JSTOR page images. But: "When we read for typos, letters constitute the field of attention; content becomes virtually inaccessible. When we read for content, semantic structures constitute the field of attention; letters - for the most part - recede from our consciousness."

    1. Except that if the written assessment is such that it can be graded accurately by software, that’s probably not very good assessment. If what’s important are the facts and key concepts, won’t multiple-choice do?

      Terrific thought here. We don't teach good test design well enough and I suspect many faculty members, being people who test well, mistakenly conflate "multiple choice" with "easy" and "open ended" with "complex."

    2. Automated grading is supposed to “free” the instructor for other tasks, except there is no more important task.

      Absolutely vital for our understanding of grading and faculty work.

    1. "The idea is bananas, as far as I'm concerned," says Kelly Henderson, an English teacher at Newton South High School just outside Boston. "An art form, a form of expression being evaluated by an algorithm is patently ridiculous."
  8. Jun 2018
    1. nothingness haunts the text

      In Re-writing Freud by Simon Morris, words are randomly selected from Interpretation of Dreams, although "flashes of meaning persist, haunting the text."

    1. Digital Writing

      Is the phrase "digital writing" as fraught as "digital native"? Or has it morphed into just plain writing? I still find myself bridging the gap analog -digital gap. For example, a summer goal is to make annotation of pdf's as close to paper as I can. I invested in a reMarkable tablet to make this happen. Do I consider it "digital writing"--yes and no. It is the merging of digital and analog. I do it so as to have less friction and quicker feedback with students. None of this matters if students can't take in the feedback or if my feedback sucks, but that is another pedagogic and compositional concern.

  9. Apr 2018
    1. Some characters were given simplified glyphs, called shinjitai (新字体). Many variant forms of characters and obscure alternatives for common characters were officially discouraged.

      The simplification of Japanese kanji was done to a lesser extent than that of the Chinese hanzi.

    1. His parents had abandoned their property in the Cuban province of Camagüey to become janitors in Los Angeles, to give their three children a new country.

      Dominguez's parents were willing to sacrifice their way of life for their son.

  10. Mar 2018
    1. To facilitate and promote the writing, publishing, and reading of literature in electronic media.

      I think that ELO's definition pretty much sums up what E-Lit, or Electronic Literature is. And I think that this concept is only going to grow bigger, and become the new norm for future generations.

  11. Feb 2018
  12. Jan 2018
    1. Chiang: There’s a passage in Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life where she’s telling her neighbor that she hates writing and would rather do anything else, and her neighbor says, “That’s like a guy who works in a factory all day, and hates it.” Writing is so difficult for me that I have often wondered whether I’m actually suited for it, and I’ve had experiences with the publishing industry that made me quit writing for years. But I keep coming back to it because, I suppose, writing is an essential part of who I am. As for advice to slow writers, I’d say that writing is not a race. This isn’t a situation where only the most prolific writers get an audience; publish your story when you’re ready, and it will find readers.
    1. After winning the Forward prize, Vuong told the Guardian that he suspected dyslexia runs in his family, but felt it had positively affected his writing: “I think perhaps the disability helped me a bit, because I write very slowly and see words as objects. I’m always trying to look for words inside words. It’s so beautiful to me that the word laughter is inside slaughter.”
    2. Vuong, who now lives in Massachusetts and works as an assistant professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, only gained a taste for poetry in his 20s
    3. Born in Saigon, Vuong spent a year in a refugee camp as a baby and migrated to America when he was two years old, where he was raised by his mother, grandmother and aunt. Two aspects of Vuong’s life – his sexuality and the absence of his father – recur in his work
  13. Nov 2017
    1. Wm Jones

      Personally, I did not believe the Democratic Writing Project to be helpful or well designed. It is a good idea but it would have been more beneficial if this conversation took place out loud among a class, rather than online. I will never read any annotations outside of my own and the four that I will comment on, and that is upsetting. This is nothing more than a way to force everyone to participate and have something tangible to grade, and the students are not retaining the value of analyzing this document. I think this would have been better if we all read it at home and we compared physical annotations in class.

    1. the ever-changing digital landscape

      I think of myself as a Moffett guy, in that early on in my teaching I found the notion of "Teaching the Universe of Discourse" and exciting and clear map for building curriculum and for assessing my students' progress at any moment. I learned to focus on a balance of the different kinds of writing in the UNIVERSE of discourse. When I began to think about what it meant to teach digital writing, I returned to Moffett's notion of looking at the range of possibility. And as the words here, "ever-changing" and "landscape," suggest, we can constantly be thinking about what to include in our digital curriculum. Snapchat? Instagram? Is blogging still an important part of the landscape? What does it mean to have more characters available on Twitter? Do my students need more time in something like a Google community with short, interactive online conversation or do they need to slow down a bit and create a web page? It's exciting to be playing in this field, and it's even more exciting when youth recognize that they can choose where they want to play and make a difference digitally as well -- and what they need to learn to have an impact digitally.

  14. Oct 2017
    1. Amazon.com : You're annotated out there. Gibson: Yeah it's sort of like there's this nebulous extended text.
    2. Well, I worried about that. I sometimes don't like to confess how little I know about these things when I start them, but I'm starting to admit to myself that the less I know at the beginning probably the better it's going to go.
  15. www.townofsananselmo.org www.townofsananselmo.org
    1. —Writing Lab

      Good resource for students seeking jobs or needing a refresher on basic writing skills.

    1. Emden, C. (1998). Establishing a ‘track record’: Research productivity and nursing academe.Australian Journal of Advanced Nursing,16(1), 29–33

      Discusses the adequacy of writing training and support in PhD programmes.

    1. Kamler, Barbara. 2008. “Rethinking Doctoral Publication Practices: Writing from and beyond the Thesis.” Studies in Higher Education 33 (3): 283–94. doi:10.1080/03075070802049236.

  16. Sep 2017
    1. These posts are our travel stories.

      The author shapes their writing by being personal to where the audience can relate to them on a closer level.

    1. Indeed, as noted earlier, one well-known thought-enhancement technology is written language itself and perhaps use of language more generally. As Levy writes, “speech does not merely allow us to articulate thoughts that we would have had in any case. Instead, it allows us to externalize our thoughts and thereby treat them as objects for contemplation and manipulation. Externalized thoughts can be worked over, criticized, and improved.”21:38-39

      This is an interesting concept, particularly with regards to writing, because many people, myself included, think as they write. I often times do not even really know what I think about a topic until I start writing about it. Essays, for example, are usually difficult to start, but I end up figuring out what my argument is by the end because the process of writing itself has allowed me to think through the subject in a way normal biological cognition would not normally allow me to.

    1. Seven of the ‘arts’ students described a process of this sort, compared with only twoof the ‘science’ students. There was, however, another approach to revision, involvingonly one revision cycle. This was mentioned by five interviewees, four of whom werefrom ‘science’ backgrounds. Um ... rewriting? No. I can probably, once I’ve got the, I’ve got the feel of it, it probablytakes me a couple of hours to write, and then, shuffling stuff around, ... it’ll probably takeme, I don’t know, a morning or something to do a fair draft of it. (Ewan, 2002, science)Only one ‘arts’ student mentioned using a single revision cycle, and he had originallygraduated in science before starting his OU arts study

      science vs arts revision cycles: science students one draft; arts multiple moving things around.

    2. Although some ‘science’ students reported similar problems, it was only ‘science’students who talked in terms of ‘padding out’ their answers in order to reach therequired length: I’m more this, get all the facts down, yes it’s only three hundred words, but that’s it in anutshell. And it’s a lot harder then to flower it up to say either five hundred words or athousand words. (Larry, 2002, science)I’m not used to waffling I think that’s the problem. A lot of the art students say oh I’vewritten too much, ... and I have the opposite problem I kind of write down what Ithink the answer’s and I’ve only got like 200 words and I have to pad it out. (Ruth,2003, science)The tendency for some ‘science’ students to write relatively short essays may berelated to their conceptions of knowledge. If it is seen as factual, then once the factshave been stated, the student might see the task as complete; as Larry said, ‘that’s itin a nutshell’. If knowledge is relativistic, however, then competing views are equallyworthy of consideration and greater elaboration is needed to make a case

      how science students see "waffling"

    3. While the ‘arts’ students frequently described a strug-gle to make their essay ‘flow’, the ‘science’ students did not talk about textual struc-ture as problematic

      science students don't see structure as an issue; arts students do.

    4. North, Sarah. 2005. “Different Values, Different Skills? A Comparison of Essay Writing by Students from Arts and Science Backgrounds.” Studies in Higher Education 30 (5): 517–33. doi:10.1080/03075070500249153.

    5. ‘However’ is a textual theme with the function of indicating the relationship of theclause to the preceding text; ‘it is apparent’ is an interpersonal theme with the func-tion of indicating the writer’s stance towards the proposition that follows; ‘during thesecond half of the sixteenth century’ is an experiential theme providing informationabout circumstances surrounding the event or situation. In the discussion that followsI refer to these three types of non-subject theme as orienting themes. Unlike thesubject, none of them is grammatically compulsory and their use reflects a choicemade by the writer about how to frame the proposition presented within the clausecomplex.These orienting themes were consistently more common in the ‘arts’ students’essays, and the difference between the two groups was highly significant (t= 2.865,p < 0.006). ‘Arts’ students used on average 31.50 textual and 15.14 interpersonalelements in every 100 clause complexes, compared to 24.28 textual and 9.75 inter-personal elements for the ‘science’ group. They also tended to use more clausecomplexes containing an experiential orienting theme, although this difference wasnot significant. Since essays which used more orienting themes were also significantlymore likely to receive a higher mark (t= 2.336, p< 0.023), it is clearly worth investi-gating further the differing ways in which these were deployed by ‘arts’ and ‘science’students.

      Very interesting. This agrees with my experience that Science students have a lot of trouble with signposting!

    6. Such tutor comments suggest that ‘science’ students are less ready to criticallyevaluate source material, a feature that can be related to the tendency already notedin their writing to downplay the role of human interpretation in the construction ofknowledge

      This whole section so agrees with my read on this! What an amazing bit of research to show specifically what the hunch was.

    1. Elizabeth, as we have seen, understands marriage as progressive, parallel to and inextricable from internal growth; Charlotte, by contrast, regards her internal narrative of growth and her social life as a single and then married woman as two separate strands: people are as likely to grow apart as grow together

      Moe reiterates her main argument towards the end of her article to pick up momentum and emphasize her thoughts.

  17. Aug 2017
    1. Focusing on the fundamentals of grammar is one approach to teaching writing.

      CUE ELA Protocols +UDL Research and background information that can be used to provide support for the use of the protocols

  18. Jul 2017
    1. For design this is a crucial factor, and a profound change. The designer of such ‘pages’ / sites is no longer the ‘author’ of an authoritative text, but is a provider of material arranged in relation to the assumed characteristics of the imagined audience. The power of the designer is to assemble materials which can become ‘information’ for the visitor, in arrangements which might correspond to the interests of the visitor. For the visitor however “Information is material which is selected by individuals to be transformed by them into knowledge to solve a problem in their life world” (Boeck, 2002)
  19. May 2017
    1. Within a couple of decades Strunk was a full professor of English, and decided to privately publish a little book called The Elements of Style (1918).

      Such a famous book! (For nerds!)

    1. simultaneous

      Technology has changed this drastically. With the growing popularity of videos, podcast, and even radio shows, an audience doesn't even have to be in a specific setting to hear a speaker. This update in speaking access has definitely bridged the gap between writing and speaking.

    1. learns to talk

      I have to disagree with this point that writing cannot be "natural." Yes, generally everyone learns how to speak, while some don't event learn how to write. But, the percent that do learn about writing can translate information more "naturally" because they can better explain their thoughts. If he the point is that talking is more a "natural" function, but it has to be learned just like writing. Just not as intense.

    2. technology of writing

      Interesting phrasing here. The way I'm reading this is that writing has turned into a luxury or something that others need to develop for us.

  20. Apr 2017
    1. joy

      Her description of the writing process reminds of Douglass' recounting of when he first learned to read. Reading was painful for him at first, because he realized the extent of his oppression, but it becomes a tool for liberation.

  21. Mar 2017
    1. she cannot fail to make of it the chaosmos of the "personal" -in her pronouns, her nouns, and her clique of referents.

      This seems to be a departure from Woolf, who thinks the best women's writing isn't personal/individual

    2. matrix

      This is a very loaded word. So for procreation, Aristotle thought that the man actively imprinted on the passive woman, and one of the definitions for matrix is a "mould in which something, such as a record or printing type, is cast or shaped." (It's also the "cultural, social, or political environment in which something develops.") https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/matrix

      Reading Cixous reminds me of cyberfeminism, which is often about "writing the feminine" through technology. I think VNS Matrix (their manifesto is below) is often considered a pioneer of cyberfeminism.

  22. Feb 2017
    1. ository

      a type of writing that is used to explain, describe, give information, or inform. The text is organized around one topic and developed according to a pattern or combination of patterns

    1. Not only were his subjects idiosyncratic, but his style was poetic, aphoristic, dra~atic, and colorful.

      As far as our readings go, did we not just establish technical writing as the new fad?

    1. ut Rheloric, being the art of co1111111111icatio11 by language, implies the pres-ence, in fact or in imagination, of at least two persons,-thc speaker or the writer, and the per-son spoken 10 or written to

      Can't help but think of Foucault's journals, especially considering that the intro to Bain and Hill mention a growing interest in private discourse because of higher literacy rates. What is the place of private or personal writing in rhetoric? How is the writer his/her own audience?

    1. some wrilers have spoken or Rhetoric us 1he Art of Compoi.itio

      This is linkage I find compelling as composition is not reducible to writing.

    2. Speaking are of course applicable equally to Writing,

      What exactly is the relationship of speaking to writing? Certainly not a seamless one.

  23. Jan 2017
    1. After all, Archimedes was in need of nothing more than a fixed point to raise the world. Einstein equipped his observers with only a rod and a stopwatch: Why would we require heavier equipment to creep through the dark tiny conduits traced by blind ants?

      The idea of people requiring only the simplest of tools to make an impact on the world is one that makes me connect this piece to the one by Foucault. As this author states, it may be disappointing that the only tools necessary to tackle large issues are notebooks and the ideas within them, making them come off to me more as encyclopedias of past experiences to aid in future ones, or rather they are just a different representation of the self-writing that Foucault mentions.

    1. In this sense it has a role very close to that of confession to the director, about which John Cassian will say, in keeping with Evagrian spirituality, that it must reveal, without exception, all the impulses of the soul (omnes cogitationes)

      To me, this idea of writing that speaks and reveals information to a "director" is the very basic idea for what first person narratives are.

      Furthermore, this idea of confessing to an audience through an interactive narrative translates to various media, as well. However, even though these confessions are seemingly necessary in textual renditions of narratives, they can often be misconstrued as more intrusive fourth wall breaks due to this change in media. This creates a very thin line between these confessions being additive to the narrative or if they take away from the overall intent of the author.

      To keep this idea going still, upon researching the definition of "cogitationes," the definitions were either of self-reflection, thoughts, or the act of thinking; something clearly represented through Foucault's writing, but a connection I found interesting, nonetheless.

  24. Nov 2016
  25. Sep 2016
    1. “You have to realize that people can change in a lot of different ways,” she explained, “especially when they are far away from home and they are asked to make some difficult choices and do hard things.”
    1. online realms

      Is paper a realm? Have never thought of it that way. Every medium is a realm? Is it helpful analytically to make this distinction? Similarly, it is helpful to make the same distinction between digital and not digital?

  26. Aug 2016
    1. Rather than write a story true to the character or true to his situation, I wrote a puzzle piece to fill in negative space that didn’t need filling in. I don’t know WHAT WE GOT out of it in the end, and in terms of practical advice, if I can’t answer WHAT DO WE GET out of a story, then I don’t have a story.
    1. less is more in a pitch. Imagine your editor on their most busiest day, on a day when all of their projects are seemingly on fire and due at the printer by lunch time, and then imagine that YOUR email is the one that comes in their inbox. A page. TWO pages at the most for a pitch. Unless they tell you otherwise.]
    1. Continuity – the strict adherence of prior texts and their treatment as sacrosanct records – paralyzes comics all too often. It punishes new readers by their virtue of being new. It rewards trivia over opening up the world and blazing new trails. It cuts the pie into smaller pieces instead of making the pie bigger. It builds barriers and creates gatekeepers. And it’s really hard to write well.
  27. Jul 2016
    1. A law professor's response to a student's complaint about his (or her) Black Lives Matter t-shirt. It is a lesson in critical thinking and persuasive writing -- as well as a reply to general hostility toward BLM.

  28. Jun 2016
    1. Historically, authorship implied writing and this associ-ation with the act of writing remains the core of the standardmodel of authorship acknowledgment. H

      authorship is associated with writing and remains the core of the standard model

    2. In biomedicine, authorship has irrevocably shed some ofits craft associations:

      calls "writing's" association with "authorship" its "craft association"

    3. The standard model accepts that authorship is linkedinextricably to writing. But writing is no longer a necessarycondition of coauthorship in certain cases. Thus, an alter-native to authorship is required to accommodate the manyother contributions that shape the published byproducts ofcollaborative activity, be they research reports, journal ar-ticles, conference papers, or technical reports. C

      standard model ties authorship to writing, but writing is no longer a crucial condition of coauthorship

    4. Rennie’s and Flanagin’s (1994, p. 469) beguilingly simplequestion: “. . . how many people can wield one pen?” S

      How many people can yield one pen? Question about authorship

    5. he standard model of scholarly publishing, inwhich it is assumed that a work is written by an author, t

      The standard model of scholarly publishing: "in which it is assumed that a work is written by an author,"

      On the relationship of author to writing

    6. o some extent, authorship has becomea collective activity, with numerous coauthors competingfor the byline, some of whom may not have written, strictlyspeaking, a single word of the associated work (McDonald,1995; Kassirer & Angell, 1991).

      extent to which authors may not have written a word in science (with bibliography)

    7. etter writing continued as a medium for theinformal exchange of information and for requesting fellowscientists to replicate experiments (Manten, 1980, p. 8).

      replication happened outside of journals, via letter writing

    1. writing behaviour. When do you write best? What parts of a paper do you find easiest/hardest to write? What are your biggest stumbling blocks? Perfectionism? Fear of criticism? What are the things that you’re best at? Putting together the Methods section? Creating understandable plots and tables? 

      Good advice on preparing to write!

  29. May 2016
    1. writing across the curriculum, critical thinking, and active learning, Bean (2011)

      Good source for "Writing across the Curriculum"

  30. Apr 2016
    1. start with the basic premise: respecting your reader’s time. Can they find the story somewhere else, and if yes, then WHY should they read you? What makes what you want to publish so special? Remember, readers have a million choices, to find information. They are better equipped than you. So why should they come to you? What is it that you got that others don’t?
    2. One doesn’t need to be a pundit, one needs to read more, and have the ability to learn from every conversation.
    3. write posts that are more informed, more insightful, and more respectful of the readers.
    1. One thing I held on to during fedwiki was that it wasn’t intended to be wikipedia, and to me that meant it wasn’t intended to produce articles so much as to sustain and connect ideas in formation that might find their way into article-like things on other platforms.
    1. would like to encourage them to be as creative and inventive as possible. But the reality is that the academy is incredibly conserva tive .

      Yes. What's the balance here?

    2. If you are not pushing the envelope, why write?
    3. Works that I have labeled not-writing are regu larly reviewed positively in scholarly journals
  31. Mar 2016
    1. The Lead In: What context is needed to understand the problem space? Statement of Originality: What is a gap in our knowledge of this area? Justification: What is a tangible benefit of filling this gap?

      This is how I learned to write texts in school and university. Is that so unknown?

  32. Feb 2016
    1. Each year a person hears four or five anecdotes that are very good, precisely because they’ve been worked on. Because it’s wrong to suppose that the fact that they’re anonymous means they haven’t been worked on. On the contrary, I think fairy tales, legends, even the offcolor jokes one hears, are usually good because having been passed from mouth to mouth, they’ve been stripped of everything that might be useless or bothersome. So we could say that a folk tale is a much more refined product than a poem by Donne or by Góngora or by Lugones, for example, since in the second case the piece has been refined by a single person, and in the first case by hundreds.

      It could be applied to the "open-source" software philosophy.

    1. I’m sorry to have to tell you that books are now considered an endangered species. By books, I also mean the conditions of reading that make possible literature and its soul effects. Soon, we are told, we will call up on “bookscreens” any “text” on demand, and will be able to change its appearance, ask questions of it, “interact” with it. When books become “texts” that we “interact” with according to criteria of utility, the written word will have become simply another aspect of our advertising-driven televisual reality. This is the glorious future being created, and promised to us, as something more “democratic.” Of course, it means nothing less than the death of inwardness — and of the book.

      Letter to Borges: Susan Sontag on Books, Self-Transcendence, and Reading in the Age of Screens

    2. Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human.

      Letter to Borges: Susan Sontag on Books, Self-Transcendence, and Reading in the Age of Screens

  33. Jan 2016
    1. When you write something, you never know who it is going to affect, or how it could help someone who’s struggling and feeling alone, or how in a low moment in their life, desperately searching on Google for answers, they will come upon your words when they need them most. And despite what our culture will have us believe—that metrics and stats matter above all else, that the number of clicks tells the whole story—somehow, in some calculation, impacting one human being has got to be worth more than all the unique page views and Shares and Likes in the world.
    1. The Center for Plain Language is a non-profit organization that promotes clear communication in government and business.

      "A communication is in plain language if its wording, structure, and design are so clear that the intended readers can readily find what they need, understand it, and use it."

      Plain language checklist<br> https://twitter.com/plain_language

    1. unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don't do it.

      From "So you want to be a writer" by Charles Bukowski

    1. “We depict hatred, but it is to depict that there are more important things. We depict a curse, to depict the joy of liberation. ” ― Hayao Miyazaki
    2. “I’ve become skeptical of the unwritten rule that just because a boy and girl appear in the same feature, a romance must ensue. Rather, I want to portray a slightly different relationship, one where the two mutually inspire each other to live - if I’m able to, then perhaps I’ll be closer to portraying a true expression of love.” ― Hayao Miyazaki
    3. “The concept of portraying evil and then destroying it - I know this is considered mainstream, but I think it is rotten. This idea that whenever something evil happens someone particular can be blamed and punished for it, in life and in politics is hopeless.” ― Hayao Miyazaki
    1. Using the Web and Wikipedia to make writing assignments more relevant and instructive. Includes links to Wikipedia tools for educators.

  34. Dec 2015
    1. More venery. More love; more closeness; more sex and romance. Bring it back, no matter what, no matter how old we are. This fervent cry of ours has been certified by Simone de Beauvoir and Alice Munro and Laurence Olivier and any number of remarried or recoupled ancient classmates of ours. Laurence Olivier? I’m thinking of what he says somewhere in an interview: “Inside, we’re all seventeen, with red lips.”
  35. Nov 2015
    1. Any Hollywood writer will tell you that attention is a scarce resource. Movies, TV shows, and books always include “hooks” that make you turn the page, stay on the channel through the commercial, or keep you in a theater seat. Scientists liken attention to a spotlight. We are only able to shine it on a narrow area. If that area seems less interesting than some other area, our attention wanders.
    2. This evidence supports the view of some narrative theorists that there is a universal story structure. These scholars claim every engaging story has this structure, called the dramatic arc. It starts with something new and surprising, and increases tension with difficulties that the characters must overcome, often because of some failure or crisis in their past, and then leads to a climax where the characters must look deep inside themselves to overcome the looming crisis, and once this transformation occurs, the story resolves itself. 
  36. Oct 2015
  37. Aug 2015
  38. www.armchairnews.com www.armchairnews.com
    1. We care about doing what we want to do creatively. We want to be interested in it. We want it to challenge us. We want it to be difficult. We want to reinvent the stupid thing every time.

      I remind myself of this when I get stuck not wanting to do something because it appears like it has already been done, especially when it looks like it was done and it failed. The use of “we” seems particularly significant, and inspiring.

  39. Jul 2015
    1. In extreme cases, an entire project would stall because I couldn't carve out enough contiguous time to get through the next part of it.

      This is the hardest problem of writing and the ways it gets undermined can be so subtle. A roommate asking, "Is this your sock?" can wreck an afternoon.

  40. Jun 2015
    1. There is a certain hubris to the notion that a mere academic writer is actually inveming. But the hubris is more than tempered by the self -evident modesty of the returns. So why not hang up the academic hat of critical self-serio usness, set aside the intemperate arrogance of debunking-and enjoy? If you don't enjoy concepts and writing and don't feel that when you write you arc adding something to the world, if only the enjoyment itself, and that by adding that ounce of positive experience to the world you are affirming it, celebrating its potential, tending irs growth, in however small a way, however really abstractly-well, just hang it up. It is nor that critique is wrong. As usual, it is not a question of right and wrong-nothing impor­ tant ever is. Rather, it is a question of dosage. It is simply that when you arc busy critiquing you arc less busy augmenting. You are that much less fo stering. There are times when debunking is necessary. But, if applied in a blanket manner, adopted as a general operating principle, it is coun­ terproductive. Foster or debunk. It's a strategic question.

      Our closing benediction!

    1. ntracategorical complexity inau- gurated the study of intersectionality, I discuss it as the second approach because it falls conceptually in the middle of the continuum between the first approach, which rejects categories, and the third approach, which uses them strategically. Like the first approach, it interrogates the bound- ary-making and boundary-defining process itself
    2. Like the third approach, it acknowledges the stable and even durable relationships that social categories represent at any given point in time, though it also maintains a critical stance toward categories. This approach is called intracategorical complexity because authors working in this vein tend to focus on particular social groups at neglected points of intersection—“people whose identity crosses the boundaries of tradition- ally constructed groups” (Dill 2002, 5)—in order to reveal the complexity of lived experience within such groups.
    3. Finally, these critiques dovetailed with two separate but highly influential developments: first, the postmodernist and poststruc- turalist critiques of modern Western philosophy, history, and language (see, e.g., Foucault 1972; Derrida 1974), and second, critiques by fem- inists of color of white feminists’ use of women and gender as unitary and homogeneous categories reflecting the common essence of all women.
    4. intercategorical complexity , requires that scholars provisionally adopt existing analytical categories to document relationships of inequality among social groups and changing configura- tions of inequality along multiple and conflicting dimensions
  41. May 2015
    1. In total, I describe three approaches.
    2. The three approaches, in brief, are defined principally in terms of their stance toward categories, that is, how they understand and use analytical categories to explore the complexity of intersectionality in social life.
    3. The first approach is called anticategorical complexity because it is based on a methodology that deconstructs analytical categories. Social life is consid- ered too irreducibly complex—overflowing with multiple and fluid de- terminations of both subjects and structures—to make fixed categories anything but simplifying social fictions that produce inequalities in the process of producing differences.
    4. bell hooks’s Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984): “Feminists have not succeeded in creating a mass movement against sexual oppression because the very foundation of women’s liberation has, until now, not accounted for the complexity and diversity of female experience.”

      bell hooks' reference

    5. Feminists have written widely on methodology but have either tended to focus on a particular methodology (e.g., ethnography, deconstruction, genealogy, ethnomethodology) or have failed to pinpoint the particular issue of complexity.

      rationale for argument

    6. In a nutshell, research practice mirrors the complexity of social life, calling up unique methodological demands.
    7. I suggest, however, that intersectionality has introduced new methodological problems and, partly as an unintended consequence, has limited the range of methodological approaches used to study intersectionality.

      argument

    8. As for the origins of the term itself, it was probably first highlighted by Kimberle ́ Crenshaw (1989, 1991). Many other key texts introduced the conceptual framework and offered similar terms: see Davis 1981; Moraga 1983; Smith 1983; hooks 1984; Moraga and Anzaldu ́ a 1984; Glenn 1985; Anzaldu ́ a 1987, 1990; King 1988; Mohanty 1988; Spelman 1988; Sandoval 1991.

      origin of term

  42. Apr 2015
    1. writing is about contrived naturalness: rigging the system of meaning to turn out the way you want, and making it look normal and inevitable in the process.
    2. Writing is an often-painful task that can feel like the death of one’s past. Equally discomfiting is seeing one’s present commitments to truths crumble once one begins to tap away at the keyboard or scar the page with ink.

      So true that the "ecstasy" of argument or articulation can quickly be killed by the deliberate act of putting ideas down on a page.

  43. Jan 2015
    1. scientific practice is more like politics - an effort to marshal support for one's position.

      What are the implication for disciplinary literacies and argumentative writing?

    1. xpert keep gaining in expertise while the less expert make little progress.

      Is this due to expertise or increased content knowledge in a field?

    2. Conventional wisdom has it that practice makes perfect and that expertise is the natural outcome of years of practice. But few people become good writers, no matter how much they write.

      Tough reality.

  44. Dec 2014
    1. how a transcript of a talk given extemporaneously does not read well on the printed page

      I was thinking of this the other day, as I was working on a podcast. Winging it came out messy. Writing it first and then reading it was neater (in sound) but came out sort of stilted and formal. Worked to find the balance between ... did not quite succeed

  45. Aug 2014
    1. INTERVIEWER On the subject of being a woman writer in a man’s world, you’ve mentioned A Room of One’s Own as a touchstone. LE GUIN My mother gave it to me. It is an important book for a mother to give a daughter. She gave me A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas when I was a teenager. So she corrupted me thoroughly, bless her heart. Though you know, in the 1950s, A Room of One’s Own was kind of tough going. Writing was something that men set the rules for, and I had never questioned that. The women who questioned those rules were too revolutionary for me even to know about them. So I fit myself into the man’s world of writing and wrote like a man, presenting only the male point of view. My early books are all set in a man’s world.
    1. Hupomnemata, in the technical sense, could be account books, public registers, or individual notebooks serving as memory aids. Their use as books of life, as guides for conduct, seems to have become a common thing for a whole cultivated public. One wrote down quotes in them, extracts from books, examples, and actions that one had witnessed or read about, reflections or reasonings that one had heard or that had come to mind. They constituted a material record of things read, heard, or thought, thus offering them up as a kind of accumulated treasure for subsequent rereading and meditation. They also formed a raw material for the drafting of more systematic treatises, in which one presented arguments and means for struggling against some weakness (such as anger, envy, gossip, flattery) or for overcoming some difficult circumstance (a grief, an exile, ruin, disgrace). Thus, when Fundamus requests advice for struggling against the agitations of the soul, Plutarch at that moment does not really have the time to compose a treatise in the proper form, so he will send him, in their present state, the
    2. Hence, a first analogy can be put forward: what others are to the ascetic in a community, the notebook is to the recluse. But, at the same time, a second analogy is posed, one that refers to the practice of ascesis as work not just on actions but, more precise]y, on thought: the constraint that the presence of others exerts in the domain of conduct, writing will exert in the domain of the inner impulses of the soul.
  46. Feb 2014
    1. Legal Writing for the Courts: An Annotated Bibliography
      • Mechanics
      • Argument
      • Style
      • Writing and Editing Process
      • Legal Briefs
      • Samples
  47. Jan 2014
    1. that’s the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly analogous to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as if they were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to you as if they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever.

      Writing analogous to painting

  48. Nov 2013
    1. The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself. This drive is not truly vanquished and scarcely subdued by the fact that a regular and rigid new world is constructed as its prison from its own ephemeral products, the concepts. It seeks a new realm and another channel for its activity, and it finds this in myth and in art generally.

      Incredible writing talent and perceptivity.

  49. Oct 2013
    1. And I know not whether both exercises, when we perform them with care and assiduity, are not reciprocally beneficial, as it appears that by writing we speak with greater accuracy, and by speaking we write with greater ease

      Link between writing and speaking

    1. But we cannot arrive at such power of thought suddenly or even soon. 3. In the first place, a certain form of thinking must be acquired by great practice in writing, a form which may be continually attendant on our meditations. A habit of thinking must then be gradually gained by embracing in our minds a few particulars at first, in such a way that they may be faithfully repeated.

      Writing is hard and it is not something you can put off. It is a habit, a lifestyle and way of thinking

    1. But to enable us to write more, and more readily, not practice alone will assist (and in practice there is doubtless great effect), but also method.

      It is not enough to write, we must apply and stretch ourselves

    2. The sum of the whole matter, indeed, is this: that by writing quickly, we are not brought to write well, but that by writing well we are brought to write quickly
    3. In writing are the roots, in writing are the foundations of eloquence. By writing, resources are stored up, as it were, in a sacred repository, from where they may be drawn forth for sudden emergencies or as circumstances require.

      Writing is the foundation and the source from which we grow. Seems strange, distances writing from us, makes it seem something disconnected and inspired from some other force beyond us

    4. We must write, therefore, as carefully and as much as we can, for as the ground, by being dug to a great depth, becomes more fitted for fructifying and nourishing seeds, so improvement of the mind, acquired from more than mere superficial cultivation, pours forth the fruits of study in richer abundance and retains them with greater fidelity.

      Plant metaphor yet again

    1. I know it is an ordinary subject of inquiry whether more is contributed by writing, reading, or speaking. This question we should have to examine with careful attention, if we could confine ourselves to any one of those exercises. 2. But they are all so connected, so inseparably linked with one another that if any one of them is neglected, we labor in vain in the other two, for our speech will never become forcible and energetic unless it acquires strength from great practice in writing.

      Writing is essential to improve not only the way we speak, but how we organize our thoughts. It produces clarity

  50. Sep 2013
    1. We can now see that a writer must disguise his art and give the impression of speaking naturally and not artificially.

      consider the audience and mask rhetoric, make it seem spontaneous

    1. It is the ability to collect an army which is adequate to the war in hand, and to organize and to employ it to good advantage.

      A theory of good writing (collect evidence and organize them in order).

    2. First of all is the ability to know against whom and with whose help to make war; for this is the first requisite of good strategy, and if one makes any mistake about this, the result is inevitably a war which is disadvantageous, difficult, and to no purpose.

      A theory of good writing. (Know the audience.)

    3. I shall never be found to have had anything to do with speeches for the courts.33 You can judge this from my habits of life, from which, indeed, you can get at the truth much better than from the lips of my accusers

      Writing vs. Speeches