Happy 2015! May this new year sparkles a renewed spirit in all your personal and professional endeavors. Since classes here at the U don't start until the 20th of January, I am having the time of my life just reading and writing this winter break (spending most of my time at a Starbucks that's located a … Continue reading Language, Words, Writing: TED Talks for Your Writing Courses
writing
The Rhetoric and Design of Course Syllabus
It's that time of the year when professors and instructors squeeze their brains and put together their hopefully-comprehensible course syllabi for respective classes. As I enter my fourth semester of teaching a freshman-writing course, I realize there's a constant urge to put more and more into my syllabus: maybe I should tell my students not … Continue reading The Rhetoric and Design of Course Syllabus
To Write or Not to Write: Should We Get Rid of College Essays?
This morning, I woke up to a heated discussion on the WPA (Writing Program Administration) listserv around Rebecca Schuman's latest article, "The End of the College Essay," on Slate. Essentially, Schuman thinks instructors hate grading college papers just as much as how their students hate writing those papers: So you know what else is a … Continue reading To Write or Not to Write: Should We Get Rid of College Essays?
#Hashtags in the Writing Classroom
Hashtags are used to group messages and label topics. Today, hashtags are widely used in the social networks as a markup for groups of interests that belong together and a language for expression that is used outside the traditional sentence structure. Steve Boyd in a blogpost describes hashtags as "twitter groupings" that can be "wonderful … Continue reading #Hashtags in the Writing Classroom
Jason Tham, Ph.D. 