COMM 337: "Anatomy of a High School Dropout"

Don Murray, author of our textbook, is the subject of an odd story titled "Anatomy of a High School Dropout" in an online education magazine. (Odd for our purposes, at least, because it's written by an educator rather than a journalist.) It's by Jeanne Jacoby Smith, a specialist in rhetoric and composition pedagogy who decided "the very things that gave Murray grief in school were those that won him the Pulitzer Prize."

I was always interested in the story, because I like Murray and because I never saw a whole lot of point in school either, at least not till grad school (but that's another story and not a very interesting one). But I never looked in the Jacoby Smith piece for anything that might help my own writing until today. Then I needed to find something -- and find it quick -- for an in-class writing assignment when a half dozen students showed up without their textbooks. Smith's story was all I could think of, so I asked them to write about what they found in it that could help them with their writing as J-students.

Which means I had to go back and re-read the story for writing tips, anecdotes about Murray and other things that might help me as a writer, too. I was surprised how much I found.

For one thing, Murray bombed out in school because he'd get too interested in a project, and he'd let all the rest of the busywork slide. I used to do that, too, and it's one of the reasons I always hated school until I could do research of things that interested me in grad school. But the same habits that hurt Murray (and me) in school are the ones you need as a professional writer.

Jacoby Smith explains:

Murray hungered for in-depth immersion in a subject of his own choosing. What mattered were topics he cared passionately about. He was motivated for a career in writing, for meaningful work that would point him in that direction, but he was not motivated for high school, which did not expedite his cause. When topics of interest captured Murray's attention, days would pass until he surfaced again. He reflects on the situation, "I was a compulsive reader held back by my ... teachers since I read more, far more, than was required. I knew I could learn what I needed to learn." His sense of efficacy, the knowledge that he could do what he determined to do, is characteristic of resilient children.

Whatever Murray decided to do he did with passion. If he failed, he did so abysmally. If he passed, he excelled beyond expectations. His Latin teacher informed him that he was her best translator in class, but in grammar he failed. Today, Murray laughs, "I simply didn't care enough about past participle, intransitive ... verbs."

Wow! That's what I was like all the way through school. I didn't much care for grammar, either. Still don't.

But the way Murray threw himself into research is exactly what pays off in journalism. In a lot of workplace settings, as a matter of fact. Jacoby Smith says Murray is an example of a "resiliant child," a type of student she's trying to reach. I don't know about that, but he was a good enough journalist to get a job with Time right out of school and win a Pulitzer Prize.

The other part I liked has to do with Murray's emphasis on surprise. One reason he was a good writer (a good teacher, too, I think) is because he was always open to being surprised. In fact, he insisted on it. Jacoby Smith says Murray:

... passed most courses, but barely. In his words, "I couldn't make sense of the work if there was no mystery involved."

What is "mystery" for Murray?

Anything that involves surprise. To this day he writes about his craft as putting pen to paper "to write what I do not expect. I invite, encourage, cultivate, welcome, and follow surprise." Though he spent his life as a reporter, writer, and writing coach, he confesses to teaching that which cannot be taught. A writer, he says, hears the voice in his head creating, unraveling, revising, envisioning the writing as it comes. Writing has become an obsession to reveal that which he does not know -- a form of ultimate reality, his daily revelation. He authors faith at the point of a pen and talks about the "voice within, the voice of the text." He claims he can pick out a newsroom's best reporters by watching them silently (prayerfully?) voice the stories as they flow onto the page.

I'm leaving out a couple of footnotes here. You can check them in the original. To me, the main thing here is surprise. It's key to the way I'm trying to teach this whole course in advanced journalistic writing.

In fact, that's what happened when I assigned the Jacoby Smith article in class. I wasn't expecting to, and it was a pleasant surprise. But I guess that's the point.

COMM 337: Your first blogs, a note on grades

Time to close the books on the assignment I gave you last week, which was to create a blog and post your answers to the question about Donald Murray's last columns to the blog. I think we're off to a halfway decent start, although I do kinda think it might have been a better start if more of you had bothered to do the @#$%! assignment. Some overall observations after reading your responses.

What I like about your blogs.

When I assigned you to read stuff by and about an 82-year-old man, I wasn't sure whether his stuff was going to bridge the generation gap. And I'm never sure how much my students are going to like the same things I do. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. It's always a gamble.

This time I thought the gamble paid off.

Something I didn't expect: Most of you commented on Murray's way of life, the way he dealt with personal matters or the way his writing reflected his way of living. His writing tips are good, but I think what he really has to offer is in the attitudes he brings to the craft. And it sounds like you're picking up on that. Good! It's a surprise, but I like surprises (well, most surprises). And I encourage all of you to look for surprises, to delight in surprises as we go along. We'll deal more with surprise as we go along.

Some of your reactions that I liked:

"While reading all of Donald Murray's articles, I got the sense that he thoroughly enjoyed what he was doing," said Christina Ostermeier. "He brought his love of life and writing out in every word he wrote. Although at times I felt a hint of sadness in his writing when mentioning his wife, who passed away before him, I think he still just loved the fact that he got the chance to mention her in his articles."

Christina went on to say that's something in Murray's writing we can all model in our own, writing about the things and the people we know and enjoying it to the hilt. I agree 100 percent.

Other comments that I liked: Ben Harley said:

... What I truly learned from him, and I think I should try to integrate into my own life, I found in his obituary.

"My parents and teachers got together and decided I was stupid," he wrote last year. "My response was to develop a private mantra: 'I'm stupid but I can come in early and stay late.' Surprise. It worked. Good work habits will beat talent every time."

I try to use this idea at work too. This is just a great mantra. Hopefully I have talent, but in case I don't I can still succeed as a writer.

Agreed. Didn't somebody once say success is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration?

Michele Bearss said there was advice in Murray's columns she could use, but "I would only use it on a personal level." She added:

Within the columns that we were assigned to read it sounded almost like Murray's preparation to leave this world. Almost as if it was his last advice to his readers. Throughout his 82 years of life, Murray wrote a lot of articles and toward the end of his life they were focused mostly on the advice he would want to give to his young readers before he past. In the article titled, "Adventures Close to Home" Murray writes, "Do I stay at home or go out? Each invitation has its own challenge, peculiar to our combination of ailments, discomforts, indignities. The easy way is to stay home watching soap operas as my father did in his last years. But I want to live the life I have been unexpectedly given as fully as possible."

Amen. Good advice for all of us. I like the quote, too, and what he said about life being unexpected. Kind of like surprises.

If you want want to see a model for what a good blog item for class can look like, visit Robert Schwartz' blog. I'll just quote the whole thing:

The one thing I found interesting about Donald Murray's obituary was this quote:

"Each time I sit down to write I don't know if I can do it," he wrote. "The flow of writing is always a surprise and a challenge. Click the computer on and I am 17 again, wanting to write and not knowing if I can."

Even at age 82, he was never sure he'd be able to complete his next assignment. Not because of any physical ailment, but because of the uncertainty that comes with the blank page -- something that all writers share at some point or another, if not all the time. It's interesting to know that even someone of his age and experience would continue to face that problem up to his death.

That blank sheet of paper may turn into a blank computer screen with changing tecnhology, but it never goes away.

What I didn't like.

I would have been happier if more people had done the assignment. This is a writing course, and I don't know any way to learn how to write without doing some writing. If you don't write, you can't learn to write. It's not rocket science, is it?

A word or two about grades.

It would be a violation of federal law for me to post grades to the internet, but I am allowed to make some general observations. One is that you have to do the assignment to get a passing grade. If you don't do an assignment, you get a zero. If you do half the assignment (if you create the assigned blog but don't bother to post anything to it, for example), you get a grade of 50 percent. If you consult our syllabus for COMM 337, you will see the following notice in the section on means of evaluation: "The instructor's grading scale is as follows: A = 100-90. B = 89-80. C = 79-70. D = 69-60. E = 59-0." Do the math.

COMM 337: Wed. in-class exercise

I developed an instinct for story, the dramatic interaction between people that moved forward with cause and effect. -- Donald Murray

In Chapter 1 of "Writing to Deadline," Don Murray tells how he developed "an instinct for story," something he says every newswriter ought to have. Typically, he tells how he developed the story-telling instinct by telling a story ... the story of how he learned to tell a story. Wow. Kinda post-modern, isn't it? But he also lists several journalistic principles he learned -- things like accuracy, using verbs and nouns, "discovery," writing tight.

Read Washington Post staff writer Teresa Wiltz' Aug. 29 story "Still Singing Those Post-Katrina Blues" and analyze it in terms of Murray's principles. How does she practice the craft? By reading between the lines, what can you tell about the way she reported the story? How does it stack up in terms of accuracy, conciseness, order, clarity, voice and especially "discovery" and "voice?" What do you think Murray means by the terms? You probably won't be able to tell how Wiltz wrote earlier drafts of the story (I can't)! But you can analyze the voice that comes from working with the story and "adapt[ing] to the writing task and the music of the voice" (9). Look at her word choices, the rhythm of the words, the way she picks up a little bit of the New Orleans way of speaking. How can you use some of her techniques in your own writing?

Post your answers as comments to this blogpost.

COMM 337 - links to your blogs / FINAL LIST

Here's a roster of weblogs in COMM 337 so far, as complete as I can make it. If I don't have your address posted yet, please email it to me. If you want to change yours, correct me, please don't hesitate to let me know. Make a note of the *permalink for this post, because you'll be using it to keep track of class discussion, etc.

• Quinn Allen untitled (qa-vs-qsa)
  
  
• Michele Bearss untitled (writing4weenies)
  
  
• Jeremy Cook COMM 337 Advance Journalism
  
  
• Eric Craddock eric
  
  
• Shalon Davis untitled (shalonspot)
  
  
• Jeremy Dixon Jeremy D's Blog
  
  
• Whitney Drobnack untitled (com337mwf1200)
  
  
• Terah Ellison COM 337 Journal
  
  
• Jeff Hall Journalism
  
  
• Ben Harley untitled (vicious_apathy)
  
  
• Deanna Jones untitled (Ms. Jones)
  
  
• Zach Kirchner Advanced Journalism 337
  
  
• Mitch Ladd The Best Blog Names Are Taken
  
  
• Meghan McCarthy meghanmccarthy
  
  
• Gina Moscardelli Blogger Gina
  
  
• Christina Ostermeier untitled (5568blog)
  
  
• Robert Schwartz Advanced Journalism Writing
  
  
• Marqueta Stewart queta-marqueta
  
  

As the rest of you (the ones with a blank after your names) get your blogs created, please let me know the addresses so we can complete the class roster. This is an ongoing assignment that will not go away. If you haven't gotten around to posting your answer to the first question on the Donald Murray obit and columns in The Boston Globe, that one won't go away either!

_______________________
* A permalink is a permanent link for a blog post. Explains the techterms.com website, they allow us to bookmark a blog post so we can come back to it later, even after "the posting is outdated and no longer present on the home page."

COMM 337: Quotes, color in New Orleans story / READ!

Cross-posted from my HUM 223 blog ...

A by-lined story in The Washington Post this morning. Very complex. Very well written. Notice the way staff reporter Teresa Wiltz starts with a soft lede ... a word picture of jazzman John Boutte singing and counting money that leads her into the main point of the story, a nut graf that very simply says, "Nearly 4,000 New Orleans musicians were sent scattering after Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005. Many of them have been trying to return ever since. Today the soul of the city -- its rich musical legacy-- is at risk."

Notice especially how she blends description -- which journalists like to call "color" -- and quotes with background. As you read it, can you imagine her sitting in cars taking notes, going to a night club in the 9th Ward, soaking up color and getting people's words down? As you read it, look for the way she reported the story, in other words.

Will the New Orleans music scene ever get back to what it was before Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005? Probably not, says an article in this morning's Washington Post. Read it (and read it now because The Post doesn't archive stories on its website forever). The spirit of the music will live on, but an awful lot has been lost. This story suggests how much.

Here's the the main point of the story, by staff writer Teresa Wiltz:

Nearly 4,000 New Orleans musicians were sent scattering after Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005. Many of them have been trying to return ever since. Today the soul of the city -- its rich musical legacy-- is at risk.

"Everything is shrinking," says David Freedman, general manager of WWOZ-FM, a public radio station in the city. "In the clubs, you get the impression that all's back to normal. When you start scratching the surface, it's smoke and mirrors.

"So many musicians have not come back. How many can we lose before we lose that dynamic? To what degree do we just become a tourist theme park?"

By industry insiders' estimates, a third of the city's musicians [...] have found a way back home for good. Another third, like Lumar LeBlanc of the brass band Soul Rebels, are doing what he calls "the double Zip code thing," parachuting into town for gigs and then heading back to temporary homes in Houston, Atlanta, Los Angeles. The final third, like blind bluesman Henry Butler, stuck in Denver, have yet to make it back.

Among the double Zip-coders is Ivan Neville, singer, songwriter, keyboardist, son of Aaron. His mom's house was washed away. She passed in January. His dad settled near Nashville. Neville relocated to Austin, jetting in and out of New Orleans a couple times a month. As for making a permanent move back home?

"I don't see it," Neville, 48, says between sets at the Maple Leaf in the city's Uptown section. "Not in the near future. The spirit of New Orleans is alive. But it will never be the same again."

Wiltz notes that high schools lost their musical instruments, and 40 percent of their students. "With the loss of schools comes the loss of teaching jobs, work that musicians counted on to pay the rent between gigs," she adds. "With the loss of students comes the loss of a future generation of musicians."

I'm cross-posting this story to my advanced journalism blog, too, because it's so well written. See how Wiltz conveys the spirit of a little club in the 9th Ward, the part of the city hit hardest by the 2005 flooding:

But the hardest thing to preserve is something that can't be purchased. It is that which New Orleanians so desperately want to preserve: the feel of the city, that NOLA mojo, the likes of which can be found in Bullets, a crowded little Mid-City joint. Inside, trumpeter Kermit Ruffins and his band, the Barbecue Swingers, are jammed against the window. A steady stream of sports is playing on the TV, but no one pays much attention.

In spirit, Bullets is as far from the tourist-laden French Quarter as you can get. Here, it's buckets of Miller Lite and chicken wings served alongside Ruffins's gritty, greasy swinging "trad jazz" -- traditional jazz. The crowd is more boomer than youthful, with seasoned souls sporting tees that read "We Survived Hurricane Katrina" and "New Orleans: Proud to Call It Home." A grizzled gent leans over a newcomer, slyly uttering the post-Katrina pickup line du jour: "I really want to show you the Ninth Ward."

As the sun sets, a man comes in peddling homemade tamales; another hawks cellphone covers and disposable cameras. Tattooed white kids arrive, while a contingent of Creole matrons stands in the center of the room, arms folded, looking just a little bit aloof. Until they start to dance as one, getting down and dirty with the beat.

A man scratches away on a washboard as band members sing in Creole and English, catcalling and ululating. Everybody, it seems, knows the words, and they sing along, loud and strong, filling the tiny club with a sense of goose-bump-raising communion.

I cry Hey mama

In the morning time

Yi-Yi-Yi

"Only in New Orleans," Ruffins chants, laughing and laughing. "Only in New Orleans."

Wiltz doesn't explain how she happened to hear the "pickup line du jour." Maybe she doesn't have to.

When it comes to American music, New Orleans is the cradle. It's the Garden of Eden. It's where it all began. Wiltz' story conveys that, and in a few words -- a well chosen quote -- she conveys how much was lost in Hurrican Katrina.

This is the city that spawned Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson and Sidney Bechet, Randy Newman and Master P -- not to mention a long line of famous musical families: the Marsalises, the Nevilles, the Batistes, the Toussaints.

Folks like to brag that New Orleans is the northernmost tip of the Caribbean, a sentiment that has little to do with geography. It's a sensibility, evident in the food, the culture, in the French and Spanish surnames, in the old folks who cling to Creole, an Africanized French patois.

New Orleanians have always celebrated the mixing of genes, the blending of races and cultures into a potent ancestral gumbo. All this informs the music here, marinating it in nostalgia and a sense of defiant joy. New Orleanians are peculiarly tied to place, ever cognizant of history.

Drive by Congo Square, and without fail, a local will remind you that it was here that the slaves played their music on Sundays, drumming away their worries, and where a slave could earn enough extra money to buy freedom. Where the Creole orchestras played in brass band concerts -- many of whose members were the black sons of rich white fathers who sent them to Europe to be educated.

"In New York, you learn jazz, you learn the blues," Paul Sanchez says. "In New Orleans, you're born into it. Baby comes out the womb chasing the rhythm."

He's waxing lyrical as he tools around the Lower Ninth Ward, cruising in his green minivan.

"I tell you, this place is magic," Sanchez says. "I say this with sadness in my voice."

In another interview, with more well chosen quotes from a 21-year-old "jazz-funk-rock-pop" musician named Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews, she conveys what remains, how fragile it is and how important it is for the future. As you almost have to do in New Orleans these days, she approaches the future through the past:

When Katrina hit, Andrews was a 19-year-old wunderkind on break from touring with Lenny Kravitz. He fled with his family to Dallas, 10 crammed in his Volvo, wondering and worrying if other family members made it out, too.

He didn't stay away for long. New Orleans grounds him. Specifically, it is Faubourg Treme that feeds him -- reputed to be America's oldest black neighborhood, which nurtured the musical talents of the Rebirth Brass Band, 19th-century Creole classical composer Edmund Dede, Kermit Ruffins and Louis Prima. The neighborhood that nurtured Andrews.

Here, high-water marks along the wooden shotgun houses and shuttered nightclubs give mute testimony to the flood. Few residents returned, but today, under a highway overpass, against a backdrop of murals of long-gone jazz greats, a group of men gathers as it does every day, sitting on metal folding chairs, trying to reclaim a little bit of community. Most of them don't live here any longer.

"These," Andrews says, pointing at the men as he pulls up alongside them in his oversize SUV, "are the last that's left. This is the soul of the neighborhood."

He rolls down the window. "Hey, Dad. Do you need anything? You hungry?" His father, James, smiles at him, shakes his head.

This is where Trombone Shorty comes to touch base, to get his "laugh on," to run errands for his elders. To remind himself not to get a big head. To remind himself of the importance of reaching back, to pull along other musicians who aren't as fortunate as he.

"New Orleans made me who I am," Andrews says. "I can't leave it.

"I need New Orleans. And New Orleans needs me."

COMM 337: Ground rules/Fri. assignment

On Friday we will cover a talk by two Catholic priests who have experience in Iraq. As it now stands, it will be in the Presidents Room (L15) at noon and it will replace the Friday writing assignment I mentioned previously. Any updates I will post to this blog.

We have been asked to abide by certain ground rules regarding identification of the speakers or the agency sponsoring the talk: (1) we don't identify the speakers by name in what we write; and (2) we don't identify the sponsoring agency in anything we write. No pictures and no sound recordings, either. You wouldn't think about this at first, but both can be used to identify people. So we don't use either.

Normally journalists are very reluctant to quote anonymous sources. But where there's good reason, it is not an uncommon practice. Given what is happening in Iraq, failure to abide by ground rules could literally get somebody killed. So we will be attending the talk "on background" and following Associated Press ground rules on the use of anonymous sources.

COM 337: Read and post to blog

Do this assignment after you open your blog and post the address to the COMM 337: Class blog addresses" comments field. Due Friday so I can read them and evaluate them over the weekend.

Donald Murray, author of our textbook "Writing to Deadline" and columnist for The Boston Globe," died at the end of last year. He was 82.

Here's what I want you to do:

1. Read Murray's obituary in The Globe and the last few columns he wrote, which are still available on the newspaper's website. (Talk about a guy who kept going right up to the end. He turned in his last column on a Friday, he died Saturday and the column appeared in Tuesday's paper.) Pay special attention to his last column, headlined "Friends' caring, sharing shows the way," and the column headed "Finding pleasure in the challenge of a blank sheet" that ran Dec. 26.

2. Write an answer to the following question(s) and post to your blog. (Especially if you're not used to blogging yet, I would recommend drafting your answers in Microsoft Word and copy-and-pasting them to the blog. If you post links, see this important *warning at the bottom of the page. If you're not posting links yet, it'll just confuse you. That's why I'm putting it at the bottom like an old-fashioned footnote.) Here's the question:

Donald Murray was 82 years old when he did. Is there anything in his last few columns that you can learn from in your own career as a professional writer?

No right answers here, although I do want you to think about these columns and see if there's anything in them you can use in your own writing. You all have different goals, and different ways of writing, so you'll get different things out of the columns and/or the obituary ... something he says about writing and the craft of writing, the way he handled his career, the way he writes, his style, word choices, etc., whatever. It's up to you, but I think he'll have something to say to all of us as writers.

An example: If I were doing this exercise, I might post a blog on the way he kept churning out columns in old age when life was obviously getting difficult for him and he had a good excuse to just sit back and not put in the effort, but clearly it was important to him to keep meeting deadlines. His daughter said something about how he lived through his writing. But I also like what he said about people might think he's stupid (although I seriously doubt anybody really did), but he could work harder. And it blows me away his last column was thanking his friends for being there for him. Did he know it was going to be his last?

No wrong answers, either. Although "die young and leave a good-looking corpse" might come close to being one.

* Warning footnote on hypertext links. Here's something I found out the hard way: If you type out hypertext -- that stuff that goes "a href equal-sign quote" you used to link to your blogs -- in Microsoft Word, Bill @#$&ing Gates will put "curly quotes" in automatically, and Blogger won't know what to do with them. I just put x's in the draft and type in the hypertext later in Blogger.

COM 337: Class blog addresses

As soon as you've opened your blog, you need to let the rest of us know your address. So I've set up a handy-dandy place you can do that. It's this post. Here are the steps:

1. Go down to the end of this post where it says "posted by Pete # 3:20 PM 0 comments" (except the number of comments will change as you follow the rest of the instructions), and click on where it says "___ comments." That will open up the comment field.

2. In the comment field, write a message telling us what you're naming your blog and creating a link to it (which is why the number of comments will change, but you've figured that out already so I don't need to tell you, right)?

Here's how you do a link. You'll have to use the angle brackets, the keys that look like "less than" and "greater than" from math class that you'll find as the shift of the comma and the period on your keyboard. Stuff that's enclosed in angle brackets is called an HTML "tag." (And HTML is short for Hypertext Markup Language. But I'll bet you already knew that, too.)

3. Start your link by entering <a href=" Then copy your blog's address (or URL) from the "Address" field on your browser and paste it in right after the quote mark. Follow it with another "> so it looks something like this <a href="yourblog.blogspot.com"> all run together with no spaces.

4. Next you need some text that you highlight so it'll take readers to your blog when they click on it. That's called hypertext. If you're doing this for the first time, it's easiest to say something like: Click here for the link. And highlight the word "here." It'll look like this: Click <a href="yourblog.blogspot.com">here</a> for link.

5. Make sure you put your address in the message. Just type it in normally without any of the angle brackets.

You may get all of this right the first time. You may not. (Don't feel bad if you don't! Just keep trying.) Pretty quickly, you'll get used to it. And it's an important thing to know because you'll be doing a lot of linking on your blogs as you get under way.

Once you've made the link, save the comment to this blogpost and make a note of the headline, the date, the permalink address of this post or whatever. We'll be coming back to it.

So the next time you're sitting at a bar and you notice somebody next to you staring into their beer and muttering "angle bracket a space href equals quote URL quote angle bracket," you'll understand why. Buy 'em a round. They may need it.

COMM 337 assignment: Starting your blogs

You'll notice on your syllabus for Communications 337 I'm requiring you to create a blog and do a lot of your work in the form of posts to that blog. I think you will enjoy this part of the class once you get used to it.

A couple of places to look to begin with:

1. There's a good brief (500 words) definition of blogging by Jill Walker Rettberg, an associate professor at the University of Bergen in Norway. She's writing a book on blogging and also has an academic research blog on blogging called jill/txt. Some of her discussion is way over my head, but she's one of the best people I've read on the theory behind the phenomenon.

2. To see what a major metro newspaper does with blogs, go to The Chicago Tribune's homepage and look for the "Latest from our blogs" box. Today's is in the middle of the page, a little to the left and directly below the chicagotribune.com nameplate. It'll probably be in more or less the same place tomorrow (Monday) when you see it. Read several of the blogs, and they'll give you a good idea of some of the possibilities.

We'll look at several other blogs in class, and you'll link to several in one of your first posts. So start looking for blogs that you can model yours after. See what interests you and what doesn't. One thing you can do is express your personality (although maybe not in the same way(s) as MySpace) in a blog. So look around and see what appeals to you and what techniques you can use in your own blog.

By the end of the week, you should be ready to start your blog. I suggest Blogger. It's relentlessly user-friendly. But you may have another host that you like better. If so,

One warning, though: Blogging is a form of publication. One of my old bosses, an elected state official, used to say: "Never put anything in writing you wouldn't want to see leaked to The [Chicago] Trib or The Sun-Times." Good advice! Never put anything on your blog you wouldn't want to see printed out and clipped to your resume before a job interview. But you can -- and should -- express yourself more informally in a blog than you do in a college paper. In evaluating your blogs, I'll be guided by the applicable standards in the Writing Assessment Rubric linked to my faculty page.

Grammar rules!

Ever think typos aren't important? Oh, people will know what I meant even if I didn't dot all the I's and cross all the T's? Well, take a look at the mess the Arkansas state legislature has to clean up. It all began when an extra "not" crept into a law on the age of consent. Here's the story, as reported by Andrew DeMillo of The Associated Press:

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — A law passed this year allows Arkansans of any age — even infants — to marry if their parents agree, and the governor may call a special session to fix the mistake, lawmakers said Friday.

The legislation was intended to establish 18 as the minimum age to marry but also allow pregnant teenagers who are younger to marry with parental consent, bill sponsor Rep. Will Bond said. An extraneous "not" in the bill, however, allows anyone who is not pregnant to marry at any age if parents allow it.

So Arkansas got worldwide headlines when DeMillo's story was picked by AP members who couldn't resist it. The Seattle Times' was typical: "Law lets even babies marry with parents' OK."

AP's original headline was probably something like this: "Mistake in Ark. law allows toddlers to marry with parental OK." Several papers and TV stations, starting with The Commercial in Pine Bluff, Ark., used that headline Friday. And The Boston Globe, ABC News and The Guardian in London, England, had, "Mistaken Ark. law would let toddlers wed."

Other headlines: "State allows babies to marry ... with parental consent" -- USA Today. "Arkansas accidentally cuts legal age to wed to nearly zero" -- The Statesman-American in Austin, Tex. "Arkansas law lets toddlers tie the knot!" in The Times of India. I don't know if that's pun on the extra "not" or not. But how about this in The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette? "Deletion of ‘not’ in marriage-age law knotted up."

Not the image you want to project of your state, or your legislature! (And that "not" belongs where it is.)

Here's how it happened. With the extra word, the law reads like this: "In order for a person who is younger than eighteen (18) years of age and who is not pregnant to obtain a marriage license, the person must provide the county clerk with evidence of parental consent to the marriage."

Well, think about it. Babies are under 18, and they're rarely pregnant. So all they need is parental consent. Right? So a code-revision commission -- which fixes typographical and technical errors in laws -- tried to correct the mistake, but The Arkansas Legislative Council ruled Friday the commission went beyond its powers.

"You're either pregnant or you're not pregnant," said Sen. Dave Bisbee, a Republican. "Rarely will that be a typographical error."

Bisbee is a quotable guy, by the way. Here's what he told The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette before the legislative council met Friday:

“Did your mother explain to you the difference between being pregnant and not being pregnant ? It’s not technical,” he said in an interview.

Arkansas lawmakers are worried about having the state become a pedophile magnet (which seems unlikely to me but not something I'd want on my resume if I were a co-sponsor of the age-of-consent bill). Me, I'm worried about all the poor slobs who were supposed to be proofreading bills before the House and Senate passed them and the governor signed them. How did they let this one slip by? Are their next jobs going to be with Wendy's or Burger King?