Author: David

Action and Events

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Plot

The sequence of events and actions in a literary work

Structure

The pattern formed by the events and actions in a literary work

  • Introduction: The beginning of a work, which usually suggests the setting (time and place) and shows on or more of the main characters.
  • Complications: Events or actions that establish the conflict in a literary work.
  • Climax: The turning point, often signified by a character’s making a significant decision or taking action to resolve a conflict.
  • Conclusion: The ending of a work, which often shows the effects of the climactic action or decision.

Conflict

A struggle between internal and/or external forces in a literary work.

Irony of Situation

A discrepancy between what is said and what is done or between what is expected and what actually happens.

 

Adapted from:

Stanford, Judith. Responding to Literature: Stories, Poems, Plays, and Essays. 4th edition. Boston: McGraw-Hill. 2003.

People

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Characters

The fictional (or fictionalized) people who are part of the action of a literary work.

Listening and Observing

  • Dialogue: Conversation between two or more characters
  • Dialect: A variety of a language different from that generally taught in school; may include distinctive pronunciations of words, original vocabulary, or grammatical constructions that are not considered standard.
  • Monologue: A speech by one character addressed to a silent or absent listener.
  • Soliloquy: A speech by one character, usually in a play, given while the character is alone on stage or standing apart from other characters and intended to represent the inner thoughts of the character.

Growing and Changing

  • Motivation: The reason or reasons that cause a character to think, act, or speak in a certain way.
  • Dynamic character: A character who changes in some significant way during the course of the work.
  • Static character: A character who does not change in any significant way during the course of the work.
  • Round character: A character who shows many different facets; often presented in depth and with great detail.
  • Flat character: A character who usually has only one outstanding trait or feature.
  • Protagonist: The major character with whom we generally sympathize.
  • Antagonist: The character with whom the protagonist is in conflict, generally not a sympathetic character.

Points of View

  • Authors/speaker/persona/narrator:. Authors write the literary work. Not to be confused with the speaker or persona, the voice that might be heard in the text, or the narrator, the voice that tells the story.
  • Third-person omniscient narrator: A disembodied narrator who knows everything about the narrative, across both time and space, and can report both external actions and conversations as well as internal thoughts of all characters and who often provides evaluations and judgments of characters and events.
  • Third-person limited omniscient narrator: A disembodied narrator who does not know everything. Usually this narrator can report external actions and conversations but can only report the internal thoughts of only one character. A limited omniscient narrator may offer evaluations and judgments of characters and events.
  • Objective narrator: A narrative point of view that acts like a camera, reporting only external events and conversations but without access to the inner thoughts and feelings of any of the characters and without offering evaluations or judgments.
  • First-person narrator: A narrator who is also a character in the work and who uses “I” or “we” to tell the story. First-person narrators can report their own thoughts and feelings but cannot directly report the thoughts of other characters.
  • Reliable/unreliable narrators: All first person narrators are to some extent unreliable, but some are more reliable than others. Narrators might be unreliable because they are mistaken, lying, mentally diminished, prejudiced, pushing a particular agenda, or for a number of other reasons.
  • Free indirect discourse: A third-person narrator that combines some aspects of the first person narrator. The third-person narrator is still a disembodied voice but as it slips in and out of the characters’ consciousnesses, their attitudes filter into the voice of the narrator. Usually associated with limited omniscient narration, where the narrative point of view looks deceivingly like it’s in the first person.

Adapted from:

Stanford, Judith. Responding to Literature: Stories, Poems, Plays, and Essays. 4th edition. Boston: McGraw-Hill. 2003.

Places and Times

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Setting: The time, place, and mood of a literary work that establish its context. It basically helps in establishing where and when and under what circumstances the story is taking place. Setting includes both specific rooms or buildings or geographic locations, but also the world or milieu in which the events occur (in other words, to describe the setting of the first Harry Potter novel would include describing the space under the Dursley’s staircase and the Hogwarts potions classroom, but would also include description of a world divided between wizards and muggles.)

Time: Time in fiction similarly includes small and large scale sense of time. Does the work span a matter of moments, hours, or eons? Is it set in an identifiable historical period? Is it slow or fast paced and does the pacing change in different sections?

Flashback: A flashback is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point in the story (there are also flashforwards).

Framing: (a.k.a frame tale, framing narrative, or framing device.) A framing story introduces one narrative in order to set up or frame another story that occurs as a story-within-the-story or serves to enclose a series of shorter stories within the larger narrative frame. Some examples include One Thousand and One Nights, Don Quixote, or The Uncle Remus stories. The film Princess Bride is a framed narrative–the frame device is the grandfather reading the story to a sick grandson, while the framed narrative is the story of the Princess Bride, Dread Pirate Roberts, Inigo Montoya, and the rest.

On Choosing a Domain Name

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You are not purchasing a web site! You are registering a domain name and server space, upon which you can build many other web sites, amongst other things. Therefore, you need a domain name that will continue to work for you after this semester is finished, maybe even after you have graduated from Emory.

The preference is for your domain to be some version of your name (i.e., janestudent.net or davidmorgen.org or johndoe.com) but if you have a very common name you might have to be a little creative.

It is also perfectly acceptable for your domain name to be a short word or phrase that is easy to remember and spell, and which speaks to some interest of yours or an aspect of your character (i.e., my friend Audrey Watters publishes a site called hackeducation.com; Kin Lane spends his careers working with APIs and his domain is apievangelist.com; or Tanine Allison, a professor of Media Studies here at Emory who is finishing her first book entitled Destructive Sublime: World War II in American Media, uses destructivesublime.com as her domain name; or one of my favorite art and design blogs, which is called thisiscolossal.com). If you’re going to choose a title or phrase as your domain name, make sure you think about it very carefully so you don’t show up on one of those lists of the most unfortunate domain names ever, like the design firm called Speed of Art that ended up with a domain name that sounds like it’s about flatulence in a swimsuit.

Do not include the word “emory” in your domain name. The university brand management office is quite emphatic about trying to keep domains including “emory” only for official university sites.

Do not include my class name or something specific about a course, or even your major, in your domain name. You will add subdomains or pages of your sites that are specific to classes, but your primary domain name should be something that can grow with you.

Build a Homestead

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“With Hearthfire you can finally place a permanent mark on the world of Skyrim by designing, building, and maintaining your own home.”

In many fantasy roleplaying games, characters need to acquire a home or a base of operations as part of game play: in Lego Lord of the Rings, once a player gets to Rivendell, it becomes the place to view the trophies for completed minikits.

In Fallout 3, players can acquire a home in Megaton once they have defused the Megaton Bomb and then they can add storage containers, an infirmary, a workbench for repairing and upgrading equipment, and some other features–including a display case for showing off the bobblehead dolls you find throughout the game that give your player character perks.

Screenshot of "a renovated Villa Auditore" in Assassin's Creed 2 by Ubi Soft.

Screenshot of “a renovated Villa Auditore” in Assassin’s Creed 2 by Ubi Soft.

In Assassin’s Creed 2, players eventually gain the familial stronghold in the town of Monteriggioni, the Villa Auditore. As they complete quests the estate is restored from a dilapidated wreck to a gleaming castle, eventually uncovering hidden chambers that hold the keys to advanced gear and skills.

Domain

In Skyrim, there is an add-on game that is just about managing your home base, called Hearthfire. There’s a fairly elaborate guide in the Elder Scrolls Wiki on the steps involved: purchasing land, planning and preparation, building a small house, adding a main hall, adding specialized towers and wings, building out the area around the stronghold and adding personnel and animals.

In this class, you’ll be building your own homestead in the form of a domain of your own. Like in the games described above, in this class you’ll start with some basic components for your domain and then slowly add on additional specialized rooms to flesh out your estate or to aid you in acquiring new skills and perks.

 

I’ll use the same steps for building a Hearthfire estate to outline the steps for building your own domain. (Click on the titles below to display that step.)

Before you can begin building your homestead, you’ll need to own a plot of land to build on. Obtain the deed to your own domain by going to Emory Domains, signing in with your Emory NetID and password, and registering a domain name. You will need to pay $12 for the cost of registering your domain (it’s only $12 because the Emory Writing Program is underwriting half the cost by paying for the server hosting that you receive along with your domain name). Here’s a help page that will walk you step by step through the registration process.

Please do note that your domain name should not be tied to this particular class (we’ll get to that later, when you build your main hall). Think of your domain name as the land upon which you will build a sprawling estate–one building on that estate will be devoted to your first year writing class, but you’ll eventually have other edifices upon that land–so you want a domain that will allow you to grow. Either register a domain name that is connected to your own name (i.e., Jane Student might register janestudent.net) or that is a brief word or phrase that is easy to spell and fairly memorable but that connects with your long-term interests in some way (e.g., Tanine Allison, a professor of Media Studies here at Emory is finishing her first book, entitled Destructive Sublime: World War II in American Media, so she used that title as the domain name for her course sites.) You are not purchasing a web site! You are registering a domain name and server space, upon which you can build many other web sites, amongst other things.

First just think a little bit about fundamental style. What sort of homestead would you like? Proudspire Manor? Batcave? The SSV Normandy? Ceras Lake Castle? Fortress of Solitude? An Onyx Modern House? Titans Tower?

You might look around at other sites, maybe even check out the sites my students built last spring for my ENG101 class.

Registering your domain claims stake to that address on the internet. Now you need to build something on that space:

  • Install WordPress in your primary domain. Give your site a title that is not “My blog.”
  • Configure the settings on your site, making the front page static instead of a posts page.
  • Add a bit of brief language on your main page about yourself. You do not need to fully develop this page for right now.

Even though it’s your “primary” domain, it’s not necessarily where the bulk of your content will go. Look at the featured image at the top of this post (here’s that picture again) and think about your small house in similar terms as that one in Hearthfire: your primary domain is the small building you create first but which mainly exists as an entryway into the main hall, which in that image is still under construction so it’s just a foundation and a bunch of beams of roof joists. The main difference in this case is that with your cPanel and server space you can build as many many halls as you like, each of them connected together via that small house.

For now, your primary domain is most useful because it’s a single URL you can put on a resume or add to a social media profile or tell a friend to, which then collects together all the other stuff you’re doing online.

The main hall is the space that you’ll be using for this class. You can create as many subdomains as you would like on the server space you’ve acquired. Your class subdomain is a second web site, with its own address and its own dashboard, that will be devoted just to this course.

This help document walks you through the steps for building a class subdomain.

Create the subdomain folder

Your domain is really akin to a folder on your computer. When I point my web browser to davidmorgen.org, it goes to that address and looks in the folder of files stored in that space, finds an index file and loads it in the browser. So the first thing you need in order to create the class subdomain is to create a subfolder, which is the simple process of going to the Subdomains area in your cPanel and naming a subfolder. You probably want the subdomain for this class to be eng181 or maybe readwriteplay. When you click on the create button after entering the subdomain name, all it does is create that subfolder on your server.

Install WordPress

The next step is to install files in that subfolder, which you do by installing WordPress a second time. The second time you install WordPress, choose the subdomain you created from the location menu, and make certain you delete the /blog/ subdirectory that Installatron suggests.

Make certain when you install WordPress that you name your site something other than “My blog.”

Configure WordPress & Create a Menu

Just like you did with your primary directory, you need to configure your WordPress settings. In this case, I’ve got some additional directions to add though.

If you left on two-factor authentication with Clef, then on entrance to your dashboard you’ll go straight to the Clef setup. If you already setup Clef on your primary domain and installed the app, you’ll just need to login once and it will configure the settings pretty much automatically.

Plugins_‹_David_s_Sandbox_Test_Site_—_WordPress

Go to Plugins and activate Akismet, which will open add a box at the top of the Plugins screen that says “Almost done – activate Akismet and say goodbye to spam.” Click on the blue “Activate” button, then the “Get Your API Key” button. You can choose the basic plan and then set the slider to however much you want to pay for the service–you’ll probably want to set the cost to 0. Enter the key that they send you in the Akismet Settings.

Just as you did with your primary domain, create two new pages–one will be your static front page and the other will be your posts page. Also, create a third page called Achievements (don’t worry about putting anything in the page just yet).

Once you’ve created those two pages go to Settings > Reading to make your front page display the new home page and to designate the other as your posts page.

Next, go to Settings > Discussion. The first box at the top of the page says “Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article” and by default is unchecked. Make certain to check that box. Save the changes to this page.

Create_a_menuGo to Appearance > Menus and create a new menu. You can call it Main or Top or whatever you want. Once you’ve created the menu, you need to tell the site where to display the menu, so check the location box (different themes will have different locations available. The image shows the default theme for 2016, but if you’ve changed themes you might have other options). I generally advise that when you’re starting out, you automatically add new top-level pages, which you can always turn off later if you want more manual control.

Notice in the Menu area to the left, you have a palette of items that you can add to the menu. In the default setup, you can add Pages, Posts, Custom Links, or Categories. Pages, Posts, and Categories are just those items that you’ve created in the dashboard.

Custom_Links_in_MenuCustom Links allows you to add a link to anything on web in your menu. Add a Custom Link that connects to your primary domain by entering the address for your primary domain in the URL box and a title in the Link Text box.

Add another Custom Link, this time directed at the class page.

Save your menu.

(Later, go the dashboard for your primary domain, create a menu, then add a Custom Link for your class subdomain too.)

If they didn’t add automatically, make sure you add your Posts page and Achievements page to the menu as well. You should have a menu which looks basically like the one on the left.

Later, you can rearrange your menus however work for you and if you’re already comfortable with WordPress and want to arrange your menus in some other style or you’ve got a theme with other menu locations, feel free to do something different. But if you’re starting out with WordPress, following these steps will help you to make your subdomain usable quickly.

One last step remains for basic setup. In the dashboard, go to Appearance > Widgets and find the widget called Meta. Click on the title, then add it to one of the widget areas on your site. This widget adds some basic links, most importantly a link to the dashboard for your site. In the future, when you’re not logged into your WordPress account, you can pull up your site and click on the login button to get to the dashboard–there is no need to go through the cPanel to get to your site’s dashboard.

You should have a site which looks something like this now:

Eventually, I will definitely encourage you to try different themes and to customize your site. If you want to try very basic customizing of this Twenty-Sixteen theme, go to Appearance > Customize in the dashboard and try playing around with colors and/or add a header image.

Advanced stuff, plugins, categories ….

Fleshing out the assignments for the course.

Managing commenting and the structures necessary for syndicating work for the class.

 

Using Stella

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Here are a few tips on using Stella, the Atari 2600 emulator you need to install on your computer in order to play a few of the required games this semester, such as Combat.

  1. First you need to get Stella (it’s open-source and free). You can find Stella for Windows, Macs, or Linux operating systems from the project’s download page.
  2. Once the file is downloaded, open the installer just like you would to install any other program.
  3. Accept all the default settings.
  4. Once Stella is installed, you’ll need a game “ROM” — this is essentially a tiny piece of software code that mirrors the code on the original game cartridge. There are plenty of places online to find ROMs. Atari Age is the premier Atari site, and in addition to scans of the original packaging and instruction manuals of different games, you can find many ROMs there. Go to individual game pages and look for the “Download ROM” icon (it looks like a white Pac Man in a blue circle). Experiment with different games. You might especially try playing the following classic Atari games:Combat, Pac-Man, Air-Sea Battle, Yar’s Revenge, Asteroids, Demon Attack, Space Invaders, and Frogger
  5. The ROMs at Atariage are often compressed as .zip files to speed up downloading (even though they are already extremely small files). Once the game is downloaded, you’ll have to “unzip” the file to extract the .bin file inside. This .bin file is the actual ROM. Most Macs and PCs can uncompress the games without any problem. Remember where you’ve placed the unzipped .bin file that is the game ROM, and you’re ready to load it up in Stella.
  6. Run Stella. When you first open the program you’ll see a DOS-like directory. Navigate through here to find where you saved the various .bin files you’ve downloaded.
  7. You might have to experiment with the different controls and functions keys. In general, press F2 to begin the game.

Pages and/vs Posts

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In this class, I make a clear distinction between blog posts and pages: all of your major, formal projects (“main quests“) will go onto your sites as pages. The side quest 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.

faq

What’s the difference between URLs and links?

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URLs are for computers.

They are specific addresses that tell the web browser where to go to fetch data and show it to you in one form or another. The URL for the FAQ page on this site is http://eng181s16.davidmorgen.org/resources-and-glossary/. The URL for the oldest post on the course blog is http://eng181s16.davidmorgen.org/davids-posts/how-do-i-use-html-to-format-comments-on-this-site-others/. With a little awareness of the syntax, you can decode that information. If you wanted to read the page or post that I just referenced, you could copy that code and paste it into your browser to get there.

Sometimes people just paste URLs into emails or pages that they’re writing, and some applications will convert those URLs into links so that you at least don’t have to go to the trouble of copying and pasting the code as separate steps to get to the pages referenced. For example, one way to show you Gavin Aung Than’s comic adaptation of a quote by Jim Henson would be to just do this: http://zenpencils.com/comic/150-jim-henson-a-puppeteers-advice/. However, most of the time readers will find URLs confusing and uninviting, and it’s difficult for you to effectively contextualize that information smoothly.

Links are for humans.

Links use HTML code to turn URLs into something that is readable and clear for humans. One way to create a link is manually by inserting some HTML code around text, making that text into a link, so

Check out Gavin Aung Than’s <a href=”http://zenpencils.com/comic/150-jim-henson-a-puppeteers-advice/”>brilliant comic adaptation</a> of a quote by Jim Henson.

looks like this in your browser

Check out Gavin Aung Than’s brilliant comic adaptation of a quote by Jim Henson.

Most of the time, though, you don’t need insert links manually. When you’re in your WordPress post editor, you can create a link by highlighting the text or image that you want to become a link and selecting the button that looks like the links of a chain, then pasting the URL into the dialog box. (The general rule of thumb, by the way, is that when you are linking to another page or post on your own site, you should have your link open in the same tab but when you are linking to something outside of your own site, have the link open in a new tab.)

This distinction between URLs and links is important for our class because our learning outcomes state that over the course of the semester, you will “demonstrate understanding of audience” and learn to “use and adapt generic conventions, including organization, development, and style” and using links instead of URLs is an important first step in understanding the reading needs of your audience and is an important stylistic and generic convention of writing for the web.

This distinction is also important because using links opens up a whole range of more interesting options for you that are unavailable when you merely drop URLs into your work. Jokes can be goofy commentaries or can offer useful insight on the topic at hand.

How do I use HTML to format comments on this site (& others)?

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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, the way there is when you’re in the dashboard composing posts and pages.

When you’re leaving a comment on a post on this site, there’s a line at the bottom that lists the most frequent types of HTML and formatting that you might want to use:

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=”” title=””> <abbr title=””> <acronym title=””> <blockquote cite=””> <cite> <code> <del datetime=””> <em> <i> <q cite=””> <strike> <strong>

For each of those codes, you just surround some text with the applicable HTML tags (i.e., you have an opening tag <em> (which adds emphasis), then the text you want to be emphasized, then you close the tag so that the browser knows when to stop emphasizing </em>).

Code Examples

Here are examples of how each of those codes work:

<a href=”http://eng101s15.davidmorgen.org”>course homepage</a>

<abbr title=”Hypertext Markup Language”>HTML</abbr>

<acronym title=”EWP”>Emory Writing Program</acronym>

<blockquote cite=”<cite><a href=”http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/l/ludwig_wittgenstein.html “> </cite> “>If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.
Ludwig Wittgenstein<blockquote>

<cite><a href=”http://eng101s15.davidmorgen.org/”></cite>

<code><a href=” “>course homepage</a></code>

<del datetime=”YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD”>This text has been deleted from the comment and there’s a time stamp to indicate when, which is not visible but is available to screen readers.</del>

<em>Emphatic!</em>

<i>Italics!</i>

<q cite=”http://eng101s15.davidmorgen.org/ “>The q cite tag allows you to provide a citation that does not show up visibly, but is available to screen readers behind the scene.</q>

<strike>This text has been struck through</strike>

<strong>Guiness for strength!</strong>

Outputs

And here’s how each of those different effects will look on this site when the comment is published:

course homepage

HTML

Emory Writing Program

If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

http://eng101s15.davidmorgen.org/

<a href=" "> </a>

This text has been deleted from the comment and there’s a time stamp to indicate when, which is not visible but is available to screen readers.

Emphatic!

Italics!

The q cite tag allows you to provide a citation that does not show up visibly, but is available to screen readers behind the scene.

This text has been struck through

Guiness for strength!

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