English 1006
Prompt #37
21 November 2013

In class today (sort of)

 Short meeting today

 What I had planned for today was two things: one was to discuss the questions about the OWL page, and the other to invite people to further edit and clarify the "reference list" items people created out of the information on Poe and "The Tell-Tale Heart." Unfortunately, both would require more voice than I yet have. To help you look at reference list items more closely, I've created a short exercise based on the postings on the "formatted citations" forum. What I'm interested in having you do is look at the various ways people have chosen to follow the OWL / MLA suggestions about formatting, and identify what questions come up. With luck, we'll discuss them Tuesday.

So, as soon as we're done here, take the four-page printout I'll distribute, and follow the instructions on the top. It probably will not take very long -- it'll take longer the more closely you look. That's good. You can work here or wherever you like; when you're done, return it. If it's any time before 3:45, you can leave your printout on the lectern at the front of class; if it's after that you can leave it in the box outside my office door, which is EC 308. It needs to be there before the end of the day today.

Information and values in texts

I've spent quite a bit of time going through the responses to the three questions on "funny" items, and can't think of a way to use them in class to explore the issue further, because in almost every case they depend on being able to see the visual. What I was hoping to be able to explore was what values the item depended on a reader holding, or pretending to hold, in order to see the item as funny; there are also items of information the artist assumed a viewer would already possess, and it's useful to distinguish the two.

This item, for instance, will be completely incomprehensible if you don't recognize the allusion to "thingsboysdowelove" or see the image in its context (or, possibly, know what  Yugioh cards are). A viewer who doesn't know those things has no way to guess what the values in the item are (the values in the buzzfeed page this is on, however, are pretty clear).

On the other hand, while it's necessary in order to understand this one to be aware of what "Obamacare" is, to know about the Web site catastrophe that accompanied its rollout, and to know what the little "loading" icon means, the values connected are a bit more complex. It seems to me it doesn't matter if you think the American Affordable Care Act is a good thing or a bad thing: if there's a value implied here it has something to do with a skepticism about the computer age itself -- we all know the frustrating experience of waiting for a page to load. 

You can do something similar with most of these, and I'd like to find a way to select out some of the most useful to do more exploration of -- but I want to come back to them after we've looked at some other instances where we can see what a writer's expectations about knowledge and values are. The first one I want to look at is a short story, and I'd like to begin by doing another sequenced reading, as we did with "The Tell-Tale Heart."

More on what writers expect of readers

There is a sequenced reading of a short story available here (it's linked from the Moodle site, as spammers pick up links to forms on the open Web). What you should do is pretty much the same thing as you did with "The Tell-Tale Heart," only this time what's particularly worth thinking, and writing, about is what the author seems to be expecting to you respond to -- how the author hopes you'll react, according to your own values and knowledge, as the story unfolds. You should also say whatever else you think might be of interest (obviously, we'll be discussing people's comments in class) -- what do you expect, what do you understand as a result of reading one section that you didn't before, and so forth.

I'm not sure how long this will take; I'd budget at least an hour or so, and try to do it in one sitting. Make sure you click "submit" at the end of the final screen; otherwise you'll lose all your responses.

Do it before Sunday night.
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