English 320 Spring 2009

Finishing up the semester: journal and Final exam

1. Journal. Due May 12. 15 points. At the end of your journal write the date you completed it and “The End” so that I know I’m looking at the final version. If you’re working on line with google docs, be sure to save your work. If you are working off line, you’ll need to upload the journal again.  In either case notify me a susan.romano@gmail.com that you’re done with your journal. I’ll send you an email acknowledgement saying that I am able to “see” your final google docs journal. If you don’t get an acknowledgement by the eve of May 13, write again.

2. Final. Due May 12. 40 points. The final exam is posted on the 320 community blog. Turn in your final electronically as an attachment via email to susan.romano@gmail.com. Look for my email acknowledgement letting you know that I received it and was able to open the attachment. 

I’m repackaging and re-weighting “Portfolio” and “Final Exam.”  You’ll turn these two assignments in as one assignment—all part of the Final. Questions 1 through 5 ask you to analyze five of your own blog posts. Question 6 asks you to analyze 5 of your post titles. This work (1-6) corresponds to the Portfolio and is worth 20 points. The remaining questions invite you to reflect on blogging from the perspective of a writer. This part will be worth 20 points.

My changes increase the weight of the final by 15 points.

Final Exam     Final Exam     Final Exam     Final Exam     Final Exam   Final Exam

Questions 1 through 5:
Analyze five of your own blog posts. Your April 10 comments and your recent Best of Class comments practice this exercise.  “Analysis” is usually defined as follows: 1) identifying parts and 2) showing how they work together. I’ve included step 3, which is to illustrate (1) and (2) with details from your post

1. Identify elements or parts. The blog interfaces supports quite a number of writing elements: text, image, video, slide shows, audio, widgets, template design. Micro-level elements include color, font size, image sizing, headings, gadget arrangement, and more; these too count as elements. Modes and genres:  narrative, exposition, poetry, lists, fantasy, humor, scientific writing, proposals, appeals, fiction, chronicles, history, arguments, instructions, advertising, invitations; activity- or passivity- inducing devices. Consider that you are dragging pieces of stuff (elements) from your quite extensive writing repertoire into this space.

2. Show How Elements Work Together for Rhetorical Effect. The blog interface allows writers to combine or juxtapose elements that in other spaces are carefully separated. So we can say that a blogger positions elements in relationship to create meaning according to audience and purpose. For example, thesis-driven arguments may be tempered with personal in order to secure attention or assure readability. Text and image may be present—but in what relationship? How do they compete for attention and how do you script this competition?

3. Illustrate your points above with specific details from your blog. You might say this: “There’s a strong educational element in my blog post that is disguised by my humor.” But saying this is not enough. You have to also quote the words that count as “education” and quote the words that count as “humor”—and so arguing that these elements are in dynamic relationship.  You might say this: “My template colors create the mood I want to establish.”  This is not enough. You must also say, “The dingy grey background makes my readers feel doomed and so enhances my argument that school is bad for you.”

How to Perform the Task: When you analyze each of your selected (five) posts, DON’T try to say EVERYTHING POSSIBLE about the post. Instead, choose elements that have high explanatory power for a given post. Then explain how these elements work together to address audience, fulfill purpose, and make meaning. Ideally you’ll use different element combinations to discuss each post. It’s certainly ok to have some repetition, but aim to provide new insights for each of the 5 posts. You can, if you wish, be critical of your own work by explaining your purpose, your idea, your writerly decisions, and then showing where your efforts fall short. This counts as critical analysis and earns good points.

Below you’ll find 2 tables of terms, elements, and descriptors. The first is a compilation of all of your observations about best-of-class posts and titles. The second list is more formal and includes terms we’ve discussed in class. These are invention tools for you to draw on. You can certainly add your own terms and elements. See also your own comments to the class blog for Friday, February 13, when you practiced this kind of analysis. But please do not copy and paste what you said. I know what you said and have just reread it. You can certainly enrich or modify what you said way back then. You might also take a look at what other people said about your blog in the comments for April 21. Some of these comments are very insightful.

Post Titles: Your Observations and Language --Uses insider puns (in other words, if you get it you think you’re an insider) --Offers not quite enough information—teasing, luring you into the post --Uses strong words in contradiction or in counter-intuitive ways --Uses Contrastive, jarring ideas; putting things together that don’t go together --Reflects Essence of blog --Uses lingo appropriate to topic—jargon signals content --Interests reader sufficiently to make him read on, yet does announce the content. --Uses sarcasm or humor --Oppositional: says something obviously not true --Uses verbal rhythm, rhyme, lyricism --Asks a question of the reader while naming the topic --Elicits specific emotions, e.g., nostalgia --Sounds fun --Uses slang --Humorous AND topical (announces topic) --Reframes the way you think about a certain topic --Echoes or references cultural knowledge --Gives strong incentive to read the post --Creates mystery and curiosity --Promises entertainment --Alliteration --Word play --Ambiguity—creating the need to read on for clarification --Creates a situation where the reader has to fill in the blank --Truncation: meaning-laden words only without connectors ( such as prepositions, conjunctions) --Accomodates two audiences: the immediate community who knows the jargon and a broader readership

Posts: Your Observations and Language --Creates (as opposed to finds) something in common with reader --Uses multimedia—as support for verbal or as lead with verbal trailing --Vocabulary spans a range of reading ages—12 year olds to adults. --Verbal visual contrast --Controversial --Attempts to use personal experience that mirrors experiences of readers. --Depth and breadth of research --Gives a sense of blogger’s personality --Voice --In keeping with blog theme --Verbal style—fast paced, transparent --Details appropriate to readership --Respectful of everyday people (OK to be disrespectful of famous people) --Informing, educating, entertaining combo --Brings something new to topic and to the particular blog: news --Creates news by putting old things in new context --Learning—blogger gets better and better --Both visual and verbal --Readability in verbal style --Factual plus personal --New information --Claims having to do with taste or other sensory appeal --Effectively paces the reader, e.g., poses question, makes reader look at something, creates pauses, then asks more questions; frames video with advance discussion --Visuals leads the eye in zigzag or other pattern --Personal tone warms up cold information --Funny and clever ending lines --Induces the reader to read all of the post AND to comment

From Status Update Handout --Immediacy (My finger is bleeding all over my keyboard) --Randomness (spatula) --Stuff I like (with a link) --Poetic (raining Earl Grey tea)	Micro-tools --color --font --design template --headings --gadgets --banner --arrangement of gadgets --template design
Calibrating Social Distance --using “I” and “you” for closing the distance --using third person for widening the distance	Building Context & Creating Audience --Widgets --Links --Citations --Quotes --Comments
Purposes --educating --instructing --making arguments --entertaining --showing something you know and like --expressing feelings --creating visual pleasure --creating verbal pleasure --soliciting something --philosophizing --musing, thinking through --create community --sustain community	Modes --narrative --argument --poetry --humor --journal --chronicle --exposition --lecture --conversation: I-you, them-us --exploratory dialogue
Scripting Readers --to be active (more/less) --to be passive (more/less) ---to do some of both	Multi-Modals --verbal (text) --visual (images/video) --audio
Mood --serious --comic --humorous --anxious or anxiety-producing --passionate --whimsical --argumentative --sad --exciting --cryptic --cynical --fun loving	Verbal Style (overlaps with Mood) --wordy --compact --diffuse --playful --sarcastic --ironic --preachy --plain and folksy style --eloquent style --formal style --youth culture style --jargon-y

Question 6
Choose five of your own post titles and discuss the means by which these titles induce people to read the post.  

QUESTION 7
Prompt: How did you originally conceptualize your blog’s topic, audience, and purpose?  How did this conception change over the course of the semester?  How did your writing change to accommodate your new vision?

QUESTION 8
The most central tenet of rhetoric and professional writing is “rhetorical situation”: one writes with her mind focused on 1) audience, 2) purpose, 3) context.  How do you conceptualize rhetorical situation when your blog is one among 150 million blogs and when you don’t know who might be reading it? We might say that audience is a fiction in the mind of the writer (and rhetoric theorists do say this).
Prompt: So what’s your fiction? How do you conceptualize “audience” when you blog? What are you thinking about when you make your writing and design decisions?  Given your experience, what can you add to theories of rhetorical situation?

Question 9
Early in the semester I asked you what propositions put forward by the authors of The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging made sense to you. Many of you were enthusiastic about the claim for the blogging’s democratizing powers. Some pointed to freedoms of the exploring mind, others to the therapeutic possibilities (keep me out of the loony bin), others to uncertainties about who is listening; others to the idea of free and unrestricted voicing.  Go back and see what you said for January 30 and/or take another look at the HuffPost claims for the power of blogging.
Prompt: Revise your statement about what’s powerful about blogging in light of your semester-long experience.

Question 10
We have spent some time on the matter of commenting. I’d like to hear more about your understanding of how comments affect your writing and how you might use them to enhance the blog itself. On February 24 you critiqued each other’s ability to respond to comments, so start by looking again at what your classmates said about your attentiveness to your comments. Commenting is also discussed in subsequent weeks. 
Prompt: Explain the nature and power of commenting to a non-blogger Illustrate by citing both your own blog and someone else’s comments or by citing your efforts to gain comments.  What kinds of comments made you do something you would not ordinarily have done? Which comments should you have listened more closely to? 

Question 11
I’m very interested in your own stories about experimentation and learning. Please point to changes in your blogging career that mark 1) increased experimentation and 2) consolidation of skills, something we might call “learning.”  Experimentation means different kinds of posts—in content, design, prose style, and visual/verbal calibration. Learning means decision points where you have begun honing your style in response to critical commentary and to what you see others and yourself doing well. This is not, I’ll wager, a linear process. In fact I see significant differences among your blogs: slow starts, fast starts, leveling off at different points in the semester, loss of interest and enthusiasm, regaining momentum, redesign, weariness, and so forth.
Prompt: Tell your own tale of experimentation and learning.

Question 12
Prompt: Describe a composing session in full detail. Many of you have told me about what you do behind the scenes to devise a good post. Much of this is out of my line of vision—I have no idea. Choose a rich post and lead me through the idea stage, research, using Word or Photoshop or composing or seeking a video, and so forth. Opportunity to impress me.

QUESTION 13
The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging tends to oversimplify the blogging arts. For example, authors do not mention that they obsessively read news—and hence begin composing with a hot political conversation in mind and often a quote to disagree with.  “Voice” is generalized, as if it were obvious how to gain voice. Nonetheless, most of you told me you learned important things from reading the HuffPost tips and tricks.
Prompt: Which tips and tricks do you find accurate and useful? Look at your March 6 comments on HuffPost tips (but expect to revise your initial take) or read them from the book.

QUESTION 14
Prompt: What do you like about blogging? What’s hard about blogging? What do you dislike? What’s easy about blogging?

QUESTION 15
On March 27 we began a process of “getting noticed” by reading Huffington Post suggestions. I divided these suggestions into “mechanical” and “artistic,” into active or passive, tracking community or engaging community.
Prompt: Using these distinctions, tell me what you did to gain audience outside of class. Some of you have mentioned efforts that I could not have imagined on my own—so be sure to give yourself credit for attempts, even failed attempts.

QUESTION 16
Prompt: What is a blog?  Create your own definition. Do not rely on the Huffington Post or other circulating definitions. Your audience for this question is a person who is going to try blogging but doesn’t know how it works.

QUESTION 17
Some blog writing positions readers (viewers) as passive people and aims to produce passive pleasure—nothing wrong with this. Other blog writing aims to get readers involved—using different means from clicking to commenting or going out into the world to do speak, write, or do.
Prompt: Tell me something very specific about how you used writing to create passive or active readers and with what success.

QUESTION 18
This is the space where you tell me something important about your blogging that I have not asked.

NOT A QUESTION
Finally, take a look at this text designed to attract new UNM students. The animation won an award. I’m showing you this because the form is very blog-like and an example of highly paid professional writing. http://beyourself.unm.edu/