English Language and Literature Commons^™

Subverting Gendered Language Expectations: A Look At My Mother, Mary Skinner

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

Features of women’s speech are typically characterized by excessive politeness and submission in the forms of hedges, fillers, indirect requests, or tag questions. Additionally, women are statistically far less likely to commit interruptions, more likely to commit retrievals, and more likely to use intensifiers, excessive adjectives, and HRT. These features combine to depict women in a negative light. Traditionally, sociolinguistics has examined the ways in which women are stigmatized and how our patriarchal society has conditioned us to view women as vapid, uncertain, unintelligent, and annoying for using these features. For this thesis, I wanted to examine the ways in …

Power And Vulnerability: How We Can Be Influenced, Christopher Fohl

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

I watched the ballet and started thinking of parallels I could connect with historical events.

Editor's note: This paper received third prize ($25).

Power And Vulnerability: Basis For Revolution?, Katlin Pistone

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

Throughout the semester, our history class explored the differences in relationships including political, economical, and social aspects. I found one of the most compelling comparisons to be how people of vulnerability have historically suffered because of their circumstances yet are able to learn that within their vulnerability comes strength and change. After the themes of power and vulnerability were presented to us in preparation for our trip to the ballet, I was able, during the production, to draw many similarities. After narrowing my topic to a certain event in history that explored these ideas, the Haitian revolution, I began to …

'Dracula: Bloodlines' And The Role Of Women, Audrey Binzer

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

The writing process began after attending the Dracula Bloodlines ballet. While watching the performance, the integral role of women stood out to me and I decided it would be a good topic to write about. From there, it was a pretty easy process. I used the program to help support my ideas and make the essay complete.

Editor's note: This paper received first prize ($100).

Reconstruction's First Election: Various Interpretations Of The Lasting Significance Of A Grant Victory, Shannon M. Stanforth

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

This paper was completed during the Spring of 2018 for my ASI 120 course. The assignment was a multi-phased historiography paper centering around the topic of Reconstruction. To begin preparing for the writing of the historiography and to gain a better understanding of the historical context and political unrest surrounding the task of Reconstruction, I read Eric Foner’s A Short History of Reconstruction. Foner’s book provided me with the knowledge to begin writing my topic proposal and introduced me to the influential event of the Election of 1868. I was interested in exploring the consequences and effects of the …

The One, But Not The Only, Lauren Durham

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

For this particular assignment, we had to reconstruct the main points that Plotinus, an ancient philosopher and educator, presents in his work titled the Enneads. In order to reorganize and retell his elaborate ideas appropriately, we had to come to understand the text in a way that would make our own interpretations easy to convey to audiences. In addition to reconstructing the Enneads, a comparison between a previously read creation story and Plotinus's ideas had to be made. After numerous in-class discussions, I established a logical order to present Plotinus's various cosmological entities. I felt that beginning with the …

The Body And Blood: What Was And Is At Stake In The Protestant Reformation, Anna L. Biesecker-Mast

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

This paper is an explanation of Robert A. Orsi's concept of presence from the introduction and first chapter of his book titled, History and Presence. Before writing any paper for a class, I thoroughly review the syllabus for the assignment. Based on the requirements listed in the syllabus, and on the discussion we had in seminar about the Orsi text and Dr. Smith's lecture on the religious origins of modernity, I drafted an outline of my paper. Throughout the process of creating my outline, I considered various organizations for my explanation as well as a few different arguments I …

Coaching Styles For Boys’ And Girls’ Sports Teams, Jack Murphy

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

The writing process for this article began when my English 198 teacher assigned our third major essay, instructing that it was to be on the topic of gender and include original research. Being a lifelong athlete, I decided to investigate how coaching styles might differ depending upon whether one is coaching boys or girls. With this in mind, I set out to interview the coaches that I know so as to gain their insights and approaches to coaching. I developed a set of questions and interviewed four coaches of varying ages who had coached girls and/or boys at different levels. …

Sustainability Education At The University Of Dayton, Olivia M. Leblanc

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

To prepare for this Researched Argument writing assignment, I completed a research proposal that involved drafting a research question and creating a general timeline for conducting reseach leading up to this project's final submission. I then analyzed ten different sources through creating an annotated bibliography that examined the credibility, content, and relevance of each resource in relation to my paper's topic. In addition to collecting resouces, I personally attended SAP events and interviewed the SAP student leader in order to understand the innerworkings of sustainability education at the University of Dayton. I then composed a draft that was analyzed by …

Insight On Female Genital Mutilation, Kara Shunnarah

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

This assignment was our third and final essay for this course; however, this essay is a continuation from my second essay in this class. Dr. Vorachek allowed us to pick any topic we felt we wanted to write about as long as it directly or indirectly related to gender. I had difficulty choosing at first, but then I began thinking about issues in our world and FGM stuck out to me. I first learned about FGM in high school, but never had the time for extensive research. I saw this assignment as an opportunity. Thus, I researched FGM, gathering information …

Pagan Saints In Middle-Earth (2018) By Claudio A. Testi, Jonathan Evans

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review by Jonathan Evans of Pagan Saints in Middle-earth (2018) by Claudio A. Testi

Place-Soul: The Sensory Perception Of Modern Travel Writing, Pilar Dipietro

Graduate Theses

Place is theorized through many lenses: geographical, sociological, political, and architectural, to name a few, and travel theorists study the economics and production of place. Yet sensory perception of places travelled are understudied. My thesis offers the determination of “place-soul” as an experiment in sensory perception of place, and the accompanying South Carolina travelogues exemplify case studies of place-soul’s revealing. By successfully ascertaining the essence of place by marrying objective and subjective lenses, and accurately describing the belongingness and connections uncovered, the reader will identify with me through words, and travel may be inspired by a shared sense of belonging. …

Paper: Investigating The Work Of William Styron: The Perpetuation Of The Fantastic Hegemonic Imagination, William Sikich

Womanist Ethics

William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner depicts a fictitious characterization of the historical Nat Turner. Styron, a white southerner, assumes Turner's perspective in order to tell a speculative story about his slave rebellion of 1831. Similarly, he tells the story of a fictional holocaust survivor in his novel, Sophie's Choice. The decision to take on these perspective evinces some arrogance on Styron's part, and the way in which he executes the narrative of each novel delivers their stories with varying levels of respect to their subjects: Styron's indirect telling of Sophie's story allows Styron some freedom to speculate, while …

Joking Hazard Brings Comedy To Snc

St. Norbert Times

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The Right Answer: Intuition In Tutoring Sessions, Hunter E. Henrichsen

Tutor's Column

In a writing center, following intuition is important. Tutor insecurities, lack of experience, and misconceptions can lead students to deny that intuition. Tutors who learn to recognize that lack of experience can learn from sessions where that intuition is denied. Coworkers and other resources are important to building that intuition and helping to create effective, independent writers rather than effective papers.

A Science Writing Center As A Catalyst For Improving Undergraduate Writing Skills In The Sciences, Andrew J. Felton

Tutor's Column

Having earned a PhD in the sciences, I am keenly aware that writing skills are at the core of being a successful scientist. Undergraduate students in the sciences not only face the immediate demands of complex course material, but in many cases the prospect of a career in which writing skills can determine professional success. Unfortunately, due to the complexity of science course material, writing assignments, revisions, and feedback to students are given relatively little attention. The Utah State University Science Writing Center is unique platform in its ability to address this limitation; bringing together a diverse pool of …

Don’T Overlook The Power Of Praise, Andrea Whittier

Tutor's Column

Writing center tutors should prioritize the use of praise in sessions with each student, whether or not the student may respond the way the tutor expects. For some students, this brings energy to the session that fuels discussion about the paper, and for other students, this may function as a tool to show them the positive culture of the writing center.

“Flowing Along The Wall”: Anarcha-Feminist Bioethics And Resistance In Octavia E. Butler’S Dawn 2019., Theresa Mendez

Master's Theses

Science fiction (sf) texts conversant with the temporal play between past, present, and future push readers to imagine the extremes of human and environmental existence, interaction, and potential. Simultaneously, despite the sf genre’s tendency to traffic in extremes, these texts provoke readers to consider the ways in which these imagined worlds are grounded in history as well as in the contemporary social moment. As Donna Haraway has argued, “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (306). This illusory boundary must continue to be traversed in order to consider how sf literatures, particularly those which imagine …

Posthuman And Alien Breeding: The Implications Of Cybersex In Octavia Butler’S Dawn 2019., Elizabeth Rutkowski

Master's Theses

Speculative science fiction affords new ways for authors to represent social problems of the modern day in an apocalyptic manner. Authors such as Octavia Butler use science fiction to analyze social injustices revolving around race, gender, and sexuality. Throughout her novel Dawn, Butler uses the posthuman to represent minority groups in the late twentieth century. The posthuman represents those who have moved from humanity towards a new opportunity that is mixed with the potential for struggle. 1 As demonstrated through Butler’s work posthumanism blurs the lines between binaries such as male / female, straight / gay, and consensual / nonconsensual …

Chaucer's Pardoner: The Medieval Culture Of Cross-Dressing And Problems Of Religious Authority, Larissa Tracy

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

One of the most ambiguous and contentious characters in Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales is the Pardoner, the last (and arguably worst) of the pilgrims described in the General Prologue. The Pardoner accused of being a gelding or a mare endowed with several effeminate traits, plays on multiple gendered associations—including that of a cross-dressing woman. Throughout the Canterbury Tales Chaucer manipulates gender expectations and assumptions in the figure of the Pardoner without fully clarifying the Pardoner’s sex, sexuality or gender, leaving the text open to potentially subversive interpretations. By the fourteenth century, cross-dressing was a relatively common literary motif, …

“The Fight Starts Here:” Appalachian Mountaintop Removal In Three Contemporary Young Adult Novels, Sarah Mawhinney

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Mountaintop removal is an issue that has plagued Appalachia as companies harvest coal from the mountains and cause consequent environmental and community effects. By focusing on three contemporary young adult novels that feature mountaintop removal, correlations between the novels and the real environmental and community effects can be drawn. The novels examined include: Saving Wonder by Mary Knight (2016), Dig Too Deep by Amy Allgeyer (2016), and The Secret Wisdom of the Earth by Christopher Scotton (2015). Mountaintop removal is a devastating and invasive process, and the costs on the land and people are irreversible as landscapes are drastically altered, …

An Analysis Of Operator Eye Behavior When Monitoring Simulated, Petrochemical Manufacturing, Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition Alerts And Warnings With Background Noise, Angela Huenerfauth

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

There are a number of potential distractions for operators when viewing plant status-monitoring information in a petrochemical plant: background noises of other employees speaking, sounds of manufacturing equipment and processes and other ambient noises like HVAC and building operation noise. When the monitoring equipment for a chemical or petrochemical plant is not designed to take into account that operators can be distracted by this noise, there is a potential safety hazard for the people in that work environment. Alarms can be missed and fundamental information can be overlooked. SCADA is “a type of control system that collects and displays data …

Technology Threat Avoidance Factors As Predictors Of Risky Cybersecurity Behavior Within The Enterprise, Andrew R. Gillam

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recent research of information technology (IT) end-user cybersecurity-related risky behaviors has focused on items such as IT user decision-making, impulsiveness, and internet use as predictors of human cyber vulnerability. Theories which guide user human behavioral intent, such as protection motivation theory (PMT, introduced by Rogers, 1975) and technology threat avoidance theory (TTAT, introduced by Liang and Xue, 2009) have not been widely investigated as antecedents of risky cybersecurity behavior (RScB). This dissertation describes exploratory research that analyzed and evaluated PMT/TTAT factors as predictors of RScB by enterprise IT users. This work uniquely contributes to the literature by investigating associations between …

Modeling Construction Management Dynamics: A Proxy Estimation Of Percent Planned Complete, Kathleen H. Mccauley

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The chaotic and complex nature of the construction industry and construction projects hinders maximization of productivity. Certain aspects of lean manufacturing are adaptable to construction with the goal of improving work flow reliability; for example, measuring work flow reliability by Percent Planned Complete (PPC). As more construction projects are being built with lean methodologies, it is important to bring this knowledge into the undergraduate Construction Management (CM) programs so that new graduates have relevant knowledge of emerging trends and can serve as change agents in industry. The purpose of this study was to construct a mathematical estimation of project dynamics …

An Evaluation Of A Biometric Enabled Credit Card For Providing High Authenticity Identity Proofing During The Transaction Authentication Process, Laura F. Poe

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Credit card fraud has continued to grow despite efforts to protect financial data from data breaches of financial institutions. Data breaches of financial transactional records over the past decade have impacted millions of U.S. consumers, resulting in decreased consumer confidence in security. Banking institutions losing money due to fraud are forced to raise interest rates and increase fees to their cardholders. The costs of fraud are passed to the banking institution’s customers to offset the losses. The requisite to detect and eliminate fraud before it occurs is mutually beneficial to both the banking institution and cardholders. Credit card companies continue …

Analysis Of The Effect Of An Ergonomic Improvement Program On Incident Rates In A Forklift Manufacturing/Assembly Plant, Miriah L. Cherry

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The company experienced a high volume of recordable injuries and decided it was time to implement an ergonomic program in order to drive down the number of ergonomic related injuries. The ergonomics program was implemented in mid-2016 and positively impacted the company’s incident rate. Due to the high ergonomic related incident rate the company had in 2016, the decision was made to implement an ergonomic improvement program in 2017. The goal is to determine the effectiveness of the ergonomics improvement program. This project consists of the study of data before and after the implementation as well as a review of …

Quality Assessment Of Conventional And Electric Vehicles In Terms Of Fuel Economy, Annual Fuel Cost, And Maintenance, Kay Rand Morgan

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Today, automotive industries and their consumers are demanding more information on electric vehicles in response to the ongoing transportation transition from conventional to electric vehicles (EVs), the problems of greenhouse gas emissions from conventional vehicles (CVs) and fossil fuel usage, and interests in green energy production and the overall environmental health of this world. This study identified four variables - fuel economy (FE), annual fuel cost (AFC), maintenance frequency (f), and maintenance intensity (I) - and used comparative statistical quality assessment and failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA), a reliability management tool, for data analysis comparing conventional and electric vehicles. …

Application Of The Image Analysis For Archival Discovery Team’S First- Generation Methods And Software To The Burney Collection Of British Newspapers, Elizabeth Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh, Chulwoo Pack, Yi Liu, Delaram Rahimighazikalayeh, John O'Brien

CDRH Grant Reports

The current study, “Application of the Image Analysis for Archival Discovery Team’s First- Generation Methods and Software to the Burney Collection of British Newspapers,” is the first test of our approaches—methods and software—to a different newspaper corpus, specifically the 17th and 18 Century Burney Newspapers Collection. This study stands as the first complete attempt at applying Aida’s software and methods to non-Chronicling America newspapers, as a step toward understanding the potential of our approaches across digitized historic newspapers. In taking this step, our goals were (1) to test how well the software and a classifier model developed on Chronicling America …

Directive/Facilitative Commenting In The Disciplines And Its Effects On Student Revision, Christina Montgomery

English Dissertations - Archive

The purpose of this study was to build on the findings by Patton and Taylor (2013) in faculty commenting so that administrators, researchers, and faculty can address how to improve writing pedagogy for students in their disciplinary courses, majors, and professional lives. The researcher interviewed six students enrolled in a graduate-level writing course at a large public university about their experiences with writing and revision decisions based on their response to directive/facilitative comments. Using grounded theory, the researcher found that directive/facilitative comments influenced students' revision practices, which resulted in improved writing in their final drafts and confidence in themselves as …

Satori 2019, Winona State University

Satori Literary Magazine

The Satori is a student literary publication that expresses the artistic spirit of the students of Winona State University. Student poetry, prose, and graphic art are published in the Satori every spring since 1970.