Register to vote!!

It is possible for Wisconsin residents to register at the polling booths on November 2, but you will probably find it a little bit easier to register beforehand: registration forms for Wisconsin residents are due by 10/23, about three weeks from now, but why not take care of it today?

Kottke.org offers clear and simple instructions for finding voter registration forms and also procuring absentee ballots for those of you who don't want to declare Madison as your place of residence.

After all this, you might want to find out where to vote in a month.

- posted by Mike @ 8:47 PM

 
Journals all graded?

Although I started lagging at the finish line there, I finally graded all the journals that have been piling up for the last week. If you haven't received a grade for one or more of your journals, that means it or they didn't make it to me: try again!

- posted by Mike @ 8:15 PM

 
Obscenity

I've been reading dozens of excellent journals about obscenity! This is a good thing, since we'll be talking about the obscene and the artistic for about the next month.

You might consider writing a follow-up journal (and posting it online!) in which you point to an artwork you find particularly obscene (if you can, link to an online picture of the artwork) and explain why you feel that piece is obscene. What do you feel is the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable art?

- posted by Mike @ 7:15 PM

 
Blog along!

The course calendar announces that you may begin posting your journals online, for all the world to read and admire, starting October 5th. I chose that date semi-arbitrarily, worried mostly that it would take about a month for all of you guys to become comfortable with what journals are supposed to accomplish. Since there have been few problems at all on that front, I've decided to open the blogging floodgates a week and a half early: starting Monday, September 27th you are invited to blog your journals and position papers!

To start your blog, go to Blogger.com and click on the Create Your Blog Now link! (Or click on above.) Signing up is easier than setting yourself on fire, and probably a lot more fun.

When you first set up your blog, email me your blog address so I can link to you from the sidebar here. This way, you and your classmates need only bookmark this URL to have links to all the freshest and finest of today's e-journals. You need not email me your journals after this point, as I shall check your blog as promptly as I can and email you comments and your grade.

Remember that even though your journals are being posted online, the same rules apply: you must make an argument, and as we get deeper into the semester you will need to incorporate analysis or insight or at least creativity to receive a check.

Why is it worth posting your journals online, revealing your most secret claims and supports for all your peers to read? Why, because doing so will give you experience writing for a public: and writing for a public is exactly what you'll be doing when you get your fancy-pants 6-figure-salary careers. Writing in response to your peers' journals, you will engage in a conversation with your colleagues, rather than an oppressed, nearly Shakespearean monologue with me as the only member of your enthusiastic but small audience.

Indeed, if you throw yourself actively into the class conversation your journal grades will shift up a little bit. If your journal responds to somebody else's journal, the grading scale shifts up 5 points (ü- 80%, ü 95%, ü+ 110%). If somebody responds to an original journal entry by you, the grading scale shifts 10 points (ü- 85%, ü 100%, ü+ 115%).

- posted by Mike @ 6:27 PM

 
Exciting Reminders!! Now updated with extra excitement!!!

#1: Friday's class meets in 6171 Helen C. White, in the Writing Center's computer classroom. Helen C. White--if you've never been over here--is the bauhausy building across Park Street from Memorial Union. It has a beautiful view of the lake, if you happen to be in one of the rooms with windows. (We won't be.)

The entrance to the upper floors is to the left of the main entrance to the building. The elevators can get a bit crowded around 8:50, so you might need to come a few minutes early, or you can always take the stairs.

#2: Conferences are 100% optional, but if you're signed up you need to come! I will be conferencing your papers at the end of this week and the latter half of next week, so there should be ample opportunities for you to chat about your essay.

When you come to your conference, remember to bring a hard copy of your essay, peer review comments (if your conference comes after peer review next week), and at least three substantive questions about your paper. Example of a substantive question: "How can I sophisticate my main claim?" Example of a non-substantive question: "How do I format my bibliography?"

#3: While the English 100 Tutorial program is clogged with requests for visits around the time your final draft of this essay is due, I believe they still have some openings for tutorial meetings next week. Now is the perfect time to schedule that English 100 Tutorial appointment!

- posted by Mike @ 11:15 AM

 
Peer Review Group Selection

Is there anyone in the class you'd rather not work with in revising your first paper? Anybody whose comments are so brilliant you absolutely must have him or her help you out? Shoot me an email if you have any particular peer group preferences.

- posted by Mike @ 2:04 PM

 
Modern woes

This is the third semester in a row in which my computer has rendered itself unusable during the first month. Last fall my monitor went on the fritz; last semester my OS died; this Saturday, my hard drive fried itself.

This means that for the next week or two I will be slightly harder to reach via email: I will still be able to answer nearly all emails I get before 9 pm on weekdays, but unless I'm on campus (as I am at present) I won't be able to answer any questions you ask late at night or on the weekend. If you need to get in touch with me at one of these times (but before midnight, please) feel free to call me at home. My home number is available through the directory.

- posted by Mike @ 1:59 PM

 
Why aren't your drafts graded?
Entry now revised for clarity and grammatical precision!

I totally missed a brilliant pedagogical moment this morning when Lyndsey asked whether the drafts are graded: although I will not grade your drafts, the more seriously you take each draft the better off your final product will inevitably be.

Here's the unpleasant, basic truth of paper-writing: the more time you spend in focused, intelligent work on your paper, the better it will turn out. This is true not just when you develop the same ideas and language over the course of multiple drafts, but also when you entirely scrap a preliminary or intermediary draft in order to start anew. The two most radically-improved papers I saw last semester came from students who were dissatisfied with their carefully-written drafts and decided to start over again with nothing more than a blank Word document and the wisdom they'd gained from approaching the topic from an ineffective angle.

By "radically-improved," I mean these papers went from exhibiting all 4 of the Common Paper Flaws to exhibiting just 1 or even 0. We're talking about a shift of multiple letter grades here. I was very impressed.

The time and diligence you pour into your first draft will absolutely be reflected in the quality--and hence the grade--of your final paper. However, that effect won't be direct, and I will certainly not explicitly grade the strength of your preliminary work, because that would just be mean: the whole point of first drafts is that they're kinda shitty. Instead, you will find that your own preparation and effort will reward you with a more accomplished argument.

- posted by Mike @ 11:20 AM

 
As Fast As Nuggets!

This Sunday afternoon, between 2 and 4 o' clock, I will hold online office hours so you can chat with me about any questions that come up as you write your paper. Even if you don't have any questions to ask, feel free to drop me a note to let me know how you're doing! I am still using online office hours on a largely experimental basis, so if you just want to let me know that you find the idea of them particularly handy, I'd appreciate knowing that.

My AIM username is on the front of the syllabus. If you haven't used an IM service before, I think you will find it fairly intuitive to start! If you want to download the client as an application, visit AIM.com; if you'd rather work from inside your web browser, there's always AIM Express. If you have any questions about getting this technology working for you, shoot me an email!

- posted by Mike @ 10:37 AM

 
The effect of your affect!

I have, like, two grammatical pet peeves. One is the blatant misuse of it's for its, a problem which is not as common this semester as it was last year. The other is the substitution of affect for effect, and vice versa. The confusion probably stems from the fact that both of these words have nominal and verbal meanings.

The noun effect (e-FECT) means something like result or consequence: "I hope that the effect of this blog entry is to clarify the meaning of 'effect' and 'affect.'" To effect something, the rarer verb form of this word, is to cause something to happen, as in "I effected a swift retreat from the jaws of death" or "I hope to effect your understanding of the difference between 'affect' and 'effect.'"

The noun affect (AFF-ect), on the other hand, is quite rare; it's the kind of word that comes up in psychology classes. (According to Merriam-Webster, it's "the conscious subjective aspect of an emotion considered apart from bodily changes." And, you know, that comes up a lot.) However, the VERB affect (aff-FECT) is the kind of word you use on a daily basis: according to Merriam-Webster, it means "to produce an effect upon." "Mike's blog entry affected me so deeply that now I'm scarred for life" or "Hurricane Ivan is affecting weather patterns on the eastern seaboard."

If you want the noun, effect will have the effect you're looking for; if you want the verb, affect will affect the meaning of your sentence positively.

- posted by Mike @ 6:13 PM

 
Don't have a CLUE?

On the course calendar you have likely observed a cryptic assignment for Friday: CLUE 1. CLUE stands for Computerized Library User Education Tutorial. (It should probably have been acronymed CLUET, but that sounds like something you'd find in a French bathroom.)

The library system on this campus is absolutely incredible. The Badger Herald recently reported that the UW-Madison library system has "the eleventh largest collection in North America," with its anchor library--Memorial, the largest single library in Wisconsin--receiving "over 1 million visits per year." As the library system itself reports, in addition to Memorial there are "more than 40 General Library System, professional and special-purpose libraries " holding

• Some 7.2 million books
• 58,000 journal titles
• 6.7 million items recorded on microfilm

And if that's not enough for you, you should know that our library system spends over $4 million every year updating enormous databases of electronic material, such as ProQuest Research Library, through which you found the AAP article for today.

That is a buttload of information. CLUE is here to help you begin to sort out how to find information--books and articles that meet your research needs--inside the enormous UW-Madison library system.

CLUE is organized as a series of three half-hour computerized learning modules. The first module addresses how to begin doing research at the University; the second looks at MadCat, the catalog to those 7.2 million books; the third module explains how to find magazine, journal and newspaper articles from among the tens of thousands available physically and electronically through the system's subscription to about a hundred journal databases.

For Friday, I'd like you to work through "Power Tools," the first of these three modules. At the end of the module there is a short ten-question quiz. At the end of the quiz the module creates a printable page with your score and ID number. Turn this page in at the beginning of class on Friday. Your CLUE work counts for about 20% of your Participation grade, or 1% of your final grade at the end of the semester.

More information:

• "Getting CLUED In" (PDF)
• "Library & Information Literacy Instruction: About CLUE"

- posted by Mike @ 10:02 AM

 
Sharing Comics

Because we won't be talking again in specific detail about the superhero comics you read for class on Friday, you don't need to worry about bringing them to class with you. However, you might think about trading comics with your classmates, in order to become more familiar with the types of comics out there as well as to get a sense of what features they have in common. The primary experience you get from working with comics will hopefully be useful to you as you begin to work on your first paper this week, giving you a range of experience and evidence to which you can freely refer.

- posted by Mike @ 1:54 PM

 
Electronic Reserve

Two of the readings for next week are on electronic reserve. In my experience, this is the way I can get a small number of texts to you most cheaply. To retrieve texts on electronic reserve, do the following:

1. Go to my.wisc.edu and sign in
2. Click on the Academic tab
3. In the Course Resources pane there should be a link to Library Reserve next to the entry for this class
4. Depending on how the Library has reserves set up for you, you might be presented with a list of English 100 instructors; if so, click on my name
5. Click on the link Design for Delinquency / Wertham
6. This will bring up a PDF file of the essay. Print it out, read it, and remember to bring it to class.

I realize that it costs money to print out these long essay; however, I assure you that printing fees for a small number of essays are far lower than fees for a coursepack of the same size.


American Academy of Pediatrics - "Media Violence" Now updated!

An important but short article for Wednesday--the American Academy of Pediatrics's official stance on media violence and its impact on children--is also available online, but not via course reserve.

1. Go to the ProQuest Research Library (you may need to log in with your student ID number)
2. Run a search for bar-on AND media violence (Miriam Bar-On is the primary author of the article)
3. The first result that pops up is the article for Wednesday; click on the link for Page Image - PDF beneath the result to load a PDF file of the article
4. Print it out, read it, and remember to bring it to class on Wednesday
   

If you have time this weekend, after you have read the Bernard-Donals and the Wertham, you might want to read this article for Monday's class. The AAP argues in agreement with Wertham, but does so from a very different standpoint and with very different evidence.

- posted by Mike @ 9:49 AM

 
Common Knowledge

Tyler just asked me a great question, one I should have answered during our discussion of plagiarism and citation yesterday. In essence, his question was "What counts as common knowledge? Do I have to cite things that are generally well-known?"

There is no scientific way of measuring common knowledge. However, there are a couple quick things to think about when deciding if a particular bit of information should be cited:

• Did you have to look it up? If you didn't know the information already, it's probably not common sense. (Unless you just needed to remind yourself of a detail that everyone should know, like the date of the Treaty of Versailles.)
• How knowledgeable is your audience in the subject you're discussing, and how commonly-known is what you're talking about within that subject? If you're writing about music theory in a journal for this class, you are writing for an audience (me) that doesn't know much about music theory. Hence, ideas that might be common knowledge to you won't necessarily be common knowledge for me. In this situation, here's the rule of thumb: if you want to talk about an idea that is covered in every intro music theory course in the country--the principles of sonata form, for example--then the idea is officially common knowledge. If you want to talk about something that even your fellow students in music theory might have to look up, cite it.
• Is the idea being discussed or advertised in multiple current newspapers or magazines?A fact that would otherwise be obscure might become very well known because of current events. For examples, details about Saturn's climate and rings were heavily discussed in the days before and after the Cassini-Huygens probe inserted itself into Saturn's orbit this summer, so those otherwise obscure details were momentarily common knowledge.

However, for all this advice a lot of the time it's difficult for a writer to tell whether the facts she knows well will be known commonly among her readers. The best thing to do in this situation is to ask. If you don't have someone to ask--if you're polishing up a draft at 4 am the morning it's due, for example--it's always better to err on the side of caution.

- posted by Mike @ 6:53 PM

 
Friday 9/10's confusing journal topic

Meggie emailed me this evening asking me to clarify what I meant by the journal topic for Friday, which asks you to identify the argument your superhero comic book tries to make. Here is my clumsy explanation:

Writers hide arguments in stories. For example, if you saw "I, Robot" this summer, you might have seen therein an argument about the dangers of rampant technological advancement. In other words, most stories have a moral, and that moral is a kind of argument.

For your Friday journal, it's important for you to briefly summarize what happens in the comic you chose, but what's more important is for you to trace out what the moral of the comic is, and how the author and artist show that moral.

At a superficial level, then, your journal will look something like this: "Here's what my comic is about. Here's the moral of the story. Here's how we can tell this is the moral of the story." You might be able to do all that in three or four sentences.

If you wanted to go beyond and insert an argument of your _own_ ("This moral is
superficial" or "This is an interesting way to convey this message" or "This moral is the same as the moral of another popular story...") that would be very welcome.

As always, email me if you have any questions about this assignment!
- posted by Mike @ 7:49 PM

 
I Can't Shut Up

Some teachers in small classes, when they lecture at you the first day, will say things like "This is the most I will talk all semester." I'd really like to say that, but I'm afraid that I might be lying. Beginning next Friday, I think, class will become more discussion-centered, but sometimes the addictive quality of the chalkboard just compels me to jabber incessantly.

There are a couple of items I didn't make it to today:

1. Take advantage of your long weekend and spend a few minutes registering to vote. I noticed that the Chocolate Shoppe down on State Street has voter registration forms, giving you an excellent excuse to go buy some ice cream. If you'd rather register online, check out ActiVote--a nonpartisan effort to get new voters registered.
2. In my scatterbrained overview of the essay process, I forgot to point out that the essay topics presented in the syllabus are still under construction. Not that you were thinking of starting writing essays today, but still bear in mind that the essays may change a little between now and when they come to be an issue.
3. I might have missed some of the point of Meggie's question, this morning, about where to find the books on the list. While the two required books (An Introduction to Writing Argument and Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth) and the one recommended book (Understanding Comics) are at UBS, the purely optional books weren't specifically ordered into any one location. UBS will have them in their general book department on the first floor, but so will many of the other bookstores on campus. Indeed, these optional books--the MLA Handbook and The Elements of Style and The American Heritage Dictionary--are probably available at used book stores like Avol's and Paul's.

As always, shoot me an email if there are other questions you'd like me to answer!

- posted by Mike @ 10:19 AM