Class Procedures and Reminders:
Blog Responding. Everybody should have received at least one comment, and hopefully two, on their Introduction and storytelling post from last week, although in the chaos of add/drop during the first week, that may or may not have happened for everybody. If you ended up without any comments, please send me a note, and I will be sure to take a look at your posts and leave a comment! I do try to make sure that the groups are set up so that everybody will get at least one comment. In the unpredictable world of how people do their work for this class in any given week, though, it might happen that you end up without a comment, in which case just let me know, and I'll jump right in!
Assignment Stack. I will be finishing comments on the Proofreading assignment on Tuesday morning, and then I will begin working my way through the very large number of Storybook assignments came in over the weekend and on Monday. If you want to check to make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here. I always try to get everything returned promptly, and you can keep an eye on the stack to see how I am progressing!
The following items are for fun and exploration:
Writing Resource: Purdue OWL. The Purdue Online Writing Laboratory, OWL, is an essential website for college writing. My advice to you is to bookmark this website and to make use of it often: Purdue OWL.
Words to Watch: Today's words to watch out for are heroin and heroine. They both come from the same Greek root, but they have different spellings and very different meanings, even if they sound the same! For details, see this blog post.
Featured Storybook: VPress.com: Blogging for Bad Guys. Even bad guys and gals - Kaikeyi, Ravana, Duryodhana and Karna - need to be part of a community, and so they use VPress to share their life's ups and downs in their blogs. This is a great example of a Storybook that uses a social media storytelling style!
FREE Kindle eBook: An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic edited by Morris Jastrow. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book, which explains how scholars discovered the Gilgamesh epic in fragments and then reconstructed it. This book might be of special interest to any of you who choose Gilgamesh as your topic for Myth-Folklore this week.
Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is A stitch in time saves nine (an English proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. This wonderful proverb does not rhyme exactly, but it has a nice near-rhyme.
Ramayana Image: Today's Ramayana image shows Visvamitra, Rama and Lakshmana. It is from a Persian translation of the Ramayana, and the painting is in Persian miniature style of the late 16th century. Beautiful!
Seven Steps to the Perfect Story: I am hoping that this class will make you start to think about just how stories work, and this Perfect Story infographic offers some very good advice.
Tuesday Event on Campus: There will be a trombone concert by Irv Wagner in Sharp Concert Hall at 8PM (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online. You can hear Irv Wagner and the Trombone Choir performing the National Anthem at a Thunder game here at YouTube.
January 21: George Orwell. Today, January 21, marks the anniversary of the death of the English writer, George Orwell, in the year 1950. He is the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four and also of Animal Farm, both of which are truly amazing novels. I make sure to re-read them every few years or so, and I always notice something new each time. The image below is a poster advertising a movie version of Animal Farm from 1954:
Note: You can page back through older blog posts to see any announcements you might have missed.
