Group items tagged

This is a technical discussion on dopamine, rewards, and time by neurologist Robert Sapolsky. His research has shown that the anticipation of reward is more pleasurable than the reward itself and this pleasure increases when the reward is not a guarantee, but a possibility. This kind of discussion may seem overly abstract and distant from the classroom, but understanding how motivation works, even on a neuro-chemical level, can help us to not only design our courses, but develop new approaches to generating enthusiasm and performance in the classroom. It is a good place to start when crafting (or re-designing) a teaching (and/or writing) philosophy. What are the rewards students associate with writing? What is our role in creating, maintaining, and providing access to those rewards? Do the rewards always have to be attainable? How do we frame these ideas for use in academic planning?

This article analyzes the linguistic dynamics of the stylistic literary voice, its bound-factors, and its application. There is definitely a much more technical approach to defining the stylistic voice; but it is actually quite interesting to read about the way in which voice is a matter of "appropriateness", instead of "grammaticality". Joybrato also uses poetical references to strengthen and accentuate his linguistic evaluations; furthermore, his dichotomies of 'literary stylistics' reveal an aspect of writing that cannot necessarily be easily seen. He even mentions the applications of today's technologies and their capacious depth of containing writing. This is article is beneficial to those trying to identify their, and/or helping others, realize their own entity of the stylistic literary voice they contain within their literary composition/cognition. Although the article slightly wanders into the plains of prolixity, I would still recommend extrapolating the information that catches your eye.

Tong's post! This article is about the complication of academic writing. It identifies some of the difficulties in understanding an academic paper. Through anthropologist view they point out that academic writing are becoming more and more complex due to many reasons like the contents of the paper, the vocabularies including syntax and discourse. It mentions something that has to do with "technical and/or scientific writing" and the relation to countries that are working to "catch up". And how it would be a hard task in helping them to understand what's really being done. People were being hired to make the text more comprehensible to other readers. Academic writing is like making/ stating an idea in a complex ways by the uses of complex vocabularies. One important thing I found interesting and true for myself is the way student approach academic writing. Students only skim over articles to get a sense of what's being said rather than reading to "make use of the information." Then I thought could it be that students have to write on multiple articles and while in school we takes several classes that are not related to the same thing/topic and therefore our reading and writing are does not focus on the same genres or format.