Conversation Posts are due on Wednesdays at midnight on the week you are assigned one. See the calendar for your assignment and mark your personal agenda.

Conversation Posts are probably your most important posts, because they have the greatest impact on our class community. These posts establish topics and questions for the week’s discussion. But don’t just identify a topic or pose a question, lay a strong foundation for the discussion. This means taking intellectual risks and putting your ideas on the table. There are many ways to approach a Conversation Post:

• you can link the text to a previous class discussion;
• you can write about an aspect of the text that you don’t understand or something that troubles you;
• you can pose a  question and then try to answer it;
• you can respond to another student’s comment or trustworthy critic’s analysis, building upon it, disagreeing with it, or directing attention to an overlooked issue.

As with any kind of literary or media criticism, the goal isn’t to explain why you like or don’t like something, but to reveal something new about the work. There’s no need to trash a work, or to redeem it. Instead, try to figure out how it works and what it means.

To achieve a “satisfactory” mark, your conversation post must also meet the specifications for all analytical posts.

Word Limit: 250 words (max)
Category: Conversation Post