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I guess one point of blogging is that one should write every day. Is this correct? Okay...well I have eight minutes until the first grade bus departs my daughter's school and I switch into full mommy mode. So I created a "tcnjenglishbooks" wiki where the TCNJ English department could start talking about our favorite books, or books we've read, or, I suppose, even books we wish to read. I wanted to be quiet about it, but word's gotten out and it's out of my control. I guess that wikis aren't supposed to be controlled. I find it all very disturbing.
More about dictionaries: I did a dictionary task with my students today in my writing course that I think was very provocative and says a great deal about how we read. I asked them to read George Will's editorial, McCain in a Glass House.
My students read it and got the gist of his argument that John McCain isn't as pious as he seems. Once I asked them to identify words they didn't feel confident about (anonymously--I wrote mine on the board: condign), we looked them up in my favorite, the OED. Then we worked over the text with the meanings in their head. They seemed to get more out of it a second time.
It still makes me think about the core question: how do readers decide if they're going to read dictionaries?
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