weblog responses

After posting my first weblog responses I found myself still questioning whether or not I fulfilled the requirements of the assignment successfully. For this reason, I stopped by Dr. Fishman's office to gain further insight on what she is looking for in our individual posts. I found the information to be very useful (so much so that I think I'm going to further revise my initial posts) and thought I'd share the specifics of our conversation with all of you (I hope it helps!).

That being said, Dr. Fishman stressed the importance of engaging the text (this is not to be mistaken with summarizing the main points of the text). We can do this, for instance, by stating whether or not we agree with the author, pulling points from the text that support our argument, and then comparing and contrasting examples used in the text to examples that are pulled from our personal lives. For instance, in my post for Chapter 1 I discussed drinking and driving on college campuses. While my argument was solid it would have more fully met the demands of the assignment if I would have compared and contrasted the argument from my example to that of the taxi driver anecdote found in Chapter 1.

In short, we should always focus on the discussion found in the text, make an argument stemming from the text, support our argument with information from both inside the text and outside the text (i.e. other websites, personal insight, etc.), and finally compare and contrast our evidence with that of the authors.

This is just my interpretation of what I gathered from my meeting with Dr. Fishman. One thing that she also stressed is that she doesn't want any of us to feel like there is only one right way to do this. This is just one approach to writing a response.

*Note*
She also said that we could all make revisions on our responses if there is something we'd like to change in hindsight.