bigthink.com "All generalizations are false. Except that one. That one's true." --Unknown I once received a paper that began, "People have been listening to music since the beginning of time." I guess such an argument could be made, if we define "time" as a human concept, e.g. this exchange from Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed: … Continue reading The Fallacy of Generalizations: “The American People”
Category: Rhetoric
We Need to Talk About Ellipses
"Colonial discourse takes over as it takes cover." -David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire An ellipsis, like grief, calls attention to the presence of an absence. It can can do so in a couple of different ways. It can help a sentence trail off suggestively, opening the reader's mind to thoughts unexpressed or still to … Continue reading We Need to Talk About Ellipses
Garbage Out, Garbage In
The syllabus for ENG101 "[r]equires students to produce a minimum of 20 pages of writing." With six sections, and a rough average of 20 students per section, that amounts to a minimum of 2400 pages per semester. My Penguin Classics edition of Moby Dick is only 625, not including the "Explanatory Notes." Now I'm getting … Continue reading Garbage Out, Garbage In
Why Do I Even Bother
The title of this blog comes from the comment I"m most likely to put on a student paper: Wrong font! I don't know why I care. I've just come to associate academic writing with serifed fonts, especially Times New Roman 12. I'm also waging a war against Calibri, which, according to Wikipedia, "replaced Times New … Continue reading Why Do I Even Bother
The Wrong Font 