Working on formatting, exploring
assumptions and expectations
What's the point of making it consistent?
I had hoped to go back to the editing people did of
bibliographical entries, but as I went through the assignments
from last time I couldn't see a way to use them here today; while
it was clear that lots of people had attended to the kind of
details that bibliographical citations demands, and that was far
from a waste of time, there wasn't a pattern of responses I could
see that we could work on. Lots of people got the citations right,
lots of people didn't, but not in ways where I could see a pattern
that would help everybody to do it better next time. So I had
planned, in class today, to do a couple of things: one was to
discuss as I promised I would last week, the questions that were raised about the OWL page.
I had then intended to go on to consider a few examples of
references from the work on researching "The Tell-Tale Heart" that
people agreed were capable of being made into complete references.
I had put them up as a Word file,
so we could look at them in class. I invite you to have a look at
them now, and be ready to ask questions about them (or other
items) when we meet on Thursday.
We'll be coming back to this issue of citation form, working with
some more traditional ("scholarly") sources. I had intended to do
that with "The Second Death" and its author, but it turns out that
there is much less written about the story than I had remembered
(or the library's databases have been restructured to make it less
accessible), so there's not much chance for individual
exploration. Stay tuned.
Still more on what writers expect of readers, and what readers
do
The responses to the sequenced reading (it's here)
of "The Second Death" are a rich source of understanding of what's
going on as we read, and I want to make it as accessible as
possible, and to set things up so that people had time, and
reason, to look at them carefully. I had thought to spend some
time in class this afternoon exploring some of the questions that
might be asked about the reader's responses to encountering the
title of the story. That didn't happen.
What I had planned, and what can happen now, is to give you a
chance, between now and Thursday, to do the same thing with three
of the sets of responses to other sections of the story
(more on that in the next prompt).