In an effort to expand your writing repertoire, you are going to publish a blog, with new posts featured every three weeks. Blogs will be read by your classmates and your professor who are looking to be engaged and entertained by your work. Please see the course syllabus for information regarding how many blogs you will write, and thus, how many points they are apiece.
Each blog post must be at least 500 words in length and must be inspired by a model text, with that text linked at the end of the post. In other words, you’re going to keep your eyes and ears open for inspiring writing: in commercials, in songs, in TV shows, film, in social media posts, etc. You’ll base your blog post on one of those inspiring pieces. Posts should be published as best-attempt, revised and polished pieces for two reasons:
- You will want to present your best work to your audience (the Instructor and rest of the class). You should not want any glaring spelling or grammar errors (unless you are doing something creative with your blog that explicitly pertains to spelling and grammar).
- In addition to commenting on the work of others in the course, you will receive comments from others as well, and therefore want to ensure your commenters are not drawn to errors in your work that could have easily been resolved with some revision.
The Process:
Go to https://wordpress.com/.
Click “Get Started” or “Start your Website.”
WordPress will walk you through the remaining steps.
NOTE: When you choose your domain, the first web address on the list is FREE. I recommend you go with that one, and of course the “start with free” option when choosing a plan.
- Post your blog address in the Designated Discussion Forum for everyone’s viewing — (something like this: http://irockenglish.wordpress.com)
- Find and save model texts (see below).
- Draft, Revise, edit, and polish a blog post based on your model text(s) of choice.
- Publish your first blog post.
- Read and comment on at least three blog posts.
- Start thinking about your next post.
- The cycle starts again: pay attention to our schedule of due dates! Publish and review the work of others.
- Remember, blogs should be:
- 500-words minimum.
- Clearly inspired by a model text.
- Published as an engaging, entertaining, best-attempt, revised, polished piece.
Use the time in between blog posts to find more models, prewrite, plan, draft, revise, and polish.
• Aim to entertain and engage.
• Take risks! These low-stakes assignments give you the freedom to play and experiment.
• Give your classmates substantive comments. Note specifically what about posts you enjoyed, how you felt while reading, or what ideas you’re taking from their posts. What not to do
• Don’t wait until the last minute to write posts.
• Don’t base your writing on word count. If your goal each time is to get to 500 words, you’re not thinking about doing the work of creating a piece that’s clearly inspired by the model text. And you’re very likely going to cut your piece off before it’s done. Write first. Check word count last.
Potential Topics
This is not at all an exhaustive list. This is just a list of examples to help you think about the kinds of model texts you might want to use (and what the corresponding blog post might look like).
- Fan Fiction — Write a missing episode for your favorite series, an alternate ending to a movie you hated, or a voiceover script for a nature documentary. Make a villain the hero. Cast a plot in a markedly different time. Start with the original and do something different.
- One liner — Work from just one line. Maybe a great opening line from a book becomes a refrain in a poem or song. Maybe someone’s texted dinner drive-thru order becomes the ending to a love letter or “Dear John” note. Maybe verses from a Megan Thee Stallion or Lil Nas X song really sound like they should be part of an advertising campaign.
- What about an obituary? It could be for yourself, or for something abstract and not usually personified, such as the pandemic, bad weather, or a romantic relationship.
- Repurposed text — Could you write a song using only easily identifiable memes? Tell a story using your grandmother’s samosa recipe? Create a recipe from lines in dish soap commercials? Use the genre of a menu to create a non-food menu (with appetizers, main courses, drinks, etc.), like a menu of K-Pop songs or a menu of social justice movements?
- What about found or blackout poetry? If you can’t meet word count requirements with one poem, you could always build a collection of poems.
- Pure imitation — You’re reading something, listening to something, watching something. You think, Wow. I wish I could write like that. TRY IT. Try to imitate their sentence structure. Try to imitate the tone. Play with vocabulary the way they do. You could devote 500 words to 50 different attempts at one gorgeous sentence, or you could try to imitate a whole essay.
- Love letters to inanimate/underappreciated objects — Start with these love letters to trees and see where your mind takes you. I once wrote a love letter to light bulbs, because I felt it would be a unique experience, expressing such devoted feelings to something so commonplace that we all take for granted. Of course, this format could work for the complaint letter genre, too.
- You’ve read viral Amazon reviews, right? You could write some of your own.
- Back to the memes idea. What if you created a collection of memes for a non-meme time period? Or a fictional world? What do memes look like during the Han Dynasty? What about in Wakanda?
- Let’s talk greeting cards. There are all sorts of life events that good cards don’t yet exist for. You could use the greeting card genre to inspire a line of greeting cards for those events—like when you end a relationship with someone but you really miss their dog or when your plant dad friend loses his first succulent.
- McSweeney’s. There’s all sorts of fun to work from there, but I’m a big fan of their lists, like this one or this one or this one.
