Welcome to the blog for my spring 2006 College Composition class. We will use this blog as a space to reflect on our class readings, brainstorm ideas for papers, respond to each other's work, and to consider how writing for a public audience poses different challenges than those posed by writing solely for a college course.
As you can see, this blog is a continuation of the work students did in my fall 2005 course. In a sense, these posts form part of the "conversation" you will be taking part in this semester. In order to get acquainted with using our blog, I want you to introduce yourself to your fellow classmates (and the on-line world!).
Your assignment for the next class is to begin posting to our class blog. Since many of you may be new to blogging, we’ll keep it simple. I would like you to read some of the posts on the blog. Reread the quote by Kenneth Burke below. After you get a chance to read some of the posts previous students have made to the blog, write a short post of your own describing the “tone” of the discussion. That is, how do students seem to use the blog? How do they engage each other? How would you describe the form of their writing? Is it formal? Informal? Since blogs display conversations chronologically, try looking at the earliest posts firsts. You can do this by going to “Archives” section and click “September 2005.” Start from the bottom and work your way up. Or, if you choose, pick another point in the discussion to “enter the parlor.” All I am asking for at this point is for you to get used to posting your responses to the blog. I would also like you to comment on at least one post by another student. We will be looking at your postings in class on Thursday.
Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument, then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him [or her]; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself [or herself] against you, to either the embarrassment of gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress (Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 110-111, brackets mine).
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