So What Do I Do?

So, let's review the steps to completing this Blog Project. You have already been divided into six groups, and those six groups have already been assigned a day in the syllabus in which they have to find a blog pertinent to the course theme and post it to our common blog for discussion.

But what kind of blog are you supposed to look for?

There aren't a lot of blogs entitled FEAR. Instead, I want you to look for blogs on hot-button issues and examine how the bloggers approach these subjects. Do they promote a lot of posts and stories that are based on fear and anxiety? Or perhaps a blog you've found has one story or entry that you think fits perfectly within our course theme. In that case, the whole blog might not have to be focused around our theme, just the one story. Or perhaps you've found a really cool blog that analyzes horror films, and you think this might be useful information for the class. Whatever you choose--and choose wisely--provide the title for the blog, the URL, and a brief description. Also provide a brief line at the beginning or end of the post that explains why you chose this particular blog and that explains why it fits with our theme. This will help guide a fruitful discussion.

Anyone who is not a facilitator (someone picking a blog for that week) is responsible for responding to the blog. The list of prompts you can choose to answer are in a Word file on Carmen. However, I will also post them below the sample blog entry that will follow these instructions. If, at any point, conversation begins to lag, the facilitators are responsible for interjecting and saving the discussion. Every person on the class must have contributed in some way to the common blog each week--whether as a facilitator or respondent.

Now, see below to begin our project. I am the facilitator and you are all respondents for this first go-round.

Welcome to Rhetoric, My Friends

So, by this point, you know about the class theme. You know that we will be studying the power and persuasive appeal of fear in all types of media in the upcoming quarter. These media may include Youtube videos, clips of horror films, radio broadcasts, newspapers, TV news, TV shows, interviews, magazine articles, journal articles, and websites. As you study this wide variety of texts, you will hopefully begin to notice the difference between writing and communication in the public sphere vs. the academic sphere.

After all, our Commonplace project will ask you to produce a piece of public writing stemming from the academic work you will do in this class. This class blog project is the perfect place to start practicing your analysis and evaluation of public writing. Because, despite the fact that we label public writing as laid-back, carefree, relatively unhampered by convention, etc., it actually is often constructed very deliberately as well.

Writers use ethos, pathos, and logos (terms we will talk about later if you don't know what they mean yet) to persuade and encourage an audience to read further. They choose pictures and visuals, consciously or unconsciously, that back up the claims they make. The very words they choose can indicate mindset, view, or bias. So use this class blog as a useful forum to strengthen your skills of writing and analysis.

And have fun.