Category: writing
A Senior in the City
A Prose Poem
Sometimes, when I realize I am awake, my mind is already moving down a path of words, pausing briefly to evaluate whether they say what I’m meaning, whether they fit together well.
I pause, remembering the small, youngish woman, struggling her grocery cart loaded with bulging yellow plastic bags across the subway car door threshold, and lurching it around. Her eyes behind thick glasses, her mouth never fully closing, she stared openly at the man in a suit, then at the man in jeans next to him. I was pulled from staring at her by a deliberately loud voice approaching and straining to make out what it meant. A large scruffy man was moving through the crowded car, chanting in a loud monotone “Spare some change,” never pausing or thrusting the ragged paper cup towards anyone. The small, youngish woman turned to an attractive young man sitting near where she was standing and said, “That’s wrong” and gestured towards her yellow plastic bags. “I do this; never ask for money.” The attractive young man kept looking away, while the rest of us watched, relieved she wasn’t talking to us. When the disembodied subway voice blurred out the next station name, she clapped her hands together, then struggled her cart over the door threshold and through the impatient pushing-in crowd.
Sometimes, ingrained politeness is a weakness.
Advice for Teachers of Writing
If you are interested in how to teach writing effectively, you might be interested in my Labour Day post on another of my blogs – http://joanvinallcox.ca/40-years-teaching-college-composition/
Free Online Resources: Grammar and Writing — Kristen Twardowski
Like any good grammar junkie, I keep a list of resources for when questions arise about the English language. The following are some free sites that I find myself referring to time and time again. They have been so helpful over the years that it would feel stingy not to share them. OWL: The Purdue […]
via Free Online Resources: Grammar and Writing — Kristen Twardowski
Dyscalculia
I’ve just read a very interesting post on a version of dyslexia that deals with numbers – http://www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/about-dyslexia/schools-colleges-and-universities/dyscalculia.html and now I understand a lot more about how my mind works, and doesn’t work.
I have trouble with left and right, and trying to read maps is painful and embarrassing. I also switch numbers (1,2,4,3,5 etc.) if I try to read them quickly. I have to be VERY careful with large numbers as I can confuse 1000 with 10,000, etc. Plus it’s very hard for me to remember telephone and other numbers, even dates in history. So I think I have dyscalculia. I am also mildly dyslexic, and have some trouble with spelling, but I love words and writing. Despite those limitations, or maybe because of them, I’ve been told repeatedly that I’m a good teacher, good at helping people learn.
I am deeply grateful that I was able to learn and develop tactics that allowed me to survive and thrive as a student and as a teacher. Both as a teacher and as a learner I have observed that people often don’t remember how they learned something; we just own and use what we’ve learned and move on. So I can’t remember how and from whom I learned my tactics for surviving my weaknesses by adapting my strengths to cover for them. The only way I can express my gratitude is to show others alternate learning and performing routes that might work for them. And share with everybody what I learn about how our human minds work, and how differences in how they work can be dealt with compassionately.
Giving people the space and opportunity to learn how they learn, and how they can deal with their weakness as well as their strengths is not only wise and kind, it creates a better world for all of us.
If you are reading this and think you might be dyscalculic, check out your sense of self-worth and see if you have learned to focus on adaptations to help you survive, or if you dwell too much on what you struggle with. Perhaps you need to acknowledge how hard you work, as much as what you can’t do easily. To boast and inspire, I eventually got my Ph.D. and posted my thesis on line – http://www.scribd.com/mobile/doc/2063617 and here’s my not quite up-to-date e-portfolio – https://joanvinallcox.wordpress.com/my-e-portfolio/
Styles in MS Word – A Jing Video
I’m attending the PBWorks Camp for teachers, and this is my homework for my second week, a screencast made using Jing on how Styles in MS Word can help in writing long pieces such as academic papers or business reports:
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I re-did this a number of times, dealing with –
- fitting what I wanted to say to the time available
- figuring out what to leave out
- making sure my set-up worked
- reducing the size of my Word screen so I could fit everything into a smaller frame
- stumbling while I was recording
I really like learning from screen captures myself, so I enjoyed creating one
Gladwell’s Outliers
I’m a fan. I admire Gladwell’s reader-friendly structure and prose, his style. I am intrigued by his unusual take on things that are both below the surface of what is (allowed to be) conscious and yet are common sense, once you’ve read the narratives and the research references and explanations. So I enjoyed reading Outliers, just as I was delighted by Blink and Tipping Point. Gladwell is a communicator who makes me think.
I especially like Outliers because it is so Canadian – it is Gladwell’s explanation of his own success, a statement that is both humble and proud. It is typically Canadian to be reticent in an obvious way, expecting others to make the connections. Gladwell started Outliers, his book about success, with a Canadian hockey story, included the impact of culture, and ended with his grandmother’s success, (which is part of the web that allowed his). All books are ultimately about their author’s and this one shows both that Gladwell knows he has done well, but he is clear that he also knows how lucky he has been in his timing and his community. He knows and demonstrates that community, culture, is the foundation for success – more than/ instead of – rugged individualism.
I have read some criticism of Gladwell’s success, much of it saying he’s not smart enough, his books are too “thin”. What I see is a wise educator, someone who understands the power of narrative as a base to set information in so readers will be able to recall it. I like popularists; I see them as educators and change-agents.
I also find Gladwell’s prose exceptionally easy to follow. People who structure easy-to-follow ideas and information are not asking their readers to do the author’s work. Authors who write easy-to-read sentences are skilled rhetoricians who understand their audiences. Many people appear to believe that “difficult-to-read” equals “deep”; I don’t. I admire Gladwell’s ability to compose material and write well.
I recommend Gladwell’s books, Outliers, Blink, and The Tipping Point.
About Using Active Verbs
Cathy Moore helps people learn how to replace is/are/ etc. with more active verbs. Check it out – http://blog.cathy-moore.com/?p=207 – It’s short, it’s fun, and it makes its point clearly. (Am I contradicting her point? ;->)
Learning Wikispaces With Readability
People decide about what to read, on paper or on the web, before they de-code a single word. If the page looks dense and/or difficult, readers, unless they are highly motivated, will just move on. When people learn to write or to create a web page, they should, IMHO, learn about readability as the same time as they learn how to use the application. I’ve tried to combine information about the Wikispaces icons and readability in this document, aimed at the new user, especially if they are not too familiar with web layout and usability.
BTW, if you read this blog regularly, you will have noticed that the links I bookmark are now being added as a post on a daily basis. I have found many interesting and helpful links on the blogs of others who also do this, so I figured out how to for mine. Hope some of them are helpful or interesting for you.
Generating a Table of Figures
I enjoy playing with new applications, and I enjoy figuring out how to use them to accomplish tasks. My previous post was a screencast showing how to automatically generate a Table of Contents, something that is very easy once you see the steps. This post is focussed on how to automatically generate a Table of Figures.
If you, or someone you are supervising, are creating a document, chances are, it will have some visual content. If it’s just clipart used to amuse, you can ignore this, but if you are inserting pictures that help communicate the meaning, you should always add a caption to help the readers notice what you want them to see. Luckily, this is a step that contributes to automatically generating a Table of Figures, as you can see in the embedded screencast below:
What I find especially fun is using, and learning, software that is new to me, while creating a screencast about an aspect of Word that is very useful, and not that well known.It’s a twofer – I learn and others learn;->
Learning Living 