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Category Archives: Writing
Moving from the Middle: The Definition of Meaning
Last week I reflected on an article I am writing about an influential 1994 conference on the sciences of “Complexity.” I am making a connection between this conference and the way we understand, enact, and teach writing. I am using … Continue reading
It’s Hard to Run in High Altitudes and Other Reflections on Writing with Mindfulness
I’m writing this post above the clouds, on route home to NYC after three days in Estes Park, Colorado for the AEPL conference, “Inviting the Edge: Mindfulness in the Writing Classroom and Beyond.” Here I respond to the question any … Continue reading
Writers Block
Last year, in the name of progress, I stopped recycling. No more retooling old writing material for new purposes. Sustainability be damned; I would forgo one of the key lessons of graduate school and go it alone: make it new, … Continue reading
Posted in What is Composition Studies?, Writing
Tagged Jane Bennett, Randall Collins, readers block, Steven Johnson, writers block
2 Comments
Writer’s Block and this Unbelievable Coffee Shop
The problem of writing: in order to designate something exactly, an exact expressions are utterly unavoidable. No at all because it is a necessary step, or because one can only advance by approximation; on the contrary, it is the exact … Continue reading
Like Being at an Academic Conference, This Post is All Over the Place
I am trying to figure out the meaning behind what could be the most significant ritual of academic life: the conference. I’m mostly referring to the big national conferences, like the MLA or the CCCC but regional conventions work for this cultural-rhetorical … Continue reading
Beginning Again and the End of Teaching
What is teaching? Is it conversation, community, correctness, conversion? Does it begin and end with the classroom, with students, with knowledge? In my parochial vision, I think of teaching in terms of the Humanities, a project that, in one scholar’s … Continue reading
May
Psalms for David He exists across an ocean of memory. It is deep, almost frozen, and swimming with monsters. Beowulf, on a dare, once swam across an icy sea in his suit of mail. There were sea beasts–“fiend-corpses“–that tried … Continue reading
Posted in Writing
Comments Off on May
Tactics, Topics, Threes
Five pages by 3pm. Six hours on Tuesday. Half a section before lunch. These are proclamations towards progress, strategies to start and finish, ways to get it, writing, done. I remember when I first used these heuristics. In graduate school, … Continue reading
