Welcome!

Dear Students,

It is exciting to begin a new year with new faces and new goals! Though there are several sections of College Writing, this is where all students of the course will unite to explore ideas and thoughts for writing. My hope is that this blog will continue beyond your time in the class and that the experience will create such a community as to bring you back to talk to College Writing students when you are an alumni of the college! These are lofty goals, but I hope each of you will help me reach them.

For a successful experience on this multi-authored blog (there are about 80 of you, afterall), I need to set up some basic rules for each of the blog types in response to: 1. StumbleUpon, 2. Helium, or 3. Journal articles.

1. StumbleUpon

Once you are set up with StumbleUpon, you will write a blog post approximately once a week for three web pages that you "stumble." My requirements for this is that you review three web pages each week. For each web page, I am requiring : 1 . the URL link to the web page. 2. what was interesting and new to you about this page?, 3. why would you recommend a classmate view this page?, 4. how well are sources cited on this web page?, and 5. after viewing the web page, what is a question about the topic? For each week, make sure to 1. include an image from one of your web pages and 2. talk about further research you may have done to learn more about a topic of interest. While you are free to talk about various topics, for the entire semester you are to review every disciplinary area of the Lees-McRae College Core Curriculum.

2. Helium.com

For Helium, I want you to choose a prompt from the website and review the spectrum of essays written on that topic. You should read the essays that are rated best, for sure. Also, read essays that are rated in the middle of the spectrum, as well as the worst of the essays. In your blog about the essays, I require you to answer the following: 1. What prompt did you review?, 2. What did you learn about the prompt topic in reading?, 3. For the best essays, how did the author use writing elements to best answer the prompt?, 4. For the lesser essays, what were some of the mistakes you observed?, 5. How would you approach the prompt if you were to write an essay in response? (Consider the most severe mistakes, rather than tiny grammatical mistakes). Again, please be varied in the topics you choose in order to maximize the benefit of your blog for your readers and yourself.

3. Journal Articles

I will introduce you to a variety of ways to access peer-reviewed journal articles. Disciplinary journals are the publications of scholars, like your professors and other people who do research for a living. For each week a journal article review is due on blogger.com, I will ask that you choose an article from a topic of great interest to you (you don't have to address the entire core curriculum for this blog type). In your blog review, I require: 1. What is your article named and how did you access it?, 2. What was the topic and what new ideas did you discover about it, while reading the article?, 3. What support did the author offer to back up his/her ideas?, 4. What did you think about the author's style and writing ability? (Were ideas communicated clearly? How so or how not? Consider the writing elements we have addressed in class), and 5. If you were writing a paper about this topic, how would you use this article? Would you recommend its use as a reference?

Be sure to look at others' blogs as well, in addition to writing your own. Doing this as you go is important, even though I will focus our blogging upon this later in the semester as well. Most importantly, enjoy this learning experience! I am quite a believer in the act of simultaneous learning and entertainment. Also, please feel free to blog as a way to gain help from members of College Writing or just to vent frustrations. I will remove posts that are inappropriate and/or offensive. I just ask that you keep it clean and keep it friendly, folks!