I've been revamping my English 120 (argument-based) in my head a lot lately, since I teach it in the summer. I want more engaging discussion boards, and for an early-in-the-semester one, I've been thinking about having students look at two items, compare and contrast them, and then dig into their own observations. The questions in the discussion board might simply be - Given these two items, do you think there are differences in how these two genders communicate? Do you see it in your own life? What are the implications for writing teachers to grapple with? Item #1: I plan to download the annotations to the syllabus from spring and block out the names of the students, replacing the names with MAN or WOMAN to give us a "real life" example to play with. Item #2: This question/answer from ChatGPT - I see more of my male students writing less in their comments and discussions than female students - why is that? Is there research on the different between textual communicat...