Posts Categorized: English Composition

Critical Thinking and Civil Debate for Ordinary Life (and Ethics, btw)

Posted by & filed under Blogs, Chart, Circles, Education, English Composition, Faculty Development, Foundations, How to, Humanities, Ideas, LifeMap, Mass Media, Speech, Strategy, TED, Uncategorized, Video.

This lesson is about how basic critical thinking works, and how important it is when discussing issues that are controversial or personal or are otherwise disposed to unnecessarily heated discussions. I will begin by showing that techniques exist for this, both for regulating emotions and then for proceeding in a rational way regardless of how […]

How to Kick Ass with Words

Posted by & filed under Education, English Composition, Sparks, Strategy.

Without a doubt, fight scenes are a necessity of fiction. Even the most celebrated “literary” fiction writers include aggressive confrontations. Authors like Flannery O’Connor and Tobias Wolfe recognized the importance of violence in writing about humanity. It would be a bald-faced lie to claim that in our Friday night entertainment we don’t yearn for it. […]

It’s an Infographic Syllabus!

Posted by & filed under Chart, Circles, Education, English Composition, Ideas, infographic, Mass Media, Social Media, Technology.

  Click the picture above to examine this more closely. It’s an infographic syllabus for an online Comp II class. All the necessary information is included for college requirements. The only thing missing? About ten pages of drollness. This is created using Piktochart, a free infographic-creation software using cloud technology.    

How to Improve English Reading Skills

Posted by & filed under Circles, Destinations, EAP, Education, English Composition, Uncategorized.

  Usually, students, and especially ESL students, find reading boring and, therefore, difficult. This blog discusses some of the problems with reading and shares some tips to help students to improve their reading skills. It discusses how reading can affect one’s grammar, writing, and vocabulary, and how it can help ESL students use English vocabulary […]

Google Car

Posted by & filed under Blackboard, Blogs, Business, Education, English Composition, Ideas, infographic, Information Technology, Technology, Video.

Introductory Video Shoot a video introducing the topic and provide purpose of lesson. Create accounts with YouTube Capture and Amara.org. You Tube Capture allows sharing of video, and Amara allows captioning. Word 2013 will allow translation of text into multiple languages, so that it can be copied and pasted into Amara captioning. Introduction Google Inc. announced […]

Does Texting Hurt Your Grammar?

Posted by & filed under Blogs, Education, English Composition, infographic.

Thanks to Ashley Miller for this post: This article gives an overview of recent recent findings on how texting has affected students’ grammar, and what those findings suggest. The entire image of the infographic can be accessed in the article. I like the infographic because it presents detailed findings related to the article and presents […]

The power of passion – Richard St. John | TED-Ed

Posted by & filed under Education, English Composition, TED.

This video would be a great way to engage students in conversations about the broader topics of passion, success, love, and wealth, and the importance of each in their lives. These conversations could then be used as a springboard for a writing activity in which students reflect on what passion means to them- how its […]