Flash Readings, Episode 4: “When I Talk to Siri”

Neon Varsity Diner sign with Flash Readings logo

In the fourth Flash Reading, Brittain Fellow Halcyon Lawrence talks about why her Samsung phone won’t take her where she wants to go. This time she wants to find legendary Atlanta diner The Varsity, but Galaxy “has no specific answers” for her. Lawrence, who specializes in speech intelligibility and accent bias in… Continue reading

Bodies and Body Language: How Poetry Can Teach Us to Communicate

Bodies, a personal yet strangely distant subject matter for most students to discuss, provide a ripe lens through which to hone the skills that composition classrooms aim to foster. As mediums of communication, bodies afford us multiple ways to express ourselves: through gestures, facial expressions, vocal tone, and body language… Continue reading

Talking as Artists: Oral Communication in the Gallery Space

In July 2015, The Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article entitled “Final Exams or Epic Finales.” In it, Anthony Crider, an associate professor of Physics at Elon University, describes how and why he ends his courses not with exams, but with “epic finales.” These epic finales can take many… Continue reading

A New Podcast, Featuring Colonel Hall!

  We are pleased to present the second podcast in TechStyle’s podcast series! Our second episode features Colonel Stephen C. Hall, USAF Retired, 1967 Graduate of Georgia Tech, and the namesake of our new home, the Stephen C. Hall Writing and Communication Building, on the Georgia Tech campus.  The podcast… Continue reading

Venturing into Unfamiliar Territory: Visualizations of the Oral Mode in the Classroom

Last week I ventured into largely-unknown territory for me – speech analysis and a consideration of the oral mode. Unknown, I say, because even though teaching involves vast amounts of time standing before an audience and, well, speaking, I have never formally studied speech at length: no speech communication class,… Continue reading

Salman Rushdie, StoryCorps, and SMARTech: Adventures in Digital Archiving

My class this semester revolved around the idea of people, material artifacts, and information that are “born digital.”  As my class blurb explains, “for people, this means that they are born into, and have only ever known, a world that prioritizes all forms of digitization; for materials and information, it… Continue reading