I’m not sure if I mentioned that I’m teaching a first-year undergrad seminar on “Writing and Data,” in some respects patterned after the Writing Scientists’ Workshop I ran last year. With 18-year-olds it’s a little different; for one thing, I find that doing two hour-long workshops in a row gets a little long for them, so I’m doing two 45-minute workshops with an in-class writing exercise in between. Last week’s worked particularly well so I wanted to record what I did. We started with this piece from Pew, “How Many Friends do Americans Have?” Because I want them to think about conveying the same information in different registers, and in particular writing more “conversationally,” I split the group into pairs and asked each pair to write a dialogue which conveyed some of the information from the Pew piece. I gave them 15-20 minutes to do that, then had each pair act out their dialogue. I had been wondering whether to have everyone start from the same source or let people pick; in the end, I was glad we were all working from the same article, because it was instructive to see how many different ways the same information could be deployed in speech, or an imitation of speech. If there’s one thing I’m trying to get across in this class, it’s that writing is much, much more than the factual information it conveys.