prompt for monday 28 january

For Monday, your only homework is to select a topic for your own Personal Essay. You can use the writings you have done for this class over the past two weeks, including

• the room from your childhood
• your collection of items for your writerly roles
• the experience of stereotyping
• the object you brought to class
• the list of potential topics,

...or something entirely different you've thought about outside of class. If you have trouble thinking of topics, you can use some of the activities on pp. 110-114 for ideas. Also, remember the suggestions we discussed from the textbook about what makes an effective topic.

Once you've chosen a topic, you'll compose a blog posting reflecting on your choice of topic. In it, please cover the following:

• what your topic is
• how you came to decide on that topic
• what questions do you have about the topic that you expect to work through in your writing (or, what do you want to understand about this topic that you don't fully understand now?) - remember that you don't need to have a perfectly neat 'thesis' at this stage in the process

Keep in mind that blog posts are expected to be written in paragraph form but can have a casual, conversational tone. These are more for you as a writer to practice writing and to learn to discover what you think by writing.

We'll begin to brainstorm and start drafting on Monday. Have a great weekend!

prompt for friday 18 january

As I mentioned in class today, your prompt for Friday is to write about the concept Ballenger mentions on page 8 of Chapter One: "One belief, though, undergirds them all: the most important thing that influences a writer's growth is believing that he or she can learn to write well."

So, you will begin your post of 250-500 words with: "I believe that I can learn to write well..." and develop from there. Like our in-class writing, your blogs are meant to be fast-writing and they can certainly include some 'bad writing.' The point is to just be writing because the only way to get better at anything is to practice it. And hopefully, as you're writing this blog, you'll begin to gain confidence in the potential for learning to write well (or if you already write well, better than well).