OK, so I have been thinking a lot about form and how it pertains to our projects.
Since we are each dealing with relatively complicated subjects and our audiences in a blog are different than in a standard academic setting, I was wondering if I should alter the form of my presentation. Within a standard academic work you make the assumption that the audience have read everything that you have, they know about the material and you pretty much just dive right into your project. A blog is not quite like this. Due to this, perhaps we should make our blogs more of an educational experience easing our reader into our given topic more gently, being sure to define new terms and make the overall information easier to digest.
Anyone else think that this is a good idea, or have any other ideas on how they think the presentation should be done?
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I think you're right. As a blog, the audience, and therefore the format and style should be quite different than an MLA research paper. There is a lot more to consider when your audience is not just your English professor. There should probably be more foundational introductions to topics, and possibly links for explanatory information(in lieu of footnotes); for example, a link to a summary of a story or an article about a particular trope.
ReplyDeleteYes! Remember Prof. Burton saying "long, sustained, connected, discourse" is the form of this blog? Well as I was thinking about this your exact points came to mind. Instead of assuming this blog would be only for my classmates and I could throw out some literary terms without fear of confusion, my approach would've been much more methodical. I would have outlined the progression of my blogs.
ReplyDelete1. Raise issue and "Why do I care?"; make it pertinent
2. Introduce terms, and past thought
3. Comment on pertinent studies and current thought
4. Make literary connection
Now those categories would each contain 4-6 blogs each, not just 4 blogs and we're done. But I didn't understand what I needed to do! So I agree with making the blog not so "scholarly" at FIRST, but progressing to a point where a follower of the blog could read it at the beginning using simple terms and by the end be educated in the vernacular and major thoughts within the field. The goal: educate your audience in a particular field of discourse.
I'm glad I wasn't just throwing this out there. So maybe our projects should be broken up into a multiple blog sequence each following a central sustained thought?
ReplyDelete