I'd intended some time ago to make sure that everyone had a chance
to be as clear as possible about the point of standardized
citation form, and about how persnickety it can get. I'll spend a
few minutes at the beginning of class today looking at the questions about the OWL page, and at
the example of citation listings I
posted before Tuesday's non-class, and responding to questions and
other issues. As I've said, we'll revisit this matter a couple of
times next term, looking at two other issues: how printed works
get listed, and -- much more important -- how we bring the ideas
from reading into our own writing. I'd hoped to be able to do that
with some research on "The Second Death," but that's not going to
happen with this story.
Looking at reading patterns: how do people read fiction,
really?
As you'll have seen, I hope, as you read them, the responses to
the sequenced reading of "The Second Death" have a lot to tell us
about how we read, how others read, how we might like to read, and
how authors expect us to read. I've been impressed with the
thoughtfulness of the inksheds people posted as a result of their
readings of the responses to the first three sections of the
story; that's what we're going to spend some time with today.
I should say again that when people respond in this way they can't
be wrong: it's what their responses are. While some responses are
wrong about the story's facts (people do misread), they are still
what the reader said in response to the story, and in that sense
they are reports of what someone thought, and valuable as we try
to understand how stories work.
I've reformatted and printed out three sets of each of the
inksheds. I'd like to treat them as inksheds are usually treated
-- that is, to look for ideas worth discussing further. I'm
going to set up some working groups and give each group a set of
the inksheds about one section of the story. Read through them,
marking sections that you think would warrant some further
discussion, and then, as a group, select a couple that you think
most worth talking about.
Remember that the assignment for the inkshed included the
following suggestions for questions to consider:
Was there something
(or perhaps more than one thing) that someone said that you
hadn't thought of, and which would possibly affect or change
your reading?
Was there a post
(or were there posts) which allowed you to see that the person
writing had brought with her an idea, a value, an opinion, an
expectation, which you didn't bring?
Did someone make a
prediction about what was to come that surprised you, or that
seemed particularly worth thinking about?
Did anything else
strike you about the set of responses to this part of the
story?
Although anything you
find interesting is by definition worth talking about, I'm
particularly interested, right now, in the second one. If you see
an inkshed that addresses what a reader brought with her ("an idea, a value, an opinion, an expectation"),
that may be worth paying some attention to.
When you've agreed on a couple, put a
clear, dark box around the text you want us to discuss, and a
number (#1 or #2) in the left margin. On the form you'll have, write a sentence or
so explaining what you think is of interest about your choice
(we may not get to all of them, and I'd like to see which got
chosen and perhaps come back to them next time).
Continuing the discussion of reading
For next time, I'd like to look further at the responses to the
story, but this time I'm going to leave the choice of what we
consider to you. There are six further sections of the story, set
up just as the first three were. They're here:
As before, they're also
linked from the main course page. Choose any two, reread the
section of the story and go through the responses, looking
mainly, this time, for evidence of what readers brought with
them (and didn't, but seem to have been expected to). Post
an inkshed on the appropriate forum. In this case, do this
before Sunday night; after that, I'm going to put up a similar
page with people's thoughts on reading the Bible passages. We'll
talk about the whole works on Tuesday, which will be our last
meeting before the end of the world, er, term.
There will be a prompt about this process on Tuesday. It will
include some suggestions for how to write a more convincing
learning reflection that you probably did for the earlier
middle-of-term exercise. If you want to get a start on the work,
what I'd suggest is going back through your own work over the
whole term, and rereading the prompts -- especially the ones
which talk about the way evaluation occurs in this course, and
the process I use to generate a mark. Go to the
previous prompt
Go to the next prompt
Go to the list of prompts
Go to the main working site for English
1006G