Your personal blog
Your blog is your space to generate writing ideas, respond to class conversations, tangle with
difficult passages in our readings and ponder connections between what we do in class and the
larger world.
If you take the blog seriously, posting to it two or three times a week, you’ll find yourself developing
a stronger writing voice, engaging more deeply in class discussions, and just generally getting a lot
more out of your studies. I highly recommend posting at least twice a week.
Some things you might do on your blog:
Develop Writing Topics: Part of the process of becoming a writer is figuring out what to write
about. Posting thoughtful questions to your blog is a good way to begin that process. Some
strategies for developing topics include offering personal definitions of abstract terms like
“freedom,” “success,” or “friendship,” making comparisons between seemingly unrelated things
(like, for instance, your education and a tree), or considering causes and/or effects of patterns you
observe in the world around you: why do we spend so much time on homework? what is the impact
of playing a sport in high school?
Try out Writing Strategies: At times, we’ll discuss writing techniques, whether new ways of
organizing entire essays, or strategies for crafting individual sentences. Your blog can be a place
where you experiment with these techniques. Spending time thinking about the best way to present
an idea can really help you succeed when the stakes are higher.
Reflect On Your Own Reading: Take the time to grapple with sentences that really throw you off, or
surprise you, or make you think. Pay attention to your own reading process, to the moments in
texts where you get a little lost, or the moments that really spark an image or insight, and record
those moments in your blog. You’ll become a stronger reader by doing this!
Reflect On Class Discussions: Take some topic that’s come up in class and continue the discussion
by elaborating on your ideas online. Don’t let the ideas we discuss in class die the moment you
leave the room. Keep turning them over in your mind by writing about them on your blog.
Make Personal Connections: Take some specific moment, line, image, theme or character from a
text we’re reading in class and relate that text to some specific experience you’ve had. Pay attention
to how the texts we’re reading provide some new perspectives on your own life.
Connect To Current Events: Discuss how some specific moment in a text we’re reading, or some
specific idea brought up in class, sparks a connection to things going on around us right now in
America. Feel free to link to articles, videos or pictures that inspired some insight in you about
American culture. The brain grows by generating new connections between individual neurons;
your blog can help your learning expand in a similar way.
Connect To Historical Contexts: Sometimes the texts we read will come from different time
periods—do some research into their context and use that research to pose questions or create
insights that might be useful in class or might help you generate a deeper understanding of
America, or of yourself.
Please complete at least three posts by this coming Friday. Here are some topics you might consider:
1.
Take a common term such as “freedom” or “success” and offer your own personal definition of it,
backed up by specific personal experiences. Make sure to consider multiple points of view on the
term before arriving at your own perception.
2.
Take a single sentence from anything we read that you think is particularly interesting in the way it’s
composed, and make an effort to imitate that sentence’s structure, that sentence’s approach to an
idea. Try out different versions of the sentence and talk about which one you prefer and why.
Pick a difficult sentence from any text we’re reading in class and “unpack” the sentence, doing your
best to follow its diction and syntax and take advantage of the opportunity the challenging sentence
represents.
3.
4.
Respond to some conversation we have in class-- offer a recap of the question or idea that sparked
your response, followed by your own insight, connection, commentary or questions.
5.
Tell a story about a time in your life where you found yourself in some situation similar to one of the
characters we’re reading about-- compare your response to that situation to the character’s
response.
6.
Find an article on nytimes.com or theatlantic.com or some other substantial news site and respond to
it-- what does it imply about America? How does it connect to your own experience, or to something
we’re reading in class?
7.
Do a little historical research and use it to add some insight to a text we’ve encountered in class. Be
sure to cite your sources!
8.
Find a “text” you’d like me to encounter (remember, defining texts broadly, as anything created by a
human being and open to interpretation), and ask me what I see in it. I’ll give you a rhetorical
analysis of it.
9.
Discuss any text at all that has sparked a reaction (positive or negative) from you. This could be a
film, a building, an item of clothing, an advertisement-- any text. Ponder why you had the reaction
you did to it.
10. Choose a character from one of the stories we read and try to write a response to something specific
about today’s culture-- say, the VMA awards or the Super Bowl, or cell phones, or the internet itself-in that character’s voice. Clearly, this is more fun the more removed from today’s culture the
character you choose is!
11. Choose a character from any piece of fiction you’ve read and compose a comparison between that
character and someone you know in real life or some character we’ve encountered in our readings.
Make sure to consider both similarities and differences in your comparison.
12. Take a metaphor we encounter in class or in our reading and tease out its implications.
13. Develop an extended metaphor of your own, one that helps explain something about your experience
of Highlands, of family life, of America, or of some text we’re interpreting in class. This is especially
useful if the metaphor leads you to some unexpected discovery as you develop it!
14. Take some setting that is very familiar to you-- a room in your house, your yard, some spot at
Highlands-- and describe it in great detail. Then describe it again, and again, experimenting with
different approaches, tones, styles, and points of view. Consider the impact of each choice.
15. Share something from outside of class that you’ve enjoyed reading-- this could be anything from a
twitter feed to a sports column to a poem to a novel. Make an effort to explain precisely what makes
it enjoyable to read, paying special attention to the writer’s style, rather than just to the topic.