Assessment Task No 1: Blog
Marked out of 100
Weighting: 30% of final mark
Description: Students will establish and maintain a blog where they will contribute three posts per week throughout the semester beginning in week two.
Posts will be published under three categories
- Writing exercises
- Brief observations from everyday life which develop the writer’s ability to observe and record detail in evocative ways. Topics might include: observations of nature, looking at faces, traveling around, overheard conversation, the built environment, the multitude of colours. These exercises must be observational and concrete, not mini opinion pieces about issues.
- Analysing features
- Students are expected to read broadly from both magazine and newspaper features. In their blog students will include links to and excerpts from their reading with brief comments which demonstrate particularly effective or problematic examples of feature writing craft. The focus of these postings should be primarily on the techniques employed rather than on the content of the feature.
- Feature ideas
- Each student will choose a “beat” that is of particular interest to them and post regularly about news and current events in their area of interest which could be developed into feature ideas. The focus of these postings should be on outlining possible feature ideas rather than just recording developments in the area.
Students should post at least once under each category each week.
Assessment Criteria: Students must demonstrate:
- a developing personal voice and a capacity to write in an engaging way from observation of everyday life events and images;
- an ability to analyse feature articles and their techniques;
- an ability to follow news and trends within a beat and generate interesting feature ideas;
- a developing sense of their blog as a cohesive online publication.
Weekly posts due date: Three posts (each of 200-300 words) weekly directly onto their blog.
Final assessment folio due date : In the final class students will submit a folio of 12 selected posts.
Must attempt: Yes.
