Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Semester in Motion

As my niece said in a Facebook posting yesterday "Has anyone seen my motivation?  I already checked under the sofa cushions and it's not there."

Somehow we've past the halfway point of the semester and I'm behind in almost everything (except reading - I always manage to get the readings done).

So here we are - students as designers, eh? 

In some ways, students are almost always designers. When they write a research paper, do a PowerPoint, make a speech – they’ve designed it.  While there are times the design is more tightly controlled than others (a formal research paper has many controls), they are still the ones designing the content – what words they choose, which parts they emphasize, how they shape their thesis, sentence structure.

Word choice is actual a huge design tool.  English has so many shades of meaning in the language.  When we have exchange students, we always have them keep a notebook for vocabulary as they learn it.  They inevitably end up with a whole page of “smile, smirk, grin, leer, sneer” words and when you would use each one.  

No comments:

Post a Comment