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Spring Quarter D-WRD Meetings

Friday, April 1: noon-1:00 lunch & discussion:

  • Review WQ Pilot and surveys: 188 from students, 5 from instructors
  • Review submission process and final-exam meeting times
  • “How do I …?” FAQ
  • Plan SQ meeting agendas and workshops

Friday, April 15th: 10:00 a.m.-11:00: Typography Workshop typography workshop postponed to a future SQ meeting. See 4/15 meeting notes here.

I find discussing paragraphs with my students extraordinarily difficult; I am never sure if I am being too prescriptive or too open-ended when I make my tentative suggestions on their writing. The immense complexities of paragraphs’ structures—how they duel with their neighbors, with the whole essay, with ambiguous sections and divisions, and of course with their nebulous, rebellious contents known as sentences—it all feels impossible to explain sometimes. Seeking assistance, I naturally started a hunt for theory concerning the paragraph, and I found a long, unresolved debate about how paragraphs should be taught, as well as about their intrinsic nature.

But there was something odd about the scholarship. In the last fifteen or so years, there has not been any major work on paragraph theory in composition. The last theoretical discussion of the subject in journals appears to be Rick Eden and Ruth Mitchell’s largely unanswered “Paragraphing for the Reader” in 1986 and Frank D’Angelo’s splendid literature review of the topic sentence from the same CCC issue. Save for some scattered empirical work, such as Randall Popken’s four studies of topic sentence genres from 1987 to 1991, paragraph theory has all but disappeared from composition research. (Duncan 470)

Friday April 29th10:00 a.m.-noon:

Friday, May 20th: 10:00 a.m.-noon:

  • Using LMS features in Digication (Johnson, Friddle, and Staley)
  • FYW digital portfolio guides for students and faculty, 2011-12

Friday, June 3rd: 10:00 a.m.-noon — for our final D-WRD meeting this academic year,

Other possibilities?