Blogging Audit

Instead of the typical midterm essay, we are performing blogging audits — reflections upon your own blogging activity so far this semester. You are not grading your own work so much as commenting on it and noticing what you notice week to week. There are two components to this audit: analysis and expansion.

Part I: Analysis

Begin by printing and reading all of your posts and comments (you can access a list of your posts from the Archives page). As you reread them, take notes, critically reading your entries as if they were written by somebody else (or at the very least, recognizing that they were written by a different you at a different time).

Compose an analysis and reflection of your posts. This reflection is open-ended and the exact content is up to you, although it should be thoughtful and directed. Feel free to quote briefly from your own posts or to refer to specific ideas from the readings we’ve studied so far. Aim for a 3-4 page (double-spaced) analysis.

Some questions to consider might include: What do you usually write about in your posts? Are there broad themes or specific concerns that reoccur in your writing? Has the nature of your posts changed in the past six or seven weeks? What changes do you notice, and how might you account for those changes? What surprised you as you reread your work? What ideas or threads in your posts do you see as worth revisiting? What else do you notice? What aspects of the weekly blogging do you value most, and how does it show up in your posts?

Part II: Expansion

For this part of the audit pick two of your posts or substantial comments and expand them into longer (but still short) essays ranging in length from 1000-1200 words. There are several ways to go about this. You can pick a post that in hindsight you are unhappy with and revise it upwards. Or you can pick a post that you think is fantastic but still contains ideas that can be fleshed out. Or simply pick a post you enjoyed writing and can see value in pushing it further in light of our latest readings and class discussions. In any case, your revisions should be non-trivial, that is, substantive changes that truly fulfill the etymological roots of re-vision.

Other Notes

The blogging audit is worth 20 percent of your final grade and is due in class on Tuesday, October 27. There will be no regular blogging that week.