Fairly standard blog. The reading is in the course reader - Malcolm Gladwell's "Something Borrowed." Our first class meeting after break is going to be talking about plagiarism, in a slightly more complicated way than you may be used to. We tend to treat it like it's a very simple issue, but, in a lot of cases, it's much more complicated than it appears. So, the blog assignment:
First paragraph - same ol', same ol'. Try to give me a one-paragraph summary of the piece that starts with a main claim (thesis statement) that you then support. This is kind of tricky, because in a lot of ways, Gladwell asks more questions than he answers. If you get totally stuck, think about starting it with something like, "Gladwell asks whether . . ." so you can indicate that the final point is fairly open-ended.
Second paragraph - just react, again. Good, bad, weird, whatever. I think this is a really interesting way to think about plagiarism. Did Gladwell's piece make you question your ideas at all? I hope you at least thought it was interesting. I think it's fairly well-written, but, in the past, I've had students become confused about the sequence of events in th eessay because of how many people are involved in the thing (two writers and one plagiarist). So do, please, use this space to ask questions if you can't figure out just what the heck happened.
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