Monday, June 16, 2014

An Article to Bring to the Attention of ENGL 3323 Students

During my morning reading, I came across Alex Malley's 16 June 2014 LinkedIn piece "Stop Sending out Boring Resumes." In it, Malley offers a few recommendations for reconsideration of how to put together an effective resume. Rethinking the conception of a resume, particularly through a literary metaphor, and having other people review the work before sending it off, are prominent among the suggestions, and they strike the eye as being good ones to follow.

Since one of the prescribed assignments for ENGL 3323 at Oklahoma State University is a job packet, including a resume, I thought the article relevant. For that reason, I tag it here for consideration.

Saturday, June 7, 2014

Some Articles, Briefly

Not all of the work I do is in the service of my academic career; a fair bit of it anymore is in freelance writing, working for clients to produce the texts they need. It has proven illuminating thus far, giving me practice in writing quickly and efficiently in a variety of styles and on a variety of subjects. From time to time, it also offers me things that I think might be useful in my teaching endeavors, such as the two articles linked and briefly discussed below.

Gretchen Rubin's 9 October 2013 article "Resentful? Overworked? Face These Painful Facts about Shared Work," posted to The Happiness Project, lays out a number of problems with group projects in the workplace. My own experience and that reported to me by students in the past tells me that the same problems apply to work on such classroom endeavors as the ENGL 3323 group assignments: Internal Proposal and External Analytical Report. Rubin's article might be a useful bit from which to base discussion leading up to the collaborative project. It also offers some useful material for discussion of document design and writing style.

Emily Shepard's 6 December 2013 article, "Films, Media, and Politics: Their Influence on the Devaluation of Women's Bodies," posted to BCRW Blog, investigates in brief how the three noted agents conduce to the way in which women are forced to be their bodies and how those bodies are then rendered of lesser importance. It also moves toward the kind of undergraduate research that is increasingly well regarded among scholars of college composition, as I found when I attended CCCC earlier this year. And it further works as an entry into the kind of online scholarship advocated by Kathleen Fitzpatrick in the 2011 issue of Profession. It might therefore be useful as an introductory example for research papers in ENGL 1213 and ENGL 2413 (although it is far too brief to be a full model for either) or as an example of a revised sort of Creative/Electronic-Media Project for ENGL 3323. (I am not happy with the offerings I have on the course website as of this writing; I will be revising the project information for the Fall 2014 term.)

I will doubtlessly encounter other pieces that may be of interest. If and when I do, I may well post about them to this blog. How many and how often remain to be seen.

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Initial Comments for the Fall 2014 Term at Oklahoma State University

I have at last received my teaching schedule for the Fall 2014 term at Oklahoma State University. It is as follows:

The schedule is later in the day than I am used to having, and I do not know how matters will be different with the shift. What I will do with my required office hours, I do not yet know, but I will figure out an approach to take.

Over the next few weeks, I will be updating my course pages with information about major assignments, including the syllabus and course calendar for each. Announcements of changes will likely appear on this blog as the changes are made.