Michal Brody is a linguist, independent scholar, and coauthor of Everyone’s an Author, Let’s Talk, and The Little Seagull Handbook.
Q: What is your process for finding reading selections that will end up in a textbook? Do you have specific sites that you visit when it’s time to start on a new edition, or do you keep a running list of interesting pieces you have come across naturally…?
A: I’ve always thought of searching for readings as fishing. It takes a TON of time. I’ve done it five times for Everyone’s an Author, two times for Let’s Talk with Readings, and many times for those books’ companion blogs. When I’m working on a book, all I do for a month is fishing: some days you catch a lot, and some days you just go all day long and you don’t catch anything. When I first started doing it in the early 2010s, it was the golden age of the internet; everything was out there, and everything was available. Over time, little by little, things are getting paywalled. I understand why there are paywalls, but those are huge obstacles now for teachers to just go poke around and find stuff. I’ve paid for a lot of subscriptions!
My process depends on the situation. For example, on the companion blogs, students read a selection in its native environment on the website where it occurs, so I pay attention to avoiding sites with a lot of popup ads or ridiculous graphic features that could be distracting. I also think about the stability of the site and such. For a book, you don’t have to worry about the visuals of a website, and you have an opportunity to do a little editing or pull a specific excerpt from a longer piece, so you have a bigger pond to fish, basically. Over time, I have collected a very thick file folder of bookmarks of promising periodicals. So I’ll start with those.
When the author team is working on a new edition of a book that’s already been published, the first thing we have to do is identify which selections are the keepers and which we will drop. Instructor reviews factor heavily into which selections are going to be dropped; also, we have to consider shelf life and current relevancy, but sometimes we keep less popular readings if we look down the road and think it’s going to stay—or become even more—relevant in the future. Once we know what we’re keeping, I can think about what new selections would complement those, leading me to fish for specific themes or questions.
Q: What criteria do you use when evaluating a potential reading?
A: I’m a good guinea pig on what makes a good reading because I don’t have a very good attention span. If I can read it all the way through without getting bored, that’s already a good sign! Other criteria: it has to have some spark, something that generates some kind of affective response in me as I read—a smile, wince, fist pump, a tear, a groan. A spark is like the difference between standing at a bus stop and seeing all the other people there but not engaging in any way, versus actually making eye contact and communicating with one (or more) of them. A spark, in its most literal sense, can ignite combustion. A relationship.
A reading should also be relevant to a critical mass of our student readers. And that’s an interesting part because “student readers” doesn’t mean “college age”—that doesn’t mean anything anymore. There’s this image of your classic “four-year liberal arts student,” but that’s a small proportion of who our intended audience is. And that’s something I love about Norton: we’re not just aiming for elite universities. Our books are used by community college students, Ivies, HBCUs, HSIs, and students of all ages in every state and region of the country. Here’s an example of a table of contents that does this well.
Q: How do you decide if a reading is not only interesting but teachable?
A: When I’m looking at potential readings, I try to imagine myself engaged in conversation about it with a class full of students. When I read, I’m looking for strong responses: “yeah!” or, “I’m not sure…is that true?” or even, “hell no!” I’m also asking, “Is this well argued? Can I find flaws that are teachable?”
Q: In most cases, you also write the questions that accompany each reading. What are your goals in writing those questions?
A: The questions are the most challenging part of my job but also the part that I’m most proud of. I demand it of myself to write questions that no student, in any class, feels excluded from—and I have millions of students I need to think about. How am I going to tailor questions to that many students? But it’s the task I set for myself. For example, something I’ve seen other books do is feature a reading by a Black author who talks about certain experiences with racism, such as being pulled over by the cops, then follow it with a question that says “Imagine you are a Black man…” Well, a lot of students don’t have to imagine that because it’s already their reality. If that’s how you write questions, it reveals assumptions about who you think your readers are. So any “imagine you are a ___” should not be part of the question. I want to get students talking about this reading and validating their own experiences. So instead, the question for that reading above could be “Remember a time that you were unfairly challenged by an authority figure.” That connects to everyone’s experience. And then, if I want to specifically address racism as it’s depicted in the reading, there are many other ways to do that.
Of course there are other questions that go toward global comprehension, rhetorical features, etc. But I always want at least one question that connects the student’s own experience to what the author is arguing or describing.
I’m aiming at students, but I’m also not ever unaware that I’m backing up a teacher—giving them tools, giving them ideas. I love that.
Q: How did you end up focusing on the role of curating readings as a coauthor, and why do you like doing it?
Luck and accident really. I was the research assistant for Keith Walters, who was working on the version of readings for Everything’s an Argument for Bedford / St Martin’s. I just kept doing that work, and it’s fun. It has obliged me to read widely in sources that I wouldn’t pursue on my own unless I was out fishing. I’m also well suited to this role because I like to follow this link, follow that one—then jump down this rabbit hole. I’m happy to be all over the place, so I love that.
Q: Why assign a collection of readings in a textbook instead of compiling free articles online?
A: For starters, a textbook collection saves a lot of time and energy. I’m sure some teachers really like fishing, and if so, by all means! But if you don’t like fishing or don’t have time to go fishing, a textbook collection helps. Another benefit is that the readings have been specifically selected to complement each other, which is again time intensive to find on your own. Finally, a textbook provides a wealth of connected readings that students can explore beyond just the essays that are assigned and use the additional readings as vetted sources for their papers.
Q: What do you read for fun?
A: I’d usually rather read a map than a novel—I’m that kind of nerd. If a TV show mentions a location, I’ll just open Google Maps and find it and play around in that place. When there was such a thing as phone books, I’d read them. You could extract a lot of juice from a phone book if you knew how to look for it. In a novel, you’re reading what this author is feeding you—nothing wrong with that obviously—but sometimes you just want to go out in the woods and forage for yourself.
Interested in learning more about Everyone’s An Author, Fifth Edition? Explore the book and resources here.
MEET THE AUTHOR
Michal Brody is a linguist, independent scholar, and coauthor of Everyone’s an Author, Let’s Talk, and The Little Seagull Handbook. She was a founding faculty member of the Universidad de Oriente in Yucatán, Mexico. Her scholarly work centers principally on language pedagogy and politics in the United States and Mexico, as well as sociolinguistic work with Yucatec Maya. Brody is a 2008 inductee in the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame.
Photo by Michal Brody.