Blogging the BBC News

As we saw in our discussion on the organization and content of Quest, Pamela Hartmann is so certain of the importance of response writing in developing strong academic writing skills that she includes a response writing exercise in every chapter of Quest, such as exercise G on page 156 (2007). Blogging is a great way to do response writing on a daily basis, and we will be doing that. 

And as we saw this morning, in academic writing, we use both italics and "quotation marks" for a limited number of specific reasons, several of which are related to an extremely important skill in all areas of academic work: the use of sources. Academics constantly cite sources containing other people's ideas, and sometimes their exact words, in their work: to agree, to disagree, for support, for a starting point, as a topic, and so on. Learning when and how to use sources effectively is one of our main goals in this course.

In order to practise these essential academic skills, and also to ensure that we are reading regularly from a variety of sources and thinking critically about what we read, we will be making regular blog posts responding to articles published on the BBC News website.

Everyone gets to write up their response to an article once a week, according to the following schedule:

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
	Golf	Mur	Preaw	Third
Aom	Job	Noom	Pui	Vee
Aom	Kwang	Plan	Sunny	Waye

And don't worry, you don't have to wait until it's your day to respond to something from the BBC News, you can also comment on your classmates' posts every day. 

Like every other skill that improves with practice, it helps a lot to include daily practice in your daily routines. I usually check what has been written and post a comment or two as I have have my morning coffee, and perhaps again later in the evening when I settling down to work. It doesn't matter what time you do your daily blogging, but make it a habit to do it at the same time daily, every day, at least six days a week. 

There are some notes available in the AEP Class Blog - information pages section on the right = "Blogging the News".

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References

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