What to put on your blogs and how weekly assingments work with your outcomes inventory...

Travis also wrote with a couple of good questions. He was confused by what I expected you to put on your individual blogs, by how the outcomes inventory worked, and how the weekly papers integrated with the ongoing inventory assignment. Since if one student is asking a question, I assume others may share it, here's my response to Travis. Write if you have follow up questions:


The blogs you set up individually are places to write about your writing and to post some of the steps involved in producing your papers. In specific, I've asked that you do a prewriting exercise for each paper. As part of this exercise, you'll produce a post for your blog in which you answer the following questions:

Who is your audience(s)?
What goals do you want to achieve by producing your text?
What is your topic?
How will you organize the text?

You might also post to the blog any pre-writing exercises in which you come up with ideas for your paper. These kinds of posts may take the form of a list, an outline, a free write, or a link to a mind map. I'll be posting to the class blog how to use such exercises to help you come up with ideas you can incorporate into your writing.

Your responses to the WPA outcomes is an ongoing exercise. For many of you, your initial reaction to a specific outcome may well have been, "I have no idea what this means." Remember, the outcomes represent knowledge and skills you should have after completing a full year of freshman level writing. However, as the class progresses, and I make posts to the class blog, exchange emails like this with you, you do some reading, and you write your weekly papers, I'm hoping you'll gain deeper insight into many of the outcomes. As you gain these insights and reflect on them, you should revise the corresponding individual entries in your inventory.

The papers you write each week, the process you use to develop and produce them, and your reflection on this process should provoke some thought about how the assignment and your work on the paper might provide evidence for claims you make about your comprehension of an outcome. For instance, when you first responded to the outcome about integrating critical inquiry, reading, and writing. You well may have written something fairly vague or simply said, "I don't understand." After thinking about your paper doing a rhetorical analysis of a game, you might change this claim and say you've learned to integrate critical inquiry, critical reading, and writing. You might support this new claim by pointing to what you learned about a game with which you were already familiar as you "read" it and wrote about it using the rubric of the three appeals---logos, pathos, and ethos.

Does this help?


Steve