Category / advice

by drnatalietjtindall

Using the Listicle as an End-of-the-Class Reflection Exercise

I enjoy a good compilation of facts, opinions, or reporting in an easy-to-digest, bulleted format. (Blame that on attention deficit and busyness.) That means that I thrive on listicles.

The portmanteau listicle mashes together the words article and list, and some of the best purveyors of listicles are BuzzFeed, Cracked, and Mental Floss. However, the numbered list in reporting has been around for ages. The best 100 albums or the top 10 political blunders have capped reporting at the close of a season or the end of a year.

I chose to give a listicle assignment for a few reasons:

  • My students in media research needed more hands-on, media-oriented writing. I forced them to dig into the research trenches, do a comprehensive search, and write a literature review on a topic. This is a wonderful exercise to help them better understand a topic in great detail, conduct online research, and learn APA style guidelines. In my opinion, students in journalism and mass communication classes should develop and write content that can go into their portfolios.
  • A listicle is a fun, creative way to reflect on the semester and what the students gained from the semester. It is hard to gauge what students really learned and digested in the semester. What things cemented in their brain post-test? What constructs and concepts stuck in their minds, and are they able to relate that to their lived experiences and future career aspirations? I didn’t know. This assignment was crafted to be a mechanism for them to showcase what they received from the class and tie that into pop culture.

Here are the assignment details:

According to Ross, a listicle is an “itemized list with a handful of carefully composed sentences associated with each point.” This is your opportunity to do something creative with what you have learned in this class. Your audience for this assignment are students who are taking the class next year. You must include videos, images, gifs, and links as well as text for your listicle. The minimum word count for the listicle is 500 words.

You will create a Buzzfeed-like list using the course content as your source. The angle for your list can be anything, but you must have at least 6 things on the list.

Before you do this assignment, read Stephen Poole’s Top 9 things you need to know about listicles and Caroline O’Donovan’s The 3 key types of Buzzfeed lists to learn before you die. Here is something from the Nieman Lab about Listicles: http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/10/the-3-key-types-of-buzzfeed-lists-to-learn-before-you-die/ — Submit your assignment via the Dropbox.

Examples of Listicles:

Note: I am not that brilliant to have come up with this assignment in my own brain. I reviewed other syllabi for social media classes. Here are some of the sites I consulted and reviewed when creating this: Multimodal Mondays and Bard College.

I reviewed the assignment multiple times in class and mentioned that the thematic narrative should drive the list. I found that for many students, they didn’t get it. They didn’t know what a listicle was until I showed them examples and asked them to pick out ones that they used. They weren’t sure how to create a listicle with gifs and clips in Microsoft Word. (This is another exercise that can be incorporated into a class: how to save documents as .HTML and/or how to use Google Docs.) The students weren’t sure of their voice: Could they be funny? Could they be snarky? Would I mark them down for being too serious? I encouraged them to be creative and take some pleasure in doing in this no-pressure assignment, but in the end, I believe that many of them felt there was a singular, right way to do a listicle.

In the end, I received 50+ completed assignments, and the majority of those fell into one categories of listicles: the framework list. Some were okay, but a few were excellent compendiums about the class and its contents. Several students agreed that it was okay to share their posts with my world, so enjoy their creative reflections about research methods:

This has been my experience with listicles. Here are some more tips for writing listicles:
http://www.bustle.com/articles/134854-8-tips-for-writing-a-listicle-that-will-get-published

So, what say you, dear #prprofs? What do you think? Would you incorporate this into your classes? What would you do differently?

PS: Also, I dogfooded the assignment with my own listicle about leaving your academic job. Feel free to take a peek and see what you think.

 

by drnatalietjtindall

Writing Notes: The Art of X-Ray Reading

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[This post contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I will receive a small commission.]

When Roy Peter Clark writes something, I pay attention. Clark is a writing coach and senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, and his advice on writing is poignant, clear, and helpful for anyone who has to sit down and bang out a message. I am still meandering through his latest book, The Art of X-Ray Reading, but I skipped to the back to get the 12 steps for being an X-ray reader.

“Why is reading important to a writer?” Many students and potential authors ask this question. “I just want to write.” You can’t just write. A writer has to be immersed in the genre he or she is writing. They have to know good prose, be able to identify what works and doesn’t work, and pinpoint the rhythms and voice needed for the particular piece. Writing just doesn’t happen. It takes practice, and part of the practice is writing. As a devotee of Stephen King’s On Writing, he makes it clear what the task of the writer is:

Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

Reading should sharpen your mind per Ray Bradbury (via Brain Pickings):

In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.

Melissa Donovan summed up the connection this way:

“To write well, there are only two things you absolutely must do: read and write. Everything else will flow from these two activities, which are essentially yin and yang. Without each other, reading and writing cannot exist. They rely on one another. They are two parts of a greater whole.”

“But how do I read?” The reading that is done as a panicked, rushing student isn’t the same reading that you have to do when you are reading as a writer. Writers must go deeper than the normal information scanning routines to look at the marrow and skeletal structures of the writing.

Clark gives some rules that any writer, nonfiction or fiction oriented, can use to strengthen their reading and eventually their writing:

  • Read. Simple enough, right? To write well, one must be exposed to all types of writing. Dig into white papers, novels, comic books, microfiction, and long-form nonfiction.

It’s 1998, and Luther Campbell walks into a party on Key Biscayne. If this were a romantic comedy, now is when everything would switch to slow motion as a Lisa Loeb song fades in.
He notices Khaled almost immediately. Even at an industry party for radio professionals, which this is, Khaled stands out, Campbell remembers.
Keep imagining this in slow motion. It’s sexier that way.
Khaled is frantic, breaking into songs to scream at anyone who dares stand still. He bounces on the balls of his feet, shifting from left foot to right like a cocky fighter, mixing an odd cocktail of Jamaican dancehall and hip-hop as sweat beads on his forehead.
It is pure energy, almost at dangerous levels. Some doctors might have diagnosed it. Uncle Luke wants to bottle it. “He had a mouthpiece on him, man,” Campbell says. “So much energy.”
But let’s back up a bit. You can stop the whole slow-motion thing now.
Read these showstopper passages again. This time do it slowly.

  • Identify the part of the passage that you like the best. In the above passage, I loved the mix of contradictory references (bespectacled Lisa Loeb paired with First Amendment defender/booty music pioneer Luther Campbell) and the vibrant metaphors. I have been to that type of party. I have seen people dance like that. I can also smell the Jamaican patties, rum punch, body oils, and cannabis all under the night stars. Yes, that imagery put me in the location.
  • Read that section aloud.
  • Circle the paragraph and make descriptive notes about why it interests you.
  • Ask yourself, “How does the writer do this?” That’s a good question, and I looked through the article again. The writer’s tone and voice was set in paragraph one. It is clear he is a patient observer of things, places, and people. One has to be to make the connective tissues of this piece–the strong metaphors, the vivid imagery, the deep insight into the Miami music scene, and the sheer humor–work.
  • Duplicate the passage and save it in a journal or file. (One of my graduate professors said that she copied by hand journal articles of her mentor so she could understand the structure, composition, and language of his writing and arguments. It worked. She writes flawlessly.)
  • Don’t imitate the text. Let it be an indirect influence on your personal writing.