Resources & Glossary

Think of this page as something in between FAQ, a glossary of terms we use in this class, and a list of some resources that you might find helpful. I expect that I’ll be adding to this page as the semester moves forward. Click on any of the subject headings below to expand the accordion tab.

Different themes handle commenting differently, but many themes allow users to create links and other formatting while leaving comments, but only if they know how to do so manually with HTML code. There’s often no visual editor that lets you use HTML at the push of a button. Here’s a post that explains what you can do in comments on this site.
It’s important that you know the difference. Links are for humans, while URLs are for machines, so use links not URLs when you write!

In this class, I make a clear distinction between blog posts and pages (which distinction I believe holds roughly true in the online world, but it’s not universal and certainly not usually specifically codified): all of your major, formal projects will go onto your sites as pages. The Sunday Funnies assignments and all of the other shorter, low-stakes, reflective writing that you do will go onto your sites as blog posts. Pages can be edited just as posts can be, but in general they are meant to serve as static, completed, more or less self-contained pieces of writing. Blogs are meant to go up onto the posts page in descending chronological order, so built into the function of a blog is that you write something and publish it, then if you have more to say on the subject or want to revise what you wrote in a major way, you do so by just writing a new blog post rather than going back to the original and restructuring it.

Here’s another clear distinction between posts and pages: posts syndicate but pages do not (because syndication is predicated on the idea of a frequently updating and changing posts page–static pages don’t need to syndicate because, well, they are  more or less static). We are relying on syndication to the course site as the means of collecting all of the work that you do on your sites into a central location, but if your major projects go onto pages and pages don’t syndicate then how will they be included? When you complete one of the major assignments, you will write a blog post, linking to the landing page for the assignment. I’ll generally ask you to write something reflective about the work that you’ve done in those blog posts. Sometimes I might ask that you provide a summary or abstract of the argument, perhaps framing the post as an announcement meant to entice readers to check out what you’ve done akin to a teaser in journalism.

One last point: for the purposes of this class, at least, all blog posts and all pages should be multimodal and should include multiple media. You should not publish a page or a post that is composed entirely of text.

Tables can be super useful when you start to play around with layout.

Here’s the page in the Domain documentation that covers getting help with your website issues. In much condensed form: start by trying to solve the problem yourself, in consultation with the Domain docs and/or the WordPress codex. If you need more help, then make an appointment at the Writing Center. If the tutor you meet with can’t help with your issue, then the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship is your next stop. If they can’t help you either, they’ll direct you to me. (Since you’re in my class, you will have more opportunities than many to come directly to me, and that’s great. But I really do want you to make a good-faith effort to figure out answers to your own questions before you come to me with them. You’ll learn more by solving your own questions.)
In “BEAM: A Rhetorical Vocabulary for Teaching Research-Based Writing,” Joseph Bizup advocates for a new vocabulary around the use of evidence and sources for students. Instead of primary, secondary, and tertiary as the main classifications of sources, Bizup proposes the acronym BEAM: Background for materials a writer relies on for general information or for factual evidence; Exhibit for materials a writer analyzes or interprets; Argument for materials whose claims a writer engages; and Method for materials from which a writer takes a governing concept or derives a manner of working. ((Bizup, Joseph. “BEAM: A Rhetorical Vocabulary for Teaching Research-Based Writing.” Rhetoric Review 27.1: 2008. 72-86.))

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