Poet Ponders the Digital

Blogger was amazing when I first began blogging in  2004 . That’s right, there are posts on my blogs dating to the year Google relaunched the platform. Today, Blogger isn’t so great. It feels old and out-dated. But it works and I have hundreds of posts on five Blogger-hosted blogs (1334 as of tonight). The idea of exporting and importing 13 years of posts into WordPress or Medium scares me. Should I migrate? I do not know. I’m preparing to start podcasting in 2018 and it would much easier to create podcast feeds and links within WordPress. Blogger themes? They stink, and customizing or creating your own is a pain. I don’t like the choices, yet I don’t have the time to tweak the themes as much as I want. Even the tweaks I have made are lost too often - and that annoys me. Blogger’s editor? It stinks. So does the formatting of posts with line breaks in place of paragraphs. Google could surely make Blogger an HTML5-compliant platform or at least use something mo...

I overuse some words and phrases in my writing. Most writers have some problem words. It isn't that the words should never be used, or that we use them incorrectly. We simply use them too frequently. The following Microsoft Word VBA macro marks words I should check for overuse. Also included are words and phrases I should avoid. Feel free to copy and modify this macro. I encourage my students to try this macro, too. Once you have the macro in Word, you can alter the word list to reflect your preferences and habits. Sub macWordsToAvoid() Dim vFindText As Variant Dim txtWord As Variant 'list the exceptions to look for in an array vFindText = Array("about", "all", "almost", "a lot", "already", "always", "along with", _ "anxiously", "absolutely", "as well", "believe", "certainly", "clearly", "definitely", _ "eagerly",...

Most writers develop patterns in their prose. Experts can use these patterns to calculate the likelihood that a given text was written by a particular author. For example, my weaknesses include "unfortunately" and "just." President Obama overuses the phrase, "Let me be clear." Does the president need our permission to be clear? I doubt anyone tries to obstruct presidential clarity. Since buying my first copy of WordPerfect for DOS, I've maintained macros to help locate and remove my personal textual demons. The idea is simple: automatically highlight the words and phrases I might want to revise before submitting the text to an editor. Four years ago, a student noticed the red words in an open Word document on my laptop. She asked if the highlighting was part of Word's grammar or spellcheck features. I explained to her that when I finish writing a document I run several macros to mark potential problems. When the student asked for a copy of the...

How do I respond to student writing using online technologies? I tend to make extensive use of Microsoft Word's "track changes" and "reviewing" modes. The real challenge for me as an instructor is to not make every edit for a student. My primary concern, and research seems to support this, is that students have been inculcated with the notion that you make the suggested corrections, no more or no less, and that is what constitutes "revising" a paper. Online, this habit becomes even easier... cut-and-paste or simply "accept change" and the revising is "done" in the view of many students. When I first started student teaching, in the late 1980s, I fell into the trap of making too many comments on papers. Now, I try to minimize how often I correct mistakes students need to discover. I also do not make as many suggestions as I did years ago. Online tools have made editing and leaving short comments much easier. For all the dang...