Skip to main content

Home/ PWR at CU Boulder/ Group items tagged writing

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
anonymous

Writing as Design, Design as Writing ( jnd.org ) - 0 views

www.jnd.org/...TS-WritingAsDesign.html

writing as design design principles

shared by anonymous on 23 Jul 11 - Cached
  • I think you have to be a writer yourself to know how hard it is to make something easy to read -- or else you just have to be a little smart.
  • One of the things that stands out when talking to designers and long-term users of poorly designed systems is that these people take great pride in their skills. They had to go through great difficulties to master the system, and they are rightfully proud of having done so. That, by itself, is alright. The problem is that the difficulties become a test of the person or group. Then, rather than ease the situation for the next people, it is used as a sort of initiation rite. The hardy survivors of the experience claim to share a common bond and look with disdain upon those who have not been through the same rites. They share horror stories with one another.
  • To be successful, both writing and design have to follow basic psychological principles. And then they must be tested, tried out with readers or users who are similar to the intended audience, and then revised in whatever manner the test results indicate. All this takes a lot of effort and time. Time to learn the principles and appropriate techniques, time to practice them, time to test one's writing or design, time to revise, retest, and re-revise. Few are willing to expend that much time or effort.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • It sounds to me suspiciously like those folks who told me that if I made errors using the Unix computer system, why then I had no business using it. Clearly those who are incompetent to use something or to understand a text have no business trying to do so. Isn't this a great defense? You can cover up any kind of inelegant design or writing this way. Wonderful.
  • but the real test of the power of the idea ? and of the thinker ? is the ability to translate it into terms that the rest of us can understand
  • Consider the effect of age on intellectual ability. Young scientists find that human intellectual abilities decline with age, starting in the late twenties or thirties. However, older scientists doing the same kind of research show that intellectual ability does not decline with age, at least not after you exclude the effects of illness, "cohort" effects, and other technical complexities. Sure, physical and sensory abilities decline ? physical strength, vision, hearing, speed of response ? but certainly not intellectual ability. In fact, older scientists point out, knowledge, or what is called "crystal intelligence," is not only unimpaired, it improves with age.
  • The same points hold today, even though the technology of writing has advanced to the point where the hard work is the mental creation and refinement of one's thoughts into a form the reader can understand instead of the physical act of writing. It is easier for writers to let all their thoughts spill out on the page as they occur to them than to do the hard, time-consuming work to make those thoughts clear and easy for readers.
  • Conscientious authors find they must spend considerable time writing and rewriting.
  • The flaw in the argument, of course, is that why should anyone bother? How will they even know that something worthwhile is in there if it cannot be understood? Sure the work got published, and sure, my friend got promoted, but did anyone read the papers? Did his work have any impact? That is where readability matters.
  • The harder the author works, the easier for the reader. Hasty, inconsiderate authors create hours of effort for the reader. Careful, conscientious writers simplify the task for readers, but at the cost of great time and effort for themselves. Whose time is to be worth more: one writer or many readers?
  • t, opposing ideas are considered very important, because each scientific paper must carefully listen to the opposing voices and try to explain why they are either mistaken or why they perhaps do not apply in this particular case
  • It is through studies of the citation index that we know that interesting statistic: an amazingly large number of scientific papers never receive even a single citation.
  • these activities are presumably done for the benefit of others, so shouldn't the needs and abilities of those others be considered? A good writer and a good designer share many things in common. They need to understand the needs and abilities of their audience, and they must consider just how the product will be used.
  • Obviously the notion of trying out the material on the intended audience is not popular among designers and writers of instruction manuals,
  • Writers need editors and test readers to serve this role. Designers need the equivalent.
anonymous

Technology and Teaching Writing | Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

www.insidehighered.com/...ng_technology_to_teach_writing

digital literacy teaching writing teaching with technology composition pedagogy

shared by anonymous on 25 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • online writing environments do not magically produce better student writing — or better teaching practices — but can allow for practice with different composing and teaching skills, which can lead to better writing, teaching, and administering depending on the form (for example awareness of audio, visual, and design considerations).
  • One of the biggest pedagogical effects this approach has had on my teaching is to allow my classroom to become, more than ever, a real artistic writing studio
  • But this is where the ubiquitous collaborative pedagogy espoused and practiced by writing teachers everywhere helps. Since so much of what we do in my writing classes involves students helping students — as well as themselves — take more responsibility for each other’s writing processes,
anonymous

Education Needs a Digital-Age Upgrade - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...on-needs-a-digital-age-upgrade

education digital literacy digital pedagogy

shared by anonymous on 08 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Simply put, we can’t keep preparing students for a world that doesn’t exist.
  • we are blinding ourselves to the world as it is. And then we’re punishing students for our blindness.
  • Teachers and professors regularly ask students to write papers. Semester after semester, year after year, “papers” are styled as the highest form of writing. And semester after semester, teachers and professors are freshly appalled when they turn up terrible.
  • ...6 more annotations...
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 09 Aug 11
       
      Echoes a thought I had recently: What if the reason student writing seems so problematic isn't that we don't ask them to write enough, but that we ask them to write too much?
  • Ms. Davidson herself was appalled not long ago when her students at Duke, who produced witty and incisive blogs for their peers, turned in disgraceful, unpublishable term papers. But instead of simply carping about students with colleagues in the great faculty-lounge tradition, Ms. Davidson questioned the whole form of the research paper. “What if bad writing is a product of the form of writing required in school — the term paper — and not necessarily intrinsic to a student’s natural writing style or thought process?” She adds: “What if ‘research paper’ is a category that invites, even requires, linguistic and syntactic gobbledygook?”
  • “Online blogs directed at peers exhibit fewer typographical and factual errors, less plagiarism, and generally better, more elegant and persuasive prose than classroom assignments by the same writers.”
  • Even academically reticent students publish work prolifically, subject it to critique and improve it on the Internet.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 09 Aug 11
       
      For an example, look up the fan fiction movement.
  • A classroom suited to today’s students should deemphasize solitary piecework. It should facilitate the kind of collaboration that helps individuals compensate for their blindnesses, instead of cultivating them.
  • The new classroom should teach the huge array of complex skills that come under the heading of digital literacy. And it should make students accountable on the Web
anonymous

Welcome to College Writing - 0 views

collegewriting.org/home

college writing free textbook

shared by anonymous on 17 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 17 Oct 10
     
    CollegeWriting.Org is a free writing textbook for college writers. * Process: Understand the working habits and and attitudes of effective writers. Improve your prewrting, revising, and editing abilities. * Research: Understand library research methods and conventions for evaluating, citing, and summarizing sources. Explore primary research strategies--surveys, ethnography, case study. * Projects: Guidance on academic genres, popular writing assignments, and links to sample readings.
anonymous

Should We Really ABOLISH the Term Paper? A Response to the NY Times | HASTAC - 0 views

hastac.org/...h-term-paper-response-ny-times

digital literacy digital pedagogy digital writing blogging teaching learning composition teaching writing

shared by anonymous on 29 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • I want my students to feel the power of writing, the power of their writing. Writing is communication.  It deserves an audience.  And that's the bottom line:  I don't want my students to see me as their audience.  I want them to leave my classes seeing the world as their potential audience.   
anonymous

Digital Discourse: Composing with Media in the Writing Classroom - 1 views

www.dartmouth.edu/...digital-discourse

digital literacy digital writing new media digital composition multimodal composition

shared by anonymous on 01 Aug 11 - Cached
  • None of these students had created a video composition before. And yet, using archival footage from Rauner and on-campus interviews, these first-time filmmakers produced a moving short film about student activism and apathy. As you watch the film, note that the filmmakers’ choices (of image, interviews, music, and transitions) are very clearly rooted in an awareness of the effect that they hoped to have on their audience.
  •   One might argue—and argue correctly—that teaching students an awareness of audience does not require that we study or assign multimedia compositions. But students are deeply engaged with these media, often relying on them to make very important life decisions, like whom to vote for in the next presidential election and why. This engagement leads students to feel that multimedia compositions matter, and that these compositions have a power that other compositions don’t have—perhaps because they believe multimedia compositions have a broad and genuinely interested audience are therefore more likely to be seen.
  • Indeed, a group of students working on a short film reported to me that they had spent an hour heatedly arguing about a single transition in their film. These were students who often overlooked transitions in their written work.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • properly designed, can enhance students’ understanding of how to compose the traditional academic essay.
  • Because web readers have more freedom in their reading practices, writing for the web requires writers to think especially carefully about their readers: web writers must both anticipate readers’ choices and try to find ways to manage these choices. A good website is thus constructed so that the reader’s experience is self-determined but also managed, coherent across pages but not redundant. Finally, writing for the Web 2.0 invites web writers to think about opportunities for interaction: writers can poll readers, invite them to comment, and even engage in a sustained discourse with them.
anonymous

Digital Is | National Writing Project - 0 views

digitalis.nwp.org

digital writing digital composition

shared by anonymous on 23 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 23 Aug 11
     
    The future of writing is digital...
anonymous

Digital Writing, Digital Teaching - Integrating New Literacies into the Teaching of Wri... - 1 views

hickstro.org

digital writing blogs wikis digital literacy new literacies digital teaching

shared by anonymous on 16 Dec 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 16 Dec 10
     
    Troy Hicks
1 - 20 of 87 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page