tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-74914884489029830402024-03-05T04:37:05.004-05:00The Writing Center at PCCCLKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00927627090984083859noreply@blogger.comBlogger241125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7491488448902983040.post-973147590223857532015-02-13T13:37:00.000-05:002015-02-13T13:37:01.065-05:00#Writing Advice: #Motivation and #Empowerment<div style="line-height: 18.0pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">In the course of my writing life, people have asked me over and
over about motivation. “How do I get motivated?” or “Can you motivate
me?” Few things strike as much fear into my heart. It’s not that I don’t
have any concern for people. I genuinely want to nurture other
writers. But I hate “motivating” people.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">Does this make me a horrible person?</span></b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">When someone asks me how to “get” motivated, I immediately pull
back. To me, this sounds like an invitation to play a guessing game with
their psychology, to start pulling wires in their heads until I make them do
the thing they want to do. This takes an unimaginable amount of energy
and patience on my part. Some days I just don’t have it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 18.0pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">When I hear this from a growing writer, I worry about two
things. First, I don’t want to give the appearance of hoarding the
Special Magical Mystical Writing Knowledge That I Surely Possess ™.
Second, I don’t want to give the appearance I don’t care about other
writers. But at the end of the day, I believe in tough love. To
write, you have to write. It’s as simple and impossible as that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">The necessity of pulling back</span></b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">When you overwater a plant, it becomes wilted and soft.
The stem grows mold and the plant can die if the gardener doesn’t hold back a
little. Sometimes I think one has to hold back to the sake of the
writer. I don’t want them to wilt. I want to see people confident
and self-actualized just as much as I want to preserve my own energies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 18.0pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">So how do I help people get off their metaphorical
couches? How do I help them to overcome their training that “writing is
impossible” and you have to “write it right the first time”?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">RX for writing motivation</span></b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">Motivation is not something you can find, and it is certainly
not something someone gives you. There is no magic button or pill.
Motivation is a series of choices we must all make. As writers, we are
not automatically afforded the respect and dignity given to more popular
professions. We must nurture ourselves, empower ourselves, and claim our
own work as work. We must learn to motivate ourselves.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">Give yourself the gift of the draft</span></b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></b></div>
<div style="line-height: 18.0pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">Produce. Produce. Produce. You are not a
writer until you are writing. There is no pizzazz in this, there is no
glamour. You are translating thought and impression into the code of
language, and making that code understandable to others. This is work.
This is labor. Own it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 18.0pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">When you actually work on something , you become intimately
familiar with the process. You learn the needs of the format or genre
you’re working with, and you learn your own habits and foibles. The
experience of working draft by draft is more valuable than a hundred writing
books. There is no substitute for drafting.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 18.0pt;">
<b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">You can’t spit out the Mona Lisa</span></b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></b></div>
<div style="line-height: 18.0pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">Distance yourself emotionally from your draft and learn to
edit. Your first draft will always be flawed. Your second, third,
and even fourth will have issues. Sometimes projects have fatal flaws,
and sometimes they need heavy-duty restructuring. This is not an
indictment on your as a writer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 18.0pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">You are under no obligation to write a perfect poem, essay, or
paper the first time. Waiting until you deem something “perfect” to move
on is going to prevent you from writing anything. Excellence is a good
goal, but perfectionism is a very bad habit.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 18.0pt;">
<b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">Identify your High Order Concerns</span></b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></b></div>
<div style="line-height: 18.0pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">Take this session by session, and have definable goals for each
one. In tutoring, we have to prioritize on the fly, and we usually only
have 30 minutes with a student. A successful tutoring session
triages a paper: both individuals ascertain what the biggest flaw in the work
is and address that first. If there’s time left in the session, they work
on small fry. This empowers the student to work on their own errors, not just
accept criticism, however well deserved – it puts them in the drivers’ seat.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 18.0pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 18.0pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">Do the same for yourself. What do you want to accomplish
this afternoon? Today? This week? Limit these goals
severely. If you can’t place it in the top three slots of your to-do
list, it’s not a High Order Concern. Not every part of the writing
process is priority one at every single step. Pull back, consider, identify,
and act.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 18.0pt;">
<b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">Parting Thoughts</span></b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 18.0pt;">
<b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></b></div>
<div style="line-height: 18.0pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">There will be days, even weeks, where you can’t get “anything
done”. That is ok. You are allowed to have a life outside of
writing. But you must develop the reflex to return over and over to your
worktable. Over time, the choices you make become habit.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 18.0pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 18.0pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">If you choose to put off a project until you find the perfect
word, detail, mood, whatever – you are ultimately choosing to not bring this
project to completion. You will develop and reinforce fear, anxiety, and
perfectionism. You have developed the habit of de-motivating
yourself. Can you live with the outcome of these choices?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 18.0pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 18.0pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">However, if you develop the habits of production, editing, and
prioritizing – you have chosen to motivate yourself. On a day to day
basis, you will have your hands dirty with the work of writing. You may
feel temporary disappointments and setbacks, but overall you will remain
motivated to continue.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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***</div>
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<b><i>Liz Reilly is a tutor and adjunct at Passaic County Community College. She has over 5 years’ experience in blogging, writing, teaching, and tutoring a wide variety of people.</i></b></div>
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LKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00927627090984083859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7491488448902983040.post-82464782874036319142015-01-26T10:57:00.001-05:002015-01-26T10:57:39.524-05:00Wordplay I: Verb! That’s What’s Happening!<div style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); border: 0px; color: #36312d; font-family: Enriqueta, georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 2.4rem; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Ok, this is adorable, and very useful. Our generation and its younger cohorts may not be familiar with Schoolhouse Rock, but we all should be. In the 70s-early 80s ABC ran a show called “Schoolhouse Rock” between cartoons on Saturday mornings. These were cute animated shorts with really catchy music that demonstrated grammar, science, American history, and civics. This one here is all about verbs, the action words of the English language. I’ll put this first to refresh everyone on the usefulness of verbs, and a reminder to have fun:</div>
<span class="embed-youtube" style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); border: 0px; color: #36312d; display: block; font-family: Enriqueta, georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center; vertical-align: baseline;"><iframe allowfullscreen="true" class="youtube-player" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WOiI7mlUZV0?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent" style="border-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 2.4rem; max-width: 100%; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" type="text/html" width="420"></iframe></span><br />
<div style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); border: 0px; color: #36312d; font-family: Enriqueta, georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 2.4rem; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); border: 0px; color: #36312d; font-family: Enriqueta, georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 2.4rem; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
OK, while you’re still singing “verb! that’s what’s happening!”, I want to ask you a question you may not get that much. How interesting is your resume to read? I’m not talking about the fascinating jobs you’ve had, but instead the style. Are you using powerful, direct language?</div>
<div style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); border: 0px; color: #36312d; font-family: Enriqueta, georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 2.4rem; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
It’s true that <strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">your resume will be read very quickly</strong>. You still have to carefully write and revise this document, but it may only have a few seconds under a recruiter’s eyes. <strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> How can you sell yourself that fast</strong>, especially when the sum total of your experience and abilities are reduced to a resume and letter?</div>
<div style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); border: 0px; color: #36312d; font-family: Enriqueta, georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 2.4rem; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Verbs! Use your action words!</div>
<div style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); border: 0px; color: #36312d; font-family: Enriqueta, georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 2.4rem; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
However, as useful as these words are, <strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">there is no magic formula</strong>. There is no one combination of really popular verbs that will guarantee you an interview. <strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">This is something that requires constant practice and refining</strong>. So please avoid cliches: we all know the jokes about synergizing your leveraging potential. Don’t do that. Use your verbs to connote action, but make sure you make sense! Above all, be concrete, be objective, and be succinct.</div>
<ul style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); border: 0px; color: #36312d; font-family: Enriqueta, georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 2.4rem; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 3.6rem; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Be concrete</strong></li>
</ul>
<div style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); border: 0px; color: #36312d; font-family: Enriqueta, georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 2.4rem; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Look at your last job. <strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Did you do anything? Say it</strong>. You <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">developed</em> lesson plans, you<i> tested</i> products with focus groups, you <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">compiled</em> reports, you <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">coded</em> software for XYZ. The fact that you did things is important, but so is how you say it.<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> Putting the action words first saves time, and gives the recruiter a better idea of your abilities.</strong></div>
<div style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); border: 0px; color: #36312d; font-family: Enriqueta, georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 2.4rem; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Look at the job posting. What verbs are they using? Use those in your resume</strong>. If they are looking for a lot of community outreach, choose verbs that highlight your people skills and communication. <a href="http://crmpubs.com/CGsFinal/Rutgers_CIPG13-14_Online/Rutgers_CIPG13-14_Online.pdf" sl-processed="1" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.2s ease-in; border: 0px; color: #e94f1d; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in; vertical-align: baseline;">Page 14 in this wonderful booklet from Rutgers University Career Services</a> has a list of verbs in case you’re stuck.</div>
<ul style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); border: 0px; color: #36312d; font-family: Enriqueta, georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 2.4rem; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 3.6rem; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Be succinct</strong></li>
</ul>
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No one, especially a busy hiring team or manager, wants to read what texts I assigned to my students in 2012, and why I chose those essays, and what writing behaviors I was trying to make them practice, and how the weather was, and what color sweater I was wearing and…and…and…</div>
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See what I mean? You don’t even want to read that and you’re here on this blog by choice! Wouldn’t you rather read that I:</div>
<blockquote style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); border-left-color: rgb(233, 79, 29); border-left-style: solid; border-width: 0px 0px 0px 5px; color: #8c8885; font-family: Enriqueta, georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; line-height: 24px; margin: 4.8rem 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 2.4rem; vertical-align: baseline;">
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Developed</strong> unique lesson plans for first year students,<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> focusing</strong> on structure and grammar.</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); border: 0px; color: #36312d; font-family: Enriqueta, georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 2.4rem; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Boom. Done. The fictional manager gets the idea that I can be creative and practical, and work with a higher goal in mind (developing students). I’ve bolded those words only for you here – don’t do that on your resume.</div>
<ul style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); border: 0px; color: #36312d; font-family: Enriqueta, georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 2.4rem; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 3.6rem; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Be objective</strong></li>
</ul>
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You are fabulous, worthwhile, and an awesome person, and I’m sure you’ll make a great employee. You are knowledgeable, capable, dynamic, and generally helpful. But there’s no room for that in your resume. <strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">You have to trust that you experience and your skill set will speak for you</strong>. That can be scary, but you have to do it.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); border: 0px; color: #36312d; font-family: Enriqueta, georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 2.4rem; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Your new potential boss doesn’t need to read about how loved you were at your previous job, or how much you enjoyed it. Tell them what you did, how you did it, and make sure they know how you can do it for them, too. <strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> It’s all about what you can bring</strong> to the new position, not you personally.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
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<b><i>Liz Reilly is a tutor and adjunct at Passaic County Community College. She has over 5 years’ experience in blogging, writing, teaching, and tutoring a wide variety of people.</i></b></div>
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LKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00927627090984083859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7491488448902983040.post-69746131150454192112015-01-14T13:06:00.000-05:002015-01-14T13:06:14.223-05:00Rules for Writing<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: 'Open Sans', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 24px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
When people hear I write, they approach me as if I’m in possession of some mystical knowledge. How can I find the time to have a thought, write it down, and revise it? Surely I am gaming the system somehow! Surely I have a charmed life, with plenty of time to read hardcover books, look out the window, and attend parties full of well-heeled people quoting western canon classics.</div>
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Joke’s on them – I don’t like leaving my house!</div>
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The reality of this is that there is no magic spell for writing productivity. It does not exist. Stop looking for it. The only way to learn to be a good (and productive) writer is to actually write. Writing is work, it is messy, it is frustrating, and it only sometimes results in useful material. It is less sorcery than it is mining: you dig and dig through piles of crap, make a big mess, and spend ages melting down raw material and chopping off slag before something remotely presentable emerges.</div>
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No one likes to hear that. It’s not the romantic starving-in-a-garret image we still have of writing. And it’s not the slick-millenial-with-a-mac image of writing we have now sold ourselves.</div>
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<a href="https://thethinking30something.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/the-internet-the-it-crowd-27191791-500-230.gif" sl-processed="1" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #bd5532; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black;"><img alt="The-Internet-the-it-crowd-27191791-500-230" class=" size-medium wp-image-165 aligncenter" height="138" src="https://thethinking30something.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/the-internet-the-it-crowd-27191791-500-230.gif?w=300&h=138" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 12px auto; max-width: 100%;" width="300" /></span></a></div>
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Nonetheless, most people turn to Google for advice. I did it, too. Turns out the internet is so full of tips for writing and productivity that a basic google search returned over 15 million hits!</div>
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There is no need to slog through list after list, dodging clickbait right and left. I have a few basic rules about writing that I’ve picked up over the years. These actually work. Hands down. They work completely and totally until they don’t and you have to try some new ones, because writing as I said before is not a magic spell. <em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(Ed. note, that is a run-on for comedic effect, please don’t do that, my boss is reading this!)</em></div>
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Well you just can’t, Minerva.</div>
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<li style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Actually Write:</strong> Oh yeah, about this one. <strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">You have to produce to be productive</strong>. You have to write to be considered a writer. You can’t just think of it, or visualize it, or hide it away. Nor do you have to win a Pulitzer. Just produce writing. This is why I recommend blogging for novice writers – at the very least, it gets writing out of the notebook and the desk drawer. If you work it properly (reading and commenting on others’ blogs) you may even get feedback. If nothing else, it’s a great way to maintain a corpus of work, and it’s very easy to go back and edit. The nervous writer can see their words formatted and “looking pretty”, which does help build confidence. This, however, is not enough, as you must also…</li>
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<li style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Give yourself the gift of the draft: </strong>No one is ever going to produce a perfect first draft, or second, or seventh. This takes time. Instead of imagining someone judging you, and being horrified if you’ve left a preposition dangling (which I surely have) – remember that<strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> every single piece of writing is a work in progress.</strong> Get it out first, then polish it. <strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">You will never spit out the Mona Lisa.</strong> No one ever has.</li>
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<li style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Revise, edit, proofread – know the difference:</strong> This is something I wish we still had time to teach in elementary and high school.</li>
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<strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Revision</strong> is looking at a finished draft, and asking radical questions about the ordering of points, the types of details used, etc. <strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">When you revise you look to make large-scale changes to the work</strong> to better the work, not coddle to <em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">your image</em> of what the work should have been in a perfect world, if you were just a perfect person. At this point, the draft is still hot lava – it can take many forms, or destroy the landscape you thought you built for it – but it always leaves a new one behind.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Editing</strong> is when you <strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">dig into the paragraphs themselves</strong>, ensuring that you have as many words as you need to make your point (or striking unnecessary clutter). If you have arguments in your pieces, you will edit them to ensure they are logically presented, and are in order. This is what you do when you’ve revised to your satisfaction, but are not yet addressing minor errors. The lava is starting to cool at this point, but you can’t quite inhabit this new land.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Proofreading</strong> is when you check for spelling, grammar, and formatting mistakes. This is the part most people confuse with editing. It’s an old fashioned term, from back when people would, when writing a book, print out a copy just to check the spelling with a blue pencil. You were literally reading a “proof” of the work, catching any last minute minor issues. The lava has long cooled at this point, and there is soil, plants, and animals on your new draft/landmass, and you are just sort of pruning your garden at this stage.</div>
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<li style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Read it aloud or </strong><strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">backwards: It is very important to divorce yourself emotionally from your work.</strong> If you want to be a writer, you have to be willing to eliminate things you thought you needed, details you may have treasured, or turn whole paragraphs inside out – you have to be willing to tear your work apart. This is because writing is meant to be read by others.</li>
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<strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Your artistic vision is ultimately in service to your readers, so you have to look at the work from their angle</strong>. When we write something, a short essay for instance, we usually have a different image in our minds of what’s on the page. The reader may not have you there to over over them and explain “what this really means is….” – your words have to stand for you. Reading aloud is the first step to making your writing an object separate from you. It’s ok to love your writing, but you must be willing to give it what it needs. Reading your work backwards, sentence by sentence, us another good way to do this – it’s also a handy way to proofread.</div>
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<li style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Make writing plans: </strong>If you want to actually be a writer, it helps to think of it like a small business. When you grow a business, you set goals, or milestones for yourself. You achieve one small thing after another, in service to a larger goal. So what’s your goal? What’s your endgame? What do you want to do with this writing? How are you going to get there? Google calendar is a great way to set dates do do things by – and you can even connect it to your mobile to ring an alarm bell to remind you to write, revise, etc.</li>
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NB: When hen you make plans, make sure they are plans you can control. “Being published” is a fine goal, but that itself you can’t necessarily make happen. “Improving my grammar”, or “Blogging weekly”, or (my personal one) “responding to more blogs to build relationships with other writers” – these you can control!</div>
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So there we are! These may or may not work for you, and you may need to use them in conjunction with other tips, but as long as you’re writing, you’re getting there!<br />
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<b style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; line-height: normal;"><i>Liz Reilly is a tutor and adjunct at Passaic County Community College. She has over 5 years’ experience in blogging, writing, teaching, and tutoring a wide variety of people.</i></b></div>
LKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00927627090984083859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7491488448902983040.post-12934438648190054172014-12-11T15:54:00.006-05:002014-12-11T16:00:21.653-05:00Talking Words vs. Writing Words<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">“Well, as we can see….”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><div style="text-align: right;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">“One thing leads to another and…..”</span></div>
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</span><span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><div style="text-align: right;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">“Anyway, the
point is…..”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">“It’s like, you know….”</span></div>
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<b id="yui_3_16_0_1_1418321717722_88237" style="background-color: white; text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Segoe UI', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px;"><b id="yui_3_16_0_1_1418321717722_88237"><span style="font-size: 12.7272720336914px;">What’s a talking word?</span></b></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Segoe UI', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Segoe UI', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px; text-align: start;"></span><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Segoe UI', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px; text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: 12.7272720336914px;">In the course of my tutoring, I often find that I have to impress on students the importance of knowing how to write in an academic register. This means words, phrases, and constructions that they use in their everyday language won’t work in an academic paper. Many of the students I see will often use informal words and phrases in their papers (from the dreaded “like” to the grating “you know”). These are “talking words” and I advise students to avoid them.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 12.7272720336914px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 12.7272720336914px;">Why is this a problem in writing? What changes? Why should we not encourage natural writing, a more conversational rhetoric? If students are more comfortable writing, they may derive more pleasure from it and, oh, I don’t know, do itoutside of the last-minute rush a day before an assignment is due.</span></div>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Segoe UI', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px; text-align: start;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Segoe UI', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px; text-align: start;">
</span>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Segoe UI', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><br /></span></div>
<b style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Segoe UI', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px; text-align: start;"></b><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Segoe UI', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px; text-align: start;"><b style="font-size: 12.7272720336914px;">“It’s like, you know….”</b></b></div>
<b style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Segoe UI', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px; text-align: start;">
</b>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Segoe UI', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Segoe UI', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px; text-align: start;"></span><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Segoe UI', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px; text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: 12.7272720336914px;">“Talking words” are named such because we say them all the time in speech. There, in face to face conversations, we can overlook many “sins”. We have the luxuries of intonation, gesture, and posture to convey our meaning. This is where meaning started, for that matter. We spoke before we wrote, and when we first spoke, we spoke to each other. So there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the “talking” word or phrase, provided it stays in its proper environment.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 12.7272720336914px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 12.7272720336914px;">The problem sets in when we change media. In a paper, those coy or instinctual usages are left without valuable context. They literally clog up the sentence. A student has to know what they are saying and how to do that in the most efficient manner possible. When a student writes a paper, they not only have page limits to observe, they also have to take into account the fact that there are multiple students and (usually) only one professor. While a student has to concern themselves with a single audience, the professor must divide their attention between multiple students, each with developed essays.</span></div>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Segoe UI', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px; text-align: start;"></span><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 12.7272720336914px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 12.7272720336914px;">This means multiple voices competing for attention. Efficiency and formality are they students’ best bets to making sure their information comes across. Having “clogged”, clumsy sentences means the professor or other instructor cannot “read” you. We literally do not know what you are saying if you do not make your info a priority.</span></div>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Segoe UI', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px; text-align: start;"></span><br />
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</span>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Segoe UI', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><br /></span></div>
<b style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Segoe UI', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px; text-align: start;"></b><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Segoe UI', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px; text-align: start;"><b style="font-size: 12.7272720336914px;">How to avoid this</b></b></div>
<b style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Segoe UI', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px; text-align: start;">
</b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Segoe UI', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Segoe UI', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px; text-align: start;"></span><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Segoe UI', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px; text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: 12.7272720336914px;">The bare-bones method is simply telling a student. When I see words and phrases that are informal and speech-like, I cross them out, and immediately explain to the student why this is unworkable styling. But I am a professional, so I have the advantages of knowledge and experience.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 12.7272720336914px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 12.7272720336914px;">For a student to learn to recognize these, I would suggest reading professional prose. Take individual sentences and analyze them. What is the point of the sample sentence? What is the main idea? Notice how fast this professional writer communicated what they needed to communicate. See how many synonyms and alternate phrases are being used. The only surefire way to learn style is to read widely and build up awareness of how language moves and operates in its written form.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 12.7272720336914px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 12.7272720336914px;"><a href="http://thethinking30something.wordpress.com/2014/11/03/talking-words-vs-writing-words/" target="_blank">This article originally appeared on Liz's blog.</a></span></div>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Segoe UI', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px; text-align: start;"></span><br />
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<b><i>Liz Reilly is a tutor and adjunct at Passaic County Community College. She has over 5 years’ experience in blogging, writing, teaching, and tutoring a wide variety of people.</i></b></div>
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LKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00927627090984083859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7491488448902983040.post-38823567053151024462014-10-30T12:02:00.001-04:002014-12-11T15:56:55.420-05:00Why Fight the Phone? Using tech to compliment writing instruction<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">This is the soundtrack for our
classrooms: *bzzzbzz* *bzzbzzz*. The rhythms of instruction are now
delineated by the tiny mechanisms in student pockets. LED lights and
miniature vibrating motors alert us to the passage of time, irrespective of the
actual pace of learning. We are all familiar with the irritation of
competing with phones. We all have policies governing their use, some
more strict than others. We are all aware that these machines aren’t
going away, nor is their effect going to be lessened. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11.5pt;"> I am going to propose that
we lay down our arms. Stop fighting the cell phone. Learn to
convert cell phone use into a teachable moment. By teachable moment I
mean use psychology and outright trick your students. I believe in this
wholeheartedly.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">Below are “Reilly’s Rules for
phones in class”. Perhaps some of these can be helpful to you in managing
this new reality we all share. We don’t have to like students’ habits,
but we have to work with them in some fashion.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">Tech policies: State, repeat, and
follow through</span></b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">First things first, you have to
decide your plan of attack. What can you see yourself putting up with on
the daily? Are you really as technophobic or technophilic as you
think? Whatever boundaries you pick, you are committed to for the rest of
the semester. How much can you put up with for 14 weeks? The
obvious exception to this are students using assistive technologies.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">Once you decide on your
boundaries for non-assistive tech, outline them in plain language on your
syllabus. Then revise again for clarity and small words. Students
tend to love technology, so you don’t want to end up splitting hairs with
them. Be clear, be direct, and make them meet your expectations. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">Make techies look up pertinent
information.</span></b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">If it’s going to be in the classroom,
you pay as well use it. My personal policy is to ask students with phones
to look up info in-class and report. If there’s a word, concept, or
process that is not common knowledge, but can easily be found with a quick
google or wiki check, make them do it. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">Use tech metaphors when possible,
or the tech itself.</span></b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">Meet them where they’re
interested. Know how various popular technologies and apps
function. And use that knowledge in your storehouse to make metaphors
students will understand. If students don’t quite understand the point of
including outside resources in their essays, present the quote or paraphrase as
a form of link. The citation is there to support their main work, and
present a “link” of sorts to a larger body of work.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">Learn to use a variety of
platforms and apps. </span></b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">This is not just professional
development for you, but also builds your word-hoard to reach out to
students. But be careful, and consider privacy. If you’re going to, for
instance, build a social media page or account for your class, be sure to model
the behavior you want your students to have, and use it to illustrate
information related to the lesson. However, I will caution you against
making social media <b>essential</b> to your curriculum, unless you are ready
and willing to walk your students through making “professional” accounts. <b><i> Do
not ever demand your students use their private profiles for your class.</i>
</b></span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">Why fight it?</span></b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">My personal policy is “don’t
fight them when you can make them work with you”. Personally, I can live
with technology, as long as it is employed usefully. My policy is phones,
laptops, and tablets are allowable, but I reserve the right to “get nosy” and
check out what the students are doing. I make it a bit of a joke, but I
follow through. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">I move around a lot during class,
around the room and up and down the aisles. I frequently make students
group or circle so there’s not much opportunity to hunker down behind a screen.
This approach requires a delicate touch - I don’t want to appear aggressive or
violate a student’s personal space. But I find that after one or two
check-ins, I don’t need to do this much. Students will start to
self-police, and the bulk of them will understand that they must engage. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">Build the lesson assuming that
someone’s going to have a phone or computer in hand - don't give them the
opportunity to hide. They’ll have to look up from that screen
eventually. Emphasize that this is what they’ll be doing in their
careers, working this simultaneous screen/face presence. They may as well
know how to do it smartly. And you may as well have one less aggravation
in your classroom!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;">
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<b><i><span style="background: white; font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Liz Reilly is a tutor and adjunct at Passaic County Community College. She has over 5 years’ experience in blogging, writing, teaching, and tutoring a wide variety of people.</span></i></b><b><i><span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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LKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00927627090984083859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7491488448902983040.post-67232756630932489142014-10-06T11:06:00.003-04:002014-12-11T15:56:47.734-05:00How to have ideas <div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">How many times have you sat
down for a session with a student, and had this exchange:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Student:
“My professor said write about XYZ.”</span></i><span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">You:
“Ok, so what’s your thesis on XYZ? What is your opinion? What
position will you take?”</span></i><span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Student:
“I don’t know!”</span></i><span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Consider this from the
student’s perspective: They have been asked to produce a substantial body of
writing for which they will be graded but they may not know anything about the
subject. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">You may not like it either
but as a professional, you have the advantage of experience and practice. You
know how to think on your feet. The students are not there yet.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Our task is to guide them
to this point. How can we get them to the place where they are able
to generate ideas and positions on given topics? How can we instill
critical-thinking behaviors necessary for academic success? How can
we impart a cogent form for their ideas without dictating content? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">This is the advantage of
our education and experience as professionals: we know how to quickly form an
educated opinion on a topic and impart it with clarity. But <i>how </i>do
we do that? It is important to know our process so we can break it
down and model it for our students.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">We know how to read and
listen. We know how to not only assimilate information but to sieve
it for useful artifacts. We know to discard unnecessary words, how
to identify and analyze key concepts. And we do this all at a speed
mystifying to students. This is why we view our assignments as
simple - we can throw ideas out a mile a minute compared to students.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">In order to show our
students how to have ideas that they can later develop, we have to think
ourselves back to their place. We have to recall what it’s like to
not be able to draw on our well-furnished minds and generate writing on just
about anything.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">This is the essence of
teaching writing, and it is not easy. We’re moving upstream against
cultural differences, systemic disadvantages, and the natural shyness of many
students when we ask them to expand on their ideas about a text in the
requisite five paragraphs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">I’ve tried to boil this
process down to a shortlist of habits that encourage idea generation. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">I have asked my own
students to develop these habits and I also ask myself to do the same when I
stall on writing. Perhaps some of this may be helpful to you as well, in your
classrooms and beyond:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">I often see students that
are stuck on brainstorming, but do not know item one about their topic. I
have learned to quiz them (“what is the income tax?” “what was the
Underground Railroad?” “do you know what hashtags are?”) Often
students simply don’t know certain facts which means I must “pull over” and
show them how to find reliable information to address that knowledge gap.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Sometimes, however,
students are disinterested in the topic and want me to tell them what to
write. This is impossible and frustrates both of us. This
is the time to try to gain their interest, and help them learn some facts about
the topic. Without basis of facts to work from, no one can generate
a cogent opinion and discuss it in a scholarly fashion. I tell them
that they don’t have to agree with the topic, but they have to understand it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">While you cannot force
curiosity onto students, it is possible to encourage it:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: -17.95pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">●</span><span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"> <b>Demonstrate
your own passion</b> (real or staged!) about readings. Find
something compelling and show them why you find this element interesting. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">●</span><span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"> <b>Ask
them pointed questions, and encourage them to do the same</b>. Few
are the students that respond well to open ended questions about their
thoughts. And questions about their opinions may elicit a flood of
words, but little thought. Putting the text under a microscope, and
having them examine specific characters and situations, and try to imagine
themselves in them can be very helpful. “What would you do it you
were in Hamlet’s shoes? Why?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: -17.95pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">●</span><span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"> <b>Ask
them to relate information to their own lives</b>. My example of the
hashtag earlier was real - this student disliked hashtags, but was unclear on
their use. They were confusing various arguments about digital communication
and had formed a position they could not defend in an essay. I
explained hashtags, but also asked them to tell me how they saw hashtags used
in daily life, and guess why. The student still disliked hashtags,
but they were now able to discuss this opposition intelligently and with a
thesis.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Summing
up</span></b><span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">There are many, many
different ways to pique student interest. But the secret is to get
them to start working with their initial rough ideas as if they are tools -
which they are. It takes the concerted effort of many people, but
seeing that light bulb go off is incredibly rewarding to both student and
instructor. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdGVTfLPgiVJ7yZkidMdIX_zPnqFFVbUZcRqvw9aaujzTgYaho2OnTc9hYnfaPHHp9TnfrAZaHpt0Rp5l41KBnMTOQOyXLYXBZeO2doffxWQzzZDqmknsq_j1eG4WQs5CDF0U8tP0bTg/s1600/liz.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdGVTfLPgiVJ7yZkidMdIX_zPnqFFVbUZcRqvw9aaujzTgYaho2OnTc9hYnfaPHHp9TnfrAZaHpt0Rp5l41KBnMTOQOyXLYXBZeO2doffxWQzzZDqmknsq_j1eG4WQs5CDF0U8tP0bTg/s1600/liz.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br /></span></div>
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<b><i><span style="background: white; font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Liz Reilly is
a tutor and adjunct at Passaic County Community College.
She has over 5 years’ experience in blogging, writing, teaching, and
tutoring a wide variety of people.</span></i></b><b><i><span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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LKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00927627090984083859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7491488448902983040.post-27720397411296065532014-06-03T11:26:00.003-04:002014-06-03T11:26:43.635-04:00Shifting Boundaries between English as a Second Language (ESL)<div class="DestructionManuscript" style="text-indent: 0in;">
Many scholars have
written about the uncertain and shifting boundaries between English as a Second
Language (ESL) programs and composition programs at colleges. When they first
began to proliferate in the United States during the mid-twentieth Century, ESL
programs and main-stream composition programs either viewed their missions of
teaching language and teaching writing as respective, separate and apart, or at
least perceived the necessity for a divided house in differences of
methodology. Since then, perspectives on this relationship have evolved, but
they have evolved in more than one direction. Most of the contention seems to
pivot on the student’s transition from one program to another, the effects this
transition has on the student, and the way that either ESL or college writing
programs respond to those effects.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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At one of end the
spectrum is a camp inhabited by many practitioners, albeit few contemporary
theorists, who view the mastering of academic writing for the English Language
Learner (ELL) as a hierarchical process beginning with internalization of
granular structures and terminating with native-like composition practices.
This camp tends to hold a rather specific idea of what constitutes native-like
usage, considers errors to be evidence of insufficient mastery, and equates
errors of language use with errors in writing practice. Within this paradigm,
it is the purpose of an ESL program to prepare ELLs to operate within
composition programs in a fashion indistinguishable from Native English Speakers
(NESs), and then, in turn, it is the mission of the composition program to
instruct and assess ELLs and NESs without differentiation. Here, the transition
from one program to the next is a gateway, one which closes once the student
has traversed it.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Not very many of the
people who hold to the view outlined above are bilingual. Or if they are
bilingual, they have never faced the challenge of using their second language
for rigorous academic or professional purposes. And their first language is
almost invariably English. My first language is English, but I learned German
in college, took classes at a University in Germany, and worked there for three
years of my life. Germans complimented me all the time on how good my German
was, which I noticed was pretty much what they said to anyone who was learning
it as a second language. No one ever said I never made mistakes. No one ever
expected me not to. No one ever corrected my grammar unless I said something
evidently different from what I meant. I wrote papers for my college classes. I
got Bs on them. My professors pointed out that the German in my papers was far
from perfect, but their feedback made it clear that the Bs were for the content
of the papers, which was fair, because the content could have been better.
Perhaps I was fortunate in that case to be attending a university situated
directly on the German-Polish border, where roughly half of the students were
not German, possibly predisposing professors to be open-minded about language.
But that hardly seems like an extreme case in a world where most people are
bilingual.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s a simple fact. A
majority of the world population is bilingual or multilingual, and research has
shown that bilingual individuals are more prone to tolerate and accept
differences in the ways that others use language. They look for meaning, not
for errors. So maybe it’s just because I’m one of them, but my sympathies lie
with the camp at an extreme opposite to the one described at the beginning of
this post, whereby I contend that language instruction and writing instruction
both need to change in ways that respect and leverage pluralistic attitudes
towards language and communicative approaches towards writing, changes which
will prepare not only ELLs but all students to live and write in the world
which is actually coming to pass, and prepare them to make it better in the
process. There lost of people who say it better than I could, but <a href="https://secure.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Books/Sample/39660Preface_Intro_x.pdf">one
of the strongest arguments comes from Jay Jordan</a>. The way we look at it,
the transition from ESL to college composition and beyond isn't a gateway, it’s
a shift in orientation where the student begins accumulating new competencies
for communication, and where the learning of language continues unabated.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I expect that the convictions
of many who follow this blog fall somewhere in between the two perspectives
outlined here. Whatever the case, it’s a conversation that ESL programs,
composition programs and writing centers need to have, and which they need to
have with each other, because the students who depend on us need us to be sure
what it is that we are teaching them. Please comment.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><b>Gunnar Jaeck</b> is a writer and teacher. He is a tutor at the PCCC
Writing Center, and has taught English and ESL in public high schools,
universities, community programs and libraries. He holds masters degrees in
TESOL and creative writing. His fiction has appeared recently in <a href="http://usedgravitrons.com/contributors/">Used Gravitrons</a> and <a href="http://infinityskitchen.com/issue-7/">Infinity's Kitchen</a>.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
LKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00927627090984083859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7491488448902983040.post-18447040519978477942014-05-02T15:50:00.002-04:002014-05-02T15:51:32.924-04:00The Writing Center, Social Networking & Communities of Practice<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">In <i>The Everyday
Writing Center</i>, the authors couch the everyday disruptions of writing
centers within the context of Etienne Wenger’s community of practice to suggest
“the ideas and concerns that may have once belonged to or originated with one
of us [become] collective matters or moments of possibility” (Geller, Eodice,
Condon, Carroll, and Boquet, 2). Such collective moments of
possibility can also extend outside the traditional, face-to-face borders of
the writing center via social media platforms like Twitter and blogs. While <i>The Everyday Writing Center </i>focuses
on traditional in-center interactions, this article extends the conversation
outside these borders and suggests that writing centers might utilize
social media like blogs and Twitter to create, build, or support writing communities
of practice. Centers can envision a new sense of the writing center: one that
engages in the practice of writing on a much larger scale </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">and emphasizes the</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> value of writing as a social practice.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"><i>The Writing Center, Social Networking and Communities of Practice</i></span></b></div>
<b><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Etienne Wenger describes a community of practice as a group of
people that share interests, crafts, or professions. Wenger mentions that
through the process of sharing information, those associated with the community
exchange ideas to develop their own understanding and knowledge about a
particular practice. Communities of practice can exist in many
spaces, whether online or onsite.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Wenger defines the structure of communities of practice as
adhering to the following three components: (1) domain, (2) community, and (3)
practice. The community of practice has a shared realm or domain of
interest. Within the domain, members of the community engage in what Wenger
calls “joint activities” and share information that “enable them to learn from
each other” (Wenger). Interaction amongst participants is responsible for
fostering community, not simply the dissemination of information. The community
of practice must be practitioners who develop a “shared repertoire of
resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring
problems—in short a shared practice” (Wenger).</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Communities of practice can also manifest in an online
environment, beyond geographical or physical locations. Wenger advocates that
online communities of practice might increase the “possibilities for community
and [call] for new kinds of communities based on shared practice” (Wenger). If
communities of practice can function in an online capacity, then social
networking might provide a platform for communities to exist, especially within
the writing disciplines. Social networking allows individuals with similar
interests and/or expertise to share knowledge and further practice within a
domain-centric community. Practitioners of writing thrive via social
networking, and connect via blogging and Twitter to discuss and promote writing
as a process, craft, theory, teaching, tutoring and more.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"><i>Blogging</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Blogs align with Wenger’s idea of a community of practice since
they support a domain (topic); generate a community of subscribers
communicating through comments, and share relevant content within a profession
or niche. The PCCC Writing Center blog publishes posts that discuss writing
best practices such as WAD, WAC, writing center theory, and writing instruction
best practices. For example, the blog post “Better Writers, Not Just Better
Writing–Even Online,” explored how writing centers supports online writers
through online tutoring, LibGuides, and portfolios (“Better Writers, Not Just Better
Writing–Even Online”). The blog post also asks its audience to comment on
how they were making decisions on writing center policy, procedure, and even
budget, as it applied to supporting students online.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The blog also promotes guest posts by outside practitioners
of writing and writing center theory such as writing center directors, tutors,
publishers and traditionally published and self-published writers across
genres. Typically, an email is distributed via the writing center listserve and
a call for submissions is tweeted through the Twitter stream. Rather than wait
for people to submit ideas for guest blog posts, reaching out to experts in the
field is also a way the blog produces guest spots. “An Interview with Muriel
Harris,” in which Harris talked about the Purdue OWL best practices, its
humble beginnings, and what's next for the online lab received 709 views within
one week of posting, and brought an unprecedented amount of traffic and
credibility to the blog (“From Local Center to Global OWL”).</span><b><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">In addition to offering
tutoring tips within the walls of the center, the blog allows the Writing
Center to create content relevant to writers across the spectrums. In February
2013, the PCCC Writing Center partnered with Claudia Serea, a
Romanian-born poet, to develop the first annual National Writing in
Translation Month (“National Translation Month”). Serea edited a month-long
series about the craft of translation and included poetry translations
from Romanian, Arabic, Persian, Russian, and Bulgarian. National Translation
Month fostered communication with scholars beyond the college’s community, and
opened the conversation about writing to writers across genres. Traditionally, writing
in rhetoric and composition asks its audience to enter into a conversation.
Such conversation promotes
a community of practice in the sense that it allows social interaction between
writer and reader, playing on the traditionally social nature of the writing
process.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">The social nature of the
writing process allows for a community of practice to prosper via blogging. Kathleen
Kitao and Namie Saeki talk about the social nature of the writing process in
their article the “Process and Social Aspects of Writing: Theory and Classroom
Application.” Both Kitao and Saeki suggest that writing <span style="background: white;">emphasizes an “initiation-response-evaluation pattern
of discourse between teachers and students” (86). The process
approach to writing includes various stages of revision in an effort to create
meaning for an intended audience: the reader. The reader and writer are in a
dialogue where the writer expounds meaning and the reader translates and
internalizes meaning. Hence, writing is a social process (Kitao and Saeki 86).
Both parties are engaged in all three aspects of a community of practice: (1)
shared interest in process, (2) a community of writers involved in the process,
and (3) clear practice of the writing process. </span></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Blogs allow for that
same type of conversation only to a larger audience of practitioners within the
writing community thereby transforming ideas of traditional theory and
supporting the social nature of writing. Before the idea of blogs even existed,
Eric Crump observed that MUDs might transform “our thinking about
relationships, our connections with and affinity to others, and the influence
and persuasive power of online communities on how we think” or view traditional
theory (Crump 177). For example, in a recent guest blog post, <span style="background: white;">Diane O’Connell,
a veteran New York publishing professional who had a successful career at
Random House, wrote about crafting compelling characters when writing novels.
While this post might seem outside the realm of writing center related content,
it may generate student and community interest in writing as a craft and
creative endeavor as opposed to a simple academic requirement.</span></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Blogs also decentralize the writing center as
Melinda Baer suggested in her article “Using Weblogs in Your Writing Center.” I
agree with Baer that blogs transform the idea of physical space, allowing
students, faculty and tutors to participate in “writing centers’ discussions on
their own terms” (2). Blogs permit writing centers to make information
available and accessible at any time and in one concentrated space even after
office hour’s end. Baer adds that such availability and accessibility of
content eliminates “excuses for not participating” in writing center
discussions (2).</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Blogs promote the exchange of ideas, which is
reflected in its content and accessibility. The more writing centers
communicate to the larger community, the more meaningful the conversation
(about writing) becomes with writers across spectrums contributing to the conversation.
By varying blog content and creating a common space for discussion, writing
centers might show they are open to an exchange of knowledge not limited to
tutoring writing, but to the methodology and pedagogy of teaching writing, the
writer’s craft (creative and critical), and professional writing thus becoming
a part of an expanded community of practice.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><span style="background: white; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"><i>Final Thoughts</i><br /><br /><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<o:p>
</o:p></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Social
networking is riddled with writing centers looking to delve outside the
boundaries of the center and the classroom. Writing centers can take advantage
of social networking to build a writing community of practice, thereby
promoting their value, claiming their space in a global community, and
reinforcing writing as a social process. Muriel Harris wrote in her article
“Preparing to Sit at the Head Table: Maintaining Writing Center Viability in
the Twenty-First Century” that in order to maintain our viability “we have to
look beyond our campuses to see where the rest of the world is headed” (13).
While she wasn’t referring to social media, she does suggest that writing
centers look outside their boundaries to determine opportunities for
intellectual and physical expansion. Social media allows writing centers to contribute
to center scholarship and discussion beyond physical space as well as connect
to a wider periphery, conceptualizing Wenger’s communities of practice and the
social and interactive nature of writing. Writing is the basis of communication
and social media is its obvious extension, permitting centers to expand writing
as a discipline outside just academic concerns.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"><b><i>References<br /></i></b></span></div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: '', serif, '', serif; font-size: 10pt;">Baer, Melinda. “Using Weblogs in Your Writing Center.”<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>The Writing Lab Newsletter</i>. 31.2</span><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 15px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: '', serif, '', serif; font-size: 10pt;">(2006):1-4. Writing Lab Newsletter Archive. Web. 19 March 2009.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: '', serif, '', serif; font-size: 10pt;">
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: '', serif, '', serif; font-size: 10pt;">Crump, Eric. “At Home In the MUD: Writing Centers Learn to Wallow.”<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span> High</span><span class="apple-converted-space"><i><span style="font-family: '', serif, '', serif; font-size: 10pt;"> </span></i></span><span style="font-family: '', serif, '', serif; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic;">Wired: On the</span><span style="font-size: 15px;"> </span><i><span style="font-family: '', serif, '', serif; font-size: 10pt;">Design,
Use, and Theory of Educational MOOS.</span></i><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: '', serif, '', serif; font-size: 10pt;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: '', serif, '', serif; font-size: 10pt;">Eds. Cynthia Ann Haynes and Jan Rune Holmevik.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span style="font-family: '', serif, '', serif; font-size: 10pt;">177-190.<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white;"> </span></span>University
of Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Print.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: '', serif, '', serif; font-size: 10pt;">Harris, Muriel. “Preparing to Sit at the Head of the Table: Maintaining
Writing Center Viability</span><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 15px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: '', serif, '', serif; font-size: 10pt;">if the Twenty-First Century.”</span><span class="apple-converted-space" style="font-family: '', serif, '', serif; font-size: 10pt;"> </span><i style="font-family: '', serif, '', serif; font-size: 10pt;">The
Writing Center Journal<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: '', serif, '', serif; font-size: 10pt;">20.2.
(Spring/Summer 2000):13-21. Web. 15 Mar. 2013.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: '', serif, '', serif; font-size: 10pt;">Kitao, S.
Kathleen, and Namie Saeki. "Process And Social Aspects Of Writing: Theory
And</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><u1:p></u1:p>
</span><span style="font-family: '', serif, '', serif; font-size: 10pt;">Classroom Application." <i>Annual
Reports Of Studies 33.1</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>(1992):
86-102. <i>ERIC</i>. Web. 11 Mar. 2013.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<u1:p></u1:p>
<u1:p></u1:p>
<u1:p></u1:p>
<u1:p></u1:p>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Wenger, Etienne. “Communities of
Practice: A Brief Introduction.” <em>Communities of Practice</em>.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><u1:p></u1:p> </span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">N.p. June 2006.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>Web.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>11
Mar. 2013.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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LKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00927627090984083859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7491488448902983040.post-37901378171143167272014-03-24T11:52:00.000-04:002014-03-24T11:52:00.277-04:00Embedding #Writing Hashtags in Your Tweets<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The PCCC Writing Center does not use the blog exclusively to
promote writing center content. Twitter is incorporated to help expand our content
reach and facilitate conversation in a way to build a virtual social presence. One way that we promote content is by using hashtags or the "#" sign followed by a keyword such as "#writing." Hashtags "allow you to organize content and track discussion topics based on those keywords," as per <a href="http://mashable.com/2013/10/08/what-is-hashtag/" target="_blank">Mashable</a>. Hashtags also make you more discoverable and searchable, which is what helps tweeps find you (#VeryCool).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Let's have a look, shall we?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The use of hashtags has
helped promote our content by making it more searchable (discoverable). For
example, by using the hashtag #WriterWednesday (#WW) we’ve been able to connect
with and gain followers to expand our Twitter stream. For example, we’ve written tweets for this
hashtag such as: “Looking to follow some new tweeps? Check out
@[TwitterName].” </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Some additional hashtags
used in Tweets that help build an account are:</span><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">#FollowFriday, which was started to</span><b style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </b><strong style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 115%;">recommend
favorite tweeps to followers</span></strong><strong style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 115%;">; </span></strong><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">#amwriting</span><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">; </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">#amediting</span><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">; </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">#writetips</span><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">; </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">#writertips</span><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">; </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">#writing</span><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">; and </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">#grammartip.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The PCCC Writing Center uses hashtags either at the end or
beginning of the tweet. For example: “Experience/practice the writing
assignment first before distributing it to students. Any revisions needed?
#TeachingTips #justsayin.” Or, incorporate the hashtag in with the tweet: “Each
language has its own confusing rules, like word order; sentence organization,
missing (or extra) parts of speech. #L2 fact.”
In addition, <span style="background: white; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">the
center’s Twitter account utilizes </span>hashtags like #MondayBlogs or #MentionMonday to promote the PCCC Writing
Center blog posts every Monday, which allows us to build our Twitter account
through the addition of new followers, and help disseminate our content to new
or existing followers.</span></div>
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<span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Remember,
social media is not for everyone, and it takes time and practice. However, you
might find it inspirational, or somewhat enlightening to branch out beyond your
writing center walls and share content over various writing landscapes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>How does your center use hashtags to promote content? </b></span></div>
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LKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00927627090984083859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7491488448902983040.post-5802828473157126432014-03-07T13:31:00.002-05:002014-03-07T13:31:37.403-05:00Imitating Other Writers<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">After I’ve been reading something
from one of my favorite authors, I often find myself adopting their style of
writing for a little while. I form my words differently and start “thinking” in
a peculiar way. This always gets me inspired to start writing again. Next time
you are feeling uninspired, pick up a book from a writer you like and immerse
yourself in their language.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">See if you
can adopt their style to get yourself started. You can even read a small
excerpt from a book and then try to continue it in the same voice.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Don’t worry about copying another
author too closely. You will find that as you write, you will naturally create
a hybrid style, influenced by all the writer’s you read, and all of your
experiences, thoughts, and emotions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
Another great exercise is to take a passage from someone else’s writing and try
to revise it and make it your own. The trick is not to change the content of
the writing, but the style and voice of the writer. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Try it now with this short passage
from author Simon Van Booy: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
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<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">When small drops began to fall and
darken the world in penny-shaped circles, no one around him scurried for cover.
For lonely people, rain is a chance to be touched.</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
LKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00927627090984083859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7491488448902983040.post-25309299713437900852014-02-10T10:32:00.000-05:002014-02-10T10:32:00.863-05:00Creative Journal Writing<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">When the topic of journal writing comes up, I
usually meet two kinds of people: the kind that say “Journal writing is not for
me” and the kind that say, “I used to keep a journal but then it got too
difficult to write in it regularly.” Journal writing doesn’t have to be chore.
It is not something you have to do every day, or even every week. If you do
want to incorporate journal writing into your regular routine, try experimenting
with different forms of creative journaling. Give yourself a prompt or exercise
every day and let yourself have fun with it. Here are some ideas to get you
started:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><b>Day 1: </b>Make a list of all the things you did today. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><b>Day 2:</b> Flip open your dictionary, randomly select 10
words and then write a paragraph using all 10 of those words. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><b>Day 3:</b> In 100 words, describe what you see out your
window. (Sometimes it is nice to give yourself a word limit. Then you know you
won’t be spending hours on a journal entry.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><b>Day 4:</b> Cut out pictures from a magazine and paste
them to your journal. Make a collage of your favorite images. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><b>Day 5: </b>Do a word association. Begin with <i>Banana</i> and go from there. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><b>Day 6:</b> Draw an emoticon of how you are feeling, or
10 emoticons of your most common expressions. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><b>Day 7: </b>Create a cartoon character of yourself. Draw
him/her and give him/her exaggerated characteristics. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Explore other journal prompt ideas online and look
at other people’s blogs to get an idea of what they are writing about. Remember
that you can make your journal anything you want.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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LKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00927627090984083859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7491488448902983040.post-81143461182177539522014-02-04T16:10:00.003-05:002014-02-04T16:10:45.365-05:00How to Manage Writing Anxiety<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Everyone gets anxious about something. Most people
are anxious about things they either don’t have much experience in or have struggled
with in the past. Maybe you are out of practice with writing, or maybe you did
poorly in a previous English class. Even though writing is often graded and
evaluated using certain guidelines, writing in itself is a very individual
process. Writing is just another form of communicating with others, and
everyone does this in their own unique way.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Do you find it easy to express your thoughts
verbally? If so, see if you can transfer those verbal thoughts onto paper.
Consider getting a tape recorder and vocalizing your thoughts, then listening
to a recording and transcribing it. You might discover that writing is easier
than you thought. Even if you do not
consider yourself a strong conversationalist, think of some other areas of
strength for you. See if you can incorporate some of these strengths into your
writing. Are you good at coming up with ideas, organizing them, explaining them
in simple terms, writing concisely, summarizing, or researching? Do what you
are strongest in and get support in areas that you might struggle with. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Pushing through the anxiety and getting the job done
(whether it is writing a paper, taking an essay exam, or writing a college
application statement) will make you feel more accomplished, more confident,
and more capable. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
LKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00927627090984083859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7491488448902983040.post-66451332168842106282014-01-27T12:43:00.001-05:002014-01-27T12:43:10.615-05:00Things You Can Do to Improve the Flow & Organization of Your Essay<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /><i>Writing is the easy part. Revision is hard. But there are a few things you can do to help improve the flow and organization of your essay. Check out some writing tips below to help keep your momentum going.</i></div>
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Read it aloud to get a sense of the flow and coherence. Rewrite or omit
anything that sounds awkward or nonsensical.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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Make sure the first sentence of everybody paragraph sets up
for the entire paragraph. This topic sentence should be like a mini-thesis for
each paragraph.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Be wary of using too many transition words like first
of all, secondly, in addition, however, and to conclude.
See how your sentence sounds without a transition word first. Then, adjust
accordingly.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Instead of trying to rewrite a sentence that just isn't working,
start from scratch. Clarify what you want to say and then write a new
sentence without looking at the old one. You will be surprised how much easier
this is than trying to rework a difficult sentence.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Simplify. When in doubt, write what you want to say in as
simplest terms as possible. Imagine you are explaining a concept or subject to
someone who has not been exposed to it yet. Do not overcomplicate the language
and wording. This often leads to confusion.<o:p></o:p></div>
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LKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00927627090984083859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7491488448902983040.post-39900285172542854712014-01-13T13:35:00.003-05:002014-01-13T13:36:23.095-05:005 Quick Tips for Becoming a Better Writer<div class="MsoNormal">
Thank you for stopping by the blog! We've put together five quick tips to support your writing!<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-indent: -0.25in;">1.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-indent: -0.25in;">Read.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Read as much as you can. It can be
anything: fiction, non-fiction, magazine articles, newspapers, memoirs,
poems.... Don’t limit yourself. The more types of writing and styles you are
exposed to, the more versatile a writer you will become.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-indent: -0.25in;">2.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-indent: -0.25in;">Write.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Write essays and stories and
speeches. Write letters and emails and notes to your friends. Write without
censoring your words and without judgment. Write what comes into your head and
see where it takes you. Just the practice of expressing your voice and of
stringing together words will not only build your writing skills, but also your
ability to connect to exactly what you are thinking and feeling.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-indent: -0.25in;">3.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-indent: -0.25in;">Connect.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Connect with others who are trying
to improve their writing as well. Attend workshops on writing skills. Ask
questions. No one expects you to know everything there is to know about
writing. If you’re not exactly sure what semicolons are used for, ask someone
who might know (a professor, a writing tutor, a classmate, etc).</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-indent: -0.25in;">4.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-indent: -0.25in;">Go
online.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">There are plenty of writing
resources on the Internet that can help you with getting started, organization,
and correct grammar and word usage. For a general place to go for some
resources, try OWL at Purdue: </span><a href="http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/</span></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-indent: -0.25in;">5.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-indent: -0.25in;">Be
Authentic.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Remember that your writing is a
reflection of your thoughts and feelings. Don’t try to impress anyone but
yourself. Be honest in your writing and let your words speak for themselves. </span></div>
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<i>Jennifer has a Bachelor’s degree in Math <a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7491488448902983040" name="_GoBack"></a>Education from New York University and an MFA in Creative
Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University. She has taught high school math in
Bergen County for the past six years and has tutored all levels of math,
reading and writing. She believes that writing is a form of self-expression - a
way to communicate ideas, thoughts, and feelings that cannot be expressed in
any other way. When she is not working at the Writing Center, Jennifer writes
short experimental fiction and creates whimsical jewelry.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
LKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00927627090984083859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7491488448902983040.post-24333599173392151842013-09-17T14:11:00.000-04:002013-09-17T14:11:01.148-04:00Poet Julie L. Moore Talks Writing, Reading & Inspiration <div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEHKdzx3ow6uyadN3FX11Z0KNNOo78DR9-D0-pBsVClSvIoGNLDWjMqGcAEtlWhNWITr4JxV2Sx8Td51jLopXd72_3paCitDAaYmPbytP9BOenKcw3M3lDD-5D5YOvC2q1RSuL10yWzw/s1600/Julie+L.+Moore.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEHKdzx3ow6uyadN3FX11Z0KNNOo78DR9-D0-pBsVClSvIoGNLDWjMqGcAEtlWhNWITr4JxV2Sx8Td51jLopXd72_3paCitDAaYmPbytP9BOenKcw3M3lDD-5D5YOvC2q1RSuL10yWzw/s320/Julie+L.+Moore.jpg" width="320" /></a><i><span style="background: white; font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">I’d like to welcome Julie L. Moore to the blog this week, an
accomplished writer and poet. Moore is the author of </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Particular Scandals, published in The Poiema Poetry Series by Cascade
Books in 2013. Her other books include Slipping Out of Bloom (WordTech
Editions, 2010) and Election Day (Finishing Line Press, 2006).
A Best of the Net and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Moore has had
her poetry published in Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry
Journal, Atlanta Review, CALYX, Cimarron Review, The Missouri
Review Online, Nimrod, Poetry Daily, The Southern Review, Valparaiso
Poetry Review, and Verse Daily. </span></i></div>
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<b><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></i></b></div>
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<b><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">On
Writing</span></i></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">My
favorite part of writing is also the hardest part: Revision. Although I love
the moment of inspiration like everyone else does, revision is what allows me
endless opportunities to play with language, trying different words, exploiting
their connotations and denotations, finding just the right one to evoke the
mood and imagery and music the poem needs. Plus, that initial draft actually
terrifies me. What will I write on the next line? How do I keep the poem going?
That’s hard work—just as hard as revision—but in revision, the language chosen
has a chance. In first drafts, I know I’ll be changing so much later on, it’s
hard to commit to the idea by even writing it. I think this is why I sometimes
ignore poetry ideas and won’t write them down. My inner critic is too negative
and too bossy! Thankfully, my Muse silence her often enough so I can write.</span></div>
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<b><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">On
Inspiration</span></i></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">The
idea for my most recent book of poetry, </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">Particular
Scandals</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">, released in June of 2013, was inspired by my life experiences, to
be sure, as well as by many walks along my rural road in southwest Ohio. In
addition, a passage in Annie Dillard’s </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">Pilgrim
at Tinker Creek</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"> ended up serving as an epigraph for my book along with a
quotation from George Eliot’s </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">Middlemarch</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">
and Cormac McCarthy’s </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">The Road</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">. Because
I’ve endured much pain and many surgeries, as have some of my family members
and friends, I wanted to write about that endurance, something I see as the
balancing act between transcendence, which tends to downplay the particular,
physical world in which we all live, and despair, which is often characterized
by wallowing in the suffering. So I wanted to juxtapose the agonizing forms of
suffering many, including myself, have experienced with blessing, joy, and
wonder. Although not referenced in any way in the book, Jane Kenyon’s poem
“Happiness” was definitely in the back of my mind because Kenyon was so adept
at delivering such gorgeously wrought juxtapositions. I also wanted to explore
theological and metaphysical questions to see where they’d lead me. The book is
able to hold all this together, I think, because of the themes regarding
particular, stark scandals that lead to suffering and death and particular,
beautiful scandals that lead to wonder and worship. I wanted to explore the
paradox of those two kinds of scandals existing simultaneously in one place or
one person, too.</span></div>
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<b><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">On
Reading</span></i></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">I
enjoy reading all genres—memoirs, biographies, and other forms of nonfiction
such as Erik Larson’s </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">Devil in the White
City</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"> and Rebecca Skloot’s </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">The Immortal
Life of Henrietta Lacks</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">; novels; short stories; plays; essays and creative
nonfiction pieces; and of course, poetry. I just love to read! Some of my
favorite authors include Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Emily Dickinson, Gerard
Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, Lucille Clifton, and Denise Levertov. Of those
writers still living and working, I have been influenced by many poets,
including, but certainly not limited to, Maxine Kumin, Mary Oliver, Donald
Hall, Sharon Olds, Ted Kooser, Louise Glück, Rita Dove, Stephen Dunn, and
Claudia Emerson. It’s ridiculous how many books (and journals) sit by my bed. I
always seem to be reading several books at once. Right now, I’m reading Jeanne
Murray Walker’s memoir, </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">Geography of
Memory</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">, Geraldine Brooks’ novel </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">March,</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">
and books of poetry by Susanna Childress, Sally Rosen Kindred, Paula Bohince,
and Maurice Manning. And I recently finished Annie Dillard’s novel </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">The Maytrees</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"> as well as Willa Cather’s </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">My Ántonia</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">.</span></div>
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<b><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">On
What’s Next</span></i></b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">I keep writing poems, and that’s about all I
can say about my next book. Many of my recent poems are ekphrastic, as they
respond to art, literature, and myths, and this is something I really enjoy
writing. I’m also writing some persona poems—from the point of view of a stone
in a field or a magpie on a fence, for instance. And I like that direction,
too. I find myself trying to write myself—my first person point of view—out of
poems lately. I like what I’m seeing in terms of discoveries I’m making. But I
have no idea what the next book’s themes will be yet or what it’ll look like. I
don’t write with a book in mind; I just write as the poems come to me. Then,
after a few years, I look them all over and see if anything hangs together
thematically. I’d love to write creative nonfiction pieces. One day, I hope to
try my hand at that genre. I don’t see myself ever writing a novel, though,
because it just seems too unwieldy to attempt! </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><b><i>Check out Julie's book below: </i></b></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Particular-Scandals-Poems-Poiema-Poetry/dp/1620327880" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9Um_3txKzT3T0uKsahoYqejxOWJfreZafD48ohobxLuaGeCQYFWv135UqoD_OGLJUeJVZXtwX1Tdhb4Nlr7E3egdhW2c6Q3-htjaW1JW7ZK8plTBfEevCrg3Y7w4S5nTpYk3wEtvzAw/s320/Particular+Scandals+Book+Cover.jpg" width="212" /></a></div>
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LKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00927627090984083859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7491488448902983040.post-8543300523003092442013-07-03T12:00:00.003-04:002013-07-03T12:01:13.565-04:00Media & the Writing Process<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
most common use of media in the writing process is in prewriting.</span></b><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
In most situations where you might have students do a reading as “research” or
for background information before writing, you can use a media object. Media
can be a way to introduce other viewpoints on issues that are not addressed in
the textbook. Many teachers use media objects as a kind of electronic textbook
supplement to provide materials that are more current. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Probably the two most obvious changes in the use of video in
education over the past decade have been in the method of delivery and in
creating learning objects. The growth of online learning has initiated much of
this technology and pedagogy. Since WI courses will be offered both online and
face-to-face, it is important to develop these connections for students.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A classroom teacher might have once sacrificed a class
session to showing a 60-minute film—that is a less likely pedagogy today. At
one end of the delivery continuum, the instructor could ask students to watch
that film via a streaming media link outside of class. Obviously, this gives 60
minutes back to the instructor and allows discussion of the video to be the <i>starting</i> place for a class rather than
it being the remaining minutes after viewing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The problems that this approach might have – for example,
the students didn’t watch the film before class or that you were not able to
synchronously “guide” them through the video -
are the same ones teachers have always encountered in having students
read material outside of class, and the solutions are comparable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A more powerful pedagogical approach can be to select the
most relevant segments of a longer work that focus student attention on content
relevant to the course. Again, the analogy is to the use of excerpted readings
within a course.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
LKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00927627090984083859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7491488448902983040.post-78955351517532938622013-06-10T13:46:00.000-04:002013-06-10T13:46:44.690-04:00Connections Roundtable: Writing Center & Library Collaboration<div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 12px;">
The Writing Initiative was created with the goal to improve student writing across disciplines, and as a part of this initiative, the <a href="http://pccc.libguides.com/content.php?pid=107122&sid=1542871" target="_blank">Writing Connections</a> program was started. The Writing Connection involves collaborating with area schools to share the best practices in teaching writing across disciplines.</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 12px;">
In 2013, we've expanded our outreach to include 2 and 4-year colleges in NJ and NY to share best practices in Library and Academic Support collaboration.</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 12px;">
Our roundtable discussion with librarians, faculty and writing center staff will be held on Thursday, June 13, 2013 at Passaic County Community College, from 1:00 PM – 4:00 PM. </div>
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The topics we will focus on include:</div>
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1. creating sustainable partnerships between library and writing center programs</div>
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2. fostering faculty support and collaboration</div>
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3. improving information literacy skills across the curriculum</div>
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The goals of this meeting are to establish a connection among college libraries and writing/academic support programs that will continue into the future, share best practices and discuss challenges that we face in library and academic support collaboration.</div>
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The next post will share the findings of that meeting.</div>
LKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00927627090984083859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7491488448902983040.post-18771796271940824372013-06-01T11:04:00.000-04:002013-06-01T11:08:52.761-04:00Twitter in the Writing Center: Guest Post by Mike Shapiro, University of Wisconsin–Madison Writing Center<i>I'd like to welcome Mike Shapiro to the blog this week. Mike is a graduate student and the online coordinator of the University of Wisconsin–Madison Writing Center. Welcome Mike!</i><br />
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In a post earlier this month on the <a href="http://writing.wisc.edu/blog/?p=3510" target="_blank">UW–Madison WritingCenter’s blog</a>, I argue that writing
centers <br />
have a lot to gain by establishing a serious, sustained presence on Twitter.
At the heart of that argument is the observation that too many writing centers,
including ours, saw Twitter as just another public kiosk where they could post
announcements. Even though writing centers see all writing as conversation, we
have strangely avoided the opportunities social media make available for
entering into conversations with our students.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9znzZvC8kMYd1Txw-kZJHbrYgqdyO3k5GjnIbeTotdIHO9KFw5nl5FH_mnthh7aaY0MOfmV2qv8X2o8ScV2S6o7OMqinJups-UNrZPl6AZ75nH2fS2id9XjeqwRik4jbnw7Pr0CJesw/s1600/wisconsin.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9znzZvC8kMYd1Txw-kZJHbrYgqdyO3k5GjnIbeTotdIHO9KFw5nl5FH_mnthh7aaY0MOfmV2qv8X2o8ScV2S6o7OMqinJups-UNrZPl6AZ75nH2fS2id9XjeqwRik4jbnw7Pr0CJesw/s320/wisconsin.png" width="320" /></a>This observation is hardly unique. <a href="https://writinglabnewsletter.org/archives/v35/35.3-4.pdf" target="_blank">Jackie Grutsch McKinney identified this as a major failing of writing center Twitter feeds in 2010</a>,
and when <a href="http://uoflwritingcenter.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/writing-centers-and-twitter-how-we-use-this-weird-space-and-how-students-perceive-it/" target="_blank">Jennifer Marciniak followed up in 2012 she reached the same conclusion</a>.</div>
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Our solution has been to monitor what students at our
university are saying about their papers. Twitter makes this exceptionally easy
to do. To see what our students in Madison are saying about the papers they’re
writing, we can run a search for “<a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=paper%20OR%20essay%20near%3Amadison%2Cwi&src=typd" target="_blank">paper OR essay near:madison,wi.</a>"
Some of the other searches round up tweets that mention “madison” and essays,
all the tweets that link to our website materials, all the tweets about writing
centers, and so on.</div>
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As an aside, this powerful search is one reason Twitter is
likely to remain an important force in campus life even as Facebook’s
popularity plateaus.</div>
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Many of the results from this search are not relevant to our
writing center, of course. The search picks up high school students, for
example, and it finds many students who are complaining in unproductive
language about having to write at all. But many students are tweeting about
writing their essays, and when we find them we can easily respond with a note
of encouragement. </div>
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This direct contact with students shocks many of the people who
have heard me discuss our Twitter strategy, and it’s the part that shocked me
when I first heard about it from our university’s social media professionals.
After all, this is peering into our students’ lives and talking to them from an
institutional account. As writers who have grown up recognizing a clear divide
between our public personas and our private selves, many of us are uncomfortable
with the thought that an institution can interrupt a conversation between a
student and her friends.</div>
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But students who use Twitter do so knowing what they say is
public. Many students choose Twitter because of its no-nonsense privacy
controls. Almost anyone who has tried to change Facebook’s privacy settings has
encountered the “friends of friends” problem: it is easy to set your account so
that some people you thought couldn’t see your posts and comments in fact can.
Twitter’s privacy settings are, by contrast, foolproof: your posts are visible
by default to the entire world; by flipping one switch, the Twitter user can
ensure you’re visible only to the people you want. The Electronic Frontier
Foundation announced this month, in its annual survey of online privacy
protection, that Twitter is the only major social network that fights for its
users’ privacy in every arena (https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-2013).</div>
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Students who tweet about what they are writing are conscious
of the fact that their schools can see them, and have been regularly delighted
to hear from us. Here are a couple recent interactions we have had with
students: </div>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/uwwritingcenter/status/332594338691420160" target="_blank">Twitter 1</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/mattmoehr/status/331553124647055360" target="_blank">Twitter 2</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/CFlucus/status/332646013955346432" target="_blank">Twitter 3</a></li>
</ul>
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As these examples show, students who learn that our Writing
Center has a Twitter presence will begin to ask us questions about our
services, and to engage with us as part of their academic lives. As our
director,<a href="http://writing.wisc.edu/blog/?p=3035" target="_blank"> Brad Hughes</a>, has written elsewhere, writing centers occupy a
privileged place in the university that allows us to be flexible and responsive
to academic needs. By maintaining a
conversational Twitter presence that listens and responds to student interests,
writing centers keep an eye out for the next collaborative opportunity at the
same time they help prove that all writing is interactive.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a></div>
LKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00927627090984083859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7491488448902983040.post-11138006096466870772013-04-30T10:26:00.000-04:002013-04-30T10:26:11.399-04:00The Purdue OWL and Second Language Writers<br />
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<i>I’d like to welcome Joshua M. Paiz to the blog this week! </i><i>Paiz is </i><i>a second year doctoral
student in Second Language Studies at Purdue University. At Purdue, he serves
as the Coordinator of the Purdue Online Writing Lab and is an
instructor in the Introductory Composition at Purdue program. His research interests
include sociocognitive approaches to second language acquisition, program
administration, and graduate student professionalization/professional identity
construction. </i></div>
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The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) receives over
200,000,000 hits annually from all over the planet. Since 1994, the Purdue
OWL’s focus has been on helping writers, and we have attempted to address the
needs of second language (L2) writers through specially designed sections for
English as a Second Language (ESL) writers. However, our ESL resources, until
recently were a little sparse and focused on L2 writers in North American
higher and community educational contexts; this means that they have not been
keyed into the potentially unique needs of our international audience. <o:p></o:p></div>
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This creates, at least in the eyes of the Purdue OWL
leadership, the need to uncover whether or not we are meeting the needs of practitioners
outside of the North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia—the so-called
English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context. This desire to better serve our
global users has led to the OWL Abroad research project. This project launched in the summer of 2012,
and it is targeted specifically at teachers of writing, focused on uncovering usage
patterns, attitudes, and needs of OWL users from across the globe. In some EFL
contexts, online writing labs are some of the few readily available resources
for the teaching of writing. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The Purdue OWL staff deployed a two-part instrument—an
online survey and a follow-up email interview—to uncover these usage patterns,
attitudes, and needs. This survey was sent to seven international professional
listservs that target writing professionals and administrators, and it was left
open for about five months. We received over 130 responses. From these 130
responses, we identified 46 individuals for email follow-up and are currently
awaiting responses before we continue our data analysis. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Although the data analysis for this project is currently
ongoing, we are already seeing some interesting trends in the data. Most
salient for us is the relative linguistic inaccessibility of many of our ESL
resources for international students of varying proficiencies in English. I’m
happy to report that the Purdue OWL is currently taking steps to remedy this issue:
we have just wrapped up a project that has sought to make all of our major ESL
resources more linguistically accessible to a wider range of linguistic
proficiencies. These changes will be coming online in the coming weeks along
side of a number of new ESL resources and classroom activities. It is hoped
that this changes will also aid practitioners and L2 writers in EFL contexts.<o:p></o:p></div>
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If you’d like to stay up-to-date on OWL research and new
ESL/EFL resources, you can visit the Purdue OWL News (<a href="http://owl.english.purdue.edu/purdueowlnews">owl.english.purdue.edu/purdueowlnews</a>).<o:p></o:p></div>
LKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00927627090984083859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7491488448902983040.post-28615761942446119872013-04-22T00:00:00.000-04:002013-04-22T09:33:34.352-04:00National Poetry Month with Maria Mazziotti Gillan<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqR8zltlGOA8OeiXfp4q-fyUWBWuzc0DNhR5dGpttCD0zu_Gyq5wI6QeI28fp1anMJT3wnUZPig4mJsLW513PJwVBGIVXuuXqX6G0C4gYszTuoJRO9DRwt1dB1ekVreZDGlI-HLqkqjA/s1600/Maria+Gillan+Color+5x7+new.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqR8zltlGOA8OeiXfp4q-fyUWBWuzc0DNhR5dGpttCD0zu_Gyq5wI6QeI28fp1anMJT3wnUZPig4mJsLW513PJwVBGIVXuuXqX6G0C4gYszTuoJRO9DRwt1dB1ekVreZDGlI-HLqkqjA/s200/Maria+Gillan+Color+5x7+new.JPG" width="141" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; text-align: start;">Maria Mazziotti Gillan</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">For the final week of National Poetry Month, the PCCC Writing Center blog would like to welcome </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Maria Mazziotti Gillan. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">She is a recipient of the 2011 Barnes & Noble
Writers for Writers Award from <i>Poets
& Writers</i>, and the 2008 American Book Award for her book, <i>All That Lies Between Us<b> </b></i>(Guernica
Editions). She</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> is the
Founder /Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community
College in Paterson, NJ, and editor of the <i>Paterson Literary Review.</i> She
is also Director of the Creative Writing Program and Professor of Poetry at
Binghamton University-SUNY. She has published 16 books, including <i>The
Weather of Old Seasons </i>(Cross-Cultural Communications), and <i>Where I Come
From, Things My Mother</i> <i>Told Me,</i> <i>Italian Women in Black Dresses, </i>and <i>What We Pass On: Collected Poems
1980-2009 (all from Guernica Editions).</i> Her most recent books are <i>The Place I Call
Home </i>(NYQ Books, 2012) and <i>Writing
Poetry to Save Your Life: How to Find
the Courage to Tell Your Stories </i>(MiroLand/Guernica, April 30, 2013). With
her daughter, Jennifer, she is co-editor of four anthologies: <i>Unsettling
America</i>, <i>Identity Lessons</i>, and <i>Growing Up Ethnic in America</i>
(Penguin/Putnam) and <i>Italian-American Writers on New</i> <i>Jersey</i>
(Rutgers). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";"><b>PCCC: How did you
know or when did you know you were a poet?</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><b>Maria
Mazziotti Gillan (MMG): </b></span><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">I knew I
wanted to be a poet when I was very young. I started writing when I was 8 years
old, and once I saw my poems published when I was 13 I knew that I would never
stop being a poet. In a way you don’t chose [poetry], it chooses you. It grabs
you by the back of the neck and says this is it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";"><b>PCCC: What topics
do you most like to explore in your poetry? What influences you?</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBe5JzwFjwdl9RVM_Mil2zhXCIk3ACAR20qUumPYj6LI8LQVmWYnHO5I4m9WzdnImXH2VkKyXh-75yPb5UntOXsN-BVtYWxV0eRVZ9Eb0r_-430JLct0eYirwo0Ou1sNHRjdsOuX1Mog/s1600/writing+to+save+your+life+gillan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBe5JzwFjwdl9RVM_Mil2zhXCIk3ACAR20qUumPYj6LI8LQVmWYnHO5I4m9WzdnImXH2VkKyXh-75yPb5UntOXsN-BVtYWxV0eRVZ9Eb0r_-430JLct0eYirwo0Ou1sNHRjdsOuX1Mog/s200/writing+to+save+your+life+gillan.jpg" width="133" /></a><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";"><b>MMG:</b> I explore
ethnicity, family relationships, place, grief, loss, the environment. My poetry
is increasingly concerned with grief over what we’ve done to the earth, but
always my poems are narrative and even when I am writing about world issues, I
always connect those issues to the personal. I have a new book coming out at
the end of April, 2013, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1550717472/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1550717472&linkCode=as2&tag=poetsonline" target="_blank"><i>Writing Poetry to Save Your Life: How to Find the Courage to Tell Your Stories </i></a>(Toronto,
Canada: Miroland/Guernica, 2013), and it’s part memoir and part a book intended
to encourage people to write so it explains in detail how I came to writing,
and how to help yourself to find what you need to write about.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">PCCC: What other
types of writing, genre, and art forms are you interested in?</b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";"><b>MMG:</b> I am
interested in visual art as well as poetry, and I began to paint again about
ten years ago. I was encouraged to do that by Beat poet Diane di Prima when we
were on a reading tour in California, and I’ll always be grateful to her for
that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";"><b>PCCC: What advice
can you give to beginning poets and poets dealing with rejection?</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";"><b>MMG:</b> My advice to
beginning poets is to read and read and read some more, and also to keep
writing even when that writing is not getting published. That’s really why I
wrote the book on writing because I thought that people needed to be encouraged
to keep on going even when they felt that no one was paying attention to them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";"><b>PCCC: What’s next?</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";"><b>MMG:</b> I’ll be
touring to publicize the book on writing and later this year I have two new
poetry books coming out. One is called <i>The
Silence in the Empty House</i> (NYQ books, Fall, 2013) and <i>Ancestor’s Song</i> (Bordighera Press, November 2013). Other than
that, I’m still writing and reading in lots of places across the country, and I
don’t plan to stop anytime soon. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Read more
about Maria on her web site at <a href="http://www.mariagillan.com/" target="_blank">http://www.mariagillan.com </a>and check out her blog
at <a href="http://mariagillan.blogspot.com/">http://mariagillan.blogspot.com</a>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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LKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00927627090984083859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7491488448902983040.post-26286308758638583922013-04-15T06:00:00.000-04:002013-04-15T13:36:58.987-04:00Celebrating National Poetry Month with Mark Hillringhouse<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mark Hillringhouse</td></tr>
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We are continuing to celebrate NJ poets and poetry during National Poetry Month on the PCCC Writing Center blog! This week we are featuring poet and photographer Mark Hillringhouse. Hillringhouse is a published poet, essayist, and photographer whose works have been widely exhibited in area galleries. His photography and writing have been published in <i>The American Poetry Review, The Literary Review, The New York Times, The New Jersey Monthly, The Paris Review</i>, and in many other journals, books, anthologies and magazines. He was the founding editor of <i>The American Book Review</i>, and a contributing editor for <i>The New York Arts Journal</i>. Thrice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and a three-time recipient of a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship, he recently won the 2011 Allen Ginsberg Award for poetry and the National Parks 2012 Calendar photography contest. His film documentary with collaborator Kevin Carey on the life of Paterson poet Maria Gillan titled <i>All That Lies Between Us</i> has just been released in DVD. And his recent book of poems and photographs titled <i>Between Frames</i> was published last year by Serving House Books. He has an MFA in creative writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University, and he is a member of the English Department at Passaic County Community College.Visit Mark at <a href="http://mhillringhouse.zenfolio.com/">http://mhillringhouse.zenfolio.com</a></div>
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<b>PCCC: How did you know or when did you know you were a poet?</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Mark Hillringhouse (MH): </b>I didn't know until college, but I wrote in high school and
was part of a poetry club. We had a teacher at Hackensack High who wrote and
published a book of poetry and she was the adviser. I published a poem at
14. By college I was sending out to magazines and I had a few published
in different magazines and then I took all the courses I could. I never
knew it just happened, it was something I couldn't help. I was a weird kid who
hung out in the library half the time in 8.11 of the Dewey Decimal system.
I grew comfortable being alone and I liked silence. I read. </div>
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<b>PCCC: What topics do you most like to explore in your poetry? What
influences you?</b></div>
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<b>MH:</b> I don’t think that my poetry has a particular message to
give. I hope it gives readers pleasure. I try to exercise
some demons, expiate some guilt, and I try to locate my feelings within those
poems. It is as if I can point to them and say that is how I was
feeling, that was what I felt, what I experienced and lived through. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I tell my students never wish away time. I tell
myself the same thing. I want to pay attention to certain things, to
appreciate them. It is also why I love photography. It is
the only way I know to stop time. I told George Tice once that I
wanted to come back and photograph something I had seen and he said that it may
not be there when I go back. And he was right. It amazes
me how quickly things change. People and relationships with family
and friends is the most important aspect of living. How we see
ourselves is another. I have poems that question the nature of
things, the nature of identity. It is a philosophical problem,
sometimes a psychological problem, but it comes up in my poetry.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<o:p><b> PCCC: </b></o:p><b>What other types of writing, genre, art forms are you
interested in?</b></div>
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<b>MH:</b> I was in my twenties when I got into
photography. I started to learn how to shoot with an old Ricoh 35 mm
camera and then I hooked up with a professional photographer who was a recent
graduate of the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. He showed me how
to handle film and compose and we went out shooting a lot together and we’d
spend hours upon hours in his dark room developing and printing. I used it as a tool to help me write. I’m a
visual thinker and I loved the dark room, watching images appear in the
developer “under water” as it were like a dream rising to the
surface. You can’t have that experience with digital photography,
and seeing everything through negatives the black and white reversed. And
because it is black and white it is abstract, removed from reality.</div>
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I still miss it, the dark room. With digital
photography I've pretty much taught myself, but I have taken a few
classes. Back when we had film cameras it was all about the lens,
buying different lenses. Now I have just downloaded “Lightroom 4”
into my MacBook Pro, and I installed a tutorial app on my iPad for using
Lightroom. I got pretty good teaching myself Aperture 3, and Photoshop
CS4. I wanted to try Lightroom. CS6 is out in
Photoshop. It is hard to keep up. I go on YouTube for
tutorials, or I take workshops. There is quiet a learning curve.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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It used to be that you got a good camera body like a Nikon
and then invested in good glass and experimented with different film and
paper. But now the camera is the film and you have to keep changing
cameras buying the newest and latest models. </div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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George Tice, my mentor in photography, said to me and I
quote him, “Photography died when Kodak stopped making black and white
paper.” I get his point. There are young photographers
now who have never seen film or a dark room. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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I moved into artist housing in Paterson in 1984 when they
opened the newly renovated Essex Mill on Mill Street which is part of the
historic mill district. I was one of the first artists who moved in
there. A community of artists developed and we got to know each
other. We put on readings, jazz concerts, some gallery
shows. I loved it. I got to know a lot of musicians,
painters, sculptors, photographers, writers and poets. I had a loft
that faced the Great Falls since I was in the back away from the
street. I had my studio there and I was always working on
photography and writing poetry and reviews and articles and interviews. Someone
gave me a copy of George Tice’s book titled “Paterson” and I was taken with its
clarity and austere beauty. Twenty years later, I got to know George
Tice and I got to help him with his sequel book to the first Paterson book,
which he titled “Paterson II.” It was published in
2006. I learned a lot from him and he is a mentor.<o:p></o:p></div>
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But I also learned a lot from watching painters
work. At the end of the day picture making is picture
making. I took a life drawing class in Manhattan at the Eighth Street
Studio School which is a fine art school run by professional working
artists. Learning how to draw the human form was the hardest class I’ve
ever taken. It was three hours every Wednesday evening for a
semester. The class stood in a semi circle at our easels in front of
the nude models and the instructor had us do five-minute charcoal sketches,
ten-minute, fifteen-minute, thirty-minute sketches. I would go
through a giant sketch pad in two classes. I remember
sweating. It was a work out. The instructor would come
over and tell me to work on this and work on that. He would show me
how to draw a line. The feet and hands were extremely
difficult. One very important thing he taught me was that I had to
feel the line and feel the line flowing from the movement of my hand and wrist
onto the paper, that it was inside you and not just something you were staring
at. This applies to photography also in that there is a feeling of
being connected physically through the camera’s lens to the image and that you learn
to see how the camera sees. But it helped my photography, helped me
with line, understanding line.<o:p></o:p></div>
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My other writing projects are interviews and essays. I
also reviewed for many years. I was a founding editor of the American
Book Review in Manhattan. This was in my twenties. I was a member
of the National Book Critics' Circle. I also was interviewing poets and
taking their portraits. I covered the New York School of Ashbery,
Schuyler, Koch, Guest, Berrigan, Waldman and others who felt that they were
part of this school loosely associated with Frank O'Hara. My favorite
genre is creative non, sometimes called the fourth genre. It can't be
labeled, but it uses the elements of fiction yet it reports from the real
world. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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I was a freelance writer for a few years and this is what I
did, long pieces, New Yorker type pieces for magazines. Recently, I've
gotten into the photo-essay which is a form of creative non.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Recently, I've begun making film documentaries with a film
maker friend of mine. It is a learning curve, but I am learning and the
photography basics are the same. We just finished a film now in DVD on the life
of Maria Gillan. It is getting some press and some reviews and we've
premiered the film a few times. I am going up to Binghampton University
next week to show it there and then NYU. I liked the process of
collaboration of working with another artist and teaming up and pooling our
resources, talents and skills. I did some of the shooting and sound and
the lighting, and he did a lot of the video taping and editing. I asked the
interview questions and we would go over the cuts and the edits. It took
a year. I thought Maria a great subject for a documentary because of all
she has done and accomplished and the fact that she is like a force of nature
in the poetry world in this state, a phenomenon really. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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We plan on doing another documentary together on the
novelist and story writer Tom E. Kennedy who lives in Copenhagen. I'm just
fascinated by his work, and his story. He's an ex pat from Queens who escaped
this country for a life in Denmark when he was 30. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>PCCC: What do you most struggle with during the revision process?</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>MH: </b>That is a very good question. I found it a challenge
to match the poems with the photographs in Between Frames and sometimes vice
versa, but I found a way to see what the poem was seeing as if it could take a
photograph and so I thought of the poem as a kind of verbal camera. There
were connections in my poems to real places and things and that made it easier
in some cases such as my diner poems. The diner represents a maternal
womb for me, a way to huddle in the light in surrounding darkness. The
forces of light and dark are in constant flux in my work and I love the edges
of light. I like the time just after the sun has set as my favorite time
to shoot. This can sometimes switch to just before sunrise. I tend
towards twilight. I’m a crepuscular writer, northern, and I write during
those times and of course late into the evening. But my process is slow when I revise. I will put poems
away for a year and then come back to them. I need that much time to get
my distance. I finish maybe a handful of poems a year, yet I take
thousands of photographs. But out of a thousand photographs maybe only
one or two are good. The same goes for poetry, but it is slower, so slow
I may live long enough for another book although I am trying. I have a
dozen new poems, but I have so many projects going.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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I'm finishing an interview with George Tice and I have a
date to interview Alice Notley this month. I am actually considering
making a documentary film about her.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>PCCC: What are you working on now? What's next?</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>MH:</b> I have been invited all over to read since my book came out.
I'm headed to Michigan on Wednesday to give a reading, and then to Princeton,
and I just read at the Hunterdon Art Museum. It has been fun reading and
showing the work. I worked out a system whereby I can project the
photographs that are in the book when I read the poems so that the audience can
see them. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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I have several photography projects that are on-going for a
few years. One is Hoboken. I've been going there for a couple of years in
different seasons and times of day or night. I start with exteriors and I
work my way into the interior of the some people who live there. I ask if I can
shoot where they live and I take their portraits. I may try nudes to work that
in as well. I cover the street, the people in the street, the different
places, buildings, stores, neighborhoods. I have many night shots and
snow shots and from the Path and the train station. It may take five
years to finish.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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My other photography project is barber shops. I
started this six years ago. I realize that the old Italian immigrant
barber is dying out, the shops are closing and the kids don't go into the old
man's business. These guys are in their 80s and 90s even. I am
trying to document them. They were a real institution in every town in
North Jersey which is heavily Italian-American. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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My next book is my book of all my interviews and the portraits
I took to go along with the interviews. This is over twenty years worth
of work going back to 1980. I have thirty interviews all published in different
magazines. Now it is time to collect them into a volume. I have a
publisher interested. I will need a sabbatical. There is no way I
can do this and work full time teaching. So I hope to apply soon for a
sabbatical so that I can see this through. <o:p></o:p></div>
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</div>
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<br /></div>
<br />LKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00927627090984083859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7491488448902983040.post-14955964277234992792013-04-08T11:16:00.000-04:002013-04-08T11:31:55.878-04:00Celebrating National Poetry Month with Claudia Serea<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih10Y0G0WG5LVOkPJVaO3n6OZ92DRzOQzOeYRYPBHb_3b1OQcc2qto6ioIwANRHBTRkv7dqg1ERYmNry7wwfvu7C9TtYu2Cw6TM7480Kf8k7dl0_3PqfpfwCmP-5Ua96yrYZpOwU3vWA/s1600/poza+claudia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih10Y0G0WG5LVOkPJVaO3n6OZ92DRzOQzOeYRYPBHb_3b1OQcc2qto6ioIwANRHBTRkv7dqg1ERYmNry7wwfvu7C9TtYu2Cw6TM7480Kf8k7dl0_3PqfpfwCmP-5Ua96yrYZpOwU3vWA/s200/poza+claudia.jpg" width="143" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Claudia Serea</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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In celebration of <a href="http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/41" target="_blank">National Poetry Month </a>the PCCC Writing Center blog will host one interview a week with an established poet. To start, I'd like to introduce Claudia Serea a Romanian-born poet whose poems and
translations have appeared in <i>5 a.m</i>., <i>Meridian</i>, <i>Harpur Palate</i>, <i>Word Riot</i>, <i>The
Red Wheelbarrow</i>, <i>Green Mountains Review</i>, and many others. A two-time Pushcart
and Best of the Net nominee, she is the author of <i>Angels & Beasts </i>(Phoenicia
Publishing, Canada) and <i>The System</i> (Cold Hub Press, New Zealand). More at <a href="http://cserea.tumblr.com/">http://cserea.tumblr.com/</a>.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>PCCC: How did you know or when did you know you were a poet?</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Claudia Serea (CS)</b><b>:</b>I never planned to be a poet, it sort of happened. I started
writing when I was in my early teens, I think I was in seventh grade. I first
wrote a sci-fi novel trilogy about kids my age who had a series of adventures
in space. Poetry came later, when I was sixteen or so, and it was always
something I did on the side, not really my main focus until 2006, I think.
Someone else first referred to me as a poet after I joined The Red Wheelbarrow
Poets group and started writing consistently every week.<br />
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<b>PCCC: What topics do you most like to explore in your poetry?</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>CS</b><b>: </b>I write a lot about growing up in communist Romania, about
my family who is still there, but also about my immigration experience, and my
current life in New Jersey and New York. There are also myths, Romanian folk
tales, dreams, my daughter, many different things. I change styles and themes
frequently to get myself out of a comfort zone.<br />
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<b>PCCC: What other types of writing do you also focus on? Genre?</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>CS: </b>I wrote some memoir non-fiction pieces about the Romanian
revolution from December 1989 and a couple of articles on the process of
writing. I continue to translate Romanian contemporary poetry. I would very
much like to write more prose, but I don't have enough time to dedicate to it.
For now, just the occasional flash-fiction, prose poems, short forms that can
be written during my daily bus commute.<br />
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<b>PCCC: What do you most struggle with during the revision process?</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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CS: Word choice is important. Musicality. Throwing out parts of
the poem that don't work and keeping what is good. Line breaks, commas, lots of
things. My notebooks are a mess.<br />
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<b>PCCC: Talk about your latest book? What's next?</b><o:p></o:p><br />
<b><br /></b></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7KRxIH44XBpE1AyfsPJthuONUDZ9ilaoj5cmAa2C3N65dU7FyNkJEUoLW2WfoBCUxteIZnLuXBzyXmIRiooByOOU8aKpj-zxsa-dZorqUjagkUa1o1_D5yfAien95jVqau0JbVWCGZA/s1600/the+system-250.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7KRxIH44XBpE1AyfsPJthuONUDZ9ilaoj5cmAa2C3N65dU7FyNkJEUoLW2WfoBCUxteIZnLuXBzyXmIRiooByOOU8aKpj-zxsa-dZorqUjagkUa1o1_D5yfAien95jVqau0JbVWCGZA/s200/the+system-250.jpg" width="139" /></a></div>
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<b>CS:</b> My latest title is <i>The System</i>, a chapbook published by
Cold Hub Press, New Zealand, and inspired by my father's experience as a
political prisoner in Romania in the late fifties/early sixties. It's a little
book that speaks against repression systems everywhere in the world. I feel
strongly that my father's and grandmother's stories are important to tell. It's
my way to honor the victims of the communist genocide. You can find the book
<a href="http://www.coldhubpress.co.nz/coldhubpress.co.nz_/The_System_~_Claudia_Serea.html" target="_blank">HERE</a>.<br />
<br />
I have two other books forthcoming: <i>To Part Is to Die a Little</i> from
Cervena Barva Press, and <i>A Dirt Road Hangs From the Sky</i>, from 8th House
Publishing in Montreal, Canada. I am looking forward to their release in the
near future. I also collaborated recently with four other Romanian-American
writers and now we are actively looking for a publisher for our collection.
Poetry has been very kind to me and I made many friends through it. I can't
wait to see what else it has in store.</div>
<o:p></o:p><br />LKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00927627090984083859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7491488448902983040.post-50945003623560493552013-04-04T13:50:00.000-04:002013-04-04T13:50:25.805-04:00Using the I Search Research Project to Develop Critical Thinking and Analytical Skills in Developmental Education Courses<br />
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Our department has recently integrated both reading and
writing courses for both Developmental Education first and second year
students. Research has been introduced
to both courses to help students understand the importance of applying the
strategies they learn in reading and writing.
The goal is to prepare students by providing opportunities where
students can practice critical reading, thinking and writing strategies.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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The “I Search” research project is a project where students
in second year developmental courses are introduced to the research
process. The method of the “I Search”
allows the student to actively engage in the research process with their peers,
and work collaboratively to effectively develop research strategies, analytical
and synthesis skills. Through the I
Search students combine literacy and writing skills to develop an in depth
research paper. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Learning Outcomes of the I Search Paper</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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</div>
<ul>
<li>The goal of the I Search research project is to help
students understand the connection between research and writing.</li>
<li>Students develop their confidence as researchers and writers
and as a result are able to think creatively about their topic.</li>
<li>Students develop collaborative learning skills through the
process as they examine their research sources with groups. This activity is known as Article
analysis. Students learn the valuable
process of examining and evaluating research sources, which is an important
high-order thinking skill.</li>
</ul>
<br />
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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As a result of completing the I Search, students are
confident in their research skills and writing ability. They develop the necessary information
literacy skills and use MLA to present their papers. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b>If you are interested in using an I Search in your writing class, please email <a href="mailto:writingcenter@pccc.edu">writingcenter@pccc.edu</a>. </b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>Today's guest post was by Heather Wojdylo, a full-time, Developmental Studies faculty at Passaic County Community College. Professor </b><b>Wojdylo </b><b>teaches integrated reading and writing courses. </b></div>
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<br />
LKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00927627090984083859noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7491488448902983040.post-10852044175760207172013-03-19T14:33:00.001-04:002013-03-19T14:57:35.638-04:00Wikipedia: A Tool for Teaching (Skeptical) Research <span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My colleagues
and I recently presented at the <a href="http://its.pages.tcnj.edu/2013/01/14/njedge-net-14th-annual-faculty-showcase/" target="_blank">NJEdge Faculty Showcase</a> at Georgian Court
University about how to use Wikipedia as a tool for teaching skeptical research.
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Wikipedia
is one form of social media, and often at the bull’s eye of “new media myopia”
(<a href="http://readwrite.com/2012/09/20/why-wikipedia-does-belong-in-the-classroom" target="_blank">Obar</a>, 2012). When asked to do research, Wikipedia is usually the first place
students look. While we might want to teach students that Wikipedia is one
place to start, it usually is not the one place where we want them to end.
Therefore, incorporating Wikipedia into classroom instruction is a powerful way
to teach students how to analyze the sources they use. This presentation will
introduce educators to possible ways Wikipedia can be utilized in the classroom
as a teaching and learning tool.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">While most
faculty and academics disapprove of using Wikipedia in the classroom for
research, <a href="http://www.ijklo.org/Volume3/IJKLOv3p057-072Parker284.pdf" target="_blank">Parker and Chao</a> (2007) suggest that “Wikis [including
Wikipedia] are one of many Web 2.0 components that can be used to enhance the
learning process” in terms of collaborative learning, building research skills,
and engaging students in the information literacy process.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:No_original_research/Archive_23" target="_blank">Wikipedia says that their posts do not include original thought and are to be neutral</a>. In other words, all information must be cited, and any uncited
material is removed. Obar (2012) maintains that “studies have shown the Wikipedia is about as
accurate as Britannica." Obar further suggests that there is still misunderstanding
surrounding Wikipedia as not many academics understand the “distinction between Wikipedia
as a tool for teaching and Wikipedia as a tool for research” (2012).
Sadly, many educators ban Wikipedia from
the classroom as a platform for research rather than considering its
possibilities as an effective teaching tool for both research and information
literacy.<br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Most
students, regardless of their technology background, have not successfully used
wikis in the classroom. By reviewing Wikipedia best practices, educators might
understand the value of incorporating this wiki into collaborative assignments
or improving students’ understanding of information literacy. In Robert Cummings' (2013) suggests in his article "<a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/03/12/cummings" target="_blank">Are We Ready to Use Wikipedia to Teach Writing</a>," some insights when using Wikipedia as a teaching tool:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="square">
<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Don’t have to use Wikipedia
as a reference source; use it to bring authentic, immediate audience for
student writing.<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Wikipedia assignments offer
the chance to consider student writers' responsibilities in topic
selection. <o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Use Wikipedia as an
opportunity to teach critical thinking.<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Use Wikipedia to teach the
importance of credibility and clarity in writing.</span></li>
</ul>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(Cummings is also the author of </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lazy-Virtues-Teaching-Writing-Wikipedia/dp/0826516165" target="_blank">Lazy Virtues: Teaching Writing in the Age of Wikipedia</a>.)</i><br />
<i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></i>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There is, though, a difference
between using technology to “supplement traditional methods of teaching, and
using it ‘to create opportunities for new objectives that may not be possible
without them’” (Benson qtd in <a href="http://www.itdl.org/journal/jan_07/article02.htm" target="_blank">Konieczny</a>,
2007). Wikis, including Wikipedia, might reshape social learning
behaviors in higher education, and it is “vital we use this technology, which
has the potential to revolutionize the world of teaching and learning” (Jaffe
qtd in Konieczny, 2007). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We are interested in hearing your thoughts. Would you use Wikipedia to teach research skills? Why? Why not? </span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Would you use Wikipedia to teaching writing? </span></b><b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Why? Why not? </span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">References</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Cummings, R. (February 25, 2013). Are we ready to use
wikipedia to teach writing? <i>Inside Higher Ed. </i>Retrieved from <a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/03/12/cummings">http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/03/12/cummings</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Parker, K.R. & Chao,
J.T. (2007).<i> </i>Wiki as a teaching tool. <i>Interdisciplinary</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Journal of Knowledge and
Learning Objects 3. </span></i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Retrieved
from<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><a href="http://www.ijklo.org/Volume3/IJKLOv3p057-072Parker284.pdf"><span style="color: blue;">www.ijklo.org/Volume3/IJKLOv3p057-072Parker284.pdf</span></a>.<br /><br />
<!--[endif]--></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Konieczny, P. (January
2007. Wikis and wikipedia as a teaching tool. Retrieved from<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><a href="http://www.itdl.org/journal/jan_07/article02.htm"><span style="color: blue;">http://www.itdl.org/journal/jan_07/article02.htm</span></a>.<br /><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Obar, J. (September 20, 2012). Why wikipedia does belong in the
classroom. Retrieved from <a href="http://readwrite.com/2012/09/20/why-wikipedia-does-belong-in-the-classroom"><span style="color: blue;">http://readwrite.com/2012/09/20/why-wikipedia-does-belong-in-the-classroom</span></a><b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">If you are interested in
reading more, check out:</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></b>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lazy-Virtues-Teaching-Writing-Wikipedia/dp/0826516165" target="_blank">Lazy Virtues: Teaching Writing in the Age of Wikipedia</a></i></div>
</div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: blue;"><a href="http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page">Wikimedia
Outreach</a></span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><a href="http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Education_Program" target="_blank">Wikipedia Education Program</a></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><a href="http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/effective-teaching-strategies/wikipedia-in-the-classroom-tips-for-effective-use/"><span style="color: blue;">Wikipediain the Classroom: Tips for Effective Use </span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: blue;"><a href="http://www.pbs.org/teachers/learning.now/2006/07/wikipedia_in_the_classroom_con.html">Wikipedia in the Classroom: Consensus Among Educators?</a></span><b><o:p></o:p></b></span><br />
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><a href="http://edudemic.com/2011/12/wikipedia-in-classroom/"><span style="color: blue;">9 Tools For Using Wikipedia in the Classroom</span></a></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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LKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00927627090984083859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7491488448902983040.post-80588704142514465292013-03-05T10:24:00.000-05:002013-03-07T12:07:31.996-05:00National Translation Month: Four translations from the Russian by Alex Cigale<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjptQc868QVPfZZ2pYBJ4hxnT7EhZxtgjWKVSJp6aXBzg6ZgXDRv-w0AK5GKSm-TvP6ZAz8Pb0Rh8Asbi1FfMl57r7LU4ST2mkA8di_NJXLJbFRkZVSEDgTsoO-1v_T9dpyMDStlkDuSg/s200/Cigale.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="200" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Alex Cigale translates for NTM</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times, serif;">We had a blast during National Translation Month! Here are
the parting shots: four very short poems by lesser known Russian Silver Age
Futurists poets (Kamensky, Severyanin, Aseev, and Gnedov) translated by Alex
Cigale. 2013 marks the centennial of the Russian Futurist movement </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_futurism" style="font-family: Times, serif;">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_futurism</a><span style="font-family: Times, serif;">,
</span><span style="font-family: Times, serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Times, serif;">a phenomenon about which Alex Cigale
writes more extensively in </span><i style="font-family: Times, serif;">em review</i><span style="font-family: Times, serif;">:
</span><a href="http://www.em-review.com/portfolio_issue1.html" style="font-family: Times, serif;">http://www.em-review.com/portfolio_issue1.html</a><span style="font-family: Times, serif;">.</span><br />
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<span lang="RU" style="font-family: "Times","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">And remember: until next year, read, write, and share your
favorite translated poems.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="RU" style="font-family: "Times","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span><br /><span lang="RU" style="font-family: "Times","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span lang="RU" style="font-family: "Times","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Warm regards,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="RU" style="font-family: "Times","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span><br /><span lang="RU" style="font-family: "Times","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<span lang="RU" style="font-family: inherit; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><i><span lang="RU" style="font-family: "Times","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">—Claudia
Serea</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Kamensky">VASILY KAMENSKY</a>
(1884-1961)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the Rathskeller<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Stuffy. Filled with smoke. Bright
voices<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Of festively chattering guests.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">With decadent music, boredom and
insanity<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Have madly twinned.... Damn it, over
quick.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">If only quicker this torture were
relieved....<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Life – is longing!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Just sing....<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Dim, desiccated, disheveled faces<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Burning in waves of tobacco smoke.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Laughing loudly wrapped in longing,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Everyone joyfully blabbering, all<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">About one thing, like the cursed,
the blind:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Life – is longing!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Just sing....<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Women’s leaden, depraved caresses,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Grief distorting their expressions,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Drunken tears and cheap makeup,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Truth painted on their deceitful
lips.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Swirling whirlwind of a fiery dance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Life – is longing!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Just sing....<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">[1908]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="RU" style="font-family: "Times","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Severyanin"><span lang="EN-US">IGOR' SEVERYANIN</span></a></span><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> (1887-1941)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The Lady's Club<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In my comfortable carriage, buoyed
by its ellipsychic bearings,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I love to visit at golden midday the
lady's club for tea time,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Where women so deliciously gossip
about social trash and quarrels,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Where the foolish rightfully are
unfoolish, the wise always stupid.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Oh all you fashionable subjects,
from you my sorrow will unfurl.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Trembling lips with irony quiver
like jelly made of wild strawberries.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">"The natives look just like
pineapples and pineapples resemble natives."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The Creole woman's quips are witty,
recalling her exotic landscapes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The mayor's wife begins yawning,
leaning over the silent piano,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Looks out the window where
fermenting July sensuously stumbles. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Around us fan the golden cobwebs, of
spleen's lazy tribes a symbol.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Having thus compared myself, isn't
this why I love the Lady's Club?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">June 1912<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="RU" style="font-family: "Times","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Aseev"><span lang="EN-US">NIKOLAI ASEEV</span></a></span><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> (1889-1963)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Phantasmagoria<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">To N. S. Goncharova<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">With the lethargy of boulevard
waltzes,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">having stirred the anesthetized
faces,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">in the electric sky a millstone
rocking,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">the revolutions of the sun disk;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">saddened manikins their heads
nodding<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">at their secret keepers the night
guards;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">walls fainted as though collapsing
clouds,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">stars stood, bemoaning,
stained-glass windows;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">above its yearning and lonely stony
body,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">having streak-pierced the earth's
axis,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">as a throughway without any
off-ramps,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">oblivion rattled with its
cloud-cover;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">beneath the horse-whips of swaying
weather<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">stiffened the Fahrenheit sign's pale
figure,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">and the same demented melody was
unraveled <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">by the improvising flute of
midnight.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">1913<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="RU" style="font-family: "Times","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasilisk_Gnedov"><span lang="EN-US">VASILISK GNEDOV</span></a></span><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> (1890-1978)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Roadside reverie<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Rhapsode<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Hey! oak – whitely – whitely<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The titanous overlordy of Heaven –<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The bush of pondering-flutey<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">With overflowed ringing you
rollick....<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Leafting speckled like Dove feathers
–<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Sky splashed into rinse of leafs....<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Hey! Oak-whiting, rustings-oaks,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Oak-limber rust-speckled flutter<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Oak-writhing branchlings-ringer....<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Hey! oak – whitely – whitely<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The bush of roadside flutings.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">1913<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Alex Cigale's poems have appeared in <i>Colorado, Green Mountains,
</i>and <i>St. Petersburg reviews, </i>in <i>Gargoyle, Hanging Loose, Many
Mountains Moving, Redactions, Tar River, </i>and<i> 32 Poems, </i>and online in<i>
Drunken Boat, H_ngm_n, and McSweeney's</i>. His translations from the Russian
can be found in <i>Crossing Centuries: the New Generation in Russian Poetry,
Brooklyn Rail In Translation, Modern Poetry in Translation 3/13
Transplants, </i>and <i>PEN America 12 Correspondences</i>. A monthly column of
his translations of Russian Silver Age poets and an anthology of Silver Age
miniature poems are on-line at <i>Danse Macabre </i>and<i> OffCourse</i>, respectively.
He was born in Chernovsty, Ukraine and lives in New York City.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Link: <a href="http://www.em-review.com/portfolio_issue1.html">http://www.em-review.com/portfolio_issue1.html</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><span lang="RU" style="font-family: "Times","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Claudia
Serea</span></b><span lang="RU" style="font-family: "Times","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> is a Romanian-born poet whose poems and translations have
appeared in <i>5 a.m., Meridian,</i> <i>Harpur Palate, Word Riot, The Red
Wheelbarrow, Green Mountains Review,</i> and many others. A two-time Pushcart
and Best of the Net nominee, she is the author of <i>Angels & Beasts </i>(Phoenicia Publishing, Canada) and <i>The System</i> (Cold Hub Press, New
Zealand). More at <span class="object"><a href="http://cserea.tumblr.com/">http://cserea.tumblr.com/</a></span>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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LKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00927627090984083859noreply@blogger.com0