Archive for October, 2007

irony of the colon

Last week I was explaining to my classes how to use a colon or semicolon, and the differences between the two. One rule I gave because I see colons misused a lot: never use a colon after a to be verb.
Today I found myself replying to a student email and using a colon after is.

WR214: Writing in Business

the obligatory male handshake

I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon with many of male students. Many of them like to shake my hand after the conference, which I’m okay with, but I’m a bit surprised by. I don’t remember ever shaking a teacher’s hand when I was an undergrad. I wonder if they shake hands with their other teachers? I [...]

Conferences with Students, WR214: Writing in Business

cirque du so-gay: drag competition on Saturday

OSU’s Rainbow Continuum is hosting the sixth annual drag competition this Saturday, October 27, in the MU Quad in a giant tent built by the OSU Foundation.
It’ll be a fantastic event with student performers competing for the titles of King and Queen of the Beever (the audience gets to vote for the title winner!) and [...]

Uncategorized

rockies!!!

Preface: I don’t follow sports. Haven’t really since I was in high school.
History: Growing up in rural Iowa, we got decent reception from Des Moines’s network stations, but my parents ordered a Network package through our satellite dish, and the stations were out of Denver. We’d watch network sitcoms an hour later than all my [...]

Uncategorized

University of Oregon may go private

interesting story in today’s OSU Barometer. The problems that develop when states don’t fund their public education enough.

Education

broken goals

At the beginning of this school year, I set certain goals/rules for myself because I wasn’t the healthiest graduate student ever over the last two years. Looks like I broke a number of them yesterday.
First rule: Go to bed before midnight on weeknights. I’ve broken this one about 3 times since school began four weeks [...]

Uncategorized

it’s 2:00 am, do you know where your teacher is

I just finished creating a trailfire presentation for my business writing students tomorrow (summary available here) — or, rather, today, as it’s 2:00 am. Why am I up so late? Due to having a lot of grading left to do and accidentally sleeping so much on Saturday, when I had scheduled time to grade. Guess [...]

Collaboration, Plagiarism, Presentations, WR214: Writing in Business

take 20

Today I took a break from reading my students’ job search memos and good news letters to finally watch Take 20, which I thought was a great film. One of the questions they asked the composition scholars in the film was, “What do you wish you had been taught in grad school (but weren’t)?” And [...]

Teaching Composition

notes from the interblags: the ridiculous amount of links edition

It’s that time again: I have to clear out my bloglines account some. Some interesting reads I want to remember and link others to:
• Related to my Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) Talk on the way people talk about Ann Coulter, Jim Aune at the Blogora links to Maxim’s take on “Mann Coulter”.
• Henry Jenkins discusses What [...]

Blogs, Education, Gender, Notes from the Interblags

yet another video from michael wesch

John notes that while everyone is paying attention to Michael Wesch’s video A Vision of Students Today, not many are linking to or showing Internet Revolution, which (and I agree with him) John says is much more of a follow up to The Machine is Us/ing Us.

I really like this video as well, but one [...]

Internet culture