Tag: WAC

Collectanea 25.25 Microthemes-Slash-Felt

/ Derek Mueller

Week of June 16, 2025

Microthemes

“One new approach that I incorporated was the use of microthemes. A microtheme is defined as ‘an essay so short that it can be typed on a single five-by-eight inch note card.’ There are four types of microtheme that I have used successfully. These are (1) summary writing, (2) supporting a thesis, (3) generating a thesis from provided data and (4) quandary posing. Each can be used to have students focus on a small segment of material and write short responses” (33).

—Janet D. Hartman. (1989). Writing to learn and communicate in a data structures course. Proceedings of the Twentieth SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 32–36. https://doi.org/10.1145/65293.71191

A reference to Hartman’s work on microthemes appears in Chapter 5, “Writing to Learn,” from Bazerman et al.’s 2005 collection, Reference Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum. As I followed this farther, I stumbled upon Trish Roberts-Miller’s 2020 blog entry, “Teaching with Microthemes.” Initially I’d been wondering about whether writing-to-learn bore even the smallest hints of drawing-to-learn, but so far I haven’t found anything connect them directly (over and above the “[blanking]-to-learn” phraseology). So, that’s it–microthemes widened to an etcetera, miniatures, the dinky heap of speck genres we have named as a way to patch wee scale pedagogical interactions and large scale genres.

Felt Sense

Figure 1. Think of it as a snowball.

F. sheds. A lot. A LOT–a lot. And so, what might these wool heaps become? From a 2009 Maker page and from elsewhere, we’re lint-rolling for ideas.

“But that hair! It gets everywhere. I’ve seen it floating around like snowdrifts under the couch, and of course it gets on every piece of clothing in the house! Grooming your dog is the best way to keep the hair from finding its way into your wardrobe permanently. The hair that you remove from the dog when you brush her can be put to crafty use! It can be felted, just like sheep’s wool. Well, not exactly like wool, but close enough! Don’t let the soft fibers go to waste. Use some pipe cleaners and a felting needle to create a replica of your pet, made from her fur!” –Brookelynn Morris

Methods of Placing

“Some methods of placing freshman writing before students are particularly interesting. Fifteen schools [out of 186 respondents] place themes on a bulletin board for student inspection. In nine schools, themes are returned and circulated in class for reading and comment. Three schools place themes which exemplify certain assignments on a reserve shelf in the library for use by students in the course. One school devotes the entire May issue of its alumni bulletin to the publication of freshman composition work. The yearbook, a printed anthology of themes used as a text, and a local newspaper are all used as media for the presentation of freshman writing.”

This, from the first CCC article, Edith Wells’ report on a survey of 400 colleges and universities’ first-year writing publications.

—Edith Wells. 1950. “College Publications of Freshman Writing.” College Composition and Communication 1.1.

Food Poisoning

Figure 2. “Easy Queasy.”

Stick Henge Update

Writing this week about branching indices in the morning and then in the afternoons, when the skies cooperate, piling sticks to hengiform monument. Stick Henge has three perimetering arc segments; each amounts to a cradle held vertical by hammer-set wooden posts. Two sets of posts are 3.5 feet tall; the third is seven feet tall. The twiggy offshed from the two black cherry trees and the catalpa have been piled into the cradles, along with a few branches from the red oak, though that one is harder to cut and slower to sculpt with. I thought I might be able to get Stick Henge finished by solstice, but Thursday’s work session convinced me that even as it is well begun and more than half done, not unlike a book project, the finishing shall be a Zeno’s paradox considering there is a slower-more to do and even after that another stick can always be placed atop.

5ives

Writing’s Microgenres

  1. Microthemes (Hartman, 1989)
  2. Aphorisms (Haynes, 2016)
  3. Representative anecdotes (Rice, 2015)
  4. Hundreds (Berlant & Stewart, 2019) (or nineties, my preferred variation)
  5. Crots (Weathers, 1980)

What other microgenres can you think of? I am teaching two sections of ENGL3844: Writing and Digital Media this fall, and I think I might build the class around microgenres and digital circulation.

Somewhat of a Virgule

“I have been hailed by a slash, called into these questions (How has the slash between rhet/comp come to be and to mean? Will the slash between rhet/comp persist?) by a virgule, a solidus, a dia/critical mark (of sorts). It is not a task I take lightly, nor one that I find distasteful. I am somewhat of a virgule myself, poised on the cusp of a slightly disreputable figure. (I once bristled when an oh-so-proper official of the MLA requested that I remove a slash from the title of my already-accepted MLA conference presentation. Before the program went to print, you see. I said no. The slash was necessary, and it stayed. For once in my life, it was an either/or decision.) Such it is with rhetoric/composition—both doomed and/or fortunate to live with this aporetic virgule between them, listing like a slightly disfigured lightning bolt” (para. 1).

—Cynthia Haynes. (2003). “Rhetoric/Slash/Composition.” Enculturation 5.1. https://parlormultimedia.com/enculturation/5_1/index51.html #slash #virgule #punctuation

Serpents/Jungle Fowl

Unexpectedly, ill-advisedly, Betty briefly took an interest in doppelgänger Hisstilla. The encounter was short-lived, peaceful. I am convinced there are at least two black racers canvassing Wonder Hollow, this younger, smaller one at the front (east), and an older, larger one at the back (west).

Figure 3. Betty, Hisstilla; Histilla, Betty. 🫱🏿‍🫲🏽
About Collectanea

Collectanea is a series I’m trying out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the fourth in this series from Week 25 of 2025, or the Week of June 16). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM

The diverter pond’s liner experiment. #wonderhollow #rollcall

Try This

/ Derek Mueller
Figure 1. Try This: Research Methods for Writers book cover.

Quick entry—it’s late and kale sweet potato soup is bubbling. And I’m still in the late stages of moving, turning in keys and parking passes at the old place this afternoon, scooping expired field mice from the attic of the new place, fetching groceries, hooking up laundry machines, chopping onions, and so on. But a project several years in the works dropped yesterday at https://wac.colostate.edu/books/practice/try/: Try This: Research Methods for Writers, a textbook we hope sees uptake in rhetoric and writing classes. I could say A LOT about this book’s development. Once it was in the hands of Mike Palmquist and the editorial team at WAC Clearinghouse, its shape and timing were never clearer or crisper. I didn’t realize it, but I read today that this book is the 150th free, open access publication of the nearly 25 years WAC Clearinghouse has been operating. So it’s an honor and a wonder and a credit to so many that this book is circulating now, as it is. [N.b., not a ninety, but hope to get back to a few more of those soon, like tomorrowsoon, or the nextdaysoon.]

Until Finally a Carrier Stumbled

/ Derek Mueller

Especially the second paragraph:

Close to large tinajas [water pockets or pools] the trails converge like strands of a spiderweb coming to the center, and within a few miles of water, broken pieces of pottery tend to appear alongside. Mostly the pieces are plain: thick-rimmed, ochre ceramics called Colorado River buff ware. Clay vessels would have been hauled back and forth until finally a carrier stumbled. The stumbles added up in places so that over hundreds upon hundreds of years pottery became evenly scattered, in some places pieces on top of pieces. Along with the pottery a small number of shells might be found, brought from far oceans probably for adornment, wealth, or ceremony. Along one of these trails I picked up part of a shallow-water cockleshell, its delicate hinges still intact after being carried hundreds of miles from the Sea of Cortés.

I started calling these trails waterlines. Waterlines are the opposite of canals, moving people to water rather than water to people. This bestows a formidable significance on the origin itself, the tinaja, because that is where you must go. Must. It comes and goes over the year, or  over the days, while the location always remains the same. You can put your finger down and say here. Of all this land, all this dryness, all of these mountains heaped upon mountains, here. (31)

Childs, Craig. The Secret Knowledge of Water. New York: Back Bay Books, 2000.

For the talk I’m giving next month at Macomb CC, “Writing Desert Survival Kit,” I’m leafing Childs’ Secret Knowledge, struck by the shard trails, anticipating the desert metaphor (much like food deserts) as accounting for what diminishes, dehydrates, and becomes perilous in crawls across the writing barren, writing spare curriculum. Waterlines, in this extended metaphor, however, introduce a centripetal and extracurricular counterpart, desert traversals, travels that surfaces and circulate writing (also supporting it). These tinajas are comparable to the writing center, which, if you decline to provide a formidable writing curriculum (e.g., explicitly guided and supported writing experiences in every year of university education), you’d damned well better fortify your tinajas.

Graphicacy

/ Derek Mueller

For the past few weeks, “graphicacy” has insinuated itself into the part of my brain where nagging curiosity comes from (the self-nagebellum), becoming the terministic equal of an ear worm: word worm. Term worm? Lexical maggot? Whatever. And there, for weeks now, it has wriggled, dug in.

I don’t recall encountering “graphicacy” before Liz Losh mentioned it casually in her presentation to EMU’s First-year Writing Program during her visit last month. I wrote down several things from Liz’s talk, but graphicacy was there on top of my notes, large and starred. It stands to reason that graphicacy keeps company with literacy. Both are –acy words, which means they are adjectives converted to nouns and that they name or identify conditions. Presumably these, too, are nominalizations, but they by-pass verbs, which is the problem I’ve been thinking about. We have reading and writing to verb literacy, but what verbs graphicacy?

I had to do a little bit of cursory sifting and searching for graphicacy, to start. It seems like the term was initiated in a mixed and sprawling range across math education (learning to plot points and interpret graphs), geography (facility with maps), and graphic design (technical-aesthetic savvy). Late last month, it surfaced in the context of a conversation about multimodal composition and the graphic rhetoric we have adopted at EMU, Understanding Rhetoric. This is the main reason it took hold for me: graphicacy seemed to gather an array of practices related both to understanding and making visuals. It sweeps into one pile an assortment of visual communications–graphs, maps, word clouds, comics, painting, photography, typography, data visualization–much in the same way visual rhetoric does. And yet, with graphicacy as with visual rhetoric, it feels like we are still missing a sufficiently encompassing verb to capture the array of practices.

At our Advanced WAC Institute on campus late last April (or was it by then early May?), I worked with a team of colleagues on a new (for us) configuration. With colleagues from Communications and Education, we put together an institute keyed on five complementary practices: writing, reading, critical (or I would say “rhetorical”) listening, speaking, and visualizing. The fifth term, visualizing, was mine to introduce to institute attendees, and it was the most difficult to identify with a verb that was adequate to account for the frame, which amounted to concept mapping, drawing/sketching as heuristic for arrangement, and creating occasions for students to work at the intersection of textual and overtly visual and designerly composition.

Because we called it “visualizing,” we began the sessions needing to backtrack and contextualize. With visualizing, we weren’t talking about conjuring brainbound images or about an indwelt priming of the mind’s eye to work on problems or particular ways of seeing. These were among the associations attendees made with visualizing. And this seemed reasonable. Visualizing wasn’t quite the right verb. But what is the right verb? What is the general verb comparable to writing, reading, listening, and speaking that relates not only to seeing but to creating visuals, especially in consideration of vector illustration programs and shape-based concept mapping software that bears only faint relation to drawing?

Graphicacy stirs this question yet again but does not quite answer it. But I hope not to call it “visualizing” ifwhen we convene the institute again next time.