Focusing on a few issues

There has been an amazing amount of text generated over the past couple of days, and my hope was (and is) that it also generated some reflection about what was going on. My aim in setting up the 12 sentences I did was to help people get into the habit of thinking about what a writer seems to be presuming you know, what she assumes you value and believe, how it feels not to be able to share what the writer expects of you, how you can tell when a writer is voicing someone else's view and when her own, and so forth -- in other words, to make reading a more conscious process. I don't mean to suggest you should always read this way, but I believe that being accustomed to being aware of such questions has the potential to make us better readers, and better writers. And that's my main purpose as a teacher.

This probably would have been a lot easier if I'd restricted the number of passages to half a dozen, or maybe even fewer, but I thought that people would be able to respond to these in a few few minutes each, so that it wouldn't take as long as it seems to have taken. And it would make today's task, of reflecting on the process to see what can be learned from it, a lot easier. Selecting out of the literally hundreds of postings ones that particularly invite reflection and discussion is no easy task, and it's been made harder for me because I've spent the last couple of days with, one might say, compromised eyesight.

I've thought of a number of ways to decide which of these are most worth discussing. Here's what I've come up with.

You should already have taken an hour to read the responses to three different passages, and posted some replies. I'd like you to take a few minutes right now to look back over those passages and the responses to them and decide on the one that most puzzles you, or the one that you think raises the most difficult or interesting issues. You might need to fire up a laptop or go up to the lab to get online to do this. When you've decided on one, write your name and its title on the form I'll hand out, and a sentence or two saying why you think we should talk about it. It would be helpful if you identified a posting or two that you think especially worth considering.

At about 2:45 I'll collect them and we'll make some decisions, and do some discussing.