Why Blog?

 

Many cultural observers have heralded the great democratizing possibilities of the Internet, arguing that those who were once silenced by power and resource inequities can, at least theoretically, broadcast their voices and harness new media to organize and advocate. In this age of communication, rhetoric seems a powerful tool, indeed.

Blogging is one such way rhetors can get their message out there, whether they are advocating for political change, building interest communities, sharing experiences and information, or just having fun. Since most blogs are meant for an audience, blogging is an implicitly civic action. Because blogging intimately connects rhetorical practice to civic life and brings together written, oral, visual, and digital media, it’s an ideal activity for this course.

But enough about the world and this course–what about you? If you find yourself asking “why am I blogging so much?” another pressing reason is, quite simply, that it improves your writing. In a 2010 study of blogging in LA 101H (RCL’s predecessor), ”intensive blogging,” which is what you are doing, was shown to improve student writing in all areas compared to occasional blogging. This makes sense. The more you practice reading and writing, the better you become.

 

Blogging Overview

 

For the spring semester of Rhetoric and Civic Life, you will maintain three blog categories (or two/three separate blogs; your choice). Your entries for each will be due before each Friday class. We will spend many Friday classes reading and responding to one another’s blog posts. Indeed, thoughtful commenting on others’ blogs will be a significant component of your final blog grade.

 

Blog Descriptions

 

The Passion Blog (tag:  passion)

 

Above all, the “passion blog” should be on a topic or theme about which you are excited to write. When you are choosing the focus of your passion blog, think carefully about how you might sustain this blog over twelve weeks to meet the course requirement—and maybe beyond! How will you introduce new topics? How will you interest and inform your readers, engaging them in your passion? How will you invite readers to comment? Writing this blog should be a pleasure and a challenge. Don’t be afraid to be quirky or creative.

In addition to perusing some student examples from “This Is RCL” for ideas, below are some broad blog genres you might consider as you develop your passion blog topic:

Lifestyle Blogs: These kinds of blogs connect people to their interests and help readers live a certain lifestyle, well, better. For example, Hungry Girl serves as a resource for dieters and foodies alike, providing low-cal recipes, weight loss tips, and journals about weight loss “journeys,” as it were. You can imagine Carrie Bradshaw’s column on Sex and the City, if it were online, as a kind of lifestyle blog. Fashion, entrepreneurship, gardening, cooking, homesteading and sustainability, fitness training, interior decorating, frat or sorority living, and even being a hipster:  these ways of life and more are all possibilities. Lifestyle blogs tend to offer timely tips or approach different topics of shared interest for readers. This kind of blog might also offer narratives, reflection, and analysis of the blogger’s own experience or “journey” that would be compelling and relatable to its audience.

Experience and Experiment Blogs: This genre of blog details an experience or project and tends to be adventurous or experimental. For instance, Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me and follow-up show Thirty Days function as video diaries of his various undertakings. The movie Julie and Julia is based on a real-life blogger’s project to cook Julia Child’s recipes for one year. Travel blogs or “bucket list” experiences might also fall into this category. As long as it is safe and appropriate, this kind of project blog (trying a new workout or cuisine each week, reading James Joyce’s Ulysses), could work well for your passion blog.

Entertainment and Criticism Blogs:  These blogs provide news, summaries, and, most importantly, analysis of the world of art and entertainment. You might devote your blog to an episodic TV show, literature, art, music, or film. The Entertainment Weekly website and Salon.com feature fantastic entertainment blogs you could check out as you imagine your project. While blogs of all genres should be written in a lively manner, criticism blogs in particular need to be engaging. The blog prose and analysis should be crisp, entertaining, and insightful. You could also produce new work in your passion blog, writing original poetry, installments of a short story, or song lyrics, and invite your audience to be the critics.

Sports or Hobby Blogs: A sub-genre of entertainment blogs, sports and hobby blogs are written for like-minded fans seeking additional analysis, news, and speculation. An example of a sports blog site is the Steeler-centric blog Behind the Steel Curtain or The Black Shoe Diaries for Penn State fans. Derby Life straddles the sport, hobby, and lifestyle categories, offering fascinating insight to the rapidly expanding universe of roller derby.

Policy Blogs: These blogs can advocate from the position of a particular political ideology, such as liberal, conservative, libertarian, etc. The topics of these blogs might be diverse, but feature news items and analysis that would reflect a certain political ideology. Two strong examples of these types of blogs come from Washington, D.C.’s best -known “think tanks,” organizations devoted to researching and advancing policies associated with political ideologies:  Think Progess is the blogging outfit for the progressive Center for American Progress, whereas the conservative-minded Heritage Foundation produces the Foundry Blog.  Wonkette is a gossipier, snarkier, independent take on D.C. news, and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight offers rigorous election forecasting and statistical analysis. You might also advocate, analyze, or report about a single political issue, such as health care reform.  Some bloggers serve as watchdogs, such as the contributors to Fact Check.org, an organization that analyzes claims in politics and the media.

Civic Issues Blog  (tag:  CI)

 

This semester, you will keep a Civic Issues blog. Each blog will focus on an issue roughly falling within one of five main categories:

*Politics
*Gender/Sexuality/Rights
*Race
*Environment
*Education

The blog will focus on the selected issue for the entire semester.  The main RCL hub site has a tremendously useful set of questions that might guide your inquiry.

The questions in each category are meant to be generative—that is, students are welcome to articulate a civic issue within one of these five categories that they do not see reflected in the questions. It’s also the case that some of the questions below might overlap, so you shouldn’t feel too constrained by that. For example, if you choose to blog about civic discourse in the U.S., you may end up blogging frequently about party politics. Some issues (e.g., hate speech) could fit within multiple categories (along with free speech in politics, or under Education as campus hate speech). In that case, you will want to choose the broader category that best captures their emphasis and interests.

As you choose a category and issue, you might think about what sparked your interest last semester. Are you interested in exploring issues related to your TED talk or paradigm shift paper? Did something you read in an RCL post or saw in a History of a Public Controversy video spark a conversation that you’d like to continue? You might also consider your own interests. What blogs do you follow? What news stories catch your eye? What issues are you curious to know more about? The issue you choose need not be something you’re an expert on; instead, think of this blog as a time to explore this issue and build understandings and opinions through informal research and conversations with peers.

You will be required to post on your Civic Issues blog roughly every other week for a total of five entries. Each Civic Issues blog entry should be around 700 words and should incorporate at least one source (which you should link to, if possible). Students are encouraged to use a New York Times academic pass to develop their blog entries. Please use the broad category and the specific issue within that category as tags (e.g.  environment, water OR education, statefunding).

 

Arranging and Tagging

 

Categories and Tags

 

When you write a blog post, you have the option to add categories and tags to your posts. Categories are broad groupings of post types. Your instructor may ask you to separate your entries into passion, RCL, and civic issue for your blog categories. You could also add additional categories. For example, if you wrote a food blog, your categories might include “breakfast” and “dessert.”

Tags are more specific to the content of the post, so if you wrote a recipe for chocolate cake, you might categorize it in “dessert” and tag it “cake” and “chocolate.” Categories are useful on your blog when readers visit and want to view several posts that are similar. Tags are useful to find specific posts and for searching on the Penn State network.

For this course, the blogging assignment uses tagging to filter student posts to make it easier for instructors, classmates, and students in other RCL sections to find your work. It is important that you follow the tagging conventions outlined below so that your posts can be found for commenting and grading.

 

Tagging Conventions

 

It is important that you use the tags listed below so that your blog posts can be found.

Across Sections:  RCL1314, & one of the following:  passion, CI, RCL

Section Specific:  Haley

Optional:  week (eg – week1, week2)

Optional:  topic (eg – football, education)

 

Category Conventions

 

You can also create three categories for the three blog post types you will be writing so visitors to your site have a quick way to view all the passion posts or other types of posts. The categories should presumably be: passion, civic issues, and rhetoric and civic life.

 

Assessment Standards

 

Overall Blog Evaluation

 

Seventy percent of your blog grade (worth twenty percent of the final grade) will be a participation grade based on these questions: Did you do all your blog entries? Did you do them on time? Did you submit entries of the proper length? Did you comment on others’ blogs thoughtfully and effectively? The final thirty percent of your blog grade will be reserved for the quality of your blogs. The quality expectations for each blog and for commenting are delineated below.

Remember, too, how important it is to tag your blogs correctly. Improper tagging can lead to lower grades, so, please be attentive.

Above all, when blogging and commenting, remain respectful of one another and adhere to the Penn State Principles.

 

Successful “Passion” blog entries:

 

*are submitted in a timely fashion and are at least 300 words.

*are written in a lively voice that engages and provokes its audience into commenting and taking distinctive stances.

*are coherent in terms of its content or focus and address a particular topic, niche audience, or human interest angle.

*are attentive to grammar and correctness, but may be written in an informal or colloquial style.

 

Successful “Civic Issue” blog entries:

 

*are submitted in a timely fashion on the assigned week (odd or even blogging week).

*will be between 500-700 words and will incorporate (and hopefully link to) at least one source.

*will offer a thoughtful presentation and analysis of the topic. The writer should be “intervening” in a debate rather than “sounding off” on a topic.

*will engage their readers with crisp prose, sensible organization, and opportunities for the reader to engage in dialog.

*will represent in their entirety a focused investigation and analysis of a topic.

 

Successful RCL blog entries:

 

*are submitted in a timely fashion (before each Friday class), with developed drafts uploaded on designated workshops days.

*consider options for how to develop responses to assignments.

*reflect meaningfully on the writer’s process, performance, and rhetorical choices.

*consider how course principles can be brought to bear upon the writer’s work.

*do not get bogged down in complaining about grades.

 

Successful commenting:

 

*furthers the discussion prompted by the post in thoughtful and meaningful ways.

*responsibly and responsively critiques working drafts, offering thoughtful suggestions that help the writer improve his or her work.

*adheres to the Penn State Principles, especially when disagreeing with the writer.

 

Rubric

 

	Excellent	Good	Acceptable	Poor
Content	Content is coherent and focused, and fulfills expectations of category (per features of success) with excellence.	Content is coherent and focused, and fulfills expectations (per features of success)  of category well.	Content is mostly coherent and focused, and fulfills expectations (per features of success)  of category acceptably.	Content lacks coherence and focus, and does not fulfill the expectations (per features of success) of category.
Style	Written in a lively voice that engages and provokes its audience into commenting and taking distinctive stances. Writing style greatly enhances post genre/category.	Written in a consistent voice that engages the audience, though may not provoke audience to take action or stance. Writing style enhances post genre/category.	Written in a mostly consistent voice, though does not engage or provoke the audience. Writing style does not add much to post genre/category.	Written in an inconsistent voice. Does not engage the audience. Writing style does not add to post genre/category.
Mechanics	Post was submitted on time in the appropriate length, with few to no grammatical errors.	Post submitted on time in the  appropriate length, with few grammatical errors that did not distract from meaning.	Post submitted on time, but the length was inappropriate (too short or too long), and/or there were a few grammatical errors that distracted from the meaning.	Post was not submitted on time and/or the length was inappropriate (too short or too long) and/or there were numerous grammatical errors that distracted from the meaning.