About Me

One of the first things to realize about me is that I have a life outside of the classroom. It's not much of one, but don't be surprised to see me at Smith's or wandering the streets of Orem. A person has to eat and get his exercise--even if students find it safer to compartmentalize everything connected to their schooling when off-campus!

But I also have an appreciation for the human capacity to bring order to chaos, to have the strength and faith to progress towards an uncertain future in an entropic universe.

Or in the logic of the applied sciences . . .

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<p>Whether that occurs in art and aesthetics . . .</p>

<a href="http://rodneysmith.com/blog/?p=90" target="blank"><img src="/files/%^&*/download?download_frd=1&amp;verifier=&^$%$#$%^&^*&^%$&^%" alt="Rodney Smith: AnnikaBicycle" width="100%"></a>

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<a href="http://rodneysmith.com/blog/?p=90" target="blank">&copy; 2009, Rodney Smith</a>

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About My Writing

As a writer I have definitely come a long way from the beginning of my college career. My writing used to have really long sentences and a lot of "academic sounding" vocabulary. But was really kind of borrowing and not very specific. To be honest, I'm not sure how some of them got passed my professors; except maybe that they suffered from the same verbal diarrhea as me. Below is a pretty sad, but accurate, example of what I'm talking about:

Of course, I'm kind of proud of my thesis that I wrote to get my M.A. degree. Not just because it's really, really long; but because it's probably the first writing assignment that I really spent the time revising. That's not to say that I didn't take time to write or research my papers before (I was the kid who worked 8-10 hours a day on final papers during the Thanksgiving Holiday). But I realize now that I spent  most of my time researching and trying to get my ideas straight in my head. This thesis represents the first time that I really tried to get my ideas together on the page.

I'm particularly proud of the introduction because I feel like the final version was really appropriate for my audience. After spending a week (5-8 hours a day) working on an earlier draft, my thesis adviser said that I should probably forget about writing an introduction because I was not able to get my thoughts out clearly enough. The guy was somehow able to piece together exactly what I meant to get across, but still felt that my introduction wasn't working.

So this is what happened when I went back for another few days of intense revising:

This example of my writing was published a couple of years ago. I think it's one of the better pieces of writing because when I wrote it I had been teaching composition for a couple of years here at UVU; so when it came to writing this paper I was a lot more conscious about my use of transitions and the cohesion of my paragraphs. Also, the issue I am addressing in this paper was pretty important to me as a writing instructor that was moving more towards using online technologies with my students but who had his own personal reservations about the effect of technology on culture and the culture of technology in the twenty-first century.