Course Recap for Tuesday, September 11, 2012

What Makes A Good Blog?

Today we examined your favorite blog by examining the different aspects of the rhetorical situation that we talked about in class on Wednesday.  We determined the blog's audience, purpose, context, mood, voice, etc.  Then we used this information to come up with a list of things that make a good.

Most of the blogs we looked at were:

1. Visually appealing (most used pictures)
2. Well organized-(most had titles, captions, and subtitles)
3. Had a fairly consistent audience, purpose, tone, and voice for most of the blog posts.
4. Simple and easy to understand
5. The subjects of the blog were on things that would obviously interest the audience.

You will use these common elements to guide you when writing your own blog posts. (See Blog Assignment Sheet under Class Documents.)

NOTES ABOUT BLOG CONTENT: We had a discussion in class about the use of graphic language and images.  I do not want to censor you, but  I will implore you to use discretion when writing your blog posts.  You have to take into consideration the context of your blogs and the potential audience.  Although, this blog is a personal blog, it is also a class assignment and anything you write will not only reflect on you, it will reflect on the class, me as the instructor, and WMU.  Although your primary audience is me and your classmates, other potential readers include other instructors and students of English 1050 or anybody curious about what Western is teaching in their classrooms.  

Again I do not want to censor you, I just want you to be mindful of the context and the audience of your blog. Profanity for profanity's sake is usually a sign of bad writing anyway. If you are going to use profanity make sure it's doing more than potentially offending readers of your blog.  If you have doubts about whether or not something is appropriate take the safe route and don't post it.  You can always start your own personal blog if you feel compelled to write about things that are NSFW (Not Safe for Work-we'll talk more about Internet lingo in the coming weeks).

Homework

• Start Reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Part One of the book is now due Thursday, Sept. 27th) 
• First Blog Post is due Monday, Sept. 17th