The CompScholar Blog

Why CompScholar?

2010-01-01T21:54:53-06:00

Writing is more important than ever because of the internet and social media. From blogging to updating status, modern writers must be scholars of a new composition to be effective.

I've been annoyed for 11 years. That's why I developed CompScholar. I've also been inspired this year, and the result is this blog at CompScholar.com.

What happened 11 years ago? I started teaching composition courses at local community colleges. I first taught as a last minute replacement only two weeks before the semester started. I inherited the textbook the suddenly retired English faculty had ordered for the class. As a rookie I designed the class around the textbook following the chapters one-by-one. It was so stifling that I had to abandon the book in week three and apologize for the money students paid for it.

They didn't care. They wanted to be done with that textbook more than I did.

I now know that college textbooks are the worst thing to use for teaching anybody anything. Reading textbooks kills the spirit of a student. All motivation is gone. Suddenly the student loses all trust for the course and blames the college or the teacher. Still, thousands of comp courses are built around ineffective textbooks. That annoys me.

I finally left the English department for the private sector, designing elearning. But, I missed teaching. I was lucky to find an adjunct position teaching at ITT Technical Institute. Teaching at night got me back in the classroom without interfering with my 9-5 job. In those night classes I found inspiration.

The students at ITT are technically savvy and practical. Freshman Composition and Comp II are a hassle for many of the students who prefer HTML to paragraphs and essays. I heard grumbling every quarter about the comp courses. I dismissed it as typical student complaining.

Then Twitter came my way. I knew instantly that writing was going to be different forever. Twitter may not be the platform forever, but status updates and micro-messaging will be here for good. Struck by Twitter's vast impact on writing, I was inspired to listen to students and realize that studying comp in this information age means studying online: blogging, commenting and sharing microblog messages.

I mainly launched CompScholar for my students at ITT. I am also thinking about other students at other colleges and universities who are bogged down by the heft of a textbook. I am thinking about other teachers and professors who recognize the major shift of web 2.0 and social media. And I am really thinking about the entrepreneurs online who are learning on their own. I will solicit writers from all of these groups to contribute articles, blogs and comments to CompScholar.

I like being inspired much more than being annoyed. The world is flatter and the hierarchies are reduced by hyperlinks. Here are the top five reasons why everyone online needs CompScholar:

Information Age: Every web site, every screen, combines text and image as the elements of communication. Writing gets judged. If you are updating Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter or writing blogs, you should be a scholar of composition.
Email & Texting Eliminated Etiquette: The ease of email and texting led to many, many people writing with disregard for any writing etiquette. Suddenly everyone was writing many times a day. Badly. You want to be seen as better than them.
College Text Books: I've read many. They are often full of good content. Even so, they are useless for teaching. Motivation is needed for students to learn and for teachers to teach. Textbooks drain all motivation and energy from anyone near them.
Elearning: I design elearning for a living. I build the flash-based movies that you've probably seen. But reading online is elearning too. I dare say you are elearning right now. I think the richest potential for learning is in comments. Commenting needs to be discussed. We need to get better at it. I have learned more from two line comments than I have from the entire article above!
Real Freshman Comp: Freshman Composition is a rite of passage for American college students. But hardly anyone becomes better at writing after taking freshman comp. The textbooks are a big part of that problem, but so are time restraints and expectations. It is a major recurring failure of colleges and teachers to expect comp students to get really into it and allocate hours and hours to their process of writing. It's a fantasy explained in the CompScholar Rhombus post. We need to get real so people can be scholars of comp and learn to write effectively.

Looking for links! Do you know of websites to link to for similar content or to enhance and extend the material in this post? If not, write something and let us know the URL in a comment!

I also have some questions that might generate helpful comments:

What is, or what was, your experience in freshman comp?
How have you learned to write successfully? Any advice?

Here are links to related content:

The CompScholar M3 Plan - discusses the micro, macro, and meta organization of this post
Alltop Writing - top websites and blogs that discuss writing and writing for the web

Please share this blog with friends and followers all over the web.

The CompScholar Rhombus

2009-10-12T12:26:40-05:00

The CompScholar Rhombus replaces triangular attempts to illustrate the writing situation. The rhombus, diamond shaped, fits the four cornerstone concepts of the writing situation: time, topic, writer and writing.

The CompScholar Rhombus revolutionizes geometric representations of the writer's situation. The beautiful diamond shape of the rhombus, like a wedding ring, unites geometry and writing in harmonious marriage. Keep in mind, for no particular reason, the mathematical fact that every square is a rhombus, but not every rhombus is a square.

The rhombus rocks these cornerstone concepts: time, topic, writer and writing. A little alliteration (topic-time and writer-writing) only enhances the thrill of the rhombus. In this Information Age, these are the factors writers must consider if they are to write successfully.

To be practical, educators cannot idealize students' writing process. Getting students to allocate hours and days to each assignment is certain failure. But students will produce more successful writing if teachers challenge them to work like project managers who are busy and who lack resources.

Like project managers, writers must seek success by determining the quality that can be achieved in the time allotted given the available resources. The best project managers know that they never have enough time and hardly ever get enough resources, so they aim to complete the work creatively so quality doesn't suffer.

Here is a likely experience for a writer with Rhombus factors (in bold):

The time frame is the first factor a writer must consider (time). Then the writer needs to have awareness of how many pages, or how many words, she can produce in such a time (time/writer). I recommend a writing race early in the semester so students can discover how much they can write in one hour and at what level of quality.

The next matter is the writer's knowledge of the topic (writer/topic). The topic might require some research, which affects the time frame (topic/time). Time, so important, will affect the degree of focus the writer will take on the topic (time/writer/topic). A writer with only 5 hours for an essay might need two hours for research, leaving a three hour window for composing. Three hours for the essay could mean a tight focus: perhaps just two pages so some revision and editing can happen.

The focus results in a thesis (topic/writing). Once begun, the writing and the writer battle (writer/writing). The author struggles to solve problems to produce the essay composed of word choice, sentence length, paragraphing, structure, style, tone and purpose (writing). Not all parts of the product are decided consciously. Tone often just happens as a result of an early word choice that dictates how subsequent sentences are written. But, young writers improve anyway through repetition and ideally discussion of their process and focused feedback.

The CompScholar Rhombus doesn't represent the great institutions by allowing quality to suffer when time and resources are taxed. But the rhombus represents reality. Should writing teachers force an impossible situation on students or teach them on their home courts? That is, teachers too must do what they can given the time and resources available: all too brief semesters, course-load flustered students and useless textbooks preaching impossible process.

Time: Some honest students would start with a small window of writing time: 3 hours the night before the paper is due. Such planning might not please the professors and parents of the world, but it is realistic. The key is to know that schedule and plan a paper that can be written in that time frame.
Topic: Topics will be treated according to a writer's existing knowledge of the topic and their access to useful information about it. The most important question about a topic is focus: How can I compress this topic--what part of the topic can I feature in an essay?

Writer: The person doing the writing matters. The writer might default to certain attitudes about a topic. Controversial topics like gun control cause most writers to think and feel for or against them. the feelings and opinions of the writer will affect their motivation to complete an assignment. The writer might be a high achiever, focused on good grades, or the opposite: a person happy with an average grade. (For more on grades, see the meta section below*.)

Writing: The triangular models tried unsuccessfully to fit writing issues into that silly three-sided shape. It was doomed from the start because factors like purpose and tone are too elusive to be pinned down by the corner of a mathematical figure. Writers will grow to know those concepts, but more immediate writing concerns for students are words, paragraph length and essay size: word count or page count.

Looking for links! Do you know of websites to link to for similar content or to enhance and extend the material in this post? Paste the URLs in a comment.

* Key Question About Grades: If students manage an assignment like a project and have little time, they might set realistic expectations, knowing, for example, that by the due date they will have only three hours to produce a two page paper that would earn a B or B+. But if right, producing such a B-level essay, shouldn't they receive an A on the project?

I also have some questions that might help writers if you comment below and answer them:

Why does framing the writing situation help writers?
With only a few in English, what is your favorite "rh-" word--is it rhombus?

Here are links to related content:

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CompScholar M3 Plan

2009-10-05T15:00:17-05:00

The CompScholar M³ plan has three parts: a micro beginning, macro middle and meta end.

CompScholar encourages writers to use the M³plan for blogs, essays and articles. The simple plan promotes crisp writing and appeals to online readers.

This post is an example of the M³ plan in action. The three parts have distinct headers to visually separate the micro beginning, macro middle and meta ending. By presenting information in these three sections, writers make reading easier by meeting the readers' expectations of order.

Micro: The beginning section briefly states the main point. The micro section is an executive summary, so busy readers can locate the main point without reading the whole thing. Today, with hyperlinks removing hierarchies, everyone is an executive. Writing must appreciate readers' time.

The micro message should be no more than 280 characters, twice the limit for a tweet on Twitter. Unlike Twitter, the writing should be full words and sentences: avoid texting language. The 280 characters is about 50 words.

Although that limit is flexible, meaning the section will not cut the message at the 280th character, a longer micro section is evidence that a topic is too large. The limit guides writers to keep writing crisp and focused on one topic.

Use of websites like Facebook and Twitter have become so widespread that, "Micro messages and micro messaging are essential to modern communication." Writing micro sections will improve writers' micro messaging skills for any website, email or text.

Macro: The macro section presents the main point and the supporting information. Using this blog as example, this macro section states the main idea (the M³ plan is useful and has three parts: micro, macro and meta) and includes the supporting details (like this explanation of the micro, macro and meta sections that you are reading now).

If a tweet on Twitter is a micro blog, then a "normal" blog is the macro forum. Just think: micro means small, macro means big.

In the macro section in M³ plan, writers state all the information, details, examples and explanations needed to express their main point.

Meta: The meta section is for community. The meta section appeals to readers for comments and offers links to relevant material. Writing direct questions that readers can answer is a good way to inspire comments. Inviting readers to share links to their work helps to create community, too. The meta section is not for final comments--all points should be expressed in the macro section. Using this blog as example once more, the final comments appear after this sentence ends but still in the macro section.

On other websites and in The CompScholar Ebook (forthcoming), experts recommend writing in different formats to suit various writing jobs. A business proposal, for example, is likely to be composed in a different format than a blog post.

Successful writers think carefully about how to lay-out their work for the best outcome. That best format will depend on the topic and time (deadline) as well as the type of writing and the writer--factors discussed in another post on the CompScholar Rhombus.

With all those factors to consider, why would CompScholar encourage the M³ plan so exclusively? Without even knowing what people are going to be writing about?

The answer is pressure. Boundaries force innovation. Deadlines create action. The M³plan for writing establishes boundaries, and they are boundaries that make sense to online readers today.

I hope some of you readers can find examples of well-organized writing online and share links in the comments. Maybe you have a blog that is a perfect example.

I also have two questions I hope to get some answers to:

Do you think the M³plan makes sense?
Since the macro section can be lengthy, how can writers plan that section to be reader-friendly?

Here are links to related content:

Please share this blog with your friends and followers all over the web.