On the Mormon Vision of Language: Bro. Chadwick and the Power of Words

I teach first year writing online for BYU-Idaho (where, by institutional requirement, I go by “Bro. Chadwick”). One of my main goals for the course is to instill in my students a sense of responsibility for the ways they use language. To that end, several semesters ago I started an ongoing screencasting project in which I record my musings over what Mormonism can teach us about responsible, sustainable language use. I’ve titled the project “On the Mormon Vision of Language.” Each week I share a new video with my students; so far, most of the vids have me exploring ideas from Restoration scriptures—the Book of Mormon and Pearl of Great Price, particularly, though I’ve also drawn from the Doctrine & Covenants and the Bible.

Since I started the project I’ve created a decent backlog of screencasts. To help me catalog them and to provide fodder for discussion and further development of my thinking on what Mormonism can contribute to a theory of language, I thought I’d start sharing the videos here, too. I’ll try to post one each Sunday (as good a day as any to devote some time to the Word) in an open-ended series called, of course, “On the Mormon Vision of Language.”

To begin, here are the first two screencasts I use to frame language for my students. The first, I tell them, is an introduction to what makes me tick. I begin by providing biographical details (extreme cheese alert! Be warned.), then I spend some time geeking out about words in response to Mormon and the Lectures on Faith. In the second video (which I’ve trimmed from a longer introduction to the first week of coursework, hence the in medias res feel of my commentary), I turn to Doctrine & Covenants 121 and encourage my students to stay tuned in throughout the semester.

With that, I give you my teacherly persona, Bro. Chadwick, on the power of words: