In ‘Translating a Policy Document into Plain English’, Timothy Laquintano from Lafayette College describes a pretty brilliant assignment that challenges students to think about AI, literacy, and the loss of meaning during translations. In this assignment, the instructor had students translate part of a complicated document into a 7threading level, and then do the same Read More…
Author: Barbara Gurgel
From the Electric Horse’s Mouth: Talking to AI About Students and Writing
The world is on the cusp of the normalization of the use of AI tools. That’s an opinion based on observation, from someone who is deeply suspicious of AI (in a science-fiction kind of way). I’ll be perfectly frank: I use AI to help me write all the time. The more I use AI tools, Read More…
Collaboration After COVID (and why it stinks)
I think it’s safe to say that, following the events of the last few years, we’ve all become acutely aware of the importance of working as a team. Post-pandemic, the importance of collaboration is more apparent than ever before. With the rise of remote learning, students have been forced to work together in new and Read More…
The view from the outside
My undergraduate degree is in Political Science. Coming from a non-English background, I honestly had no idea what the heck I was doing when I arrived at this program. I probably hadn’t taken an English class since Sophomore year… which for me was more than ten years ago. I have never taken a rhetoric course Read More…
Who Educates the Educators?
Despite decades of research on Black Language, its survival since enslavement, and its linguistic imprint on the nation and globe, Black people and Black Language scholars keep having to remind y’all that it is a legit language. (Baker-Bell) Have you ever heard an author pop off so loud you hear it through the Read More…
How to begin to think about Anti-Racist Pedagogies
At this point in 2022, if you’ve been paying any kind of attention to the popular discourse around race in America, you’ll have heard the sentiment that ‘it is not enough to not be racist. We must also be anti-racist.’ While it may be a newish concept in the zeitgeist at large, anti-racism has been Read More…
Plain Language and Why Autocorrect is Racist
We English scholars are a bunch of snobs. There, I said it. Historically, English loves to gatekeep “correct” and “proper” English. Recent movements to decolonize the field have attempted to foster the ideology that no language usage is more correct than the other. And while anti-racist English standards are necessary, it’s also necessary to teach Read More…
Hidden Arguments, Known Secrets
THE MYTH OF OBJECTIVITY In Hidden Arguments: Rhetoric and Persuasion in Diverse Forms of Technical Communication, Jessica McCaughey and Brian Fitzpatrick explore a gap in Technical Communication education. They claim that, unlike popular perceptions (both internal and external) of Tech Comm, persuasion and rhetoric are a part of the ways technical communicators write. They are, Read More…