T Blog

Today and yesterday (Wed 4/16 and Thu 4/17) were individual conferences, so we didn’t have class, and with the beautiful weather, I think it was pretty good timing! Conferences will continue for the first part of next week (Monday and Tuesday) and then we return to regular classes with that big 15-20 page peer draft.

Tips for the research and writing project: All drafts should have a works cited list, and we’re using MLA style for documentation. See page 412 of Hacker for a sample Works Cited list. To cite an entire website, see Hacker 389. A page or “short work from a website” is page 390, and your articles from Academic Search Premier are cited like a “work from a service such as Infotrac” on page 391 and 394.

For integrating quotes, review Graff Chapter 2 and 3.

Finally, every essay needs a strong claim. A claim or thesis statement should be an assertion, an arguable statement that a reasonable reader could disagree with. Then the essay has something to prove and the reader has a reason to keep reading. Or if you need a more practical reason to present a strong thesis in your introduction, you’re unlikely to be able to get an A on your essay if it’s just a “data dump.”

If you’re looking for blogs on your topic, check out Technorati at http://www.technorati.com. They have a great search engine. And of course, don’t forget the massive number of social computing examples tagged in my del.icio.us bookmarks: http://del.icio.us/mendhamt/socialcomputing.

You’ve just completed HW 41, and HW 42, the first podcast, is due at the beginning of next week. You have the directions, and they’re also on the Documents for ITW 101 page.

Have a good weekend, and good luck with your essay writing!

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 6:51 pm and is filed under What We Did in Class on ___. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.