Start Here

• Hi, I'm Mike.
• This page isn't an index; it has some starting points for this site as a whole.
• make-public Start-Here

• Some things I'm interested in...

  • 🏛 Rhetoric and 🖋 Writing & Communication

    • I'm interested in how classical rhetoric can be used to help students with their writing.
    • I didn't discover rhetoric until my Master's degree, when I attended a random writing workshop for OGS and SSHRC scholarships. It was revelatory, and seemed much, much more useful than the things I'd learned in high school. I now tend to teach a lot of rhetoric in my classes because it's what I wish someone had taught me.
    • Here are some places to start:
      • The five canons of rhetoric
      • Rhetorical structure (or "arrangement")
      • [[your audience encounters your text linearly]]
      • [[Monty Python skit transitions teach you how to transition between paragraphs]]

  • 🎓 Teaching & Pedagogy

    • I think about teaching a lot. I enjoy it and think it's important :)
    • Here are some things I think about:
      • student agency
      • Engfish
      • [[using text expanders to comment on student writing]]

  • 🏗 How-To

    • Random tech stuff I've found helpful.
    • [[keyboard shortcuts for window management with Keyboard Maestro]]
    • [[creating a "hyper" key for easier keyboard shortcuts]]

  • 🔍 Research

    • Some bits of research I'm interested in:
      • I'm obsessed with metonymy.
      • semiotics and the Book of Nature

• FAQ 💬

  • Why does this site exist?

    • The selfish reason:

      • This site is kind of like note-taking, except that writing in public forces me to be slightly more rigorous with my presentation, and this has advantages for my thinking and writing habits. ("The best way to learn something is to teach..." etc.)
      • For instance, at the time of writing this start page, I'm teaching ENGL378/MTHEL300 online, and writing out explanations of concepts like ethos, pathos and logos can be re-purposed for my teaching, almost as a pseudo script or outline for a video or something like that.

    • The slightly less selfish reason:

      • Sometimes when I talk to someone (or I read their work, or whatever), I wish I could look up their sources and figure out where they're getting their ideas from. With that in mind, I'm trying to document that a lot on this site.

  • What software are you using?

    • I'm using Roam Research.