Monthly Archives: September 2006

Issues of Correctness

By Michael Becker | Published: September 27, 2006
Joseph Williams’ essay res­onated with me more than any of the oth­ers for a few rea­sons. First, I taught one of his books in my class this semester—a short­ened edi­tion of his Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. I first read Style six years ago, and I still believe the words that opened that [...]
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Interchangeable Students

By Michael Becker | Published: September 20, 2006
USA Today con­trib­u­tor Patrick Welsh wrote recently on the plight of the “aver­age stu­dent.” Welsh claims that these stu­dents, who fall between “gifted and tal­ented” and “learn­ing dis­abled,” are often ignored by schools because those schools can gain more pres­tige by deal­ing with stu­dents at the extremes. Welch crit­i­cizes this track­ing sys­tem, and harkens back [...]
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Theory and Composition

By Michael Becker | Published: September 18, 2006
Writing occu­pies a sin­gu­larly dif­fi­cult posi­tion. At its core, writ­ing is com­mu­ni­ca­tion. It moves infor­ma­tion between people—moves it more reli­ably than speech because it freezes words and trans­mits them as the author wrote them. Writing should there­fore be a tool of immense prac­ti­cal pos­si­bil­ity. But writ­ing also lives some­where between thought and inter­pre­ta­tion. While the [...]
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Annotations

By Michael Becker | Published: September 15, 2006
I’ve read sev­eral books now where the author tells me in the intro­duc­tion that he or she has spent the past sev­eral decades writ­ing in the mar­gins of books. This author then pro­ceeds to tell me about look­ing around his or her library the other day and decid­ing that, by God, it was time to [...]
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Intertextuality

By Michael Becker | Published: September 15, 2006
Through Google’s blog search for “hyper­text the­ory,” I found this post by A White Bear on the sub­ject. First of all, this per­son got together with other grad stu­dents in his/her master’s pro­gram to dis­cuss HT. Why is no one in Bozeman inter­ested in this enough to get together in our spare time and talk [...]
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