April brings “Autism {fill in the blank}” day and month. Is it “Autism Awareness,” “Autism Acceptance,” or something else? I don’t have the time or energy to care. Each year, I rant about the month. Most people are “aware” of autism, though I question if that awareness helps anyone. My…
Tag: academic writing
It’s the last few days of April, with finals starting in a few days. Student project teams are submitting their final reports, videos, and interactive fiction projects. As with the entire semester, I’ll be swamped with grading for the next two weeks in a mad dash to file grades on…
February 2024 is almost over and I haven’t managed to release a podcast episode with a guest since October 2023, nearly four months ago. The best I could do was a quick podcast on how busy we are, which I recorded in December out of a sense of guilt and…
NOTE: This rant is cross-posted and expanded from the Rogue Rhetorician, where I focus on rhetoric and philosophy. It’s been a decade since an academic supervisor wrote that my various creative and non-fiction writings were all of little value. He took my sarcasm, my jabs at academia and academic writing, seriously and…
Podcast Episode 0026; Season 02, Episode 12; January 22, 2019 Daniel Sansing discusses his interest in writing and communication theories. Sansing studies academic composition and teaching composition courses. The myth that autistics are only concrete thinkers dismisses the uniqueness of individuals. Yes, some of us are concrete thinkers… and we can…
Writing is how I relate to myself and to others. Writing has been a part of my life since at least the second grade when I started to make little books and write short stories. I tried to start a novel in the fifth grade, which I still dream of…
This special issue of Kairos was released in 2002: http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/7.1/coverweb.html And now, in 2018, I’m still presenting on the need for natural accommodations in writing courses. We have made little progress, sadly, in either our physical or online spaces. Often, there is resistance to adjustments, such as transcripts or captioning of…
Atypical students are, at least according to current data, attracted to the STEM fields. Neurodiverse individuals feel safer in those academic and professional fields with concrete questions and problems, with clear approaches to best answers. Autism is, by definition, a concrete form of processing information and a communication disorder. We think differently…
Required college composition courses often serve a gatekeeping function, ensuring that only the right sort of students advance towards degrees. Though anecdotal, every campus course-related hearing I’ve been involved in as an expert on autism and neurodiversity was a writing course. These were not always first-year composition, but they were…
I was recently asked whatever happened to my planned update to Spectrum of Relationships. The simple answer: I have been distracted by more interesting (to me) things and didn’t really push to get the book updated. I’m not nearly as involved in autism advocacy in Pennsylvania as I was in…