Liminal Wordsmith

academia

  • Writing as a Living Practice

    Looking back on my Advanced Composition course, I can see how each reading slowly changed the way I understand writing. We started with Gregory Ulmer, who introduced electracy as the digital age’s version of literacy. That idea alone made me see how much the online world shapes how we communicate. Then we read Marshall McLuhan,

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  • How Political Rhetoric Shapes Education Policy

    For this week’s assignment, I chose an article about the Trump administration’s plan to shrink and restructure the Department of Education. What stood out to me right away is how much the entire debate relies on strategic language. Supporters frame the changes as reducing “heavy-handed federal intervention” and “right-sizing” the department, while critics argue the

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  • Sirc, Shipka, and Why Writing Should Feel Alive

    Geoffrey Sirc talks about composition like it should be a “happening,” and honestly, as a writer, that makes perfect sense to me. Writing feels better when it’s an experience instead of an assignment. It works when it’s a little messy, a little playful, and connected to whatever is going on in real life. After all,

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  • Composing the Sacred Ordinary

    This space feels like what Jody Shipka might call a living composition, where words breathe through the quiet magic of their surroundings. The chalkboard’s message, glowing softly beneath its carved wooden frame, is more than text; it is an incantation. Around it, the crystals, books, and small guardians of myth form a chorus of meaning,

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  • Beyond the Screen

    When I think about writing, I usually picture a screen. The blinking cursor, quiet room, the soft hum of a laptop. But Jody Shipka’s Toward a Composition Made Whole reminded me that composing doesn’t have to live inside a document. It can be the sound of scissors cutting paper, the texture of a pen dragging

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  • Sirc’s Take on Writing and Visual Art

    When Geoffrey Sirc talks about writing as a kind of visual art in English Composition as a Happening, I have to say I definitely get what he means. He’s basically saying that writing shouldn’t feel so stiff or mechanical. It can be more like painting or creating something you can feel and see, not just something

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  • Style as Survival

    Richard Lanham’s Style: An Anti-Textbook argues that writing is never just about what we say. It is about how we choose to say it. The word “style” doesn’t mean decoration. It means self-preservation. Every writer, whether they admit it or not, hides behind the rhythm of their sentences, the patterns of their punctuation, the voice

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  • Learning to Break the Rules

    An anti-textbook? That definitely sounds intriguing, particularly to a college student. With Richard Lanham’s Style: An Anti-Textbook, I was immediately drawn to the idea of something that questioned the rules of writing instead of worshiping them. Most writing guides feel like they’re trying to sand you down until nothing sticks out. Lanham does the opposite. This

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  • First Impressions of Lanham

    I’m still working my way through Richard Lanham’s Style: An Anti-Textbook, but even from what I’ve read so far, it feels really different from any other textbook I’ve studied. Instead of handing out rules and “right” ways to write, Lanham treats style as something playful and rhetorical. It’s less about following steps and more about

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  • McLuhan Meets Ulmer

    While McLuhan and Ulmer never met in the physical sense, if you read them together it feels like they’re talking across time. Back in the 60s, McLuhan said, “the medium is the massage.” Years later Ulmer came along with his own idea, electracy, which is basically literacy for the digital age. Put those ideas next

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