In-class Writing Prompt

How do you write? How have you written over the course of your life? Describe your writing experiences in school. Describe your writing experiences outside of school. When have you written alone? When have you written with others.

After sharing our writing as a group, we’ll look together at Fitzgerald and Ianetta’s excerpt from The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors that focuses on authorship studies (you can find this piece in Blackboard). This excerpt gives a brief history of how authorship has been understood over time, how the early history of authorship, beginning with the classical period, understood writing as divinely inspired. Through the Renaissance and Romantic periods, authorship “evolved” and was seen as writerly genius and a marker of originality. Have you ever felt the effects of these old myths about writing and authorship in your own lives? Or does your writing today–within the networks of social media & document sharing–look totally different than this western history of authorship?

WordPress Check-In

How did creating your website go? We’ll leave some time to troubleshoot this & answer any questions about the syllabus than you might have since last class.

Homework

READ Bruffee’s article “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind'” (available on Blackboard) before next class. I will divide the article into sections and assign groups of students to focus on separate parts to present to the class.