Posting Guidelines

GUIDELINES FOR POSTING READING RESPONSES TO THE BLOG

By midnight on Wednesday of each week, post a blog entry responding to one of the readings for the week. You are responsible for everything assigned for the week, but you will only respond to one of the readings on the blog. Posts should be between 100 and 300 words, and they may be creative or analytical. Always specify the reading you are responding to.

Here are some ways of responding to the text in either creative or analytical mode:

Appearance
Comment on the visual aspects of the piece or write a creative response that emulates the visual form. Notice how a text looks on the page, how it is structured, what strikes you about the way it looks, and how the visual aspects complement the content (or don’t).

Imitation
Write a creative piece that imitates the text you are responding to. Pay special attention to stylistic or structural elements that will work to create a text with a similar sound or feel.

Parody
Write a creative response that pokes fun at the original text. Look out for elements of the work that can be exaggerated for critical or comic effect.

Translation
Translate the work from English to English. This could mean changing the diction from “high” diction to “low” diction, or to the language of the street, or into a regional dialect. Or you could go through the text and replace each noun with the one that follows it in the dictionary. Or you could try to re-state the piece in one paragraph, or turn a poem into a story or a story into a poem. The possibilities are endless!

Conversation
Write an analytical response that enters into a dialogue with the reading. What questions do you have? What does the piece remind you of? What themes or ideas might you want to explore further? What rings true or doesn’t? You could also write a creative piece that poses or answers questions related to the text.

Inspiration
Explore the themes, phrases, details of craft, characters and ideas that strike you, stir you up, make you want to sit down and write. Respond with a creative or analytic piece.

Instruction
Write a critical response that investigates the mechanics of the text. How does the author handle time, space, sound, rhythm, silence, texture, color, movement, shape, weight? What can be learned from the author’s methods? What could the author have done better?

Introduction
Did you encounter vocabulary, concepts, or theories you aren’t familiar with? What writers does the author refer to again and again that you would like to explore? Note these in a brief analytic response.