English Faculty Publications and Presentations

African American Sonnets: Voicing Justice and Personal Dignity

Jeffrey Westover — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:00:52 PST

There is no monolithic blackness nor a single tradition of sonnet writing among black writers. Elizabeth Alexander sums up this idea in the second stanza of her 24-line poem "Today's News": "I didn't want to write a poem that said 'blackness / is,' because we know better than anyone / that we are not one or ten or ten thousand things" (I. 14 - 16). To keep Alexander's point in mind, in what follows I focus primarily on political protest and personal dignity in sonnets by twentieth-century African American poets. While my approach turns from the tradition of the love sonnet to the subsidiary tradition of the political sonnet, one could just as easily address the way black poets since the Harlem Renaissance have adapted the sonnet to write about love. My choice is simply a pragmatic one, based on the central fact of racism and the historic response of black writers to it.

Sentiment and Style

Tara Penry — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:37:44 PST

Like Hallmark cards and Disney movies in our own day, sentimental cultural texts abounded in America during the nineteenth century. From temperance tracts to melodramas, deathbed daguerrtypes to tombstone etchings, the genres of sentimental discourse reached well beyond the sphere of the literary. Yet in verse, prose sketches, novels, and other established literary genres of the nineteenth century, sentimentalism left clear traces, though it produced no theorist -- like realism's Howells or modernism's Pound -- to analyze, articulate, and legitimize for posterity the motives and methods of sentimental literary expression. This analytic and theoretical work has been left to latter-day critics, who use the term "sentimental" to designate a body of texts and cultural practices that privileged emotional relationships and rhetoric, especially relations and rhetorics of sympathy that purport to redeem or console.

On the Interaction of Variation and Exceptionality in Modern Hebrew Spirantization

Michal Temkin Martinez — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:11:24 PST

Modern Hebrew (MH) spirantization is a variable phenomenon with many exceptions. Adam (2002) claims that the variation is driven by the exceptions and concludes that spirantization is changing, yielding what is currently a variable grammar, with expected and variant forms in free variation, and moving toward one with no alternation. This paper reports the results of an acceptability rating task showing that, in alternating segments, the expected form is still rated as more acceptable than that variant forms, and that which variant surfaces (stop or fricative) depend on its underlying root position. Additionally, participants indicate that some variation is acceptable in exceptional segments. This suggests that, far from moving towards non-alternation, variation and exceptionality affect each other, reducing alternation in alternating segments and alternations in exceptional segments. MH has three stop/fricative pairs that participate in spirantization- [p]/[f], [b]/[v], and [k]/[ χ]- with the fricatives surfacing in post-vocalic position and stops occurring elsewhere. MH spirantization is complicated by the presence of both exceptions and variation. Exceptions are cases in which [p], [b], and [k] do not alternate with their fricative counterpats and vice versa, such that stops may surface in post-vocalic and fricatives in non-post-vocalic position. There is also variation in MH spirantization (Adam 2002, Temkin Martínez 2008), with segments surfacing as stops were fricatives are expected and as fricatives where stops are predicted.

The Literate West of Nineteenth-Century Periodicals

Tara Penry — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:23:18 PST

Asked to picture a western scene, most literate Americans in the nineteenth century, as today, would describe an outdoor landscape, with or without people in it. Few would conjure up a picture of a young woman writing by lamplight at her home, a girl searching her father's pockets for a book from the circulating library, a married couple reading letters in their one-room cabin, or a printer leaning over his typecase. Yet these images, if not uniquely western, belonged to the nineteenth-century West as much as did sublime mountainscapes, buckskinned hunters, or battle scenes between Plains Indians and the US army. In the popular imagination, literacy was crucial to eastern sentiment - allowing colonists to organize themselves with documents like the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, and the US Constitution - but unimportant to a region of armed conflict, oral, negotiation, lynching, and squatters' rights.

On the Write Track: 21 Strategies to Prepare Clear & Accurate Documentation

Roger Munger — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:32:54 PST

Powerful Presentations: PowerPoint Tips to Help You Deliver Understandable, Memorable Presentations

Roger Munger — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:31:30 PST

Information Design: Strategies to Make Your Proposal Reader Friendly

Roger Munger — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:29:42 PST

Designed to Succeed: Strategies for Building an Effective Proposal Management Internship Program

Roger Munger — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:28:19 PST

Green Writing Curriculum: Showing Your Students How to Make a Difference

Roger Munger — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:25:56 PST

A growing group of green writers are persuading people to change their thinking and their behaviors for the benefit of our planet and its inhabitants. Adding a green writing assignment, unit, or course to your curriculum, the author argues, is an excellent strategy for showing students how their writing can make a difference in their community. This article discusses the design of a green writing course and offers suggestions for incorporating a green writing component in your discipline-specific courses.

Temporal Analysis: A Primer Exemplified by a Case from Prehospital Care

C. Geisler et al. — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:23:24 PST

Williams and the Grotesque

Jacqueline O'Connor et al. — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 15:01:00 PST

Editor’s Note: The following panel was transcribed directly from tapes made at the 2005 Tennessee Williams Scholars’ Conference.

Coleridge's American Revival

Samantha Harvey — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 13:07:09 PDT

Writing White Papers in High-Tech Industries: Perspectives from the Field

Russell Willerton — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 10:02:16 PDT

White papers are increasingly prevalent in the high-tech industries where many technical communicators work, yet these documents have received relatively little discussion in technical communication forums. Survey results indicate that some technical communicators do write white papers, and that they believe white papers deserve more attention. To understand what white papers are and how they are used, I interviewed 10 practicing technical communicators who write white papers as part of their work. Their comments provide an overview of white paper audiences, the purposes for which white papers are written, the content of typical white papers, the people and processes involved in creating white papers, and the ways white papers are evaluated.

Big Stuff at the Middle Level: The Real World, Real Reading, and Right Action

Jeffrey D. Wilhelm — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 09:57:15 PDT

FINALE! CONCLUSION! Phantasmagoric display of FIREWORKS! Well, sorry...Since this isn't hypertext or video, I can't truly display my students' pyrotechnical virtuosity on these pages. In this book's final chapter, what I can do is to examine nonfiction use in the middle school classroom relative to big issues. In fact, let's go right after this "BIG STUFF" as my student Sean affectionately called it. After all, school should be about Big Stuff, and so should our reading. To get us started, here are some Big Questions that I think we need to ask:

What should middle school kids (and all others) be learning in school, and for what purposes?
How can we tech middle level students in powerful ways that are consistent with these purposes?
How does the classroom use of nonfiction fit into all this?

Pals Forever: Me, Bobby Fisher and the Hardy Boys

Jeffrey D. Wilhelm — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 09:53:31 PDT

My old middle school pal Bobby Fisher e-mailed me the other day. I hadn't heard from him in probably thirty years. We were in Webelos and Boy Scouts together; played on the same Little League team (morbidly enough, the Burmeister Funeral Home Bears); and shared many adventures like bike trips, building forts, and playing middle school sports. He'd found a script about a Hardy Boys adventure that we had written and performed in fifth grade as a kind of dress-up book report. Then he'd found my contact information on the Internet and gotten in touch.

Making it Matter Through the Power of Inquiry

Jeffrey D. Wilhelm et al. — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 09:52:05 PDT

Given all the findings about how boys underachieve in all areas of literacy (see Smith and Wilhelm 2002 for a review), and how little the boys we studied read, we were surprised to find in our "Reading Don't Fix No Chevys" study that all of our young male informants (from sixth through twelfth grade) engaged intensely and with great enjoyment in all kinds of literate activity. What motivated that activity were the conditions of flow experiences articulated by Csikszentmihayli (1990). When the conditions of flow were present, the boys embraced literated activities. When the conditions were absent (as was the case in most of their school-based activities), the boys rejected literate activity.

Thoughts on the Twenty-First Century Classroom

Jeffrey D. Wilhelm — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 09:49:28 PDT

Boys and Literacy: Complexity and Multiplicity

Michael W. Smith et al. — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 09:48:12 PDT

In this chapter we provide reviews both of research that documents the fact that boys underperform girls on measures of reading and writing and of critiques of that research that question its significance. We go on to consider two fundamentally different explanations for the difference in boys' and girls' test scores, one rooted in biology and the other in social constructivism. We also examine two kinds of responses to the disparity: those that focus on individual interest and those that focus on situational interest. We provide evidence that boys have a wide range of diverse interests and consequently argue that attempts to reform curricula rooted in providing texts that boys like may miss the mark by assuming that educators can know in advance what books will attract male students. Consequently, we contend that approaches focusing on developing instructional contexts that are characterized by ample instruction, appropriate challenges, clear goals, and feedback, demonstrated utility in the here and now, and social connections are more promising. We conclude with a consideration of research on how young men read and talk about texts and argue that stereotyped views of masculinity are problematic in thinking about curriculum or classroom interactions.

The Role Visualization Strategies Play in Struggling Readers’ Engagement, Comprehension and Response to Text, or “Wait, You Mean it’s Supposed to Make Sense Every Time You Read?”

Mary Massie et al. — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 09:46:05 PDT

Knowing and Becoming: Teaching and Reading Literature as a Process of Transformation

Jeffrey D. Wilhelm — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 09:34:12 PDT