Assignments
Due Dates for all assignments are listed on the schedule.
Grade Values
- Reading Journal — 40%
- Journal Evaluation — 20%
- Book Review — 40%
Reading Journal
After each unit of reading on the syllabus, you will produce a 500 word journal entry tracking your reading experience of that chunk. What things did you notice when reading? These journals can discuss things you enjoyed or found confusing while reading, how you managed the reading, things you are finding curious about the author’s style, or anything else you think is important or relevant to documenting how you are experiencing the course reading.
These reading journal entries will be posted to a blog on Blackboard. You need to include your entry in the body of the blog entry. Entries that are posted as attached files will be given a grade of 0.
Journal Evaluation
Having completed the above reading journal, I want you to reflect on your reading practices. Do you see a change over the semester? Do you think you are a good reader? An attentive reader? Does keeping a journal of what you are thinking about while reading help you enjoy novels more? Do you think it is a distraction?
In addition to possibly answering these (or other) questions, this evaluation asks you to generally reflect on your reading practices and what you learned by thinking about them. How did you manage the schedule? Did you primarily read paper copies of the texts or were you using an eReader. How did you find either experience?
This reflection, addressing both the process of keeping a journal and the media in which you did the course reading, will take the form of a 1000 word paper detailing your reading experiences.
Book Review
You will write a book review for one of the books we have read this semester. A book review is a special form of writing that helps others decide whether or not to read a book. These reviews are generally witty but also have to be concise and considerate. You will have exactly 500 words in which to explain the salient plot details of the book, provide background information on the novel including background on the author and any information about awards won, as well as evaluate the novel according to criterion you design. As a rule, book reviews are easier to write when you have strong feelings (negative or positive) for a book you read. In general, though, the point of this kind of writing is to capture whether or not someone should read a given book and to document why. You are strongly encouraged to read this brief tutorial on writing book reviews from Purdue’s OWL and might want to take a look at the New York Times’s archive of book reviews.