A central feature of this course will be the writing we do on this site.  In what follows, I will outline three things:

• a rationale for why I ask you to blog in the first place, rather than write traditional essays
• a quick primer on how to create your first post
• a simple rubric to guide your writing + an example of a good-looking post

First things first: why blog?

1. Blogging is sharable: rather than have a private circuit between you and me, we have a much more dynamic conversation across the entire class.

2. Blogging is public, sort of: I like the idea that we are responsible for our ideas in front of broader audiences.  In practical terms, I doubt anyone is listening in most of the time, but I think it’s important that we roll up our sleeves and defend our arguments in an open and public forum as often as possible.  And of course, you can show your family/friends/pets what we’ve been up to in class.  For those who have reservations about privacy, note that a) I’m happy to help you get a username with some anonymity, so you have relative privacy beyond our class; and b) you are free to delete your posts at the end of class.  If anyone has serious reservations despite all this, feel free to contact me.

3. Blogging is sturdy: rather than forget the piece of paper once it’s been handed back, we can link back to prior statements or observations, or to each others’. If you like, you can leave your posts up for future students to see.

4. Blogging is responsive: rather than only getting comments from me, you’ll comment on and get comments on each other’s work.

So how do you post? Here’s a quick guide to posting on WordPress for newbies. It’s super easy once you figure it out the first time. So here goes:

1. Make sure you’re logged in: if you’re logged in, you’ll see your avatar in the upper-right-hand corner of the window. If you aren’t, you’ll see the text “log in.”

2. START A POST: there are several ways to post. Here’s the easiest: click the <+ NEW> icon in the top middle of the screen and select “post.” It looks like this:

3. WRITE SOMETHING: “New Post” will take you to a basic text editor. So write something. If you want to get fancy, you can add italics, bold, indentation, insert images or other media, and whatnot. But most of the time you’ll just try to write some reasonable sentences. When you’re done, click PUBLISH on the right (see image below). Or, if you’re not quite ready, you can save it as a draft and reopen it later, via the “POSTS” section of the dashboard. Helpful hint: WordPress autosaves your work every few seconds, so it’s very, very rare to lose stuff. Nonetheless it’s not a bad idea to compose posts on a word processor and then paste them into WP just in case. I personally live dangerously most of the time and have never lost anything, but your call.

If you want to get really fancy, add a tag or two or some media. In the right-hand column, you’ll see a bunch of options. Most of the time you can ignore most of them, but “tags” allows you to add, say, the name of the author you’re writing about or a topic that you hit in the post. So for a post on Du Bois, you might tag it “Du Bois,” “SOULS,” and/or “double consciousness.” If you want to add media, for example a relevant image, click “add media” in the top left-hand part of the window and follow the prompts.

We’re good, right? Happy blogging.

What makes for an excellent post? For this class, posts should:

• be between 400-800 words (use word count in WordPress or your word processor)
• explain a given text’s argument (for secondary readings) or analyze its form and themes (for primary readings), using quotations and paraphrases of the text with page numbers in parentheses
• engage a text critically, noting its limitations, its links to other texts we’ve read, its unstated assumptions, etc.

Here’s a simple rubric, adapted from Mark Sample, that I will use to evaluate your work (see how the academic blogosphere encourages sharing and exchange? I told you so!):

Last but not least, here’s an example of a good-looking post.  I’ve linked to it in a Word doc so you can see some marginal comments that explain why it’s good.  And remember: it’s not an exercise in cookie-cutting: your results may vary, and there are lots of ways to write an excellent post.

As promised, I wanted to share with y’all a few examples from the first round of blog posts. To repeat my disclaimer from classtime, these are not the “top ranked” posts, whatever that means. They aren’t even the one that I necessarily graded the highest. They are, however, really good examples of how to do some of the things I’m asking you to try out really well.

Here’s Andi’s post on Emerson and Du Bois. Notice how she finds something a little, well, weird to show us: that Du Bois has a riff on how we was able to live, if only briefly, “‘above the veil, in a blue sky’, which, just as Emerson promised it to be, ‘was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads.’” So Du Bois aspires to the same elevation and universality as Emerson but can only get there over the heads, so to speak, of often hostile peers.

And here’s Tyler’s post on the same topic. He emphasizes, instead, the long philosophical history of valorizing childhood as a purer, if more difficult to sustain, mental state than adulthood. Again, a non-obvious place to go in the analysis, one that many readers will have missed in their reading, yet one that helps us see Emerson’s attachment to Romanticism more broadly, as in William Wordsworth’s comment, in a famous poem, that the “child is father of the man.” I also note the clever title (“Visually Impaired”) and the judicious use of humor (e.g., that Emerson must have been high to write that way. For more on Romanticism and illicit drug use, read De Quincey for sure!).

Finally, check out Kaitlyn’s piece. She manages to pull off the tricky move–one that I don’t necessarily recommend doing most of the time–of pulling in multiple authors at once. She gives a pithy but accurate summary of Emerson’s argument and then pivots to her own take–that Du Bois, Fanon, and Hurston all strive for the same feeling of universality that Emerson assumes but find it difficult or impossible in the debilitating fun-house mirrors of the “racial imaginaries” of their respective places and times. She closes by circling back to Emerson, niftily pointing out that he celebrates, in his essay, “an ability largely and unwittingly based in his own privilege.”

So, great work, you three. And great work everyone, really: I could have picked many other pieces that also do great work on these texts. If you’re feeling confused/frustrated about this component of the course, get in touch.