Wednesday, February 5, 2020

On Not Reading Enough of the Right Books...

About ten years ago, one of my creative writing professors was curious about where I learned to write.  I had finally admitted that most of my stories were science fiction, and that most of my reading choices were similar.  Unlike my classmates in the MFA program, I had never been a huge fan of "literature."  I love a good book, yes, but I don't seem to have the attention span for great books.  Getting through them is a real struggle for me — it should be no surprise that I usually earned B's in my college literature courses.  For an English major, I wasn't exactly the best reader.

On Reading the Fantastic and Writing the Meh

I learned to write when I was "young."  As a sixth grader — all of eleven years old — I developed a fixation on The Lord of the Rings.  And also Dungeons and Dragons.  With character sheets on one corner of the desk and hand-drawn sketches of a "hobbit swashbuckler" in the other corner, I put all my attention to the beautiful blank page before me: the story.

Saturday, February 1, 2020

UDL Project: Universal Design for Learning in English Composition

To provide new resources for my students, I've started a new website that applies Universal Design for Learning to Writing Courses like English 101.  Much as I love Blogger, I'm finding that Google Sites offers somewhat more flexibility in terms of layout and organization, so I've been starting the site from scratch rather than continue on my Intro to Fiction and Poetry website at IFP.12Writing.com.