ENG 1020 Blogging Instructions
“Curiosity is the wick in the candle of learning.”
-William Author Ward (American scholar, author, editor, pastor and teacher)
Good writers must be endowed with enormous curiosity and a love of language. This term, I hope that each of you will become more curious about the most basic tool that a writer possesses—the word.
You should begin reading and listening more carefully to the words and phrases that you encounter in your daily lives and locate a word or phrase that you are completely unfamiliar with. These can be words from conversations that you have had with friends, and family members, words /phrases that you overhear in conversation, in music, from movies, on the radio, or words that you noticed in newspaper and magazine articles, etc. The possibilities here are endless.
Each week, Three to four students will be blog leaders for that week.
As blog leaders, it will be your responsibility to post six to ten paragraphs on your web log that particular week discussing the new words/phrases that you have encountered.
You should provide your readers with a definition of the word/phrase, but you should also go beyond simply providing a definition. You should also discuss things like how the meaning of the word might change in different contexts and where the word may have originated. Did it originate within a particular culture or social subculture? In addition to your post, provide your readers with web links to examples of uses of the word that you have located on the world wide web.
Students who are not blog leaders will be responsible for responding to the web logs of blog leaders. By the end of the semester, each student in class should have made postings to 20 different blogs. As you respond to these, keep a running log on the worksheet that I have provided. Note the xanga ID of the individual that you responded to, the date you responded, and the topic of your post. These logs will be due twice during the semester (once near midterm and once near the end of the term).
