Form and Function

Hi everyone,

I'm enjoying reading your abstracts so far - you have lots of great insights and interesting ways of delving further into areas authors may have left unclear (or not argued convincingly).

One comment about the form and function of abstracts: Remember that an abstract is a formal piece of academic writing. It gives an objective, comprehensive overview of a text in as succinct a way as possible. Part of boiling the argument down to "2-3 sentences" is to force you to be concise and to leave out extraneous material (for example, "I thought it was boring" - does not tell us very much about the author's argument. Make sure you have made clear that you understand what the argument is first, then proceed to critique in the 3rd step [comments/questions].

Also, please be sure to use the format described in the calendar and in WebCT (i.e. a) argument, b) key terms, c) comments/questions). If you have additional comments you want to add in prose, that's fine, but be sure you've done a,b,c first. It's an organizing principle that helps you (ideally) boil down an article into a simple structure that will be helpful in 1) organizing a discussion about the article and 2) helping you remember what the article was about in a few weeks when you've forgotten the details.

Lastly, a note about reading strategy, which I touched on briefly the other day: Always position yourself FIRST as a "generous reader." I often read things that I absolutely hate and disagree with (or find boring, uninteresting, poorly written, largely unintelligible or the reverse: utterly simplistic), but I force myself to try and *see where this person is coming from* - and am often surprised that after thinking about it a while, I realize the person has a good point. In the past, I sometimes rejected things I read out of hand if I thought they were 1) jargonistic (e.g. highly intellectualized academic prose, which gets on pretty much everyone's nerves, including highly intellectual academics) or 2) "stupid." Then years later I went back to that same text and realized that I had blinded myself by my negative approach to the text and missed the point of what it was trying to accomplish. There is usually *something* you can take away from a text.

On a logistical note, please let me know via email if you have difficulties posting to the blog or downloading/printing articles, so that I can help rectify the situation. First, because when I read about it here on the blog, it's too late for me to do anything about it. And second, because an abstract is a formal academic piece of writing, so you want your prose to sound, well, formal and academic, which means: stay focused on the *content* of the course and our readings in your abstracts and blogs, rather than the logistics of the course or readings, which are better handled in person or via email.