Category: Writing

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A comic to remember for later… and potentially why…

First things first: the comic for later is PoCom-UP-001, which was a group/collaborative comic of enormous propotions. It’s a pretty slick flash interface, too. Scott McCloud used this in his talk recently as an example of his concept of the “infinite canvas” possible for comics on the web.

Second, some of you, especially those of you who have witnessed my pooh-poohing of the role of “visual rhetoric” in teaching, may be wondering why I’m interested at all in this comic stuff. Two basic reasons. First, while I’m still not convinced that overt attention to “the visual” has that much of a role in introductory writing classes (at least the introductory classes we have here at EMU because of factors that involve both the students and the poor access to computer lab facilities), I am very convinced it’s important in the advanced undergraduate writing class I teach all the time.

And comics play a role there because for the last couple of semesters, I’ve been teaching a simple comic writing/analysis exercise. This has partly been the result of Linda AK’s influence (a HUGE comic fan), and also because of Scott McCloud’s campus visit. Anyway, I came up with a comic assignment– here’s a version of it— and I think it has been reasonably successful. I’m set to teach this course online again this spring/summer (alas, not next school year though), and I’m planning on switching things up a bit. And I want to include some other “wacky” examples of comics.

Which is why I’m linking now.

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Cool Comic Maker

Steve's comic

This isn’t quite how I feel (but close, I suppose). Anyway, the thing that’s really cool here is a page called stripcreator, which I found via a student in my online 328 class.

Oh, and this reminds me that Scott McCloud is speaking tonight; more on that later….

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Blogging as a "career?"

One of my students in my Writing for the World Wide Web page tipped me off to this the other day:

The U.S. Department of Labor puts out what I believe is an annual report called the Occupational Outlook Handbook. I recall this being the sort of thing you looked at when you went to the high school guidance counselor’s office to get ideas about what you wanted to do when you grew up; it was on paper in those days, of course.

Anyway, if you look under the entry for “writers and editors,” you will eventually come to this passage:

Bloggers write for the Internet. Most bloggers write personal reflections on a subject of close personal or professional interest. Some blogs take the form of a personal diary; others read like reports from the field—first-hand, subjective accounts of an event or an activity. Most blogs are written for recreational reasons with little expectation of earning a fee; however, some blogs promote a business or support a cause and may generate interest or income through other activities.

Well, sort of. There usually isn’t money in blogging, but I’m not sure it’s recreational exactly.

Actually, a search on monster.com with the key-term “blog” does turn up a surprising number of jobs. The problem is that most of them are on the computer-geek side of things– design an interface, be the software engineer for, etc. No ads that say something like “Seeking the random thoughts– sometimes useful, often times not– of a middle-aged academic blogger. Low six figures. Pseudoanonymous identity bloggers will be considered.” And so forth.

I guess I’ll keep looking….

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A writing/exercise tally: not a bad idea for me, too….

On Clancy “CultureCat” Ratliff’s blog, I noticed this morning she’s keeping a tally of her writing and exercise patterns. Not a bad idea linking writing to working out, especially while working on the dissertation.

I remember when I was in the midst of that project— wow, I just realized, this was ten years ago to the month (I am getting old!)– I didn’t take this approach. I just ate and ate and wrote and wrote and generally did not take care of myself. I was in even much worse shape than I am right now, and that’s saying something; the workload this term has made the gym seem like a distant memory.

Sigh….

Well, maybe I’ll get some exercise walking to and from my hotel to the Palmer House in Chicago.

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On writing talks

I can’t say that I’ve been somewhat MIA on my blog simply because I’ve been working super-duper hard on talks that I’m giving at the CCCCs and at the Jacobson Symposium in Omaha the following week. That’s only part of it. The week before last was winter break, and while I did blog and work a lot while in Florida, I also vacationed a lot too, which means that I fell too far behind on work things due this past week. And there was also a fistful of meetings and other obligations in the department. It was one of those weeks that felt like two weeks.

Anyway, even if I haven’t been working super-hard on my presentations, I have been working. I’m not completely done with either of these spiels but I have good starts on both and, in a sense, they are both written in my head already. This is not to say that I am ready to give these talks, nor is it to say that I am going to just “wing it.” But I’m getting there.

I know that I’ve written about this here in the past– actually, almost exactly a year ago— but it’s on my mind so I’ll say it again: in the choice between conference performance styles of someone “reading a paper” versus “speaking/talking extemporaneously,” I say “reading a paper” wins out. Listening to someone read something out loud that isn’t meant to be read out loud can be painful, but I think it is much worse to listen to someone, ah, “wing it.” Let me put it to you this way: just “winging it” often ends up being a bit like singing in the shower: sure, it sounds fine in there to you, but try that in front of other people and it usually goes poorly. So, IMO, unless you’re a really REALLY good public speaker and/or you basically have a presentation that you wrote previously memorized, it’s probably best to read something.

If my speaking role is small/short, obviously interactive, and/or extremely casual, I prepare some notes– possibly a hand-out– and that’s about it. These sorts of settings would include what at the CCCCs are called “Special Interest Groups,” workshops (which are basically the same as teaching and things like that tend to be too interactive to plan too carefully), roundtable discussions, etc.

But if my speaking role is not short, which is the case for both of the things I have upcoming, I need to write a script. And I say “a script” as opposed to “a paper” or “an article” because I think a presentation script has to sound good in a way that’s different from something meant completely for the page, and it has to be relatively short. In my experience, a 15-20 minute presentation should be about eight pages long, double-spaced. And better to be the speaker whose presentation is a little short than the one who is still rambling on after 25 minutes.

There are two different things I’m playing around with this year that are new for me. First, PowerPoint slides, and lots and lots of ’em. At last year’s CCCCs, I went to see a fantastic presentation by Lawrence Lessig. Most of Lessig’s fantastic-ness was the very smart things he had to say, but almost as impressive to me was the “show” of his presentation, which included about a million slides. Most of them were very simple– just a few words on a screen– but the effect was fantastic. So while I’m not hoping to imitate Lessig exactly, I am going to have a bunch of slides in the spirit of Lessig.

Well, that and Stephen Colbert’s “The Wørd” segments on his Comedy Central show. In other words, I’m hoping to have a lot of slides that are a combination of informative and entertaining.

Assuming the LCD projector works, of course.

The second thing I’m playing around with– probably after the conference, actually, though who knows, maybe before– is this software that Collin mentioned recently in this post which is supposed to make it easy to merge audio and PowerPoint (or Keynotes) presentations and end up with an mp4 multimedia presentation. The software is called Profcast, and other than what I just wrote, I have no idea how it works yet. If I get around to finishing my presentations soon, I’ll let you know….

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Edison's "Multi-media" Inventions


I was going to subtitle this post “If I write about this on my official blog, does at least part of my trip become a tax deduction?” But I’m not…. And I had also meant to post this a couple of days ago. It’s funny how being “on vaction” actually meant I had more time to do this sort of blog work. But I digress…

Anyway, my last stop on my winter break vacation in Florida was The Edison and Ford Winter Estates in Fort Meyers, FL and, among other things, I was quite struck by the number of ways in which Edison’s inventions paved the way for the writing and multi-media technologies we use now.

Some of it is stuff you all knew about already. At the top of this entry is a photo of an early phonograph. You turned the flywheel on the left to a specific speed and then talked into the small thing in the middle/right part of it, which then etched the vibrations/recordings in a piece of tin foil-like stuff. To play it, you reversed everything.

Edison phonograph
Not a very good picture, but this is a phonograph that Edison himself worked with. Apparently, Edison was so deaf that he literally would bite into the phonograph to hear/feel the playback. According to the information at the exhibit, Edison’s teeth marks are in the upper-left hand side of the machine.

Edison film stuff
And of course, Edison was one of the inventors/innovators responsible for “moving pictures.” Here are some examples of early movie cameras. One thing I didn’t realize/learned from the exhibit: Edison set up a film company in Queens, NY, and his company made what is often considered one of the first “great” silent films, The Great Train Robbery. But apparently (and this is again according to the things they had at the Edison/Ford museum), Edison was soon passed by other early film pioneers like DW Griffith and Louis Mayer.

Early networking?
But then there are the inventions that are a bit less well-known– at least to me. Here’s a (bad, unfortunately) picture of an early office dictation machine. Essentially, the boss talked into the contraption at the bottom and then the recording was sent out to one of “the girls” via a telephone-like interface so that it could then be typed up.

Mimeograph #1
I don’t know exactly what this says about me, but I guess the writing/media technology that I found most surprising was the Mimeograph. You remember the mimeograph machine, don’t you? I certainly remember getting those purple-lettered hand-outs all the way through my schooling, and I think I actually used one of these babies when I first started teaching college as a grad student in the late 1980s.

Anyway, it turns out Edison earned a patent on the mimeograph in 1876, though his was quite a bit different from when I remember it. His original machine was flat (the one on the right) and the stencils were created by what was called an “electric pen:”

Electric Pen

When I first saw this in the museum (with just this label of “Electric Pen” and no explanation), my first thoughts were “what the heck is that?” This explanation at the IEEE Virtual Museum helped. Basically, you used the pen to create a stencil-like sheet that could be run through the mimeograph machine. As the IEEE site points out, this particular technology was replaced with the more efficient typewriter, first a special kind that could make stencils and then with carbon paper.

There were a few other pictures, but you get the idea.

I don’t have time to puzzle it all out right now, but I guess I just found it striking somehow that this sort of simple duplication technology has been around as long as it has. This sort of simple “desktop publishing” certainly was an important part of my own education and my own study as a writer; perhaps there’s something worth exploring here a bit more? Hmmmm….

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Blargon (?!) in the NYT (and none of it from me…)

Loyal readers, do you remember how, a couple weeks ago now, I had a post seeking blog specific jargon? Well, I feel comfortable now revealing that the inquiry that prompted that post came from none other than William Safire and it resulted in this article in the New York Times Magaine this weekend.

Well, okay, it wasn’t from Safire directly; it was from one of his researchers. But he (the researcher, that is) did email and leave me a phone voice mail message about this back at the end of January/begining of February, and I obliged with a blog posting trolling for requesting input.

It’s an okay enough piece, but I guess I have two critiques, both of which I suppose are semi-obvious. First, a lot of the terms/jargon in this article seem, well, a bit of a stretch for me. I mean, “moonbats?” “deliciousing?” “blegging?” I dunno…

Second, Safire makes no mention of me nor any of the comments on my post about this. I feel kinda used.

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Belated Blog Post: Yet more on handwriting

It’s been a super-busy week around here at EMU and it promises to be even more busy next week. Our department is hiring two positions in literature and a department head. The department head position in particular means a lot of meetings and hallway discussions. And of course other business in the department goes on. Counting things having to do with job candidates and other events I either have to attend or things I should attend (and not counting stuff like teaching and office hours), I have nine meetings and/or “events” on my calendar next week. Eek.

Anyway, Nick Carbone sent me a link to the Inside Higher Ed article “The Surprising Process of Writing” by Shari “the Nomad Scholar and not her real name” Wilson. The basic premise of the essay is Wilson thinks her students write better essays when they write them out by hand. She offers a series of explanations for this: “the process of writing in-class in a timed situation seemed to discourage the kind of overwrought, constipated writing that some students produce with a typed paper;” “handwriting encourages students to focus on the writing process;” and, most problematically, “handwriting brings writers closer to their work — which may encourage excellence with particular students.”

Most of the comments on the Inside Higher Ed site basically says “this doesn’t seem right to me,” there was some discussion on the WPA-L mailing list about why this argument doesn’t ring true, and I of course feel the same way. But quite frankly, the explanation as to why Wilson thought her students’ handwritten work was better than the typed assignments strikes me as obvious: the writing situations were different.

The handwritten assignments were in-class writings, and while Wilson doesn’t give examples of any assignments, I would assume that the in-class assignments were a great deal more specific in terms of subject and purpose than the out-of-class assignments. An in-class assignment might be something like “In her chapter in the assigned reading, Smith makes three points about ‘X;’ explain one of them and why you agree or disagree.” Or maybe “Compare these specific Smith and Jones readings.” In contrast, I would guess/bet the out-of-class assignments are quite a bit less specific– “Tell your reader about an important event” or something like that– and there may have been additional burdens, like providing some research.

So what I’m suggesting here is the handwritten assignments were “better” because students had a clearer sense of purpose (answer this question) and they had a clearer sense of audience (no one else is going to read this; this is from me to Wilson, or whatever her real name is). Simple as that.

Wilson writes that she “typed up a student’s handwritten midterm and compared it to two computer-generated essays,” but I don’t think that’s a fair test. If she really wants to make this comparison (and by the way, I think it is ultimately an idiotic comparison because the vast majority of writing tasks our students complete in school and elsewhere are done at the keyboard anyway), why not ask students to complete an out-of-class writing assignment by hand? Why not arrange for one of these in-class assignments be done in a computer lab someplace? That would be a more realistic test, seems to me.

All I know is this: I was teaching a class a few years ago where there was an in-class writing activity– an essay test, if I recall. For reasons not worth explaining, I was able to give students a choice between writing their exam out by hand or using a computer. I thought that maybe five or six out of the 20 or so students might take me up on the computer offer. To my surprise, all 20 students opted for the computer, and when I asked them why, the answer (with a shrug) was basically “this is how I write.”