This is where you will be coming weekly to post pictures and links of writing you find in its "natural habitat."
Be on the look out for writing in all it's various genres and contexts and tell us a little about what you think that writing means, how it persuades, and whether or not you feel like it is doing an adequate job of doing so. (Please, also, refer to my class hand out for more thorough instructions.)
For you first post, however, I'd like you to tell the class a little about yourself. In this post, please include a picture of you and at least one link to something on the internet that you think is cool. Also, please follow the regular guidelines of at least 200 words for this and subsequent blog posts.
I'll start:
As I mentioned in class, I am from Arizona. From, as in, I lived there longer than I lived anywhere else (about 12 years), though I have also lived in northern Utah, Las Vegas, and San Francisco--and now here in good ol' Champaign. My wife and I love it here as do our kids.
I've been married for eight years (gasp!--since many of you were 10! Holy crap!) and my kids are five, three and one. Though of late, I have become a total academic/computer nerd, I used to want to be a rock star and played in a band with the same guy (and various others) for 6 or 7 years. You can listen to some of our tunes here.
Other than that, like I mentioned: unadulterated nerdiness. I really enjoy pretty much anything that has to do with composition: writing, teaching writing, blogging, twittering, non-alphabetic text composition (as in music, art, design, architecture, etc.), and of particular interest to my teaching is visual rhetoric which entails all kinds of fun stuff--like street art! Banksy is one of my favorite street artists. We'll be spending some time playing around with these visual texts and thinking about what they can teach us about writing. You may not think so, but there really is a ton!
Here's a picture of me with my old band mates in Chicago the day after Radiohead rocked Lollapalooza:
