The Vault: Books and Videos

Recommended Teaching Resources and YouTube Videos I Found Useful

This book is excellent: it offers road maps for a variety of writing assignments, including reviews (which are not common in other writing manuals), as well as a selection of interesting readings. I found this text essential for my prompt elaboration.

This was the primary textbook for my class, per Boston College’s FWS requirement. I assigned essays and certain chapters on writing mechanics.

This is the same handbook I was assigned as an undergraduate, and it can’t be beat for simplicity of organization and quick reference. I assigned it to my students to offer quick corrections of grammar and proofreading mistakes. I purposefully chose this slightly older edition to reduce costs to my students and retain the nifty spiral binding.

This book is a fantastic resource for academic and lay writers of all stripes, and I adapted the section on “Specious Barriers to Writing” for use as a class hand-out.

Curzan and Damour’s book helped settle a lot of my butterflies regarding the pragmatics of first-time teaching. Favorite topics covered: first-day impressions, ideal physical presentation, grading, syllabus advice, and dealing with difficult student situations.

A classic text with everything you ever wanted to know about effective teaching.

The following are a list of YouTube videos I use for pedagogical purposes:

I begin the semester with the infamous video by former-UCLA student Alexandra Wallace on “Asians in the library” to get my students to consider rhetorical situations like audience, tone, and purpose. What went wrong in this video?:

For one of my classes focusing on critical reviews, I had my students read Pete Well’s scathing review of Guy Fieri’s restaurant, and then watch his NBC interview defense:

I introduce the discussion on plagiarism with this goofy video, courtesy of Rutgers University:

To get my students to reconsider what were the ethical implications of the Kony 2012 viral video from the charity Invisible Children, I show them this excellent satire on philanthropy oriented towards African countries:

And during my presentation on public speaking, I offer this excellent example of a concise, well-rehearsed argument: