Due Friday April 3

Follow up Tuesday’s in-class work.

1. Report in (comment) on what you have done this week to 1) track audience/community and b) attract broader audience/community by showing two adjustments or experiments you’ve performed on your own blog. Be specific yet discuss fully the implications of your actions—saying what you aspire to accomplish by your moves.
2. In the same comment cite the URL for a blogpost that illustrates # 1 above by embedding the URL or URLs into the comment screen. Use Geoff’s anchor code to create a link.

 Example:

<a href="http://www.w3schools.com">Post Title or Blog Title</a>   

where you insert between the quote marks the URL for the specific blog post.

Possibly you’ll need to provide two links so that we can see more fully what you’re doing to attract and monitor community.

It’s fine to comment saying you need more help and then to re-try.

2. Write to me at susan.romano@gmail.com if you want to be considered for a department award.  Your blog counts as an example of your professional writing.

3. Extra Credit up to 2 points: Read the pdf taken from Richard Lanham’s Economics of Attention. Comment on the class blog making sure it’s evident that you’ve engaged the reading thoughtfully and thoroughly. Try out some personal style to review this reading.

Due Tuesday April 7

In the remaining 5 weeks you’ll attend to your blog by performing new experiments in writing: developing new content, enhancing or revising design, broadening community, and improving verbal style—all or some of these areas. You may choose additional challenges—let me know.

For Tuesday:

Be sure you’ve uploaded your journal to google documents and that I am now sharing it (you can check by just looking and adjust if need be). Set to “view” for me. You write and save online; I read only.

1. Read the comments I sent you during the past week. Copy and import them into your journal and label them Instructor Comments. In most cases you’ll find a number of suggestions for enhancing your blog during the next 5 weeks (there are a couple of exceptions). Now think about your OWN agenda for your blog—plans that have nothing to do with my suggestions. Combine ideas and write up a 5-week plan. Here are some options. The expanding-community item is mandatory, as is your ability to discuss your writing and designing critically.

a) Making documentable efforts to expand your audience artfully and mechanically beyond the classroom.

b) Enhancing your verbal style.

c) Enhancing your visual style.

d) Planning, researching, and providing new content in order to keep readers interested and willing to come back.

e) Working on your blog design—adding or changing gadgets, changing templates, sharpening visual focus, adding “read more”—all with rhetorical justification.

f) Discussing and evaluating your enhancements in your journal entries.

2. Email me at susan.romano@gmail.com to notify me of the journal update and ask me to review your plan of action. Make sure I can see your journal in google docs.
3. Post comments to new blogs on blog roll. Devise means of linking your interests with theirs. Report these efforts and results in your journal. I’ll be looking for them.
4. Blog.
5. Comment on your groupmates’ blogs.