Dear Jonathan,

Read a blog.  Write to your fellow classmate and reflect what you found interesting and generative about that blog.  You don’t have to read or write like an instructor.  Instead, be a generous classmate and try to witness what the other has done throughout the course of the semester. Post the result on the student’s blog in the comments and on your own blog as a Week 13 post.

Dear Jonathan, 

After reading your blog entries, what stuck with me was your frequent use of personal experiences to underscore your arguments and thoughts. I think in a blog entry this is a good way to extend your argument, and help bring an added dimension to the topic. However, it would be helpful to the reader if you did not purely rely on personal experiences as evidence. I would suggest that in the future you bring in direct quotes from the texts that we were examining as primary evidence. Although you often referred indirectly to the text, you never directly quoted anything. As a reader, this makes it hard to follow your reasoning and believe the arguments you are making. 

On this note I think it would be good to write in a manner where you assume that the reader has heard of the topic/text and knows the general gist, yet cannot remember all the details. I often felt like I was jumping into the middle of a conversation you were having with an acquaintance, which made it really difficult to follow what you are saying, and also made me less inclined to read on due to the resulting confusion I had. It seemed to me like I missed the context of what you were saying and I found myself having to remind myself what the prompt was you were responding to. This should not be necessary. I think if you apply a Point, Evidence, Explanation structure to your paragraphs, it will help strengthen your points and also help walk the reader through your arguments. Remember that you have to pick me, the reader, up where I am at that moment. 

I do feel like your responses became more detailed and structured towards the end when compared to your first blog entry, which I think is an improvement in engagement worth highlighting. In order to help you bring your writing to the next level I would suggest first of all deconstructing the prompt, by highlighting key words that might require a definition from you, as well as the nuances that have to be taken into account when responding to the given question. For example, for your blog entry on catharsis, I noticed that there was never any mention of how you were defining catharsis for the purposes of this blog. This was also a pattern I noticed in your other blogs (e.g. the blog on Brecht or even the second blog on translation). This is very important, as the more advanced the writing becomes the more important it becomes to clearly state what the “assumptions” are that your are making, or why you are defining it in that way. In the case of catharsis, you could have explained what Aristotle defined catharsis as by introducing direct quotes from the texts we read. 

In regards to definitions, I think you have to be careful with the wide sweeping statements that you make. I was especially put off by this in the blog where you had to adapt Antigone/Antigonik into a Brechtian form. By not providing any definitions of what it means for something to be Brechtian and relating your choices to this desired effect it seemed like you lacked deep understanding of what Brechtian is and means. For example, when you said “I don’t think that I would change the text of the scene, primarily because I really enjoy the language in Antigone.”, I was put off because your personal likes/dislikes do not govern the adaptation’s Brechtian nature. There seemed to be a common disconnect in your blogs that resulted from your personal tastes – which are very important but need to be put aside sometimes – dominating the conversation, often to the detriment of delving into the material.

From all your blog entries, I personally liked the portion of the ‘Waiting for Godot’ blog the most where you suggested staging it on a bus in order to highlight the perpetual waiting of homeless people or other “outcasts” of society on a salvation. I thought that was a great idea, and I found it would have been a really interesting staging in reality. I think there were some good nuggets in that thought, albeit it was not elaborated on too much. 

Lastly, I know that these are blog entries, and not essays so the rigid structure of an essay is not entirely necessary. However, I felt that the use of informal language and the very conversational style of the entries detracted rather than added to the content. I would find myself getting caught up and put off by the clash between the very colloquial vernacular and the more serious topics you were discussing. I don’t think this requires writing in ‘high-academic’ language where we as readers do not understand the vocabulary used, however I think making it less conversational would have added more clarity, both in terms of diction and grammar.

All the best, 

Kami