Bonni: [00:00:00] On today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed episode number 243, John Warner is back this time to talk about his new book The Writer’s Practice: Building Confidence in your Nonfiction Writing.

Production Credit: [00:00:15] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni: [00:00:26] Hello and welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating and learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Bonni: [00:00:52] Today I am once again joined up by John Warner. It’s great to have him back. He’s now having his third episode on Teaching in Higher Ed. He originally started back on episode 172 talking about values, interdisciplinary knowledge, and pedagogy. He was on episode 233 pretty recently talking about his book Why They Can’t Write- and apparently he can write and has written another book, The Writers Practice: Building Confidence in your Nonfiction Writing by John Warner. And I’m so happy to have him back joining me today so soon to talk about that new book. John is a writer and teacher of writing with 17 years of experience across four different institutions. He’s a contributing blogger at Inside Higher Ed, a weekly columnist for The Chicago Tribune, and is an editor at large for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He currently holds the position of faculty affiliate at College of Charleston and lives in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina with his wife Kathy and their dogs, Oscar and Truman. John, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

John: [00:02:01] It’s a pleasure to be here.

Bonni: [00:02:03] I feel like you’re an old friend now. It’s fun to talk and-.

John: [00:02:07] I know. I Need to put “conversation with Bonni” in my calendar on a monthly basis. I could be better off for it.

Bonni: [00:02:13] Every time I get to talk to you it’s like a new thing though in the sense of this time I want to start out with us talking about how you invite us into this book. And you start by inviting us to write about making a peanut butter sandwich. And I felt very welcome and very at home. And would you talk a bit about why you decided to start with that?

John: [00:02:33] Sure. That exercise of asking people to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and there’s even space in the book itself, if you have the physical book to write it in there. That comes from my third grade teacher, Mrs. Goldman, Bobby Goldman who is retired but lives in Florida and who have been in touch with since I finished the book and it was nice to reconnect with her. She gave us that assignment in third grade. At the moment in my life for her recognized that I was a writer. That writing had purpose, writing had an audience, and that writing had stakes, that when somebody reads you writing something bad or good could happen.

John: [00:03:13] And in this case, Mrs. Goldman had us actually make our sandwiches, following our instructions to the letter. If you can imagine, a room full of third graders trying to make peanut butter jelly sandwiches when they have said things like “Take peanut butter, put on bread.” And hadn’t said how much or use a knife or anything like that. The results get pretty messy pretty quickly. But it was just an amazing lesson in terms of having with epiphany like “oh writing is for somebody. There is an audience. There is a purpose.” And I never forgot it. And so I’ve used this exercise in just about every writing class I have ever taught. I’ve used it in many sort of faculty seminars where I have made tenured professors write instructions for a penut and butter jelly sandwich. I’ve made corporate people write instructions for peanut butter sandwiches, it’s a kind of universal introduction to I think waiting as a process and something that requires consideration of audience before you do it. So that’s why I wanted to start the book with it.

[00:04:21] Recently on Twitter, Clint Smith, who’s been on the show before he talked about how much he loves to shop in used bookstores and to buy used books and how those margins and other kinds of annotations are just a story in and of themselves. And I was picturing people after having read your book and gone through all of what you call “experiences versus assignments.” And what that might mean. I mean I think that would be really a treasure for someone to get to trust another person enough to share their work through this book. So talk a little bit about the choice to call these “experiences” versus “assignments.”

John: [00:05:01] Sure. So years ago, I had stopped using the word essay. I didn’t like using “essay” because students came with so many preconceived notions of what an essay was, how it worked, how it was structured, what they were supposed to do, often tied up with notions of the dreaded five paragraph essay. [?] So I stopped using “essay” and I had switched to a framework that I called writing related problems, so there’s a problem we need to solve and we’re going to solve that with writing. My editor, Penguin, was not wild about putting “problem problem problem” all over the book. So I thought about it some more and realized that while most of the experiences in the book do revolve around problems, some of them really are just experiences through which writing is a mechanism or method we use to encounter the experiences. So I use “experience” because that’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to experience something that’s writing related, most of the time for an audience, most of the time with a specific purpose. And when we have an experience, the goal is to, pardon the cliche, learn from the experience. We hear that over and over. We want to learn from the experience. So rather than focusing on the artifact only which is produced, the essay. Let’s think about the whole thing. Let’s think about what we’re going to learn by having a writing experience and once I sort of happened upon that and thought, “Well, that’s even better. Thank you, editor. Thank you Meg for convincing me that I should think of it again.” So yeah, experiences.

Bonni: [00:06:42] Why did you decide to write this book?

John: [00:06:45] This is a kind of compare it to my other book that we talked about previously, Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessitities is I was working on a proposal for that book and kept thinking about how I really wished there was a book that I would have been given when I started teaching 25 years ago if there was a book that gave not just assignments or what I call experiences, not just curriculum, but also a kind of set of values and philosophies with approaches to writing that I could make use of, that would inform my own approach, that I could adopt wholly when I wanted to do that, that I could take an altar when there might be a better approach for my students. I would have really loved to have a book like that and I looked around and saw it didn’t exist out in the world now. So I got really excited about the thought of trying to bring that book into existence so it kind of happy simultaneously with that other book. At one point, I had both of the proposals out in the world in looking for homes at the same time. So it was a sort of a fit of madness to think I should sell two books at the same time. But thankfully, knock on wood, it worked out and I got to do both of them.

Bonni: [00:08:08] The very beginning of the book starts with this question of who are you as a writer? And I smiled when I saw that part because I tend to sometimes have skipped that part and it doesn’t go well. And one quick example of that is that I teach a technology and leadership class and one of the things that we talk about early in that class is the idea of digital identity. And I invite them to participate in Twitter, if they want, although I don’t require it. And there’s also a component of blogging there.

Bonni: [00:08:42] And we talk a lot about taking themselves and putting themselves online and thinking about what parts of themselves they want to share and some of the rewards and some of the risks involved in doing that. And I will never forget when a woman wrote to me, and she was so hungry to learn you could just see it in every word, and she said “I want to do this. I want to do this assignment. And you’re asking me to do this, but I don’t even know who I am. So how could I figure out who I am online?” And as soon as I saw this part of your book I thought, “Ah John I needed you. Where were you all those years ago?” Could you talk about starting with this sense of identity and who am I?

John: [00:09:22] Yeah. This again is born of my own classes where regardless of the genre of writing I am teaching or the level of student and teaching, I want to know how they see themselves in relation to writing. As a writer, the framing of that is “who are you as a writer?” is deliberate. It is something particularly in the first year writing class, many students will simply resist identifying themselves as writers and I want to break that down as quickly as possible. I want them believing that the definition of a writer is simply somebody who writes, which is something they are going to do in class.

John: [00:09:59] So for the student, it’s a reflective and self exploration exercise. But also for me as the instructor, I get a better sense of how students view their own world of writing and experiences in writing, which again this assignment gave rise to the Why They Can’t Write book because one of the things I was seeing over the course of quite literally years is students who could only define themselves and their writing in relation to the grades they’ve received on reading assignments in school.

John: [00:10:31] So if they would say “I think I’m a good writer. I get As in English class.” Some people say “well I get A’s in English class, but I don’t think I’m a good writer.” And it would begin to distress me that they were defining themselves soley to that metric, what kind of grade a teacher put on your writing. Then so in class, I use it as a way to open up a discussion with students to see why they hold these attitudes, how I am hoping that their attitudes towards reading will shift over the course of the semester. But just to be fully transparent in the same way in the story about your student reveals that if we get ahead of ourselves, we may not know where our students are and we may make assumptions about students that are not wholly informed by what’s true. And this is a reminder “who are you you as a writer?” is a reminder to me as their instructor to step back and take a little inventory of where students think they are and give them an opportunity to tell me where they think they are.

John: [00:11:36] So yeah I think that in the sequence of my own class, they do the peanut butter instructions in class the first day and the first assignment at the end of that class period is to write a “who are you as a writer?” response. So those are first on the list always.

Bonni: [00:11:52] As you are sharing those examples. I was feeling a lot of a sense of failure at not doing this and it’s so easy to make those assumptions. But then I wanted to be a little bit more gentle with myself because I realized just this last Monday in my business ethics class that I’m teaching, I have an exercise where I hang up a bunch of posters around the room was just like 8.5 x11 signs that say things like “I am becoming a person who…” And “my sense of ethics shows up in these places…” And “someone I really admire and consider to be an ethical person…” So they would talk to a partner and then they would also take stickies and write down sort of a title that represented the story that they shared with the person. And one of the people had a sticky that they couldn’t come up with anybody that they thought of as an ethical person. They couldn’t think of an example. So I realized like yes I need to go set a table that says I can really try the best I can to not make assumptions. And yet so many times we’re connecting with people and we are often sometimes not whole ourselve so it’s this is a dance. This is a journey. This is not a destination. But I want to be perfect at it right now. And these questions of who we are is really a lot of why so many of us find such significance in teaching.

John: [00:13:12] Yeah I have been thinking about this book a lot just because it’s fresh and it is coming out. And while I was writing it I was thinking “oh man I really wish that I had thought of this earlier, I had written it years ago.” And really I think the truth is I couldn’t have because of how old this stuff is really processed. You don’t know what you don’t know until you understand you didn’t know it. And this is sort of the sum total of 20 years teaching writing, and writing, and editing, and thinking about the teaching of writing, and I could not have written it 10 years ago and I probably could not have written it three years ago.

John: [00:13:56] So we can’t beat ourselves up too much on this stuff. I’ve been hearing from teachers, it’s been really gratifying some of the early reception for the Why They Can’t Write book and I think it’s the teacher’s nature to beat themselves up a little bit when we change something, when we do something differently than we’ve been doing it before and recognize that maybe it’s better. But it’s the nature of the beast. I don’t think we can beat yourself up for having done our best engaging in a process of reflection that reveals maybe a different path than taking that path, that should be celebrated. We shouldn’t spend too much time self flagellating over what is and always will be a process and an imperfect series of steps, we just can’t avoid that.

Bonni: [00:14:43] It’s easy to- at least it’s fairly easy for me to wrap my head around this first half of what we’re talking about. But the false assumptions I quickly recognize are also there are thinking that OK so you couldn’t have written this book 20 years ago, but that that also then means you’re done, like you have it figured out so maybe one day then I’ll get to where you are and have it all figured out. There are so many people who have just said such poignant things about, we assume all these people around us to have it figured out and we’re the only ones who don’t.

John: [00:15:14] There’s already things I would change in the book. Not in radical ways but I’ve heard from some early readers about assignments they use that are similar but have like a little tweak that is a little better than I’m doing. I’m like “oh man, I’d love to be able to incorporate that.” And of course give credit to where I got that idea. It is purely iterative. There’s no finish line. That’s the thing I always liked most about teaching and writing. Not necessarily that you can get better every time, but that each time is another attempt and you’re going to learn something from. You learn from his experiences. But to think that you have it figured out once and for all is simply not true. Of the the best teachers any of us have had, they will tell you the same thing. As soon as you think you’re done figuring this out, I think it’s probably time to retire.

Bonni: [00:16:06] How do we read like writers?

John: [00:16:11] Well the big distinction I make with students is again particularly working in the first year writing class where they have been reading for what does it mean? and what does it say? quite often. I want students examining the piece of writing understanding essentially how it says what it says. I use a couple of frame works for this. I talk about the moves that a writer makes, the rhetorical moves. I talk about purpose often on a paragraph by paragraph basis. We’ll look at the first paragraph of something like a review which is one of my early experiences in the book, everything was framed around the questions. So, in review, the question “Should I?” – read like a writer by looking at a review. So I see what does a reviewer do in the first paragraph of a review? Well, they review the subject. They may introduce their own particular stance or bias in terms of a particular actor or loved the last album by a musician or they don’t like romantic comedies or what have you. And then we look at another paragraph. What is this paragraph doing? Wow is this working? How are these paragraphs joined?

John: [00:17:23] So we’re really breaking it down from a message and purpose standpoint so we understand what it says. We also want to know how it’s saying what it’s saying. So one of the things I will have students do is produce a reverse outline, to take a finished piece of writing and then try to create an outline based on what they read just to look at a skeleton of a little bit. And the sooner students start to recognize moves like “oh the writer did this” or “this is how the writer did this particular move I’ve seen before,” the closer we are to putting those move in our own bag the trick.

John: [00:18:01] I am actually not a golfer but I sometimes think of it in golf analogies, Like we have a golf bag and when you first start, you maybe have two clubs. A three iron and a putter and that is all you can swing. Over time, the goal is to put more clubs in that bag so at the right moment, where you need a sand wedge there’s a sand wedge. So it’s a matter of kind of recognising the moves, recognising the skills, and then developing the ability to use those moves in our own writing. I think those often happen hand in hand.

Bonni: [00:18:34] And just to illustrate that I know even less about golf than you may, at the first moment of you speaking, I thought you said if you need a sandwich then you can get your sandwich and then I realized you said sand wedge.

John: [00:18:50] You could use a sandwich while you are golfing also.

Bonni: [00:18:54] I think I could use a sandwich a lot more if I was golfing than I could a sand wedge.

John: [00:18:59] Oh absolutely.

Bonni: [00:19:02] So one of the things that we looked at in earlier in our conversation was this question of “who are you?” And then in the book we get to the question of “who are our readers?” Would you speak about how we should think about profiling our readers?

John: [00:19:18] Sure I am going to give credit to where we learn this because it’s in the acknowledgements of the book but I like to give credit where it’s due. I got this from a woman named Marlene Preston, who was a communications professor at Virginia Tech when I was there and was the coordinator of the course I taught which was a two semester course we had the same students both semesters first year course which was fantastic. And it was first year writing essentially in the first semester, first year writing with a kind of communication framework.

John: [00:19:48] And then the second semester was research and public speaking which would culminate with a research project where students would both write a paper and giving in the same topic. And her framework for thinking about audience is the NAK, their needs, their attitudes, and their knowledge. And this overlays with the rhetorical situation of message, audience, purpose by breaking out audience and looking at other elements of the rhetorical situation with the needs, attitudes and knowledge.

John: [00:20:21] So if you think of what an audience needs, it may be we could be thinking of what are they going to do with your piece of writing? Is it going to be like a set of instructions or overview? Are they going to be making a decision? Are they going to read it once? Are they going to skim it? Are they going to keep going back to it? Are they looking for entertainment? Are they looking for information? Are they looking to be persuaded? All these things.

John: [00:20:44] The attitudes are the attitudes they bring to what they’re going to read. How familiar are they with it? If we are talking about an argument, it might be the beliefs that they bring to the topic we’re going to talk about.

John: [00:21:00] And knowledge similarly is what do they know? What do they know about what you are saying? And that helps us understand better what do they need to know to appreciate what you are saying?

John: [00:21:12] The NAK, needs, attitudes, and knowledge is the first thing I go to when I start talking about what I’m going to write. And I keep in my mind the whole time I am writing as the idea reveals itself to me – to keep checking back in with my audience and their needs, attitudes, and knowledge as I go. But it really keeps me on track not just in terms of message, but structure and sequencing, all that stuff. So it’s a very handy framework to have in mind while you work.

Bonni: [00:21:39] Another theme that you explore is why on earth proofreading is so hard. Would you share about that? I should say proofreading our own work- why is that so hard?

John: [00:21:52] Sure there’s a couple things going on. One is a well known sort of psychological phenomenon known as the perceptual set, where our brains are used to filling in whole information based on partial information. So when we think we see enough to figure out the whole our brain stops seeing. They have an illustration in the book of some cliches where there’s only four or five words and yet there’s a egregious typo that people- and I do this in class all the time- I put them on the white board or the PowerPoint and people do not see them, they are staring at them and do not see the error because of this perceptual set.

John: [00:22:37] Related to that is when we write something we know what we intended to say and our brain will see the thing we intended to say rather than the thing we actually said. This begets the homonyn errors like there, they’re and their. But other things like one of my frequent ones is I will leave the “ly” off of words where I need them so instead of definitely, it’ll just be definite. And when I’m just reading through say on the screen I won’t catch it so I have really need to be careful ,I read everything aloud to myself slowly and clearly in order to find those things that usually short circuit our brain’s tendency to fill in the perceptual set with information that’s not actually there. Which is sort of a good idea in general. And it’s almost foolproof as long as you’re honest with yourself. If you do start to sort of mumble and skim, it doesn’t help. It really is, you have to read it until you really get to know the person. I usually invite the dogs in the room and read it aloud to them and see how they like it. And they will sort of cock their heads as though they understand, even though they don’t. It’s a reminder to read fully slowly, read out loud, make sure that I am processing each and every word and idea.

Bonni: [00:24:01] John, this is such a wonderful treasured book. And it goes so well with Why They Can’t Write. And I’m glad that you went through whatever torturous things you had to go through to get them both out into the world and have people be able to access both of them.

John: [00:24:16] Thank you. It was a busy year for us. It was not a bad way to spend a year.

Bonni: [00:24:21] This is the time in this show where we get to give recommendations and I’ve been chuckling ever since I was thinking about what I might recommend because the last time you were on the show John, you did a little number on me and whoever else decided to your to recommendation because you recommended a couple of podcasts that are so good. And it was right over the holidays I believe, so I went on this whole journey of the podcast, The Armchair Expert which you had recommended last time. So I felt like you were both doing harm to also giving me something enjoyable to listen to.

John: [00:24:52] Glad to be of service.

Bonni: [00:24:57] So I thought you described it very aptly. So I was trying to come up with some way to return the quote on quote “favor.” And I couldn’t do it, so I’m going to instead go in a different direction and that is to recommend that people look at this Twitter thread that I will make available in the show links.

Bonni: [00:25:13] This is a young man who I wasn’t familiar with until seeing this. There’s a lot of tweets that have been going around on Twitter about faculty who have decided to make very public the fact that they don’t make accommodations for their students even though a letter has come out from their office of disability services that says that they need to. And so people are pouncing on them.

Bonni: [00:25:37] And actually in one case, I don’t have the link to this particular Twitter exchange but in one case the person came back around and said “Gosh I shouldn’t have ever put that up there and it was really unwise of me. Thank you all for educating me.” And that’s like the best of what we could hope some place like Twitter might do.

Bonni: [00:25:52] But so this is a thread by Matthew Courtland, esq. And I’m just going to read it. Actually maybe I’ll first just read his profile really quick just to give people a sense of who he is since I didn’t know him either. So his profile on Twitter says “Healthcare is a human right. Disabled, chronically ill, writer, lawyer, public health nerd.” So here’s a little bit from Matthew Courtland- I’m not going to read the whole thing but hopefully enough that people want to go click on the link and read his whole brilliantly written story.

Bonni: [00:26:26] He writes: “Someone messages to ask, in what I believe to be good faith, why I go so hard at academics for ableism. It’s because the roof leaks. When it’s wet outside, water leaks from the bedroom ceiling. You may ask quite reasonably, why don’t you do something about it? Because sometimes I have to pay the rent late. I was told by law school administration that I couldn’t tell professors I had a disability or that I needed accommodations. I have IBD” (which for those who don’t know that stands for irritable bowel disease). “My symptoms require as my accommodations letter put it ‘unhindered restroom access.’ The law school tried very hard to violate the ADA. I had to threaten to sue them to be allowed to tell professors I had a reasonable accommodation on the basis of disability that meant if I needed to go to the restroom, I wasn’t going to raise my hand and ask for permission as some professors insisted. One professor upon my disclosing chronic illness, said you don’t need somethin silly like a large font, will you? When I explained crones, he interrogated me about how would he really know if I was faking or if I was really in the bathroom? That was the first interrogation of many. I was cross examined repeatedly about my accommodations even though they were from university disability services and based upon voluminous medical evidence, where they legit? No really. How was I scamming them?.”

Bonni: [00:28:08] That’s just a little bit. He goes on it’s very well written and if I do come across the other bookmarks that I tried to save and apparently had just discovered before calling John was unsuccessful in saving about a lot of these threads around disability, I’ll post those on the show notes as well. So what a wonderfully written thing.

John: [00:28:27] That’s great. I have not seen that one, I had seen the earlier debate and it was wrapped up with so many other issues of academia and power and authority and this kind of stuff but it’s just the notion that a law professor, an English professor, a history professor, has some sort of expertise that can determine whether or not a student is faking a disability for whatever reason they might want to do this is just ludicrous. And the people who believe that their authority extends to that I think really need to check themselves and that’s a great illustration.

John: [00:29:06] As to why, we’ve talked about this previously that there’s no reason not to trust students in their own experience of the world and to try to impose that authorit on them does not do them any favors. It doesn’t do the professor any favors either. Why do you want to put yourself in the position of being a sheriff or jailer of your students? I don’t know how that helps anybody.

Bonni: [00:29:26] The other thing I liked about sharing this with you on this episode, John, is I mean what a masterful first entry, someone messages him asking why he goes so hard at people who do this. It’s because the roof leaks. And our brains just instantly, “what does he mean? What is this roof? What is he talking about?” I didn’t know who he was and I’m captivated by this roof and why it leaks.

John: [00:29:49] That is fantastic.

Bonni: [00:29:51] John, what do you have to recommend for us today?

John: [00:29:53] So I’m going to do three books because I can’t resist but I will try to do it quickly. Once I can do quickly because so many people been talking about it and I wrote a review of it. But I’ll just keep saying it, it is Thick: And Other Essays by Tracy McMillan Cottom. She’s a superstar. The book is amazing where when people hear words like “intersectional scholarship” or “intersectionalism” and they wonder without is is, read Professor Cottom’s book and you’ll see what that means. And all that really means as you look at the world and you think of different issues very deeply and you combine issues with other issues until you reveal something that other people haven’t seen before and that reveal is a literal revelation. And she has more revelations in every single essay in this book. And if she is not already, and I think she’s getting there, she will be a major national voice above anything she wants. She’s amazing.

John: [00:30:57] The other book is one I also wrote about for Inside Higher Ed caller Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer who is the copy chief for Random House, the head copy editor and copy cheird for this major publisher and has worked there for many years. And as I wrote in Inside Higher Ed, many years ago I gave up using style guide in my writing classes because I never found one that fit with the way I think about writing. They’re far too prescriptive, they’re too rule based, they don’t really help students think about their writing. Dreyer’s English is the first style guide I’ve seen in decades that I would include my class. Not only would, but will. So I recommend it for that.

John: [00:31:45] And finally a book called On Writing by Roger Sale. This book is long out of print it was published in 1970. I was introduced to it at the relatively recent Modern Language Association Convention at a panel on forgotten texts of rhetoric and composition and one of the speakers, John Shield from Indiana University talked On Writing and as he was talking about it and describing it, I was just getting more and more excited. Roger Sale are still writing many of the same critiques that I write about how we teach writing and the systems surrounding the teaching of writing in 1970 that I have in my book from 2018/2019. So it is simultaneously heartening that I’m not alone or that people think the same way as me, and a little bit disconcerting in that this book was published the year I was born. And we’re still having these discussions. It’s a really interesting way of thinking about writing. He’s got some very specific analysis of student writing that is great and you can get your hands on a used copy, I recommended it, On Writing by Rodger Sale. That is it, three books.

Bonni: [00:32:55] I’m thinking that I probably won’t put the amazon link to On Writing because there’s a paperback copy you can get your hands on for $499.96. So.

John: [00:33:04] I know that the better route for used books of that kind of the old kind I find is Abebooks, that is my go to for older used books. It’s a clearinghouse for all the little used bookshops in America. It’s a better bet than for these things. I think I got mine for $7 and it’s in decent shape, it has all the pages, it is yellowed, but it holds together.

Bonni: [00:33:34] Yeah. And Circling back to the tweet I mentioned from Clint Smith earlier in our conversation about sometimes even having the used book has some neat treasures that you wouldn’t have gotten if it was a new one.

John: [00:33:45] Absolutely. Or even my copy of On Writing, it had the invoice slip from Random House to the [00:33:53] book seller – [0.0] which is sort of very old school carbon copy. It actually reminded me a lot of my mom owned her own bookstore where I grew up. It reminded me of her bookstore because we used to see those things all over the place back in the day. So yeah. You never know what little treasure you will find in a used book.

Bonni: [00:34:13] Yeah. I love it. Well John, it’s been so good having this conversation and it’s fun that the last one wasn’t that long ago either. So thanks for coming back on the show and I’m looking forward to the next time we get a chance to talk.

John: [00:34:23] Yeah it’s always fun. Anytime you want to invite me, I am here.

Bonni: [00:34:27] Thank you. The book is called The Writer’s Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing by John Warner. And I was so grateful to get to have this conversation with him today again so soon since our conversation about his last book, Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities, also by John Warner.

Bonni: [00:34:51] And I’m thankful to all of you for a last name and getting to hear from so many of you on Twitter and in other spaces just about the kind of impact that people like John Warner are having on you, on your work, on your teaching, on your lives. Thanks for sharing those moments with me. And if you would like to connect on Twitter I’m @Bonni208. And there also is a vibrant Teaching in Higher Ed accountant, its @TiHigherEd and you can find us both on Twitter. Thanks so much for listening. I’ll see you next time.

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