Today’s Plan:
- Clarifying Our Process
- Medium.com
- Article Exercise
- Homework
Clarifying Our Process
Here is how the next few weeks will work. You are producing 4 essays–one every two weeks. You will draft the essay one week (like this week). You will bring 3 paper copies of your draft to class on the Friday of a draft week. Again, this is a draft week. Your group will read your essays and discuss them in class on Friday. You will take the essay home and revise it. You will submit a revised draft of the essay to Canvas as a GOOGLE DOC LINK by 11:59am on Sunday. I will comment on those essays Sunday and Monday and hopefully not Tuesday.
We will then be in a publishing week. You will revise the essay according to my feedback and add new material. You will publish the essay to medium.com before Wednesday’s class. In class on Wednesday, you will read and comment on each other’s essays in medium.com. On Fridays, we will do some grade norming and workshopping to discuss writing more. Rinse. Repeat four times.
At the end of this four week cycle–sometime in November–you will select your favorite medium.com essay and revise it into a longer research paper. We will deal with that down the line.
Using Medium.com
Today we are going to set up medium.com accounts. We will walk through the process together. After we are done, I want to make sure everyone knows:
- Make sure they know how to put in a link
- Look at other medium essays for formatting–the use of images, headings, “pull out quotes” (the + tool)
- Make sure they all know the magic power of “CTRL +Z” (digital natives are unicorns)
- Talk about “tags” and the publish button. DO NOT PUBLISH TO MEDIUM UNTIL I TELL YOU.
- Make sure they know how to find their drafts when they go back to medium
Article Exercise
Once you’ve set up your medium.com account, I want you to “go public” on an article.
- Politics
- Education
- Sports
- Pop Culture (DnD, Burt Reynolds)
Kinds of comments.
Do something in Canvas. Use the template for summaries I introduced last class: [Author][Time] [Genre] [Title] [Claim]. [Evidence].
Homework
Finish drafting your first medium.com article. It should be around 700 words or so. Print out 3 copies for class on Friday over in CAND. Single-spacing is fine (save some trees), but don’t shrink the font or margins.
