English 3336 Restoration and Eighteenth Century Drama and Theatre
Prompt # 13
5 October 2012

Revising, responding, and reporting

During class this morning

Not much work had been done last night when I posted my questions. More may have been done by the time we meet, but in any case it's clear that even though the assignment said "The first thing to do is make sure all of them are formatted in the same way, and ready to read; the deadline for making sure this is done will be before class time ends this morning" none that needed reformatting had been reformatted.

The timing of this made it difficult to follow the second part of the assignment, "Between then and tonight, everyone should read the other four reports with some care and post questions and comments on the reports on the Forum that I've set up." But in any case, I only found four responses posted (and most were not very ambitious in offering real questions and real suggestions). There have been some since, but it's not clear in many cases whether they were posted before, or after, revision ("Between now and Friday morning, each report should be further expanded with the help of the questions and suggestions") had begun.

I don't see that it will do us much good to engage in oral discussion of our work until we've read and responded to what's there, and done further elaboration. This might be easier to do in printed copies, so I've reformatted  the reports we have to make them easier to read and comment on, and printed out copies. We'll spend the morning reading and responding to the reports we have. You can do this in the classroom or wherever you find it comfortable to work. As you read, make marginal comments (I've left a margin at the right), and ask questions and make suggestions at the end. When you finish each, sign your work. At 10:15 we'll meet back in EC 124 so that people can retrieve their edited hard copies.

Between now and Tuesday morning everyone should extensively revise her report (that may well mean dropping chunks of it; please bear in mind that such work is never wasted, as we will almost certainly come back to it later). Post your new version right over the old one. As always, I suggest copying the text and working outside of Moodle till you're finished, and then deleting the old version and pasting in the new one. The Moodle editing window is terrible.

As your revise between now and Tuesday, here's a hint: I would suggest that in almost every case the kind of information and understanding we're looking for is most likely to be found in the general literary histories I listed to start us off, rather than in specialized studies. It might well be worth going back and having a look at those sources, and adding them to your bibliography.

After Tuesday morning, read all the revised reports with some care. We'll discuss them Wednesday morning. As you read, and as you work on your own, be thinking about what we all ought to read as a way of getting started on the plays of the period. We'll make some decisions Wednesday.


To Next Prompt
To Previous Prompt
Back to List of prompts
Back to Main English 3236 page