This Week's Recap: Pushing Ourselves Forward and Resisting the Urge to Slide Backward (even if it seems easier)

This week's blogs posts showed an interesting mix of ideas, writing styles, and creative choices. The "free choice" blogs for this this ran the gamut of topics, some fascinating (check out Oscar's blog to see the most interesting title of the week!) and some more ordinary. I enjoyed reading the wide variety of topics chosen to explore this week and encourage you to check out what others are writing about (and leave comments).

In the Outcasts United blogs, some people reverted to a "summary mode" of writing rather than an "inquiry mode" of writing. Those who engaged in inquiry moved beyond summery and instead asked questions, explored possible answers to questions, thought about the connections between the book and college, thought about what we could learn from the book and what we could apply to our own experiences. In all college writing, try to avoid simply summarizing even if what you read was boring or not to your taste. Try to avoid telling your readers how boring it was, how you didn't like it, or how you "don't really have anything to say." Readers will wonder, "then why are you writing this?" Yes, it's an assignment so that's why you're writing, but it's your choice on what to highlight in each post, your choice as to what style to write in, your choice to make your writing engaging for your readers...or not.


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For this upcoming week, one post should be on time management as I explained in more detail in my post last week. For the other post, I want you to find two professional blogs that are both interesting to you in some way but are both different from each other in some way. Write your post with the purpose of introducing your readers to these two blogs, writing a little about what the blogs are about, discussing the style of writing and/or visual peresentation of each blog, why they interest you, and what others might find interesting about them.

Also, I'd like each person to spend a little time browsing through other student posts this week. Next week I'm going to ask you to think about assessment a bit more and nominate your personal best post (and grade it) and find some examples of "A level" posts that others have written.