New year, new start to the Freshman English blog. Never mind the older dates on the posts below. They’re probably new to you anyway. But, yes, our first go round stalled a bit in our second semester, when we were beset by technical problems and, alas, a narrowing-then-closed window for writing. The technical problems are […]
Author: Scott Campbell
Old New Ideas
Apropos of very little, I wanted to offer a few snippets from what has to be my favorite article of the last year or so. It took me a while to get around to it (it’s from the November 2011 issue of College English), but I am fascinated. The article is itself comprised of […]
Flow and Eddy
I like easy puzzles. My favorite puzzle, in fact, has only one piece. In a recent conversation with other writing instructors, I raised the question of why so many students come into the Writing Center asking for help with the flow of their writing: “Does my paper flow?” “Do my paragraphs flow?” It’s an understandable […]
Snow Write and the Eight Habits
In the last year, there has been some buzz in the field of rhetoric and composition over a document called the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, which, from what I gather, is designed to provide some key terms for ongoing debates about what writing instruction should be. The document, however, is rather quiet about […]
Improvisation and Composition #1
In an afterword to his extensively researched history, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, George Lewis expresses his disappointment with the limited rhetorical form of the scholarly book, especially as it pertains to his subject, the Chicago-based musical collective, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Although this […]
Son of “Panopticism”
I’ve been using Michel Foucault in first-year writing courses since I began teaching, and I’m not alone. There have been portions of Discipline and Punish in Bartholomae and Petrosky’s Ways of Reading for as long as I can remember. I may be misremembering, but I recall Foucault’s first section, “The Body of the Condemned,” in […]
First Words
What to do about beginnings? So self-conscious, so artificial. Well, let’s start with a word of explanation. This blog is meant as a notepad or sidebar to the UConn Freshman English Program, as a place to stash ideas, work through first thinking, or just generally rehearse pieces of our evolving catechism in short form. We […]