Wordle of the Daydle

Tuesday Tickler

A Study in Characters


We learn a lot about our own characters by the actions they take. We learn a lot about characters in general by looking at the people around us.

For this Tuesday Tickler, look around at the people you see on the street, the bus, or at a restaurant. Describe what they look like, but also focus on what they are doing. Once you have your description, try to write a scene about these characters.

Here are a couple ideas to start you off:

An early 20s white male, baggy jeans and a hoodie, parks his new, massive, red SUV in a university parking lot. He pulls from the back seat a backpack with a local band patch and a skateboard with a couple of peace signs and a "Save the Trees" sticker. He slings the backpack over his left shoulder and carries the skateboard to class.

A late 20s white male, in jeans and denim jacket, drives his blue moped through a busy intersection. He is staring down at his side, texting on his iPhone which sticks out of his pocket.


What are the possible stories surrounding these characters? Explore!



Image courtesy The National Archives, http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalarchives/5078049145/, licensed as Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs through Creative Commons.

Wordle of the Daydle

Tuesday Tickler

Use description to investigate the effects of a catastrophe.








Photo courtesy blakesamic, http://www.flickr.com/photos/blakesamic/2151717824/, licensed as Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs through Creative Commons.

Wordle of the Daydle

Challenge yourself to use all the words in a short story, poem, or dialog. Or use 10. Or focus on one word for inspiration.

Tuesday Tickler

Personify a plank of wood!

Tuesday Tickler

Emphasis on description: Describe the journey of a bird headed south for the winter.










Photo courtesy of Bruce Timothy Mans, http://www.flickr.com/photos/btm/296028/, licensed under an Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs license.

Wordle of the Daydle

Challenge yourself to use all the words in a short story, poem, or dialog or focus on one of the words for inspiration!

Tuesday Tickler

Focus on detail and setting in a scary scene to draw out fear and suspense.











Photo courtesy Urban Sea Star, http://www.flickr.com/photos/28633851@N05/4728946272/, some rights reserved under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs license.

Wordle of the Daydle

Challenge yourself to write a poem or story containing all the words or choose one for inspiration.

I Need a Nap: The Rhetoric of Documentation Styles

As you may surmise from my last post, we've been busy at work revising and upgrading our online style guides. Our graduate assistants Rebecca and Ashley did most of the work collecting sample publications and putting them into MLA, APA, and CMS format.

I've been doing the work of editing. For anyone out there who thinks an editor is a person who sits at a desk with a red pen tucked between her ear and skull occasionally pulling  it out to circle a comma splice or two, I've got news: the editor's job is not only misunderstood, it's also a lot of work. Specifically, the editor clarifies ideas in a document (without tampering with the intended meaning) while correcting errors, making final stylistic choices, and checking for accuracy. A large part of checking for accuracy is understanding where information comes from and what motivates the purveyor of the information. In other words, editing requires a complete understanding and an ability to finesse that "thing" called rhetoric.

And so I've spent the last month becoming the world's expert on APA and MLA (and soon to be CMS). I know: that's quite a title I've rewarded myself, but hear me out.

When the American Psychological Association gets together to update their "publication manual," they are not thinking one whit about what the Modern Language Association did when they updated their "handbook." And for many of our students, that's the rub. In high school, the default documentation style is MLA. Not many students will be using it in their disciplines, so a few high schools have adopted APA instead. It makes no difference: When the students come to college there is only one documentation style, the one they know, the one chosen by their language arts teacher. When they are asked to make a choice or even switch to another style, they have no idea why they should choose one over the other or why a prof would ask them to use the style of a particular discipline. The official style manuals don't explicitly describe their rhetorical stance: Why are titles of articles not capitalized in the reference lists of APA, for example? Why has MLA decided to omit URLs in favor of the word "Web"? The editors of both manuals have discussed those stylistic choices and have good reasons for them. But they never consulted the other groups of editors.

When a person, like me, sits down to distill a variety of style guides into more accessible tip sheets, she discovers a lot about what the organizations that produce them value. Here are bulleted lists of values I've inferred influenced the decisions of each organization.

APA seems to value...

• Both qualitative and quantitative research (for example, market research and ethnographic studies, respectively).
  
• Summarizing several studies to support the researcher's conclusion as well as finding specific quotes and paraphrases that support discrete ideas.
  
• New forms of presenting research, including podcasts, blogs, videos, and forum posts.
  
• Finding and using credible sources on the Web, including government technical reports, laws, statues, scholarly journal articles, and online magazines and newspapers.
• Using URLs that link directly to a document when that URL will likely remain static, but favors using the domain name when the website (all one word in APA) is searchable.
• Following the lead of newspapers by capitalizing headlines as most newspapers do (only in the reference page, not in the body of the paper).
• Writing as if the paper will be submitted to a journal in psychology or education, among the other disciplines that use it.

MLA seems to value...

• Primary research, including the explication of literary texts.
• Critical and theoretical secondary research as opposed to qualitative and quantitative research.
  
• Using quotations and paraphrases to support discrete ideas that then support an overall conclusion.
• Print and print-based sources over strictly digital sources; hence, there is no model for citing an eBook in a works cited list. The organization instead encourages flexibility in improvising digital sources from similar print sources.
• Visual appeal and legibility; therefore, the editors have done away with clunky URLs that make the works cited list difficult to read.
• Consistency in terms of capitalization and punctuation rules.
• Writing as a part of class requirements, although, certainly, the handbook was also meant for those intending to submit to the MLA's conferences and publications.
  

The reason for these differences is that psychologists and educators (the primary users of APA style) research very differently from those who study the meaning of language and literature. Unfortunately, our first-year students in particular don't understand what it means to be part of a discourse community and how these manuals help to establish the rhetoric of the particular community they were meant to guide. For them, documentation is busy work meant to prove they weren't plagiarizing. They don't understand that the day they declare their major, they are shifting into a community whose rhetoric they will need to navigate.

Of course, the tutors in the Writing Center have been trained to help students making this shift, and we look forward to the challenge!

Photo is courtesy BritneyBush, http://www.flickr.com/photos/tzofia/485531100/, licensed with an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs copyright through Creative Commons.

Tuesday Tickler

Each Tuesday, we'll feature a prompt designed to tickle your fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and scriptwriting fancies.

Thursdays, we'll feature a Wordle prompt of random words. You can challenge yourself to use all the words in the Wordle, attempt 10, or focus on one.

The tickler for Tuesday October 4 is below. Have fun!






The protagonist (antagonist?) hires two private investigators to tail each other. What intrigue ensues?

Photo courtesy _Flood_, http://www.flickr.com/photos/_flood_/3118876772/ Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Noderivs License.

Thanks to writing major Merit Mitchell for the suggestion!

My Brain Explodes: Overhauling the MLA Style Guide

This past week has seemed somehow longer than any other week in the UCA Writing Center. A project we thought might take a couple of days ended up taking more than a couple of weeks. And that project, as the title of this entry suggests, was overhauling the MLA Style Guide.

At this point, I'm ready to write a dissertation on the varying rhetoric of the APA, MLA, and CMS documentation styles because I've certainly become an expert on all three. But the changes made to the latest edition (the 7th) of the MLA Handbook shocked me when I took the time to read it. Most shocking of all was this passage concerning in-text documentation:

"If your source uses explicit paragraph numbers rather than page numbers--as for examples some electronic publications do--give the relevant number or numbers preceded by the abbreviation par. or pars. ...If the author's name begins such a citation, place a coma after the name. [I'm letting the typo in that last sentence stand because it pretty well expresses the state I'm in after weeks of figuring out MLA.]

***

"When a source has no page numbers or any other kind of reference numbers, no number can be given in the parenthetical reference. The work must be cited in its entirety though you may indicate in your text an approximate location of the cited passage (e.g., 'in the final third of his article, Jones argues for a revisionist interpretation'). Do not count unnumbered paragraphs" (221). Emphasis mine.

Of course, for many of us who require research writing in our classes, this is not great news. I can certainly understand the motivation behind it: For online and digital research, finding a quotation or paraphrase is as easy as hitting Ctrl+F, but for many students who are already confused about documenting sources, it opens up a larger can of worms. A paraphrase that is unintentionally too close to the original text will be easy to spot and could open students up to accusations of plagiarism. A well-written paraphrase, on the other hand, will be harder to search for, which may mean that readers won't have the same level of access to the research as the writer.

Then there are the changes to the works cited list. MLA has done away with clunky URLs in favor of simply including the type of media, print, for example. Everyone was hoping that the contributors would once a for all settle the confusion regarding online and digital sources. Unfortunately, that did not happen. In fact, I'd venture to say they actually managed to make the handling of these sources even more confusing. The handbook "helpfully" states, "MLA style is flexible, and sometimes you must improvise to record features not anticipated by this handbook. In some cases, citation formats devised to handle complex print publications may serve as a basis for improvisation" (182-3). There are no models for including blogs, podcasts, forum posts, videos watched on YouTube, etc. in the new edition. Some may say that these models aren't necessary because blogs, for example, cannot possibly be considered credible. In my opinion, nothing could be farther from the truth. There are blogs on every subject. The one I included in the UCA Writing Center's MLA style guide (as a suggestion only) is a blog about linguistics written by a gentleman with a Ph.D. in the subject. There are a lot of educational and credible materials on the Internet that shouldn't be discounted.

But that isn't all. Except for online only scholarly journals, MLA considers all Web sites non-periodical. So if you're looking for the model for an online newspaper, you'll find it in section 5.6, "Citing Web Publications," and more specifically in 5.6.2 "A Nonperiodical Publication" where you'll find models for articles from the New York Times Online, Newsweek, and The Atlantic Monthly lumped in with citations from the Encyclopedia Britannica Online, A Bibliography of Literary Theory, and even Google Maps.

So after going over the changes and practicing a bit with the new tip sheet in our professional development meeting, my brain was done with documentation styles...until next week when I will begin editing the APA style guide.

Just remember, if you need help understanding MLA, you can make an appointment at www.uca.edu/writingcenter. We're prepared to help you save your own brain from exploding.

Image courtesy of Nevery Lorakeet, http://www.flickr.com/photos/neverylorakeet/4055975423/

Launch of the UCA Writing Center Blog

Hello and welcome to the UCA Writing Center Blog!

Beginning Thursday, November 8, a creative writing prompt will be posted every Tuesday and Thursday. These prompts are designed to help you develop all aspects of your creative writing: character, plot, voice, dialog, and even genre.

If you don't write creatively, don't worry. As the semester progresses, we hope to post resources for academic writing as well.

Be sure the check the sidebars for updates and announcements for upcoming workshops and other UCA Writing Center resources including Online Sessions and Online Workshops. If you have any questions or suggestions, please email us at ucawritingcenter@gmail.com or leave a comment here. We would love to hear from you!