Hello everyone! My apologies for not making it to class today — my lingering cold took a turn for the worse and I apparently have bronchitis. I spoke with Professor Garceau about what you went over in section and I believe that he introduced the general framework of the Literary Journalism assignment. For your first blog post, I want you to do some prewriting and research in preparation for your interviews.
After you have read Carol Burke’s chapter “Literary Journalism” in the Humanities Core Writer’s Guide, and set up an interview, you should describe how you locate your interview subject and what event or idea will you be interviewing him or her about. Why do you want to do this interview? What interests you about this person or event? What kinds of questions do you plan to ask your interview subject? What kinds of responses do you expect to hear to these questions?
What do you know about this event or idea already? What kinds of research will you need to do to broaden your understanding of it? In researching background materials, you will want to move beyond general searches on search engines and into academic and periodical databases. Try researching the event or idea on Academic Search Complete, American History Life, and Google Scholar (links on the sidebar at right). Once you have located academic and periodical sources on your topic, identify and (if possible) hyperlink to three of the sources you found most useful and explain why. What are the main conversations surrounding your event/idea? Is your topic contentious in any way? What important terms/events/concepts did these sources introduce that you will include in your interview? How has your research helped you revise your initial questions? How would you now formulate those questions, and why? What additional questions will you pose to interview subject that driven by your research? What kinds of additional research will you need to do in order to prepare yourself for your interview?
This first blog post addressing these questions should be approximately 500 words, and should be posted once you have completed your necessary speculation, planning, and research. Ideally, I would like to see these posts up on Monday, April 4th, though I also understand that it may take into mid-week to locate interview subjects and conduct the necessary secondary research.
Hope you have a wonderful weekend, and I hope to be back on track health-wise with you on Monday.
