Skip navigationLog in to follow, share, and participate in this community. Not a member? Join Now! Maybe you remember the first Big Read from 2012: Moby Dick, 135 chapters in 135 days, a radio extravaganza dreamed up by Philip Hoare and Angela Cockayne; read by the likes of Tilda Swinton, Stephen Fry, Mary ... Sharing The Big Read with Students
BackPhoto with computer and garden by April Lidinsky While many of us have hobbled through the spring semester, there is no rest for the weary, it seems. I hope you are all taking socially distanced and masked wal... Some Things Haven’t Changed: Our Relationships with Our Students Are Still Paramount
BackAs I write this, states are beginning to reopen. And yet there remains an almost universal sense that this pandemic is far from over. And behind even that, in the shadowy crevices of so many psyches, I sense we also k... For my last blog of the 2019-2020 Bits blogging year, I wish to return to the cataclysmic event in which we are all, unhappily and reluctantly, participating. This is history, and while, unfortunately, what we... The Politics of the Pandemic
Back Inspired by the work of Laura Aull, I’ve been introducing students to corpora as a way to find information about writing in various disciplines—they can, for example, easily check whether profession... Using a New Corpus for Student Searches
BackToday’s guest blogger is Tanya Rodrigue, an associate professor in English and coordinator of the Writing Intensive Curriculum Program at Salem State University in Massachusetts. Several years ... A Soundwriting Pedagogical Framework for Teaching Rhetoric
Back Amid the daily reports of admissions to hospitals, of numbers intubated or in ICUs, and of the unthinkable roll call of deaths, I’ve felt almost numb with grief. And with anger, too, as I see how many ar... The Rhetoric of Public Health Reports and Press Briefings
Back When I was putting together the 4th edition of Emerging, Sherry Turkle’s “Empathy Diaries,” the introduction to her 2015 book Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, seem... Rethinking Turkle: Conversation and Coronavirus
Back While trying to think of something other than the pandemic to write about for this blog (all pandemic, all the time is not a good formula for either writing or mental health), I found myself rereading Robert L... The Medium is the Market: The Semiotics of Popular Storytelling
Back Before the pandemic, I had never heard of Zoom. What a difference a couple of months can make! Now, like most of you, I find myself “zooming” on a daily basis: Boards I serve on meet via Zoom; comm... Tips for Looking Your Best in Video Classrooms
Back We have reached the arc in the pandemic when we are testing the waters of returning to “normal.” At the same time, we are holding conversations about why “normal” is the wrong destinati... Post-Pandemic Grading: Let’s Not Return to “Normal”
BackWesley Dunning teaches writing at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. His work appears in Blueline, Gravel Magazine, and others. What follows is a recent conversation I had with him: &... Poetic Rhetoric: An Interview with Wesley Dunning
BackFor the past few months, I have been analyzing the feedback I gave first-year composition students during the spring 2019 semester—looking for patterns in my lexical choices, references, and syntax. Student prog... “We” in Teacher Feedback: Reflecting on our Feedback Voices
Back This blog series is written by Julia Domenicucci, an editor at Macmillan Learning, in conjunction with Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. Grammar Girl podcasts can be smoothly integra... Grammar Girl & Ideas for Teaching Online
Back Listening, as I do almost every week, to StoryCorps on NPR, I have been struck by how quickly that organization has adapted to the new pandemic conditions, shifting from two people face to face in a booth reco... Teaching (and Recording) Oral Histories During a Pandemic
BackMorgellons, the controversial disease at the heart of Leslie Jamison’s essay “Devil’s Bait,” differs from COVID-19 in significant ways. And yet Jamison’s central question seems usefully r... Morgellons-19: Empathy and Epidemics
Back One of the key principles of Signs of Life in the U.S.A. is the critical role that cultural mythologies play in shaping human consciousness and the way we experience our world. So, as we face a pandemic disease... No Exceptions: or the End of a Mythology
BackFeeling like I have been unwillingly dropped into a Camus novel (The Plague) or famous diary (Pepys's will do), I find writing this blog to be a very strange experience. The thing is, in spite of multiple reasons to b... Semiotics in the Time of a Plague
Back Well, I'm trying at any rate. Right now that means moving along with the 10th edition of Signs of Life in the U.S.A. We're in the copyediting stage, which can be (and is being) conducted entirely through digit... Keeping Calm and Carrying On
BackIt’s Easter Sunday, it’s raining, and I’ve been in my house for almost a month. I was hoping this blog post would come together quickly, that I would have some technical trick or insightful advice to... Teaching, Writing, and Quarantine: This is a Mess
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