“Carefully defined writing activities” in a learning situation have an even less direct relationship to “writing” than “pasturized process cheese food” has to “cheese.”
This wonderful quote comes from a post by Professor E. Shelley Reid on the Writng Program Administrator’s listserv last April. Professor Reid was involved in a discussion of Automated Essay Scoring (AES), which I mentioned in a post a couple of days ago.
One of the comments to How Do Your Sell Plain Language to Your Manager? insisted that a software program called StyleWriter is the key to management support for more successful writing in the workplace. I want to respond to that recommendation. But I realized that the commenter and I understand “plain language” differently. So I’m going to…
In Part One of my attempt to explain how I understand plain language, I focused on the elements of a text that must be managed to create a plain language document. Anyone who has known me for long, however, could have predicted that I would talk about the rhetorical context of a high quality document in Part Two. …
Today, I am correcting proofs for a teaching note that will soon appear along with my lecture-tutorial on tone in Journal of Organizational Behavior Education. The paper explains the teaching philosophy behind use of video lecture-tutorials like those I have been posting here at ProsWrite. (Click on the tab to view the complete collection on…
My first new post in a while. And I’m ranting — albeit somewhat quietly. This time I’m reacting to a newly published research article about assessing student writing within MOOCs. Balfour, the author, provides a review of two technologies for assessing writing when you have a huge student-to-teacher ratio: Automated Essay Scoring (AES) and Calibrated…
About a year ago, I posted Kitty, ABC, and beautiful locations when I learned that the Association for Business Communication (ABC) chose me as the winner of the Kitty O. Locker Outstanding Researcher Award. I’ve just returned from New Orleans where I attended the ABC’s annual convention and had the privilege of addressing the convention audience in a plenary address titled “What is outstanding…
I’ve been thinking about the nuggets of wisdom I have to share with those who are new to teaching novices to write successfully in the workplace. I came up with 3 guidelines, which I shared with some new college instructors in a workshop last week. I thought they were worth sharing on Pros Write as well. Referring to…
