WRT 105
Blog Critique
Tessa Brown
September 17, 2013
Dear Rachel,
Your blog post focused on the belief that literacy is more than just conventional reading and writing and that all forms of literacy are equally important. I enjoyed reading your blog as it was not too heavy; you combined personal experience with factious quotes from the text which lightened the read. You responded to the question by taking pieces from various texts we have read and mixed them with your own personal experiences to make them feel more practical and understandable. You used the suggestions from the rubric in a way that your blog felt like it covered several of the suggestions, but did not feel overwhelming. You opened your blog by stating that technology was changing the way we teach literacy and you seemed to develop that claim throughout the entirety of the blog. You brought in your personal experience of finding literacy in soccer. I too played soccer so I found that particular example intriguing; however, you later told the stories of your experience with camp and childhood reading. The diversity of these stories allowed you to engage with a large audience and remain relevant to them all. You then added quotes from the texts we read in class which drew a connection between your stories and what we have been studying in class. All of these stories contributed to your original claim that all forms of literacy should be equal, but I feel that the story about soccer drew on literacy as a different form, while your other stories argued that technological literacy was better than conventional literacy. Your vague original claim allowed for you to veer to far off course and I feel it broke flow in your blog. The structure of your was effective as you stated a claim and, for the most part, stuck to it for the rest of the blog. There were a few place that I thought you could have have written a bit more about the relevance of quotes. I especially saw this in the Jay-Z quote “I probably wrote a million rhymes that night”. You stated the quote, but only wrote one sentence on the relevance of the quote. I feel if you added more context as to why Jay-Z said the quote it would make several additional connections to your personal experiences and the message you are portraying in your blog. At the end of your blog you began to write about your title as a flashpoint for the reader, but you only wrote one sentence on it. I feel like there is a lot more you can do with the title as a flashpoint. Overall the blog read well and I learned new aspects of both literacy and you in reading our blog. I felt I did not have to try too hard to find your point in your blog. I feel the you left out some of the complexity of a few things. For one the Jaz-Z quote I mentioned above is more complex than you made it out to be and your title as a flashpoint could have been built on more. I also think you could have done more with the “Style Wars”. I feel it would have flown smoother if you picked certain aspects of the moving and directly compared them to your experiences in soccer. For example, you mentioned that by running on the field your were leaving a mark, but you never directly connected it back to “Style Wars”. I feel if you had added a sentence like “I marked all the different fields I played on similarly to the way the kids in the movie marked all the train cars they encounter” , your project would be easier to see. I also think that if you used pictures and videos, they could work as flashpoints form imagery in the reader.
Sincerely,
Andrew Garcia
Andrew's Blog 