Monday, July 9, 2007

Welcome, Writing Students in WRIT1 and WRINT!

Greetings, all 四應外一 students (in the Basic English Writing class) and students in the Intermediate Writing class. I'm Dr. Chris O'Brien.
This is the home blog for our class 5511,
初級寫作(一), or Basic Writing I, nicknamed WRIT1, and the Intermediate Writing class, nicknamed WRINT, in your own Google Group nickname and elsewhere.

During the first week of this semester, you should do several things.

1. Send me your information from my homepage (www.yuntech.edu.tw/~oshuhua/)
2. Join up to my Google Group from the same homepage, reading my special instructions and using the right kind of "nickname": WRIT1, underscore, then your English name, underscore, and then the last 3 digits of your student number, like this: WRIT1_Nelly_063. All email you send me should use this nickname in the subject line, please.
3. Set up a free blog on Blogspot (www.blogger.com)--please do not use a blog service where everything is written in Chinese, as I don't read Chinese.
  • Please do not have music playing on the blog, and let me see the text of your posts when I view the page with your blog (some services such as "yam.com" or "wretch" break these rules a lot, so please avoid them. Life's too short to keep turning off your music or search separate pages just to see what you wrote.)
  • Also, please set up your blog so that anyone can comment; sometimes in the past people had me beg for permission just to give them instructive comments--what a drag! Path from Blogger: Dashboard > Settings > Comments > Who can comment? USE "ANYONE"
4. Please respond to this post (in other words, comment) and give me your Group nickname and the address of your blog.
  • You should get started writing during the first week of classes.
  • Please use ""WRIT1" as a tag or label for each of the posts on your own blog that you want me to grade, so I can see them all together, apart from any personal posts that I should ignore.
  • You should write three times a week or more every week for this semester.
  • Please remember that this is practice for college writing, so please use good grammar and spelling, and use paragraphs. Please use a spell-checker and grammar checker before you post.
  • Remember that the goal is to practice writing carefully and correctly, frequently! I won't grade more than one post per day, so don't bother "scatterposting," that is, posting twelve times in one day, as some students have actually tried to do before!
I'll update this post as the semester approaches. Have fun writing!


Chris O'Brien