Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
Publication N'ya-hap me-ye-moom: Chaucer, California, and the Literary Landscapes of Bailey's Cafe(Arc Humanities Press, 2024) Adams, JennyPublication The Block(2003-01-01) Bromell, NicholasPublication Why Deny Speakers of African American Language a Choice Most of Us Offer Other Students?(2008-01-01) Elbow, PeterMainstream teachers commonly invite mainstream students to freewrite and use very informal language for early and mid drafts of important academic essays--and hold off surface editing till the end. This amounts to inviting mainstream students to do lots of writing in their spoken vernacular--and to wait till the end to edit into a clearly different dialect: edited ("correct standard") written English. This essay argues the same approach for speakers of African American Language--and addresses objections.Publication The Believing Game--Methodological Believing(2008-01-01) Elbow, PeterA defintion of the believing and doubting games; a thumbnail idealized history of believing and doubting; and three arguments why we need the believing game. Paper given 4/08 at annual CCCC.Publication Voice in Writing Again: Embracing Contraries(2007-11-01) Elbow, Peter"Voice in writing" has fallen into a kind of limbo as a topic: it's vexed; it's discredited by most composition scholars; it's not much written about recently; and yet it remains widely used by readers, teachers, and writers. I examine good reasons for paying lots of attention to voice when we read and teach writing; and also good reasons for ignoring it. And finally insist that we can usefully do both.Publication Vernacular Literacy(2006-01-01) Elbow, PeterHow our present culture of literacy serves to exclude many many potential writers--and why changing that culture is a sensible and feasible goalPublication Coming to See Myself as a Vernacular Intellectual(2008-02-01) Elbow, PeterA short essay taken from remarks at the annual 2007 convention on getting the Exemplar Award. I look back over my career as an ongoing attempt to democratize writing--operating from the stance of a "vernacular intellectual" (a concept coined by Grant Farret).Publication A Unilateral Grading Contract to Improve Learning and Teaching [co-written with Jane Danielewicz](2008-01-01) Elbow, PeterRegular grading is a problem for many reasons--but most of all because it so often harms the climate for teaching and learning. In this essay we describe and explain a contract grading system that we have found extremely beneficial to teaching and learning. It's a hybrid system. Students are guaranteed a B if they do all the things laid out in the contract. The teacher gives evaluative feedback as usual, but no teacher judgment can endanger the guaranteed grade. Grades higher than B, however, depend on teacher judgments of writing quality. The central leverage lies in designing a set of activities that--if engaged in over fourteen weeks--will get all students to improve enough to deserve a B.Publication The Music of Form(2006-06-01) Elbow, PeterThe concept itself of "organization" tends to be biased towards a picture of how objects are organized in space--and neglects the story of how events are organized in time. I’ll explore five ways to organize written language that harness or bind time. In effect, I'm exploring form as a source of energy.Publication The Hype Man as Racial Stereotype, Parody, and Ghost in Afro Samurai(2013-01-01) Russworm, TreaAndreaPublication The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's Belinda(2003-07-01) Rosenberg, JordanaRecent work in eighteenth-century studies has been notoriously preoccupied by what seem to be striking metaphorical resonances between economic and aesthetic 'spheres of practice,' but, as I argue in my paper, it is the confounding of these analogies that may be most salient. Although Edgeworth's Belinda has been frequently read as demystifying aristocratic codes by replacing sharp sociality with good-natured bourgeois instruction, I show that this text imagines the difference between bourgeois and gift economies not as the substitution of humor's instructive mirth for wit's arch conceits, but as a spectacular encounter between the two.Publication Introduction: Media Studies has Ninety-Nine Problems…But Tyler Perry Ain't One of Them?(2016-01-01) Russworm, TreaAndreaPublication Using Careless Speech for Careful, Well Crafted Writing--Whatever Its Style(2013-01-01) Elbow, PeterI write here to correct a common misreading of my work. I've not been fighting all these years just to make writing easier by loosening standards; I've been fighting to make writing better. Especially in my recent *Vernacular Eloquence*, I've been trying help people use their vernacular spoken language to produce writing that is nevertheless careful and excellent--to break out of the unclear, roundabout, or mashed-potatoes prose they so often produce when they try to write right.Publication The Uses of Binary Thinking(1993) Elbow, PeterWhen thinkers encounter a contradiction they have traditionally tended to take one of three courses: to try to figure out which side is right; to figure out which side should be seen as hierarchially dominant; or to figure out or how to use a dialectic process synthesize them into a higher concept. In this essay I argue for the value of trying to learn to affirm both sides in all their contrariness.Publication A Unilateral Grading Contract to Improve Learning and Teaching(2009-12-01) Elbow, PeterContract grading has achieved some prominence in our field as a practice associated with critical pedagogy. In this context, we describe a hybrid grading contract where students earn a course grade of B based not on our evaluation of their writing quality but solely on their completion of the specified activities. The contract lists activities we’ve found most reliable in producing B-quality writing over fourteen weeks. Higher grades are awarded to students who produce exemplary portfolios. Thus we freely give students lots of evaluative feedback on their writing, but students can count on a course grade of B if they do all the required activities—no matter our feedback. Our goal in using contracts is to enable teachers and students to give as much attention as possible to writing and as little as possible to grades.Publication The Believing Game or Methodological Believing(2009-01-01) Elbow, PeterThe kind of thinking most widely honored is often called "critical thinking." I call it "the doubting game" because the premise is that we should test ideas by subjecting them to the discipline of doubt. It's a valuable and necessary methodology for good thinking because it trains us to find hidden flaws in ideas that sound attractive or that are widely assumed to be true. In this essay I suggest a different kind of thinking that is equally important but little honored or even noticed. I call it the believing game because the premise is that we should test ideas by subjecting them to the discipline of belief. The believing game trains us to find hidden virtues or strengths in ideas that sound wrong or even crazy, or that are widely assumed to be false.Publication Ranking, Evaluating, Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment.(1994) Elbow, PeterRanking: a one dimensional quantitative judgment--as with grading. A one dimensional quantitative score can never be an accurate reflection of the quality of a multidimensional product (like writing and many other human products). Evaluation: a multidimensional judgment--using words or providing a multidimensional grid. Judging allows for more trustworthy assessment of writing and many other products. Liking. This section explores the benefits that come when teachers actually learn to *like* student work--and indeed to like students--and how one can learn to like work even if one judges it to be not very good.Publication The Real Things: Photographing Scenes of the 1960s(2011-12-01) Bromell, NicholasPublication Exploring Problems With “Personal Writing” and “Expressivism”(2002-01-01) Elbow, Peter