Of all challenges faced by college and senior high school students, few inspire as much angst.
Blogs vs. Term Papers
The format — designed to force students to produce a point, explain it, defend it, repeat it (whether in 20 pages or 5 paragraphs) — feels to many like a fitness in rigidity and boredom, like practicing piano scales in a key that is minor.
Her provocative positions have lent kindling to an intensifying debate on how better to teach writing in the digital era.
“This mechanistic writing is a proper disincentive to creative but untrained writers,” says Professor Davidson, who rails resistant to the form in her own new book, “Now The thing is It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn.”
“As a writer, it offends me deeply.”
Professor Davidson makes heavy use of the blog as well as the ethos it represents of public, interactive discourse. As opposed to writing a term that is quarterly, students now regularly publish 500- to 1,500-word entries on an internal class blog concerning the issues and readings they truly are studying in class, along with essays for public consumption.
She’s in good company. Around the world, blog writing is becoming a basic requirement in sets from M.B.A. to literature courses. On its face, who could disagree utilizing the transformation? You will want to replace a writing that is staid with a medium that provides the writer the immediacy of an audience, a sense of relevancy, instant feedback from classmates or readers, and a practical connection to contemporary communications? Pointedly, why punish with a paper when a blog is, relatively, fun?
The brief, sometimes personally expressive blog post fails sorely to teach key aspects of thinking and writing because, say defenders of rigorous writing. (more…)