The Linux Migration: Text Expansion

Summary: I am migrating much of my computer life from the Mac to Ubuntu (Linux). I needed a replacement for my text-expansion tool, TextExpander. It looks like Autokey will do well enough. See the last paragraph if you care to know why I am migrating.

Text Expansion

I don't know how anyone lives without it. Is there anything you type more than once? (Phone number, email address, comments on student papers about what makes a good thesis statement? Common phrases for correspondence, like "Thanks for writing" or "Let me know if the attachment gives you any trouble"?) A text-expansion tool allows you to assign that text string a "snippet": type the snippet ("tfw") and it automatically exands ("Thanks for writing"). It works in any application: email, web browser, MS Word, wherever.

Not convinced? Think of it this way: it's not even about saving time (though it saves a ton of time). It's about saving attention. Let your text-expansion tool do the mindless work, while you keep your attention on the task at hand.

TextExpander for Mac

TextExpander is simply the best. No contest. It makes it super-easy to include wild cards (like current date and/or time, in multiple formats), dropdown menus of your own making (such as Mr./Mrs./Ms./Dr. for salutations), fill-in fields ("NAME"), and many other fancy-pants add-ons to the relatively simple idea of text expansion. It's the Lexus of text expansion. I miss it already when I'm on Ubuntu. If you're on the Mac, get over to Smile Software and give them your money.

Autokey on Ubuntu

It's not the Lexus of text expansion, but it's...well, I don't know cars well enough to offer an analogy. It's free. It does text expansion except that results are a little chancy in Firefox. It relies on Python scripts for wild-card additions and macros; I don't know Python, but it includes a few examples that I can hack on with my piddling knowledge of regular expressions and other programming languages. Oh, and something TextExpander doesn't do: Autokey lets you set "hot keys" for (say) launching your favorite applications. Take away: If you've used TextExpander, it's a servicible but not enthralling replacement that brings some of its own possibilities to the table. If you've never used a text expansion tool before, you'll love Autokey to death, I'm not kidding.

Why the Migration?

Our IT department cut our hard-drive space in half on the last computer "refresh," that's why! (Trying to save some money while moving to the more expensive SSDs, or solid-state drives.) I've had my whole life on a single laptop since my adjunct days when I owned my own machine, and when I eventually got an institution-owned computer, they simply had me copy my whole Home/user folder over. Now, to be clear: my 20 GB of photos (many of which are work-related anyway) and 8 GB of game folders (Civ 5, come on) are not the reason that my 370 GB of data on a 500GB machine won't fit on this new 250GB SSD machine. But, I can't make a case for a larger HD as long as anything non-work is on the machine. Anyway, it got me thinking that it really would be healthier to have a "room of my own," especially since I seem to have little choice. So, why Linux? I'm a Mac user since 1994, but they cost the moon, and I am starting to chafe at the demands and dependencies of the walled garden. Linux is the pain that everyone says it is, but I know from experience that Windows is like an itching-powder union suit to me. I'm comfortable on the command line and philosophically supportive of open source. Anyways.

My Other Blog is a Seminarium Blog

Much of my recent work is at Seminarium Blog, a group blog about pedagogy in religious studies (higher education). Seminarium is a creation of Fortress Education. I have added a page to Anumma, linked in my sidebar, pointing to my recent writing and vlogging at Seminarium.

I haven't walked away from Anumma blog, though I am definitely in one of those periods where Anumma is eclipsed by the rest of my writing life: Seminarium, scholarship projects, student assessment, administrative writing, etc. It's not my first fallow period here--as Anumma has evolved from solid Old Testament and ancient Near East studies, into "biblioblogging," into Hebrew Bible and higher education, and increasingly into digital learning--and, insh' Allah, won't be the last. Thanks for reading, keep me in your feed, and come visit us over at Seminarium!

Fear and Anger in DigiWriMo

Remember when we all used to apologize for "not blogging lately"? In those days, readers would have to click all the way over to your blog (uphill both ways, in the snow) in order to see whether you had posted anything new. So, we felt guilty if there wasn't always something waiting for them, to justify the trip. I think that, by now, we all know about "readers" and RSS feeds: as long as someone still kicks out a blog post from time to time, we can keep their feed in our reader of choice, and it doesn't matter if a few weeks pass between posts.

So this isn't an apology. What it is, is an observation, or a pair of them. This month is Digital Writing Month, and I am doing my poor best to write 1,667 digital words each day. (I won't get to the whole 50k-in-the-month: if I don't manage the quota for a given day, then I start fresh the next day without trying to make it all up.)

A lot of days this month, I don't succeed. One of the reasons I already knew about, but it's worth holding up for attention during Digital Writing Month. The other, I guess I knew that too.

Observation 1: If I do not write, it is often because so many other people have control over my calendar.

This is what Merlin Mann would describe as the bigger-picture "In box" problem: an In-box is anything in your life (not just email) where people can drop stuff that thereby becomes your problem. For contingent and junior faculty, it can be super frightening to say No to anything. When you're afraid, your whole life is an In-box: an ever-increasing list of items that are "unknown, ambiguous, or incomplete."

Observation 2: If I do not publish, it may be because I am angry.

There's a reason that so many bloggers in academia are pseudonymous. They are in a position to write freely, in a semi-ranting mode (or even full-tilt), about things that are happening now in their courses, or among their faculty colleagues, or in their administration, or among their institution's partners. We "nymous" bloggers aren't so free. For the most part, when something gets right under our skin, we need to process on it a while, to detach, before being able to write on it publicly. And anger doesn't compartmentalize: when I'm well ticked off about one thing, it colors the way I write about anything. Fortunately, I consider unpublished ranting Drafts to count toward my Digital Writing Month total.

I consider these reflections to be a mark of how good Digital Writing Month has been for me so far this November. We're all so busy, it's not easy to stop and pay attention. I've got some decisions to make about this In-box business and the things that bother me, and Digital Writing Month helps me see them more clearly every day, both on "good writing days" and on the other days as well.

Is there anything that Digital Writing Month is helping you to see more clearly?

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[Fear and Anger in DigiWriMo was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/11/14. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Digital Writing Month: My Plans

Today marks Day One of DigiWriMo (Digital Writing Month), in which I try to write 50,000 digital words during the month of November. DigiWriMo is inspired by the concurrently-running NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), and is the brainchild of Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris of Marylhurst University.

So what are my plans for DigiWriMo? These:

• Blog posts like this one. Some blog posts I will publish, and others I will bring to Draft status and keep in the can. I also have a number of drafts already in progress that I can work at.
• Finish my self-paced online course. I am enrolled in the 10-CEU Professional Certificate in Online Teaching course (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and have been stalled on the last two projects of this course for months. So, now's my chance to treat it as a priority and finish up.
• Keep my SBL/AAR presentation in progress. This happens in only two weeks, but I'd like to do a lot of free writing on the project and see how that causes me to continue revisions between now and the day I present. Once it's been delivered, I'll record an a/v version for YouTube.
• I've had an idea for a biweekly newsletter, and have even drafted the first issue. I'd like to re-visit that first issue, then also get a bunch of features drafted for later issues. I'll feel better about launching that project if I've got several articles "in the can."
• Tweet a bunch, as usual and maybe more. Keep a hand in on the DigiWriMo Facebook page.
• Where possible, participate in events planned by the good folks at DigiWriMo.

So there are my first 400+ words (including Markdown markup), toward a daily goal of 1667+. Are you participating in DigiWriMo (or NaNoWriMo, or any other WriMo)? What are your own plans?

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[Digital Writing Month: My Plans was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/11/01. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Use Verbal Phrases in Bullets, Lists, and Outlines

Wherever my students have needed to write bulleted lists or other short phrases, I have found myself urging them to use verbal phrases rather than just nouns or noun phrases. This has led me to review and change the way I write outlines, lists, presentation slides, and other works calling for short, undeveloped prose.

Student work

Most of the written projects I assign call for paragraphs of developed prose, rather than outlines or bullet points. But sometimes an outline is unavoidable; our institution requires an outline as part of a student's Masters thesis proposal, for instance. And occasionally, I will offer an assignment that asks for short phrases rather that developed sentences. For example:

• a presentation whose slides follow the 1/1/5 rule of "no more than five words per slide";
• a worksheet to be filled in with short phrases;
• a list of "critical issues" regarding a particular biblical text.

So for example, if the student is writing a Venn diagram comparing the birth narratives in Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2, I may see items like these. My proposed improvements follow in parentheses.

• the angel Gabriel (> angel Gabriel appears to Mary)
• the star (> star guides three wise men)
• shepherds (> shepherds receive a revelation)

Look how much more content comes to the fore by the inclusion of a verb (often with its object). Similarly, a list of critical issues surrounding a biblical text may look like this:

• redaction (> vocab changes suggest redaction)
• genre (> formal elements point to novella genre)
• the word "virgin/young woman" (> meaning of alma is disputed)

(Note that, in the last example, I offer a passive verbal phrase. This is still verbal! Don't make me go all Pullum on you about the misunderstood and maligned passive verbal construction.)

Again, in the list of critical issues, the inclusion of a verb forces the student to actually articulate the critical issue, rather than merely evoke it with a noun or noun phrase.

I began asking students to incorporate verbal phrases into their bullets and outlines simply so that I could better understand what in the world they believed they were doing. The results have been excellent: often a piece that looked shoddy in its first draft proved to be really well and carefully conceived once I could see the "verbs behind the nouns."

Professional work and productivity

Only as a result of all this have I found myself looking at the outlines and bulleted lists that I produce in my own work, whether for others or, more often, for my own consumption. I find it much easier now to "keep the thread" from one stage of a written piece to the next, instead of staring dumbly at my pre-writing and wondering what the heck my ideas had been.

Some of my readers will know of David Allen's "Getting Things Done" methodology, or will use a task-management tool like OmniFocus. When creating Projects and Tasks in a productivity scheme or tool, it is essential to give them names that have verbs: not "Jill's thesis" but rather "Read Jill's thesis" or "Annotate Jill's thesis" or "Return Jill's thesis"; not "Presentation" but rather "Brainstorm presentation," "Outline presentation," "Collect graphics for presentation," and so on. A noun phrase just sits there and stares vacantly at you. A verbal phrase pokes you with a stick and issues a command.

What is your experience with short phrases in outlines, presentation slides, task management, or wherever you read and use them? Do you do okay with noun phrases alone, or have you also found that you need a verb to bring things into focus, whether in others' writing or in your own?

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[Use Verbal Phrases in Bullets, Lists, and Outlines was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/04/09. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

MultiMarkdown and Me

MultiMarkdown: All I Never Knew I Wanted:

When I write, I want to write text files that are ready to be published either as word processing files or to the Web, with full formatting, while still already human-readable simply as text. And I didn’t even know how badly I wanted that until I discovered that it’s possible with Markdown. This is probably easier to show first, then tell.

• Download sample in *.txt format: this is the blog post you’re reading now, as I wrote it in plain text.


• Download sample in *.rtf format: this is the same document as exported to RTF, readable in almost any word processor.

As you can see, the *.txt file is human-readable, and I get the same formatting results whether I publish to *.rtf (for word processing) or to HTML (for web publishing as you’re reading it now). This is the point.

Results Explained:

These examples illustrate the gist of it. As a writer, this is what I gain from MultiMarkdown:

I get to create a human-readable document that can nonetheless be exported to the Web as HTML. Have you ever seen a page of text that is marked up for HTML, that is for web viewing? It’s a blizzard of tags that make the actual content unreadable. (You can see an example if you select, in your browser, View: Source or Page Source.) But with MultiMarkdown (or just Markdown: see below), I have a document that is prepared for the web, but which is also totally readable in plain text.

I get to create a human-readable document that can nonetheless be exported to a word processor as *.rtf (RTF). Have you ever seen a page of text that is marked up as *.rtf, for opening in Word or another word processor? It’s even worse than with HTML. (You can see an example if you take the RTF file linked above, change the suffix from *.rtf to *.txt, and open it in Apple’s TextEdit or in Microsoft Notepad.) But again, with MultiMarkdown, I have a document that is prepared for export as *.rtf to almost any word processor, but again which is also totally readable in plain text.

I get to write this file just once, and archive it as a single file, no matter whether I used it for word processing or web publishing. The same file, written in MultiMarkdown, can be exported as an *.rtf document, easily read in almost any word processor, or as HTML, easily read by any browser or pasted into a blog post or web site.

I get to compose this file in plain text, in any application that suits my stage in the writing process (collecting ideas, outlining, drafting, editing, publishing). It doesn’t feel like I am writing “markup,” it feels as much as possible like I am simply writing. The beauty of Markup is that most of it derives from email conventions: a line of white space between paragraphs, or asterisks surrounding a word or phrase to mark emphasis, or two asterisks for strong text. There are multiple ways (see below on Gruber’s Markdown) to write Web links that are wonderfully readable, completely unlike HTML web link markup.

I get to be sure that it will be readable in twenty years, without a word processor or web browser to render the formatting. Do you have any old files that you cannot read anymore because they only exist in an obsolete format like “AppleWorks”? The stuff I wrote during my Masters work can only be opened as plain text, and the text is entirely buried in obsolete markup and code. But the stuff I write today in Markdown is already human-readable in plain text, and will remain human-readable for as long as we have plain text.

This is the beauty of MultiMarkdown: plain text files, easily readable to the human eye, but already marked up for headers, sub-headers, ordered or unordered lists, emphasis, and footnotes…both for word processing via *.rtf or for web publishing via HTML. Yeah, it’s the writer’s holy grail.

What is MultiMarkdown?

John Gruber developed Markdown with the web-publishing end in view. Markdown allows almost any formatting one will need for most purposes: emphasis (usually italics), strong text (usually bold), paragraphing, lists, block quotes, hyperlinks to the web, and more. However, Gruber’s Markdown exporter only exports as HTML, because web-publishing is what Gruber has in mind.

Fletcher Penney developed MultiMarkdown as a supplement to, or extension of, Gruber’s Markdown. It accomplishes two things:

• It exports Markdown as *.rtf rather than only as HTML. (It also exports to OPML, LaTex, and other formats that you may or may not know about or be interested in.)


• It adds syntax for things like bibliography, footnotes, tables, and more.

So, MultiMarkdown incorporates all the features of Gruber’s Markdown, and extends the idea beyond web publishing to word processing. Note that you do have to install Fletcher’s MultiMarkdown script and support package in order to export MultiMarkdown plain text files as HTML, *.rtf, or other file formats.

My Workflow

I like this because I often don’t know where doodling, note-taking, and outlining might leave off and “writing” begin. I am learning to write in MultiMarkdown all the time, in every stage, because any of that stuff may, at some point, become part of the written piece. Composed in Markdown, anything I write is legible while I play around with it, and it won’t require additional formatting for word processors or for the Web once that writing sits in the final, published piece.

For example, this blog post was

• begun as a note in NotationalVelocity,


• moved into OmniOutliner while I played with structure and began some drafting,


• imported via OPML into Scrivener for continued drafting and editing. From Scrivener I can compile it as HTML (as for this post in WordPress), or as *.rtf for word processing. I save it in Scrivener, but also compiled as plain text ( *.txt) for archiving.

At any of these stages I can compose freely in MultiMarkdown, working in whatever tools suits my present location and purposes, knowing that the result will be a human-readable plain text file formatted for word processing or for the Web.

What do you think? It can sound complicated, and there is a bit of a front-end learning curve (not much, for anyone who already habitually writes in “email style” paragraphing), but once learned, it is all simplicity itself. Can MultiMarkdown do for you what it does for me?

[MultiMarkdown and Me was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/05/02. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

The First Rule of Write Club is…

…you do not talk about Write Club. The second rule of Write Club is you DO NOT TALK about Write Club.



Okay, that isn’t how they're numbered by Claire P. Curtis, and she doesn’t call it Write Club. But Writing Group has rules:

1. [Y]ou must schedule a time every week


2. There is no backing out.


3. [All are] responsible for reading and commenting carefully.


4. Three seems to be the  magic number

(School House Rock bonus link by Brooke).

Do read the entire article: The rules are fleshed out with personal experience, and Curtis has excellent suggestions about choosing participants and making Writing Group work.

I have occasionally discussed a Writing Group with colleagues, mostly back when we were in course work and already had plenty of external pressure to write. During the dissertation years…well, you’d have to be a sadist to bring up a Writing Group with an ABD (that’s “all but dissertation,” or “antisocial behavior disorders”). And anyway, putting three ABDs into a room for Writing Group would be like the legendary Roman death sentence for parricide.

It is probably time for me to re-think Writing Group: my employment situation is settled for the next few years, and while my administration and teaching responsibilities are pretty consuming—especially for the next year—I should be able to carve out some manageable, defined space for research and writing. To offer an analogy: my wife, who handles the books in our household, has always been amazingly good at making sure we “pay ourselves first” even with our often-preposterously-modest incomes: something goes into savings before any bill payments go out. Writing, by analogy, is how an academic “pays herself first.”

Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of Write Club?

[The First Rule of Write Club is… was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/03/30. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

The Writing Process: An Interview with a Fourth Grader

Writing is thinking.

Writers know this by hard experience. Writing is not simply reporting on thinking that has already taken place: the thinking that goes on happens by writing, or it doesn’t happen at all. It is this knowledge that brings a writer, again and again, back to a writing process.

In recent years, I have seen—anecdotally—a sharp decrease in understanding about a writing process. Otherwise excellent students can be heard to say, in the last week of the term (out loud, where people can hear), “Yes, I plan to write that 8000 words paper for Prof A  today, tomorrow, and the next day, and then I’ll write that 3000 words for Prof B in the two days after that.” It’s not laziness: you heard me say “otherwise excellent students.” It’s not simply a function of being overwhelmed: compared to earlier years, the students are not taking heavier loads or working longer hours. Rather, my sense is that, on average, fewer students have received, in their secondary and undergraduate education, a grounding in a writing process.

My current syllabus attempts to force a writing process on the students by requiring stages toward a final thesis paper, with students reviewing one another’s work at each stage:

1. Research report, written to rubrics and submitted for review to three peers;


2. Thesis statement with plan for defense, written to rubrics and submitted for peer review;


3. Complete draft, written to rubrics and submitted for peer review;


4. Final draft.

Early results have been underwhelming, with a sizable percentage of students simply failing to accomplish the research report. Again, this suggests a lack of familiarity with the benefits of a writing process: anyone who has benefitted from a writing process in the past will be eager to embrace it later when given the opportunity. At the same time, students who accomplished the research report have been eager to get to the peer review.

So now you understand why it is that, when my fourth grader, lying in bed and chatting before lights-out, began to talk about “the writing process” as they learn it in elementary school, I leapt for the laptop and began to record. Take ten minutes, and learn how it’s done.



[The Writing Process: An Interview with a Fourth Grader was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/03/22. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

What's (Not) Going On around Here: Craft

A very short while ago (subjective time) I announced a plan to pen a short series of insufferably self-absorbed, navel-gazing gritty, fact-finding posts about what goes into this particular web address. For my purposes, the series amounts to an attempt to respond reflectively and directly to the fact that a five-post-a-week habit had fallen into…irregularity.



This morning, I take a moment to stir into that glass of water a few words on writing.

For me, putting words on a page is enjoyable in direct proportion to how much attention I can give them. Like anything else. It’s the difference between a leisurely afternoon maintaining your bicycle and sweating out your shirt to patch & inflate a torn inner tube on the way to your first job interview in three months. Or, to return inadvisably to the theme of “irregularity,” it’s the difference between crafting your martial arts patterns & techniques every morning and flailing through them in miniature while behind the wheel driving late to the promotion test.

To put it in terms of product rather than process, a blog post worthy of the name is, on average, a good 250+ words that are lovingly chosen to accomplish some keenly-felt goal…not, as Drifty reminds us through prophetic sign-act and through don’t-miss dialogue with Blue Gal, twelve words wrapped around a link to Digby. Or to James, or Peter, or Mark.^[1]

So I offer what another craftsperson, Poul Anderson, liked to call “the triumphant discovery of the obvious”: it turns out that, when one is five-alarm, brain-yammering, cringing-and-trembling, fear-mad busy on most days of your vain life that are given you under the sun… one finds that opportunities to craft quietly-running bicycles, effective Taekwon-do patterns, and satisfying strings of words fall as few as workers, and as far between as pebbles in the sky.

BACK TO POST (N.B.: Secondly, I've got to get more bloggy friends with OT names. But firstly, we need to make permanent the thread about Where All da [Biblical-Studies-Bloggin] Wimmin At?)

[What's (Not) Going On around Here: Craft was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/02/16. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

What's (Not) Going On around Here?

“What's not going on around here?” That's easy: writing.

“What is going on around here?” is another question, and amounts to, “Why isn’t writing going on?”

The easy—far too easy, and therefore false—answer is, I am just way, way too busy. And I am too busy, so that is not the part that is false. What is false, is the notion that there is such a thing as “Too busy to write,” if writing wants to be happening.

I have in mind a short series of short posts, in which I think aloud a bit about why I write here, and what sorts of things get into the way of writing in a space like this. It will not be about “blogging,” so much as it will be about “blogging here at Anumma.”

So, feel free to read or not read. Without anticipating the results of my inquiry, I can say that it is likely that there will be, at the other end, blog posts having some continuity with what has gone before: reading CoS in a year, how to be a student, the social web and teaching higher ed, a little light debunking of Bible woo, and of course, Hebrew Bible (Old Testament).

What’s (not) going on around here? Every few days, on a schedule negotiated between a crushing teaching load and a persistently impatient desire to write, we’ll just see.


[What's (Not) Going On around Here? was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/10/24. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Students, You're on Notice!

Yesterday afternoon, my son had a play date with a Taekwon-Do classmate who also happens to be the child of one of our Masters students. The student, my wife, and I chatted aimlessly while the kids played on a water slide in the back yard. Among the topics that came and went were:

• The first of the Amarna Letters (EA 1), with comments on the epistolary genre of the letters (specifically, how a flattering salutation and an exhaustive list of well wishes and assurances of well-being precede a body mostly involving bitter squabbling);


• How 1000 words is really not that many to write, and how students with writing experience know that editing down to 1000 words is ‘way harder than getting up to 1000 words in the first place.

Not three hours later, I got an email from said student, in which she:

• composed the email in a parody of the epistolary genre of EA 1; and


• pointed me to where she had demonstrated our point about writing by banging out 1000 words on the first topic to come ready to hand, specifically Ecclesiastes 1–2.

Students who would complain that form criticism is intractable or that 1000 words is a lot to write: you’re on notice!

[Students, You're on Notice! was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/07/30. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

SBL 2010 Program Book

Mark Goodacre alerts us that the preliminary online program book is available for the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. He tells us what he’s doing there (I am so totally at that second one, Mark), and invites us to do the same.

The title of my own presentation is, “To Those Far and Near”: The Case for “Community” at a Distance. I am presenting it in the session, “Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies.” The theme for this session is “A Workshop on Interactive Technologies for Teaching and Learning.”

Insert here obligatory fear-based murmblings about the current state of the project.

Who else is presenting? What other interesting things are you doing at SBL 2010?

[SBL 2010 Program Book was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/06/08. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Reading-from-the-Page in Presentation: Crazy's Defense

Opinions about how to present effectively (or at least, not crashingly boringly) at the professional conferences come up perennially on the blogs, usually (for us Bible types) around the time of our November professional conference, but at other times as well. Other fields also make their own observations (h/t to Bitternsweet Girl).

Now, Dr. Crazy makes a thorough argument for the “reading from a piece of paper” model of presentation. Crazy is in literary studies, and most of her argument is directly relevant to what we usually do in biblical studies: present novel interpretations of literary source material that is already well known to our hearers.

As usual, Crazy’s post draws thoughtful comments, some of which challenge the distinction she makes between presentations of experiments (as in the sciences) and presentations as described above (as in literary and biblical studies, though I know our epigraphy and archaeology sections might fall more into the description-of-research mode).

Take a look. It’s never too soon to be thinking about the next conference. Does Crazy make you re-think the “reading a paper” mode of presentation favorably, even though that’s almost certainly not how you teach?

[Reading-from-the-Page in Presentation: Crazy's Defense was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/04/30. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Well, It's Like This...

So what does it take for a reasonably regular blogger to go AWOL for nearly two weeks? Not much, it turns out. I changed my daily schedule a bit in order to get more physical exercise, and there was this beautiful spot in the day when I usually write my posts, and…

Anyway, I’m playing with solutions. Keep me on your reader, if you would, while I settle into a new routine.

To thank you for stopping by, and to keep such lapses as this of mine in perspective, I offer you The Known Universe:



[Well, It's Like This... was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/04/28. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Follow-up: Writing the Bible

Having my adult students add 350 words to an existing biblical narrative proved a tremendous success in terms of inspiring close readings of, and imaginative engagement with, the details of the text at hand.

In an earlier post, I speculated about a possible assignment in which students would write a sequel, or prequel, to a thorny biblical narrative. Here is the assignment as eventually described to the students (who, in this course, are lay people seeking degrees suited to varying lay pastoral ministries):

The Rape of Tamar, and “Writing the Bible”: 350 words.

Read 2 Sam 13:1–22. Read it again with care, attending to the ways in which the narrator accomplishes characterization and plot. Get an understanding of the narrative in its details.

Imagine that you have the opportunity to add 350 (contiguous) words to the story: either right before it, or right after it, or at a single location inside of it somewhere. Imagine what task(s) might you want to accomplish with these words. Do you want to settle down problems, or highlight them? Produce justice, or underscore injustice? Explain things that seem unclear, or confuse things that seem clear? Defend particular characters, or condemn them?

Remember that you're writing a narrative: give the characters things to say, things to do, ways to interact with one another. Don't just fill it all with the sonorous pronouncements of an all-knowing, external narrator.

You don't get to delete any part of the biblical text, only add material: up to 350 words, all written continuously, either right before, right after, or somewhere within the story.

Finally: in keeping with the tenor and devices of the surrounding narrative: you don't get to give God an active part or a speaking role. Characters may refer to God, but only human beings are explicitly active, speaking parts in the story.

In your post, use some device to show where your words fall with regard to 2 Sam 13:1–22.

One student created a childhood relationship between Amnon and Tamar to serve as background to the rape story. Another allowed Tamar to confront David for his negligence and speak an oracle against him. One of them allowed Tamar to take revenge by slipping a male beggar into a drunken Amnon’s bed. Several of them added layers of double-cross to the political machinations in the background of the story.

The students did a simply amazing job with the assignment. I was all the more surprised because we have not discussed narrative criticism, yet they worked skillfully with different ways of accomplishing characterization, with using time, and with plotting. Since I have not really been happy in the past with my ability to teach narrative criticism to introductory students, I think that from now on I will use this assignment as a “getting started” exercise in narrative criticism: by having them do this first, I can then use their own narratives as a resource for illustrating the elements of narrative.

[Follow-up: Writing the Bible was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/03/31. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Write the Bible: Poetic Parallelism

In an earlier post, I suggested an opportunity for students to “write the Bible.” This is another one, stolen from…er, inspired by, a friend.

Teaching biblical poetry to her students, my friend (who sometimes comments here as HebProf [whups: HBprof]) came up with a cool exercise: she gave them the first of a pair of parallel lines from a biblical poetic text. The students would then write a second line such that it is parallel to the first. For example, she might give them the first part of Psa 102:6 (English verse numbering; Hebrew Psa 102:7)

I am like a barred owl of the wilderness

The students would then each write a line they propose to be parallel to that first line. After comparing suggestions, they are shown the biblical parallel line, here

I have become as a screech owl of the wastes.

My own learners will be M.Div students reading the texts in English translation, and while there are more sophisticated ways of understanding Hebrew poetic parallelism, I think that Robert Lowth’s old “synonymous, antithetical, and synthetic parallelism” is a good place to begin. Given opportunity, I would look for ways to talk further with introductory students about “seconding” and “stair-case parallelism,” and only in a seminar setting get into ideas of grammatical, morphological, and semantic parallelism.^[FOOTNOTE]

So, for example, the biblical line is clearly meant to be “synonymous” parallelism. By having students produce a range of alternatives, it can be made clear that “synonymous” embraces a wide range of possibilities to answer Psa 102:6a, such as:

I am adrift on the sea alone. Or,

I am a beat cop at midnight on a street corner.

A student trying to create an “antithetically” parallel line for Psa 102:6a might offer the following:

But you are like a new bride among the village women. Or,

But I will become like a crow among the flock.

For a “synthetically” parallel line, she might try:

with no cloud for shade. Or,

Who will tend me?. Or,

A raptor snapping at mice.

The difficulty that students would have grasping the nebulous category of “synthetic” parallelism would, I think, provide a wonderful jumping-off place into the more recent descriptions of poetic parallelism with their clearer engagement of grammar and linguistics.

What do you think of such an exercise? Do you have suggestions for improvement? Are there other exercises by which you have your students “write the Bible”?

BACK TO POST I am glancing at David L. Petersen and Kent Harold Richards, Interpreting Hebrew Poetry (Guides to Biblical Scholarship, Old Testament Series; Gene M. Tucker, ed.; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), chapter two. I think that this resource would be a great choice for a class of mostly English-language exegetes with a handful of students who have taken Hebrew as an elective.

[Write the Bible: Poetic Parallelism was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/03/11. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Mysteries of the Global Flood Revealed!

In a culture where writing on the Bible will always be too secular for some people and too prone to apologetics for others, published works in biblical history might seek to more carefully emulate Caesar’s wife, avoiding even the appearance of (fideistic) impropriety.

Yesterday, I called attention to an infelicitous phrase in King and Stager’s Life in Biblical Israel (Westminster/John Knox Press, 2001). Writing about a Pre-Pottery Neolithic olive processing site on the sea floor off modern ʿAtlit (that’s south of Haifa, or south of Mount Carmel), King and Stager had written that the site was

…inundated in the mid-sixth millennium, probably by a world-wide flood.

The paragraph referenced Ehud Galili, “Prehistoric Site on the Sea Floor,” New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, 1:120-122. There, I find this ’graph (emphasis mine):

About twenty thousand years ago, the last Ice Age reached its peak. Soon afterward, the melting ice caused a rise in sea level that resulted in a significant reduction of coastal plains throughout the world. By the beginning of the Holocene, however, in about 8000 BCE, the Mediterranean was about 30 m lower than its present self.

In other words:

1. About 20,000 years ago, the most recent glaciation event (not an “ice age,” which are longer, such that we may well still be between glaciation events in a single Ice Age) peaked, with sea levels rising between then and now (on average, that is, with relatively short term accelerations and decelerations set aside).


2. By 10,000 years ago (around 8,000 BCE), waters had risen nearly, but not yet, to a then-coastal site settled by folks who press olives.


3. By about 7500 years ago (ca. 5500 BCE), waters had risen enough that the increasingly-sodden coastal site was abandoned, though not necessarily precipitously (King and Stager will note that no olives are left unprocessed at the site). Today, it is under water.

In King and Stager, this 15,000+ year rising of sea levels, with coastal sites gradually shifting landward, is collapsed into a “world-wide flood” that “inundates” the site “in the mid-sixth millennium.”

This choice of words obviously, and unfortunately, evokes the biblical story of an instantaneous and cataclysmic global flood (Gen 6–8). This evocation is equally damaging for biblical studies, whether the audience is those who read Gen 1–11 as history, or those who suspect with dismay that all biblical historians will do so.

This confusion, about whether the biblical narrative is being uncritically accepted, is compounded by a habit that King and Stager share with other biblical historians, whereby biblical narrative episodes are presented in language that presupposes their historicity. For just one example, (page 109),

The terebinth…gave its name to the Valley of Elah, where David slew Goliath (1 Sam. 17:19).

Not, “where David is said to have slain Goliath,” but “where David slew Goliath.” It is as if a writer on ancient Greece were to say, “Troy archaeological level VIIa is topped with a destruction layer, including burn marks to the walls outside of which Achilles slew Hector.”

This writerly habit could be explored further in another post. Here, I simply offer it as the kind of thing that makes it hard to know what to do with a cursory reference to “a world wide flood” in an academic, peer-reviewed work on the history of ancient Israel.

What would you say, reader? Do I make too big a deal over nothing? Or, in the context of larger conversations about isolating the fideistic from the evidentiary in biblical studies, does every molehill deserve scrutiny?

[Mysteries of the Global Flood Revealed! was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/03/10. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Write the Bible

Or supplement it, anyway.

In my niece’s middle-school, the kids first read some book or series of their choice; then, they get to write an extra chapter, either within a book, or between two books of a series, or as a prequel or sequel to a book.

I am thinking of adapting this to a discussion-board assignment. I would give them a notably thorny or confusing biblical text, and the students would get to write some additional material (just several lines of dialogue, exposition, whatever). They would then also be asked to explain what “goods” are offered by their own additions, and to comment on one another’s work: Does it alleviate some moral problem in the text?  Does it help explain some character’s behavior (including God’s) that is otherwise hard to understand in the text at hand? Does it cause two adjacent narrative elements to better cohere together, and if so, how?

In choosing a text, I would like it to be 1) narrative, and 2) somewhat off the beaten track while not so obscure as to feel irrelevant (not, say, Gen 3, yet not unexplained corpse of Deut 21 either). Aaron and the golden calf is a possibility; or the dismembered concubine; or David and Bathsheba; or an epilogue to Jonah; or Job 1–2.

What text would you consider for such an assignment, and why? What do you think of the possibilities for such an assignment?

Being a Student: Writing for the Course

“He could have written this before ever taking my class!”

Among my rubrics for student writing is the requirement that they rigorously engage the course materials (readings, lectures, discussion) and also engage the methods taught in the course (narrative criticism, form/genre criticism, attention to historical contexts, and so on).

For introductory students, who are still trying to get a handle on just what we are reading/doing/talking about, this can at first feel a bit abstract. Recently, an exasperated colleague at another school made a comment that, in my view, offers an excellent “thumb rule” on this business of writing for the course:

“He could have written this piece before ever taking my class!”

If I had to isolate the single most common complaint that I’ve heard professors utter about student writing, it wouldn’t be about grammar and spelling, or about making deadlines, or even plagiarism. It would be this complaint, that a piece of student writing (often for a final project in the course) could have been written by the student without ever having taken the course in the first place.

So, ask yourself—early in the process of planning, and again early in the writing, and again when approaching completion—could I have written this before I ever took this course? Or am I making concrete use of the readings I’ve read, the lectures offered, the modes of inquiry that have been encouraged, the discussions facilitated in class?

“Audience” and Student Writing

To whom should a student imagine herself writing, when doing her course work? At least, she’ll want to know how much knowledge of the subject matter she can presuppose on her reader’s part. Further, a writer naturally imagines a hearer: an interlocutor to her line of reasoning, a narratee to her narration.

In my experience, the usual reflex is to imagine the professor as the audience. This makes a kind of sense: the work is actually to be read by the professor, of course. And, the professor created the assignment in the first place, so doing the thing feels like an “answer” to that.

However, many students will already know some drawbacks of imagining the professor as their reader. For one thing, the professor’s knowledge of the field of study will usually so far exceed the student’s that the student has no idea what prior knowledge or presuppositions to assume for that reader…not to mention the creeping fear that the prof will know some bit of data that totally demolishes whatever line of reasoning the student has gone out onto the limb with in her writing. Further, the student may have negative, fearful, or ambivalent feelings about the professor. The conditions for good writing are delicate, and as easily frightened away as shy woodland creatures: the imposing shadow of the prof-as-reader can all too easily paralyze the writer before she can really get started.

At the same time, I don’t think that the utterly uninformed layperson—what I think of as the “tabula rasa” audience—is a much better alternative. If the imagined audience has no prior knowledge of the subject matter, then the student writer feels compelled to explain every little thing to the nth degree…and the work becomes unmanageable. Also, this “tabula rasa” audience is rather amorphous. I prefer a nice, clear audience in my head.

For my part, I suggest that in their writing, my students imagine a strong colleague as their audience. That is, some one (or two, or three) classmates who have kept up on the reading, heard the lectures, participated in the discussions, and have sought to make connections between the different elements of the subject matter. This solves the question of prior knowledge: the writer does not have to explain every little thing, but insofar as her research has led her to information not covered in class, she should bring that data into relation with her classmate’s body of knowledge. The “strong colleague” is (or can be) a positive figure to hold in one’s mind, and emulating that mental audience is an attainable goal: the “strong colleague” is like the writing student herself at her imagined best. In the writing that she is doing at that point in time, the “strong colleague” represents the best of what she is trying to be.

What do you think of the “strong colleague” as an imagined audience for student writing? What sorts of audiences have you imagined for yourself when you write, and with what results?