Set up a blog (or journal) from an interface of your choosing, be it Middlebury’s wordpress (for instructions, see: go/wordpress), tumblr.com, livejournal.com, blogspot.com, or another interface. (If you use tumblr.com, you will need to install comments through disqus as instructed here and here.) Do take into consideration whether you want your blog to be available publicly; if you’d rather have the blog visible to only Middlebury students, choose Middlebury’s wordpress and speak with me to ensure the proper settings.

I encourage you to personalize your blog and have fun with it. Every week, you’ll write the minimum of two “reading distillation” posts, one post per assigned (bolded) reading, with each post averaging about 250-500 words. [You will not be writing responses to the Little Seagull Handbook readings, but we will be discussing them in class.] Each reading distillation post should be tagged “reading,” and should encompass the following points:

1. Summarize your sense of the main point of the essay; don’t talk around the essay but rather try to dig into the substance of the main point. For example, rather than: “This essay was about blogging,” something more along the lines of “This essay argues that blogging democratizes authorship possibilities, but only to a limited degree, as author agency is dependent on interface rules and blogging community culture.”
2.  What questions do you have of the essay? Are there points you are confused about/don’t fully understand/find contradictory?
3. What problems (if any) do you have with the essay’s argument? What critique (if any) would you make of the essay? Does it have holes or inconsistencies? (Feel free to say that you unabashedly love and are fully swayed by an essay’s argument, if that’s the case, but it’s always good to stretch your mind by looking for counterarguments, even if you don’t buy those counterarguments fully.
4.  What larger questions do you find yourself asking having read the essay? How might you usefully apply the ideas of the essay to larger issues, questions, or other contexts?

You can skip two responses, either over one week, or split over two weeks, over the course of the semester. Your reading responses are due to your blog by Sunday nights at midnight. Beyond the required readings, feel free to have fun with your blog; post pictures, embed video, link, reblog, whatever inspires you.

To keep in mind as you write your distillations:

1. Use simple sentence structure, and simple language. Avoid unnecessary jargon and passive construction.
2. Finish each thought before moving on. If this means you cover less ground in your distillation, so be it. Better to say less more fully than to say more but nothing at all. (I made a proverb!)
3. Use concrete language and engage with details. Don’t stay on the surface of ideas, but tangle with their specifics.
4. Draw on your own experience and perspective, but don’t simply agree and reject with no context. Read with an open mind, but don’t silence your own insights. But be aware where those insights come from, and if they just come from your gut (a la Stephen Colbert) then challenge yourself to question your assumptions.
5. When using quotes, pick the segments of the quote you will use very carefully, and always contextualize and build on your chosen quote. Summarize the idea in your own words (even if you’re including the quote) and connect it to your larger argument.
6. Always connect the different threads of your analysis/parts of your distillation.
7. Once you have a draft, take a break! Come back to your distillation fresh and try to read it with an outside eye. Does it make sense? Or have you condensed your ideas so that they make sense to you, but might not to an outside reader? (One great way to test this is to read each other’s distillation drafts and point out the confusing bits!) If you suspect that they need a bit more decoding, then go back and add on guiding sentences that help unpack and spell out what you mean at each point.