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, one group will have a Reading Post due, and once per week one group will have a Synthesis Post due. 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. 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.

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. Therefore, you should 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 300 and 350 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 375 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 disagreeing, slightly modifying the original idea, or finding new and better support for a point — 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 Friday (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.

Before class, everyone must read the reading 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 title) and the general subject, for example: “A1, Emerson: The Arbitrary Nature of Genre” or “C3, Whitman: The Barbaric Yawp.”  Always label a synthesis post as a synthesis, then add a general description of your topic, for example: “B2 Synthesis: Narrators, Reliable and Unreliable.”

You post messages simply by sending an e-mail to the listserv address, ENGH341-001-FALL-2019-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. Note that if you normally 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 Masonlive account. The listserv 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 selecting a single font and font-size. Please do this.

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 as it is. Considering that even a post that offers an erroneous interpretation of a reading 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 if you follow the instructions, cheating on one is not only immoral but reflects a poor understanding of the concept of risk-reward ratio.

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 page. Until you get used to them, I recommend keeping that document open while writing your post.

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 style can inhibit clarity, and reading badly written prose is immensely frustrating. Writing clearly 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 “‘Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave / Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare’ (15-16) 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 or avoided. 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. Because most of you in this class are English majors, your writing also reflects on your professionalism. 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 clear and grammatical sentences.

Create a folder in your personal e-mail account for the listserv. You can call it “ENGH 341” 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 the examination and give you ideas for your essays.  

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. I will read all of the posts, of course, and in class will bring up points 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. If you want to e-mail me a question, do so directly, not through the listserv.

Reading 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 will 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 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% or lower, failing to submit the response before class begins = 0%.

When I comment on your reading 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 synthesis posts and your major writing assignments. You can find explanations of the abbreviations I use on your posts on the Comment Key.

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, directness and 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 +3 for not only correct but concise and graceful writing, and -10 for major problems in clarity, grammar, or quotation and citation rules. See the Style Score Guide document for further explanation. 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 on Monday earn no credit.

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 all of these questions affirmatively, success is almost guaranteed.

Following is an example of a Reading Post that earned a 4. It is in response to poems we are not reading this semester, but you can still use it as a model. Note the effective use of quotation. The writer does not quote just because quoting is required but uses the quotations to provide evidence for points she wants to make. Also, note that this post is not overly long: once you subtract the quotations and citations, it is 329 words. It is a 4 because it is thoughtful, perceptive, well-reasoned, and makes good use of quoted passages. It is also both clearly and concisely written:

Subject: B5 Sassoon & Owen: same message, different tones

These poems written by soldiers during World War I all express the pain and horror of war but convey that message through strikingly different tones. Siegfried Sassoon conveys how close he was to the men under his command. Reading “Suicide in the Trenches” we know immediately that the speaker writes from personal experience: “I knew a simple soldier boy / Who grinned at life in empty joy” (1-2). Right away, we know the speaker has seen too much of war to romanticize his subject. The words simple and empty are far from complimentary, and the sing-song nursery rhyme rhythm and short lines suggest mockery rather than the dignity of tragedy. They establish the boy’s innocence and make the graphic suicide described by “He put a bullet through his brain” (7) more shocking. Sassoon isn’t interested in creating a tragic image of a noble English hero, because that would evoke our sympathy and thus let us feel better about ourselves because we feel bad for the dead. Instead, the next line is cold: “No one spoke of him again” (8). This death is just one of millions. This sets up the final stanza, which delivers Sassoon’s message:

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer as soldier lads march by
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go. (9-12)

The You makes clear that he is calling us readers smug. Then, he juxtaposes our patriotic cheering with the verbs Sneak and pray to point out our hypocrisy. He is not asking for our sympathy or understanding; he is scornfully telling us that we will never understand what the boy suffered, and what all the other boys continue to suffer.

In contrast, Wilfred Owen makes clear that he is not angry or bitter. In “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” the speaker describes a comrade’s gruesome death and then again addresses the reader directly:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori. (25-28)

Calling the reader My friend creates a completely different tone. He is not insulting us but gently letting us know that we are in the wrong. Yet the image of someone — presumably a civilian, probably an older man who is in no danger of dying in the war — telling young soldiers with such high zest that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country carries its own inevitable irony, and that irony makes us angry with ourselves.

[name redacted]

Again, the post is not particularly long (less than 560 words, not counting the quotations). In this case, 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 concise, with some graceful turns of phrase and correctly formatted quotations:

Subject: C3 Synthesis: Tone and effectiveness in the Great War poets

War poetry, depending on the poem and who is reading it, can be glorious, shocking, and overwhelming, but can it be beautiful? If the urn in John Keats’s poem “Ode to the Grecian Urn” was right — “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” (49) — the more truthful the poem, the more beauty it possesses. All of the poets we have studied were soldiers; each fought for his country and documented the truth as he saw it. Even so, some poems are more beautiful than others.

Rupert Brooke died from infection before he made it to the battlefield. Not surprisingly, therefore, his truth was based on a naively romantic view of war. He depicts death in battle as a kind of victory: “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England” (1-3).  The plot of land in which his body decomposes will be richer because he has brought the homeland of England with him; indeed, as he makes clear when he writes that he is body is “dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware” (5), England is not just part of him — he is a piece of England. That this poem became a common reading in funeral services should surprise no one. It directed the bereaved to dwell on the glory of England and their loved one’s service, rather than on his suffering, death, and decay.

Siegfried Sassoon despised Brooke’s ideals because he knew the civilians (which Brooke was when he wrote his war sonnets) were ignorant of what he saw his men suffer.  [Name redacted] notes the contrast: “Unlike Brooke, Sassoon makes death sound futile and without purpose” (B5). For the soldiers mired in a war of attrition in which tens of thousands of men could die in a day without shifting the battle-line more than a few yards, it was. But Sassoon’s point isn’t to critique the futility of war but to attack what in his “A Soldier’s Declaration against the War” he calls “the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.” Sassoon’s poetry is his attempt to remedy that lack of imagination by supplying us with depictions of those agonies. Thus, “Suicide in the Trenches” ends with a stanza that lands like a slap in the face. His poetry contains both truth and a kind of harsh beauty, but his scorn towards civilians is a problem: his derision is more likely to put readers on the defensive than win their sympathies.

Unlike Sassoon, Wilfred Owen primarily expresses pity and sorrow. In poems such as “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Owen describes the brutal reality of war, but the tone and message are different: “Owen makes clear that he is not angry or bitter at us. In ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est,’ the speaker describes a comrade’s gruesome death and then again addresses the reader directly . . . He is not insulting us but kindly letting us know that we are in the wrong” ([last name redacted] A4). The tone is indeed kinder, but what makes the poem powerful is that Owen’s descriptions are far more explicit in their visual imagery:

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon we flung him in
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs  (15-22)

If beauty derives from the crafting of details, this is extraordinarily beautiful writing. The succession of -ing words here — guttering, choking, drowning, writhing, hanging, gargling — makes us feel as if this man is suffering as we watch. The way the dying man’s comrades flung him tells us that he is no longer anything but a burden, which conveys war’s dehumanizing nature. That all of this not only really happened but happens again and again in the speaker’s dreams tells us he is haunted by the experience, and may be forever. He suggests we would feel different about war if we had those nightmares, too. Even in this case, though, Owen does not wish us to suffer too much: If in some dreams contrasts with In all my dreams. The speaker cannot escape them, whereas he merely wants us to be reminded of the horror of war occasionally so that we do not continue to tell young men how wonderful it is to die in combat. After all that, addressing the naive reader as “My friend” (25) indicates admirable patience.

[name redacted]