Some attention to formatting and presentation [postponed]

I had intended to print out the reports and invite people to select those they could suggest formal improvements for, as a way of focusing attention on matters of format and presentation. As I looked through those posted so far, though, it seemed to me that a high percentage of them had not attended to the "rules" enough to be easily edited or corrected. I intend to spend some time on this (I think it's important, for more reasons than simply that people need to be sensitive to it for other courses), but I haven't figured out quite how to do it. So here's a short, immediate exercise: choose any report you like, look through it, and see if you can see a formal choice the author made that you would suggest she should change to make the presentation more conventional. Reply to the report with an explanation of what you see that could be improved. Do this until you've done three.

What have I got in mind? Formatting of references, use of references and quotations in texts, attributions, punctuation and presentation of quotations . . . nothing to do, right now, with what the report has to say; focus on how it's presented. We'll talk about this when I have a sense of where the most immediate issue are.

Do this this afternoon.

Reading for Writers

What we're going to do next is select some writers we need to know about if we're going to call ourselves people who are experts on the nonfiction prose of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century. Here's how we'll begin doing that.

Between now and Wednesday, using whatever items seem appropriate from the course list of Reference works (but not the same one you used for the first assignment), find five writers who wrote nonfiction prose between 1660 and 1789, and about whom you can find at least two comments from scholars or critics (different sources) indicating that the writer is an important or considerable figure. The comments should be at least a couple of sentences long. Your source itself might, of course, be quite a lot longer -- in that case, transcribe (or copy and paste) only what seems to you most persuasive. What you create should be in this form (I've picked someone I expect nobody would likely have found otherwise):

Sir Roger L'Estrange, 1616-1704

" . . . journalist and pamphleteer, and an active royalist, was obliged to flee to the Continent in 1648. After the Restoration he was appointed surveyor of printing presses and licenser of the press. He issued The News and the Intelligencer (1663-6) . . . ; also many political pamphlets, one of the earliest being a reply to Milton, No Blind Guides (1660)." Margaret Drabble, ed., The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Fifth Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 566.

"On Monday, 31 August 1663, he issued the first number of his newsbook The Intelligencer, and followed it on Thursday, 3 September with The News. From the point of view of Charles II and his ministers L'Estrange was an excellent choice; he had no desire to see any newspapers published at all. . . . L'Estrange was, in fact, a brilliant journalist, and was soon to show himself to be one of the ablest of the political pamphleteers, but his heart was never in the business of supplying his fellow countrymen with unadulterated news." James Sutherland, English LIterature of the Late Seventeenth Century [Oxford History of English Literature, VI]. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969, p. 234.

Save your findings as a file, so that we can work with them later. Print them out and bring them to class Wednesday.