blog posts & comments
Blog posts
Description:
In lieu of a formal paper, you will write three blog posts. These blog posts are short (300-500 words) reflective essays tying together your personal experience and an analysis of the reading. As part of your assignments during the first few weeks, I've included blog posts that might serve as a model for your posts (thought note that they are 3x as long as yours need to be). See this link for further details about writing an academic blog post.
From the link: "Blogs are a more informal platform to present an argument that builds on your own perspective. Compared to a formal academic analysis, blog posts give you more freedom to discuss personal experience and emotional reactions to course material before delving into analysis. Just as in a formal academic paper, you need to include citations and analysis of evidence in a blog, but by no means do you need to use a very rigid structure. This is a place to let your thoughts meander a bit. A blog post does not necessarily need to cohere as a uniform piece of analysis, but it still should make sense. With this looser framework, you can be creative with structure. You can emphasize important points in a range of ways: short paragraphs, bullet points, bold text, italics, underlining, and headings. Because blogs are an electronic platform, images, videos, and links are helpful to demonstrate your thinking." (Hamilton College Writing Center)
Please be aware that the blog is public – anyone with the URL can see it. Be circumspect about the information you give about your identity and location.
Process:
During your weeks to blog, as you read the assignment, pay careful attention to how you're reacting to the text. Are there any vignettes that you find particularly affecting, either positively or negatively? Do you find echoes of a transformation you've experienced in the mythological travails of Ovid's characters? Or does the passage remind you of something you've read or watched, something meaningful to you?
When you have a sense of what you want to write about, draft your blog post in Google Docs or Word (don't write directly onto the Wordpress platform because you don't want to lose your hard work!). Come up with a clever title. Find an image that connects to what you're writing about. When you're ready, log into Wordpress and publish your post.
Plan ahead: posts are due each Tuesday at 6 PM CDT to give everyone time to read them before class on Thursday. If you're only citing the assigned book, you don't need to include a bibliography, but if you're using a different translation or are bringing in other sources, please include bibliographic entries in a consistent style of your choice.
Purpose:
Writing formal college papers is an important skill, but once you're out of college you probably won't have many opportunities to use this ability. Writing catchy, persuasive articles for a public audience, however, is an increasingly vital skill in many careers. Whether you want to run your own business someday, become an artist or writer, or work in a communications field, familiarity with Wordpress is an extremely marketable skill and one that is transferrable to other media platforms.
Moreover, Ovid wrote the Metamorphoses so he could obtain immortality through his art; countless artists have followed in his footsteps and thus also gained immortality. By publishing your thoughts on a public platform, you too will become immortal, just like Ovid, Caravaggio, Picasso, Ted Hughes, and many others.
Criteria:
Before you publish your blog post, ask yourself the following questions:
Does my post have a catchy title?
Do I make my purpose/main topic/thesis clear in the first few sentences?
Do I quote at least 2 lines from the assignment, and is the quote contextualized?
Is my post between 300 and 500 words in length?
Is my post formatted correctly (no indents; single space between sentences; single space between paragraphs)?
Blogs are worth 10 points each x 3 weeks = 30% of your grade.
Blog comments
As I mention elsewhere on this syllabus, learning in the college classroom is a dynamic polygon formed by a constant stream of knowledge flowing between the text, the professor, and each student. Rather than having you turn a paper into me, where learning happens in a straight line between the student and the professor, these blog posts allow the writing process to be part of the ongoing conversation we're all having over the course of this term.
Blog comments are how you show your classmates that you've read and learned from their blog posts. During the weeks when you don't post a blog of your own, you have 24 hours to read your classmates' blogs and comment on at least two of them. Comment substantively: point out something in particular that you really liked, or were surprised by, or learned from the blog post. If you disagree, please remember to disagree with the idea, not the person.
Criteria:
Two comments on two different blogs x four weeks
At least one sentence long
Comments are worth 2.5 points each x 2 per week x 4 weeks = 20% of your final grade