Compiled by Prof. Alan Marscher, Director, Center for Excellence in Teaching, Boston University, for a faculty development workshop on February 13, 2006; some items were contributed by attendees at the workshop. One of the attendees strongly recommended David Allen's “Getting Things Done” book, available at http://www.davidco.com/store/catalog/Getting-Things-Done-Paperback-p-16175.php.

I. General

A. Keeping track of what you need to do
1. Write things you need to remember to do in your date book, calendar, PDA, etc.
2. Prioritize your list:
a. Important items with deadlines
b. Less critical items with deadlines
c. Important items without deadlines: give yourself target deadlines
d. Less critical items without deadline
3. Also categorize each task according to the time you think it will require
B. Planning your day, week, & semester or summer
1. Block out parcels of time for which you have obligations
2. Block out parcels of time for yourself: personal e-mails, relaxation, reflection, coffee break with friends, etc.
3. When you have a block of free time, consult your list of tasks & do those that fit into the time slot, starting with the highest priority
4. Minimize travel to essential (includes vacation!) trips
5. Organize your out-of-class time with students
a. Office hours, meeting times
b. Meet in groups if possible: can be beneficial to students to interact with peers, saves you time
c. Letters of recommendation:
i. Have students supply addressed, stamped envelopes well ahead of deadline
ii. Have students fill out an information form to give you material for letters
C. Cut corners whenever possible
1. Consider trade-off of quality vs. time
2. If you are not naturally great at a lower-priority duty, don’t compensate with higher priority
D. Back up all your work!
1. Hardcopies
2. CD-ROM, large back-up disk, whatever – it takes too much time to re-create!
E. Make others aware of your deadlines: chair, colleagues, staff, students, family
F. Maintain a good (for you) filing system
G. E-mail
1. You do not need to respond immediately to messages!
2. If a student asks a question of general relevance, send reply to entire class
3. If reply would need to be lengthy, use phone call or office visit instead
4. If you will be away from e-mail for extended period, set up a “vacation” message
Write that you will reply to messages after your return as time permits – don’t promise!
5. If faced with a pile of e-mails, go through them from latest to earliest (some issues will have already been resolved)
H. Maintain a list of accomplished tasks
For your annual report and to gain some satisfaction when many tasks are not yet done
I. Off-load tasks that you can delegate to staff and/or students
Choose tasks carefully so that time for instructions & amending their work is limited
J. Maintain a log for a week, 2 weeks, or month of how you actually spend your time
If actual time spent does not match priorities, make adjustments
K. For every new responsibility, research area, student working with you, etc.:
You MUST drop something else that takes your time.
II. Classes

A. Preparation
1. Aim for less than 2:1 prep to class time ratio for familiar topics
a. Longer prep time for less familiar topics, but give yourself a cut-off
b. Don’t aim for perfection the first time you teach a course
2. Plan to cover only about half of your initial estimate of material
a. Applies to composing syllabus as well
b. Plan time to interact with students to determine how well they are absorbing material
3. Use technology only when it really adds value
a. Consider using PowerPoint only for images + captions, animations/videos, etc.
b. At most, include outline in presentation (perhaps more in notes posted on website)
4. Unless extensive research is needed, start preparing only within a few days of class
a. Reduces prep time
b. Reduces need to refresh memory
5. Give yourself (& students!) an occasional prep break: class discussion, review session, group activity, discussion of assignment(s), guest lecturer, video, etc.
6. Write down list of items you will need to take to class
B. Before Class
1. Give yourself 15-30 minutes to collect your thoughts (& yourself!)
2. Check list you wrote beforehand of items you need to take to class
C. Immediately After Class
1. Write down issues that you need to consider for the next class & questions for exam
2. Give yourself some personal wind-down time
III. Service Duties

A. Volunteer for one or two departmental/college service duties that you think you would be worthwhile and not take too much time
B. Requests for service by your chair, dean, etc.
1. Learn (with help of mentor) what requests you can safely refuse
2. Say "no" if you really don’t think that you have time or want to perform the duty
3. If a straight "no" is infeasible, ask your boss what other service duties you can drop to make time for the new duty
IV. Research

A. Finding the time
1. Create blocks of time for research during the semester
a. No non-research-related e-mail, no phone calls, etc.
b. Find the best place with minimal distractions but with necessary resources
2. Stop working on academics within a few days of the end of classes
3. Don’t start working diligently on your classes again until late in the summer
B. Summers
1. Think of summer research time as almost over on June 1: get cracking!
2. Confine work on academics to relatively small blocks of time

Cheats for Essay writing

1. Generate the Ideas 1. Generate the Ideas
Key verbs for this phase: SPEW and VOMIT

Goal: Empty your head; articulate the ideas. You’re
writing for yourself

•
Write whole sentences or phrases; avoid
keywords
•
Write down the silly and half-baked ideas too
•
Turn off the internal editor/censor
•
Don’t wait for a fully-formed idea; write down
what you’ve got
•
Use the words you have to attract the words you
want
•
Let your mind roam
•
Don’t avoid conflict—list pros and cons
•
Talk to yourself—these are private notes
•
You don’t get the idea and then write. You write
to get the idea.
•
Focus on QUANTITY—let the QUALITY take
care of itself
•
Generate more text than you think you’ll need
Move on to the next stage when you feel nothing
new is coming out.

Take a Break

•
Take a long break if you can afford it.
•
If time presses, divide the effort into thirds: spend
a third of your time on generating, a third
composing, a third expressing.
2. Compose the Ideas
Label the ideas with topic headings
1.
Print out your ideas file and label lines,
paragraphs, chunks of prose with topic headings.
2.
Write marginalia, annotations, additions on
separate paper. But do it quick; don’t linger.
3.
With ideas on paper to react to, you’ll get more
ideas. Write them down.
4.
You’re still writing for yourself. Don’t force
anything.
5.
Don’t worry about sequence; that comes later.
Just tag your ideas.
THINKING ON PAPER CHEATSHEET


Take a break

•
Congratulate yourself on the amount of raw prose
you’ve written.
•
Live with your ideas without the pressure of full
concentration.
Retype the topical draft

Yes, retype it. The whole thing.

1.
Group the topics together. Incorporate the
marginalia, annotations, and additions.
2.
If you feel inspired, add stuff, but don’t force it.
3.
Add little corrections, linking phrases, subtle
changes along the way. But don’t force them.
You’re still writing for yourself.
4.
Think of this activity as mainly retyping, though
more than that is going on.
Rewriting is rethinking. You’re re-engaging with
your material, turning what was static thinking into
active thinking.

Think of it as reshuffling, neatening your notes.

You want to keep the pressure off. Tell yourself this is
mainly mechanical, a clean-up operation.

This is your FIRST DRAFT.

Take a break

Bask in the warm glow of your productivity.

You’ve proven to yourself that you have lots of ideas
and you have lots to say.

Sequence the topics

1.
Print out the topical first draft.
2.
Mark with arrows, numbers, letters, etc. a
sequence or sets of sequences.
3.
Mark some areas “Intro,” “Conclusion,” “Main
Body,” “Supporting Evidence,” etc.
Now you’re starting to transition from writing for
yourself to writing for your reader. Think about the
arrangement of topics that will convince your reader.

Note to yourself the connections among the
various items. Add connecting phrases: this
suggests, moreover, on the other hand, etc. Seal
those relations for yourself and your reader.

This is your SECOND DRAFT.

Take a break.

3. Express the Ideas
This is the performance part of writing, where
you’re onstage.

Goal: Communicating with others.

Now’s the time to worry about style, grammar,
formatting, language, tone, etc. But it should be
easier since you’re now editing structured prose, not
generating and figuring out ideas on the fly.

Sharpen your ideas and arguments. For every
statement, ask “So what?” and “Specify!” as ways to
clarify points and to anticipate stupid reader questions
and stupid reader objections.

Retype

You knew that was coming. Remember: rewriting is
rethinking, no matter how mechanical it feels.
Experience your writing as the reader will experience
it: one word at a time.

This is an advanced stage of revision. The big
pieces should be in place by now. So keep the
changes small, unless the big changes easily suggest
themselves.

Sleep on this draft.

Read it aloud. You’ll be surprised at the small but
important changes that pop out at you.

Show it to others. Get their opinion on how to make
it stronger.

Monitoring Your Progress
Writing is a continuous process of generation,
composition, and expression. Phases are repeated
and sometimes combined (particularly the last stages
of revision).

You may skip from one phase to another,

sometimes to good effect, sometimes not.

Be aware of where you are in the process. Try to
keep generating, composing, and expressing
sequential. Avoid blocks or confusion from doing too
much at once or reaching for a final effect too early.

http://brownstudy.pbwiki.com/f/mikestipsheet.pdf
Page 1 of 2


THINKING ON PAPER CHEATSHEET


Evil Metaphors & Cliches 1
(anything) from hell
a laugh a minute
a question mark hangs over
about face
ahead of the curve
all in due time
all the way to the bank
at the end of the day
at this point in time (prefer “now”)
barking up the wrong tree
bated breath
bear fruit
bend over backwards
better late than never
blazing inferno
braindump
brainstorm
break down barriers
brutal reminder
building bridges
burn the midnight oil
burning bridges
business at hand
call it a day
carnival atmosphere
chew the fat
clean bill of health
cookie cutter
devil is in the details
dog eat dog
dog in the fight
due to (prefer "owing to" or "because of")
eat your own dog food
firestorm
firing on all cylinders
fly by night
food fight
freak accident
full-scale search
gangbusters
get a handle on
grease the skids
herding cats
holding feet to the fire
horror smash
hot pursuit
impact (as a verb)
in order to (prefer "to")
in the black
in the nick of time
in the red
last-ditch effort
leaning forward in the saddle
leave no stone unturned
Evil Metaphors & Cliches 2
left at the altar
lessons learned
let a thousand flowers bloom
level playing field
long pole in the tent
low-hanging fruit
may or may not (may implies "may not")
nose to the grindstone
not ready for prime time
on a weekly basis
on steroids
open a can of worms
outpouring of support
proactive (one is either active or inactive)
quite frankly
red herring
reinvent the wheel
run it up the flag pole
rushed to the scene
same sheet of music
sense of urgency
showstopper
shrouded in mystery
silos
slippery slope
sooner rather than later
split second
stove pipe
straw man
survival of the fittest
synergy
talk off line
teach how to fish
tense standoff
the cart before the horse
the eleventh hour
the fact (of the matter) is
the long and short of it is
think outside the box
time after time
time and again
time heals all wounds
time is money
time is running out
to be honest with you
touch base
unsung heroes
up the ante
utilize (prefer “use”)
wealth of experience
wipe the slate clean
with all due respect
work in a vacuum
zero tolerance
Evil Passive Verbs
is, am, are, was, were, be, being, been, I'm,
it's, he's, here's, she's, that's, there's, they're,
we're, what's, who's, you're
Books
Thinking on Paper by VA Howard & JH Barton
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
Art & Fear by David Bayles & Ted Orlando
Revising Business Prose by Richard Lanham
(or any of his books on revising prose)
URLs
Continuous revision process
http://markforster.net/index.php?view=38
Paramedic Method for Revising Prose
http://www.yale.edu/bass/2paramedic.html
Mike Shea’s writing tips PDF
http://mikeshea.net/writing_tips.pdf
See how this presentation evolved:
http://brownstudy.pbwiki.com/InlsFinalProject
Remember…
• Don’t wait for the Muse. Writing is an activity,
something you do—it is not something that
happens to you.
• Inspiration doesn’t strike when you’re
writing—it strikes when you’re in the shower.
• Writing is like prospecting for gold.
Sometimes we make a lucky find of a nugget
on the ground, but most of the time, it takes a
lot of sifting to find the precious metal in the
sand.
• Use the words you have to find the words
you want.
Diagnosing Prose Problems
1. Circle the prepositions (before, after, in, on,
to, apart, for, into, above, from, by, beside,
over, among, through, around, between, etc.)
2. Circle the "to be" forms.
3. Ask "Who is kicking whom?"
4. Put this action (the "kicking") in a simple
active verb.
5. Start fast—no mindless introductions.
6. Watch out for “shun” forms
(recommendation, initiation, interpretation,
etc.)
7. For each sentence, mark off its basic
rhythmic units with “/”. How monotonous does
the passage sound?
8. Read the passage aloud with emphasis and
feeling.
9. Mark off sentence lengths in a passage with
“/”. Do sentence lengths vary?
Process Variations
Continuous revision. Generate ideas, think
in full sentences, but stay inside one file.
Revising and embellishing, not retyping. Every
time you go back, you add more to it. Works
best with the "little and often" strategy. Good
for when you want to teach yourself about a
specific topic.
Oral presentation with no final written
product. Generate, organize, and sequence
the ideas as explained. Use these as the basis
of your outline. If you don’t want to use notes
during your presentation: Open a blank file
and type out your presentation without
referring to your notes. See if you own the
information.
Orwell s Questions
• What am I trying to say?
• What words will express it?
• What image or idiom will make it clearer?
• Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
• Could I put it more shortly?
• Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
Orwell s Rules
• Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure
of speech which you are used to seeing in
print.
• Never us a long word where a short one will
do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, cut it out.
• Never use the passive where you can use
the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, scientific word,
or jargon if you can think of an everyday
English equivalent.
• Break any of these rules sooner than say
anything outright barbarous.
Causes of Writer s Block
• Doing too many things at once. For example,
expressing ideas before they’re fully
articulated.
• Trying to get it right the first time.
Believing you need to have the right words
now, instead of writing now and finding the
words later.
• “Real writers only do first drafts.”
• Waiting for the Muse / inspiration / your
subconscious to gift you with ideas.
Fear. Dread. Boredom.
• “All I need is will power and self-discipline.”

the odd creative position that playing a game creates

On another level, there’s the odd creative position that playing a game creates in terms of the opposition between the self-creating of the narrative through the play-process and the limitations placed upon you by the parameters and depth and programming. We need to ask ourselves how this is alike or different from conventional ‘fanfic’ writing. Are we not limited by the boundaries of the format from which we are poaching, in the same way that we can't escape past the boundaries of allowable play within a game? There are differences, but there are also similarities that are intrinsic to both: a sense of ‘play’ within the margins, as well as the opportunity to explore those margins. The primary goal of fanfic is to celebrate the source text, even as the edges of that text are being extended.

One of the primary questions I have

One of the primary questions I have with higher-level fan fiction is the inherent legitimacy of the revisions, in view of “canon”. An example, indeed the one that started me thinking about this question, is that of the Star Trek novels of Alan Dean Foster, written in the 1970s. To understand the potential importance of his work, we need to remember that this period was the gap between the original run of the series (1966-68) and the return of the “official story” with the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979. While Gene Roddenberry and later Ric Berman refer to the series--now a franchise of series-- and motion pictures as solely representing the canonical text of the Star Trek story-line, Foster’s work arguably influenced the content of the story-lines in the movies as well as maintaining both interest and sufficient remembrance of the series throughout the decade-long period in which no official text was being created. The question is then how much of this influence translates into actual authority, in terms of the text. The answer is surprisingly little officially; the Roddenberry/Berman-authorised canon remains hegemonic in the world of Star Trek.
However, when represented in new textual formats, the authorial dichotomy of ‘canonical’ and ‘peripheral’ text is often inverted. For example, YouTube parodies such as “mishaps” represent the new canon in that genre, with traditional textual representations relegated to the status of peripheral influence and cultural source language in Saussurean semiotic terms. The ideas of symbology, discrete and deliberate choice are repeated. However, it would be easy to see the differences solely in terms of symbology. Hwever the truth is more layered than a simple, single point of derivation; for every narrative “beat” in the new media there is an implied collective knowledge, one that is assumed to be understood by the viewer

Me Teach Essay Making Real Good.

As you may or may not know (probably the latter) this is my second year working here: /www.queensu.ca/writingcentre





This year I got traded up to being a PAID member of the staff there, instead of volunteering there. ( One obviously led to the other, so I consider it time well-spent on a number of levels).


I really like the job, despite the occasional challenge of unravelling a student's thesis from the mass of disjointed sentences spread across a half dozen pages.


If there was to be ONE thing I'd change, were I in charge (and maybe with a bit more experience, I'd see that the system doesn't even need tweaking) it'd be the idea of actually having a formal course in tutoring; You just sort of sit in and after a session or two, they assume that since you're supposedly a hot shit Upper Year or Grad Student, YOU automatically know how to make the Froshies and 2Ys in your own image...


Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. What I seemingly, and I say this because it's seldom obvious even to me on the first go round, even after 10 (1o!!!) years in Uni...what I seemingly find is obvious to me is also hard to articulate to someone else...You often see these glaring structural issues and think "How can you THINK that there's a good, cogent argument in here???"

Writing in the Margins: Organic Development of Canon in FanFic and Game-Playing

It is the common cultural attributes of media that allow us to decipher the "code" of visual text. Unlike spoken language, which is a result of a consensual cultural tradition and subject to the input of various external sources, visual text--especially that of moving visual text-- is a result of a limited arbitrary pool of conventions being presented as a truncated form of 'language', much in the vein of a computer code. The limitation of the system is that the community from which it arises--and therefore the resultant language that emerges from it-- is even more arbitrary than usual. However, there is a tradition of cinematic and visual media conventions that form a core of reference as much as any language in existence. Even though cinematic language is only about 120 years old, it has already built up a sufficient repertoire of references that we need to realise that it is a language unto itself. Like all languages, although the choice of signifier might be arbitrary, the reception of it is not; like all languages, Media is subject to approval and acceptance by the recipients. We as media consumer-critics look at this mass of incoming signal and decide which of these conventions we will accept and perpetuate and which we will reject. There is the concept of cultural acceptance and compatibility that Malcolm Gladwell has labelled “stickiness”(Gladwell 1996).

Thesis Subject:Semiotics/symbology in YouTube remixed trailer mock-ups.

Structure:

• Intro.


• Saussurean background.


• Identify elements


• History of those elements


• Importance of the basic symbology.


• Continuance of that influence in today's culture.


• Implications of Influence.


• 
  
  Conclusion.

Lynch on stuff.

More on one of my fave Directors and artists:
Lifted from IMDb. com, just so you know....



David Lynch has beautiful hands. They stay folded much of the time, but when the director gets going, when his conversation begins to flow and an idea buzzes in his head like a fluorescent bulb, his fingers flutter in unison and his palms sweep in synchronized arcs. When this happens, Lynch could be a magician working some undefined "presto-change-o" mojo over an upside-down top hat. It makes you wonder—is he about to manifest a rabbit?
Actually, yes. Three of them. Life-sized humanoid suckers, trapped in some purgatorial deadpan sitcom. They materialize early and late in Inland Empire, and are scarcely the strangest things on display in this three-hour excursion through disintegrating consciousness, multiple darkened rooms of gloom and pretzeling movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie ambiguities. The film-which Lynch shot himself, on and off for three years, with a consumer-model Sony PD150 digital-video camera-is easily his most challenging and out there since the midnight-movie era of Eraserhead, some 30 years ago. Much as then, the new film is trickling out to theaters, city by city. It's practically being hand-distributed by Rhino (best known as a record company specializing in sometimes zany archival reissues) who will release Inland Empire as a DVD this summer.
It is, like every Lynch film save Dune, exactly what he wanted to make-a kind of parallel to the Hollywood noir of Mulholland Dr. (Just whose voices belong to those rabbits?) This time, however, there's only one actress, a fading, 40-ish star played by Laura Dern (who also starred in Lynch's Blue Velvet and Wild At Heart), whose onscreen and off-screen personas get scrambled inside her head. There's also a grim Polish saga that might have something to do with white slavery, a chorus line of streetwalkers, a Gypsy curse, a pretty brunette who sits alone in a hotel room weeping, and a pet monkey. But that's the easy stuff.
"When Mulholland Dr. came out, no one understood it," says Lynch, sitting in a candy-colored studio in a huge Chelsea nonprofit arts complex that's been secured for his low-budget promotional visit to New York. His silver hair is swept up into the kind of semi-pompadour that would do a televangelist proud, and his white shirt is buttoned to the neck under a formal black blazer. "Now, everyone understands that one but they don't understand this one." Not that Lynch understood it himself when he began shooting the fragments that would eventually become Inland Empire, a title that alludes to the non-coastal region southeast of Los Angeles, but primarily to the interior landscape of the mind, the director's playground.
'CINEMATIC JAZZ'
"When he called me, he said 'Let's experiment.' Those were the first words out of his mouth," says Dern, who appears in almost every scene of the movie, and who gave up so much of her time to assist with the often nebulous enterprise that Lynch gave her a producer credit. Dern was given a 70-minute monologue that Lynch had written, its segments forming the oscillating core of the finished work. "I loved that I played a character I couldn't even define. It's so all over the map, and to have someone trust you enough to say you can be all these aspects of a woman-it's the greatest sense of flying off a mountain."
Dern's co-star, fellow Lynch veteran Justin Theroux, reaches for a different comparison. "It's like cinematic jazz," says the actor, who had a key role in Mulholland Dr. "There's just something that happens in his films that obviously doesn't follow the conventions of normal storytelling. It eventually becomes its own animal." As the actors worked in scenes that were assembled in bits and pieces, they often seemed to be performing in a kind of void. "There are some scenes we shot, and on that day the lines are so funny, we're just cracking up. Then when you see them in the film it's a heart attack."
That's the sort of juxtaposition on which Lynch thrives. "The unknown pulls you in and it's kind of thrilling," he says, never quite explicating the journey. He becomes verbose, however, when discussing his experience with digital video. "My film students tell me, 'Geez, David, they make us work on the PD150 and we can hardly wait to get ahold of a Panavision and shoot 35 [mm] and you're leaving Panavision to use the PD150!?!'"
Fine for taking cinematic notes, perhaps, but, c'mon man, it's not even high-def.
"It's the way I want to shoot everything," Lynch insists. "It's not just for 'taking notes.' I'm falling in love with the way it goes with this small lightweight camera, with its 40-minute takes and the automatic focus, and seeing what you get, seeing it right there. You see exactly what it's going to look like and if you don't like it you can alter it. Once you get into a scene you can stay in there, deep, for a long time. You can talk to people while you're shooting the thing. Start again, get a little deeper. Start it again and catch a thing, and you don't have to interrupt it."
Suggest to Lynch that he's pushed the camera to its visual limits-giving Inland Empire a grainy, sometimes harsh look that might come from poor TV reception augmented by a broken contrast knob-and he gets even more excitable. "Yeah, it's bad quality," he says. "I'm not pushing it to make it worse. I'm seeing that it's out of focus and I don't give a shit! It's workin' for me. It's just beautiful to me."
'JIMMY STEWART FROM MARS'
This does sound perfect for Lynch, who's a full-time creative tinkerer, not terribly unlike the urbane scoutmaster he might be in a parallel universe, easily suggested by his warm, "Hey, Buddy!" persona and Midwestern twang. ("Jimmy Stewart from Mars," is how Mel Brooks described him, and it still rings true.) Daily, he indulges his love of painting, enjoys photographing nudes, builds his own furniture, and even delivers brief video weather reports weekdays on the free section of his website: DavidLynch.com. And, lately, Lynch has spoken a lot about another enthusiasm, Transcendental meditation, and the influence it's had on his life. Once a skeptic, he's practiced the discipline for 20 minutes twice a day since 1973 and credits it with leading him to "this unified field, pure-bliss consciousness." Lynch refers to this interior space by the Vedic phrase atma. "The self," he says. "Know that. Know it by being it, and you got the whole thing." Puzzled moviegoers groping for a skeleton key to the Lynchian funhouse, there you have it.
"Life becomes more like a game," Lynch says, fingers dancing. "It's way more fun to me. Way more fun. Every morning becomes more like a Saturday morning, a really sunny day. And all weekend you get to do your favorite things." He shares his inspirational thoughts in a new book, Catching the Big Fish, which is only one of many current projects. There's also Dynamic: 01, a DVD of weirdness from the website; the DVD release of the second season of Twin Peaks, Lynch's cult TV series; a March exhibit of paintings in Paris; and even his own brand of coffee.
That's right, look for David Lynch Signature Cup Coffee online and at theaters showing Inland Empire. "It's really good coffee," Lynch exclaims, settling for Starbucks this particular afternoon, smoke curling from the American Spirit cigarette he pinches between his left thumb and forefinger, held perpendicular from his upturned palm. "I drink 20 cups a day. But they're cappuccinos. There's not that much espresso in with the milk."
Now, we can all drink this strange brew. "It's perfect for art houses," Lynch says. "Like going back to the Beatnik days. Like coffee should be!"