On this page are papers I have written for graduate classes, as well as essays for publication (published or in process). As most are long, I include here either the introduction or a synopsis. Should a paper pique an interest, pdf versions are made available. Although the categories overlap, I have put each paper where it fits best, rather than include multiple copies of the same paper. Teaching papers include two types: theoretical/pedagogic or practical, such as a lesson plan. Research papers comprise topics of my choosing. Literature papers are included to show writing for the different purpose of literary analysis rather than research.

TEACHING PAPERS
Studies in Rhetoric and Computers, Composition Pedagogies, Teaching of Writing, Teaching of Literature

Studies in Rhetoric – Computers and Writing:
"Threading My Way" (Dec. 2005, pdf)

[Intro] This is a working document; it has to be because it discusses teaching out of context, as I am not yet teaching. At this point, all is theoretical. Far from invalidating my thoughts, however, this exercise is valuable in solidifying my teaching position before I enact it. In a recent conversation with Terry Zawacki, George Mason English professor and director of the GMU Writing Center, she brought up the melding of theory and practice. Most often, teachers in practice are not even aware that they are in the middle of theory; becoming aware of the circle of practice-theory-practice or theory-practice-theory (depending on your starting point) and addressing both aspects makes for stronger focus and adaptability. This kind of ongoing self-reflection and self-definition will be both a struggle and a necessity as I launch into teaching. As this paper is for a particular course, Rhetoric and Computers, and there is no way I can address every issue related to how I want to teach without writing a book, I will touch on several areas, with a stronger focus on teaching with technology.

(top, teaching, research, literature, publish/present)

Composition Pedagogies: “Birth of a New Compositionist: Composing My Way to the Visual” (May 2006, pdf)

NOTE: This project included multiple visuals to accompany the text. The pdf currently does not include these additional elements.

[Intro] Visual pedagogy, visual thinking, visual rhetoric, visual literacy, THE VISUAL. I came to this topic because it wouldn’t leave me alone, and after examining all the visual aspects of my life and looking over past research projects in my graduate classes, I have figured out that the visual is indeed very important to me and to my theoretical grounding as a future composition teacher.

In my library/database travels for this project, I have found a staggering variety of fields from which to gather and cull information, including (in no particular order) art psychology, cognitive psychology, reading theory, design theory, architecture, media studies, cultural studies, digital studies, visual thinking/perception/intelligence/literacy/rhetoric. The point of this list is to illustrate the depth, breadth, and complexity of relationships that this topic generates. All these avenues relate word and image in some way, inner and/or outer. Of course, the problem posed by this multitude of fields and sources to consult is that clarity is elusive; following a thread of reasoning always ends up branching off into at least two other directions. Although I have included different sections in this project, they serve more to highlight specific issues and to break up the prose than to identify clear and cohesive arguments within each one. As befits the topic, a project on the visual does not lend itself easily to linearity.

Although I will be focusing on visual literacy and visual thinking, I want to make it clear that I will not specifically be addressing issues surrounding digital literacy, which people sometimes take to be equivalent to visual literacy. The technological realm is one factor in studies of the visual, but it is by no means the only one. The visual has, does, and will occur outside the digital environment. Visual literacy encompasses digital literacy and although there are different factors and criteria involved in creating a visual argument on paper versus one in hypertext, the feature essential to both media (and others) is thinking spatially and holistically. This is the foundation of visual anything, which is then modified according to the medium. Anything that I am advocating can be instituted in an unwired educational environment as easily as in a wired one.

(top, teaching, research, literature, publish/present)

The Teaching of Writing: "Revision as Distillation"
(December 2005, pdf)

[The following, which is different from the pdf, is the Rationale section from a one-page synopsis of the activity.]
In each piece of writing lives many other pieces. The purpose of this activity is to give a writer more openings, however she interprets that, based on the feedback she receives. If many of the same words recur, she can feel pretty confident that she communicated a consistent theme (even if it was not what she intended!). If the words are all over the map, then she has to think about that and decide what to do with the information. As readers, we form quick impressions of a text; this activity helps writers reconsider their work from their readers’ perspective, to see what else their piece contains that they may not be aware of, to come in through the back door and see the same landscape from a different vantage point. It is looking at writing purely from the point of view of pathos (what jumps out) rather than logos (how it is constructed), and making the works anonymous dispenses with ethos, which can affect a reader’s pathos response.

(top, teaching, research, literature, publish/present)

The Teaching of Literature: "Examining the Familiar"
(May 2006, pdf)

[Intro] In teaching literature, I want students to come away with some fundamental notions and practices. The first is that writing is fundamental in any and every class, not just in English; and within English, not just in composition. Writing in the ways I want students to do, which is daily such as through journals, double-entry notebooks, in-class writing, note-taking in group work, and/or regular and brief response papers, serves not just as communication but as a locus of exploration and discovery with a long-range goal of enhanced clarity and confidence. Another is that the examination of literature, or any text, should depend on the community as much as on the self. Note that the teacher does not figure prominently, because I prefer to see the teacher on the margins, guiding and/or redirecting, with as light a touch as each situation allows (bearing in mind that some classes may require quite a bit more than others, and will vary even from lesson to lesson). This communal site of learning is vital to interpretive work in broadening awareness and tolerance of others’ views, as well as testing one’s own. Last is that anything with a prefix of “re” is to be encouraged, in particular rereading and reflecting. This latter metacognitive realm is one that is the most promising in terms of seeing learning as a continual, ever-changing process that can always be improved upon.

(top, teaching, literature, publish/present)

RESEARCH PAPERS
Spelling, Two-year WAC

Literary Scholarship: "Putting Spelling into Adult Life"
(December 2004, pdf)

[Intro] When I first became interested in the topic of spelling, I came to it from an odd personal perspective. My first language and my schooling until college was in French, yet the English language has been my focus throughout my college life (as an English major and a writing workshop teaching assistant), my professional life (as an editor for more than fifteen years), and now as an English graduate student. In college and in the work world, I always noticed that, even at such a late stage, many of the students and professionals I encountered could improve their spelling; most people by that time have discovered that spell-checkers do not guarantee error-free work. As a good speller myself, I wondered why such a problem as sometimes surprisingly bad spelling still seemed to exist among adults who had completed the majority of their schooling. In addition, I wondered how to persuade these adults that spelling is an area worthy of improvement.

(top, teaching, research, literature, publish/present)

The Community College: "Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) in the Two-Year College: Investigative Beginnings" (December 2006, pdf)

[Intro—partial] Similar to the late John Lovas, I find it difficult to tackle any research without considering why a topic is meaningful to me. In a multimedia presentation at the 2002 Conference on College Composition and Communication, Lovas named one section “Fragments of my literacy autobiography” (270) and, after looking at the myriad venues through which he came to literacy, surmised that they are “probably why this text has taken the forms it has” (272). I have found a comparable need to trace the flow of my interest in writing across the curriculum (WAC), specifically at community colleges, so that I can work from a solid foundation on which to brace my exploration of the topic. Discovering why a topic won’t leave me alone informs not just my thinking on an issue but more prosaically why I may choose one source over another. In this respect, I believe all research is personal.

[Conclu] The time may be at hand to renew the journey to prominence of WAC in the two-year college. Rather than talking of “Why Johnny Can’t Write,” it seems that the headline these days should be “Why Johnny Can’t Think.” This, I think, is the place to join all WAC efforts, two-year and four-year, together with the seemingly newfound (at least in publications and the press) and ever-growing interest in critical thinking skills. A strong case can be made in favor of writing in all disciplines if the link between thinking and writing is made clear. A melding of the two perspectives would create a stronger and much larger army of advocates, and in these larger numbers could be the key to another strength behind any WAC program—funding.

(top, teaching, research, literature, publish/present)

LITERATURE PAPERS
Native American Literature, Immigrant Fiction

Native American Literature: "It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" (May 2005, pdf)

[Intro] Regardless of genre or length (and leaving aside Web publications), every book has an ending. Even though endings are a part of the whole, separating them can be an exercise to see whether compelling patterns or ideas about a group of works surface. No doubt much argument can be brooked about the usefulness or even the wisdom of separating the part from the whole, but as an exploratory exercise, it can yield some interesting insights. In a general and introductory Native Literature class such as this, with varied and disparate readings, I was curious whether the endings of the six novels we read had something in common given all the differences in authors’ ages, sex, region, and nation/tribe, and in the works’ genres, styles, and formats. Do any shared ideas stand out that place these novels under the heading of Native Literature, or is that in fact what they have in common, that they are works written by Native authors?

(top, teaching, research, literature, publish/present)

Immigrant Fiction: "The Moments of History"
(December 2006, pdf)

[Intro] How does an immigrant deal with history, both her own and that of her countries? To explore this question, we may find clues in two works, Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses and Eva Hoffman’s memoir Lost in Translation, each of which blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality. For an immigrant, history is a double-edged sword, with the past and the future being the two sharp edges and the flat plane of the blade being the purgatory-like present. That present most often is an uncomfortable place of heightened awareness. Also, in the hopefulness of the future simultane­ously lies a betrayal of the past, and thus often the oscillating present is the only choice. Fundamentally, then, one cannot speak of an immigrant without looking at how a person deals with the past, present, and future. Any discussion must also take into account the three phases (sometimes more) of becoming: before, after, and the journey between the two.

(top, teaching, research, literature, publish/present)

PUBLICATIONS & PRESENTATIONS

Appreciating the Visual's Role in Writing in the Disciplines (article)
Writing@Center, Spring 2007, newsletter of the George Mason University Writing Across the Curriculum.

Visual Praxis across the Disciplines (presentation)
George Washington University Graduate Symposium , Washington, D.C., May 31 2007.

(top, teaching, research, literature, publish/present)

[this page updated 5/2/07]

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