Today’s Plan:
- Attendance
- Review Proposals
- Drafting Piece #1
- Volunteers for Workshop on Thursday
- Index Cards
- Homework
Review Proposals
Let’s take a look at those titles:
- Imagine a World about Women
- Feminism: A Modern Definition
- In Community We Trust
- Sex in the Comic Book City
- Sports Community Proposal
- The Petrol Heads: A Look Into The Current Car Community
- She’s a Woman: Proposal Project
- Proposal for Discourse Communities: Feminism
- Education Community Proposal
- Football
- Feminism in Our Everyday Lives
- Entering the community of Feminism
- Comics are weird: a look into the comic book community
- Potential Political Threats on American Education
- Video Games: The Home Video
- Community Conversation Proposal
Thinking about the discussion of periods in the last class:
I began playing soccer at a very young age when I lived in Ghana, West Africa. When I played, many people took this game seriously because in West Africa, soccer is a promoted sport. In America women’s sports isn’t really something that is widely supported unless it’s college level or the olympics, but I refused to make that an excuse for myself. Soccer for both genders is a high interest, unfortunately many people don’t see it in that perspective.
And:
Neymar’s transfer has caused a lot of chaos in the soccer community in the past few weeks. As a member of the soccer community I feel that if I was to be put in the position Neymar was, I would choose the team that is offering me more and is more interested in me and my talent.
A quick hit:
So now the challenge is to give modern feminism a modern definition for a new generation of activist fighting many of the same issues that have plagued our society for generations.
Another quick hit on introductions:
Communities are something we all join and we all have. What community we join dictates what makes us unique and different from each other. There can even be a sense of a community within a community, for example, video games. There are video games that purposely create a place to play with people doing the same mission, quest, or objective.
And
In society everyone has a certain niche or interest in common things like reading or dancing and these interests are called communities. A lot of communities in the world surround big societies like movies,music, sports,politics, comic books and superheroes.A community that I have chosen to be part of is the athletic community.
And
In today’s modern society, there are many groups that focus on activism, and one of the most widespread is feminism. Modern day feminism is very different than what it was in the nineteenth century when Virginia Wolf started the fight. Today feminism is so complex that the definition of modern day feminism is going to mean something different to everyone. Modern day society is much different from our nineteenth century counterpart, our world and our views have evolved with time and societal changes.
And
For my proposal project, I will be justifying the issue of the over sexualizing of female comic book characters, from Wonder Woman’s iron bikini top to Harley Quinn’s skin-tight outfit.
And
Think back to a day when a woman’s main purpose was to stay inside all day, prepare every meal and clean the entire house. As naïve as it sounds, I always thought these days were far behind us.
Let me focus attention on the third part of the proposal project:
The final component of the proposal is your Potential Topics. Here is where you trace out what topics you think your community will be addressing over the next month, so that I get a sense of “proof of concept.” You aren’t in any way wedded to these topics: I have said before, the primary force driving this semester is the idea of community. Communities are always reacting to unpredictable events in real time, and I want your process to be fluid enough that you can switch on the fly. But, at the same time, I want you to do enough research into your community that you have a sense of upcoming events, releases, problems, that your community will likely address.
And here’s how I described this in the email I sent out Thursday:
Third, the final section is where you give me a sense of two articles that you want to write. For some this might be easy–if you are writing about sports, for instance, you can give me a list of 4 recent articles on Colin Kaepernick’s protest, with short descriptions of each, and then some sense of how you plan to respond. If you are writing about politics this might be trickier, since you can’t necessarily plan if something insane will happen that you will want to respond to. But you can still give me an idea like the one above–maybe four articles on Trump’s response to the hurricane, or 4 articles on perceptions of BLM, or four articles on whether Congress will raise the debt ceiling.
Drafting Medium Piece #1
It is time to start writing for medium.com. This week you will draft the first essay, and then revise it next week. The draft is due this Sunday as a word or google doc; you will *not* be posting to medium until next week.
Here’s the description of the assignment from the syllabus:
During weeks 4-13 you will draft, revise, and publish 4 pieces on medium.com. Each piece is expected to be 800 to 1000 words and reference 2-5 (depending on depth) other perspectives on a single issue.
What I really want to stress to them here is that your medium posts are 75% summarizing and comparing what other people have said and 25% arguing for your own position. A stock blueprint:
- First paragraph points the reader to something that just happened or is about to happen
- Second paragraph offers one perspective on it
- Third paragraph compares that perspective to another that basically agrees with it (but maybe points out minor differences)
- Fourth paragraph contrasts those perspectives to a really different perspective
- Fifth paragraph offers and even different perspective, or someone who brings a new question to the issue/event/object/etc
- Sixth paragraph argues which person you think is the most right and why
- Seventh paragraph shows how you would argue against the person you think is the most wrong (might point to another article with some concrete evidence)
- Eighth paragraph concludes without getting all wishy washy and saying “well, that’s my opinion but there’s a lot of opinions, what’s yours?”
I want to take some time and have you nail down what you will write about this week.
Medium Piece Volunteers
Need 2 or 3.
Homework
Read They Say, I Say chapter 3 (42-43). Use one of the templates from pages 46-47 as you draft your first medium piece. You can draft the piece in either Word or Google Docs (preferred, I’ll show you all google docs on Thursday). We will be meeting in the computer lab on Thursday (Ross 1240).
