Express Yourself

Go read and comment on at least three of your classmates' blog essays. Try to spread around the comments. If someone already has four or five comments, go look for another essay with fewer. Try to make your comments specific, with an eye towards giving feedback that will help when the author sits down to revise his or her essay. If you like something, tell them what you like about it. If you don't like something, tell them why and try to make specific suggestions on ways to improve it.

Remember, the goal for any piece of writing is to be interesting and informative. There are many ways to accomplish this goal. There are even more ways to miss the mark. Not everything well written says things that are important, and not everything that's important is well written and engaging. Every piece of writing can be improved. Your job is to help that happen. Put time and thought into the feedback you leave. 

Read back over the writing advice I posted for you. Think about what the essays you are reading are trying to say. Do they have a point? How well do they succeed at making that point?

Every piece of writing must have a plan, a purpose, and a central point. Before you begin to write, therefore, you should take time to work out the argument of your paper as well as the arrangement of its several parts. You should, in other words, think hard in order to avoid merely collecting sentences that add up to an aimless ramble in the vicinity of an ill-defined idea.

Any piece of writing that begins with “Webster’s Dictionary defines …” or “In this tormented age in which we have the misfortune to live …” is likely to be so boring that the reader will never finish it.

Here are a couple of examples to help get you started thinking about writing. Take a look at these two opening sentences:

Example 1: In my younger years, I was a computer serial killer. 

Example 2: The Internet is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “an electronic communications network that connects computer networks and organizational computer facilities around the world”. 

Which one makes you want to read further? Which one helps "provoke interest, focus your reader’s attention, and not induce sleep?"

Finally, leave some feedback for yourself. After reading and commenting on your classmates' essays, what ways do you see to change and improve your own writing. Leave a comment for yourself on your own essay.

You should post all of your comments by midnight, Sunday 9/19.