Welcome to English 100

I set up this blog to help you ease into the new world of Ashland University and our English class—sort of a low-intensity introduction.

The material which follows will be a mix: some “Nuts & Bolts” stuff about managing college life, some personal observations and ideas, and some specific details about our course. I’ll keep the blog going after the semester begins, so this can continue to be an informal conversation.

College is an incredibly big adjustment—almost like moving to a foreign country. I’d like to help you make that move as gracefully as possible.

A few details about this blog

This isn’t an official AU site, and everything here is my own opinion. Because it’s not an AU site, anybody on the Internet can read it, so if you have a friend who is in another English class—perhaps even in another college—I have no problem with you sharing the address.
The blog software puts the newest items at the top, but you can still read older items that have fallen off the opening page. Just click MORE POSTS at the bottom. Or you can click the thing that looks like three little lines ☰ at the top right to search for older posts by key word or by topic.
You should expect something new here every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
I have enabled comments on the posts, but comments will be moderated, so if you write something, it won’t appear for a while.
I’ll be sending out weekly reminders to your AU email address because there’s a lot of coming and going in the class roster during the few weeks before class begins and I want to catch the newcomers.

Welcome to our class

—Curtis Allen

Comments

Getting Your Computer Ready for School

Back when I was a student, everyone packed up their portable typewriter for the move to campus. Lots of people got a new typewriter as a graduation gift, but I didn’t. I ended up using one we bought when I was in high school. The story is probably the same for you, except that it’s a computer, not a mechanical typewriter. Whether you just bought a new one or kept your old faithful companion with all of its stickers, you need to do a few things to get the machine ready for college. Getting Old Faithful ready for college Is Old Faithful sick? If the machine crashes a lot, has trouble (and takes a long time) doing things, or pops up weird ads to play poker or look at porn, you probably have a virus. (You just had to download that fancy screensaver, didn’t you?) Take a deep breath—bite the bullet—pay the computer repair shop to clean it up for you. Now that Old Faithful is feeling better … Back u...

Our Future Word Processors

The rumor from my secret sources is that Ashland University will soon make a transition away from Google Docs (and Google Drive, etc.) to a Microsoft product. Here are my early (and very personal) thoughts about the transition. Google Docs was always “word processing lite” Though it is getting better, Google Docs never gave much help with spelling or writing style, and its approach to page formatting was very primitive. Paragraph styles were especially weak. Docs was one of the first programs to automatically save your work, and that was a great advantage, but many other programs do that now. Its file format is unusual and hidden, so one result is that I keep getting files I cannot open from students who don’t really understand how it works. In general, Google Docs is OK if you are not too fussy about your final product, don’t want to learn how to use a better tool, and need something fast, free, and undemanding. I don’t think many businesses would use Google D...

Why is the info wrong?

If you click the three lines thing ☰ (it’s actually called a “hamburger”!) in the upper right, you get links to “Assignments & schedule” and “Readings.” Those links are wrong at the moment. The “Readings” link goes to an empty page and the “Assignments & schedule” takes you to the material for the spring semester. Don’t panic. I’ll be figuring out the new semester in the next month or so, and I’ll post a notice here when I’ve got everything nailed down.

English 100 at Ashland

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