She-Hulk and Academic Writing

So far, now we’ve talked about genres in terms of how they play out in music or popular media and how they play out when we call them “disciplines” and embed them in our universities.

What I’d like you to do for Friday is think about ways in which blogging, pop culture and academics might overlap.

First off, I’d like you all to watch this video. This comes to us via Australia and a fashion/comic book blogger named Cazz. Every month, Cazz takes a break from a picture-and-text heavy post to film a Comic Book Roundup, in which she reviews a trio of recent comic books. The July video is Friday’s reading assignment and for Friday’s blog, you’ll write a response detailed below.

(In case my embedding doesn't work or you'd like to check out more [I highly recommend it, both for personal fun and for writing your response] here's a link.)

Then, pick one of these prompts to write about. I know it’s hard to pick just one, but narrowing your focus is an important way to begin a larger writing project. It will also allow you to go more in depth with each topic. Since this week, you’ll also be commenting on your classmates’ posts, I would recommend picking a post to comment on that’s a different post than the one you wrote about.

1)   How is Nerdburger an effective communicator in this video? Be specific about her appeals to the audience, topics and strategies. In what easy is this specific to the genre of blogging and in what ways is it good writing in general?

2)   How is Nerdburger an effective writer in her video? What are the similarities between this, as a (good or bad) representative of the blogging genre and the genre of academic writing, as you understand it? What is the same and what is different? How could one imporove the other?

3)   How is Nerdburger an effective blogger in this video? You may want to poke around at her blog or others in order to write about how she wins and maintains an audience, keeps a discourse going on her site, creates a sense of presence and so on. How can what you see in Nerdburger’s blogging be applied to our own class blog in posts? In discussions?

Finally, I’d like you to end your post (remember, about 500 words, or one whole page, single-spaced) with at least three expectations you have for class blogs. For example, here are mine:

1)   Blog posts will look at one topic or view in depth, providing multiple views, forwarding arguments and asking open-ended questions for commenters.

2)   Discussion posts will be thoughtful, critical, polite and longer than one sentence. They will raise questions and answer questions posed by the blogger.

3)   Blog authors will respond to comments by other classmates.

Yours don’t have to be like mine. Consider your experience reading online, posting discussions in class via Canvas, face to face discussions and more as you think about what you’d like these blogs to become over the semester (remember: you’ll be spending a LOT of time with them.)

Have a good week/weekend, guys! As always, contact me with questions (Twitter’s good for short ones.)