Lydgate

I'm up in the rafters of our new house, which is under renovation, and I feel myself fall through. I wake up with a powerful jolt. I'm awake in time to feel my body fall back onto the bed.

Your Job

Create a web-based version of the research project you completed for your Honors Essays. Web versions should be 1,500 words (or fewer) in length and enhanced by both images, links, and a list of suggested readings.

Drafts are due in class next week; please bring copies of images, links, and suggested readings with you. Boone Gorges is designing the templates for our course web site, and he'll come to class to walk you through the technical details involved. We're using Movable Type for this, so it should be pretty straightfoward.

Advice

1. Think carefully about audience; revise your essay so that it will appeal to a broad range of smart, curious readers. (The challenge will be achieving this without dumbing down your ideas or research.)

2. Use headings and sub-headings to organize your material.

3. Choose images that will draw readers in AND make sense in terms of themes and content. Place these images strategically.

4. If you want, you can make a downloadable version of your original essay available.

Writing for the Web

Take a look at some of the links below, all of which contain advice for writing for the web. Notice that they give a variety of advice, much of it consistent, some of it contradictory. Think critically about this advice. We will draw on it when we workshop your drafts in class next week. Notice the information they all provide about readers on the web, "chunking" content, and the importance of summary material and sub-heads.

Writing for the Web (Dartmouth University)

Writing for the Web (Penn State)

Writing for the Web by Daniel Will-Harris

Writing for the Web: Guidelines for MIT Libraries

I had a dream that my friend Matthew, a poet and English professor, had organized a poetry reading in some small but grand city (like the one in The Unconcoled?). He read a fantastic poem about an elephant. Then, a woman with blonde hair, who looked like a stereotypical librarian--pastel cardigan, glasses, tidy haircut, pearls--got up and read a riveting poem called "Good Thoughts." The conceit of the poem, which was mainly interior monologue, was that it was absurd to assign value to thoughts. It documented the range of her thoughts over the course of a day or so, but was then punctuated by reflection on the absurdity of deeming some of them good and some bad (meaning either immoral or unproductive or somehow damaging).

When I woke, I found myself fascinated by the question of evaluating thoughts. We have some control over what we think, but certainly much less than total control. Surely, some of what we think leads to positive outcomes and some to negative. But the cause and effect relationships are hazy, indirect, and unpredictable most of the time. Self-help gurus suggest that positive thinking will change our lives, and I believe in cognitive therapy enough to believe that this is largely true. As I type, I'm also struck by the fact that Freud's work was about stripping value judgments off the contents of what he called the unconscious, one particular form of thought.

I'm thinking I might use the poet in my dream's idea about "good thoughts" as the kernel of some writing, which is what interests me most about the dream. I think I may use it in both a nonfiction essay and in a fiction project I'm hatching. I'm always on the lookout for material to cull from dreams, and I may have found one!

For some reason I'm in LA, with many of my closest friends, looking at a vacation house development. This one is designed to appeal to people who wouldn't normally buy a house in a development. All the houses are small cabins, the place is supposed to be a 100% eco-friendly, sustainable environment. It's on a hillside some place that looks like Laurel Canyon. The houses are made of wood and stone-- or seem to be.

I'm with a bunch of people, including the developers, who have just about convinced us all to buy. My partner, Dave, finds a pile of unrecycled waste, including a bunch of broken furnaces (in LA?). He starts picking through them and isn't pleased by what he sees. The sun starts to set, and next thing I know, he's disappeared into the woods and there are helicoptors overhead. Starsky and Hutch arrive. They're hunting for Dave, because he's a fugitive.

Next thing I know my friends Danny and Julia disappear too. It seems that someone has forced Danny to kidnap Julia. Starsky and Hutch are looking for them too.

It's night when the hunt really gets going. It spans the whole of LA--the hills, the streets, etc. It takes place in bushes and in alleys. It lasts a long time, but eventually, Starsky and Hutch start to realize that Dave is the good guy and the developers are evil. He had uncovered their plot to sell houses made of cardboard, outfitted to be eco-friendly stone and wood strcutures, to a bunch of unsuspecting would be environmentalists.

Eventually, Starsky and Hutch find Dave in the underbrush in the woods. Starsky carries him down the hill. They find Julia and Danny in the parking lot of donut shop. The developers go to jail. But Julia can't quite forgive Danny. In fact, none of us can really figur out why he kidnapped her.

http://qcpages.qc.cuny.edu/Writing/dreams/

Here's a site with an HTML color chart, with codes.

Hi everybody. Let's use this forum to nominate, discuss, (and maybe even vote on) titles for our conference on May 16. I'll nominate two:

The Art & Science of Dreaming (too dull?)

Royal Roads to the Unconscious?: The Art & Science of Dreaming

Use the comments section to nominate as many titles as you like--and then to discuss the merits of the nominations.

Hi everybody. We need to decide on a the time span and format for our conference. Let's use this forum to discuss possibilities. Please weigh in with your ideas. I'll get us started.

Possible Time Spans

10-2
11-2
11:30-2
12-3

Last year's conference was a brisk 2 1/2 hours. There are pros and cons to this. It meant that about 9 people got to really present their work. Another 3 served as panel chairs, making introductions, etc. Another six then served on a roundtable, about film adaptations of literary works. Those who presented only really had about five minutes. But, the overall effect was impressive, and they had a pretty good audience throughout--and people weren't fidgeting or getting bored. Of course, this was also because the multimedia elements of the conference were handled so well.

See the extened entry for a proposal for format. You all can weigh in with your own ideas and suggestions.

A Conference Presented by the 2006-07
Cohort of Honors Students in English

Wednesday, May 16, 2007
11:30 - 2
Campbell Dome

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream
The Art and Theory of Dreaming

A Conference Presented by the 2006-07
Cohort of Honors Students in English

Wednesday, May 16, 2007
11:30 - 2
Campbell Dome

Click below to see preliminary role assignments for the conference. These may still shift. You may trade roles with another student, or request a change (though I can't guarantee we can make the change).

Moderators should think about coming up with two-minute introductions (about a double-spaced page) to the panels. These will need to get people interested, provide some kind of context for the presentations, and introduce the speakers. They'll need to be crisp and efficient, but also substantive.

Roundtable speakers will need to prepare focused three-minute presentations and choose images that will scroll behind them as they speak. The presentations should address the central question of the roundtable very directly and explicitly.

Panelists will prepare five-minute presentations based on their research (and now web) projects. These presentations will also need to be focused and efficient. They should establish motive, articulate an argument or central claim very clearly, and offer one or two pieces of interesting evidence to illustrate the argument.