It’s not a problem I can solve, but it’s a reality I can acknowledge, a paradigm through which I can understand my actions.

Regardless of your discipline, there’s a good chance that at some point you will be responsible for teaching or grading writing in some shape or form.

What if we rode harder onthe performative, as Barad urges, seeing it as“material enactments that contribute to, andare a part of, the phenomena we describe.”19This ontological shift asks us to situate thehuman more complexly in the material world, and seek out fresh understandings ofhow it manifests in who we are and what we do.

ee it instead as extended out and threadedthrough material objects and practices

I will complicate both narratives, showing that each depends on earlier devel-opments.

Seneca

CORRESPONDENCE

The letter one sends in order to help one’s correspondent —advise him, exhort him, admonish him, console him— constitutes for the writer a kind of training: something like soldiers in peacetime practicing the manual of arms, the opinions that one gives to others in a pressing situation are a way of preparing oneself for a similar eventuality.

notebooks serving as memory aids. Their use as books of life, as guides for conduct

writing about oneself appears clearly in its relationship of complementarity with reclusion

You don't need complex sentences to express complex ideas. When specialists in some abstruse topic talk to one another about ideas in their field, they don't use sentences any more complex than they do when talking about what to have for lunch. They use different words, certainly. But even those they use no more than necessary. And in my experience, the harder the subject, the more informally experts speak. Partly, I think, because they have less to prove, and partly because the harder the ideas you're talking about, the less you can afford to let language get in the way.

It seems to be hard for most people to write in spoken language. So perhaps the best solution is to write your first draft the way you usually would, then afterward look at each sentence and ask "Is this the way I'd say this if I were talking to a friend?" If it isn't, imagine what you would say, and use that instead. After a while this filter will start to operate as you write. When you write something you wouldn't say, you'll hear the clank as it hits the page.Before I publish a new essay, I read it out loud and fix everything that doesn't sound like conversation. I even fix bits that are phonetically awkward; I don't know if that's necessary, but it doesn't cost much.

If you simply manage to write in spoken language, you'll be ahead of 95% of writers. And it's so easy to do: just don't let a sentence through unless it's the way you'd say it to a friend.

As with all of the arts, literature was once upon a time entirely made possible through patrons. This goes at least as far back as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. They were able to write because their patrons provided them financial support. And this was of course true of all of the other arts. Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, however, literature and commerce got mixed.

like you kind of hide yourself in school but when you’re outside of school, it’s like you open yourself up. You unfold everything.

by 2009, the rate for men was 61% higher than the rate for women.

TBI-related death rates decreased from 2001 to 2010 from 5.2 to 4.3 deaths per 100,000 children aged four and younger, from 3.2 to 1.9 deaths per 100,000 adolescents aged five to 14, from 23.4 to 15.6 deaths per 100,000 individuals aged 15 to 24, and from 17.6 to 14.6 deaths per 100,000 adults aged 25 to 44.

increased in individuals 65 years and older.

TBI-related emergency department visits increased from a rate in 2001 of 420.6 per 100,000 people to 715.7 per 100,000 people in 2010. TBI-related hospitalizations increased from 2001 to 2010 from 82.7 per 100,000 people to 92.7 per 100,000 people. TBI-related deaths decreased from 2001 to 2010 from a rate of 18.5 deaths per 100,000 people to 17.1 deaths per 100,000 people.

Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? Your next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter? Your next ball of fact. You select what goes in and you decide what stays out. At base you have only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in—if not, it stays out. That’s a crude way to assess things, but it’s all you’ve got. Forget market research. Never market-research your writing. Write on subjects in which you have enough interest on your own to see you through all the stops, starts, hesitations, and other impediments along the way.

(cf. Neal et al. 2012; Painter et al. 2002; Hearn et al. 1998).

Unfortunately, David Allen’s technique cannot simply be transferred to the task of insightful writing. The first reason is that GTD relies on clearly defined objectives, whereas insight cannot be predetermined by definition.

regularly check if our tasks still fit into the bigger picture

breaking down the amorphous task of “writing a paper” into small and clearly separated tasks

Planners are also unlikely to continue with their studies after they finish their examinations. They are rather glad it is over. Experts, on the other hand, would not even consider voluntarily giving up what has already proved to be rewarding and fun:

“One cannot think without writing.”

speculative

speculative writing

failings of the person here presenting them

In all these cases, the notion of temporal structuring through ongoing practices helps us understand and bridge the temporal oppositions underlying the research litera­ture. We tum now to an empirical example to demonstrate how this perspective can offer a new understanding of the temporal conditions and consequences of organizational life.

While adopting one side or the other of this dichotomy may offer re­searchers analytic advantages in their temporal studies of organizations, difficulties arise when these positions are treated-not as conceptual tools-but as inherent prop­erties of time. Focusing on one side or the other misses seeing how temporal structures emerge from and are em­bedded in the varied and ongoing social practices of peo­ple in different communities and historical periods, and at the same time how such temporal structures powerfully shape those practices in turn. By focusing on what or­ganizational members actually do, our practice-based per­spective on temporal structuring may offer new insights into how people construct and reconstruct the temporal conditions that shape their lives.

Our purpose in this paper is to develop the basic out­lines of an alternative perspective on time in organiza­tions that is centered on people's recurrent practices that shape (and are shaped by) a set of temporal structures. We see this emphasis on human practices (as distinct from external force or subjective construction) as bridg­ing the current opposition between objective and subjec­tive conceptualizations of time, and thus as making pos­sible a new understanding of the temporal conditions and consequences of organizational life. By grounding our perspective in the dynamic capacities of human agency we believe we gain unique insights into the creation, use, and influence of time in organizations.

In this paper we explicitly integrate the notion of social practices from this literature with that of enacted struc­tures drawn from the theory of structuration (Giddens 1984 ), arguing that the combination can be valuable for the study of organizations in general and of time in or­ganizations in particular. With respect to the latter, we have obtained important insights into how temporality is both produced in situated practices and reproduced through the influence of institutionalized norms.

We contribute to this discussion within organizational re­search by offering an alternative third view-that time is experienced in organizational life through a process of temporal structuring that characterizes people's everyday engagement in the world. As part of this engagement, people produce and reproduce what can be seen to be temporal structures to guide, orient, and coordinate their ongoing activities.

researchers explore the embodied. embedded. and mate­rial aspects of human agency in constituting particular social orders (Hutchins 1995, Lave 1988, Suchman 1987).

You don't understand: You a jazz musician by default. And that just opened me up.

And when you like a sound or an instrumental, you want to approach it the right way. So you sit on it.

It starts there first, before I even heard any type of melody or lyric. That's just DNA

tossing white hair like a Pentateuchal prophet.

vaulting mode.

feeling squeezed in the form

eliminating apocrypha

That is no way to start a writing project, let me tell you. You begin with a subject, gather material, and work your way to structure from there. You pile up volumes of notes and then figure out what you are going to do with them, not the other way around

the busty Swede they expected turned into a short and bearded man.

the busty Swede

they didn’t give sex.

They massaged everything from college football players to arthritic ancients

We’re asking faculty to play “Icky Thump” when they haven’t mastered “Love Me Do.” We’re asking them to knit complex cables when they haven’t even combined knits and purls. We’re asking them to bomb down a black diamond run when they haven’t figured out how to stay upright on the green run.

d.develop the topic with facts, definitions, and details;

Except that if the written assessment is such that it can be graded accurately by software, that’s probably not very good assessment. If what’s important are the facts and key concepts, won’t multiple-choice do?

Automated grading is supposed to “free” the instructor for other tasks, except there is no more important task.

"The idea is bananas, as far as I'm concerned," says Kelly Henderson, an English teacher at Newton South High School just outside Boston. "An art form, a form of expression being evaluated by an algorithm is patently ridiculous."

nothingness haunts the text

Digital Writing

Some characters were given simplified glyphs, called shinjitai (新字体). Many variant forms of characters and obscure alternatives for common characters were officially discouraged.

His parents had abandoned their property in the Cuban province of Camagüey to become janitors in Los Angeles, to give their three children a new country.

To facilitate and promote the writing, publishing, and reading of literature in electronic media.

Barthesian

Chiang: There’s a passage in Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life where she’s telling her neighbor that she hates writing and would rather do anything else, and her neighbor says, “That’s like a guy who works in a factory all day, and hates it.” Writing is so difficult for me that I have often wondered whether I’m actually suited for it, and I’ve had experiences with the publishing industry that made me quit writing for years. But I keep coming back to it because, I suppose, writing is an essential part of who I am. As for advice to slow writers, I’d say that writing is not a race. This isn’t a situation where only the most prolific writers get an audience; publish your story when you’re ready, and it will find readers.

After winning the Forward prize, Vuong told the Guardian that he suspected dyslexia runs in his family, but felt it had positively affected his writing: “I think perhaps the disability helped me a bit, because I write very slowly and see words as objects. I’m always trying to look for words inside words. It’s so beautiful to me that the word laughter is inside slaughter.”

Vuong, who now lives in Massachusetts and works as an assistant professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, only gained a taste for poetry in his 20s

Born in Saigon, Vuong spent a year in a refugee camp as a baby and migrated to America when he was two years old, where he was raised by his mother, grandmother and aunt. Two aspects of Vuong’s life – his sexuality and the absence of his father – recur in his work

The sense of loss which speech inflicts is recuperated and “worked through” by writing.

Wm Jones

the ever-changing digital landscape

Low Stakes

Amazon.com : You're annotated out there. Gibson: Yeah it's sort of like there's this nebulous extended text.

Well, I worried about that. I sometimes don't like to confess how little I know about these things when I start them, but I'm starting to admit to myself that the less I know at the beginning probably the better it's going to go.

—Writing Lab

Emden, C. (1998). Establishing a ‘track record’: Research productivity and nursing academe.Australian Journal of Advanced Nursing,16(1), 29–33

These posts are our travel stories.

Indeed, as noted earlier, one well-known thought-enhancement technology is written language itself and perhaps use of language more generally. As Levy writes, “speech does not merely allow us to articulate thoughts that we would have had in any case. Instead, it allows us to externalize our thoughts and thereby treat them as objects for contemplation and manipulation. Externalized thoughts can be worked over, criticized, and improved.”21:38-39

Seven of the ‘arts’ students described a process of this sort, compared with only twoof the ‘science’ students. There was, however, another approach to revision, involvingonly one revision cycle. This was mentioned by five interviewees, four of whom werefrom ‘science’ backgrounds. Um ... rewriting? No. I can probably, once I’ve got the, I’ve got the feel of it, it probablytakes me a couple of hours to write, and then, shuffling stuff around, ... it’ll probably takeme, I don’t know, a morning or something to do a fair draft of it. (Ewan, 2002, science)Only one ‘arts’ student mentioned using a single revision cycle, and he had originallygraduated in science before starting his OU arts study

Although some ‘science’ students reported similar problems, it was only ‘science’students who talked in terms of ‘padding out’ their answers in order to reach therequired length: I’m more this, get all the facts down, yes it’s only three hundred words, but that’s it in anutshell. And it’s a lot harder then to flower it up to say either five hundred words or athousand words. (Larry, 2002, science)I’m not used to waffling I think that’s the problem. A lot of the art students say oh I’vewritten too much, ... and I have the opposite problem I kind of write down what Ithink the answer’s and I’ve only got like 200 words and I have to pad it out. (Ruth,2003, science)The tendency for some ‘science’ students to write relatively short essays may berelated to their conceptions of knowledge. If it is seen as factual, then once the factshave been stated, the student might see the task as complete; as Larry said, ‘that’s itin a nutshell’. If knowledge is relativistic, however, then competing views are equallyworthy of consideration and greater elaboration is needed to make a case

While the ‘arts’ students frequently described a strug-gle to make their essay ‘flow’, the ‘science’ students did not talk about textual struc-ture as problematic

‘However’ is a textual theme with the function of indicating the relationship of theclause to the preceding text; ‘it is apparent’ is an interpersonal theme with the func-tion of indicating the writer’s stance towards the proposition that follows; ‘during thesecond half of the sixteenth century’ is an experiential theme providing informationabout circumstances surrounding the event or situation. In the discussion that followsI refer to these three types of non-subject theme as orienting themes. Unlike thesubject, none of them is grammatically compulsory and their use reflects a choicemade by the writer about how to frame the proposition presented within the clausecomplex.These orienting themes were consistently more common in the ‘arts’ students’essays, and the difference between the two groups was highly significant (t= 2.865,p < 0.006). ‘Arts’ students used on average 31.50 textual and 15.14 interpersonalelements in every 100 clause complexes, compared to 24.28 textual and 9.75 inter-personal elements for the ‘science’ group. They also tended to use more clausecomplexes containing an experiential orienting theme, although this difference wasnot significant. Since essays which used more orienting themes were also significantlymore likely to receive a higher mark (t= 2.336, p< 0.023), it is clearly worth investi-gating further the differing ways in which these were deployed by ‘arts’ and ‘science’students.

Such tutor comments suggest that ‘science’ students are less ready to criticallyevaluate source material, a feature that can be related to the tendency already notedin their writing to downplay the role of human interpretation in the construction ofknowledge

Elizabeth, as we have seen, understands marriage as progressive, parallel to and inextricable from internal growth; Charlotte, by contrast, regards her internal narrative of growth and her social life as a single and then married woman as two separate strands: people are as likely to grow apart as grow together

Research and background

PhD students: How do you keep your notes while reading scientific papers?

The magic is in you. “I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing.”

Aiding the Writing-Stalled Professor

Focusing on the fundamentals of grammar is one approach to teaching writing.

For design this is a crucial factor, and a profound change. The designer of such ‘pages’ / sites is no longer the ‘author’ of an authoritative text, but is a provider of material arranged in relation to the assumed characteristics of the imagined audience. The power of the designer is to assemble materials which can become ‘information’ for the visitor, in arrangements which might correspond to the interests of the visitor. For the visitor however “Information is material which is selected by individuals to be transformed by them into knowledge to solve a problem in their life world” (Boeck, 2002)

Within a couple of decades Strunk was a full professor of English, and decided to privately publish a little book called The Elements of Style (1918).

simultaneous

learns to talk

technology of writing

joy

she cannot fail to make of it the chaosmos of the "personal" -in her pronouns, her nouns, and her clique of referents.

matrix

ository

Not only were his subjects idiosyncratic, but his style was poetic, aphoristic, dra~atic, and colorful.

ut Rheloric, being the art of co1111111111icatio11 by language, implies the pres-ence, in fact or in imagination, of at least two persons,-thc speaker or the writer, and the per-son spoken 10 or written to

"with my diploma wri11e11 m, my lwck!"

some wrilers have spoken or Rhetoric us 1he Art of Compoi.itio

Speaking are of course applicable equally to Writing,

After all, Archimedes was in need of nothing more than a fixed point to raise the world. Einstein equipped his observers with only a rod and a stopwatch: Why would we require heavier equipment to creep through the dark tiny conduits traced by blind ants?

In this sense it has a role very close to that of confession to the director, about which John Cassian will say, in keeping with Evagrian spirituality, that it must reveal, without exception, all the impulses of the soul (omnes cogitationes)

Itdidnotsimplytrain,itcreated,thepublicperson

explicate

“You have to realize that people can change in a lot of different ways,” she explained, “especially when they are far away from home and they are asked to make some difficult choices and do hard things.”

author.

online realms

Rather than write a story true to the character or true to his situation, I wrote a puzzle piece to fill in negative space that didn’t need filling in. I don’t know WHAT WE GOT out of it in the end, and in terms of practical advice, if I can’t answer WHAT DO WE GET out of a story, then I don’t have a story.

less is more in a pitch. Imagine your editor on their most busiest day, on a day when all of their projects are seemingly on fire and due at the printer by lunch time, and then imagine that YOUR email is the one that comes in their inbox. A page. TWO pages at the most for a pitch. Unless they tell you otherwise.]

Continuity – the strict adherence of prior texts and their treatment as sacrosanct records – paralyzes comics all too often. It punishes new readers by their virtue of being new. It rewards trivia over opening up the world and blazing new trails. It cuts the pie into smaller pieces instead of making the pie bigger. It builds barriers and creates gatekeepers. And it’s really hard to write well.

professional outgrowths of that old blogging school

at the end of the day, all we’re doing here is soapboxing into a robot.

Historically, authorship implied writing and this associ-ation with the act of writing remains the core of the standardmodel of authorship acknowledgment. H

In biomedicine, authorship has irrevocably shed some ofits craft associations:

The standard model accepts that authorship is linkedinextricably to writing. But writing is no longer a necessarycondition of coauthorship in certain cases. Thus, an alter-native to authorship is required to accommodate the manyother contributions that shape the published byproducts ofcollaborative activity, be they research reports, journal ar-ticles, conference papers, or technical reports. C

Rennie’s and Flanagin’s (1994, p. 469) beguilingly simplequestion: “. . . how many people can wield one pen?” S

he standard model of scholarly publishing, inwhich it is assumed that a work is written by an author, t

o some extent, authorship has becomea collective activity, with numerous coauthors competingfor the byline, some of whom may not have written, strictlyspeaking, a single word of the associated work (McDonald,1995; Kassirer & Angell, 1991).

etter writing continued as a medium for theinformal exchange of information and for requesting fellowscientists to replicate experiments (Manten, 1980, p. 8).

writing behaviour. When do you write best? What parts of a paper do you find easiest/hardest to write? What are your biggest stumbling blocks? Perfectionism? Fear of criticism? What are the things that you’re best at? Putting together the Methods section? Creating understandable plots and tables? 

writing across the curriculum, critical thinking, and active learning, Bean (2011)

start with the basic premise: respecting your reader’s time. Can they find the story somewhere else, and if yes, then WHY should they read you? What makes what you want to publish so special? Remember, readers have a million choices, to find information. They are better equipped than you. So why should they come to you? What is it that you got that others don’t?

One doesn’t need to be a pundit, one needs to read more, and have the ability to learn from every conversation.

write posts that are more informed, more insightful, and more respectful of the readers.

One thing I held on to during fedwiki was that it wasn’t intended to be wikipedia, and to me that meant it wasn’t intended to produce articles so much as to sustain and connect ideas in formation that might find their way into article-like things on other platforms.

would like to encourage them to be as creative and inventive as possible. But the reality is that the academy is incredibly conserva tive .

If you are not pushing the envelope, why write?

Works that I have labeled not-writing are regu larly reviewed positively in scholarly journals

The Lead In: What context is needed to understand the problem space? Statement of Originality: What is a gap in our knowledge of this area? Justification: What is a tangible benefit of filling this gap?

Each year a person hears four or five anecdotes that are very good, precisely because they’ve been worked on. Because it’s wrong to suppose that the fact that they’re anonymous means they haven’t been worked on. On the contrary, I think fairy tales, legends, even the offcolor jokes one hears, are usually good because having been passed from mouth to mouth, they’ve been stripped of everything that might be useless or bothersome. So we could say that a folk tale is a much more refined product than a poem by Donne or by Góngora or by Lugones, for example, since in the second case the piece has been refined by a single person, and in the first case by hundreds.

I’m sorry to have to tell you that books are now considered an endangered species. By books, I also mean the conditions of reading that make possible literature and its soul effects. Soon, we are told, we will call up on “bookscreens” any “text” on demand, and will be able to change its appearance, ask questions of it, “interact” with it. When books become “texts” that we “interact” with according to criteria of utility, the written word will have become simply another aspect of our advertising-driven televisual reality. This is the glorious future being created, and promised to us, as something more “democratic.” Of course, it means nothing less than the death of inwardness — and of the book.

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human.

When you write something, you never know who it is going to affect, or how it could help someone who’s struggling and feeling alone, or how in a low moment in their life, desperately searching on Google for answers, they will come upon your words when they need them most. And despite what our culture will have us believe—that metrics and stats matter above all else, that the number of clicks tells the whole story—somehow, in some calculation, impacting one human being has got to be worth more than all the unique page views and Shares and Likes in the world.

unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don't do it.

“We depict hatred, but it is to depict that there are more important things. We depict a curse, to depict the joy of liberation. ” ― Hayao Miyazaki

“I’ve become skeptical of the unwritten rule that just because a boy and girl appear in the same feature, a romance must ensue. Rather, I want to portray a slightly different relationship, one where the two mutually inspire each other to live - if I’m able to, then perhaps I’ll be closer to portraying a true expression of love.” ― Hayao Miyazaki

“The concept of portraying evil and then destroying it - I know this is considered mainstream, but I think it is rotten. This idea that whenever something evil happens someone particular can be blamed and punished for it, in life and in politics is hopeless.” ― Hayao Miyazaki

Among Hollywood writers, Disney has the reputation

More venery. More love; more closeness; more sex and romance. Bring it back, no matter what, no matter how old we are. This fervent cry of ours has been certified by Simone de Beauvoir and Alice Munro and Laurence Olivier and any number of remarried or recoupled ancient classmates of ours. Laurence Olivier? I’m thinking of what he says somewhere in an interview: “Inside, we’re all seventeen, with red lips.”

Any Hollywood writer will tell you that attention is a scarce resource. Movies, TV shows, and books always include “hooks” that make you turn the page, stay on the channel through the commercial, or keep you in a theater seat. Scientists liken attention to a spotlight. We are only able to shine it on a narrow area. If that area seems less interesting than some other area, our attention wanders.

This evidence supports the view of some narrative theorists that there is a universal story structure. These scholars claim every engaging story has this structure, called the dramatic arc. It starts with something new and surprising, and increases tension with difficulties that the characters must overcome, often because of some failure or crisis in their past, and then leads to a climax where the characters must look deep inside themselves to overcome the looming crisis, and once this transformation occurs, the story resolves itself. 

I had always hoped writing could be like a Halloween costume, as fraudulent as possible.