5/17: Course Wrap-Up and P4 Peer Review Tips

Okay, this is it! While you do P4's peer review today on Slack, I wanted to make a brief post wrapping up our class and covering some important logistics things.

P4 Peer Review Tips

Things to talk about in today's peer review:

Did they include the image in the document? (At the end for the paper, probably?)
Did they describe important aspects of the image before analyzing them?
Did they discuss the image's layout, color scheme, figures, or other things we talked about?
Does the image have a well-explained context?
Do they have a clear thesis, where they state what the image is trying to do and how it does it?

Also, remember that you will not get feedback from me on this paper. The whole point is to make sure you can do okay without me.

Okay? Okay. Now let's wrap up the course.

Course Evaluations and Final Exams

There is no final exam for this course. The short P4 paper/Slack post combo is the final assignment. P4 and the Slack discussion are due by Sunday, May23.

Course evaluations can be completed here, and are due by midnight on May 18th, so please do them once you're done reading this post. Be sure to complete your course evaluations--this semester, like last semester, was weird and online, and any data we have on how well it went, and what we can do differently in the likely case that we’ll have to do a partially-online semester again, is very important. Don’t forget.

Arak Essay Contest

The Arak Journal, the collection of student essays that you did Paper 1 about, is published each year. The winners of the Arak Award--an essay contest composed of edited or revised research papers from ENGL 110 classes like this one--are published in the journal. If you’re proud of your research paper (P3), you should consider submitting the essay for the contest. There's a $100 prize for each of the six winners.

The contest submission deadline is January 10, 2022 (incidentally, my birthday). So you can revise, think about, and reformat your P3 essay to comply with the submission guidelines found here over next winter break. It's not urgent, but worth considering!

You are strongly encouraged to submit your essay to the contest, if you have the time and bandwidth to keep thinking about it. The worst outcome is that you don’t win, and the best outcome is that you get published, which looks very good on your resume when you graduate. Also, a cool hundred dollars is not nothing.

Final Grades

Final grades for all your courses will be available to you on or just after May 24. In the case of our class, your graded P3s will be back soon, followed by P4s and your final grades. My intention is to finish grading and return all materials to you by May 24 at the latest.

If I email you about a missing assignment or broken file, please try to respond promptly. I will not be able to grade any papers submitted after the 23rd.

Deadline Flexibility: If you asked for an extension or otherwise failed to get P3 or P4 in on-time, make sure to have all your work in by the end of this week. I will not be available to update grades after May 23rd.

For students who are worried about poor quiz grades or a missing blog: grades for this course are calculated from two main things: how good your papers are, and how complete your other work is, in that order. If you missed 1-3 quizzes or 1 blog post, this will not have any affect on your grade (unless it was the P3 blog adaptation that we had a whole class about--that's not miss-able). A ton of missing stuff, on the other hand, will affect the grade. You are graded on patterns of behavior, not one-off mistakes.

E110 Lessons Recap

Here’s the highlights of what we learned (or tried to learn) this semester:

In order to be an effective communicator, you have to identify and serve the needs of your audience.
Rhetoric is the art of arguing, as opposed to literature (which is the art of written storytelling) and sophistry (which is the art of tactical, deceptive arguing). The lines between these things are a little blurry, and lessons from one inform the others.
Argumentation is composed of ingredients, like your personal style, and your appeals to your audience’s emotions, sense of reason, desire for confidence in your authority, and their need for relevant connections to their lives.
You can use formulas or tricks, like the paragraph machine, the STAR criteria, rabbit hole research strategies, or rewriting instead of revising to make your research and writing process smoother and less painful. Some, like the paragraph machine, are specifically designed to keep you moving forward when you’re out of energy and overworked. Just remember to save time for “making it pretty” later.
Affordances are features of a medium or genre that tell you how you can use it, what the audience expects it to be used for, and what rules of genre you have to play by (or creatively violate).
People do not communicate at random, and for no reason: we do it when we want something to happen, and we plan (at least subconsciously, and not always smartly) how we’re going to make that happen using our words.
We are ethically/morally responsible (and sometimes legally responsible) for the communication we put out into the world and its consequences. It’s no mistake, in the US, that the First Amendment is about speech and the Second is about guns. Information and communication are more powerful, and often more dangerous, tools than physical weapons. Physical weapons are still dangerous too (don’t play with swords, guys), but communication is tricky because everyone has immediate access to it. You are likely encountering weaponized information right now, in fact, thanks to the fact that our democracy's information defenses were allowed to decay by certain leadership decisions over the last 20 years.
The words “apart” and “a part” mean opposite things, because English is a silly language.
Arguments don’t just happen in text: images, videos, podcasts and art are all arguments for some message. Sometimes they have several messages at once.

Special Semester Lessons

In addition to the normal writing-class-lessons above, this strange semester highlights one of the big lessons that I work on in research, and that most people are told but never “get.” The lesson is this:

Reality does not play by story rules, but we impose storytelling on it.

As many of you have surely noticed, living through a major historical catastrophe, with nigh-on millions of likely-preventable deaths on a global scale, doesn’t feel like it does in movies. There aren’t big choices, climactic final showdowns, or clear cause-and-effect relationships. Instead, things seem like they just keep happening, and we learn the whys and hows and “whose fault is this?” later.

For most of us, the important decisions aren’t the kind protagonists make in stories: instead, it’s how we say and act on a daily basis and small choices you don’t even realize you’re making. Did you hoard toilet paper? Did you text back your lonely friend? Did you remember to wear PPE when interacting with others? Did you practice social distancing at Thanksgiving? Did you shut down misinformation when you found it? Did you remember to vote, if you could? Did you sanction domestic terrorism? The story of an event--the history stuff kids will learn in school--is narrated later, by people debating stuff, coming to an agreement (or not), and justifying, remembering (and sometimes deliberately forgetting) their own choices.

The desire to make a coherent story out of an event larger than yourself is human--it’s why we talk about stuff. It’s also why people who are especially unprepared for events fall into bad narratives: conspiracy theories, rumor-mongering, propaganda, demagoguery, and all that toxic stuff you saw on the internet and on cable news and finally, in real life in January. In the absence of a story that makes easy sense, people make up their own, whether they are particularly qualified to do so or not. The stories they make up tell you less about the stuff that actually happened and more about the person making the narrative.

This is why effective writing and arguing and storytelling are so important: knowing the needs of your audience, shaping your narrative carefully, and identifying when someone’s doing the same thing (but for bad reasons) are basic skills for not getting sucked into a narrative made by someone louder and less competent than you.

Many of these discussions about how to “make the story correctly” take place in academic writing. More ridiculous versions of this process happen on TV and Twitter, with politicians and loud people and, occasionally, an actual expert. Get out the popcorn, but remember: laws, democracy, society and justice are all stories we bring to reality together, so make sure your storytellers are worthy of your attention. Make sure they aren’t trying to harm you (or, indeed, your whole society) with toxic storytelling or manipulative arguments.

Even smart people can fall into toxic stories if they’re not careful, or if they’re afraid, or if there’s no good information available. This will be happening a lot in the next few years especially. Be careful: information is easily weaponized, for good, bad, or otherwise.

Summer Break Activities

Since our summer break is going to be very Quarantine is Over But I Have Anxiety Now for most of you, here’s a few recommendations related to this course (and some that aren’t) that don't involve going outside:

For a great guide on how to navigate a whole world of complicated, sometimes malicious, information, preeminent journalists and experts have put together this mini-course. It’s an afternoon’s reading, if you’re interested: Investigating Disinformation and Media Manipulation, 2020.

For a more interactive, but longer mini-course on the same sort of thing, CrashCourse has a great course on Media Literacy that you can find here.

Here's a neat 5 minute video on Detecting Misleading Infographics.

For a more entertaining, narrative-style discussion of how we got this way, I recommend Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants. It’s available in print, audiobook/audible, and kindle versions on Amazon. I'm teaching an Honors ENGL110 class in the fall themed around those lessons--tell your friends!

For you “I like to learn through research and reading” nerds, I recommend Tim Wu’s book above, or the print version of The Looming Tower (for you terrorism/spy/real crime fans), or Mukherjee’s The Gene: An Intimate History (for those of you in pre-med, bio, exercise science and nursing, or biology nerds of all flavors). The audiobooks of all three are also very good, if you're more of an auditory learner.

For the fiction fans:

SF: Daniel H. Wilson’s Robopocalypse (new-ish scifi) or finally read Frank Herbert’s Dune (old scifi, but a movie is coming soon).
Politically-Themed SF: Malka Older's Infomocracy is great for you sociology and political science nerds. I mean, it's great in general, but especially...
Fantasy: anything by N. K. Jemisin (she’s just rad).
Crime: Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey. It’s like if Hogwarts got investigated by a very tired-of-magic private eye. (CW: childhood trauma, magical murder, mental illness).
“Proper Literature”: Dracula, the original book, is actually weird and amazing but not what you think it’s going to be if all you’ve seen is Dracula-themed movies. Try it. The full-cast unabridged audiobook with Tim Curry is also good, but very long.
Short Reads: Annalee Newitz’s “When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis” (CW: pandemic, poverty, cute robots being sad), Siobhan Carroll’s “For He Can Creep” (CW: a cat vs. the actual devil, very creepy). Note: Siobhan Carroll is actually a professor at UD, totally rad, and recently won some prizes. Also she helped train me so maybe I'm biased, but the prizes say I'm right to be.

For the Video Game people:

I hear good things about Animal Crossing, but I don’t have a Switch.

Things I play as I grade: Rimworld, Stellaris, XCOM2, Kerbal Space Program, Among Us, Cyberpunk 2077, and in a few days (when I finish grading), the remastered edition of the classic videogame Mass Effect, which was my first videogame fandom.

For the Binge-Watching crowd (Netflix mostly):

Fluffy Cartoons with Real Feelings: She-Ra, Avatar: The Last Airbender
So Drama, Much Yelling: Money Heist (it’s in Spanish. Do not dub it. Read the subtitles, or maybe just get with the program and learn Spanish.) (CW: everything. Spain is rough. Crime is rough.)
You Have to Pause While You Laugh: Lucifer (CW: supernatural violence, and the actor who plays the main character is a thirst trap), Ted Lasso.
Subtitles: The K-Drama Romance is a Bonus Book is adorable.
Fooooood: Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.
A Perfect Film in Every Way: Knives Out
LGBTQ+ Rom-Com with a Slightly Problematic Ending but Very Good Casting: Happiest Season

The Course is Over!

The last awkward thumbnail!

I’ll still be around if you need me after the course is over. My email will still work. If you need writing help or just want to say “hi,” I’m around.

I’m proud of all of you for surviving the semester, and for doing so well under very crappy circumstances. Remember to wash your hands regularly and to not fall prey to conspiracy theories.

And, um, as you all know, I have no idea how to end conversations, so…

Go. Be free. Good luck on your exams. Make good choices.

Okay bye,

–Professor Michael