Poet Ponders the Digital

By May, I'll be half-way through an MFA in Film and Digital Technology. People ask why a Ph.D in rhetoric would need an MFA. My explanation follows. Rhetoric (and composition, since they are often lumped together in academic settings) has struggled between the tension to teach traditional rhetoric and a need to update our courses and field to reflect new technologies and trends in communication. Other departments expect us to teach how to format academic papers (MLA, APA) and write traditional genres: the five-paragraph (yuck) "essay" (which isn't an essay at all), the term paper, the journal article, the "book review" (again, which isn't a review at all), the thesis, and so on. We know these forms and many of us want to resist them. Yet, our classroom work is often relegated to the "service" of other academic fields. Shifting away from composition seems necessary for me to explore rhetoric where it is now most effective at reaching broa...

When I read academic job listing for "Digital Humanities" the skills range from HTML coding to video editing. Some list audio editing. The jobs are so varied that you cannot pinpoint what the phrase means. Is my doctorate in rhetoric, scientific and technical communication sufficient? Often it is not. Some posts suggest an MFA or Ph.D. in media production. Starting January 2016, I am going to be working towards completion of my MFA in Film and Digital Technology. This feels like a last-ditch effort to revive my academic career, while also giving me more credentials to support my creative writing. With or without an academic revival, I'll benefit greatly from the courses and the exercise of creating and editing digital works. One of the frustrations I've had on the job market is that nobody seems to know what the "Digital Humanities" are or how to prove you have the skills to teach the courses. My age and my experiences are a serious obstacle on this...

Back to school means back to the battles with Blackboard (I've posted on that plenty of times). Even if BB was the perfect learning management system, there would still be the days spent planning and organizing online content for a new course. This week, I'm gathering the reusable materials I will upload and preparing new materials. By next week, the shell for the writing course I'm teaching will be reasonably complete. My summer was meant to be spent learning to program in Objective-C. It was also meant as a time to finished a research project and revise an academic book chapter. None of those things happened. Life in the digital age doesn't seem to give us more time, but it does give us more potential tasks. My to-do list kept growing faster than I could complete projects. Maybe it is a time management issue. I completed a lot of tasks in the last few months, many of them creative writing projects. I also am preparing a new website complementing my creative inte...

Video games are written, before and during the coding process. They are, after all, stories — from the simple story of a hungry "Pac-Man" avoiding ghosts to the complex stories of modern massive(ly) multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). Yet, some of the aspiring game developers I've met don't quite appreciate how important storytelling is to game success. Blood and guts in high-def will only carry a game so far. During my early years as a computer geek, I'd sit at my VIC-20 keyboard and create text-based adventure games in BASIC. I continued to do this well into college, because there is something about writing a text adventure that forces you to consider the storyline of a game carefully. While text adventures have declined in popularity, graphical first-person games are still constructed as stories beneath the fancy rendering. The tool I've used in the classroom to teach video game writing is Inform [ http://inform7.com ]. The Inform website...

Pittsburgh TechFest was Saturday, June 1, 2013. For me, this is like going to a county fair or theme park… minus the junk food I adore. Technology captures my imagination, and I do love new hardware, software, gizmos, and gadgets. But, reality has set in, yet again, and I cannot immerse myself in tech and do everything else I enjoy doing. As readers know, I've been trying in fits and starts to relearn programming concepts, and then teach myself Objective-C for OS X and iOS applications. I really do love code almost as much as I love creative writing of the English variety. The "almost as much" is the problem. Annually, TechFest features seminar "tracks" on everything from careers development to Web development. You can go from database sessions to object-oriented programming. It's wonderful, the skills on display and the discussions. Yet, I am forced to choose between writing or coding, because both require more than a full-time effort for success. ...

My wife and I maintain two blogs, Twitter feeds, and a Facebook page dedicated to creative writing instruction. I have discovered that readers prefer to choose how they receive updates and blog feeds, so we've tried to offer the most popular options. First, a reminder to visit the Tameri Guide for Writers ( http://www.tameri.com/ ) if you are interested in creative writing. The Tameri website is not an academic writing website, though it includes some resources for teachers of writing. Our blog on creative writing and mass market fiction: http://www.tameri.com/wordpress/ You are reading my blog on using technology in writing instruction: http://poetcsw.blogspot.com/ The two blogs are featured on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tameri-Guide-for-Writers/239305212783049 You can find "Follow Us" links for Twitter on the blogs and on the Tameri website. Please consider following us using the social networking method of your choice.

I am set to join the faculty of a small private university this summer, as an assistant professor within the institution's School of Communications and Information Systems. I will share more information about this position and its duties in coming weeks. This blog post focuses on why I am accepting an academic appointment and how it might help me as a writer. The decision to accept and embrace a university position is not financial, political, ideological, or idealistic. The pay is, well, academic. I've never been a "classroom radical" with a political agenda. As for idealism, I'm generally considered a curmudgeonly cynic. No, this is a selfish choice made for a desire to improve myself. For the last six months, I have peen pondering if I should alter my career path. After considering a return to the corporate life, I have decided to remain focused on my first passion: writing. Currently, I am a freelance writer, often exploring the relationship between tech...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley December 2009 Issue October 22, 2009 Software to Help the Writer Within Winter tends to drive me inside. I don’t mind the occasional cold winter day, but weeks of dense morning fog and damp drizzle are best enjoyed from a window. I find I write more during the winter months, sitting at my desk with mug (after mug) of hot tea with honey. Apparently, I am not the only writer motivated by the shift in seasons. Each November is National Novel Writing Month , which celebrated its tenth anniversary this year. Known as “ NaNoWriMo ” (say it aloud, with a long “Oh” sound) by participants, what started as a challenge among friends in the Bay Area has become an international happening. The official Web site (http://www.nanowrimo.org/) includes the history and rules for this great start to the writing season. The Web is why NaNoWriMo has exploded in popularity. This is a non-profit, no entry-fee, event that allows everyone to potentially “win” — if you can...

When I consider what I hope to teach and research, I begin with the question how online collaborative tools shape the composition process. How does technology restrict or expand the choices available? Is composing enhanced or degraded for those with special needs or language limitations? Because I am a creative writer, I view "team" compositions of interactive fiction with the same curiosity I have for non-fiction projects. Composition, in my mind, includes a mix of what we often label as creative and academic genres. What matters to me is the writing process, regardless of how we might categorize the product at a specific moment. "Composition and rhetoric" are often perceived as limited to the study of academic genres. I cannot foresee myself being limited to genres I want to challenge and reshape. The "rhetoric of fiction" and "rhetoric of theatre/film" are topics I would hope to teach in the future, from a technological and co...

I posted a response to Geoffrey Sirc's "Box Logic" ( Writing New Media , 2004) that might have been my reaction to his essay, but I also think I didn't quite understand the essay. Hearing Prof. Sirc speak on November 27, 2007, I realized his theories were not far from my own, at least within creative writing, which might have been why I didn't sense any "revelation" in the essay. At the same time, the links between art theory and composition that escaped my comprehension when reading were much much clearer during the visual and oral presentation. However, I also don't complete agree these approaches help in a college composition course meant to teach academic norms. This leads to an interesting question: why would I be thrilled by his presentation, but utterly flummoxed by a text? Why did the text leave me confused and disappointed, while hearing Prof. Sirc was fascinating? I think it is important to admit -- Sirc's ideas are interesting....

Assignment: find images of interest to you and collect them. I do not collect much of anything. I do not know of any "scene" nor do I have any particular focused interest at the moment. Maintaining my Web sites is now about maintaining content, not creativity or discovery. (They are academic tools, not hobbies.) I seldom leave my house, except to travel between the home and the university campus. I do not have any hobbies, which would merely distract me from writing assignments. I have no desire to gather random things without purpose, and the "purpose" of completing an assignment was painful enough with the Flikr slideshow I was asked to produce earlier in the semester. Without my wife's assistance, the idea of looking at pictures would have been too daunting. When I have "nothing to do," I do whatever I am asked to do by my family or employer. I have a list of stories and projects at all times, though, giving me guidance when I wonder wha...

Responding to Geoffrey Sirc's "Box Logic" ( Writing New Media , 2004): 1) What should we be teaching as composition? (p. 110) I do not spend much time on Web design (HTML, CSS) because those technologies will change within a year or two. Rhetorical thought, however, is a skill that can be applied for both analysis of existing material or synthesis of new. Thinking strategically is a portable skill. 2) I truly despise the "creativity" of making blocks of text non-columnar (113). It is painful to read as it is, so why make it any more difficult? If this were poetry, I would be forgiving — poetry is condensed meaning. This is not poetry. It is a mockery of poetry and creativity to have a scholarly article make pretense of creativity. Bluntly, the blocks serve no purpose in this text. They do not move me emotionally, they merely annoy me as a reader of a dense text. If you want to be poetic be poetic, but this is not even prosaic. It's silliness. 3) I a...