Responding to the News: weekly blog schedule

As we have noted, every chapter in Quest includes a response writing activity, such as exercise J. on page 30 (Hartmann & Blass, 2007). These response writing exercises are there because Hartmann and Blass think that they are important for practising fluency in a less strictly academic form of writing. In response writing activities, we are still writing full English sentences, and we do want some organization, but they are responses, not carefully research and planned pieces of writing. Since much academic writing involves citing and responding to the work of others, combining this writing activity with regular reading outside of our class reading also gives practice in reading.

This is our weekly blog schedule.

	Bloggers
Monday	A	Nid	Yuko	Pu	Apple
Tuesday	Akira	Pat	Bright	Taey	Book
Wednesday	Apple	Petch	Joe	Tarn
Thursday	Book	Pu	Natt	Tum	A
Friday	Bright	Taey	Nid	Yuko	Akira
Saturday	Joe	Tarn	Pat
Sunday	Natt	Tum	Petch

When it's your day to blog on something in the news, please

• choose an article from one of the publications on my "Looking for Something to Read?" list on our class blog.  You may blog on an article from elsewhere, but it must be from a publication at a similar standard, which rules out The Nation and The Bangkok Post, although you are very welcome to respond to something in those papers as an extra post if you like.
  All of the publications on my list have articles on a wide variety of topics, so you should have no trouble finding some that interest you, whether because you agree, disagree, think it funny, or interesting for any other reason. 
• follow the suggested organization, but don't worry too much about it. That is, begin with a very short introductory paragraph that at least introduces your source, and perhaps explains why it caught your interest as something to respond to; follow with a short summary paragraph that tells us the main points that you want to respond to; and then move on to your response to the ideas in the article, which should be more than half of your total post and one or two paragraph, although you can write more if you like. 
• it is a good idea to make the title of your source in the introductory paragraph a link
• you are citing a source, so you must write a reference list entry. These are important academic writing skills that we want to practice in these response writings, even though the writing itself is not as rigorous as academic writing. Again, in your reference list entries, make the URL a link. 

Something I find useful is to email myself a link to articles that interest me but which I don't have time to read and think about immediately - I then have a reminder in my Inbox to go back and read them later. Most online publications now include the option of emailing a link to an article.

Note added July 1:
I usually create my reference list entries in Notepad, and then paste that text into the references section. If you copy and paste from sources, the formatting can be weird. Doing it in Notepad removes all the formatting, leaving only the text, which will then be fine when pasted into your blog post. But don't forget to add italics where needed and to make the URL an active link. 

__________

References

Hartmann, P. & Blass, L. (2007). Quest 3 Reading and Writing, (2nd. ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.