assignments ENGL298 Second Year Seminar: This Bridgewater Life
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Need to be in touch with me?
LEE TORDA 310 Tillinghast Hall Bridgewater State University 508.531.2436 ltorda@bridgew.edu www.leetorda.com |
SPRING 2014 Office Hours
Monday: 3:30 to 4:30 Tuesday: 11:00 to 12:00 Friday: 1:00 to 2:00 and by appointment. |
FINAL CUT: STORY CHECKLIST FOR YOUR PODCAST
Do I really have to explain what this means? We’ve spent a semester collecting material for telling your story, thinking about how to tell a story, listening to how other people tell their stories, and now it is your turn. Your job is to take all of the parts and pieces that you’ve worked on this semester, and put them together in exactly the right way you should—exactly the right way, the only way possible to do justice to telling your story. How will you know when you’ve got the story right? Well, that’s the tough thing, isn’t it? Only you can know that, storyteller.
WHAT YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR AS A GROUP . . .
We will try to do this in stages. This may not entirely work out because we tend to take longer than I think we will. But let’s be hopeful. . .
1) Bring together all the sound files you’ve collected to make your 15 minutes story. You probably have more than 15 minutes. You probably should have more than that. Bring in all the music, interviews, your narration, all of it. Just as we’ve been doing all semester long, be prepared to share and get feedback from other groups. Be ready to get and give feedback on these materials. For both this class and the class where you share your draft of your completed 15 minutes (see number two), you will help a fellow group figure out things like Big Idea; Main Character; Problem, Struggle, and Resolution; appropriateness of music choices; appropriateness of organization of material.
2) Bring a draft of your completed 15 minutes to class. Be ready to share it with a partner group. Be prepared to get and give feedback on these materials for all the issues listed in Number One.
3) Bring a draft of your completed 15 minutes to a conference with me. We’ll listen to it together and discuss how successful it is. We will talk about what you might consider doing before turning it in. We will consider all of the same issues that you were asked to consider in numbers one and two.
4) Turn in your completed fifteen minutes as part of your final portfolio. This will be the main component of your final portfolio. See that section of this web site for complete details on what is due on that day. Pull out all the stops for this final fifteen-minute story. Make it as spectacular and whimsical and wondrous and clever as anything you’ve heard in our fifteen weeks together. I’m so excited to see what you do.
ME TRYING TO BE HELPFUL: By the end of the semester, you’ll have a lot of information about how to tell a story—sort of too much. It will get hard to keep it all organized. Thus, from the beginning of the semester, we will be building a sort of checklist of what makes a good story—from the story part to the technical part. We will visit this checklist a number of times during the semester, building it as we go. By the time it is most useful to you—in the final stages of putting your story together—it will be complete. We will use it as a guide for workshops and conferences at the end of the semester in particular, and, when possible, during the semester as well.
GOOD STORY CHECKLIST (come back soon to see this list grows & changes)
From 27 January 2014
Do I really have to explain what this means? We’ve spent a semester collecting material for telling your story, thinking about how to tell a story, listening to how other people tell their stories, and now it is your turn. Your job is to take all of the parts and pieces that you’ve worked on this semester, and put them together in exactly the right way you should—exactly the right way, the only way possible to do justice to telling your story. How will you know when you’ve got the story right? Well, that’s the tough thing, isn’t it? Only you can know that, storyteller.
WHAT YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR AS A GROUP . . .
We will try to do this in stages. This may not entirely work out because we tend to take longer than I think we will. But let’s be hopeful. . .
1) Bring together all the sound files you’ve collected to make your 15 minutes story. You probably have more than 15 minutes. You probably should have more than that. Bring in all the music, interviews, your narration, all of it. Just as we’ve been doing all semester long, be prepared to share and get feedback from other groups. Be ready to get and give feedback on these materials. For both this class and the class where you share your draft of your completed 15 minutes (see number two), you will help a fellow group figure out things like Big Idea; Main Character; Problem, Struggle, and Resolution; appropriateness of music choices; appropriateness of organization of material.
2) Bring a draft of your completed 15 minutes to class. Be ready to share it with a partner group. Be prepared to get and give feedback on these materials for all the issues listed in Number One.
3) Bring a draft of your completed 15 minutes to a conference with me. We’ll listen to it together and discuss how successful it is. We will talk about what you might consider doing before turning it in. We will consider all of the same issues that you were asked to consider in numbers one and two.
4) Turn in your completed fifteen minutes as part of your final portfolio. This will be the main component of your final portfolio. See that section of this web site for complete details on what is due on that day. Pull out all the stops for this final fifteen-minute story. Make it as spectacular and whimsical and wondrous and clever as anything you’ve heard in our fifteen weeks together. I’m so excited to see what you do.
ME TRYING TO BE HELPFUL: By the end of the semester, you’ll have a lot of information about how to tell a story—sort of too much. It will get hard to keep it all organized. Thus, from the beginning of the semester, we will be building a sort of checklist of what makes a good story—from the story part to the technical part. We will visit this checklist a number of times during the semester, building it as we go. By the time it is most useful to you—in the final stages of putting your story together—it will be complete. We will use it as a guide for workshops and conferences at the end of the semester in particular, and, when possible, during the semester as well.
GOOD STORY CHECKLIST (come back soon to see this list grows & changes)
From 27 January 2014
- It's got a main point or a moral or something like that
- It's relevant or relatable--people can listen to it and even though they don't have that exact experience they feel like they understand something about the story being told.
- It uses sound--like music and some sound effects
- Sort of going along with that: it uses different voices. Not just one person telling the story--even if it is one person's story
- It uses a lot of imagery and detail (which is interesting because we don't see anything on the radio)
- It is emotionally powerful
- You can follow it--even though you can't see anything, you can follow these complicated story.