Writers create meaning from disparate sources, bringing together ideas from across vast swaths of human experience. For this unit, we'll be looking at how this process occurs and how you can use it to deepen your writing.
Monday, September 19, 2011
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Music Videos: Image, Lyrics, and Tone as Visual Literature
Whether you're crafting a documentary or sharing a funny moment from your childhood, photos and videos can significantly affect the audience's experience. One of the best places to observe this effect is in music video covers, where a single song can be transformed using changes in visual imagery and themes. In your writing, you can apply these same considerations as you compose the visual scenes within your stories and poems. By drawing the reader's eye to certain images as opposed to others, you can adjust the way your writing is seen and understood.
Unit 2 / Music Videos - Parody Videos
Intro to Chaos and Narrative
Of Related Interest: Parody and Satire
Intro to Chaos and Narrative
Of Related Interest: Parody and Satire
Video Parody: Bending Visual Genres
The accepted conventions of a given genre are often best seen in parody. By looking at trailers and "spoof" trailers for Mary Poppins and The Shining, we can see how choices in scene selection and music can drastically change the tone and message of a piece.
Please Note: A few of the video trailers featured here are a bit disturbing.
Unit 2 / Music Videos - Parody Videos
Intro to Chaos and Narrative
Of Related Interest: Parody and Satire
Intro to Chaos and Narrative
Of Related Interest: Parody and Satire
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Workshop Group Rotations
Earlier, we discussed the role of peer review in helping us improve as writers, and then we used the methods of progressive feedback to give constructive help to our fellow writers. Today we'll use these techniques as we prepare written feedback for our classmates in different groups.
**Note: Since you'll be responding to feedback and completing revisions, tonight's homework assignment is cancelled. We'll wait until next week to transition from Blackboard to Moodle.**
**Note: Since you'll be responding to feedback and completing revisions, tonight's homework assignment is cancelled. We'll wait until next week to transition from Blackboard to Moodle.**
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Progressive Workshop Feedback: Four Rules
The success of any writing workshop depends upon the quality of the feedback. The way we present this feedback is often just as important as the feedback itself. Here are four "Rules to Live By" when providing feedback to your peers.
Workshop Peer Review - Four Rules of Progressive Feedback
Monday, September 12, 2011
Workshop Peer Review: Helping Writers Improve through Directed Feedback
Today we're going to look at how we provide feedback to help our peers improve their writing. Receiving feedback can help you better understand how your audience perceives what you've written - giving feedback will help you attune your senses as to what's important in written work.
Workshop Peer Review - Four Rules of Progressive Feedback
Thursday, September 8, 2011
How to Create Your Blog in Blogger
Creating a blog can be challenging. To help you, I've set up a "how-to" blog which illustrates how to create a blog to share your research and your writings. Simply visit WritingBlogGenre.Blogspot.com and follow the directions starting from the About tab at the top.
Monday, September 5, 2011
Sharing Information Online with Blogger
Research isn't helpful unless we're able to effectively discuss and share our findings. For today's project, you'll assemble a basic framework for sharing research using Blogger.
Conducting Multifaceted Research
As writers, one of our primary tasks is to bring together disparate types of information, analyze them, and then present them to our readers as a coherent (and complete) narrative. To do this, we first need research our subjects from several different angles.
Multifaceted Research - Sharing Information Online
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Parody, Satire, and Genre
Often, true mastery of genre is best seen in our ability to mimic the genre forms while breaking our expectations in terms of the message.
Of Related Interest: Music Videos - Parody Videos
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
The Oral Tradition: Writing Evolves from Speech
It's no accident that written alphabets are adapted to serve the needs of spoken speech. As humans, our language first evolved as an oral tradition. It's only been recently (in the past five to six thousand years or so - yes, recently) that language has come to be shared through visual media.
Milner Library Resources
Research is a critical component of writing. Whether you write fiction, nonfiction, or even poetry, you want your words to reflect reality - doing this effectively sometimes requires the kind of specialized knowledge best found through the library.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Online Collaboration: Bridging Time and Geography
This Post is Under Construction. To learn more about online resources, see Establishing Your Online Presence.
Blog Platforms for Building Your Online Presence
As writers, we depend upon our audience to provide feedback and support for our work. Fortunately for us, we live in the era of personalized mass communication. Through blogs, social media, and e-mail, we are able to reach out to our readers in new and exciting ways. Here are resources and tips to get you started.
Your Online Presence: Blogging
One of the critical components of writing is sharing that writing with an audience. For English 101, you'll be using online resources to share your work with other members of the class and audiences from beyond Illinois State. The first part of this involves your "base of operations," so-to-speak: the blog.
Setting Up Your Blog
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Shifting Grammar and Syntax to Meet Genre and Cultural Conventions
Today, we're going to examine the role of grammar, style, and syntax in understanding the conventions of genre. This post complements Haley Stouffer's article "How i Lrnd 2 Txt: An Adventure in Genre."
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Fall 2011 Pre-Course Survey
Here's a quick survey to see where each of you are in your writing. Please be sincere in your answers - in genre studies, there are no wrong answers. Every writer is somewhere on the writing continuum - our goal is to help you progress both as a writer and a thinker. Go to Form-->
English 101: Composition as Critical Inquiry
Today we'll go over the course syllabus and several the electronic resources we'll be using over the semester.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Teaching Meter in Poetry
Now that you've seen what meter is, let's take a look at how we learn to use it. This article is useful both for teachers of poetry and for those who would like more practice with hearing meter.
Meter in Poetry
Meter is the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in each line of a poem. In a stressed-syllabic language like English, meter is the way we identify and understand the overall rhythm of the piece.
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