I think most writers are under the impression that the first draft is the hardest part of writing a manuscript.  I know I felt that way when I began my dissertation.  But in reality, knocking that first draft out seems like the proverbial walk through the park when compared with the act of revision.

Becky Levine tackles this topic in her article "What now?  How to Revise from a Critique" in October's Writer's Digest.  While it discusses the topic of revision in terms of creative writing, the advise that Levine gives is still spot on. 

One thing that Levine comments on and something that I soon realized when I was in the revision stages of my dissertation is that you need to make the easy revisions first.  Go ahead and take care of those pesky little things that your writing group or committee members have noted.  This really gives you a sense of accomplishment and you can check things off your to-do list.

Something that Levine asserts, however, and which I believe we rarely think about is that "revision is not all about writing and rewriting" (53).  WHAT??!!  Anyone's first instinct to this statement is likely "what the crap is it then".  Levine follows this up with "it's more about thinking" (53).  You give that a moment to sink in, and it's like you have that "aha" moment.  It's one of those moments when you finally realize that you've failed to see the forest for the trees.  Revision = thinking.  Once the small things are marked off of your to-do list, it's not time to plunge into the major revisions, but rather time to "think".  Think about what your writing group members or committee members have said.  Think about whether or not the comments they have made are valid and whether or not they will work for you. 

So if you are faced with revision comments that have you breaking out in a cold sweat, take a deep breath, read through them, and then sit back or go to the park and just think!

I've learned a lot lately that you won't find in any books or journal articles.  I've learned that moving 6 animals and 2 people into one house in the city is not easy, especially when two of them are BIG dogs who are use to living in the country with hundreds of acres to roam and no barriers.

I've learned that a BIG dog can come through a mostly closed, 15 inch wide window with apparently little effort, after opening the window of course.  I've learned that a PS3 can survive this, barely.  Had it hit the floor, I don't think the results would have been quite so favorable.

I've learned that cats really don't give a rat's a@# about people but get extremely PISSED when you mess with their environment.  And a pissed cat is not a happy thing.  They decide they will show their displeasure by breaking all litter box rules. 

So what have the animals learned?  Well, the cats have learned that we will not hesitate to lock them into a very small bathroom (not currently in use) with a really BIG kitty box, food and water, and very, very LITTLE room for laying and sleeping.  The dogs will hopefully slearn that it does not hurt my feelings to leave all of the windows closed when no one is home regardless of how warm it might get.  One dog in particular will hopefully soon learn that I am bigger than him and that I'm not afraid to use my "biggerness" to get him to behave on a leash.

All in all, I have learned one H%#$ of a lot lately and didn't need ANY stinkin' books to teach me any of this.  So all things considered, I think this qualifies for a 260 days of learning post.

And one of these instances is in virtual environments research.  I was totally psyched to read "Online Instructor Immediacy and Instructor-Student Relationships in Second Life" by Traci L Anderson.  I would go so far as to say I actually enjoyed the first four pages.

I agree with Anderson's comment that "immediacy behaviors bring about a sense of psychological and/or physical closeness between people" (101).  I also agree when Anderson invokes research that states that "educators must work toward integrating a greater variety of immediacy behaviors when teaching in online environments" (101).  The fact is, I have quite a few stars in the margins of these first four pages, which is always an indication that I am connecting with the text.

However, it all goes down hill for me after this.  For instance, Anderson informs the readers that "in this research the alpha coefficient for modified 9-item perceived immediacy measure was .86 (M = 21.6.  SD = 8.31)" (106).  Now I know that those who are familiar with quantitative methods understand all of this mumbo-jumbo, and I'm good with that because I knew there would be explications in the Discussion section.  But things continued to go south for me even in that section.

In the Results, Anderson states that "as student perceptions of instructors' nonverbal immediacy in Second Life increased, student motivation increased" (107).  This sounds good, right?  Well . . . maybe not.  The next paragraph states that "although student motivation was assessed in this study, the specific factors that motivate students were not" (108).  Huh???  Didn't Anderson just say that immediacy increased . . . motivation increased?  How can Anderson claim that if specific factors were not assessed?

The rest of the text is similar.  Everything is positive but then maybe not so positive.  By the end I was wondering what exactly the research proves.  Bottom line: maybe I do need to know what all those numbers and initials mean, or maybe, just maybe the research needs to be more clearly presented!!

Learning and reading come in all forms and I have found that to be especially true over the past couple of nights. 

Last night I became the Orc, Vrigka, in World of War Craft, and tonight I inhabited the body of an assassin in the PS3 game Assassin's Creed.  So what could I have possibly read and learned by playing games you might ask?

Well, it's been a while since I've been in any gaming environment.  Many want to call Second Life a game, but it's not, and it is nothing like WoW or Assiassin's Creed.  In WoW, once you have made your character, the reading begins.  You are expected to be able to read and follow directions to learn how to survive in this world and how to adapt to that culture.  Luckily, with WoW, the directions remain on the screen until you complete the task at hand, making it easy for the gamer to learn.  I haven't yet played long enough to know what my retention might be, but for a first time experience, I was impressed.

Assassin's Creed is even more reading than WoW.  And I found myself struggling to keep up with the speed of the game.  Even though I was playing on a big screen tv, I found the in-game written tutorials to be extremely small in comparison and difficult to read because of that.  After some initial frustration, I finally started to get the hang of the game play and began to make some progress.  The in-game tutorials are comprehensive, and once I re-familiarized myself with the literacy of game tutorials, I was feeling pretty good.

After I quit the game after only an hour of play, I decided to look much more closely at the manual that came with the game.  The booklet was written in typical font, nothing special, but then I started noticing a hand-written type font and started to pay closer attention.  Much to my surprise, these snippets were commentary on the actual written instructions.  At one point the respondent wrote "doesn't this belong in the fight section?  You should add a note that attacking is easier if you are locked on a target . . ." (8).  Amazing.  I never thought I would find a game instruction booklet that included revision comments.  I'm already envisioning how to include this text the next time I teach first-year writing.  A lesson in revision and critical reading.

So yes, I truly believe I lead a charmed life.  I have a job that I love and hobbies that inform my job in surprising ways.

Yes, I am behind in my blogging, and I am about resigned to the fact that it will be next to impossible to get 260 posts by the 30 of April.  What this means is that I will continue the project beyond the 30 of April so that I can at least complete 260 posts.

In the mean time, I read four articles tonight for my Web Authoring course.  Of the four, three interested me, one resonated with me, and one was full of stats that I had never really considered. 

The article that resonated with me was Kyle Mueller's "How Environments, Real and Virtual, Influence Us."  Most people would not realize this to look in my office, but clutter really does bother me.  I don't like tight spaces, and clutter resembles a tight space for me.  Like Mueller points out, "as a natural progression, a home and a website seem to accumulate things--and at the same time, they are rarely purged of non-essentials" ("How Environments).  Mueller is absolutely right.  Rather than taking things off of our websites when we need to do an update, we just keep adding, creating more and more clutter.  No wonder some websites make me cringe.  I also agree with Mueller when he argues that "too many colors,  colors that clash, or use of too much strong color can make a space feel cramped and cluttered" ("How Environments").  Color, perhaps above all other design elements, has the greatest affect on me emotionally and psychologically when it comes to web design.

The article full of statistics is "Why Color Matters" by Jill Morton.  One fact that Morton relays is that "color increases brand recognition by up to 80 percent" based on studies by University of Loyola and Maryland ("Why Color Matters").  And who would have thought that making Ketchup green would boost Heinz sales by $23 million ("Why Color Matters)?  You see red with white lettering and what is the first thing that pops to mind?  Yea, Coke.  Color does matter, more then we really co.

The funny thing is, the third article I read that really didn't mean a lot to me is Joshua David McClurg-Genevese's "Color: An Investigation."  So while this article wasn't particularly eye-opening for me, it did remind me that color is not something that people have depended on since the beginning of time.  As McClurg-Genevese points out, "the first true critical thinking about color occured during the Renaissance in Europe" ("Color: An Investigation").  I think we tend to believe that color theory has always been around, but this is far from true.

Three articles, one blog post, color.  I will look at websites differently from hence forth.

So I'm attempting to teach Web Authoring this semester to a wide range of students, and by wide range, I mean their knowledge ranges from beginner to coder. 

At any rate, one of the texts for this course is Jeffery Zeldman and Ethan Marcotte's Designing with Web Standards.  I have read the introduction and the first chapter and the authors continue to discuss the forward compatibility of websites if designers adhere to the standards that have been set forth by W3C and other standard bodies.  They argue that designing with these standards will "ensure that sites so designed will continue to work in tomorrow's browsers and devices, including devices not yet built or even imagined" (32).

I'm sorry, but I have been around since the beginning of the Web and I find it hard to believe that the design standards we are using today will work without doubt in technology we haven't even imagined as of yet.  The authors themselves discuss how even today many designers are still using hacked code in an effort to remain backward compatible.  What makes the authors believe that the standards chosen today will continue to work into the future?  I might have bought the argument if they had not made so bold a claim as to state that these same standards will work in things not yet imagined. 

While the class is not required to read the entire text, I plan on it.  I look forward to knowing their reactions to this weeks readings, but especially to this claim of forward compatibility, and I look forward to learning how the authors believe this will happen.

In class on Wednesday, I talked with my students about the importance of writing in web authoring.  One of the articles they were to read, which of course they didn't (partly my fault), was Amber Simmons "Reviving Anorexic Web Writing."  My students seem to believe that it is just common sense that you'd need the content of a web site before you could create or author an effective design.  What they don't seem to realize is that prospective clients may not always see it this way.

Simmons tells a story of one difficult client who wanted her to drop everything and create a quick and dirty website for his latest and greatest project.  Her reply . . . was to smile "at him, nodding in all the right places, and when he stopped talking for just long enough I said, 'All that sounds great.  When you're ready to give me the content you want to use so I can see what I'm dealing with, let's talk. '" The clients response . . . "'Can't we just add that later, once the design is finished'" ("Reviving"). 

This brings up two really good points: 1) writing and design have to go hand-in-hand, and 2) it really does help if the designer is the author of the content as well.  The fact is that it really does help if the designer of the web site can also be the author of the written content.  If the site is intended to be somewhat playful, and you design it that way, it's likely that you can capture that essence as well in the text.  An outside author may not have that ability.  It's obvious that attempting to design something without content would likely equal failure. 

Bottom line: never design without content, and attempt to always be the author of that content.

When I told myself that I needed to blog tonight (I mean I had already done the reading), I really did not (still do not) want to.  I'm tired, it has been a rough day, and, quite frankly, the reading I did for tonight's blog left me with nothing.  Not sure how I ended up with TWO readings that left me feeling nothing two nights in a row, but it has happened.

I read Dean Allen's "Reading Design" for tonight, and I highlighted all of three passages.  From what I can tell, Allen is ranting about web designers lack of consideration for the reader when they choose how to represent fonts. Allen argues that the education of many of the students he teaches "had plainly focused away from what I consider the primary goal of communication design: to make vital, engaging work intended above all to be read.  To use design to communicate" ("Reading Design"). 

The one thing that I did find useful about the article was Allen's "An Entirely Incomplete List of Things a Non-Illiterate Designer Should Know Before Being a Designer" at the very end of that article.  That is worth printing and putting in a place where you'll always see it if you have plans to be or are a designer.

That is all I have to say about this article.  It ain't much, but I at least I read and blogged.

At this point in time, I would have to say that even the lack of a reaction to something we read is, in itself, a reaction.  Does that make sense?  I keep reading it, and it feels right.  So here is an example.  I read Sharon Lee's "Human-to-Human Design."  and even though I understood the content, I didn't have a strong reaction one way or another to her comments. 

I've learned (and I think that I've mentioned this before) that if I underline or mark up something I read a LOT, then I'm definitely connecting to the piece.  Oooooo, so is there a difference between connecting and reacting?  Hmmm, I don't think I want to go there tonight.  At any rate, there is very little marked in Lee's article.  First, she begins her piece by writing "it's not new to say that we now live in an age in which survival in business depends on your ability to communicate effectively through the internet" ("Human-to-Human").  Wow, I'm sorry, but for me, that simply is not much of a hook. 

Everyone knows that it is the beginning that sets the tone.  In a book, it's those first few pages or maybe the first chapter, but in an article as short as Lee's, it's gotta happen in that first paragraph.  It didn't happen, therefore, I've lost interest from the beginning.  Now this does not mean that I don't believe Lee's article gets across some important information.  It just doesn't do it in a very effective way for me. 

So when she writes about audience and how we, as web designers need to have a more narrow focus of exactly who that audience is so that we can design better websites, it's not that I don't agree with her.  It's just that the way she has written it has bored me.  However, when she later argues that "storytelling is a rich and compelling way to involve the user in a design, evoke an emotional response, or enhance a user's learning experience", my "ears" perked up immediately.  I understand these words, and more importantly, the adjectives she uses: "rich", "compelling", "emotional".  This sentence was under the heading of "Tell me a story" and I got it. 

When I arrived at the section sub-titled "Enchant me", I expected the same kind or similar language, but it left me dry.  For instance, "design can create order and instill a feeling of peace and serenity" just left me feeling nothing.  Lee fails to get across this idea of "Human-to-Human Design" that the title indicates I should understand by the end.  I either failed as a reader to connect to her ideas through her writing (which is entirely possible), or she failed to communicate them effectively with her choice of language.  Go on over to the site, read it, and let me know your thoughts!!  http://www.alistapart.com/articles/humantohuman/