[This is a guest post by Evan Snider, a doctoral fellow in Rhetoric and Writing at Virginia Tech. His research interests include visual communication, digital writing, and professional writing pedagogy. --@jbj]
Any academic practice that rests largely on inertia is one that’s ripe for hacking. One such opportunity is hiding in plain sight: Even as word processing software has highlighted design elements, even as design programs have become more accessible and user-friendly, even as my home discipline, rhetoric and composition, has dedicated much more attention to visual literacy, many faculty members continue to specify detailed formatting requirements for student writing.
You know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about sentences like this:
Your paper must be double-spaced, 12 point Times New Roman, with one-inch margins.
Such draconian formatting requirements stifle students’ creativity and cut off any critical thinking about what should be a crucial part of any writing-intensive classroom, namely visual design. In what follows, I hope to spark a conversation about why these formatting requirements persist, as well as pedagogical strategies for teaching design instead of rules. I hope this post can function as both a collection of arguments against a fairly common policy and (with its followup) a beginner’s guide to teaching design in writing.
Students in all disciplines are more than capable of producing and analyzing visual work in amazingly rich and complex ways. Learning about document design has become a critical component of many college composition courses, and students are better off for it, better prepared for the highly visual demands of the contemporary world. Still, a sizable chunk of well-meaning and thoughtful teachers establish hard and fast formatting rules that may make their lives easier, but do a disservice to their students.
After painstakingly careful research—i.e., talking to people I know who have these requirements in their syllabi and assignment prompts—I have distilled the most common reasons why people choose to force their students to write in a particular font or with particular margins or spacing or with particular headers or footers.
- I spend twenty hours a week responding to student papers and my eyes hurt enough as is. I want the papers to be readable!
This sentiment–all too understandable at this time of year!–downplays the complexity of readability (or legibility). Instead of giving formatting requirements for readability reasons, try teaching your students about readability: what it means, why it is important, how to achieve it, and so on. In the process, your students can learn a significant amount about typographic elements, including spacing, kerning, letter forms, serifs, and more. Reducing something as complex as readability to “12-point Times New Roman” doesn’t help anyone. After all, there are literally countless readable fonts out there, many even more readable than Times. - How can I tell if they’ve met the page requirement unless they’re all using the same formatting guidelines?
Another perfectly practical reason to institute formatting requirements! They put every student literally on the same page and allow teachers to visually compare paper length with ease. But this approach doesn’t really level the playing field, since savvy and/or determined students can easily stretch out a paper with slight changes to kerning and spacing. Given the capabilities of modern word processors, the only way to get an accurate length is through word count. (Why we care so much about paper length is a topic for another day!) Word processors make it incredibly simple to have a word count for all papers, and all teachers need to do in this case is accept digital copies of student papers. - I want my students to turn in papers that look professional and academic.
In many ways, this is related to the first point about readability. We’ve all likely received a student paper with atrocious visual ethos: perhaps the ink is faded or off-color, or the spacing is peculiar, or the fonts shift in the middle of a paragraph. Formatting requirements would seem to prevent some of these issues, since they call students’ attention to things that they would likely otherwise ignore and leave on default settings, things like fonts, margins, and spacing. But, there is a real difference between paying attention to something and actually knowingly (and rhetorically) manipulating that thing. And, as we’ll see in the next point, when we institute these requirements, we’re setting students up to fail without ever giving them an opportunity to succeed. - I don’t want to be influenced, positively or negatively, by students’ design choices; I want to focus on the content of the writing.
Comments like this imply a binary—word/image, content/form, etc.—that doesn’t necessarily hold up under scrutiny. In rhetoric and composition, Anne Wysocki has argued persuasively against these binaries, exposing the inability in complex visual work to distinguish between visual and textual content. Moreover, like it or not, we are all influenced by visual design every day, sometimes subtly, sometimes less so. So, while we may be standardizing that influence, it is still there. We’re also making it so that any deviation from the expected norm is considered negative, evidence of an inability to follow directions.In other words, if we require a certain format, we will in fact be influenced by design, but never positively: we will only think worse of students who for whatever reasons do not follow our rules. I absolutely understand the impetus to control the scope of writing courses, which have grown exponentially over the past couple of decades. But, visual design is always there, is always a part of writing, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.
- They’ll need to learn to follow conventions if they are going to continue in the academy/workplace.
I can’t deny that rhetorical constraints are often placed on writers’ freedom to design documents as they please. Students, though, will almost certainly have to follow similar rules in other situations, including in the workplace, and I hope that our classrooms can offer a safe space in which playing with those rules is encouraged, and not punished. Moreover, while the ability to follow conventions of all stripes is certainly important, the ability to understand, historicize, negotiate, and even resist those conventions is far more important. Formatting conventions do not exist in a vacuum, and while they are solidified in style guides and other texts, they are often fluid and change depending on technologies and rhetorical situations. For instance, the gold standard of student paper formatting exists for several reasons, not the least of which involves Microsoft’s push to use Times as the default font in word processors and web browsers. A knowledge of why those conventions exist, how to negotiate them, and the consequences for following and/or breaking them is far more useful for students than simply being forced to follow them blindly. - I don’t know why I do it. It’s just what I’ve always done.
And here we come to the heart of the matter. Inertia is particularly strong in the academy, and this fact is no more evident than in how we design our papers. Even as Microsoft Word has attempted to shift away from the standard—by changing the default font and making visual design tools such as styles much more visible—academics have clung to it desperately. I suspect that most teachers had a reason for formatting requirements at one time, but whether or not those reasons still exist is questionable. Over time, conventions become habits, and habits become rules. What were once fluid and negotiable guidelines are hardened into a set of practices without any real reason behind them.
I hope the above discussion is convincing enough on its own. In case it isn’t, though, I’ll lay my cards out on the table. I teach document design. When I teach composition, I spend a significant amount of the semester on visual design. I’m also a scholar of visual design. Obviously, then, I care about design, perhaps unhealthily so. And I want everyone else to care, too. But, even if you can’t bring yourself to care about visual design, then you should still care about formatting requirements on assignment prompts and/or syllabi. Everything we put on these documents tells our students something about us, about what we value, and about what they should value. By making these requirements, we are telling them not to think critically—or even at all—about the visual layout of their documents. We are telling them we value conformity over creativity, practicality over originality, our needs over theirs.
But let’s say you’re right there with me and agree that we should be teaching design instead of rules. What are some ways to begin doing so? Well, teaching design instead of rules can be a tricky process, but it need not consume your entire course. I see three primary steps that need to occur for students to learn to design texts within a writing-intensive course:
- Students need to see the value of design. It all starts with students recognizing that design is a part of what they do when they write. For example, Wysocki has suggested low-impact assignments like asking students to write a document, then interrogating in class why they chose to format it as they did.
- Students need to begin to see the page differently. One of my colleagues asks her students to sketch their names using a typeface that conveys something about themselves. In doing so, she is able to help students begin to see typefaces as co-constructing visual meaning. Other assignments to help students begin to see the page differently might ask them to experiment with white space or typefaces in their own documents or take a complex textual page, divide the text into segments, and draw the page as segments without any actual text.
- Students need to begin to see the screen differently. Word processing programs are some of the most ubiquitous—and invisible—software applications out there. We tend to think of word processing programs as simple, but they are in fact incredibly complex and powerful tools. For students to design texts, they need to know not only how to use the tools available to them, but also how those tools shape their writing. When I begin to talk about document design in my writing classes, I frequently have students bring in a document they wrote earlier in the class (an annotated bibliography works well, since it has a lot going on). Then, we work in groups and begin to use Microsoft Word to re-design their documents. I begin mostly by asking them to play with the software and with their designs, and I ask them to produce multiple different design ideas. After that, we begin to go into design principles and I provide explicit instructions in the capabilities of word processors, including tabs, styles sheets, and font options, all of which are new to the vast majority of students. My end goal is to help students see the screen, particularly the interface of word processing programs, differently; even making them aware of the interface’s capabilities is a strong step in that direction. This approach also helps mitigate issues of technological access, since it afford students an opportunity to do design work in class, instead of asking them to work with programs on their own that they may not have access to or may not use with enough regularity to be comfortable exploring.
In short: the rules we give our students should be negotiable, and in order for them to be negotiable, we need to talk to our students about those rules, why they exist, what the consequences of breaking or following them are, and so on. It’s not hard to do so. In addition to the assignments above (with more to come next week!), there are countless resources such as Robin Williams’s The Non-Designer’s Design Book and Robert Kramer and Stephen Bernhardt’s “Teaching Text Design.” Design does not need to consume your writing courses, but it does need to at least be acknowledged, rather than brushed under the rug in favor of formatting requirements.
So, here’s what I’d like to see that all-too-common sentence about formatting look like:
You may design your paper however you want, but be aware that you will be graded on the visual ethos of your paper, particularly how well you negotiate the visual conventions of an academic paper in a class like ours. Your paper should be readable and take into consideration the needs of your audience. Most importantly, though, you should have fun and be creative with your design. Just because you need to make your paper look a certain way doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with it!
Do you address document design in your writing assignments? Have helpful strategies for doing so? Let us know in comments!
Image is by Flickr user (and awesome person) Jo Guldi / Creative Commons licensed
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52 Responses to Teaching Document Design, Not Formatting Requirements
drnels - December 2, 2010 at 8:53 am
I agree with a lot of the premises behind this post, but I go about in the opposite way. I, too, teach Document Design, but I often don’t give them the freedom described here mainly because students, at least in our Professional Writing program, don’t end up having that freedom on the job. One thing I do is bring in the style manuals from different local companies and show students how each company expects different things. One company says all headings in every memo should be in Garamond, in dark blue, and following a particular heading style that they describe in detail. Another wants all headings in memos in fourteen-point Times New Roman while the body text is twelve-point and in a font I can’t remember right now.
I can understand wanting to give students freedom, but I choose to give my students certain parameters that replicate those at the places where most of our graduates have gotten jobs. I change it up for each assignment so they can learn to adjust and to figure out how to do things differently. I don’t think telling students to have one-inch margins on all sides is a bad thing since Word often has the default of one-and-a-half-inch on all sides. When I tell students to change it, some of them freak out because they have no idea how to do it. I think it’s good to teach them how to do it.
I very much agree that visual ethos is important, but I don’t focus on letting students create their own. Instead, I want to get them to recognize that the visual ethos they want is probably not what they are going to be allowed to get away with on the job, so they better know how to change styles.
And I often use sections of “Teaching with Type” in my classes to make these points, though Robin Williams’ work is what I used to use. I do admit that, in lower-level classes, students tend to get more annoyed with changing parameters, while our upper-level classes, where we use Adobe InDesign for some assignments, are where most students really start to get it.
kimon - December 2, 2010 at 10:38 am
I think that a good next step is to even step out of the word processor world and the concept of document design and to think more broadly about digital publishing as the logical next paradigm for the composition of assignments. I eschew word processors and paper completely in my courses. Instead I use a wiki that students contribute to constantly all semester whether it is through blog-style posts, comments, uploading of media, or through structured assignments. Using the wiki allows them to play around with many of the traditional formatting structures that word processing entails but also gets them thinking about hyperlinking, juxtaposition and integration of information throughout a site. This provides a broader context for them to make different kinds of contributions and to think of design not just in a visual way but also in a functional way.
For the course I am teaching this semester the students (5 of them in a graduate level Interface Design course http://interface-design-10.wikis.bgc.bard.edu) have to collaboratively design an interface 30 years in the future. For the project they need to do research about the history of different aspects of physical interface (haptic feedback, visual and aural features, etc) as well as design a prototype. For a project this size a simple word processing document just doesn’t work and the wiki allows them to design a more flexible presentation that is more site like and breaks up their work into subsections. In this way they are considering design but it is more a question of web design than simply document design and gives them experience with a medium that they are more likely to be composing for in the future.
All that being said, this is a great post and I look forward to implementing some of your considerations and practices in classes and across our curriculum as I get our students to think more thoughtfully and thoroughly about the composition of their work. Our program here at the Bard Graduate Center focuses on design history and this kind of thinking should appeal to both the students and faculty.
ryancordell - December 2, 2010 at 10:43 am
Like drnels, I’m torn about this. Ideologically, I’m right on board–and I’d love to see what my College Writing students could do if we spent more time talking about effective design. With that said, I know that my colleagues in our Writing Intensive courses–where my students will be in the semesters after they leave my class–often have very strident guidelines about formatting. As Nels sees a duty to prepare his students for jobs where they will not have much design freedom, I see a duty to prepare my students for upper division classes in which they won’t have much design freedom. Part of College Writing always involves teaching them to read a syllabus, understand a professor’s requirements, and meet them.
Perhaps a hybrid approach is in order. Discuss design, give them some assignments with free reign, and give others where I specify the design requirements.
matt_l - December 2, 2010 at 11:06 am
I’d like to agree with this post, but . . .
Sure, there are a lot of things that students need to learn about document design. Most of them don’t know how to use their word processors. Many students are unwilling to explore the software and learn how to use the most relevant features. But that does not make it my job to teach them how to do it. They should be taught those skills explicitly in a design or digital typesetting class.
I teach history classes. I am interested in finding out what the students have learned about the class material and how they can express that in an essay. They have a hard enough time using footnotes. Some of them cannot write in complete sentences. Most of them have problems with paragraph structure.
I do minimal marking for grammar and mechanics, but I tell the students that this stuff counts. If you express yourself like a cretin, it does not matter how readable the document design is; you are not going to be taken seriously.
Setting up the formatting requirement takes document design off the table so I can spend more time figuring out what they know about history.
mebrett - December 2, 2010 at 1:58 pm
I wish that someone had taught me about document design when I was a student, either at the undergraduate or graduate level. I am a historian employed in the research division of a medium-sized museum which has no formatting standards. I try to make my reports look professional, but often end up defaulting to Times New Roman 12 (which I actually dislike).
Yes, many students will go into situations where the formatting will be dictated. They may also end up in jobs where there is no guide and the ability to create an appealing document could lead to promotion and other successes.
drnels - December 2, 2010 at 3:05 pm
@mebrett, I’d suggest picking up one of the many report writing textbooks out there for ideas. I use the “Guide to Report Writing” when I teaching Report Writing and Design. And our general intro textbook, “Writing in the Technical Professions,” has a great section on reports. When it comes to creating an in-house style guide, I’d start with Carolyn Rude’s “Technical Editing,” which I love, love, love. You are right that not all places have guidelines. Many of my students have said that creating the style guide is often their first task on the job in such cases. Actually, one of my students who joined a small software company said they use Rude’s text as the style guide.
philosophy - December 2, 2010 at 6:46 pm
I’m pretty much in agreement with matt_l: I want to know how much students have learned about class material & readings, or from their research; their document design is irrelevant, so long as the document is easily readable. Well, not entirely irrelevant, because 1.5″ margins and lots of white space means that I have to flip through more pages, it’s more of a hassle to flip back (or scroll back)to recheck what the student said awhile back, etc. So I like as much text as is feasible per page, compatible with easily read font and font size. Eg. on this CHE screen, I’d prefer that the stuff over to the right (advertisements, editors list, etc.) be removed so that the right-hand white space could be used for text, and I wouldn’t have to scroll down as much. Scrolling up and down (and especially right to left) is a bother.
A qualification: design of powerpoint slides does matter quite a bit, and makes a big difference in effectiveness of communication to an audience.
stevenlberg - December 3, 2010 at 7:47 am
I believe that students must learn that there are specific conventions in academy and the workplace. However, there is no need to have them complete all of their assignments using specific requirements.
I require MLA (or a student chosen alternative such as APA) for the first assignment. Then, I assign research projects where design becomes an issue.
I find that students now do more research than they did when I required all papers to use formal conventions, learn critical thinking skills that they are going to need to continue to use in the academy/workplace, and produce work that makes them proud of their accomplishments.
Steven L. Berg, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English and History
Schoolcraft College
dank48 - December 3, 2010 at 8:43 am
Assign them the works of Edward Tufte, and the rest will take care of itself.
trainer12 - December 3, 2010 at 9:21 am
I think that students need to know APA, MLA, Turabian and what ever the style of the academic department, company or if it is Journalism, the AP Style or other guidebooks out there. The professor or instructor has the right and should tell his or her students, what format they should use, and if the institution has a contract with Turnitin.com, or other anti-plagarism Website, do that as well.
Their also is another reason on insisting on rigid document design formats and type font styles. It is not just word counts, but the prevention of malware, virus, Trojans, spyware and other bugs, accidentally being passed on by students unintentionally.
As an instructional designer in training, adding graphics, animation, video and other content to assignments, this is problematic. So in English, Journalism and other writing intensive of “writing across the curriculum” courses this may not be a problem, but if we want students to be more creative, we need to be mindful of this potential problem and consult with our respective IT or informational technology department staff. They may also maybe concerned with document size, bandwidth, Firewall security and copyright concerns.
drusba74 - December 3, 2010 at 9:21 am
I have never had problems with students following the formatting requirements. If we are teaching a class devoted to writing, I can see why this is important and how this is feasible. However, if you are teaching a course in which papers are one means of assessing the student’s comprehension, I am not sure this is an effective strategy.
My students have struggled with basic thesis development, general organization of ideas, and the use of references. These are areas I devote time to discussing (if I have time for it). Document design is important, but if we don’t have the time– a quick and clear checklist on format helps me and the students focus on some other fundamentals.
pennjb - December 3, 2010 at 9:48 am
I am certainly supportive of teaching more visual design, though I wonder how many of us actually are trained to do so.
However, if we value academic argument, then we often have to spend lots of energy on that task–visual design can complement that teaching of argument, but for many writing tasks such design is not pertinent to the writing assignment. Having a standard format, then, does make sense.
Finally, our students enter a variety of discourse communities as they travel through their undergraduate career. Each community has particular rules–would be urge students to write creative lab report in Chemistry when a standard format is a given for presenting results. I think w can make a similar claim in the humanities and the teaching of writing–we follow the MLA format. Though MLA, APA, and Chicago Style, using the three most visible example, seems to stunt student’s visual creativity, there is often a necessity to the format, a fact that was not addressed in the Prof. Hacker article in much detail.
Having said all this, I am sympathetic to the argument overall, though I think the issue is more complicated than the writer presents.
demery1 - December 3, 2010 at 10:07 am
Great topic, great arguments and a great series of responses. This is what makes the Chronicle update worthwhile.
As an advocate for writing across campus, I recommend allowing students freedom in design at times, but there are other moments(many others) where I recommend that faculty take some ambiguity regarding design off the table.
I regularly meet faculty who say “I don’t care if the document is pretty as long as the content is good.”, which, of course, demonstrates the fallacy of the form/content binary. However, by creating clear formal guidelines, students can spend less time thinking about design (should I use AMA, APA, AP, or MLA?) and more time thinking about arguments and evidence.
A document with formal design requirements is no less designed than one without. The only questions is who is responsible for the labor. It might be OK to do a little work for the students in order to keep them focused.
12109204 - December 3, 2010 at 10:09 am
I’m intrigued; however, I believe students need to master a basic format (MLA, APA, etc.) before they can intelligently “break the rules.” The parallel I draw is to the essay format: although I am not a fan at all of the basic 5 paragraph form, I find it’s incredibly useful for students (especially those with poor writing skills) to first master it, and then the most creative can begin to bend and break the rules to good effect.
jovanevery - December 3, 2010 at 10:23 am
If one is teaching composition, I can see how substantial class time could be spent on design and the impact of it on things like readability, professionalism, etc. Also importance of knowing and following rules, and knowing when it’s okay not to.
But for most classes, the prof wants to focus on the content of the course, not the guidelines for the paper. In addition to not knowing much about visual design, and having enough to read in their own field without adding in a lot of visual design stuff, they don’t give priority to this stuff for good reason.
That said, I think you make a good argument for setting out the requirements as principles rather than rules. (Something I am always in favour of, but that might just be me.)
The principles seem to be: readability, consistency with other academic papers (if one is asking for an academic paper), length (specified in word count, not pages, something that is common in the UK and seems oddly resisted in North America).
If we want them to write in an academic style, we should be encouraging students to think of their papers as novice versions of the kinds of things academics themselves write and which students read. Encouraging them to look at the style requirements for journals in the discipline makes sense.
But there are several acceptable styles in any discipline. As long as a student is consistent within one paper, that should be acceptable.
jovanevery - December 3, 2010 at 10:26 am
BTW, I also laughed at the 12 pt Times New Roman bit.
This is a requirement for grant proposals to the major government funder of social sciences and humanities research in Canada (SSHRC). They have become more strict about it, not least because academics themselves were fudging on the page length using smaller fonts, and narrower margins, and committee members were very unhappy, particularly given the large volume of applications for a small number of grants.
As I explain it to researchers that I help with grant applications, most of the people sitting on committees are over 40. They can’t read anything smaller than 10 point font. And if it’s difficult even with their reading glasses on, you only make them uncomfortable, and grouchy. Do you really want someone reading your application in that frame of mind?
I think students can be usefully informed that visual elements DO affect the evaluation of their paper and they should try very hard not to have them effect it negatively by making it harder for the person marking their essay to see the stuff they really want to evaluate.
tribblek - December 3, 2010 at 12:01 pm
I am in some agreement with matt_l on this. However, this article has inspired me to include some explanation of the importance of visual design in my classes. My biggest issue is that my students (mostly incoming freshmen) do not know how to use a word processor (beyond entering text). I ask them to learn at least enough to modify the visual look of the document and to experiment with readability. Yes, once they get it, then they invariably desire to submit papers in “chiller” or “clown” font. Which is why I have specific typeface requirements on certain papers. I never use the page requirement… I myself took advantage of that in grad school — fudging font sizes and margins (hmmm…. 13.7 point font and 1.34″ margins? that’ll work!). Of course, in doing so, I really learned to negotiate my word processor!
drnels - December 3, 2010 at 1:15 pm
My favorite, since I grade electronically, is when I can see that students converted all periods to fourteen, sixteen, or eighteen point font to make the essay longer when all text is in twelve. I always think (and usually write in the margins) that it must take a lot of time to do that when it doesn’t really help them all that much. They meet the minimum page length, but they still lack evidence and detail.
Of course, most of my assignments now are word count and not page length, or I give no page length or word counts and just say, “Get this job done.”
blauridsen - December 3, 2010 at 1:44 pm
Synchronicity is working for me today, yeah!
I am composing a 1/2 day workshop called “APA for Geeks”.
The assignments is for a PhD course on collaboration to improve curriculum. The mandatory is to collaborate with my peer faculty on the design of a workshop. I teach adults in a CIS program (online) which culminates in a senior capstone course which requires a presentation and a paper that meets APA standard. Most students have not taken a writing course. The distraction is to coach on traditional APA “tricks” such as correct citations and the chiche “Your paper must be double-spaced, 12 point Times New Roman, with one-inch margins”. Prof Hacker’s piece (Dec 2) gives to me the inspiration to set the stage for “value of design”, seeing the page and the screen differently. Designing a document is a good idea!
ctwardy - December 3, 2010 at 2:03 pm
I *like* separating content and form. See “The Beauty of LaTeX” for examples. http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex.
“LaTeX is a free typesetting system that allows you to focus on content without bothering about the layout: the software takes care of the actual typesetting, structuring and page formatting, producing documents of astonishing elegance.”
tallenc - December 3, 2010 at 2:15 pm
My students are taking too many classes and working three jobs, and they have never learned grammar, much less critical thinking. They don’t have the time to worry about designing their essays creatively. I’m not saying document design isn’t important, but it is secondary to the quality of the writing. The point of the standard format is not to inhibit them, but rather to free them up to think about more important things.
george_h_williams - December 3, 2010 at 2:29 pm
@ctwardy: See Bryn Lutes’ post that we published here last April: “Getting Started with LaTeX.”
Please note, dear readers, that there’s no need for you to explain why you won’t be following these suggestions. If you’re happy teaching writing the way you currently do, then that’s great! (I have to admit that I share the reservations voiced by the skeptics in the comments thread.)
As for my own teaching practices, I tend to require the standard formatting Evan mentions above– “double-spaced, 12 point Times New Roman, with one-inch margins”–although I given them latitude on choosing a font that looks similar to Times New Roman. (I’m a fan of Caslon, for example.) I don’t require a specific page length but rather a specific number of words, thus hopefully reducing the attempted typographical sleight-of-hand to make less look like more. By reducing their choices in document design, assignments focus their attention, their intellectual energy, and their creative energy instead on other decisions. (This is, as I understand it, one of the goals of the “Pecha Kucha” style of presentation.)
However, I find Evan’s post is thought provoking. And I wonder if it might be worthwhile to create an assignment where students don’t have to author the words of their documents but instead focus solely on design. And here I’m imagining something like Jason’s “Easy Way to Teach Citations,” but with much, much more detail. What if, for example, a student had to come up with 3 different designs for the exact same document and then discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each design? This might be particularly useful in, say, a professional writing course focusing on very specific genres of writing.
…just thinking out loud.
snuffdog - December 3, 2010 at 4:01 pm
I’m one of the faculty targeted in this article, but what I do with my assignments’ formatting mandates is to deliberately invoke my “excuses” as learning opportunities– that is, my students and I look hard at how such reasons behind an audience’s formatting expectations may both constrain _and_ facilitate the writer’s composition process. And what’s really interesting is when my students run with this analysis and compare a rigid format’s affordances/detriments to those offered by texts allowed a more creative design; in some writing situations, there is not an obviously “better” choice.
johnbarnes - December 3, 2010 at 7:30 pm
I’m more extreme about separating form and content. I require that they submit freshman composition papers electronically; then I change all formatting to my preferred version (American commercial publishing manuscript style) before reading it. They can’t pull style tricks even if they want to; the words have to be good words.
I also teach design classes, though not document design; for those, obviously, matters are very different. But comp should be about the words, the sentences, and the paragraphs — and nothing else.
In an advanced design course, I probably would ask them to design the document for its message — but I’d do that knowing they had, or should have had, backgrounds in both comp and design.
drnels - December 4, 2010 at 4:25 pm
@johnbarnes write, “But comp should be about the words, the sentences, and the paragraphs — and nothing else.”
But when you say paragraphs, you mean a body of text that has to be designed a certain way for us to know it’s a paragraph. And our students come to our classes with different ways of designing paragraphs, or at least my students do. One will single space with a blank line between paragraphs, while one will double-space with a tab for indentation or setting the program to insert a tab automatically with each return (which I hate because it makes it tricky to format lists and headings and such).
I might have agreed with this comment if I didn’t have students trying to write their papers in Excel (one word in each box) or who sent me papers that were one long paragraph or each sentence as its own paragraph. Paragraphs have to be designed a certain way so we know they are paragraphs.
22062114 - December 5, 2010 at 7:34 pm
There are two grave problems with the usual academic format (12 pt. Times New Roman set double-spaced on a 6.5″ measure).
First, Times New Roman was designed for newspaper work (for the London Times), which means that the current format requires our students to use a type that was excellently designed to produce readable text when set small, on short measures, and tightly line-spaced for their term papers that must be set comparatively big, on overly-long measures, loosely line-spaced. And then we wonder why the type is ugly. It’s isn’t Stanley Morison’s fault that we are abusing his type.
Second, our academic format stems from the days of typewriters, which produced mono-spaced type. A typewriter using pica-type would put just 65 characters on a 6.5″ measure. Times New Roman, a proportionately-spaced type (like almost all non-typewriter typefaces), will be much more tightly spaced than any Pica typewriter typeface. It sets more than 90 characters on a 6.5″ measure. It’s a well-established fact that lines more than 70 characters long substantially decrease readability. Giving our students the type specifications we typically do, we are requiring them to produce well-nigh unreadable papers.
Assuming 12 pt type of normal set-width, term papers should be set on measures no longer than 5″. Instead of Times New Roman, Hermann Zapf’s Palatino or Matthew Carter’s Georgia would be good choices.
If you must specify length requirements, specify word counts. Better yet, demand that students write concisely, using no unnecessary words, in making their cases.
austinbarry - December 6, 2010 at 8:07 am
Formatting requirements seem like a throwback to a time when the end product of writing was a physical paper. With web publishing, an individual writer probably doesn’t have much control over formatting. Imagine what a mess this forum would be if every comment was a different font? With ebooks, font size and page size are the choice of the reader.
I’d ageee with 22062114, times new roman was designed for a specific purpose, and not designed for single column papers. We are teaching students bad design.
jplampin - March 7, 2011 at 4:39 pm
What about it’s rating (or lack thereof) for earthquakes?
opendna - March 7, 2011 at 5:11 pm
Stock shipping containers have a max gross weight of 24,000 kg and are designed to be stay in place even at 30-degree angles. If a ship is weighted improperly then it might snap back from wave too fast and cause stacks of containers keeling over. It’s pretty rare that a stack of containers actually falls over, but even then: they’ve got a few million kg of momentum, which you’ll never see in a dorm.
These buildings usually require fresh study by zoning authorities, because they’re completely different from traditional structures. Southern California architect Peter DeMaria got his work approved in Redondo Beach, CA (high earthquake risk) and it won an award from the American Institute of Architects. For the 2010 Olympics, the city of Whister (another high risk community) used containers for workforce housing. I’m not finding a whole lot from earthquake zones (usually UK or Germany), but those two examples suggest that the idea isn’t totally irresponsible.
Personally, I’d feel safer in a building made of steel shipping containers than any steel-reinforced concrete/masonry structure.
22108469 - March 7, 2011 at 5:12 pm
I didn’t think that area had much in the way of seismic activity (?)
tee_bee - March 7, 2011 at 5:21 pm
Apparently, the seismic hazard is moderate, not severe. http://www.ga.gov.au/image_cache/GA11006.pdf
I doubt there’s be enough lateral acceleration to topple these, and my sense is that the structure is tied together via the stairwells, and other parts of the structure that aren’t made of “containers.”
What’s disappointing about this headline is that I thought they were really recycling the actual containers themselves, in some way. There are an awful lot of these empty containers around the world, constituting a lot of steel and other resources. But it appears that the ANU folks factored in all the inputs before reaching their solution. So this is pretty cool.
sarasansh - March 7, 2011 at 5:24 pm
I thought that was the case as well,a great way to recycle.
sullivab - March 7, 2011 at 6:14 pm
I don’t know: tell a bunch of testosterone- & beer-addled 19-year-olds that there is no way that they can tip these things over, and they will undoubtedly rise to the challenge. Seriously though, this is a pretty clever idea. Bravo to ANU, Hutchinson Builders, and their Chinese partners for developing this “inside the box” (so to speak) solution.
tdb489 - March 7, 2011 at 6:47 pm
I’ve seen this in South Africa though the containers are not stacked, they are used as individual houses. They are insufferably hot in the summer and cold in the winter regardless of ventilation. It is semi-suitable for people who earn less than $5.00 per day. It is despicable that HDCs can no longer afford traditional housing. I called the international faculty housing in South Korea a shanty house for immigrants. I will NEVER endure such indignities again.
beverlypwood - March 7, 2011 at 7:22 pm
Glad to see they have drainage and “flashing”, is that peculiar to Australian students? Hope they will stand the test of time, they do not look very stable or ready for longevity.
chemteach - March 8, 2011 at 12:54 pm
Some of the comments here indicate that the readers did not understand these are not the standard shipping containers. Rather, the company who produces shipping containers in China, was asked to make these containers to order.
djacobs12 - April 30, 2011 at 3:23 pm
They have been using shipping containers in vancouver as low cost housing for at least a year, and I believe in london as well, so maybe this can help meet student housing demand and drive costs down too.
fiona - June 29, 2011 at 2:34 pm
I don’t get what this is about. Staying or going where? Who is this about? If this is for humanities Ph.Ds, not staying somewhere often means the end of a career. This entry seems half-written.
bigtwin - June 29, 2011 at 2:41 pm
yeah, you left out a little thing in this post – the subject.
mwilsonk - June 29, 2011 at 3:16 pm
This must be about staff or administrators. Faculty who leave almost never “come back.” I know of exactly one person in my discipline who returned to a previous institution where she had been tenured before her departure.
And beloved dentists? I know of people who miss particular restaurants, but (with apologies to dentists) I’ve never heard of anyone who missed their dentist.
raza_khan - June 29, 2011 at 3:35 pm
I agre with mwilsonk. Faculty who have left rarely come back… there are those rare expceptions.
Having taught in more than 4 different colleges (with three as full-time), the day I do not feel good going to work to enjoy what I will do as a faculty , that is the first day I start seriously think of moving… My take is simple…. I gotta love work enough that I am willing to be on campus half an hour every single day before I have any scheduled committments.
Raza
____________________
Raza Khan, Ph.D.
Dr.Raza.Khan@gmail.com
mnprof - June 29, 2011 at 3:36 pm
From the information on the sidebar, the author is vice president for human resources at the University of Arizona…
Leave it to an upper-level administrator to be verbose AND vague… (just me being snarky, of course)
david_brown - June 29, 2011 at 4:35 pm
I’ve heard of few endowed-chair faculty leaving and returning, but never for any faculty at a less accomplished level. I’m sure it must happen from time to time, but is exceedingly rare.
nyhist - June 29, 2011 at 4:55 pm
in one case I am familiar with, a senior faculty member moved to a new place, soon regretted it, asked to come back, and was refused because his original institution had tired of his repeated searches for other jobs while on its payroll. In another case, a faculty member resigned to take a job with a research institute but two years later, when the original institution had just started to gear up to search for a replacement, asked to come back, and was taken back (the search for a successor was never formally begun). So it does happen for faculty as well as staff, in my experience.
elgato1204 - June 29, 2011 at 5:05 pm
My department loses at least one faculty member every year, and usually more than one, to departments that offer more money or are higher in the pecking order. I take this as a sign that we’re hiring and supporting really good people. But it sure is hard to be trying to find first-rate people every year who might be movable, and then actually hiring them, to replace the people who leave. I agree, however, that they very rarely return.
As for dentists, if you live in a university town (small) and have kids, then you probably have one you love and will surely miss.
richardtaborgreene - June 30, 2011 at 3:03 am
We all imagine, if we stay, that effort or new directions will somehow allow us to continue to learn, change, and grow in any reasonably decent locale, the web enabling all that now. HOWEVER, the AMOUNT of learning, changing, and growth done THAT way is approximately 1/100th the AMOUNT done by putting ourselves in new environments where we HAVE to adapt LOTS of ways whether we want to or not of feel good or not or have to time or not or feel competence and prepared or not.
So the dream of “I will put down roots here and develop” is not real and does not become real. We stagnate in familiar environments except for a rare few who develop there DUE TO BAD HORRIBLE CRISES. If we want to be different than our selves ten years from now, the easiest way is the forced adaptations of a move. Painful but inescapable growth beats painful and voluntarily self evaded growth.
HOWEVER, exploring who you are, what you can do, what you want, if done by constant change and moves, makes you uinreliable and shallow. We can safely explore ONLY by exploring via contributions and minimal contributions take about 3 or 4 years in any one place. Exploring by visiting means never contributing so after 3 or so explorations you have an 8 year patch of nothing done to prove your worth.
totoro - June 30, 2011 at 4:04 am
I also don’t understand this article at all. In response to those who say that faculty never leave and then come back, that isn’t true in my experience. First there are all those who go to work in government etc. for a while and then come back. And I worked at my current university (not in the US from in the late 90s for 5 years and then worked in the US and then I came back here recently and just got an offer of a permanent job). In international moves it is quite common. I also was a VAP at my alma mater (in the US) after doing a post-doc elsewhere. So, I’ve “come back” twice in my career.
cwm4c - June 30, 2011 at 9:08 am
“…but two years later, when the original institution had just started to gear up to search for a replacement, asked to come back, and was taken back (the search for a successor was never formally begun).”
Funny that this doesn’t strike us as an insane way for an organization to operate.
lkaplan - June 30, 2011 at 10:57 am
I this piece is reflective. Thank you for making me think and realize that not one institution can define you and no position can make you stay put.
22108469 - June 30, 2011 at 11:01 am
“…and having to wear a coat in the winter makes them even more annoying.”
Well, OMG, like, wearing a coat is SO geriatric!
jeeb47 - July 1, 2011 at 5:00 pm
For me, the decision to leave my beloved “home” institution and state was based on my desire to advance to the next level in my administrative career with no place to go at my current, small institution. At the next institution, I was forced to make a change and move to yet another state and administrative position which, so far, has been a great fit for me. So while I didn’t really want to leave, circumstances forced me to make change and have new experiences which have enhanced my knowledge of higher education. I have yet to find a new dentist in my current town, but I’m sure that will work out too!
StephenM123 - April 27, 2012 at 4:18 pm
Those Bantus aren’t pastoralists, not in tropical forest.Their lifestyle won’t be that different, especially when it comes to disease loads.