Reflections on Blogging the News and Our Class

My thanks for the active, thoughtful, and I hope fun, way you have been contributing posts for discussion here and sharing ideas on the issues raised. There are a couple of things that I'd like to comment on now that we're well into our first week of regular response writing.

First, you might have noticed some variations from the standard format. This happens when you write in MS Word or another word processing program and then copy and paste your text into your blog post. The copy and paste operation copies not only your text, but also MS Word's formatting. Apart from sometimes making for a smaller, less easily read font, that's not a big problem, except that some imported MS Word formatting contains hidden code that can mess up the entire page being displayed, which is a bit annoying. However, apart from that reason, I would suggest that you not write your posts here in MS Word.

The stronger reason for not using MS Word relates to the purposes of the response writing here, which is to practise writing for fluency in response to an idea. Although we want well formed sentences that clearly state an idea, the ideas need not be fully supported, and they may wander considerably from the topic and ideas to which they are a response. It is, for example, perfectly OK to write "I think", "That reminds me", and such like. So I don't think the writing should take too long. I was a bit worried when A wrote that it had taken him two hours to write his first post (Mr. A, 2010). That's perhaps not too much for the first one, when you are learning and trying things out, but I hope it won't take that long each time. The bit of your post that is closest to formal academic writing is the paragraph where you give a short  summary of the ideas in your chosen reading that you are responding to. That requires reading and understanding the article well enough to be able to summarize what is relevant to your response, and then writing the summary paragraph, preferably without looking at your source. (Why shouldn't you look at it?)

With one or two exceptions, your response, which should be the longest part of each post, does not require research since it is simply your response to what you have read, although the comments of others might prompt you to do a little research later. The notable exception to this is if you are reminded of something else which you want to include in your response, in which case you might want to check a reference or detail, but if you are confident in your memory, that's probably enough. Fluency means "easily and clearly", and as Quest explains, it does not mean "stopping to use a dictionary and obsessing about grammar", although grammar certainly matters since it helps to make our ideas clear (Hartmann & Blass, 2007, p.30, ex.J inter alia).

The second point I wanted to discuss was raised by Tum, and supported in a comment by Book: is it necessary to chose and respond to an article from one of my suggested sources? (Tum, 2010). As I've already answered there, it never was necessary to do that. But when I thought about it a bit more, I decided that since the primary purpose is response writing, it would be reasonable to allow responses to questions from class to also count towards meeting your posting obligations. That is, if you write up a question for discussion such as Apple has already done when she asked that very productive question that helped us to focus on and clarify the significant difference between topics and main ideas (2010), that can replace one of your two weekly blog posts. Such questions are also based on what we are reading and writing, so meet the other main purpose of these response writings, which is to encourage regular critical reading.

Finally, a couple of how-to notes that you might find useful:

• to insert the paragraph symbol ¶, hold down the "Alt" key and type 0182 (Alt + 0182)
  This is used to often in academic writing that it's worth remembering. 
• you can use the HTML tab <i>makes italic</i>  in comments. (Make sure you have both <i>  and </i>)
• you can also insert links into comments if you like. The HTML tag is: <a href="put the full http:// link here"> put the text to be a link here</a>. Again, make sure you have the closing </a>. 
• worth repeating is that it's a very helpful to "Subscribe by email" to:
  1. all of your own posts so that you know when someone leaves a comment
  2. every post on which you comment so that you can follow the subsequent discussion, especially comments that disagree with yours.
  Just click "Subscribe by email" below the comment box. 

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References

Apple. (2010, June 27). ???. Class Blog - AEP at AUA. Retrieved July 3, 2010 from http://peteraep.blogspot.com/2010/06/blog-post.html

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

Mr. A. (2010, July 2). Thinking green: new breed internal combustion engines. Class Blog - AEP at AUA. Retrieved July 3, 2010 from http://peteraep.blogspot.com/2010/07/thinking-green-new-breed-internal.html

Tum. (2010, July 2). Could we use another website for writing? Class Blog - AEP at AUA. Retrieved July 3, 2010 from http://peteraep.blogspot.com/2010/07/could-we-use-another-website-for.html