Dr. Harrington’s Blog

This week’s reading is a trio: two on-line pieces (by Wysocki and Boese) and a print article by Mary Hocks.  Hocks’ piece discusses the two online pieces in terms of visual rhetoric.  Read through Hocks to get a sense of the framework she proposes, and then look to the online pieces to experience the rhetoric–and […]

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This week’s reading is a report addressing issues arising from teaching with blogs.  I’m guessing that you’ll find parts of it dense, and parts of it quite easy to follow.  Brooks et al.are pretty clear about their aims: ” Our goal in this paper is to bring some greater specificity to, and […]

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I have never before changed a reading assignment in between class readings, but when I saw the announcement that comic creator and historian Scott McCloud will be speaking on campus during our class time next week, I couldn’t resist. Class will begin as usual at 6:00 in CA 237, and we’ll spend the first […]

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This chapter is from the text W510 students have been reading, Teaching Writing with Computers: An Introduction, edited by Pamela Takayoshi (an IUPUI alumna!) and Brian Huot. Janet Carey Eldred and Lisa Toner, writing for an audience of people who are just starting (or soon to be starting) to teach writing, outline ways writing technologies […]

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This article is a written version of Kathleen Blake Yancey’s Chair’s address to the annual gathering of college composition teachers.  She delivered her speech to an audience of thousands of college writing teachers, in an auditorium in San Antonio, Texas, with two power point presentations on either side of the stage.  The side bar quotations […]

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This is chapter 9 from Clanchy’s book From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307, in which Clanchy explores the myriad uses of literacy in medieval England.  He argues that literacy grew in this period because of the explosion in record-keeping; he’s interested in the spread of literate practices (the production of documents) as well as […]

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Dennis Baron is an English professor at the U of Illinois who’s written extensively about language history and technology/literacy connections.  This piece looks at the ways in which technologies affect writing in very hands-on ways–the technologies available to us change the practices we have as writers.  In this piece, Baron looks at what it takes […]

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I don’t know much about the Journal of Electronic Publishing. It’s an online journal addressing ways electronic publishing affects the industry, the academy, the workplace. They say that they are both magazine and journal–I’m not sure what that means. We’ll see what we think.
Ferris opens her piece with an overview of the […]

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This piece, like Selfe’s from last week and Brandt’s, appeared in CCC (College Composition and Communication, the journal of the college section of the National Council of Teachers of English).  Note the abstract at the beginning which summarizes their argument.
On 643 the authors establish the gap—the things we don’t know and haven’t studied—that lead them […]

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Of the three pieces for this week, Scriber’s uses the most formal, academic tone and conventions. But she addresses a question you’ve already written about this semester: what is literacy? As she points out on the first page (6), how you answer the question of what literacy is leads to different ideas about the problems […]

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