GHC Community: GHC Bloggers
More on poster talks
By janetkayfetz, May 3, 2013
In the previous post, we focused on how to get started with your poster talk. Once you have an interested listener or a group of listeners and you have started your poster talk, what are some things to be thinking about? Sean Maloney, a PhD student in Computer Science in my UCSB Great Presentations class [...]
Poster Talk Interaction
By janetkayfetz, April 19, 2013
Congratulations! You are presenting a poster of your research at a professional conference! You have worked hard to organize your research story and results into a poster format. The poster is ready; you are at the conference; and you are standing right next to your poster ready to talk about it with anyone who is [...]
Discourse Community and Writing
By janetkayfetz, March 6, 2013
I am presenting the thoughts of Computer Science PhD student Yipeng Huang on the subject of discourse community. This text is part of Yipeng’s Final Writing Assignment in our Academic Writing Class at Columbia University. Thank you Yipeng! “In the Academic Writing class, students wrote science stories that imitated articles published by the experts we [...]
Great Presentations Class
By janetkayfetz, February 23, 2013
We just completed our 5-week Great Presentations class for PhD Computer Science and IGERT students at Columbia University. I was thinking about what the class is really all about. Here are my thoughts: In our class we don’t simply discuss a checklist of important and useful pointers about how to put together and deliver a [...]
“Your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.”
By janetkayfetz, February 3, 2013
“Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writing. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style. These revelations [...]
Process in Process
By janetkayfetz, January 3, 2013
“The key is to understand not only that “writing is difficult,” but that finding the “process of writing” that works for you is really challenging as well. For this reason, I’m convinced that everybody should systematically “meditate” about his own writing and should try to develop his own “process of writing” by iteratively experimenting with [...]
E. B. White and Audience
By janetkayfetz, December 23, 2012
INTERVIEWER Is there any shifting of gears in writing such children’s books as Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little? Do you write to a particular age group? WHITE Anybody who shifts gears when he writes for children is likely to wind up stripping his gears. But I don’t want to evade your question. There is a [...]
DNA
By janetkayfetz, December 9, 2012
In our discussion of Francine Prose’s ideas about the importance of words, I suggested to my class that words are like the DNA of writing. Bren student and biologist Taylor Debevec responded to this idea in an email: “Your statement that words are the DNA of a written piece of work is brilliant. DNA is [...]
Reading and Writing
By janetkayfetz,
Here is an interesting passage we discussed in my Bren School advanced writing course: From Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them (2006) by Francine Prose (http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/08/31/how-to-read-like-a-writer/): “With so much reading ahead of you, the temptation might be to speed up. But in fact [...]
Designing a Story
By janetkayfetz, November 28, 2012
“Organizing your ideas so that they express a clear and logical story is a design problem.” Architect and Bren School graduate student Ben White showed our Bren writing group how we can design a text by sketching out the parts of a story before we begin to compose — in much the same way that architects [...]