Intro Interactive – ICM501a

The response paper or seminar paper is the mainstay of graduate courses in the humanities and social sciences. It is a bit like a mini-review essay. It asks the participant to critique and reply to a particular reading. Throughout my own graduate career, more than half of the courses I took had periodic response papers due, and they almost never told you what was expected. They sometimes included questions, but more often, they asked you to come up with your own questions to answer. There is method to this ambiguity: response papers represent an opportunity to discover your own voice, draw upon your own intellectual history and reading, and integrate ideas in a unique way. Basically, you are using the readings and materials as a springboard for your own ideas and critiques. I cannot tell you how to write the perfect response paper any more than I can tell you how to paint your own masterpiece.

That said, I can offer some hints and directions, some things that a response paper should and shouldn’t have:

• A response paper should tell a story. When you do the readings and engage in other material, you should absolutely be pulling out observations and otherwise make note of how the reading makes you feel. You should be looking (and copying/highlighting/underlining) passages that you can use as evidence in your response paper. But simply copying those into an unordered list of observations is not enough. Having analyzed the materials, your paper should endeavor to synthesize your observations into a whole. You should choose your most intriguing ideas and weave them into a story; ideally into a story that draws from most or all of the materials, as well as outside sources and personal experiences.
• A response paper should have an argumentative thesis, and this should be stated explicitly. You should be presenting a point of view, and a point of view that you can demonstrate with evidence. If I get to the end of the first paragraph and don’t know what your thesis is, you need to revise that first paragraph.
• While you are arguing for a particular case, it shouldn’t just be opinion. I don’t particularly care if you like or agree (or dislike or disagree) with the readings, unless you can use that opinion toward the readings to form a strong case, backed with clear evidence. In other words “I thought this was dumb,” doesn’t get us very far, but “here’s where the author is wrong, and here’s a better alternative argument,” is good.
• Terrible title “Response paper #3.” Great title “The Remarkable Case of the Missing Breadcrumbs.” Try for interesting titles–followed by interesting responses. I should be able to identify your response papers without too much difficulty because of the content and frequent reference back to the assigned material. If I can’t, that is a problem.
• The very first sentence of your response paper should grab the reader’s attention and refuse to let go. A response paper without a good hook won’t hold the interest of your reader.
• Likewise, each paragraph should have a clear topic sentence. I should be able to say in a few words what the paragraph is attempting to do and why it is important to the rest of the response paper.
• Your response paper should be interesting to a reader not in the class. That doesn’t mean you should recapitulate the readings–you are not writing Cliff’s Notes (or at least not for your response paper). Because you are introducing an innovative and creative idea that you have come up with while engaging the materials, you should be able to convince someone who hasn’t engaged in this stuff to try to.
• Use hyperlinks. We are writing on the web, and hyperlinks strengthen your argument. Likewise, use of images and video, when appropriate, can make your response stronger. One student in a previous class made very nice use of appropriate video clips to provide examples of what she was arguing.
• Use examples. I expect you will be writing responses that are fairly conceptual, which is a good thing, but anchor these in real examples from the real world.
• Use subheadings. The response papers need not be very long, but they will probably be long enough to require subheads. Especially when writing for the web, subheadings increase the scannability of your writing and are strongly recommended. If you go on for three or four paragraphs without a subhead, it becomes more difficult on a screen.
• Double-space between paragraphs, and do not indent. People reading the web expect this as the norm. It also avoids the problems of the “wall of text.”
• Read others’ blogs first. If you are merely repeating their arguments–even unintentionally–your response it redundant. If, on the other hand, they write something similar to your own thinking, and you can link to their entry (to the permalink for their entry), you’ve killed two birds with one stone.
• When you cite the readings, you may use whatever method you most prefer. The ideal is to be able to hyperlink to the appropriate article or book–but don’t hyperlink to sites that require the course password, as this will only be helpful to those who are in the course.
• There are no particular length requirements for the response paper. A response paper is too long when it is longer than necessary to describe your ideas. If it is too long, it is unlikely your peers in the class will give it a careful reading. TL;DR. It is too short when you have failed to say something interesting, or when you have said something interesting, but failed to provide evidence and a compelling argument to go with it.
• You might find this PDF explaining a response paper, and this PDF of an example of one, to be helpful resources.
• The rubric for grading your blogs generally applies also to the response paper. In addition, I will be looking for a demonstration that you have read and understood the readings; that you have formed a strong, well-supported argument; that you have structured your essay well, drawing on possible criticism and deflecting any problems, providing a clear roadmap of what is to come early on in the essay and strong introductions and conclusions; and that you have crafted a clear and well-organized entry, devoid of problems in style, diction, grammar, and spelling.

I know you have questions! Ask them below.

Last year very few new students had actually even heard of Twitter. That’s changed, and now most of you have probably at least heard of Twitter, and many probably have used it.

There are a couple of ways of understanding Twitter. If you understand how blogging works, then you might think of Twitter as a micro-blog: a collection of very short blog posts.

Or maybe it’s like texting, but CCing the world.

Or maybe it’s like the “awareness” function of Facebook and other social networking sites, without all the rest of the junk.

In any case, what is really a very basic tool has become popular–perhaps in part because it is so simple. Signing up is easy, just go to the site and get an account. And actually “tweeting” is easy too: just type in the box. And this is where most users of Twitter stop. Yes, it’s easy, but what’s the point? Without a community of others following you, it seems pretty silly to tweet. (If no one hears your tweet, have you even really tweeted?)

So, you want people to “follow” you; that is, you want them to pay attention to what you have “tweeted.” How do you do that? Well, you could tell people in your Facebook network that you are tweeting. Or you could add it to your signature on emails. Or you could indicate it on the “about” page of your blog. If your on TV, you can tell your listeners. Heck, maybe you can even beat out Ashton Kutcher.

Or you can follow people and hope they might follow you back. These days, that’s less likely, because folks might assume you are a spammer until you prove otherwise. Finally, you can “retweet” interesting posts you see. This may lead folks to follow you.

But generally: say something interesting! No one cares what you had for breakfast. Think about how to be original in less than 140 characters.

When you tweet something related to the class, but sure to include #501a somewhere in the post.

And you may want to follow @halavais and @quicm.

Finally, this site has some great advice on making good use of Twitter, and you may want to give TweetDeck a try, both because it makes Twitter easier, and because it provides a nice example of using Adobe’s AIR platform.

One of the things I’m asking you to do in your first week is set up an aggregator and add some things to it. But lets not get ahead of ourselves. First, what is an aggregator?

An aggregator is also sometimes called a “feed reader” which leads us to wonder, what is a feed? A feed is a machine-readable version of a regularly updated site. When the site changes, the feed is updated, and programs can check these feeds and show them to you. (Another word for feeds is RSS, but I am trying to get away from that, since it isn’t as clear and descriptive as “feed.”)

I’m going to recommend you set up an aggregator on Google Reader. There are lots of others, but Reader is my current favorite. Once you set up an account, you can subscribe to several sites. Subscribing on Reader is pretty easy, since it will go out and find the feeds for you. If you put the URL of the site in Reader as a subscription, it should be able to go out and autofind the feed.

What should you sign up for? Naturally, it’s a good idea to add this blog. I would also recommend adding the blogs I’ve listed over to the right as “Regular Reads.” You may also want to add the blogs of some of your colleagues in the class.

Finally, you should add at least one other feed–one that you think is particularly interesting. Then post to your blog, and let us know about your aggregating experience, and what your “extra” feeds are, and why you added them.

Now, rather than running around the web trying to find out what’s new, you just have to go to your aggregator.

Welcome to ICM501a for the fall of 2009. I’m very excited to get started, and I hope you are too. Please note that the tabs up top give you access to the syllabus and the modules for the course.

As you get your first posts up, I will link to them from the blogroll on the right.

On to module 1!