Blog Intro

This blog, http://citizen002.blogspot.com, will be a valuable resource for our ENGL002 course. Here are a couple of the things I use blogs for:

• Lecture Notes: Most of my lecture notes are directly imbedded within the Writing Strategies and Writing Activities (see below) posted to the blog. This means that you can spend more time asking questions and creating your own set of personal notes from the posts that we review that day. Additionally, a lot (and I do mean a lot) of time expanding on what is posted; quite often our discussion of writing will lead to new examples discussed, new ideas, and sometimes clearer ways than the post may give without the context we provide together.

• Writing Strategies and Writing Activities: To reduce the use of paper, I often use the blog for in-class activities. Sometimes I will post the same activities has I provide as hard copies. On the day we are working on a particular reading or writing, I tend to post a Writing Strategy (or more) that we can use in attacking the kind of writing we are currently doing. I also tend to follow up outlining the Writing Strategy with Writing Activities, which are prompts that ask you to practice the Strategy just gone over. I may also use the terms Pre-writing Strategy and Pre-writing Activity, depending on the mood I am in!!! 

• Homework Reminders: I do NOT always post reminders, but I do like to use this blog for doing so about ten times during the semester. I will especially use the blog to remind you of additional homework from that in the syllabus' weekly schedule.

• Schedule Changes: If we have a drastic change in the reading / essay due date, I may post it here along with informing the class during our scheduled meeting times.

• Helpful Grammar and Class Reading: When a topic is relevant, I tend to post extra places for you to go and use outside of what we do in class. I will post links from places such as Purdue University's OWL website when we work on particular rhetorical issues -- such as Thesis Statements or Misplaced Modifiers. These extra places are great places to get more info on topics related to your improvement as a writer.  Also, if I find an article that supplements our in-class readings and discussions, I may post the link along with an explanation of what we can do with the reading!

• Links: On the right hand side of this blog will be useful links (updated as I find relevant) that you may go and read on your own in your personal pursuit of becoming a more well-rounded citizen. In the least, I like to create links to important, CREDIBLE periodicals that many academics either routinely read or go to when they are doing the first legs of research! I also like to include links to good grammar (like OWL) and research-citation (like Diana Hacker's) guides, and to places to find good literature and well-written pieces on topical issues (the Virginia Quarterly, aka: VQR).