Posting feedback for Thanksgiving week

Just a note: I'll not be giving feedback on Wednesday/Thursday this week (due to the holiday) but on Friday and Saturday.

Hope everyone has a wonderful, safe, and relaxing Thanksgiving!

Julie

Editorial Tricks of the Trade for Quotes

How to use editorial tricks:

A quote from the article, "Continental, American Expand Peak-Day Surcharges"

• ... = means to take out text in the middle of a quote.
• (emphasis added): means to highlight some text in a quote and acknowledge it (see $10, 20...i)
• [ ]: means to add clarifying information in a quote

United Airlines, Delta Air Lines and its Northwest Airlines subsidiary are charging $10, $20 or even $30 above the published base fare on designated dates, said Ryan Berryman, senior. ... Continental [authority] has similarly expanded its surcharge dates, spokeswoman Mary Clark said. [emphasis added]

Video links

Adding Video

1. Find your Chad Vader video
2. Find the embedded link (if on the web) and copy
3. Toggle to your blog
4. Toggle to "edit HTML"
5. paste in the field before/after the text where you want it to go
6. Toggle back to "compose"
7. Publish post...

Density: Or Why Don't Students Take My Advice?

Maybe I'm the knucklehead here. Am I speaking clearly? Elaborating on my point? Being honest with my assessment of a piece of writing from a student? I think I am. But it's gone overboard, and it's a minor technicality at that. I have a few students in particular who don't cap their "i"s--in emails to me, in Blackboard posts, or in actual essays. In all three places, as a matter of fact, after much reminding. And I don't know what to do about it.

I've tried being nice, friendly, just providing a little reminder here and there about the power of academic etiquette. I'll suggest, "Hey, Bob, don't for get to cap those "i"s--this is for academic credit, right?" Then, when the issue doesn't change, I go into "Bad Cop" mode. Bad Cop consists of, over the last two semesters, institution of the "-2 Rule," which basically means that any instance of text-speak (noncapitalization, strange abbreviations, etc.) in any academic communciation with me results in a lowering of 2 points, per instance, off a student's final grade. I once had to cut 16 points from a student's overall grade for continued text addiction.

Here's how I feel about it: either the student is just sloppy, rushing, or they plain don't care. But it is my job to show them that the rest of us care. I can be reading a newspaper like The Washington Post and completely stop reading an article if I notice this error showing up. If I stop reading it enough, the newspaper loses my business.

The Collin College Faculty Association mentions issue specifically in their "Students' Guide to Academic Etiquette":

Students should check their electronic mail daily. Students should not expect instant replies to their mail, nor should they expect instructors to reply to messages on weekends and holidays. Students should avoid chat-room style of grammatically incorrect sentences, using lower-case "i" for the pronoun "I," shouting" a message through the use of capital letters, and disrespectful discourse. Students should inquire first whether attaching assignments to an e-mail is an acceptable alternative to handing them in during a class period. [Miller]

On the surface of things, this seems reasonable. I might not agree with every note that Collin College has put on that weblink, but this seems quite alright.

I have to offer one caveat: that the respect-through-etiquette goes both ways. Professors had better not wait two weeks to respond to an email or a request for help. We have to run the spell-checkers, too, in addition to being clear, concise, direct, encouraging. It's more than a matter of form: students are our employers. They pay for our services, and we need to bring our "A" game into every space in which we interact academically.

It's important to note: an error here or there is human. A consistant repetition of an easy fix is thickheaded.

References Cited
Miller, Joyce Marie. (2005). "Students' Guide to Academic Etiquette." Collins College Faculty Association. Retrieved November 16, 2009, from http://iws.ccccd.edu/jmiller/A_Student

Feedback and Commentary Shorthand

There are a few new abbreviations/acronyms I'm planning on using in feedback on blogs. Here are some clarification descriptions about what I mean:

Flow: When I use the term flow, I generally mean that a sentence is choppy because of word choice, missing words, or even a repetition that would appear in multiple sentences. To fix this issue, proofread your text out loud: 90% of the time students "catch" the error when they hear their writing.

PR: Proofreading needed. Maybe there are spelling errors, or undercapitalization (think "i"), broken words that should be combined (my self vs. myself), homonym issues (their vs. there), and so forth. Let me know if you want to learn some cool proofreading tricks to help catch these mechanical issues (ruler, out loud, back-to-front, and team reading methods are some of my favorites).

FORM: The formatting seems to be off. There could be too much white space between paragraphs, or no spacing, or neon fonts, or everything in italic (which strains the eyes).

PP: Issues with plagiarism appear. This is generally an unintentional thing (forgetting quotes, or forgetting to name the source of the quote), but because everything you post is submitted for academic grade, it's important to know that if you cut/paste, you must quote. 100% of the time. In addition, you need to name the source and hyperlink or create an old-fashioned reference.

BH: Bury that hyperlink! Place it inside a word so that there are no interruption in the flow of your text.

MORE: I want to see more details. You might be making a good point about an issue, such as "There is little doubt that we have spent billions in Iraq" but how many billions? On what exactly? Blogs are small spaces with which to do big things: convince your audience that you have researched, found good sources, and can easily back up a main argument with specifics.

REF: Look at your references--are you following MLA or APA style? Do you have the 5 main elements of a reference: author, title of piece, URL, copyright date, and access date. In addition, did you name each source in the text where you used it?

What I will do for the last 5 weeks is use these shortcuts at the end of a post, in parenthesis, like this: (RES, PR). This way, I'm giving you an indication of suggestions that aren't content related, but I'm making you do the legwork in reviewing your piece to find them. Of course, I'll always be available to help one-on-one as well.

Belonging to both Camps: Being a Teacher and a Student

Some people find it passing strange when I tell them that I am both a college English professor and a writing student. At the moment, I'm working on my dissertation to complete my Ph.D. in English composition. This Tuesday, I have a meeting coming up with both my dissertation director and a committee member, after I witness a close friend's final dissertation defense.

This is a strange place to be because of a few factors: I find writing sometimes an infuriating process, in that what I think I want to say sometimes comes out completely different than I had intended. This echoes Peter Elbow (1973) regarding "translation" of thoughts to text. Elbow suggests that our memories are quite like movies in our mind, and translating them to others is a review process that asks, "did you see that movie the way I did?" Generally people don't. In my head, I know what I am going to say, but then when I read a text, it usually isn't what I expected. I know my students go through this process a lot, too. This is generally why it's much easier to give feedback to others; we can "see" errors or mis-steps in language use, detailing, and structures in others' writing because we are seeing it for the first time. This is in opposition to working on our own texts, in which sometimes we're so familiar that we can't see the glaring issues on the page. I think the cliche here is called "not seeing the forest for the trees." We can relate this to work in a writing classroom with texts, or even extrapolate it out to life situations in which a person, like myself, pays attention to one issue without focusing on the other.

Consider this analogy: say a person is driving down the street, paying close attention to directions to get to the right place. But what they're not paying any attention to is the gas gage, which is now in the red. They won't get to their destination without both directions and enough fuel. It's unfortunate that many of us overlook the obvious (the data behind the details) when we're trying to get to our destinations. In my case, I hope I attended to enough of the structures inherent in dissertations (provided a clear methodology, enough of a literature review, and a sound thesis/issue) so that I get the "it's looking good" pep talk on Tuesday.

I sometimes think that being a teacher-student would be a benefit to my current students. Of course, I understand the anxiety of submission, of grades, of approval. I cannot tell you how many times I've left one of my professor's offices on cloud 9 simply because I got the feedback, "you're on the right track." I'm hoping to hear that this Tuesday, but part of me wonders whether this dissertation process will ever end. I suspect that this is a lot like a student in a 16-week class at about week 12. They've done quite a bit of work, and they're tired. My students might be working, with families and life situations that keep them from busy, tired, and sometimes distracted. All I can suggest now is to hang in there. At some point, this too shall pass. I thank Monique (a previous student) for that sentiment...

Reference
Elbow, Peter. Writing without Teachers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

This College Grading Thing...

Over the past few semesters, I've worked with a wide range of college students: the overprepared, the underwhelmed, the "just passing time until something better comes along," the honor rollers, and a plethora of others. What intrigues me currently is that there is no one "typical" college student, but that so many college students expect classes to be "typically" easy for them.

Yes, some English classes (of which I have the most experience) will be easy for some students; these students are either naturals, in that they were the ones who won the writing awards in high school, served on the school paper or yearbook, read voraciously, and have a natural ability to write effectively regardless of their audience. They are out there. And then there are those who struggle mightily to get the A or B grade, submitting draft after draft, working overtime, getting tutors. They succeed even without the "natural" talent.

It's the others that continue to surprise me, even after 9 years of teaching full-time. When I was a college student, I never expected courses to be a "gimme." I did expect college professors to abide by their own syllabi and be reasonable, grading on topics they covered in class, to be available for help during office hours, to be pleasant and to not show favorites. But I'm noticing a trend in what I consider beyond-the-pale behavior in the demand for A grades by those whose work is not exemplary.

Here's an example. A few semesters ago, I had a student in one of my classes get a B. From all the documents and my own experiences as a grader, I know that B stands for "above average effort" and is considered a good grade. The student in question wasn't particularly bad at what she did: she showed up for all her classes; asked questions; did her work on time. Based on my rubrics for how I grade, and the grades she did, she got a good, solid B. Now here's the disconnect: I received an email from her a few days after the course was complete, complaining about the B. It seems as if Samantha (a pseudonym) figured that her attendance and regular submissions earned her the A grade.

So I ask you: what is in a grade? What differentiates an A from a B student? My answer is generally the same: it's in the writing. Showing up and asking questions is good, of course, but in an English class the writing is the significant output device, the way in which a student can display their knowledge of course concepts, their ability to negotiate the terrain of scholarly writing, and their opportunities to move an audience from apathy to acceptance.

I'm sure Samantha continued to be upset about her grade. But this is happening more often, and sometimes it just has to do not with the earned effort, but other outside pressures that revolve around both teacher and student. Consider the points made by Richard Schiming of Minnesota State University regarding grade inflation, a term coined to describe why some teachers and professors give higher grades than the average:

1. Institutional pressure to retain students;
2. Increased attention and sensitivity to personal crisis situations for students;
3. Higher grades used to obtain better student evaluations of teaching;
4. The increased use of subjective or motivational factors in grading;
5. Faculty attitudes;
6. Content deflation; and
7. Changing mission.

It happens often, and there isn't just one neat solution to fix the issue. Some students are used to getting good grades. But what college faculty need to do is make clear that there is a standard difference between high school and college work, just as there is between undergraduate and graduate-level work. That showing up is great, but it by no means is a guarantee of excellence. That every professor grades uniquely, and that students should learn the context of the classroom, meaning that knowing what to ask and give each individual professor is as necessary as completing the assignment on time.

And, sometimes, the most important thing to learn is that not everybody is an A student, and that there is nothing wrong with a B or a C.