The New Work of Composing

 
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NYMA:

Mother Always Said

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These quotes have guided us along our way, helping us forge paths when we couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

Meaningful quotes

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A basket of Easter eggs
Sonia Johnson (1987) encouraged us to bear witness to our experiences, to own them, to claim them, to “tell the truth” about them (p. 263). But as women, as women who are academics, it is hard for us to tell the truth of our experiences. If we tell the truth about how long it takes for us to complete the scholarship, we feel guilty because we fear not being good enough, not smart enough. If we tell the truth...

Friday, June 10, 2011
Roxanne's daughters
I always feel like there are/should be raised expectations for us. We are some of the most educated people in the world (departments and conferences full of people with PhDs) and the rhet/comp people specialize in communication and the fem rhet/comp people certainly should have knowledge of basic arguments in feminism. The fact that we are making these arguments to/with people trained in these areas...

Friday, June 18, 2010
A white flower
My five-year-old daughter makes invitations all the time. She gets pens and paper and markers, envelopes and stickers, and sets to work. She makes invitations to parties that she and her friends pretend to have; she gives them their envelopes and they giggle and run around and play; they are content because they have received invitations and those invitations mean friendship, and conversation...

Tuesday, March 9, 2010
A young girl drawing in the sand
The longer I do this job—as a scholar, a program administrator, and a teacher—the less equipped I become to do it, the harder I think it is, and the fewer results I see. Can we really teach writing in classes of 25, meeting two days a week for sixteen weeks, with the same assignments for each student?

Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Five jellyfish
This is the argument I have been trying to make my whole academic life, and I am finally gathering the words to be able to do so:

We are stuck in a sea of overwhelming choices, and we only get to have a moment every now and again with just the right person whose choices have, randomly accidentally-on-purpose by way of the universe, lined up with ours for just a minute so that we actually...
A woman with clouds in the background
Looking up from the bottom of a tree