HW 4 - First comments

One of the most important parts of the class is the chance to participate in intellectual conversations with others that help you sharpen and deepen your ideas and minds. The blog comments can make that or break that. If you leave thoughtful blog comments that spark the author to further thought, to reconsideration, to boldness - we will enjoy a tone of intellectual development. If you leave perfunctory blog comments that tell the author that you are just doing it for the grade and don't particularly care then we will suffer a tone of stagnation and pretense.

I am connecting you to 2 other people for commenting - you all will be a triangle or a trio or a triad - most importantly a team that takes each others' ideas and work seriously and tries to help each other reach deeper thinking and fuller feeling. We will start with my mixes but later on we can talk about switching up if people want to. These comments will be due Friday the 18th at 8:30am. Please put your comment on each author's blog post but also copy and paste both comments to your own blog as a separate post from your own initial thoughts (could be titled HW 4 - Triangular Comments 1).

In general I want your comments to follow the following format - not like you're a prisoner of the format (but maybe that you're on probation from it - so if you break the rules you better be improving on it) - ABCDEF.

A – Appreciate some specific Aspect of the post. Succinctness or thoroughness, readability, particular ideas, language use, tone, humor, imagery, etc.

B – Briefly restate major point/argument/thesis. Show you understand it or explain which parts you don’t.

C – Connect - Connect the author's arguments or ideas with another student's or with something you've seen in the world or with their opposite.

D – Develop - Help the author develop her work further by pointing out spots that are worth expanding, need some revision, or are like wanna-be celebrities (jumping up and down saying "write about me!")

E – Explore - Write a little about what the author's post makes you consider in your own life and in your understanding of how others' live.

F – Friendly and encouraging sign-off.

To help you see what I think would add to our course the most, I wrote an example of a Very Good Comment. Obviously if I was commenting on a less enjoyable, less thoughtful essay my comment would be shorter and less enthusiastic. Keep it real, yo. But Charles H's post was really this good, so this comment I wrote is honest.

Charles,

Great first post! I guessed you might be a skilled writer - your similes ("on shrimp pasta from red lobster"), language use ("so I can be 100% inside what I am listening to"), and tone are shiny and warm and I appreciated your skills.

Your paen towards the pleasures of digital/electronic stimulation was heartfelt - briefly - the ipod bubble-wraps you in joy, reality TV shows keeps your day spicy but safe, texting protects you from loneliness and awkward silences, and the whole assemblage keeps you happy and occupied. But you also name the world outside of the screens as important.

Your perspective is probably the dominant one - most people enjoy this stuff (even if maybe less vigorously than you) but also want non-digital life too. I think the advertising executives who show silhouettes dancing alone would be very pleased with your post. To continue connecting your writing - I also noticed you banging into chairs a lot while dancing today - perhaps you shouldn't fully believe the ads about it being just you and the music?

It would be a good idea to proofread - right now you've got a genius first line but your 3rd full paragraph ("that i feel...") begins with no context and you've lost consistency of capitalization also. To develop the ideas in your piece I think you've got to open up the Big Can of Worms - what is human life for? OK - that's too big - what about, "What is your life for?" Does a life of pleasure, of bubbles, of packaged drama, with occasional forays into reality strike you as a good one? This connects to Manley's class too.

One question that your post brings up for me, in exploring how it relates to my life and yours - is that I feel sometimes that we're all working with the stimulation on too high a level. Do you ever make time to just sit in the park and look at the sky - to eat without distraction - to meditate? Or does the vibration of ears and eyes and emotions have to be constant?

Thanks and I look forward to reading how your thoughts on this continue to develop.