In this course, you will need to bring a notebook and pen to every lesson. If you have the Oxford Wordfinder, any other monolingual (English-English) dictionary, or vocabulary book, they may be useful, too.
In the second semester, we will build on the blogging ability that you learned in the first semester. To benefit from the course, you should be able to:
- write a blog post, without feeling that it's a big job
- write a reasonably interesting one-paragraph post in 10 minutes
- write a comment on someone else's blog
- use tabs to switch between different web pages
- use keyboard shortcuts (Command-T, A, C, V, Tab)
- send photos to your blog
- find time regularly to blog outside of class time, even if it is only a short time
- read a very easy and short English book in about 30 minutes
If you cannot yet do some of these things, please learn them quickly, because after the first 2-3 weeks I will assume everyone can do these things. I will be happy to show people how to do these things individually until about the middle of October. But If you come to me in December asking me how to open a new tab (for example), I will know that you haven't been studying seriously. In cases like this, don't be surprised if you fail the course!
In the first semester, it may have taken some of you a long time to become accustomed to using the computer for writing. Typing, logging in, making links, using tabs -- all these things may have been difficult for you. Therefore, it was difficult to make strict rules about how much blogging you should do (though most people worked quite hard and there are some very nice blogs). In the second semester, everyone should already be used to using the computer, so you should be able to write much more. Try to always be aware of how much writing you have done. If you copy all your writing to a Word document, for example, how many pages are there? If you were taking a conventional writing course (e.g. handing in a "report" every week), would this quantity be enough? One advantage of blogging is that it helps you to write casually and enjoy writing, and therefore write more. Please make sure that it doesn't work in the opposite way for you!
I will give you more details later, but as a guideline I suggest that 500 words per week is a reasonable target. This would mean about 7000 words during the semester.
Earlier, I mentioned conventional writing courses. One feature of conventional writing courses that we haven't done yet is looking at the quality of your writing in terms of grammar and vocabulary. The main reason for this is that to improve your writing you need self-awareness, and to learn self-awareness you need to have a lot of your own writing to work with. This semester you will learn how to use your own writing as a tool to improve.
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