This Week in E-Mail Auto Response, 12/22 - 12/26

Though it was a holiday week, with the office closed anyway from 12/24 at noon through the weekend, was doing some work each day, if only the work of changing my auto-response messages. Which of course is play too.

Monday, December 22: Merry Monday

Merry Monday to you, merry Monday to you, merry Monday, merry Monday, merry Monday to you.

Though today is not my birthday, the birthday song is fun to make up words to any day.  I'd go on to a riff on the "how old are you now" verse, but asking about age is impolitic.  In case you're wondering, however, I am 65, though if you meet me ever you'll swear I look young for my age. And I do. I find that after a certain point, if you're going to lie about your age, it's better to lie up.

In fact, if I were writing a self-help book, that would be the title of one of its chapters: 

"It's OK to Lie About Your Age if You Lie Up (Unless You Are Under 21)"

And the chapter might open with these lines:

Actually it's more than o.k., it's in fact wise to lie up about your age. First, most people who do lie, unless they are under 21, lie down. Which means then that you have to live down to your age. Lie up and live it up. Plus lying up on age is aspirational -- adding years gives you a number to shoot for, is in its way life affirming. 

Tuesday, December 23: Dick and Jane

This is Nick's auto-response.

"Look," says Dick.
"See it in the inbox.
See it ready to be read."

"Yes," says Jane.
"Yes, I see it in the inbox.
Will you open it?"

Dick clicks on Nick.

"See," says Dick.
"See what Nick says."

Jane calls, "Sally, come see."

Sally says, "Nick auto replied to Dick."

"It is in Dick's inbox.

I see it already.

Can we go have cookies and scotch now?"

"Silly, Sally," says Jane. "Cookies and scotch are for after work."

"Let's leave work now," says Dick.

"Yes," says Sally, "Then it can be after work."

See Dick and Jane and Sally leave work.

See them forget the cookies.

Wednesday, December 24: 'Tis the Day Before Christmas

Tis the day before Christmas, and all through the house

No technology is stirring, not even a mouse

Well, that's not true. We used the toaster today at breakfast, and the t.v. is on, and my daughter's in her room listening to music via an mpg3 player. And the lights are on, and soon we'll be using the oven, not to mention we did drive a  car, and my other daugther made a card with water colors and brushes, an art technology.

So a revision. Because in an auto reply one should not lie:

'Tis the day before Christmas, and all the through the house,

All technology is whirring, _except_ the email mouse.

Thursday, December 25: Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas

I hope your day brings joy and good company, though I hope that for everyone everyday.

If you are one to give and receive gifts on this day, I hope you receive more than you give  -- that the monetary value of the gifts you receive is higher than whatever you spent on the gifts you gave. Or I hope that you at least break even if you can in that regard.

Now wishing you a profit isn't to diminish the joy of giving that today is about for so many. I hope you do know the joy of giving.

Unless you've managed the minor Christmas miracle of getting everyone just the right gift, gifts that bring genuine joy to their hearts and show you to be a gift giver of superior talent and sensitivity, so much so that you shame those lame gift-givers that seem this time of year to abound. Not that I'm jealous of your your gift to gift, but if you're a perfect gifter,  I hope you stub your toe and find lumps in your mash potatoes.

Friday, December 26: The First Return

And lo, on this day Mary and Joseph wrapped their babe in swaddling clothing and went to the agora to exchange the gold, incense, and myrrh for more practical things, like a bed, fresh camels, and a place to live.  The stable looks good in a creche, but not so much for bringing up the King of Kings. This was no easy thing in those days, because the good agora was far away, and the caravan traffic slow and heavy. But though Joseph was tired and wanted to stay home, Mary insisted they shop and trade, telling Joseph he could buy some wine and goat meat on a stick and wait till she was done for all she cared, but he had to lead the donkey she rode there because she needed to hands to hold the kid.

And so began the tradition of exchanging gifts the day after Christmas, where men and women who cannot stand being out now sit over beer and nachos in any bar at or near the mall waiting while their partners to correct imperfect gifts or to put those gift cards to use, which is always more pleasant because you don't have to find the gift receipt, if one was provided.

And thus it was decreed that for people over 13*, the perfect gift is cash, not a gift card with its fees and worse god help those who suffer them, good for only a particular store or mall, but cash. Of the three magi, the wisest was he who brought gold, and so Mary sent him the first thank you note.

*For 13 and under toys. Not clothes. Especially not socks and most especially not pajamas. Toys -- and if the toys are to nieces and nephews, loud ones, to help your brothers and sisters not sleep in on Saturday's and Sunday's.
 

This Week in E-Mail Auto Response, 12/15 - 12/19

About This Week in Auto Response

Each workday, I write a new auto response e-mail for my work address only: nick.carbone AT macmillan DOT com. If anyone e-mails me, they get an auto response, even on days when I'm in the office. I mean why not? It's not quite a "set it and forget it" move, but the auto response does at least confirm for a send of e-mail to me that their letter has arrived.

http://bit.ly/1qEx6Pv for a note on the rhetoric of auto responses.

Monday, December 15: Blank You, Spam

I do hope you do not mind getting this automatic reply. Please feel free to fill in the ending blank:

Because I must do that work due that I do so well, I reply to tell that my unread inbox will swell.  I've turned off the chime, shut down the bell, so no alerts my progress will quell. If you need a response I'll get back in a spell. Unless you've sent spam, in which case, you can just go to ___.

Tuesday, December 16: Peter, Paul, and Mary and Me

I've been thinking about hammers of late, and the Peter, Paul, and Mary song that starts, "If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning . . ." keeps popping into my head because of it.

A hammer is a technology in search of things that need hammering: nails, of course, but sometimes horseshoes, or pegs, or the handle of a chisel, or metal to be shaped . . .

Hammers vary and can be banged for a lot of different purposes and situations. Sort of like writing. Writing is a technology in search of things that need hammering out too. I guess that would make the song go like this:

I'd write out danger,
I'd write out a warning,
I'd writer out love between,
My brothers and my sisters,
All over this land.

Wednesday, December 17: It's a Wonderful E-Mail

Quotes from It's a Wonderful E-Mail, the story of an outbox in despair because it thinks it makes no difference what it sends; Outbox learns its messages matter after an angel in need of wings shows Outbox how its messages have made a difference.

Hey look, Outbox. We serve hard drinks in here for unwritten mail that wants to get drunk fast, and we don't need any characters around to give the joint "atmosphere".  

Strange, isn't it? Each e-mail touches so many other lives. When it isn't sent around it leaves an awful hole, doesn't it? 

Remember, Outbox: no e-mail is a failure that has contacts.  

You see, Outbox, you've really had a wonderful e-mail. Don't you see what a mistake it would be to never send again? 

A toast to Nick's Outbox: The longest messages in town. 

Every time an autoreply is read to the end, an angel gets its wings. 

Thursday, December 18: I Am a Romantic, but Not Ridolfo

Right now the rain is almost snow. Some drops are clearly water, some white globs, slush on the way to being flakes. Given a few more degrees, I'd need a shovel today. But the degrees that do come will be warmer not cooler and so no shoveling just yet. Still, it's good sweater and hot drinks weather, simmer a stew weather, and, sitting with a warm computer on one's lap, in the cozy glow of the snow-white editing screen longing for words, writing weather. 

This is clearly not La Boheme, I'm no Rodolfo writing despite the cold in a gusty garret, but there is something Romantic to writing on a blustery day, even if only for work. Some of the stuff I'll be working on, the pedagogical stuff not the expense report stuff, requires idealism, passion, and even with all the science I know, respect for what remains mystic and uncanny about teaching and learning. So that's largely what I'll be doing today, writing stuff for courses I won't be teaching, instructors who are not me, students who will not be my own, creating imaginary classrooms with real students in them.

Friday, December 19: Writing to Unstuff

My head is stuffed. No, not because my ego is bloated (though it often is), in which case anyway, to be pedantic, I'd've said my head is swelled, but rather because I get allergies from, I suppose, dust in the winter, when windows and doors stay closed  and the air dries.

And so, while I wait for my daily ZYRTEC® to take effect , which I wash down with my morning shot of brandy, another winter tradition used only as a daily medicinal against the allergy, which medicinal, because it makes me sleepy, is followed by two cups of coffee, a brisk shower, and a morning walk to my office, which, since I work at home, is a short perambulation of six strides from bedroom to living room where couch and laptop await, I work on small things that can happily be done with a stuffed head in something of a slight haze.

Today that work is converting Microsoft Word documents of multiple-choice quizzes into the Respondus quiz format. It's tedious markup, remind me much of the days when I used to write with Word Star, a wonderful word processer that wasn't WYSIWYG when I used it. You were never quite sure until you printed whether the underlining or italics you marked up the text to have were rightly marked up. Same too with converting a quiz in Word to one in Respondus. It ain't until you import that Respondus manuscript that you really know whether there's an error.

So the work is tedious because I didn't write the quizzes, don't like the quizzes -- they're banal grammar questions, not fun at all -- is really a matter of conversion as a favor to a professor using some of our technology.

Such sometimes is the glamorous life I lead and why today, though my head is stuffed, it sure as hell ain't swelled.

This Week in E-Mail Auto Response, 12/09 - 12/12

Series Introduction

I have, in an effort to be more efficient at work, decided that I will only check my work e-mail  -- nick.carbone at macmillan dot com -- twice a day. And thus since replies will not be instant, each day I will write a new auto response so that my virtual correspondents know that in due time I will in fact read their tender missives.

I began this new approach with great resolve on December 9, a Tuesday. Though I suppose I could have saved it for a New Year's resolution, I believe in starting early when an idea is good. Also, it's year-end review season, and I can point to the tactic as an accomplishment in the same way that having a child just before the end of year is a great tax break.

Here are the auto responses for this first week. Each Friday, I'll post the weekly collection. Whatever I use as Friday's message will stay through the weekend.

See http://bit.ly/1qEx6Pv for a note on the rhetoric of out of office auto responses.

 

Tuesday, December 9:

And on the 9th day of December, the skies opened and the rain deluged, and verily I said unto me --- 'tis a good day to stay home and write unperturbed by the nuisance of a drench-the-trenchcoat commute to an office where, once I arrived, I would simply be writing while wet, with door shut to be undisturbed, meeting with no one, talking to no one. So I am home writing dry. If you need me, write me. If you need me to pay attention immediately, call me, my number's in the .sig below.

Though come to think of it, if you are seeing this iteration of my o/o/o, you are not someone who works in my office, and so it makes no difference to you where I am because it's not like you're in my office looking for me. But at least now you know I'm dry. And writing.

Wednesday, December 10:

Once upon a time I came to the office, sat at my desk, and turned on the automatic reply message. I then shut down my e-mail program. It was a gray and blustery day, and my work for the day included one brief face to face meeting and then lots of reading & writing. So I am in full e-mail denial if you are reading this: I've silenced the e-mail notification ding and icon and removed the e-mail shortcut from the start tray. If you're reading this far, know that I will blithely ignore my inbox until tomorrow. If you really need my attention, best to call.

Thursday, December 11:

Thank you for writing. No, really, I do mean it. Thank you. Even if your e-mail consternates, requires me to jump-to something, means more work of one kind or another, thank you. Sure, an e-mail of some other kind -- notice of good news, a gentle reminder to do something pleasant, like "Nick, don't forget to take your office nap today," praise of any kind, even if it's not for me -- might be more enjoyable, and so if you're sending one of those, consider my thanks even more profuse.

But really, whatever you send, since I'm a don't-let-the-sunshine-spoil-your-rain kind of guy, thanks. I'll get back to you as soon as I get back to e-mail reading, which is now deliberately intermittent.

Today my attention will be enslaved by other things, more, so I hope, productive things. 

Friday, December 12:

The Incredible True Story of the First Textbook

Because my new work efficiency diet requires me to cut down on my e-mail consumption, let me tell you a very truthy story while you wait for my reply.

Today is Friday, December 12, with only 378 days until Christmas 2015. On this day in 105 AD, paper making was invented in China. On the next day, that would be December 13, 105, the first textbook was published. No, not by Macmillan, we're not that venerable. The book was print on hand-written command. The first draft required readers to scroll, but after two unrolls to see more text, eye-ball tracking revealed that reading stopped; instead, students took to watching thieves get their hands cut-off, the role-playing video game activity of the time. Professors, since times were stricter then, tried corporal punishment, but the poking students in the eye with a stylus and yelling "since you will not do the assigned reading, dog, you do not need this!" proved counter-productive. So in revision, the book came out in a compact edition, a single sheaf, no scrolling required. However, by then, in addition to to thief punishment, other diversions had emerged -- ceramics was a growing hobby, and rice krispie treats were invented because opium had been discovered too. hus in its third revision, the book was reduced to an illustrated koan that could be copied by just about anyone. And so it spread, almost like a virus, across the land, causing giggles with each forward. But it also put the publisher out of business.

Glad those days are gone.

Meanwhile, I do check e-mail, but only twice a day, not constantly. So I will find your message eventually and if it requires one from me, I will respond. If a response is not required, know that I read every word you wrote, underlining the good ones.

Want to Pass a Writing Test? Memorize an Essay

A July 12, 2013 New York Times Magazine piece by Curtis Sittenfeld about her time, while a creative writing graduate student, tutoring a woman who needed to pass the writing test on her GED exam, describes an unsuccessful two year struggle to pass the exam:

During the two years my tutee and I worked together, she tried to pass the English section of the G.E.D. several times and didn't succeed, always unable to write a sufficiently coherent essay. It crossed my mind from time to time that maybe I wasn't her ideal tutor. For one thing, my understanding of grammar was more instinctive than formal. I didn't think of, say, gerunds or reflexive pronouns as gerunds or reflexive pronouns; I just knew how to use them correctly, which wasn't the same as knowing how to clearly explain them.

Sittenfeld got a job on graduation, and moved before her student passed the GED, under the guidance of a different tutor. But she had become friends with her tutee, who, after passing, explained to Sittenfeld her strategy:

Over the phone, my tutee told me about her new tutor’s approach to the English test: together they would construct a vaguely worded essay. My tutee would memorize it, and depending upon the test’s essay question, she would alter it slightly. Weeks after I moved away, she used this method, and it worked; she finally passed.

And that seems to me to be the issue so often in teaching writing. Learning, about gerunds and reflexive pronouns wouldn't necessarily have helped  pass the writing test. The test isn't about gerunds and reflective pronouns; it's about writing a formulaic essay that's predictable and acceptable enough to be easily scored and passed.

There are two lessons in this. 

Lesson 1. If You're Teaching Writing, Let Students Write

I want to be clear -- I don't mean to criticize Sittenfeld here. She did the best she could with what she knew and with her experience as a 25 year old volunteer. But the lesson from her experience I encourage is this: Let writers write. 

I do a lot of work with teachers of developmental writing, and they often do stress the need for their students to be able to know grammar and usage terms and rules, so much so that the students don't really get as much writing done as they would in first year writing courses. They do more workbook exercises, here lectures on grammar, read grammar handbooks before and during writing. So grammar and rules are first, and finding something to say a distant second.

We don't know enough about how Sittenfeld taught to know what the balance of workbook to actual writing was in her tutoring, but the attention to error and rules before writing is a common practice still in developmental writing courses. And it's the kind of attention that makes it harder for students to write well because it leads with anxiety by focusing students first on perceived deficiencies. 

The place for her to get tutee to have gotten to, is the place Sittenfeld describes for herself when she writes, "For one thing, my understanding of grammar was more instinctive than formal. I didn't think of, say, gerunds or reflexive pronouns as gerunds or reflexive pronouns; I just knew how to use them correctly."  

That balance of mainly playing and referencing would translate to mainly writing and then referencing a handbook or learning a rule for grammar or usage as needed. But too much developmental writing focuses on the rule book and exercises first, not play, not a reason to want to know the rules. It's the opposite of the balanced and explicit-about-transfer approach recommended by the NCTE's Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar.

Lesson 2. If the Test is Stupid, Undermine it By Teaching Tricks for Passing It

If your students are going to be assessed by readers trained to read like a machine, or a machine trained to match the reading and scoring of humans normed to read like a machine, discover what the testing regime will pass and teach students to mimic that. Don't let the weight of such tests, meaningless often in what they measure, stand in the way of students moving forward. Sittenfeld's student needed the GED to get into cosmetology school, and was motivated enough to do that for over two years, working through and past GED test attempts until she got it. Most students lack either that resilience or the means to keep trying even if they were a mind to. 

That the student passed by memorizing a formulaic essay, a strategy that probably alleviated the stress from prior failures, is not a condemnation of the student nor Sittenfeld's work as a tutor, but rather of the inanity of the test. The strategy worked because the test design allows and encourages it. 

But if testing is going to treat students so shabbily as to call for the kind of formulaic writing only ever used to pass writing tests, then the tests what they deserve for not being valid in the first place.

#worthassigning: How to Write Effectively without Really Trying

This is cross-genre advice. Feel free to use these tips when sending memos to your supervisor, e-mailing colleagues, working with an author who needs some help, drafting a personal ad, and other places and times when writing makes a difference but you are really too busy to give it much thought.

1. E-Mail: End all e-mail with "Sent from my iPhone," or "Sent from Blackberry."  Research shows that readers of messages with those auto-added advertisements forgive grammar errors and typos more readily:  collision detection: Why people forgive your bad spelling in email "sent from my iPhone"
2. Georgia, Georgia, the whole document through, just an old sweet font, keep Georgia on your mind, for better grades.  How typeface influences the way we read and think - The Week
3. If page length matters . . . Triple Space! Graphics!: http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail64.html
4. Extortion, lying, and sudden endings: tips for getting readers to read: http://workableweb.com/_pages/tips_how_to_write_good.htm

Editing, A Love Story in Four Subheads

1. What Love Has Got to Do With It

Hybrid Pedagogy published, on November 22, "Love in the Time of Peer Review," a tender evocation for peer review as the act of giving lovingly to academic colleagues the feedback needed to make a a journal submission better. The ten authors and reviewers who crafted the piece open, by way of bell hooks, with a reminder that education -- of which teaching, reviewing, and editing, are a part -- is an act of love:

Love, patience, kindness, humility, truth — we don’t often talk about these things in the academy. Even those of us who eschew discussion of “efficiency” and “effectiveness” in favor of “empowerment” often stop short of genuine affection. But education, at its core, is an act of love — it seeks to empower as its very nature. And this care fuels our desire to help each other become full agents in our own right. 

When we truly love, we humanize rather than normalize. Much of what the academy does — both in teaching and in scholarship — is about norms. Even our new wine ends up in old skins, as the norms of academic discourse dominate the dissemination of our work in journals, monographs, textbooks. But love does not “insist on its own way.” In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks advocates for “an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom” (207). Empowering another human to be a mindful agent in their own learning requires a great deal of patience, kindness, and determination. These things only coexist with conscientious effort. This is the work that we all do as we exist simultaneously as authors, editors, and students. 

As editors of Hybrid Pedagogy, ourselves also educators, we strive for love-as-peer-review. We seek to “give any author a voice,” bringing our voices to them in a meaningful and accessible way through a specific style of peer review. In this, we spread a little love around so that we leave the world in better shape than we found it.

Their work reminds me of the approach Kairos sought in its beginnings and still carries to this day, an ethos of cooperation, where peer review was not blind after a piece was accepted, but collaborative. In 1997 I was on the Kairos editorial board, and drafted a small webtext called "So Ya Wanna Be An Editorial Boarder?," one of the nodes for that piece, ""Peer Review" ... The Next Iteration," says:

Peer review is honorable and necessary. It gives authors a glimpse of their audience--colleagues in their field who can help them massage a contribution into better shape. We know that peer review can be abused; the "blind read" can turn colleagues into pit bulls who do no more than tear and gnash a piece to bits. It's an odd habit. When we teach peer review, we make sure to steer students from savage to constructive criticism. But too many blind reviewers neglect to practice what they teach. So it goes. 

But so it doesn't have to go. Kairos seeks to maintain the best in peer review--collegiality, respect, encouragement, sound advice, and honesty--while at the same time avoiding the imperious dismissal and disdainful rejection harried readers can fall habit to. 

What Hybrid Pedagogy writes of love and peer review speaks to my heart, both as an academic who still gives peer review advice to fellow academics, and as an academic who also works for a textbook publishing company, who sees the work that textbook editors and authors do. Textbooks, at least in my experience at Bedford/St. Martin's, are works of love, of scholarship transformed into pedagogy. The work depends very much on the kindness of reviewers, but is really only successful when authors and editors can do the hard work -- the intense work -- of loving what they're working on well enough to bring a book to fruition.

2. Publishing is Pedagogy

Though writing about academic scholarly publishing, Hybrid Pedagogy gets at the heart of how a good publisher views textbook publishing, and at the heart of why I enjoy working in the field:

Publishing is a pedagogical activity: for the author, the reviewer, the reader, the (re)user. Like all pedagogy, it sits in the present tense. And yet, it also holds to an emergent vision for the future. 

Like the editors at Hybrid Pedagogy, the editors who work on textbooks do so because they love what they do, and care as much about teaching and learning as the authors they work with and the faculty who teach.

Work on a textbook happens in a present where the work is designed to meet an emergent future student. The work embraces a pedagogical vision meant to serve that student. Developing a textbook is a labor of love, and the story of each book's origin is a pedagogical love story.

At Bedford, such love stories were made possible by its founders, Chuck Christensen and Joan Feinberg.

Just as Kairos sought to forge new ground in the academic publishing and acceptance of native hypertext scholarship, just as Hybrid Pedagogy seeks to forge new ground by making peer review an act of loving and generous grace, Chuck and Joan forged new ground. Chuck retired at the end of 2001, and Joan just recently announced her resignation. In her farewell letter to the company, she sets forth, much the way Hybrid Pedagogy is doing now for their project, the vision that guided her and Chuck:

From the start we wanted to be known as a different kind of publisher.  Bedford was a company committed to innovation and high quality and committed to the disciplines we published for.  We put great care and attention into every title we published.  Our secret was that we developed every book we published.  Every Bedford title had a development editor working on it.  We used to say that we employed 80% of the development editors in the business, and I think it might have been true.  Most of our development editors had graduate degrees in the fields they worked on, so they had a clear understanding of the needs of students and instructors.  We tried to make ourselves a useful presence in our disciplines by publishing professional books, by supporting professional organizations, and by giving good parties.  We also were committed to hiring and training the best people and creating an environment where they could do their best work. 

3. Editing as a Teaching and Learning Marriage -- It Sometimes Takes Tough Love

It's no small thing to build a successful business -- Bedford/St. Martin's was the most successful company in college publishing these past 33 years -- on a model of care. Care of the kind Chuck and Joan, then Joan as she carried on, both nurtured and insisted on, takes money, time, faith, patience, and yes, love. Entering into a project with a Bedford/St. Martin's development editor means having your book reviewed, revised, developed, and sold very carefully, with as much time as is needed to draft, review, revise, review again, revise some more, to reach a first edition. There is a lot of labor, a lot of love, years, in that process.

With rare exception, in most scholarly publishing, once a journal publishes the article or the university press publishes the book, authors and editors may not ever work together again as authors and editors. Textbook publishing, however, takes a long view, and the relationships of textbook authors and editors can last decades.

Wendell Berry, in his wonderful essay, "Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms," writes, "The meaning of marriage begins in the giving of words. We cannot join ourselves to one another without giving our word. And this must be an unconditional giving, for in joining ourselves to one another we join ourselves to the unknown."

Hybrid Pedagogy recognizes this in their take on peer review -- what loving peer review means begins in the words given. Working with a textbook author begins too in the giving of words, the endeavor is suffused in words, from the first conversation of an editor with a potential authors. The words begin at pedagogy, continue with pedagogy through all the work of writing, feedback, revising, and end in a pedagogical tool upon publication.

Chuck and Joan set up a shop where, because each book requires so much energy and love, each editor only worked on a few key projects at a time. Bedford does not encourage lots of proposals; instead, development editors try to find the right professors to work on the right books.

To make this work, development editors learn the fields they edit in, read the journals, attend conference sessions, listen to faculty on campus visits. Development editors are as immersed in the field as are the editors of academic journals and presses, only with a focus more explicitly on pedagogy.

Love Can be Tough A Road to Walk

Now human hearts and minds are fallible. Not all marriages work, after all; not all hiring decisions lead to tenure; not all submissions accepted at a scholarly journal find completion; and so not all textbook editor and author partnerships work. But at Bedford/St. Martin's, because projects are few and because editors only develop projects they can believe in, the work usually lasts.

Belief in a project matters. You cannot love without belief. The work of love in publishing, academic and textbook, as in a marriage, can be hard, involving frustration, despair, and the occasionally needed intervention. Thus the work of a development editor partnering with an author involves recognizing another truth Berry describes:

. . . no one party to it can be solely in charge. What you alone think it ought to be, it is not going to be. Where you alone think you want it to go, it is not going to go. It is going where the two of you . . . will take it. You do not know the road; you have committed your life to a way. 

Textbooks are a genre, recognizable as such. They, like poetry, like marriage, have recognizable forms, and procedures for discovering what a book needs to be. For first time author and editor teams, neither party can be solely in charge, and though the editor may be experienced, and the author perhaps well-published and an expert teacher, neither will know, nor can know absolutely which way the road to the book will wend.


Textbook writing is hard because the writing needs to speak to students and at the same time written in a register instructors hear and recognize. Creating a pedagogy students can follow as students and teachers can adapt as instructors requires lots of reviewing.

The road to a first edition can be long and winding indeed. I've seen books take five or six years from contract to publication, with several review cycles, where two, three, or four full revisions and re-conceptions took place. Such a journey, where people work so closely on work so important, is only possible with love -- sometimes tough, sometimes tender -- marked by respect and patience and forgiveness for one another, and the willingness to celebrate the Aha! moments together, to share joy, when things work.

 

4. Love's Legacy Not Lost

I do not know -- who can -- whether the road Hybrid Pedagogy forges for academic publishing will be followed by others. I think it should and hope it will be. Having been down the road at Bedford/St. Martin's, I can say that publishing with love is a great road to follow. But whether others follow Hybrid Pedagogy, their work and their essay serves as beacon and reminder that scholarly and pedagogical writing not only can be but naturally wants to be loving. Their legacy will be the good work that emerges because of their approach, work that will not exist without their love.

I'm drawn to these considerations of love and legacy by the occasion, mentioned above, of Joan Feinberg's recently announced resignation from Macmillan Education, the company that owns Bedford/St. Martin's.

Chuck and Joan leave a prodigious body of work as a team, and Joan an incredible body of work on her. They've helped create hundreds of textbooks published over three decades that have supported the learning of millions and millions of students. 

Chuck retired early in my career, and so most of it was shaped by my time with Joan.

Joan's a great a teacher. She smiles genuinely, listens carefully, criticizes constructively, and praises readily, all qualities that made working with her fun and learning from her motivating. I've learned as much about teaching and working with teachers from the conversations we've had, and the questions she's asked -- important questions, the ones with no easy answers -- in both private and group meetings in the office. But I learned most from the questions I saw Joan ask professors about their work, their teaching, their students.

Joan stepped into the presidency of Bedford/St. Martin's in January 2002, and then was co-president of Macmillan Higher Education, January 2012 to December 2013. All of us higher education  --faculty, textbook editors, administrators, writing center and learning center directors, directors and members of the centers for teaching and learning  -- know the past dozen or so years have been, and remain, tumultuous. Systemic change is sweeping colleges and universities as well as the textbook industry. Joan helped Bedford/St. Martin's weather those changes by keeping to the vision.

The times required making hard calls, in a tough, competitive, and roiling climate, an era that saw competitors disappear, or go into bankruptcy, or taken over by venture capital firms. But as higher education roiled, Joan tended to authors and editors by continuing to lead us with, and to encourage in us, the "love, patience, kindness, humility, truth" necessary to good writing and editing. And so as Joan resigns, Bedford/St. Martin's still has the most developmental editors of any college textbook publisher, editors who only know how to do their work with love because with love is the only way for the work to have value.

I wish for Hybrid Pedagogy, that they too always find the space, time and shelter to work in the way that their love for learning requires, that as their years go on, when she is needed, they find among their founders, their Joan.

#worthassigning: Laura Hudson on Twine, the Video-Game Technology for All

If you go to http://twinery.org/ to learn about Twine, you get this:

Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. 

You don't need to write any code to create a simple story with Twine, but you can extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript when you're ready. 

Twine publishes directly to HTML, so you can post your work nearly anywhere. Anything you create with it is completely free to use any way you like, including for commercial purposes. 

Twine was originally created by Chris Klimas in 2009 and is now maintained by a whole bunch of people at several different repositories. 

That's intriguing -- its open source, don't need to write any code, simple stories possible -- but it doesn't tell a story about what Twine can do.

Happily and wonderfully, very compassionately -- yes, a compassionate look at software -- Laura Hudson offers a wonderful profile of Twine by profiling a game developer who creates emotionally powerful and compelling games, a woman named Porpentine.

Here are some excerpts from Hudson's piece, just as a sampler of what makes her writing so good.

A free program that you can learn in one sitting, Twine also allows you to instantly publish your game so that anyone with a web browser can access it. The egalitarian ease of Twine has made it particularly popular among people who have never written a line of code — people who might not even consider themselves video-game fans, let alone developers.  

Chris Klimas, the web developer who created Twine as an open-source tool in 2009, points out that games made on it “provide experiences that graphical games would struggle to portray, in the same way books can offer vastly different experiences than movies do. It’s easy to tell a personal story with words.” 

Twine games look and feel profoundly different from other games, not just because they’re made with different tools but also because they’re made by different people — including people who don’t have any calcified notions about what video games are supposed to be or how they’re supposed to work. While roughly 75 percent of developers at traditional video-game companies are male, many of the most prominent Twine developers are women, making games whose purpose is to explore personal perspectives and issues of identity, sexuality and trauma that mainstream games rarely touch on.

And on Porpentine:

One of the most prominent and critically acclaimed Twine games has been Howling Dogs, a haunting meditation about trauma and escapism produced in 2012 by a woman named Porpentine. The gameplay begins in a claustrophobic metal room bathed in fluorescent light. Although you can’t leave, you can “escape” once a day by donning a pair of virtual-­reality goggles. Each time, you’re launched into a strange and lavishly described new world where you play a different role: a doomed young empress learning the art of dying; a scribe trying to capture the beauty of a garden in words; a Joan of Arc-like figure waiting to be burned on a pyre. And each time you return to the metal room, it’s a little dirtier and a little more dilapidated — the world around you slowly decomposing as you try to disappear into a virtual one. 

“When you have trauma,” Porpentine says, “everything shrinks to this little dark room.” While the immersive glow of a digital screen can offer a temporary balm, “you can’t stay stuck on the things that help you deal with trauma when it’s happening. You have to move on. You have to leave the dark room, or you’ll stay stunted.” 

When I first met Porpentine outside a coffee shop in Oakland, Calif., she was wearing a skirt and patterned knee socks, her strawberry blond hair pulled back in a small plastic barrette. We decided to head to a nearby park, and as we walked across the grass, she pivoted on one foot — an instant, unconscious gesture — and did a quick little spin in the sunshine. When we arrived at a park bench, one of the first things we talked about was trash, because her Twine games teem with it: garbage, slime and sludge, pooling and oozing through dystopian landscapes peopled by cyborgs, insectoid empresses and deadly angels. In Howling Dogs, the trash piles up sticky and slow; in other games, like All I Want Is for All of My Friends to Become Insanely Powerful, tar floods the room suddenly from an indistinct source. Forget pretty things, valuable things: Porpentine’s games are far more interested in what society discards as worthless. 

“Trash has very positive connotations in my world,” she said, trying to smooth the wild ends of her hair as the wind off a nearby lake kept bringing them to life. “A lot of my work is reclaiming that which has been debased.” A transgender woman who has faced harassment for much of her life, Porpentine referred to herself as “trash-bodied” several times as we talked. It’s not an insult, she explained: “Me and my friends, we hide in the trash. People call us trash, but we glorify in it.” At 14, she was kicked out of her home. It’s not an unusual story — an estimated 20 to 40 percent of homeless teenagers are gay, bisexual or transgender. When I asked her what she was doing before she made Twine games, she said, “Just surviving.”

Why I'd Assign This Piece as a Course Reading

What makes Hudson's piece compelling to read, and useful for thinking about as a teacher of writing, is that it accomplishes three distinct things, all signaled in her opening lines:

Perhaps the most surprising thing about “GamerGate,” the culture war that continues to rage within the world of video games, is the game that touched it off. Depression Quest, created by the developers Zoe Quinn, Patrick Lindsey and Isaac Schankler, isn’t what most people think of as a video game at all. For starters, it isn’t very fun. Its real value is as an educational tool, or an exercise in empathy.

Her piece touches on GamerGate, uses it as a reference and reminder. So that's the first thing it does, offers a commentary on the issues surrounding GamerGate. And she gets at that not by focusing on GamerGate per se, but on the platform and games women are writing. And it's that -- focusing the story on women writing games unique to gaming, where women make up 50% of gamers -- which comments on GamerGate. So the second accomplishment of her work is providing a deft understanding of Twine as a gaming platform. Why it's easy to use, how the ease-of-use opened up gaming to non-computer code trained developers. She doesn't write a tech manual on using Twine, but her descriptions of the games she's played, including many detailed scenes from Porpentine's games, illustrate how compelling and powerful Twine can be in creative hands. And third, her piece is about women who make games, and the kinds of games they are making, brought to life by her portrait of Porpentine.

Teasing out with writers how she structures her piece to reach these goals would be fun, but not necessary. Hudson's piece is an exercise in empathy, and for that alone it's worth assigning.

But it's also, in its way, a piece about the power of story. The games Hudson highlights, her portrait of Porpentine, reminded me of two works I love about the power of story. After reading about Porpentine, I couldn't help but think of this line from Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony: “I will tell you something about stories . . . They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.”

Hudson's description of Porpentine's games, and Porpentine's own words, also put me in mind of Adrienne Rich's "Diving into the Wreck," which to me has always been about the point where words end and feeling/sensing begins, words carrying one to the point of immersion and deeper knowing. So the developers Hudson writes, "explore personal perspectives and issues of identity, sexuality and trauma." And the diver in Rich's poem explores as well:

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.

Writing in Twine

Hudson's piece is a great read -- lots to think about in English and writing classes, technology and culture courses, and can stand as course reading. But Twine is also a writing space, Hudson explains, "Twine games, they’re essentially nothing but words and hyperlinks; imagine a digital “Choose Your Own Adventure” book, with a dash of retro text adventures like Zork."

And so her piece is also an invitation to writing in Twine, an encouragement, even if never explicitly made.

Twine would be a great platform for having students write in.

I just came from a session at NCTE where the panelists spoke of the transitions teachers make from being students in teaching programs to being teachers. They spoke of the fear and anxiety new teachers face, the doubts, the challenges. One speaker, Audrey Lensmire, described group she formed, a kind of teacher support group for 6 women in her program who were out teaching. It began because the women would appear at her office, shut the door, and share. The teacher ed program lacked a course or space where teachers could talk about the mental and emotional strains of teaching. Many of the women in Audrey's group also carried the burden of mental health issues they recognized in themselves or were being treated for. But until they got in the group and could talk about this, they carried that burden alone.

I am also thinking of Twine and Lensmire's work with the work Margaret Price did in her book, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life,  The book, to quote from a review by Stephanie Kerschbaum,  "reveals how individuals with what she terms mental disabilities—which she defines broadly to include not only intellectual and developmental disabilities, but also autism, learning disabilities, and psychosocial disabilities and mental illnesses—are persistently excluded, ignored, and targeted in higher education."

Playing Twine games composed by artists such as Porpentine can be a powerful empathetic experience, just as hearing Audrey Lensmire and her colleagues today was powerful. Or just as reading Margaret Price, Melanie Yergeau, Adrienne Rich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and today, Laura Hudson, is powerful.

I wonder: what would a game in Twine about teaching look like, if Audrey Lensmire's group were to write one, and how would the writing of the game change their view of  themselves as teachers? What would Melanie Yergeau, who does great work in digital media and disability studies, who writes compellingly and unflinchingly about autism, compose?

It's not that these people -- Melanie Yergeau, the women in Audrey Lensmire's group, Margaret Price -- need to nor have to use Twine. But their work looks at the kinds of issues that many Twine game developers explore, and so I cannot help wonder what composing in Twine might bring to those whom their work supports. They are all women scholars who, while they ground their work in theory and the relevant literature, give voice to what's often unsaid, through the personal stories that also permeate their work.

And it's not that the Twine pieces we ask students to write, or maybe write ourselves, have to explore the inner emotional and cognitive worlds Margaret, Audrey, and Melanie share explore and share. Twine simply looks to be an intriguing platform for digital composition, where many courses use games or explore their creation. Twine can be a tool where different writing assignments, different writers, will bring to it their own purposes, their own maps.

What David Wiley Gets Wrong About Textbook Publishers and How it Can Hurt OER's Growth

I just tweeted this observation in response to remarks David Wiley made in a quick interview with Steve Kolowich for the Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus Blog (a good read).

@stevekolowich @LumenLearning @opencontent #opened14 fwiw, 4 txtbook cos., the dbs & sending books matters far less than a good sales force.
— ncarbone (@ncarbone) November 20, 2014

Let me explain. But first . .

some caveats . . 

a reminder:
I work, happily and proudly, for the Bedford/St. Martin's imprint of Macmillan Education, a college textbook publisher. From my point of view, and I would say many of my colleagues, Open Educational Resources are a good thing; OER is no more the enemy of Macmillan Education than Pearson is. They are competitors, part of a changing industry. A professor who assigns an OER resource instead of ours is no different, from my point of view, than a professor assigning a Norton textbook instead of ours.

an acknowledgment:
OER content has improved. Early OER was disorganized, hard to find, not well supported, often poorly edited. I know because I wrote some of it and read a lot of it. It was more a collection of class handouts and assignments scattered hither and yon in varied OER projects or personal collections. But now the content and structures around OER are getting better, with crucial support coming from state legislative initiatives, foundations, and projects like David Wiley's Lumen Learning.

a belief:
I've contributed a bit to OER projects, advising on projects like Joe Moxley's Writing Commons, recommending Mike Palmquist's Writing Studio, reviewing free online tools like bibliography builders, doing peer review for an open access journal,  and regularly pointing faculty to free content I would find #worthassingning were I teaching. I think OER is a good thing, a valuable movement. It has helped motivate commercial textbook publishers to do more with e-commerce and e-books that help bring down costs. Competition does that.

How David Wiley Sees Textbook Companies Abilities to Reach Faculty -- Not Nicely, Not Accurately.

Steve Kolowich's discussion with David Wiley focused on the difficulty of making faculty aware of OER resources, knowing how to find them, choose them, and assign them. Wiley has this take on publishers' advantages:

Traditional textbook companies “have a budget to send out dead trees—big marketing budgets,” he said. “That’s what you’re really competing with: (a) with that marketing budget and (b) with a very, very lean-back experience for the faculty member where content just magically appears, for them, on their desk, and they say, ‘Oh, this table of contents looks good,’ or ‘I like the cover art on that one.’ It’s not generally a very proactive experience for many of them.” 

and

“I don’t think you can market OER the same way you can market textbooks traditionally,” he said. “The way textbooks get marketed is there are these huge collections of databases of which faculty members are teaching which courses at which institutions and how many sections and how many students are estimated to be in each section—tracking all of that data and figuring out which of those are worth mailing dead trees to, and which can we only do in email, and—just huge amounts of money. And it’s the kind of money you can only spend when you charge $250 for a textbook.”

I love the dead trees line. Textbooks, of course, are not dead trees, though some trees, or recycled products from earlier dead trees, do die in their making. Textbooks are pedagogical tools, whether printed or online.

Publishers do send exam copies. And publishers do try to keep track (Though not as efficiently as Wiley’s evocation might suggest.) of which professors teach which courses, how many students are enrolled those courses, which prior books, if any were used in those courses, and other things it really helps to know.

But publishers also try to be smart about which books to send; postage is a cost; exam copy books finding their way to the used book market is a cost; and professors peeved by getting too many unwanted and unasked for books is a cost.

But here’s the thing, sending books in the mail works when and if the book is likely to be wanted by the professor. Here’s the other thing, the real important thing that David Wiley gets wrong -- by omission: sending books matters, and data helps, but the strength college textbook publishers have is not in databases and a book sampling budget, but in people, two groups especially: the sales force who knock on faculty doors, and the editors who develop books with faculty input and by faculty authors.

People Matter More Than Data and Mailing Books

Look, good information matters a lot, and it can be recorded, stored, and turned into data. But to get good information, you need good people. A good publisher sales representative will learn which faculty teach which courses and how they like to teach the course. Good sales representatives filter pedagogical need, helping faculty find the book or digital media that will most likely be useful. A good sales rep is also an advocate, conveying to editors and publishers faculty feedback, requests, and critiques.

So if a professor gets a book on her desk and likes the table of contents and decides to order the book, very often it's because the process to that point -- the meeting with reps, looking at other books, talking to editors -- was very proactive. It's a myth to think that sending books and targeting faculty based on what's in a data base makes the difference. Faculty are more sophisticated than Wiley implies. The decision on which book to use, even if not made after consulting a sales rep or editor from a publishing company, is made on more than what's in the table of contents or what's on the cover.

Choosing what content to use in a course is hard when one is choosing something new. The decision to choose is proactive. The advantage publishers have, in their sales force and with their editors who work with customers, is that they can help faculty make those decisions by listening, filtering, and recommending. And, then, if the recommendation is chosen, supporting the choice with instructor teaching guides, and if a department uses the book or media for enough sections, campus teaching workshops, often author lead, that qualify, very often, as faculty professional development.

People Ain't Perfect, But Are, in Aggregate, Effective

Not all reps are good, not all editors responsive, not all faculty even interested in talking to a rep or editor. But the key thing textbook publishers have that OER projects do not have are people whose careers center around talking to faculty about teaching. And the best reps and editors, the really good ones, the ones faculty tend to enjoy spending time with, are those who care as deeply about teaching and learning as faculty do.

Textbook companies hire a lot of people who really do see their work as a mission to better teaching and learning. It may not seem that way if you've not met those folks, but they are essential to the sales a textbook company earns.

Not Seeing the Forest of People for the Dead Trees

So my thinking is that OER won't really take off if it learns that how professors choose books is not simply a marketing advantage marked by databases and mass mailings.

Until the OER movement has more people who can do the kind of work of helping faculty match their teaching needs to OER resources, and helping faculty adopt and use the resources well, it will be harder for OER to get the attention it may -- where the stuff is good -- deserve.

I am sure that there are good OER initiatives emerging that harness the enthusiasm of OER advocates, people who will promote and recommend OER. That's to be encouraged because without it, OER growth will take longer.

The best publicity for publishers is smart reps and editors talking to professors about creating, reviewing, and using their stuff.

It's about lots of people talking to lots of people lots of times.

Three Peer Review Tools at Glance, and Four Other Options to Boot

Here's an e-mail that I thought Gmail wouldn't let me send to two discussion lists I am on because it was flagged as spam.  I'm posted it here so I could send to the lists the link for this post instead. Turns out, the message did go through. Ah well. Since then, I've revised this a bit so it works better as a post.


When we (Bedford/St. Martin's, now an imprint of Macmillan Education) were ramping up our project with Eli (http://elireview.com), my colleague, Melissa Graham Meeks, did a quick review of the peer review tools landscape, including Calibrated Peer Review from UCLA (http://cpr.molsci.ucla.edu/Home.aspx)  and from U. of Pittsburgh, SWoRD (now called Perceptiv -- http://www.peerceptiv.com/)

Here're her notes on those:

  . . . Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) from The University of California and SWORD from the University of Pittsburg.   Calibrated Peer Review works by training writers to read instructor-supplied models before completing a peer review activity and a self-reflective scoring of their own drafts; the system produces a single score that accounts for student’s performance when calibrating to the models, when scoring drafts as a reviewer, and when self-evaluating (comparison of peers’ ratings with writer’s own rating). The appeal of CPR for instructors is the single-score derived without instructor intervention once the models and rubrics are set-up. Like CPR, SWORD generates a single score. SWORD uses an algorithm to assign a grade to students’ writing based on the feedback given (reviewer accuracy is accounted for) and students’ reviews (accuracy as indicated by other peers’ scoring and helpfulness as indicated by the writer are accounted for).  But, like Eli, SWORD allows instructors to design rating and comment prompts. SWORD also has an established library of prompts, which instructors can customize.

These comparisons overlook the fundamental difference in these tools: Whereas CPR and SWORD are [primarily framed] as summative  review tools with gradebooks, Eli takes a formative approach to a writing process that includes both review and revision: Eli’s patent-pending* approach to capturing review feedback and allowing writers to build a revision plan from that feedback distinguishes Eli from every other product on the market. Eli’s espoused purpose is to teach review and revision by giving instructors analytics that match their personal teaching goals and giving students a scaffolded process that mirrors expert writers’ behaviors; CPR and SWORD simplify the review and grade it.

SWoRD/Perceptiv:
SWoRD is a cloud-based reciprocal student peer-to-peer student assessment system.  Students upload their assignments into SWoRD, which automatically and anonymously assigns the document to from 3 to 6 of the student’s classmates.  SWoRD Peer is equally effective for presentations, videos, art projects, business plans, legal briefs, and any other task requiring formative feedback.

CPR:
CPR trains students to provide good feedback by having them rate 3 “source” texts first; reviewers must pass this calibration phase before they can rate 3 peers’ work and then they rate their own using the same criteria used to evaluate the source texts. The system compares reviewers’ scores to each other as well as the writers’ self-assessment to reviewer’ assessment; these two scores are combined with the writers’ performance during calibration to derive a single score.

Eli:
Eli Review is a software service that supports and reports student engagement. As they write, give feedback, and use feedback for revision, students learn from each other. Reports give students and instructors a clear window into the peer exchanges, making it easy to assess effort, identify exemplars, and motivate revision. A revision planning tool let's students choose which comments they'll work from in their revision, sort the comments in order of priority, make notes on how they'll use the comments. The revision plan can then be reviewed by the professor for further guidance. Reviewers get the most boost to their helpfulness rating when comments they write make it to revision plans.

__

The folks at Perceptiv have done a good bit of publishing -- http://www.peerceptiv.com/wordpress/research/publications/ . They developed their approach with NSF grants. (The creator of the program is a cognitive psychologist; the creator of CPR was a chemistry professor, I believe; both professors took peer review seriously and sought to use writing more fully in their teaching.) The research from Perceptiv is good and useful stuff and shows, contra MOOCs which didn't do it too well, that peer review, done well, can be a reliable means for feedback, especially if done early and often.

Eli Review's approach -- see http://elireview.com/development/ for a link to their first professional development piece -- draws directly from composition theory and seeks to turn writing classrooms into writing workshops (If you visit writing classrooms, you'd be surprised, or maybe not, at how much lecturing goes on.)

All three tools require some forethought and planning to use fully and richly. And that's the challenge in their use for most faculty, whose first instinct (understandably) begin digital teaching by taking their analog assignments and putting it on the Web. In the work Melissa did, CPR and SWoRD found purchase in WAC-focused science and social science courses, often larger course (though not exclusively).

Other tools for Peer Review - that are open to folks from other campuses to try . . .

1. Joe Moxley's Myreviewers:  http://myreviewers.com/
2. Mike Palmquist's WritingStudio:  http://writing.colostate.edu/
3. MARCA from UGA's Ron Balthazor & Christy Desmet:  http://calliopeinitiative.org/
4. Les Perlman and Irv Peckham might weigh in here, but I also imagine iMoat could be readily adapted to do peer review even though its original use was for writing placement: http://web.mit.edu/imoat/

--
* This is not a cliche. Eli did apply for a patent because they have a unique algorithm for deriving a reviewer's helpfulness rating based on how their review comments are rated, but more importantly, which of their comments make it to a writer's revision plan.

The Ineluctable Attraction of Grammar Quizzes and the Case for Reviewing Grammar Sites

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education's Lingua Franca Blog, Geoffrey Pullum has a piece on the decline of grammar education as measured by the quality of grammar advice and quizzes that proliferate on the Web. He opens with a telling observation:

Google fetches more than 300,000 hits for the term "grammar quiz"; yet if quizzes on chemistry were as uninformed as those on grammar, they would ask silly questions on peripheral topics (“Who is the Bunsen burner named after?”), and would make no reference to the periodic table, or atoms or molecules. The web’s grammar quizzes deal in minor pieces of puristic flotsam with roots in dimly understood 18th-century grammatical analysis.

People love doing grammar quizzes online. I don't know why. But the sites seem to multiply like weeds (Some weeds are prettier than some flowers, so nothing against weeds; I just prefer this cliche to 'breed like rabbits'.) and draw hits. Maybe the exercises are fun if you're doing them by choice?

I recently stopped working for a college textbook publisher, and so I know how hard it is to get a good grammar quiz written. Even with dedicated editors, authors who write grammar handbooks and sweat the details, experienced question writers, and professional proofreaders, some questions still don't come out quite right. The volume of questions needed, the difficulty of writing a question that isolates one issue, and the excruciating challenge of writing a sentence and then trying to come with three or four variations of it, so that there are good distractors, hints at why exercises lack quality.

So it's not surprising that a lot of the stuff on the Web that is free, open, and done by people who love the topic perhaps not wisely but too well can cause more problems than it solves. Pullum looks at one site in particular, Collins Dictionary -- http://games.collinsdictionary.com/GameGrammarQuiz/, and details the quiz's faults, before coming to this summary judgment:

And that’s all there is! Irrelevant, pointless, or misconceived questions on a minuscule range of topics, set by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. Not a single sensible question with a clearly correct answer on a noteworthy point of English grammar.

Now, I want to be careful. Grammar and the degree to which writing teachers address it is fraught ground.  So two things up front.

First, I make plenty of usage and occasional grammar errors in my own writing, especially one draft writing like this blog post. If you see something, say something (constructively, please), and I'll make an edit.

Second, when I teach sentence level revision, even when I teach the most novice of writers, I don't assign grammar quizzes in bulk. My primary concern as a writing teacher is not to teach grammar, but to give students enough understanding of grammar terms and guidelines to make good decisions as writers when they attend to their sentence level revisions during proofreading and copy editing stages. So I'm in the Grammar in Context, patterns of error, minimal marking camp by and large. I don't ignore this stuff, don't shy away from teaching or using grammar handbook language (independent clause, dependent clause, names of parts of speech, and other fun stuff) as needed in that context. For more on this, see the NCTE Guideline on Some Questions and Answers about Grammar at http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/qandaaboutgrammar.

That said, I do find grammar quizzes can be useful if used judiciously, as a part of sequence that takes students back to their writing. Briefly, the sequence is: discern an issue that remains after revising, experimenting with sentence combining, voice, and other fun stuff. Teach the writer how to look the issue up in a handbook, have the writer read what they need to in the handbook. Often, to help a writer process handbook advice, an exercise or quiz on the issue can help. Handbooks explain rules by showing incorrect and then correct sentences. Or incorrect sentences edited to become correct. Bedford/St. Martin's usability research on handbooks shows that writers look at those sentences first, and might, if they feel they need to, read about the issue. Sometimes they don't. At any rate, I find that having a student do an exercise or two in the form of a grammar quiz helps to reinforce the correct/incorrect lesson a bit. But I don't think even doing that is useful unless very soon after -- immediately is best -- the writer applies what they learned to their own writing, or in an editing workshop, classmates' writings. (See http://cbwshare.wordpress.com/2014/02/07/using-word-for-sentence-editing/ for a handout that helps with this.)

When I do the sequence above, I use the site and exercises associated with the handbook I'm using. I know more and more professors do not require a textbook publisher's handbook, but I've tried teaching without one, and found that even good resources, like Purdue's OWL, which I love for lots of reasons, is to hard to use for too many students compared to a well-designed, professionally edited -- and this is important, consistently authored -- handbook. Of course plenty of people do use a handbook and also use one of the many free exercise sites out there.

Assign Students to Review Grammar Advice and Exercise Sites

Whether as an instructor you use a handbook and its exercise site; or use a handbook and an alternative free exercise site; or don't use a handbook at all and ask students to use a free grammar advice and exercise site, given Pullum's observation about the quality of the sites out there, it's really important to only ask students to use sites that can be trusted. And no site should be taken for granted. Because free sites get a lot of traffic, which means a lot of writers, novice writers who may not know better, use them and learn from them. For example, a well regarded free site,

Capital Community College's Guide to Grammar and Writing, says it gets 30,000 hits a day.

At Bedford/St. Martin's, we have, for now, a free and open -- no code, no book purchase required to use it -- grammar exercise site called Exercise Central -- http://bedfordstmartins.com/exercisecentral/.   It's a site that gets traffic from all over the world, and from people who aren't using any of the books or media we sell. A majority of the accounts are unassociated with professors, that is, quizzes don't report to a professor grade book. They're simply being done by writers concerned about sentence level issues because I think a lot of writers like doing quizzes and/or think they'll help.

So it would be a good project, either as part of a proof reading class, a linguistics class, a tutor training course, a grammar course, a style course, or other course that touches on addressing sentence level issue and choices, would be to ask students in those courses to review some of these sites, especially since a lot of students seem to find them on their own and engage them on their own.  And not just the free sites that are put up by enthusiasts, or dedicated teachers such as Charles Darling, but also the stuff that textbook publishers provide, whether as open websites or behind a free code given with a new book, or, as increasingly is the case, products that are sold on their own.

Notes Toward Review Criteria

Criteria for a review, gleaned from Pullum's blog post, might include, but do not need to be limited by (so add you're own if you do this assignment) the following:

The puristic flotsam factor:  Does the quiz ground itself in the overly prescriptive bête noires of its author?

The confusion factor:  Is grammar used too broadly, with quiz questions under that name for issues of convention, spelling, punctuation, and style?

The instructional factor: Are there explanations -- either before a question is asked, in response to a quiz takers choice, or by reference to a print or online book? 

The accuracy factor: Not to be confused with bête noires of one's own, or even misnaming something as grammar that is not, but does the site get stuff fundamentally wrong in the ways Pullum illustrates?

The pedagogical factor:  Hello, are you reading, writer? I once visited a computer lab at a community college where students had to complete a battery of grammar exercises. This counted for one credit. Students could take the tests as often as they wanted. I watched students open a question -- not read the question nor the choices -- and just guess. If the answer was right, the noted the choice. If it was wrong, they noted the choice. When the question came around again, if they had gotten it right, the stayed with choice; if they had gotten it wrong, they tried a different choice. They were hacking the quizzes to get high scores.  Now, this behavior happened in part because of how the site was used, and how the lab was graded. But often teachers do in fact, where free sites support doing so, grade based on exercise activity. Does the site in use support the grading logic?

And most importantly . . .

The learning factor: A lot of sites are a lot of fun -- http://chompchomp.com -- is a hoot.  And a lot of sites (see Exercise Central) aim for friendly and engaging (you be the judge) but more traditional in tone and approach. Whichever the approach, is there a way to tell whether the use of the site teaches anything?

For example, grammar sites of the kind we're discussing don't teach proof-reading. And having students do a ton of exercises does not mean you'll suddenly see error free prose. You may see more constricted writing, shorter pieces, loss of details, less ambitious sentences as writers seek to avoid all the grammar issues they've been drilled on, but even then, writing teachers who have students do lots of exercises regularly observe, and sometimes complain, that final drafts still come in with errors.

So what do exercise sites teach? Are they primarily teaching grammar terms and standard edited English rules about punctuation and spelling? Is the test of effectiveness of a grammar exercise quiz site that ability of a student to get better scores on grammar exercises tests?

#worthassigning Feedback and Revision: The Key Components of Powerful Writing Pedagogy

Peer Feedback and Why it Matters for, and Leads to, Better Revision

Eli Review begins a new professional development series with a wonderfully smart piece called "Feedback and Revision: The Key Components of Powerful Writing Pedagogy" at http://elireview.com/content/td/feedback/. Eli Review, and this article, is powered by the minds and experience of expert teachers and accomplished composition researchers, Jeff Grabill and Bill Hart-Davidson, and a protege graduate student of theirs, Mike McLeod.

While their piece is pitched to faculty, and is excellent for graduate teaching associates taking a writing and teaching of writing course, or for learning center or writing center tutors, or to introduce powerful peer review and revision strategies to faculty via WAC programs or centers for teaching and learning, it is also the kind of thing I'd assign to students, even the most novice of them, as well.

The piece is structured as six part module:

1. Helpful Feedback Fuels Learning
2. Revision Leads to Better Writing
3. What Feedback Is and How to Teach It
4. Teaching Revision: The Basic Moves
5. But I don’t have time! 
6. Discussion, Resources, and Next Steps

The first five parts include short videos that punctuate the text, which is engagingly written, not overly jargoned, The piece is simply friendly and encouraging. It makes getting better revision seem possible, not insurmountable.

Though for teachers, with an implicit focus on classroom assignments and contexts, the insights on feedback apply to tutors, especially in writing and learning centers that might also do small group work, where tutors help coach writers to give feedback.  It's worth assigning to students because it makes accessible the research and theory behind asking students to do peer feedback, something they're often reluctant to do. By making clear the connection of feedback to revision, and revision to growth as a writer, and revision as more than just surface edits, the piece helps teach novice writers the value of the doing peer review, of giving it as well as getting it.

This kind of insight into the reasons for requiring peer feedback, for valuing it, for doing it early and often, helps students buy into doing it. Remember, it's not easy to learn to give good feedback, and it takes students time to learn how to use feedback and how to trust feedback from their peers. Eli Review, as a product does more than any product I know to help that learning, build that trust. But even if you're not using Eli, the insights and discussion will  help you get students to giving, listening to, and revising more fully from peer review. So it's worth assigning.

To help with assigning to students, to make this something you can better use either to introduce feedback and revision or as part of any course with writing¹, here are variations on Eli's questions for discussion that you can use with students:

1.     In the past, how has feedback helped you make decide what kinds of changes to make in your writing, learning, or other goals such as getting better at sport, or cooking or dancing or some other pursuit? How will feedback help you achieve the learning goals you set for this course?
2.     Have you ever given someone feedback, advice, help of any kind and then thought to yourself, hey, that's a good idea, I'll try it myself? If you give writing feedback to a classmate that's really useful to them, do you think it might also be useful to you, or based on something that was useful to you?
3.     Writing is part of this course, and our goal in revising based on peer feedback is in part to teach you all how to get and give feedback on your own. What role does writing play in other courses you have, and how might feedback play a role in learning in those courses?
4.     How might your learning about writing change, learning about yourself as a writer, if you had data on the usefulness of the feedback you gave, a record of what feedback you found useful, and reflective revision plans that show how you made used the feedback you received? 

1.  If you're teaching a first year writing course based on Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle's Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning "First-Year Composition" as "Introduction to Writing Studies" , the Eli piece is useful for introducing some of the research and practices behind peer review and revision. See also Doug's and Liz's Writing About Writing.