SUNY Fredonia
College of Arts and Humanities
ENGL 427: Major Writers
Fall 2009
Section 1: M 10-10:50, Rockefeller Arts Center 236
Office: Fenton 265; M 11-12, TTh 9-12, 3-5, F 11-12, 3-5, and by appointment; 673-3856
E-mail: simon@fredonia.edu, brucesimon18@yahoo.com
Web Page: www.fredonia.edu/department/english/simon/
ANGEL Space: https://fredonia.sln.suny.edu/default.asp
Course Blog
This page takes on three important questions about the Course Blog: what, what for, and how to. My goal is to make this page as useful to you as possible, so let me know if it can be improved. If anything is badly worded, unclear, or missing, please contact me with constructive criticisms. Thanks.
What
The Course Blog is your chance to bring your ideas on the issues raised by the three major fantasy trilogies we are studying this semester to a wider audience and to attempt to enter into and influence discussions of the works of Tolkien, Donaldson, and Pullman. You will write one blog post on each author's trilogy and one blog post comparing aspects of their trilogies, either on our course blog, sf@SF, or on a blog of your own (in which case you must email me the link). You will be graded on a dual qualitative/quantitative scale, as follows: 0 blog posts will earn you an F, 1 blog post a D, 2 a C, 3 a B, and 4 or more an A; your actual grade within each range will be determined by your average and peak grades on your blog posts. For example, 4 high-quality posts will earn you an A+, 2 mediocre posts will earn you a C, and 1 bad post will earn you a D- on this portion of your final grade. You have until the end of exam week to publish your posts, although it might make more sense to space them out over the course of the semester. And you will get extra credit for doing more than 4 posts, both in this portion of your grade and on the attendance/preparation/participation/teamwork grade.
What For
The Course Blog is meant to give you the opportunity to write a little more formally and more thoughtfully than in your free writing on specific topics in class and the more open-ended and varied interactions on the ANGEL discussion board, while still retaining the flexibility, individualism, and variety of these forms of writing. By doing it, you will discover how it feels to write to an actual audience--not only your fellow students in this course, but also the students in my American Popular and Mass Cultures course who are also blogging at sf@SF this semester--and respond to members of it, as well, thereby giving you practical experience in entering into and influencing critical, fan, and industry conversations that will prepare you for the final research project. Finally, the course blog gives me a chance to see how you respond to each writer and how you go about comparing them, whereas a critical essay would have involved your choosing a single writer or comparative topic to focus on and me getting less insight into the range and scope of your responses to the readings this semester.
How To
The first step is to join the course blog, sf@SF. I will send an email to the address of your choice inviting you to join. You simply need to use or create a google ID and password (google owns blogger, the blogging platform we are using) to join the blog and remember them to create and edit posts. I chose blogger because it's very easy to use (not to mention free). I also took a "pen name" instead of using my own, not so much to hide my actual identity, which is pretty obvious to anyone who knows how to click on my profile, but instead to create a blogging "persona" for those who don't care to check out who's actually writing what they're reading on my blogs. You should decide if you want to follow my lead or use your own name on the course blog. If you have any questions on these or other matters, see me after class or in office hours, drop me a line, or ask your peers for help on the discussion board. Every so often, blogger has technical difficulties; I have not found their tech support all that useful in the past, but it's there if you want to try your luck. Hopefully we won't have to deal with that much this semester.
The next step is to decide what you want to write on each author and how to go about comparing their trilogies. And to decide what kind of voice(s), style(s), persona(e), and goal(s) to establish in your blogging for the course. The great thing about blogging as compared to, say, critical essays, is that you can use a wider range of techniques to persuade your readers of the point you're trying to make, or even simply assert a point and try to get your readers to take it seriously, rather than worry about how precisely to prove it. Blogging, in short, can be more of a rough draft of your ideas and allow more of your own personality (or an invented one) to shine through than traditional academic writing is or does.
You might find that a post of yours has received a non-spam comment from a reader or a link from another blogger or website. Think of this as a form of "peer review" on the web and try to use it as an opportunity to explain, justify, qualify, revise, or rethink your original idea. I'll be judging the quality of your blog posts in part on internal evidence (quality of ideas and writing) and in part on external evidence (visits, comments, links). If you ever start and hold your own in a major cross-blog discussion, you'll get an automatic A in the course. That's a promise!
ENGL 427: Major Writers, Fall 2009
Created: 11/25/09 5:36 pm
Last modified: 12/11/09 4:21 pm
Webmaster: Bruce Simon, Associate Professor of English, SUNY Fredonia