Welcome to English 209 and to the Spring 2016 semester!

This course blog is an online extension of our classroom space. It's a paperless way for me to make important course information accessible to you from any Internet-accesible computer. I hope you will explore and use the course information supplied here. Be sure to check this blog often for new information useful to your success in this course. I will also use this space to post queries for your response, course announcements, and other news or events of interest to literary research scholars. Please feel free to post any initial questions or comments about the course here.

I look forward to working with you this semester.

Sincerely,

Dr. Brown

Online Class Post for Monday, March 19, 2012

What did you learn?
How will you apply it?

I hope you had a good spring break!

Instead of meeting synchronously today, you'll post a comment here as per the homework assignment listed in the course syllabus. The assignment is to reflect on your learning experiences from writing the Short Research Essay and to articulate here, in one paragraph, how you will apply that learning to choosing a topic for, researching, and/or writing the Long Research Essay. This assignment counts as one participation grade and is due by midnight tonight, on 3/19/12.

Research Writing Assignment for Friday 2/10/12

Your Go-to Site

Chapter 17 in A Short Guide to Writing About Literature, "Writing a Research Paper," provides excellent models for bibliographic citation of various types of sources, a sample literary research paper, a draft editing checklist, and advice for sites (both online and print) to begin searching for secondary sources. This chapter is an especially important guide as you continue your preliminary research and move from the proposal to drafting an essay.

Assignment: In a two-paragraph comment to this blog post, identify the resource site that has proved most useful for you. I'm hoping that we can share the particular online databases, print bibliographies, genre companions, etc., that have become our go-to sites whenever we need to find additional research on our topics. Your comment should include a way for others to find this site, explain how it has been useful to you, note any disadvantages, and include your recommendations for how it might be useful to other literary researchers.

In order to post a comment here, you must have an online account compatible with Blogspot. You may use either an existing online account like your SU gmail account or set up a new one expressly for online work in this class. You may use whatever online moniker you prefer (barring the offensive). After the semester is over and final grades issued, you are free to disable any online account you used for this class. This assignment counts as one participation grade and is due by midnight on 2/10/12.