Starting tonight, I will ask you to compose the first of your four essays for medium.com. I want to spend a bit of time thinking about the expectations for these essays. This is a bit difficult for me, since all of you are writing different topics for different audiences, and the exact nature of your writing is up to you to decide and develop. But here goes.
My base expectations is that the essays should be around 1000 words. The essays should be self-contained, with an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. They could be anywhere from 8 paragraphs to 30 paragraphs, depending on your writing style.
Medium.com essays do not need work cited or reference lists. They should, whenever possible, invovle meaningful links to sources. Links are meaningful when they provide a concrete sense of where they go, such as this link to the Copybot’s short piece on writing better links. Also, if you link to something, you should not suppose that a reader will have read it. As with a quotation, you should supply the person with a summary of the piece to which you linked.
Rather than focusing on a single source, I would like to see the essays discuss a particular idea, and reflect reading in a few different sources. For instance, to continue to think about my imaginary essay on rape culture, I might divide that up into several different ideas:
- Public debates over rape culture
- Women’s fear
- #Yestoallwomen hashtag
- What can be done about rape culture (personally, politically, institutionally)
Each post could then focus on one of these issues.
This first essay will likely be the hardest for you. If the entire semester is building a house, then the first essay presents the challenge of where to first put your shovel. To make it a bit less daunting, I am introducing a constraint: whatever your topic or paper, in the course of your essay I would like you to discuss why the issue is important to you. Notice I did not stress important. I want to know what motivated you to think and write about this issue. Why do you think it is interesting? Why is it worth your time? Why write about it? Chances are if you can’t invent a compelling reason to write about it, then nobody will be interesting in reading about it either.
This constraint doesn’t have to be the paper’s introduction; it might make more sense to use it as an anecdotal interlude (as Corder does), or as a conclusion. It might be a short section, or a longer one. It should be at least 5 sentences. It should not be more than 33% of the total paper.
Additionally, each of your paper needs to be responsive to sources. What sources? How many? How responsive? I don’t want to get into to that level of specificity, because I think that would be too constraining. But I do want to say that, when you work with a source, you should be able to contextualize it and summarize it. When was it written? By whom? Its purpose? Its audience? Its evidence? Etc.
I will ask for two volunteers who believe they can finish up their essays a bit early. Volunteers need to send out their essays, via twitter, by 9:00am on Friday. Everyone will be required to read the essays and comment on them before Friday’s class, keeping in mind the workshopping topics we discussed in class.
