Prompt #9

"> Prompt #9 English 3336 Restoration and Eighteenth Century Poetry and Prose
Prompt # 9
28 September 2011

Setting out on new explorations

Finding some answers

I'll transcribe the questions onto a Web page, and assign people to them at random. How many each person will have will depend on how many questions there are.

You job between now and Tuesday is to find answers to your questions -- in the library, or on the Web. Here's the trick: each question has to be accompanied by a step-by-step explanation of what you did to find the answer, and a reference, or set of references, at the bottom. Your answers should be posted as responses to the questions, which will be on the usual sort of forum. If more than one person answers a question, that's fine; we'll see if their answers differ -- and we'll expect that their strategies for coming up with them will. Post your answers and explanations before class time Monday.

A second assignment

This one won't take long. But we're going to be coming back to those reports, and I'd like them all to be formatted appropriately, so that I can link them from the main resources page. Here's what you should do with yours: copy the text into a new posting, on the "Revised Reports" forum, and then make sure that

your name's at the top
the author, title, and publication data of the book(s) you're reporting on are next (in
the text of your report is single-spaced
paragraphs are separated by empty lines, not indented
and lists, etc., are formatted readably

There are reasons for all these, in this circumstance -- for instance, you don't need to identify the course, date and instructor, because everybody who reads this already knows that; you do need your name, because people click on links and forget what they clicked on; you don't need references at the bottom, because there's only one (or maybe two), and that's what your report is about; you don't need double-spacing, because that's to leave room for comments, but wastes space on a screen; you don't need to indent paragraphs, because the online convention is not to, but to leave spaces between paragraphs. All these are generic characteristics of this kind of writing -- but obviously not of term papers or emails.

You might, of course, also do some further touching up of the actual text as you reread and rework the report.

This should take at most a half hour (for some people it's really going to be only a question of pasting the text into a new location, and maybe doing a bit of tinkering). Do this before Thursday night.

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