jour112

This semester your journals will be based on your readings in Literature for Composition and Mythology. The titles of the three reading assignments each week are posted on the course syllabus. The procedure to follow in writing your journals is given below.

Read the assigned story, poem, or play and think about it so that you can have something to say.

Select "Discussion Forums" from the Serf control panel and then select the forum for the current week in the semester. Each forum will contain three "topics" which are the titles for the literature to be read. Select a topic, read the question, and answer it. Note that each week you must give a direct response to the questions for two of the assigned readings. For your third journal, respond to what another student has written about the third literary work.

Your journals may be regarded as free writings; that is, they may be a first response written at one sitting and with only a minimum of revision to correct errors which affect coherence. Although the journals are not expected to be pieces of finished writing, they should give evidence that you understand the literature and can formulate your own thoughts about it.

Although it may be possible to give a correct response to some of the questions in just a sentence or two, you are expected to do more. The questions should serve as a stimulus for your own thoughts. Therefore, after you have specifically answered the question, elaborate on your answer: relate the ideas in this reading to ideas in other assignments, develop arguments contrary to those offered by the writer, search for analogies in other situations, or relate personal experiences which support or contradict the author's contentions. Whenever you make an assertion about a literary work, use a quotation or make specific reference to some aspect of the work to support your statement. When you quote, make sure to copy exactly and to use quotation marks.

You should write your journals at the computer using the word processing program of your choice. Each journal should be one single spaced page as viewed on the screen of your computer.

Once you have written your journal with the word processor, save the file using a name that relates it to the title of the literary work you have written about.

Print a hard copy of the journal. Submit your three journal entries to me in a folder. Journals for TTH classes will be due on Thursday of each week. Journals for MWF classes will be due on Friday of each week. I will record that you have written your journals and return them to you.

After you have written your journal, saved it to your floppy disk, and made a print out of it, copy your journal into the discussion forum. Follow these steps: 1)From the Edit menu of your word processor, choose "Select" and select the entire journal you have written; 2)use the copy function of your word processor (Ctrl+C)to copy your journal to the clipboard; 3) go to the discussion forum in Serf and paste (Ctrl+V) your journal into the dialogue box for the journal topic you have written about.

When you follow the steps given above, you will make your journals accessible to everyone in the discussion forum. Therefore, you want to do your best. Read the literature thoughtfully and express yourself clearly. Show that you are capable of serious thought and concise expression.

You must keep up with your journals. The third week of class, the first discussion forum will be closed. The fourth week, the second forum will be closed, and so on, until the end of the semester. Once a forum has been closed, you will not be able to make up the work and your grade will be affected.

You will write thirty-nine journals for the semester beginning the week of August 24 through the week of November 16. The journals will count 30% of your class grade. Your grade on the journals will be determined by dividing the number of journals you have written by 39.

In addition to recording your journals weekly, I will monitor the discussion forums. If your journals are not satisfactory because they are not long enough, because they indicate that you have not read or do not understand the assigned essays, or because they are incoherent, then you will not be given credit for them.

The journals are a major part of the class, so take them seriously.