LB 492 Blog Post 2 Assignment: Radioactive
Most of you have done a great job with your first blog posts! We hope Medium.com, and the medium of blogging, are working for you. A few pointers for the next round:
- Make sure you’re spending some time on the structure and formatting of your post. While these are not formal academic essays, they are each small opportunities to write for the public. Things like clear paragraph breaks, headings/subheadings, and yes, even bulleted lists, are clues for your readers.
- If you have trouble knowing when to start a new paragraph, make a short outline before you write (do this anyway!). A paragraph should have only one main idea. One sentence that makes a claim. The rest of the paragraph should support the claim with further reasoning and evidence (usually examples).
- You also may want to type out the text in Google docs or Word and then paste into Medium and format, just be sure you format.
- Don’t be afraid to show your personality and creativity. Think of a clever title, add an image or two, and play with your personal writing voice. Be sure you are making deliberate choices, otherwise a casual tone might come off as sloppy. But one of the great appeals of blogging is that you can use informal language and slang when it’s appropriate.
- Hyperlinks are your friends! Any time you are referring to ideas, articles, videos, etc. that might be of interest to your reader, you should be hyperlinking directly too the source. This is also part of providing attribution rather than a formal bibliography (though we always love a bibliography; who doesn't?).
And now, for this week’s prompt:
Think about what it was like to read the first part of Radioactive. What are the affordances (and limitations) of presenting Marie Curie’s life and work in this way? How is it different from more traditional treatments of science and scientists? Draw on ideas from the Art as a Way of Knowing Conference Report (last week’s readings) and on Radioactive to help you answer these questions.
To practice using quotes effectively, please use at least one quote from Radioactive and one quote from Art as a Way of Knowing.
When you use a quote in an essay or blog post, you want to make sure you don’t just drop in a quote without context. You want to explain the quote in the context of the original piece and to articulate how it helps shape your argument. Finally, you want to give the author credit and cite the source in some way. UNC at Chapel Hill has a nice guide to using quotes.
Please use the tags LB492 and 492Post2 (our thinking on tags is evolving).
As always, if you have any questions, feel free to comment with them here or to email us.
