Guidelines for Comments

GUIDELINES FOR RESPONDING TO BLOG POSTS

By midnight on Wednesday of each week, respond to 3 of your fellow classmates' blog entries by posting comments to the entries. This is not a place for evaluative responses (“I liked,” “I didn’t like”) or editorial suggestions (“cut the second paragraph”). We will be posting rough and often fragmentary, work and exploring our own reactions to the reading at hand. With that in mind, please respond in one or more of the following ways:

1) State what was meaningful, evocative, interesting, exciting, and/or striking in the piece (i.e. “the image of the little girl playing with the cigarette butts stuck with me all week.”)

2) Respond in analytic mode. Name an element or elements and describe its/their function.
For example: “ I noticed that the stanzas you posted had an aba bab cbc rhyme scheme, while the poem you were responding to did not use end rhyme at all. It’s interesting how both poems have a feeling of extension and forward momentum even though the two forms are different.”

3) Ask at least two neutral questions about the work, without voicing opinion. “I wondered why you made the mother so unlikeable” is an opinion disguised as a question. Instead you might ask: “what is the mother’s role in this piece?” or “how to do you hope audiences will react to the mother?”

4) Suggest an exercise for further development. This could be as simple as suggesting a way to explore a secondary character (i.e. “make a list of everything John’s sister has in her purse”), or as complicated as suggesting a way to re-envision the whole piece (i.e. “You’ve written a scene in which Anne loves her parents and wishes she had known them better before they died. Now try writing the scene so that Anne hates her parents and cannot forgive them for dying when she was so young.”)