I am an old fashioned letter writer

…yet another MOOC…this one about writing, so I'm putting CWL back in harness to post assignments and reflections. The course is English Composition I: Achieving Expertise, from Duke and on Coursera. It may seem like an odd choice for someone who has taught FY comp: since I have already blogged recommending it to my ESL self-paced study group and on Facebook to local GED students (albeit both with qualifications), I should check it out personally ~ and definitely before recommending it further or adding it to my GED and Independent Learning pages on Scoop.it. 


The first writing activity, "I am a Writer," is a "brief essay (~300 words) in which you introduce yourself as a writer to your classmates and instructor. How would you describe yourself as a writer? What are some of your most memorable experiences with writing? Please draw on your experiences with writing and refer directly to some of these as you introduce yourself as a writer. After you have written and posted your essay, please read and respond to two or three of your classmates' postings." Mine (also here on the course Forum) follows:

A “letter writer” long before the internet, I penned and snailed hand written letters in another lifetime. I come from generations of inveterate letter writers. That shapes my earliest writing memories. Learning languages, I would start writing letters in the new language as soon as I had a handful of words to rub together. I still am one: same genre, different medium. 

6 blog design tips for non-designers

…definitely CLW fodder. I should cross post it to the New Faculty Majority blog too (filed under wishful thinking). Tag it #readability, #webwriting & #genres (this last would make a passable CLW post too…let me count the genres I write thee…). 

I don’t do a lot of B2B (blogger-to-blogger) posts here, but I was trying to read a blog post the other day (about something I really wanted to learn about) and the design of the blog made it absolutely painful to read! So I thought maybe I’d take my experience as a web designer and write a little post with a few tips that’ll help make anyone’s blog more comfortable to read.

Blogger Cassie lays out 6 easy design tips with visual examples: left justify always, link color matters, use headers, watch line lengths, short paragraphs, skip serif for body text. But if you love something. keep it ~ it's your blog. Now read the rest of 6 blog design tips for non-designers