I used to write in my WordPress blog monthly sometimes weekly, but then I got busy teaching and just didn’t. I’ve longed to get back to blogging, so this morning I spent over an hour figuring out how to post in my WordPress.com blog. I finally ended up paying for the cheapest plan for a year, so I could add a new post!

The above images are my Summer reading for teaching First-Year Writing. I read Teaching With Ai for the Advanced WAC workshop in May. My plan is to incorporate AI as an editing tool for my students. I read Unflattening in 2016 and just read an interview with the author, Nick Sousanis, yesterday. I’m now reading Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies Classroom Edition by Linda Addler-Kasner and Elizabeth Wardle. I read the first edition a couple years ago. I’m on Concept 1.0 Writing is a Social and Rhetorical Activity. Absolutely, as I write this newest post that will be shared with my social media accounts, writing is a social activity.

The second image is of the graphic memoirs I’ve read this summer that I may add to my student’s reading list. Yes, I use comics in my writing course, which relates to Nick Sousanis, a comics artist, who wrote his dissertation in comics form as the Unflattening. This morning I reread sections that I had sticky notes on. Sousanis references Plato’s dislike of images and explains “in relying on text as the primary means of formulating understanding . . .the visual provides expression where words fail . . .and what can be made visible when we work in a form that is not only about, but is also the thing itself”” (59). He explains the different names this medium has been called “comic books, graphic novels, sequential art, manga” etc. but prefers “comics.” He goes on to reference Scott McCloud’s sequential aspect of “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence” and states “. . .the reader animates and transforms the static into the kinetic. . .and brings it to life,” as shown in the image below (61).

This is one of the reasons I love introducing my students to the “magic” of comics. I haven’t referenced Sousanis in several years because our textbook was a graphic text, Understanding Rhetoric an allusion to McCloud’s Understanding Comics. But a year ago, our First-Year Writing Program changed our course text to a less expansive digital eBook Let’s Talk: A Pocket Rhetoric that is not graphic. So I need a few more sources to help students understand why I incorporate comics into a writing course.

This morning, after reading the threshold concept, writing is a social and rhetorical activity and perusing Sousanis again, I was inspired, I really wanted to write a blog post. I had several ideas of what I wanted to talk about and explain because writing helps me formulate how I will present my ideas to my students. However, since this has taken all day to write I lost some of my ideas. Now that I can write in this blog again I will be posting more often this summer.