Your total posts grade counts for 25 % of your total class grade. Posts are assessed based on the following four criteria: timeliness and format; scope of discussion; engagement with the text; and explication of your interpretation. While there are posts for almost every reading, you will only be graded on four posts of your choosing. Before midterms you will select two posts from the first half of the course that you wish to have count towards your grade (excluding the Intro Post). And then again before finals, you will select two posts from the second half of the course that you wish to have count towards your grade (excluding the Outro Post). Remember that the timely and thorough completion of ungraded posts still count towards the online discussion portion of your participation grade. All graded posts will be assessed based on the following four categories:
25 % timeliness and format: A large part of this class is the online discussion. Posts are great ways to not only share ideas that we may not have time to discuss in class but also for you to practice writing and argumentation and exercise your close reading and interpretive analysis skills in a focused and low stakes arena. Low stakes means that I do not expect posts to be as long and developed nor as stylistically clean as I expect papers and final project assignments to be. However I do expect you to you to take the posts seriously and to challenge your self to focus on in on a particular aspect of the text and clearly present your thoughts about how that portion of the text is working. I will demonstrate how to post to the WordPress site the first week of classes. If you miss this demonstration or find you need additional help, please meet with me BEFORE your post is due, so that I can assist you.
timeliness – All posts should be posted by noon the day before the post is due. This means if you are scheduled to post for Tuesday’s class, your post is due at noon on Monday. Punctual posting is necessary to allow me and your peers time to read the posts before class. As noted above, late posts can affect both your post grade and your online discussion grade.
format – 1) Posts should be 200-350 words long. 2) Each posts should include a relevant and creative title that signals something of the content or ideas your post addresses. 3) Similarly you should include one or two relevant tags to your post. As the semester progresses, you may also use tags that others have used. Tags are not the same thing as subject categories. Tags are easy ways for you to index your work and make creative links to other’s conversation.
important: 4) Before submitting your post you should check any and all relevant category boxes. These boxes are essential to my ability to locate your posts and track your progress as the semester progresses. I will not go hunting the site looking for your late and/or improperly categorized posts. If you do not click the appropriate category boxes, and I am unable to locate your post, I will consider the work incomplete.
25 % – scope of discussion: The post assignments are meant to help you practice close reading (close looking, close watching, close listening) a text. As such your posts must focus on a very small and discrete aspect of the text.
By small and focused, I mean that you should identify a particular passage (i.e. no more than a page or 10 seconds of a recording) or specific formal detail (e.g. the small but twice occurring mention of soup in The Awakening). The object of your consideration should be something you can point to in the text using time stamps; spatial coordinates; page, paragraph, or scene numbers; or some other concrete measure for distinguishing the parameters of your object of analysis from the whole of the text and/or its overarching topics, themes, and symbols.
Accordingly your posts should not be an analysis of a main character, a recurring trope, a major symbol, or an overarching theme. It may be that the stakes of your interpretation (i.e. why your reading of this part of the text matters) has something to do with the way we might read a main character, recurring tropes, major symbols, and/or overarching themes, but such a connection (while you may state it early on) should be discussed towards the end of your post. The bulk of your post should focus on making a very small claim about some very small aspect of the text you are examining. You will be graded on how clear and appropriately focused your object of discussion is. Overly broad or vague points of discussion will not receive full credit.
remember the extra credit: If you find you don’t have enough room to say all you want to say in the post, hurrah, that’s excellent! I hope you will have more to say than the very focused analysis this assignment asks of you. If you find yourself in this wonderful position, you have many options: 1) If these additional thoughts still feel fuzzy or indistinct, you may just want to index them after you finish relaying your more thought out idea. Perhaps you conclude your post with a “Further Thoughts” note. These further thoughts may be presented in prose or simply in bullet points. 2) If your additional thoughts are more flushed out (or if you’d like to try to flush some of them out), you can always make additional posts examining these additional ideas. And/or 3) you may choose to continue this line of exploration in one of your papers and/or the final project.
25 % engagement with text: Posts are not as extensive as writing a paper, so you should use them as opportunities to practice focusing your attention and consideration of the form and content of the text (i.e. both on what the text says and also on how it says what it says and why that matters). Posts are not free-for-all opportunities to use texts as spring board to otherwise unrelated, or very distantly connected, ideas about other topics, texts, or personal experiences. If the texts inspires a wealth of associative connections, you should feel free to explore them in additional posts. However your assigned post must focus on engaging the actual text.
Engaging the text often includes providing quoted material and/or clear descriptions of what exactly in the text you are asking readers to focus on. If you can write your posts without looking at the text at all, you are probably straying too far from the text. Similarly if you can write the exact same post word-for-word about some other part of the text or about an entirely different text, you are most likely not engaging enough with the specifics of this particular text.
25% – explication of your interpretation: As practice for your papers, I expect you to not only bring our attention to some focused aspect of the text and to posit some idea/interpretation about that aspect of the text, I also expect you to clearly explain to your readers how you arrive at that interpretation. Think of your self as the teacher explaining to the class how this X part of the text can be (ought to be) understood in Y way because if we read and understand it in Y way we will be able to grasp this important Z interpretation of what the text is doing. Even if you think your ideas are obvious or simple, you must take the time to spell out every part. You must teach your ideas!
Just Playin' 