And another sample blog assignment

English 201, Section 004

Commonplace Book—or, “equipment for living”

As you read in Chapter 1 of Rhetoric: A User’s Guide, the commonplace book is a traditional rhetorical tool, a book for collecting images, words, any scrap or snippet to aid the rhetorical canon of invention. In addition to offering a mechanism for developing ideas, the commonplace book supported its owner’s rhetorical education. Although we may not dedicate the time students once did to the work of invention, we do have excellent tools for collecting, storing, and sharing these pieces. The options are numerous, but for our purposes we will be using Tumblr, a microblog that allows you to “share anything”—and that’s exactly what you will be expected to do. The purpose of our commonplace book is twofold—to establish a collection of idea-developing marginalia and to develop intentionality in relation to our writing.

This assignment includes a lot of flexibility. Tumblr allows you to post text, photographs, quotations, weblinks, dialogue, and audio and video clips easily, and you are open to experiment with any and all of these. Again, the purpose is collect bits of inspiration. There are only two requirements/limitations related to content. First, you must post commentary for any links, photographs, or audio-visual clips. This commentary doesn’t need to be lengthy; a sentence should suffice. Second, your classmates will be required to read your Tumblr. With that in mind, do not include content that your classmates could construe as discriminatory, indecent, or harassing.

commonplace book reviews
Though the theme, content, and medium of the items you include in your commonplace book are open, the frequency is not. In order to receive an A on this assignment, you must post five times per week for thirteen weeks, and reblog/reply one time per week. You may start as soon as you like, but the clock will start running next week.

week	day	date	posts		reblogs/replies
			on date	total	on date	total
4	Thursday	9/15	10	10	2	2
7	Tuesday	10/04	15	25	3	5
9	Thursday	10/20	10	35	2	7
12	Tuesday	11/08	15	50	3	10
15	Thursday	12/01	15	65	3	13

If you maintain the schedule above, you will be on track to receive full credit for the assignment. Completing 85% (55/11) will earn a B, and so on. You will keep a Google spreadsheet log of both your posts and your replies/reblogs. You should keep it updated, but it must be current on the days we hold Commonplace Book Reviews.