I have created a listserv for the class. A listserv is an e-mail reflector, a way you can send an e-mail to a single address so that everyone in the class receives it. When used properly, a listserv is a great way to converse with your classmates, test out ideas, ask questions, and generally work with the material and each other in productive ways.

A message to the listserv is called a post. You are in one of four groups: A, B, C, or D. Everybody in the class always receives every post sent to the list. For each class some people will have a Reading Post due, and once per week some people will have a Synthesis Post due. Later in the semester, you will need to also contribute Movie Posts, which are like Reading Posts but for films. Here is what you should do for each type of assignment:

Reading Posts — A reading post is your opportunity to record whatever thoughts, questions, and emotional or aesthetic reactions you have as you read. For every reading assignment, I will post possible issues or questions to consider on the Reading Prompts pages, which are linked from the Class Calendar. When your group has a reading post due, you should pick one of them and respond to it as best you can. Because these responses represent the early stages of your thinking about the readings, you should feel free to use them to test out ideas, ask questions, and admit confusion; indeed, summary judgments and easy answers aren’t much use to me or your classmates, whereas confusion, when clearly expressed, can be stimulating. On the other hand, I admire students who are willing to venture an opinion and back it up. What is important is that your response demonstrates your engagement with these works.

The key to reading posts is to keep them focused by quoting specific passages — you must support your argument with textual evidence by quoting and citing the reading for that day at least once during your post — and commenting on those quotations in order to support a point. Do not simply quote and expect us to see what you see in the passage; explain. That means you should never begin or end a paragraph with a quotation. Start by establishing a point you want to make or an issue you want to explore. Quote (do not paraphrase) the text to provide evidence for what you are saying. Then, comment on the quotation: never assume that your peers or I will see what you see in the passage you quote, let alone see it the same way. Quotations provide evidence; they do not make your case for you.

Do not do research for posts. They are your responses to the readings; not a test of your ability to Google.

Your audience for these posts is people in the class. You should therefore assume everyone reading your post has also read the assignment to which it responds; do not engage in plot summary or waste time presenting background information we all know. Call your readers’ attention to specific elements of the text (characters, scenes, plot points, and so on) and quote textual evidence, but do not summarize as if you are writing for people who have not read the work in question.

Note that you can use the prompts as you see fit: do not feel as if you need to address every point a prompt brings up. Also, if you have a particular question or idea that is not covered by a prompt and about which you want to post, go ahead. In most cases, though, the prompts will focus your thoughts and help you do a better job on this assignment.

Reading posts should be between 275 and 325 words long, not including the quotations, and they are due by midnight the night before class. This means posts for Monday are due Sunday night, and posts for Wednesday are due Tuesday night; the time of your post is automatically recorded by the Mason computer system. Note that longer does not mean better: if you send me 500 words for a reading post I will not be happy, because I do not want reading all the posts to be burdensome for your peers or correcting them to be burdensome for me. If you find yourself going over 350 words of your own writing, cut something; you can always bring up additional points in class.

Synthesis Posts — A synthesis post asks you to pull together some of the readings and discussions from the prior week. In each synthesis post, you must quote and respond to at least two reading posts by your classmates that have come in since the prior synthesis post. Whenever quoting a passage from another post, do not include the whole original message in your post: always cut everything except the passage you want to quote. You should also quote from the readings from the prior week at least once, and the quotation should not be the same as one that your peers whom you have quoted took for their reading posts. Your goal is to make use of the class lectures and discussions to answer questions and respond to points people had made in their reading posts — whether that means building on their ideas to support your own, slightly modifying the original idea, or rebutting it — and to draw some tentative conclusions. Synthesis posts should be between 500 and 600 words long, not including quotations, and they are due by midnight on Saturday (in other words, at the end of the day). Note that synthesis posts do not have prompts, and again, excessive length is a detriment, not a sign of superior effort.

As with reading posts, the key to synthesis posts is working effectively with quotations. Do not begin a paragraph (let alone the whole post) by quoting a peer. That’s like being a tennis player who refuses to serve. If you start out a paragraph with something like “Ashley says,” you surrender both your initiative and your authority. Again, start by establishing a point you want to make or an issue you want to explore. Then, quote the text and your peers in any way that helps you make your point. Always set up and comment on quotations, which means you should never present two quotations back-to-back. Also, do not quote your peer quoting the text: quote peers for their ideas, not their evidence.

Movie Posts — A movie post is much like a reading post. Again, I will put up a number of prompts for each film (or in one case a TV series); again, demonstrating thoughtful engagement is key. Film gives you numerous elements on which you can choose to focus. The script, or screenplay, is like any other play: a work of literature. But unlike a stage play, the audience is not rooted to a single spot. The camera (cinematography) takes the place of both a theatre seat and a narrator, determining both our literal and metaphorical perspectives on the events we are seeing, which are also influenced by the set, lighting, special effects, costumes, and make-up. Great acting brings characters to life, and conversely a bad performance can ruin a well-written character. But the two crucial elements of a film that novice viewers tend to underestimate are editing and sound, including music. A well-known axiom states that a film gets made three times: once on the page, once in the camera, and once in the editing room. How scenes are cut and put together is crucial to our experience of a film. Sound and music also matter a great deal. Sound has the ability to immerse us in a scene in a way the cinematography alone cannot, and if you think music doesn’t matter, imagine watching a battle scene or a romantic scene while this plays. As always, considering how a film accomplishes or fails to accomplish its goals is much more important than saying it is good or bad. I want analysis, not a movie review. Movie posts should be 275-325 words (plus any quotations, if you quote dialogue), are always due by midnight on Sunday, and again, you should read all the incoming posts before class.

Before class, everyone must read the reading posts and (if applicable) synthesis posts for that day.

To make everyone’s life easier, always put your name at the bottom of your post. Also, please use the subject line in the e-mail to identify your post. As the course goes on, we will begin to accumulate a lot of them, and this makes it easier to sort through them later. Identify the assignment number by group letter and post number, the text (by author name or a short version of the title) and your general subject, for example: “A1 Homer: Achilles’s rage” or “B3: Narrative style in Hemingway.” Always label a synthesis post as such, then add a description of your topic, for example: “B2 Synthesis: Trusting the teller of the tale.”

You post messages by sending an e-mail to the listserv address, ENGH201-L@listserv.gmu.edu.  I suggest you store the address in your address book and simply insert it from there; the most common reason a post does not go through is that a student has mistyped the address, and if you do that, you do not get credit for the post. Note that if you use more than one e-mail account, or if you have your GMU e-mail forwarded to another account, you still must send your message from your Mason account, which by university regulation is the one I must sign up for the listserv. The server recognizes addresses, not people.

Type your post in the body of the message; do not send it as an attachment. This list does not allow attachments to be distributed through the server.

When your classmates send their posts, you will receive them, usually within a few minutes (though sometimes the system — like all systems — slows down). You are responsible for reading your classmates’ posts before class. Our class discussions will often build on posts sent the previous night, and I will assume each of you has been paying attention to what the others have had to say.

Technology notes:

1) The Mason e-mail system (Masonlive) will sometimes cut off messages in which a single paragraph is longer than six or seven hundred characters (keystrokes). You will not have a problem with this if you break your paragraphs properly.

2) When you copy and paste something (a quotation, for example, or if you try to compose your post in a word processing program like Word) into your post, formatting can go haywire. You will not see it, but when other people try to read the post, they will find wild changes in the font, and some punctuation marks (especially apostrophes and quotation marks) may not transfer correctly, which makes your post hard to read. For this reason, after you type any post, a good habit is to select the entire text (you can do that by hitting Control A on a PC, or Command A on a Mac) and then select a single font and font-size. Please do this.

A listserv is a relatively informal means of communication. Therefore, your tone in a reading post can be somewhat relaxed and conversational. For example, contractions and even well-chosen slang are acceptable. I certainly expect that you will use first-person pronouns (I, we, me, us, my, our, and so on) occasionally, though using them too often is a bad habit. However, poor grammar inhibits clarity, and reading badly written prose is immensely frustrating. Writing grammatically and spelling correctly are matters of courtesy as well as what writers call ethos, your reputation with the reader. People who write about a novel and spell a character’s name wrong aren’t taken seriously, and don’t even get me started on people who write using text-shorthand, as in “‘Pale flakes with lingering stealth come feeling for our faces / We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare, snow-dazed’ (21-22) is gr8 imagery.”

While reading posts can be somewhat informal, I want you to maintain stricter standards for synthesis posts. Consider them more like short essays. First-person usage should be limited, and grammatical and stylistic errors will affect your score. See the explanation below of how grammar and style will affect your grade on a synthesis post.

It comes down to this: readers can generally detect and will resent a lack of effort. If you cannot be bothered to re-read what you have written before hitting Send to make sure that you are conveying your point clearly, why should anyone else want to read what you have to say? Finally, bad writing habits are hard to break. Writing is a kind of mental muscle memory. Make writing clear and stylish prose a habit even when writing informally and your overall writing ability will improve. Your writing also reflects on your professionalism and even basic competence. You probably wouldn’t trust a doctor who refers to your heart as the “blood-pumpy-thingy”; readers will not trust your judgments on literary topics if you cannot consistently write grammatical sentences.

The purpose of quoting and citing is to support your own argument. To do it effectively, you must set up quotations in a substantive way that connects them to your own point, and then comment on them in order to make your point persuasive. Literary analysis is much like law: evidence supports an argument; it doesn’t make your case for you. A lawyer doesn’t hold up a piece of evidence, say “This proves my case,” drop it on a table in front of the jury, and then sit down. He or she knows that the opposing council will make a different claim for what that piece of evidence means. Instead, a lawyer constructs a narrative — he or she tells a story, in other words — that gives meaning to that piece of evidence. You are in the same position. In practical terms, this means beginning or ending a paragraph with a quotation is usually a bad idea in academic writing.

You can find further guidelines on using quotations effectively, including explanations of how to format and cite them, here at the Quotation and Citation Guidelines for Listserv Posts page. Until you get used to them, I recommend keeping that document open while writing your posts.

Create a folder in your personal e-mail account for the listserv. You can call it “ENGH 201” or whatever you like. Save messages from the class to this folder. You need your classmates’ reading posts in order to write your synthesis posts. Posts can also prove useful for review purposes.  

Meanwhile, you should save all of the messages you send to the listserv in the same folder. Moving them from your “Sent” folder only takes a few seconds and makes finding them later much easier.

After providing the initial prompts, I usually will not intrude on your listserv discussions, though I sometimes might offer a brief comment or question if the discussion has taken a wrong turn. I will read all of the posts, of course, and in class will bring up interesting issues that have arisen on the listserv so that we may continue the discussion face-to-face. But generally, this list is for you to communicate with each other. Of course, you are always free to e-mail me with a question, but I suggest you do this directly (off-list).

Reading posts and movie posts must be of the suggested length, properly titled, submitted on time, and demonstrate thought and basic knowledge of the reading. For each reading post that meets these requirements, I will award you a score of 3 or 4. Posts that are short, fail to quote a text, or are otherwise unsatisfactory can earn a score of 0, 1, or 2. However, I reserve the right to give a post no credit if it reveals little effort or evidence of reading the text. A post that is not titled properly in the subject-line cannot earn higher than a 3. Reading posts that are submitted late but within two hours of the deadline lose one point. Posts submitted more than two hours after the deadline but before class lose two points. Any post not sent by the beginning of class earns no credit (meaning that it counts as a zero). These grades will be converted by the usual formula: 4 = A or 95, 3 = B or 85, 2 = C or 75%, 1 = D or 65%, 0 = F 55%, failing to submit the post before class begins = 0%.

For synthesis posts, the grading system is different. These are longer, and should be more carefully structured and organized, so I strongly advise you to draft and revise them before submitting them. They must be of the suggested length, properly titled, submitted on time, and demonstrate thought and basic knowledge of the reading. In addition, you must also accurately quote and cite the text and two of your peers’ posts from that week of classes and work thoughtfully with these quotations, which requires both setting them up in a substantive way and commenting on them in a meaningful way. I will award these posts two scores: a Content score determined by the quality of your insight and analysis, your use of quotations to support your points, and your organization, and a Style score determined by your clarity, grammatical correctness, concision, proper citation and formatting of quotations, titling, and overall readability and style. The Content score will be between A+ (100%) and F (59% or lower). However, quoting either a text or a peer inaccurately will result in a full grade penalty. If you can’t devote enough attention to your work to copy something correctly, you have wrecked your own credibility. The Style score will be a modifier that can range between +5 for not only correct but concise and graceful writing, and -10 for major problems in clarity, grammar, or quotation and citation rules. For example, if your synthesis post scores a B+ for Content and a -4 for Style, you would receive a score of 84.5% (B+ = 88.5 – 4 = 84.5). If you submit a synthesis post late but within two hours of the deadline, you will incur a 10% penalty. If you submit it after that but within 24 hours of the deadline, you will incur a 20% penalty. Submitting the post any later than that but before the next class will earn half the credit it would have if you had submitted it on time. Synthesis posts submitted after class begins earn no credit.

When I grade your posts, I will point out grammatical and stylistic errors. You would be wise to review these corrections carefully and use them to improve your score on future posts and your major writing assignments. You can find explanations of the abbreviations I use on your posts on the Comment Key.

Review your post while asking yourself the following questions:

Does my post have a clear focus and is everything in the post relevant to it?

What is my point (which is different from a focus)? If a reader walks away from my post with just one sentence in his or her head, what would it be?

Do I support my point well with textual evidence and logical argumentation? In other words, do I quote the text and (if a synthesis post) my peers and engage with the quotations in a productive way, which means consistently setting up the quotations substantively and commenting on them afterwards?

Is my post appropriately paragraphed? Is the writing clear, grammatically correct, and concise?

Is the length appropriate to the assignment?

Did I format and cite all my quotations appropriately?

Did I title my post appropriately in the subject-line?

Did I put my name at the end of the post?

If you can answer yes to all of these questions, success is almost guaranteed.

Honor code rules are in effect for this assignment, as indeed they are for all assignments. On occasion, students have submitted material gathered from essays available online or web-sites such as SparkNotes as their reactions to a reading. Obviously, this defeats the purpose of the Reading Posts, which is to get your initial reactions to these works. My policy is simple: plagiarize on any work for the course, and I will report an Honor Code violation and request failure of the course as a penalty. (The Honor Committee has never rejected my request.) The reality is that if I catch someone cheating, I cannot judge his or her work fairly from that point on because I will always wonder if the work I am reading is authentic.

Keep it simple: do not do any outside research for your posts. Looking up other people’s opinions is not the point; reading closely and thinking diligently is. Besides, I am assigning you plenty of reading and viewing as it is. Considering that even a post that offers an erroneous interpretation of a reading or film will earn a score of three (provided you meet the other requirements), the emphasis for this assignment is clearly on thinking and expressing your thoughts, not on offering a correct interpretation. Given that you cannot earn less than a B on a Reading Post or Movie Post if you follow the instructions, cheating on one is not only immoral but reflects a poor understanding of the concept of risk-reward ratio.

Following is an example of a Reading Post that would earn a 4. It is from a different course and focuses on a book you are not reading (Frankenstein), but you can still use it as a model. Note the effective use of quotation: the writer does not quote just to quote, but uses the quotations to provide evidence for points she wants to make. She also sets up every quotation in substantive way (not just by saying “Shelley writes”) and comments on it, rather than expecting readers to see her point on their own. The post is also clearly focused and organized, it meets the length requirement at 315 words (not counting quotations), and the writing throughout is clear.

Subject: B6, Shelley: Frankenstein the monster

Most first-person accounts elicit the reader’s instinctive sympathy for the narrator. As Frankenstein progresses, however, Victor becomes less sympathetic. When confronted with the reality of creature that he has brought to life, he flees and loses track of it. He has become so caught up in the science of creation that he never thinks ahead to the reality, except to daydream about how “A new existence would bless me as its creator and source” (78). This desire to be blessed by his creation suggests he may be too human, too needy, to be taking on the role of Creator. When the creature awakens, Frankenstein feels an immediate revulsion based solely on the creature’s appearance: he is “unable to endure the aspect of the being” (81). The choice of endure is overwrought, especially given what he ends up enduring later in the novel. He immediately regrets what he has done, abandons his creation and accepts the conventional view that he has crossed boundaries better left uncrossed.

If his irresponsibility were directed only toward his creation, I might be more forgiving. However, he also fails to step forward at Justine’s trial. Despite his insistence that nobody would believe him, he doesn’t even try. I couldn’t help but scoff at his certainty that he suffers more than anyone else, which demonstrates his narcissism and obsessive nature.

I don’t mean this evaluation of Victor’s character as an attack on the novel. His unlikeability makes it more intriguing. Instead of turning Victor into a deity, which his status as a creator already threatens to do, Shelley portrays flaws that keep him human, ultimately raising questions about who the real monster is. The creature may be overly kind in offering to “be mild and docile” to Victor (123). Should he owe gratitude to the man who abandoned him, simply because Victor is his creator — a creator who built him to be without real hope of companionship or happiness? Without the first-person narration, I suspect Victor’s passivity and irresponsibility would paint him in an even less flattering light.

[Name redacted]

This synthesis is from the same course, and incorporates a quotation from the reading post above. In this case, the post is not particularly long (438 words plus quotations), but note how well the writer weaves together quotations form the text and from peers. Note also that the writer does not merely agree or disagree with what others in the class have written, but builds on the other posts in both cases. Finally, this post is well-written: grammatically correct, of course, but also with some graceful turns of phrase, correctly formatted quotations, and a lack of wordiness, and thus it would earn an A and a +5:

Subject: C4 Synthesis: Nature as a Therapeutic Agent

When initially reading Frankenstein, I was primarily concerned with the effects of Percy Shelley’s additions to Mary’s manuscript. Percy’s changes show why this novel is a product of the Romantic movement. The various roles nature plays in the book, especially the role of therapeutic agent, are key to this understanding and provide insight on Romanticism’s theoretical foundations.

Throughout my reading, I noticed how the book depicts nature as separated from society and man-made institutions, creating a powerfully destructive dichotomy. Failure to understand this dichotomy resulted in some confusion over Victor Frankenstein’s character. From the beginning, the Shelleys represent Nature as both spiritual and moral, so Frankenstein — whose entire project defies the natural processes of both birth and death — may well seem unlikeable. Moreover, his desire for his creation to look up to him as to a god strikes some readers as unseemly: “This desire to be blessed by his creation suggests he may be too human, too needy, to be taking on the role of Creator” ([name redacted] A8). However, what makes Frankenstein seem narcissistic is not any fault of his own character, but rather his indoctrination by human institutions: educational, scientific, and religious. Deep into his studies, Frankenstein says, “Learn from me, if not by my precepts at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow” (76-77). The fantasy he has of himself as a divine Creator to his Creation is not far from the Old Testament and YHVH’s continual demands for worship. Thus, Frankenstein is not being portrayed as an inherently unsympathetic character, but as someone whose essentially noble self has been twisted by society’s corrupt institutions.

Institutions are also to blame for Frankenstein’s inaction at Justine’s trial. Several people expressed frustration that he does nothing to save an innocent woman for whom he expresses great affection. [Name redacted] points out that this is not what we expect from a Romantic hero in the Byronic tradition: “If Percy Shelley and Lord Byron are indeed the inspirations for Victor Frankenstein, then what does this inaction say about Mary’s opinion of them? Both men write passionately about injustice, yet faced with the opportunity to prevent it, Frankenstein does nothing” (D7). In this instance, once again, Shelley portrays human institutions, in this case the judicial system, as the problem; Frankenstein is helpless. And in reality, Byron’s and Shelley’s dreams of bringing in a new and better age came to nought, at least during their lifetimes. Regardless, the point is that society and man-made institutions are the antagonist, not Frankenstein.

The dichotomy between nature and man-made institutions is tangible throughout the novel and gives further credence to this point. From a plot standpoint, when Frankenstein is in Geneva, he becomes overzealous in his studies to the point where he becomes sick. [Name redacted] briefly discusses Frankenstein’s relationship to nature: “Instead of going to nature of answers, he seeks to control it and tame it, to make it a man-made creation” (A8) Once again, it’s not that Frankenstein seeks to control nature, but that society seeks to control nature, and furthermore nature’s effect on Frankenstein and nature is therapeutic. After his troubles in Geneva, Frankenstein says, “By degrees this calm and heavenly scene restored me, and I continued my journey towards Geneva” (99). Whenever Frankenstein is on the verge of losing it, an escape from civilization and into nature heals him.

[name redacted]