Getting Started Writing

Since I haven't posted here for quite a long time, it looks like I need to think about how to get started writing, for sure!

A study of student writers at Oregon State showed that many of them consider getting started writing to be one of their biggest writing problems. In my keynote talk at the May 2010 Oregon Rhetoric and Composition Conference at Portland State University, I am inviting other teachers--students, too-- to post ideas for getting started writing.

Here is mine: I label a document “Journaling on x” (whatever the topic is), and just start typing, tossing out ideas, making lists, asking questions. I tell myself this is not much, just a little place to put some things down, which reduces my anxiety. I date the entries and post with the most recent at the top. Sometimes I get going and actually write quite a bit that can go into the real document.

What’s your idea for getting started writing?

Great Grammar Projects

I have thoroughly enjoyed reading and evaluating the Great Grammar Projects for WR 330. The assignment challenged students to select a set of texts and within them locate a number grammatical structures. The range of sources was impressive: from the Brontes, Poe, and Shakespeare to Elle, People, and Fitness Magazine. One team analyzed the grammar of cartoons, which they discovered to be a tough place to locate complex and compound sentence structures. Closely related was the project that looked at the graphic novel, Maus. Mallory and Jennifer studied the screenplay of Dead Poets’ Society, while DeDe analyzed her mom’s newspaper columns and Matt looked at his own Barometer columns. Jonathan and Jennie had fun with the irreverent website The Onion, while Kyle took on the complex language of mathematics books. The Onion and math projects are both posted online at writingcommonsone.blogspot.com. Alec made a story using sentences from New Yorker articles, an odd combination of Biblical commentary and borderline porn. His is not posted on the blog, but he has a great sound track. There were so many good projects: I wish I could discuss them all.

One of the most fun to read was from Kevin, a Microbiology major, who took his examples from the poetry of Donald Justice. Reading Kevin’s project reminded me of how much I like Justice’s poetry. In one stanza of “The Evening Mind” Kevin found a simple sentence, a participle, apposition, and a gerund:

Now comes the evening of the mind.
Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood;…
Faintly the martyred peaches crying out
You name, the name nobody knows but you.
It is the aura and coming on…

I noticed the difficulty a lot of folks had finding an appropriate sentence for the pattern S+V+IO+DO. It is important to remember that to have an indirect object, you need to be using one of the “give” verbs. Aimee and Kelly found a good one in “Calvin and Hobbs” when Calvin describes the news organizations:

“They give me what I want: antics, emotional confrontation, sound bites, scandal, sob stories and popularity polls all packaged as a soap opera and horse race.” The IO is “me” and the DO is the clause “what I want.”

It was also tough to find ellipsis. I’d like to find out the history of the ellipsis. I’m not sure they were even in use during Shakespeare’s day. Kaelyn and Jessye weren’t able to find any in the plays they studied. I just checked the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which is available on the library website under Online Resources. The first OED reference to “ellipsis” is 1612, but the first that seems like our usage is from Cowley dated 1667. Alexander Pope (1727) wrote “The ellipsis, or speech by half-words [is the particular talent of] ministers and politicians.”

I was glad that several people found the project fun. Playing with language is a good thing. Laura and Lindsey H. said that while they were working on finding examples in People Magazine, their friends kept stopping by to try to help. The only problem was that their friends couldn’t recognize any of the grammatical structures that were needed.

I want to thank my students for all the work they did on these projects. They demonstrated impressive understanding of English grammar.

Silence on the Commons

I have been out of blog-touch lately as I recuperate from an injury and the accompanying brain fog of pain. What a freak accident: Who gets knocked over by a car door, falls onto a fire hydrant, and breaks three ribs? The Three Stooges?

In the next day or two I’ll be posting my thoughts on the end of the term in Understanding Grammar, and especially my thoughts on my first experience with class blogs.

Grammar of the Heart

Grammar of the Heart

Last week in the checkout line at Safeway, I saw a tempting display of candy hearts, those tiny confectionary messengers from childhood. I bought four boxes and enlisted my students in Understanding Grammar at Oregon State University in what may be the world’s first analysis of the grammar of candy hearts.

Here are the results of our study.

The most common grammatical construction on the candy heart is an imperative statement, a command: Be mine, Love me, Kiss me, Marry me, the hearts ordered, like little romantic commanders-in-chief.

The next most common construction was what could be called the seductive (often possessive) noun cluster: My man, My baby, My love, My girl, Lover Boy, Cutie Pie, Sweet talk. Perhaps these flattering nominal confections should precede the bossy imperative hearts. “Lover Boy” and “Cutie Pie” before “Love me,” “Kiss me.” We found only one seductive adjective cluster, a message with a Mo-Town beat: So fine...

One of the most puzzling messages was “Let’s read.” Huh? What, we wondered, is the romantic subtext of such a heart? Let’s read each other love poems? Let’s read instead of making out? Is this a break-up heart? Nobody breaks up on Valentine’s Day, do they? Do they??

There was one heart designed for the over-reaching suitor: Get Real. Very harsh for a valentine candy. They may need a tone-checker back at the candy factory.

The class noted a technological influence infiltrating candy(heart)land, visible in text-messages like URAQT and URA10. Would anyone over the age of fifteen even understand them?

What’s missing from the box? There were no Janet Jackson moments. Not a “You’re hot!” in the lot. The raciest message we found was “Got love,” which my students read as a punctuation-free, imperfect allusion to “Got Milk?”

Despite the intrusion of “Get Real” and “Let’s Read,” my class concluded that the tone of candy hearts is positive, even optimistic, and the messages are always in the present tense. So grab some candy hearts and live in the moment, Lover Boy, Cutie Pie. That’s the grammar of love.

Check Out the Class Blogs

I have set up team blogs for members of my class. This term the focus is Understanding Grammar. Here is how the set-up works: I created seven blogs, naming them Writing Commons One, Writing Commons Two, and so on through seven. Blogger lets me invite others to join my blogs. So I divided the class into seven groups and invited four or five students to each blog. Then Blogger sent each of them an invitation. Once they accept the invitation, they are members of that blog and can post entries by going to http://blogger.com, signing in, and then choosing the post link.

Blogger gave me a choice of templates for setting up a blog. Just as I used variations on the name of my own blog, Writing Commons, for the student team blogs, I also used variations on the same template for the team blogs. My tech TA, Kaitlin, figured out how to change the colors on the templates and did that on all seven blogs for me. But using one color scheme would work, too.

To start the conversation on the team blogs, I posted several questions. Students can respond to any of them they want. The assignment for the first week was to post one response to the questions on the Lisa Delpit article. There were some problems with lost invitations and lost passwords, so that did not work perfectly, but overall, the process went well. The assignment for the second week is to read the postings of one's own team and respond to at least one post. Then also read the postings of one other team and post at least one comment. Comments are posted by clicking on the Comment link at the end of a particular post.

People who are not in the class are able and welcome to post comments on any of the blogs.

Readers who would like to see what the students have to say can look here:
http://writingcommonsone.blogspot.com
http://writingcommonstwo.blogspot.com
http://writingcommonsthree.blogspot.com
http://writingcommonsfour.blogspot.com
http://writingcommonsfive.blogspot.com
http://writingcommonssix.blogspot.com
http://writingcommonsseven.blogspot.com

Scroll to the bottom of the postings to see the prompts I gave for the assignment.

Language and Diversity

This week my grammar class will be considering issues of language and diversity. The Faculty Senate of this university has asked faculty to recognize the work of Dr. Martin Luther King by somehow bringing the issues he cared about into the classroom. The WR 330 assignment this week is to read Lisa Delpit's article, "The Silenced Dialogue:Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children" (Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 58 No. 3, August 1988). As soon as we get the team blogs going, students will be discussing this article and related issues in small groups on Writing Commons.

Some students have noted that the Delpit article is sixteen years old and wondered what Lisa Delpit has been doing since. Delpit is the Director of the Center for Urban Educational Excellence and the Benjamin E. Mays Professor of Educational Leadership at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Other sources for information about Lisa Delpit are:

Review of The Skin That We Speak, which contains an article by Lisa Delpit, 2003.
http://www.essentialschools.org/cs/resources/view/ces_res/291

An interview with Lisa Delpit on Public Radio entitled "Choosing Excellence." 15 minutes. 2000
http://www.pbs.org/merrow/tmr_radio/pgm6/guests.html#3

Several term-papers-for-sale sites also offer brief book reviews of Delpit's book, Other People's Children, which collects her articles from Harvard Educational Review. They are waiting "24-7" to sell you a book review. I'm sure this is not what Delpit had in mind when she talked about access to the "culture of power" through language.

Another important site with information about language and discrimination is:

http://tolerance.org/
This site, sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center, contains many resources for teaching tolerance and living a tolerant life.

On tolerance.org you will also find a teaching tool called Writing for Change, developed at Oregon State University by the Difference, Power, and Discrimination Program with funding from a Writing Intensive Curriculum grant. Susan Shaw and Janet Lockhart are the authors of Writing for Change.
http://tolerance.org/teach/web/wfc/index.jsp

The history of the Southern Poverty Law Center and their role in the Civil Rights Movement is available at:
http://www.splcenter.org/center/history/history.jsp

Vicki Tolar Burton

Getting Started

This blog will be the writing commons for myself and for my students. This term the class involved will be an upper-division Baccalaureate Core course called Understanding Grammar. I have not used a blog before, nor have most of my students. My inspiration was a visit to our campus by Laura Gurak from the University of Minnesota. Laura is involved in the online publication Into the Blogosphere. She talked about using blogs in her graduate seminar. Since I am trying to bring more technology to our Writing Across the Curriculum program, I want to try using blogging in my own teaching.