I'm in the process of reading and commenting upon your reading responses from last week, and wanted to give you all a few pieces of information based on my readings of them.

First of all, your responses are by and large good. Some of you could bear to go into a bit more detail in your close readings -- carefully analyzing the issue as it is represented in the text, supporting your points with demonstrated evidence from the text, or from other texts, and so forth. Remember that these responses are meant to be the equivalent of about a one page paper. And remember that these are supposed to be a little bit more formal than your average blog post -- you need to pay attention to the conventions of good academic writing (including grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, etc., but also including citation formats, diction, structure, and other issues), as I'm assessing these responses both on the quality of the ideas they contain and on the clarity with which those ideas are expressed.

Second, on the tags: I'm cleaning up the tags we've used so far a bit, to create a bit of consistency. All posts must have tags, but don't overuse them -- creating too many similar tags makes things more confusing rather than more organized. (So, for instance, we had tags like "response," "reading response," "response 1," and "ST reading response"; I've combined all of these into "Response 1," so that all posts about that idea will be grouped together.)

Along that line, when you post your reading responses for this week, be sure to tag them "Response 2". A careful use of tags like this will help me to make sure that your reading responses are recorded properly.

Let me know if you have questions, and I'll look forward to seeing you all tomorrow.