Respond to a Reading
Class readings can offer you some excellent fodder for exploration. Sometimes, I’ll use a reading in order to supplement a lecture, and the content of the reading is lost in the discussion of technique. Other times, we’ll focus on content and miss some of the craft of the work. It is also inevitable that in discussions about the readings we might gloss over points that you feel deserved more attention. Or perhaps one of your points required a more deliberate exploration than you could muster in the heat of the moment.
Continue a Class Discussion
The hour and fifteen minutes of class time is rarely long enough for us to have a developed and thorough debate. But our classroom discussions don’t need to end when we walk out the door. On your blog, you might develop the position you were arguing, or supplement it with evidence that you find online (link to it!). You might provide some overarching analysis that frames our discussion in a new light. You might take the opportunity to more honestly articulate your concerns or responses. All of this gives us an outlet for that unsettling feeling that results from realizing the perfect thing to say at a time when it is no longer useful.
Link and Respond to Another Blogger’s Post, or an Online Article
As I’d mentioned in the Hopes and Concerns post, the blogosphere is hypertextual. This means that we can engage in conversations through the posts, particularly as we use links to create connections between ideas and people. Not only are all of the students in my sections of ENG102 posting to their blogs (see the list at the right), but so are millions of other online readers and writers. By linking to another blogger’s post you not only create a connection between their content and yours, but you also create a literate social sphere. You might also choose to riff off of other forms of online content, like photos at flickr, news articles in the Arizona Republic, or Magazine articles from Seed. At the end of this entry I've included instructions for incorporating links.
Share Something About the Writing Process
Finally, you might choose to share something about the writing process as you work through your assignments for this class. In the past, students who posted a description of a problem they were having were rewarded with generous and helpful advice from their peers. In other cases, you might describe some particularly successful approach that you’ve discovered. Or perhaps you’d like to challenge or explore some of the lessons about the process—questioning the legitimacy of “legitimate” sources, or exploring the importance of editing.
Other Posts
This list is meant to provide models. Hopefully it becomes a useful tool for developing meaningful posts. But I don’t in any way mean for it to be limiting. If you want to write a post that falls outside of the realm of the kinds of posts described here, please don’t let the list stop you from writing that post. Please do keep in mind, however, that this is a course blog and not a personal blog. The party on Friday night was probably a blast, but it shouldn’t be the topic of a course blog post unless it somehow relates to the questions of research, rhetoric and writing that are the purview of this class. That said, if you can connect real-world personal experience to the content of this class, I might believe that my life was a little more meaningful.
Instructions for Incorporating Links
If you are responding to an outside source, blog or otherwise, here are the step-by-step instructions for incorporating a link into your post:
1. Sign in, and navigate to the “New Post” page
2. Type some text that you want to link to another web page.
3. Highlight the text and click on the Link button.
4. Type the web address for the webpage you'd like the text to link to and click "OK."
5. You have linked the text. Now, when readers click on underlined text, they will be taken to the web page you linked to. Note, too, that you can type around this text without losing the link.
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