Every August, educators around the globe unite in a common purpose, a ritual as dull as scraping cuticle that we might as well blame on the late Cicero—we draft syllabi. While it’s true that that the tedium will often conjure flashes of euphoria as we experience the rush of designing
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Full disclosure: I don’t know everything there is to know about teaching. Shoot, I probably know far less than most of the people taking the time to read this post. So take my “rules for teaching” suggestions below with a large, crumbly grain of salt. With that out of the
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I may have fallen in love with a new way to learn (or teach, however you look at it). It’s kind of crazy and it threw me out of my comfort zone, but it changed the way I think about teaching. It included four cameras, a non-governmental organization (NGO), and
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Well, I guess it’s official: we English-speakers have a pretty lame name for the symbol that looks like this: @. In most of our conversations, you’ll hear it referred to simply as “the ‘at’ symbol.” Could there be any more boring way of naming such a beautiful little mark that we
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DIDLS is a strategy for analyzing tone. It usually applies to a written or oral text. . It’s an acronym that stands for diction, imagery, details, language and structure. To begin your analysis, it helps to have a basic understanding of what tone is. Tone is the speaker’s attitude. It is
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SOAPSTone is an analytical strategy that you can use when reading texts, writing about texts and planning original writing. There are 6 steps that make up the analytical process of the strategy (and the acronym). S- Determine the Speaker Who is the voice that tells the story? Is it a character,
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The University of Chicago-Illinois recently published this cool little infographic, citing the different types of college plagiarism, reasons why many students plagiarize, and some general facts about what types of plagiarism are most common. If you want to read more about plagiarism, check out the infographic I created a couple
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Have you ever taken AP Language and Composition? If so, you have likely heard of the OPTIC Strategy for visual analysis. If you haven’t taken it, or would like a refresher, then we’ll help you out. The OPTIC Strategy is a 5-step method used to analyze visuals. The strategy can
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Welcome to the world’s first (as far as we can tell) Periodic Table of Punctuation! There are fourteen commonly used punctuation marks in the English language. Some would argue that other marks, like the forward slash and asterisk, may be considered part of the punctuation collection, but for most intents
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We have yet another wonderful translation of our Plagiarism infographic, this time in Spanish. We are excited to see our infographics being used in so many places around the world to help students, teachers, and business writers. Thank you to Ignacio Oyarzún and Charlotte Pichuante Escaida from Bibliotecas UC for the translation.
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