Three Things Thursday: Flow, Sun Ra, and NDQ

I feel like I haven’t done a Three Things Thursday for a while and at this point of the semester, I feel like I’m doing all I can just to keep various balls in the air.

So here goes:

Thing the First

This week, my students in my introductory level World Civilizations class are working to revise the papers that they’ve been writing all semester. As they prepare to revise their latest drafts, I asked them to make a list of things to work on in their final draft. The top thing on their list was working on FLOW. 

I love the idea of flow especially when it refers to that state of semi-consciousness when things just seem to come easily. I see it used when describing musicians who are improvising and athletes who are immersed in a performance. But I don’t think that the students are referring to that. Instead, they see flow as something that they can inject into their writing. For many of these students, flow is something that exists at the level of the sentence or the paragraph and that smooths transitions between ideas, statements, and phrases. It makes a text easier to read.

It’s been interesting to try to convince them that flow isn’t something to be added at the end, like a sprinkling of salt or a garnish on a bowl of soup, but something that is inherent in how we organize our ideas. Flow comes from the synchronization of our ideas and arguments with the language that we use to express them.   

Thing the Second

The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota works closely with its authors to promote their work, but we also acknowledge that we don’t have a marketing budget, we don’t have resources to run the flag up at conference, and we don’t advertise much if at all. 

As a result, we work to amplify the efforts of our authors to promote their work. Here’s a great example of this.

You can can get a copy of Sun Ra Sundays here.

Thing the Third

As readers of this blog know, we’ve been working on the pulling together the North Dakota Quarterly archive. Building an archive is always a work in progress (it would seem) and we discovered that we missed a volume of the journal during our first round of scanning.

My student collaborators on this remain relentless and they scanned this volume to add to the collection of archived North Dakota Quarterly.

Here’s a link to a story by Michelle Disler (who is also contributing to the most recent volume of NDQ some 15 years on!).