Skip to main content

Clay Burell's Library tagged writing →  View Popular

22 Dec 09

Thank a teacher | Edutopia

  • After one particular writing assignment, she handed back the papers and mine was the only one with a note attached to the top. I peeked under the note and saw an A -- I was floored. But then I saw the note was actually from a UC Berkeley professor who was a friend of hers. His note encouraged me to keep writing! I couldn't believe my teacher thought enough of my work to share it with a professor.


    I think that was a turning point for me. Before Ms. S, it never occurred to me that I could grow up to be a writer -- I hadn't even planned to major in English. But I eventually did and became a journalist. I often think about my teacher's simple gesture. She probably had no idea the impact it would have on me, but it changed the course of my life.

08 Aug 09

What the Mainstream Press Can Learn from Matt Taibbi's Takedown of Goldman Sachs | Media and Technology | AlterNet

Interesting discussion of Taibbi as writer at the end. Not sure I agree, but would open good discussions with students and other writers.

www.alternet.org/...%27s_takedown_of_goldman_sachs - Preview

writing

  • The weakness of the piece is where others might find strength, its polemical nature and its hyperbole. When you call Goldman a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,” you’re in a sense offering a big fat disclaimer—this piece is not to be taken literally and perhaps not even seriously. You make it easy for the Gasparinos of the world. When you say Goldman engineered various crises when you mean something perhaps more nuanced, that’s a problem. It’s not that you lose cognoscenti—that’s fine—but readers then are left to figure out where the case against Goldman ends and license begins. It doesn ‘t seem fair to them.
14 Jul 09

Salon.com | Against comprehensive reform -- of anything

A good example of the use of history to discuss current affairs. Allusions to the French Revolution and Henry Clay to illuminate Obama policy give the author a stronger persona and wit. Show to students for one answer to the "History: So what?" question. (So: alluding to it knowledgeably will make your writing more impressive to the blasted SAT scorer and college application essay dude. Better still, it might make your writing more fun to you.)

www.salon.com/...print.html - Preview

ncsshistory writing

Web Worker Careers: Writers and Editors - GigaOM - Salon.com

Good overview of different types of writer and editor jobs. File for students.

www.salon.com/...index.html - Preview

students writing reference jobs

25 May 09

Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony

This moved me when I was young. It moves me with different fears now.

www.cscs.umich.edu/...mahlers-ninth.html - Preview

nukes writing gilgamesh

20 May 09

Holding College Chiefs to Their Words - WSJ.com

Valuable for college essay lessons: The Wall Street Journal turned the tables on the presidents of 10 top colleges and universities with an unusual assignment: answer an essay question from their own school's application. We can read each president's essays.

online.wsj.com/...SB124155688466088871.html - Preview

collegesearch essays writing seocho

16 May 09

These God Pundits Can Give You a Splitting Headache | Sex and Relationships | AlterNet

Matt Taibbi at his funniest. Attacks Stanley Fish and Terry Eagleton for jumping on top of the God train from their ivory towers. Great prose here.

www.alternet.org/..._give_you_a_splitting_headache - Preview

writing religion non-theism humor

  • now that 21st century capitalism has hit the wall and yuppies everywhere are flying through the windshield into debt and foreclosure, the God-hawkers will show up here, too, to argue that where materialism and science have let your postmodern liberal self down, religion comes ready with answers.
  • First of all, why is that no professor alive can make it ten feet from his front door without sticking an a priori into a sentence? Is there some kind of subterranean lair where academics are beaten with whips and clubs until they learn to write alliterative book titles (”Pus, Primates, and Pessimism: Jane Goodall’s Descent into Septic Shock”) and lard up perfectly good sentences with epistemological catch-phrases? Weird.
  • 1 more annotations...
15 May 09

How to Get Elected Officials to Listen - wikiHow

A great resource for authentic student writing - and citizenship.

www.wikihow.com/et-Elected-Officials-to-Listen - Preview

politics activism usa writing

24 Feb 09

New slant on writing encourages participation

  • Yet outside of school, students and others are writing -- e-mails, Facebook entries, text messages, blogs, job letters, resumes and more.



    Writing has become so ubiquitous that we are now living in the Age of Composition, according to Kathleen Blake Yancey, past president of the National Council of Teachers of English and Hunt professor of English at Florida State University.



    "Through writing, we participate -- as students, employees, citizens, human beings. Through writing, we are," she wrote in report called "Writing in the 21st Century."



  • "I think we're conceiving of writing very differently than we did before. We're understanding writing takes place in lots of different environments and for lots of different purposes," Dr. Yancey said in a phone interview.
  • 6 more annotations...
15 Feb 09

Joe Bageant: A Commodity Called Misery

I'm so loving Bageant's Belize journals. They're stark, honest, and beautiful.

www.joebageant.com/...a-commodity-called-misery.html - Preview

psychology writing capitalism travel

  • the pathology of Americaness is entirely about human consciousness, a taboo subject in our declining industrial super state. The subject has been officially smothered, or even demonized by authority since it was first openly broached in the Sixties. However, those running the industrial government complex learned a few things too in the process. Particularly about the efficacy of dope. Being authoritarian and capitalist, they of course preferred downers over the mind expanding drugs. And ever since then corporately produced biochemicals, tranqs, mind numbing anti-depressants and the like, have been successfully used privately on individuals to squelch the psychic anguish produced in the Darwinian workhouse America has become. Not that I'm entirely opposed. As I've said before, if this officially sanctioned dope were a bit more ecstatic and colorful, I'd be right there in line for my share. Hell, I'm an American -- instant gratification works for me too. But an anesthetic to workhouse burnout just ain't enough incentive. Beyond that, the street drugs are crap these days. So to our King Kong pharmaceutical industry, I say: "Work with me here, guys!"

  • Seriously though, back in the Sixties, along with LSD, nature and Buddhism, I looked to psychology for answers. Sure, psychology was very much a bourgeois affectation and fad at the time. But it looked damned promising to many of us, including a redneck hippie with tons of cultural and family baggage to unload and an allergy to mindless toil -- especially those aspects of psychology that dealt with social realization.

    But who'd have guessed it would become a massive and officially sanctioned ideological control arm of the state? A form of social control and containment of the citizenry through a governmental and corporately sponsored "mental heath system?" And the way it does so is this: It refuses to acknowledge that our aggregate society holds any responsibility for the conditions it produces in our fellow individual members.

  • 5 more annotations...
1 - 20 of 180 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page

Selected Tags

Related Tags

Highlighter, Sticky notes, Tagging, Groups and Network: integrated suite dramatically boosting research productivity. Learn more »

Join Diigo