PREPARATION FOR 4/23 (PORTFOLIO WORKSHOP AND NEXT-ROUND WIKIPEDIA)

Dear Everyone:

Nice work during Thursday's workshop. In our final week, there is much to do, so I promised a blog post to help you prepare.

Portfolio Workshop
As a reminder, Tuesday's portfolio workshop will be conducted as a peer review with an emphasis on navigating and user-testing each other's portfolios. This means you will need to have the following in place by the beginning of class time:

• your portfolio's structure (either on blogger.com or in your preferred application, though I highly recommend just reconfiguring your blog, since you have been working so hard on it all semester)
• your portfolio's design (by which I mean both its look and its rhetorical velocity, where the visualization of your portfolio is actually demonstrating to viewers some of what makes rhetorical delivery so complex)
• an overview page with summative statements (where needed) and all linked contents (at minimum, this should include Short Assignments and major assignments, as well as your analytical essay)
• a full draft of your analytic reflection (either as a linked document or as a page on your portfolio)
• at least one of the major assignments revised in final form (you do not need to have all of them revised for this peer-review workshop)

Wikipedia Article Draft
Also as a reminder, by the beginning of Tuesday's class, we need to have the Wikipedia article completed. I will then move it into our Wikipedia project space and assign the final round of editing tasks. So, this means you will need to have the following done in our Google Drive Class Space by the beginning of class time:

• all content finished and clarified (I believe only 2 groups have content outstanding);
• your editing task complete (see the workshop document for the various categories, as well as the pages on Wikipedia and in WWC and Style that are serving as our editing guide;
• all bracketed call-outs resolved and removed, all editing marks resolved and removed;
• all endnotes inserted with full citations.

Please do give it your all; I'm checking Google Drive frequently, so I have a good sense of who is doing what. But also, at this point you all "own" all sections of the article, so your expertise matters in all of it.

Looking forward to next week,
-Prof. Graban

 

PREPARATION FOR 4/18 (PEER WORKSHOP 2)

Dear Everyone:

You know you have done a great job of drafting intensely -- and are doing a good job of editing intensely -- when the draft metamorphoses into something messy before the next phase. Welcome to the messiness! As you all start taking ownership of each other's sections, we'll move forward in editing teams, so as to focus on the integrity and coherence of the content, and so as to work towards smoothness of language and tone. (And in reality, those things work together, rather than as separate categories.)

Based on today's workshop, please make any major organizational changes (e.g., moving material into or out of your section, of copying/pasting between sections) as soon as possible, to ensure that content is at least located where it needs to be in the article. Then, by the beginning of class time on Thursday, please have completed your editing assignment directly in the Class Space on Google Drive. Here is the list of editing groups for which you volunteered:

• Cohesion: Jenn Gaudreau, Stacey Cox, Morgan Hough
• Explainers: Lindsey Sullivan, Amanda Diehl, Erik Reed
• Perspective Checkers: Donovan Todd, Catalina Quintana, Katherine Saviola
• Tone and Stance: Tyler Avery, Shay Morant, Rachel Young
• Readability and Word Choice: Rachel Cushanick, Brittany Morrill, Austin Tillery, Brittany Stephens
• Quotations (especially formatting and what to do with long quotes): Jordan Spina, Cassie Hamilton
• Fact Checkers: Anneleise Sanchez, Joey Arellano, Nick Pelton
• Paragraph Focus: Chris Menendez, Danae VanPortfliet

This time, you are taking control of the whole article for your particular task. Please use the "Wikipedia Peer Review 1" handout to guide you (if you don't have a hard copy, you can find it in BB "Handouts" at the very bottom of the list), since I offered up some examples from the actual article and even pointed you towards relevant resources, online and off. So in other words, those resources are our editing guide for this next phase.

You'll be working individually, which means it is possible that even those of you working on quotations might come up with different solutions to what you see as similar problems; this is perfectly fine. Edit and resolve what you can -- after all, you are giving each other permission to do so -- but if you are hesitant or unsure about making a major change, feel free to call it out in {{boldfaced double brackets}}.

At the beginning of class on Thursday, I will move our first revised version into a Wikipedia project space where it will live for a week as we do our second round of editing -- which will involve a whole new set of editing teams.

Much fun ahead!
-Prof. Graban

PREPARATION FOR 4/16 (PEER WORKSHOP 1)

Dear Everyone:

As a reminder, we are following the syllabus and Wikipedia assignment sheet, which means that Tuesday's class will serve as a guided peer workshop for the first full (and polished) draft of our Wikipedia article. I'm asking for a "completed and well-rendered draft of your section of the article." By the beginning class time tomorrow, please be sure that your group has pasted its completed section into the shared class document.

Much has to happen by the end of our class period, including making final decisions about copying and pasting content between or among sections, and making final decisions about editorial roles. Thus, writing groups whose sections are incomplete will slow down the class and be unable to receive credit for the peer review.

Also, please bring to class the following:

• When Words Collide
• Style
• Wikipedia assignment sheet
• Portfolio assignment sheet (if you have lingering questions)
• "Twinkie" book review (from Thursday's class)
• sources or references you came across that are essential to your section of the article and/or to someone else's.

We will devote the first part of our workshop to a quick discussion of how we would rewrite the book review as a plot/book summary for Wikipedia, and we'll most likely take up some lingering questions from last Thursday's workshop on "Coherence, Cohesion, Rhythm, and Grace."

Looking forward to it,
-Prof. Graban