September 2007 Archives

Bring 5 copies of your paper.

Your revision (4-5 pages, due next week) will require outside academic sources, but this version can simply focus on your chosen literary text (Frost's poetry, The Professor and the Madman, or Hamlet).

Your thesis should reflect your ability to make an argument that moves beyond summarizing the plot or describing the characters. Language that I suggested in class includes "If we consider [a passage] in [a particular work] to mean only [a particular thing], we exclude the possibility that..."  or "Because [observation], [claim]."

Thus, "Hamlet and Harry Potter are similar in many ways" does not make a thesis. We can make it more specific: "In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the young hero, tasked by the ghosts of his parents to complete their unfinished battle, is far less philosophical and far more active than Hamlet is when he faces his own task in Acts I through III. Because Hamlet is still reeling from the destruction of what was a stable home, and Harry has never known a stable home, Harry is better suited to putting his personal needs aside in order to accomplish his mission." 

Feel free to post trackbacks to this page if you would like to use your blogs to discuss the development of your thesis.

You are welcome to view the movie, but it is not a required text and our class discussion will focus on the script.

Apply Roberts to Hamlet.

Read: Read the assigned text.

React: 24 hours before we discuss an assigned text in class, post your Agenda Item (a brief quote from the assigned reading, and a brief note explaining what you'd say when called on in class) posted to your blog, following the trackback procedure. (Even if you haven't finished the assigned reading yet, please do post your agenda item on time.)

Respond: Before class time, I'd like to see everyone post a comment on everyone else's agenda item. (In larger classes, I ask for 2-4 comments, but our class is small enough that I think we should all follow each other's blogs.)

Reflect: Bring to class a half-page reflection paper that mentions by name a student whose agenda item helped you notice or question something about the assigned reading. I encourage you to post that half-page reflection on your blog, but doing so is optional. (Your upcoming portfolio assignments will ask you to include examples of blog entries that show your ability to reflect deeply, to launch a good discussion, etc., so it will be to your benefit to plan to publish longer reflections on topics that really interest you.)

In class today, post your reflection paper on your blog, and create a trackback following the procedure described in the trackback tutorial.  Then, since our class is so small, I'd like each student to post a thoughtful comment on everyone else's blog.

Starting next week, for each assigned reading in class (that includes the literary works, our textbook, and online texts), follow the RRRR sequence.

The purpose of this entry is for all of us to practice creating a blog entry on our individual sites, in such a way as to create a link from the new page back to this page, and from this page back to the new page that comments on it.

Imagine if you read something in a book, then pulled out a piece of your own paper and jotted down a note about it.  Somebody else who came along and read the same book would never know that a piece of paper exists somewhere with your thoughts on it.

Blogging can seem lonely and pointless unless other people read and respond to what you have written. So follow these steps, and you'll draw more readers to your writing.