Yesterday in class, after we studied Ian Falconer’s New Yorker cover The Competition, we examined Tetsuya Ishida’s painting Seedlings (1998), and you chose one of those two visual texts as the subject of a writing exercise–a bibliographic entry, followed a paragraph of summary and a second paragraph of commentary–as practice is your ongoing annotation work. My versions of the assignment, which I wrote as samples for you, appear below.
Summary
Tetsuya Ishida’s Seedlings depicts a classroom of uniformed Japanese teenagers, all males, whose teacher, seen only from the shoulders down, holds a textbook in one hand. The teacher drapes his other hand on the head of one of the pupils, one of two students presented as microscopes with human faces.
Commentary
Although the subject at hand is biology, the study of living organisms, the student seedlings barely seem alive themselves as they stare blankly into the distance. The uniformity Ishida depicts with their haircuts, crested blazers, striped neck ties, and rows of desks, takes a surrealistic twist with the images of the two pupils who have transformed into microscopes. By placing the teacher’s hand on one of the students-turned-microscope, Ishida indicates that the instructor—himself objectified by the absence of his head—approves of the metamorphosis, that for him, the goal of education is for the individual to be consumed by the subject itself, becoming merely a cold metallic instrument.
. . . and a Second Look at The Competition
Falconer, Ian. “The Competition.” Writing Analytically by David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen, 9th edition, Wadsorth/Cengage, 2024. p. 108.
Summary
Ian Falconer’s mostly black-and-white New Yorker cover The Competition depicts four beauty pageant contestants, three of whom stand in stark contrast to Miss New York. Her dark hair, angular body, narrowed eyes, tightly pursed lips, and two-piece bathing suit set her apart from the nearly-identical blondes–Miss Georgia, Miss California, and Miss Florida–with wide-open eyes and mouths and one-piece bathing suits.
Commentary
The self-satisfied expression of Miss New York suggests what the authors of Writing Analytically present as the second of two possible interpretations for The Competition: “[T]he magazine is . . . admitting , yes America, we do think that we’re cooler and more individual than the rest of you, but we also know that we shouldn’t be so smug about it” (Rosenwasser and Stephen 112).
Work Cited
Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. Chapter 3: “Interpretation: Asking So What?” Writing Analytically, 9th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2024. pp. 81-118.
Next Up
In class on Wednesday, you will compose a short essay that reflects on the process of researching, drafting and revising your final essay and annotated bibliography. In it, you will include one relevant quotation from the article that served as a starting point for your project or a relevant quotation from Writing Analytically.
Falconer, Ian. “The Competition.” Writing Analytically by David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen, 9th edition, Wadsorth/Cengage, 2024. p. 108.
Today in class, we will examine Ian Falconer’s New Yorker magazine cover The Competition and a second visual text: Tetsuya Ishida’s painting Seedlings. Following our in-class study of Falconer’s and Ishida’s artwork, you will choose one of the two visual texts to serve as the subject of a writing exercise–a bibliographic entry followed by a paragraph of summary and a second paragraph of commentary–as practice in your ongoing annotation work.
If the style of Ian Falconer’s New Yorker cover seems familiar to you, it may be because you encountered his work when you were a child. His book Olivia, published in 2000, received the 2001 Caldecott Medal, an award the Association for Library Service bestows upon the book they deem the best children’s picture book of the year. Falconer followed Olivia with several sequels, including Olivia Saves the Circus and Olivia Helps with Christmas.
. . . A Model Final Essay and Annotated Bibliography
Scrabble as a Game Changer in the College Classroom
Earlier this month, when I reread Jonathan Kay’s Wall Street Journal op-ed feature “Scrabble is a Lousy Game,” I once again meditated on his criticism of Scrabble as a word game that deemphasizes semantics. In Kay’s words, “Scrabble treats language the way computers do—as arbitrarily ordered codes stored in a memory chip” (par. 7). I asked myself, if I want my students to play a board game that cultivates word power, collaboration, and critical thinking skills, is Scrabble the game to choose? Thus, Kay’s review became the starting point for my research on the benefits of Scrabble play. As I scrolled through search results, I found not only articles that specifically addressed Scrabble in the college classroom but also many that focused on the value of the game itself for sharpening the mind.
The bibliography that follows includes Kay’s review, the starting point for my research, four refereed research articles, and two interviews with former students of mine. Three of the four refereed articles offer windows into the classrooms of professors who have incorporated Scrabble play into their curricula: an English professor at California State University-Monterey Bay, a professor of Christian education at MidAmerica Nazarene University, and a professor of engineering at Tomsk Polytechnic University in Russia. The fourth article addresses cognitive evaluations of competitive Scrabble players and what they reveal about how experience shapes word recognition.
Though Kay’s criticism of Scrabble warrants reconsidering the inclusion of Scrabble in my first-year writing classes, his disapproval of the game stems from the practices of tournament-level players, not people for whom the game is a pastime—or from students, like mine, who play Scrabble as a classroom exercise. It’s also notable that collaboration, which is an essential component of team Scrabble, does not factor in Kay’s review.
In “Tabletop Games and 21st Century Skills Practice in the Undergraduate Classroom,” Mark Hayse and his colleagues who participated in the study report “that tabletop gameplay helped students move from classroom passivity to classroom ‘engagement’” (298). My own students did not address engagement in their interviews with me—though their engagement is evident during Scrabble play—but instead focused on vocabulary building and the relationship of the game to the composing process. Jesse Brewer noted that the game has “introduced [him] to new words,” and Ava Salvant observed that the game has “[p]robably influenced [her] ability to write.”
How much does Scrabble play cultivate our word power? The answer to that question remains unclear, but the research of psychologists and educators points to the merits of team Scrabble for improving not only our language skills but also our facility with critical thinking, team-building, and spatial skills.
As I review the research on Scrabble that I have outlined here, I envision it as groundwork for a larger project, one in which I would use the theoretical framework of composition studies to examine the benefits of incorporating Scrabble play into the first-year writing curriculum. Such a project could be an interdisciplinary one since some of the skills the game promotes, such as collaboration and problem solving, are key to a variety of disciplines. Whether I undertake that project, the knowledge that I have gained will inform my teaching as I continue to seek ways to improve my students’ quality of learning through opportunities for wordplay in the classroom.
Annotated Bibliography
Brewer, Jesse. Interview. Conducted by Jane Lucas. 20 Oct. 2023.
English 1103 student Jesse Brewer recounts how he has played Scrabble for most of his life. Ever since he was a young child, he has played the game with his grandparents whenever he visited their home in Pennsylvania. Brewer will continue to play Scrabble after the end of the semester because the game remains a tradition in his family. In his words, “[M]y grandmother is still going to want to play it every summer.” Brewer also notes how the game has expanded his vocabulary, saying it has “introduced me to new words, which allows me to read and write more capably in everyday life.”
Brewer’s remarks on vocabulary building highlight the game’s verbal benefits, and his observations on Scrabble as a family tradition serve as a point of contrast to that of some other students’—such as Ava Salvant’s—who had not played Scrabble before playing it as a weekly exercise in English 1103.
Brewer is a sophomore computer science major at High Point University, where he was enrolled in English 1103, section 20, in 2023.
“Critical Habits of Mind” addresses the teaching practices of a group of college math andwriting faculty who collaborated to develop lessons to foster intellectual capacities, such as motivation and self-efficacy. Developmental educational instructors from three Californiacolleges, Cabrillo College, California State University-Monterey Bay, and Hartnell College, partnered to pilot classroom activities, including clicker technology, peer writing review, improvisation, metacognitive writing activities, and Scrabble Fridays. Reflecting on their collaboration, Fletcher observes that foregrounding procedural knowledge, as their pilot activities did, enabled them to couple their teaching of discipline-specific content with the set of behaviors essential to teaching and learning. Fletcher notes that Hetty Yelland, who devotes her Friday classes to Scrabble play, observes “the extra effort students have to make to overcome the boredom—and their passive word knowledge . . . eventually leads to more active and internalized language practices” (54).
Fletcher’s account of Hartnell writing instructor Hetty Yelland’s Scrabble Fridays is of particular value to education researchers and teachers considering Scrabble play as a classroom activity that dovetails with discipline-specific content and also fosters foundational learning skills.
Jennifer Fletcher is a professor of English at California State University, Monterey Bay. Her books include Teaching Arguments, Teaching Literature Rhetorically, and Writing Rhetorically.
“How a Hobby Can Shape Cognition” presents the findings of Canadian researchers inthe Departments of Psychology and Medicine at Calgary University who investigated how the word recognition skills of competitive Scrabble players differed from those of age-matched nonexperts. The researchers’ cognitive evaluations revealed differences only in Scrabble-specific skills, such as anagramming. Also, the researchers observed that Scrabble expertise was associated with two specific effects: vertical fluency and semantic deemphasis. The study’s results indicate that experience shapes visual word recognition.
The research of Hargreaves and his former colleagues at Cardiff is pertinent to educators who seek to understand the cognitive benefits of frequent Scrabble play. Notably, the semantic deemphasis that the study identifies—and that Jonathan Kay addresses in his commentary—contrasts the gains in language skills that Hetty Yelland observes in her students.
Ian Hargreaves is professor emeritus of journalism, media, and culture at Cardiff University and one of the contributors to A Manifesto for the Creative Economy, a ten-point plan for bolstering creative industries.
Hayse, Mark. “Tabletop Games and 21st Century Skill Practice in the UndergraduateClassroom.” Teaching Theology & Religion, vol. 21, no. 4, 2018, pp. 288–302., https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com.libproxy.highpoint.edu /doi/epdf/10.1111/teth.12456.
“In Tabletop Games and 21st Century Skill Practice in the UndergraduateClassroom,” the research of Mark Hayse and his colleagues is guided by the primary research question, “Does tabletop gameplay require the practice of 21st century skills?” (290), and their secondary question, “What initial links might be drawn between tabletop gameplay, 21st century skill practice, and undergraduate learning?” (290). All three professors reported “that tabletop gameplay helped students move from classroom passivity to classroom ‘engagement’” (298) and that “[e]ven though tabletop gameplay technically was coursework . . . the nontraditional nature of it seemed to render it as play more than work” (298).
Hayes’s findings are useful for researchers interested in how incorporating table-top game play into college curricula fosters such twentieth-first century skills as critical thinking and problem solving, creativity and innovation, communication, and collaboration. His findings are also of particular value to educators considering adding table-top game play to their secondary- or post-secondary courses.
Mark Hayse is Director of the Honors Program and Mabee Library Professor at MidAmerica Nazarene University. His other publications include an essay on the World of Warcraft, a study of the video game featured in the collection Don’t Stop Believin’: Pop Culture and Religion from Ben Hur to Zombies, edited by Robert K. Johnston, Craig Detweiler, and Barry Taylor.
Kay, Jonathan. Review. “Scrabble is a Lousy Game.” The Wall Street Journal, 4 Oct. 2018. ProQuest, https://libproxy.highpoint.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com /newspapers/scrabble-is-lousy-game-why-would-anyone- play/docview/2116081665/se- 2?accountid=11411.
In “Scrabble is a Lousy Game,” writer and editor Jonathan Kay criticizes Scrabble for its lack of emphasis on semantics. In Kay’s words, the game “is like a math contest in which you are rewarded for reciting pi to the 1,000th decimal place but not knowing that it expresses the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter” (par. 5). Kay asserts that the best board games for casual players involve a mix of luck and skill and recommends two other board games, Codenames and Paperback, as better options for wordplay.
While Kay’s review focuses on the competitive player’s approach to Scrabble, the concerns he raises about the game’s deemphasis of word meaning and the frustration that novice players can experience warrant the attention of educators who are researching the potential drawbacks of introducing Scrabble play into their classrooms.
Jonathan Kay is senior editor of the journal Quillette and the author of Your Move: What Board Games Teach Us About Life.
Kobzeva, Nadezda. “Scrabble as a Tool for Engineering Students’ Critical Thinking Skills and Development.” Procedia: Social and Behavioral Sciences, no. 182, 2015, pp. 369-74. ScienceDirect, https://www.sciencedirect.com/ science/article/pii/S1877042815030669.
“Scrabble as a Tool for Engineering Students’ Critical Thinking Skills and Development” presents research involving second-year engineering students and teachers of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) at Tomsk Polytechnic University in Tomsk, Russia. The students, all non- native speakers of English, played Scrabble as an in-class and out-of-class-activity for oneacademic year. At the end of the year, the best six student players competed in teams in a tournament against two teams of the six EFL teachers. Throughout the tournament—which was conducted outside of the classroom to relieve students of the pressure to obtain a high score—the researcher, Nadezda Kobzeva, observed the contrast in the students’ and teachers’ practices as players. While the EFL instructors possessed an advanced knowledge of English language, they were newcomers to Scrabble. On the other hand, the engineering students with limited knowledge of English relied on the skills they developed throughout their year-long Scrabble program. In the feedback the students provided after the tournament, which they won, the majority rated the skills they developed as Scrabble players as excellent in all five fields assessed, including team building, thinking, spatial skills, vocabulary, and spelling.
Kobzeva focuses her research on engineering students, but her findings are also valuable to researchers and teachers in other fields who seek answers to the questions of how Scrabble can be used effectively as a learning tool, and what specific skills students may develop through frequent play. Unlike Mark Hayse’s findings, which focus exclusively on the twenty-first century skills, known as the 4Cs, Kobzeva’s research highlights other skills that students develop—in particular the Russian engineering students’ (non-native speakers of English) greater facility with the English language.
Nadezda Kobzeva is a professor of engineering at Tomsk Polytechnic University. Her other research articles include “Ontology of Key Metasigns in Translatology,” published in V Mire Nauchnykh Otkrytii (In the World of Scientific Discoveries).
Salvant, Ava. Interview. Conducted by Jane Lucas. 23 Oct. 2023.
English 1103 student Ava Salvant reveals that she had never played a game of Scrabble before playing it as a weekly exercise in English 1103. She also notes that the game has “[p]robably influenced [her] ability to write because not always when you sit down to write do you know the exact words that you want to say. You kind of have to go with the flow and put down as many words as you can on the board in Scrabble or on the paper in writing.”
Salvant’s observations as a novice Scrabble player underscore the similarities between game play and the writing process, and they also serve as a point of contrast to that of some other students’—such as Jesse Brewer’s—who bring years of Scrabble experience to their first-year writing class.
Ava Salvant is a sophomore neuroscience major at High Point University, where she was enrolled in English 1103, section 19, in 2023.
Next Up
At the beginning of class on Wednesday we will revisit The Competition and Seedlings, and you will have the remainder of the period to devote to writing your reflection on your final essay and annotated bibliography.
Keeping a u on your rack before the q is played is one way to decrease the chances that you will be left holding the q, a deduction of ten points. Learning q words without u’s, such as the ones listed below, will increase your word power and provide you with more options for playing the q.
qabala(s): an esoteric method, discipline, and school of thought in Jewish mysticism. Also qabalah, cabala, and kabbalah.
qadi(s): an Islamic judge. Also cadi.
qaid(s): a Muslim tribal chief. Also caid.
qajak(s): a kayak.
qamutik(s): a sled drawn by dogs. Also komatik.
qanat(s): a system of underground tunnels and wells in the Middle East
qapik(s): a monetary subunit of the manat (Azerbaijan).
qat(s): a shrub
qawwali(s): a style of Muslim music
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review the blog posts devoted to Scrabble tips, including this one.
(L-R): The CSE (Council of Science Editors) Scientific Style and Format, The AMA (American Medical Association)Manual of Style, The Chicago Manual of Style, Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA), MLA (Modern Language Association) Handbook
As you continue to revise your final essay and annotated bibliography, pay careful attention to matters of style. If you have questions about the format of a bibliographic entry, look to the resources available to you in the library and online. The list of links on my blog includes the websites for both the MLA Style Center and OWL (Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab). At the library’s reference desk (pictured above), you can pick up a handout on MLA style and consult a physical copy of the MLA Handbook, eighth edition.
If you use a citation generator–either one available through the HPU Libraries databases or elsewhere online–keep in mind that the citations frequently include errors. Compare them with the models at the MLA Style Center, on OWL, or in the MLA Handbook, eighth edition.
Documentation Styles
The library’s reference desk also houses handbooks and handouts for other documentation styles, including APA (the American Psychological Association), CSE (the Council of Science Editors), and Chicago Style. Those are styles you will be required to use for projects in art, history, religion, sciences, and social sciences. For more information on some of the styles you will use in your other college courses, see “The Four Documentation Styles: Similarities and Differences” in Writing Analytically (367-75).
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review the posts on my blog devoted to Scrabble tips.
This morning you will have the class period to continue your research and writing. Although you will be working on your laptops and tablets, you will still be required to submit a handwritten exercise at the end of the class period. It will consist of a minimum of two paragraphs, each of which mentions at least two of your sources. The two paragraphs may be paragraphs from your essay, paragraphs from your bibliography, or a combination of the two. I have included sample paragraphs on the assignment handout as guides for you and am including them below as well.
Sample Essay Paragraph
In “Tabletop Games and 21st Century Skills Practice in the Undergraduate Classroom,” Mark Hayse and his colleagues who participated in the study report “that tabletop gameplay helped students move from classroom passivity to classroom ‘engagement’” (298). My own students did not address engagement in their interviews with me—though their engagement is evident during Scrabble play—but instead focused on vocabulary building and the relationship of the game to the composing process. Jesse Brewer noted that the game has “introduced [him] to new words,” and Ava Salvant observed that the game has “[p]robably influenced [her] ability to write.”
Sample Bibliography Paragraph
The research of Hargreaves and his former colleagues at Cardiff is pertinent to educators who seek to understand the cognitive benefits of frequent Scrabble play. Notably, the semantic deemphasis that the study identifies—and that Jonathan Kay addresses in his commentary—contrasts the gains in language skills that Hetty Yelland observes in her students.
Writing Center
As you continue to revise your final essay and annotated bibliography, consider visiting the Writing Center. If you do so, you will earn five bonus points for the assignment.
To schedule an appointment, visit https://highpoint.mywconline.com, email the Writing Center’s director, Professor Justin Cook, at jcook3@highpoint.edu, or scan the QR code below. To earn bonus points for your final essay and annotated bibliography, consult with a Writing Center tutor no later than Thursday, April 10. The due date for posting the assignment to Blackboard and to your WordPress blog is Wednesday, April 9 (before class); the hard deadline is Friday, April 11 (before class).
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review the posts on my blog devoted to Scrabble tips.
Yesterday’s class focused on a review of the sample student essay and annotated bibliography “The King of Storytelling,” an exercise that should continue to serve as a guide for you as you develop and revise your own essay and bibliography.
The notes that follow address some of the points of content and form that we addressed in our review. As you continue your own research and revision work, revisit these notes as well as the paragraph that you wrote in class yesterday.
Content
The essay’s introduction does fulfill its basic requirements: It addresses the writer’s purpose for compiling it, clarifies what drives the research and what interests the writer in the subject, and also states what questions the writer seeks to answer.
The body paragraphs of the essay do include a minimum of two quotations from two of the five sources; however, the student does not mention all of the sources in the body pargraphs. In the introduction, he lists the five sources, but two of them are simply referred to as “two other articles” (par 1).
The student misses the opportunity to draw on lines from “Strawberry Spring” as examples of the writing strategies that King recommends. In the third and fourth paragraphs, the student mentions King’s advice to avoid using adverbs that end in ly and to avoid passive voice but offers examples of neither.
Consider again the examples that I wrote on the board in class:
“‘He got another one,'” someone said to me, his face pallid with excitement” (273).
“He got another one,” someone said excitedly.
The first sentence, which is King’s, is more effective than the second one because the ly-ending adverb “excitedly,” which modifies the verb “said,” contributes virtually nothing to the story or to the reader’s experience of it. “Excitedly” is abstract; it isn’t something readers can see. They can, however, see a “face pallid with excitement” (273), an image that indicates that the speaker’s heightened state of emotion isn’t all together pleasant since “pallid” is a paleness associated with illness.
Springheel Jack . . . “I saw those two words in the paper this morning” (269).
Springheel Jack . . . Those two words in the paper this morning were seen.
Springheel Jack . . . Those two words in the paper this morning were seen by me.
The first sentence, which is King’s, is more effective than the second and third ones because it is written in active voice. Because the narrator is performing the action in the sentence, seeing the words in the paper, readers are looking over his shoulder, seeing the news story for themeslves. In the second sentence, no one performs the action. In the third, the narrator is present but is the recipient of the action. Both the second and the third sentences distance the reader from the narrator, making them passive observers of a passive narrator.
Including such examples would enable the student to enhance his essay in several ways: (1) he would demonstrate his understanding of active voice, passive voice, and ineffectual ly-ending adverbs, (2) he would illustrate how King draws on his own writing advice in his fiction, and (3) he would synthesize information from a secondary source (Marc Hye-Knudsen’s “How Stephen King Writes and Why”) with information from a primary one (Stephen King’s “Strawberry Spring”).
Such enhancements are always the products of revision. Only after rereading your sources and annotating them can you begin to see how they complement one another.
Form
The parenthetical citations include only the author’s last name, and in some cases only part of the last name. The only quotation that should not be followed by a parenthetical citation is the one from the student’s interview with his classmate.
The bibliographic information for two of the three scholarly sources is incomplete and the entries are marred by errors of mechanics and style.
Wherever the parenthetical citation (Knudsen) appears, the student should have replaced it with a (Hye-Knudsen 8) or (Hye-Knudsen, par. 12), depending on whether the source is paginated. Additionally, if the words are actually Stephen King’s, the student should attribute those words to him with a parenthetical citation for an indirect quotation: (King qtd. in Hye-Knudsen 8) or (King qtd. in Hye-Knudsen, par. 12).
Neither the bibliographic entry for Brown’s article or Hye-Knudsen’s includes the title of the journal where the article was published. The absence of the titles coupled with the absence of page or paragraph numbers in the parenthetical citations may lead readers to wonder whether the student actually accessed and read the articles or simply read abstracts or excerpts. More troubling than the omission of the journal names are the references to Brown’s short article as a book. No careful examination of a text would lead the reader to conclude that it’s a full-length book if it’s only a few pages long.
Next Up
Tomorrow you will have the class period to continue your research and writing. Although you will be working on your laptops and tablets, you will still be required to submit a handwritten exercise at the end of the class period. It will consist of a minimum of two paragraphs, each of which mentions at least two of your sources. The two paragraphs may be paragraphs from your essay, paragraphs from your bibliography, or a combination of the two. I will include sample paragraphs on the assignment as guides for you. You will not receive a grade for the individual exercise itself; instead, it will factor in your final essay and annotated bibliography grade.
Some of you have probably already drafted paragraphs that mention two or more sources, which means that you will simply have to transcribe them for tomorrow’s exercise. If that isn’t the case and you are concerned about completing the two paragraphs by the end of the period, give yourself a head start.
Jane Lucas 