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I teach document design. When I teach composition, I spend a significant amount of the semester on visual design. I’m also a scholar of visual design. Obviously, then, I care about design, perhaps unhealthily so. And I want everyone else to care, too. But, even if you can’t bring yourself to care about visual design, then you should still care about formatting requirements on assignment prompts and/or syllabi. Everything we put on these documents tells our students something about us, about what we value, and about what they should value

while the ability to follow conventions of all stripes is certainly important, the ability to understand, historicize, negotiate, and even resist those conventions is far more important. Formatting conventions do not exist in a vacuum, and while they are solidified in style guides and other texts, they are often fluid and change depending on technologies and rhetorical situations. For instance, the gold standard of student paper formatting exists for several reasons, not the least of which involves Microsoft’s push to use Times as the default font in word processors and web browsers. A knowledge of why those conventions exist, how to negotiate them, and the consequences for following and/or breaking them is far more useful for students than simply being forced to follow them blindly.

The prevalence of Google in student research is well-documented, but the Illinois researchers found something they did not expect: students were not very good at using Google. They were basically clueless about the logic underlying how the search engine organizes and displays its results. Consequently, the students did not know how to build a search that would return good sources. (For instance, limiting a search to news articles, or querying specific databases such as Google Book Search or Google Scholar.)

In other words: Today’s college students might have grown up with the language of the information age, but they do not necessarily know the grammar.

Librarians often have to walk that line between giving a person a fish and teaching her how to fish, proverbially speaking, says Thill. And the answer can rightly vary based on how quickly she needs a fish, whether she has the skills and coordination to competently wield a pole, and whether her ultimate goal is to become a master angler.