Anne Fernald has a great post on the process of selecting essays for a college reader. It’s something I have a little experience with myself, but Anne writes brilliantly about the process.
I also recall another emotion in this process: terror — terror at picking something that wouldn’t really inspire freshmen, but instead annoy, or worse, bore them.
But I wanted to comment a bit more about Anne’s frustration in finding blog posts to recommend. I’d have to agree — it’s difficult to find a single blog post that stands on its own in a collection of unrelated essays. Come to think of it, it’s also difficult to find an essay that does that. We pick essays that respond to each other in some way. Because essayists don’t have the luxury of linking to the texts they’re responding to, they have to give us at least enough context to show us the connection they’re making. Most of the time, when an essay is truly out of its original context — in a magazine, or as a chapter in a book — the cues the essayist provides us aren’t enough. The anthologist fills that gap by placing related essays together in a chapter, or writing an introduction to give needed details.
Newspaper columns are probably the worst, often responding to a particular event that happened a day or two before. When the event is fresh, the column makes sense, but a year or two later, most columns fall flat.
To anthologize blog posts, since the links are where most of the action is, you’d have to actually show what the links are, either with footnotes or by including the linked items in the anthology as well. But even that isn’t as graceful as a sly link integrated directly into the text. Sometimes just hovering over the link is enough — you get the sense of where the link is going and can anticipate what it’s going to say. Sometimes you have to follow the link, read what it says, and then get back to the original.
So I think the only effective way to create an anthology of blog posts would be to do it online, so students can have the experience the way the bloggers intended. Yeah, someone really ought to do that. It still wouldn’t be perfect, because by next semester half the links would be dead, but it might be a start, a way of showing that blogs are literature, too.
Well, we’ll see how good the Blooker Prize winners are. I tried to turn my blog into a blook and it was extremely frustrating. I kept in perhaps 100 posts (out of 1500+), with much editing to provide the context that was originally provided by links. In the end, I decided that I should re-think the whole thing before getting it published.
Thanks for the nod, Dave. I wonder about blogging and freshmen writing. One of the most exciting things about blogs is that they move so fast and the bar to getting started is so low: just log in to a free service and set up a blog! You’re a blogger. So, it seems like it would be fun to introduce some of that energy to students.
But energy and excitement is not the only goal of a freshmen writing class. And talking about what makes one blog good and another weak could easily devolve into something as pointy and off-putting as intruding into students IM messages to correct the grammar.
I condsidered starting a blog within my class this year and then let it go because I couldn’t figure out how to set the parameters without killing the spontaneity from go….
I was really talking about more about discussing blogs as literature more than using the activity of blogging as a pedagogical tool. I think you’re right — that an overemphasis on blogging in freshman comp could end up giving a misleading impression of what college writing’s all about.
That said, I think that many blog posts and especially interchanges do rise to the level of academic discourse, and teaching comp using blogs as a theme is in some senses no different from using “the abortion debate” or “gun control” as a theme. The point is just to have a starting-place, and some models of good writing. Then you still need to show students how to do formal academic writing.