Click here EN220 Blackboard Page to enter the discussion group on Blackboard

You will be responsible for writing ten email messages during the course and responding to ten email messages other students write. Both your message and your response should be done as part of your weekly homework assignment, and will be graded on a weekly basis every day. If you miss your posting and your reponse for the week, you will lose your points for them.

Posts should be around a minimum of 200 words in length but generally not exceed 400 words. Replies should be about 100 to 200 words in length. At the end of each post or reply, write the number of words in parentheses like this: (267 words)

Strong Recommendation: write your postings on a word processor, like Microsoft Word, that has a spelling/grammar checker. Then copy and paste the text into the body of the Blackboard post. In Microsoft Word, easily get your word count by highlighting your own text (not the quote), then go to the Tools Menu, then go down to Word Count.

All weekly posts are due by Monday midnight (Tuesday morning, 12 AM)

All weekly replies are due by Wednesday midnight (Thursday morning, 12 AM)

This assignment is worth 100 points for your ten emails and 50 more points for your ten responses to other emails.

The email messages you send as posts should include concise critical commentary or observations about a reading passage from the syllabus covered during the week. This could include a continuation of a class discussion about the passage or work, a curiosity about an aspect of a work, a critical interpretation, a challenge or disagreement to what has been stated concerning the work in class or other material of an academic nature. Avoid merely posing questions that offer no answers--you should express an intellectual stance or position of some sort!!! Include your word count in parentheses at the end of each of your posts (253 words).

Alternatively, you could post about a scene from a science fiction movie or television program that you have watched and studied. The scene should be described in detail, then you should analyze the scene for content, theme and relationships to other works in the course.

Make sure your subject line identifies your post as the official post to be graded by beginning with "Post One: Aldiss's Toys" or "Post Two: LeGuin's Symbols", etc., the posting number should be followed by the subject of the post, as shown.

Your replies or reponses to other student's posts should be thoughtful and worthy of typical college classroom discussion. Try to add to the student's comments or observations by adding some of your own thoughts, comments and observations. You should reply to messages that have NOT be replied to yet or have only been replied to once. Include your word count in parentheses at the end of each of your replies (150 words). To repeat: you should NOT reply to a message that already has been replied to twice before. If you do so, you will lose points for your reply. Rather, reply to posts that 1) have no other replies or 2) that only have one reply.

[Return to O'Conner's E220 Home Page] [Return to O'Conner's Main Millikin Home Page]