English 2783
The Art of Fact: Contemporary Literary Journalism
Prompt # 8
30 September 2010
 
The process, reiterated

The problem

My daughter edits an Ottawa newsmonthly. This evening about an hour ago, she sent our family email a message she called "a rhetorical question."

Why, do you suppose, would a person who'd been told to cover an event on the weekend of the 27-29 for a newspaper being delivered on the 11th of October, and knowing that the deadline for said article was the 1st of October, then proceed to write the *entire* article about the "upcoming event this weekend, Sept 27-29," complete with suggestions as to what parts of the event attendees should check out, and send the article to the editor on the 30th?

I told her that I thought that person had probably learned that in school.

This morning I sent an email to the class list that said:

While I was disappointed to see how few people posted learning journal entries, I am more concerned that only three people had posted revised reports on the forum by the Saturday night deadline, and only a few more have posted since.

The reason for the weekend deadlines is, of course, that I want people to have a chance to read things before class meetings, so
that we can use the face-to-face meeting time for things appropriate to it, and the between-the-meeting time for things that can best be done alone, or on line. None of this can work if the texts aren't available. Sure, if there are special circumstances one or two reports might be posted late and still be read, but if there's nothing to be done on Monday night but read there's hardly much point to dragging everybody out to EC 223.

Please post your report as soon as possible, and read as many of the ones posted as you can, before class tonight.

At 4:00 only one further report had appeared, and no one had posted any comments.  Further, the prompt last time was as clear as I could make it about the format the reports should be posted in, including a sample of what one might look like. Of the eight reports there, only four had actually formatted the report appropriately. It's not clear to me whether people didn't understand, or simply didn't read, the prompt.

Since what I had planned to do in class tonight will certainly not be possible, I can't write a prompt. So I'll leave the folks to whom it most matters -- the folks enrolled in the class, especially those who've actually done the work -- to  figure out what's appropriate to do in class to avoid the meeting being a complete waste of everybody's time. My view of course, is that we have two main tasks: to learn as much as we can from each other's writing (thin as quite a lot of it may be) and to discuss what we've learned, and to make a decision about what to do next (based in part on the emails -- nine, as of 6:50 -- received so far). How do we do that?

When there's a decision, someone should email the class list with it.

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