Submitting Assignments

Respect your work, your readers, and your sources.

  • Submit Work On Time
    • Unless otherwise noted (as is the case with blog posts), assignments are due at the beginning of class date they are listed by on the syllabus. 
  • Cite Sources
    • All quoted materials should be properly formatted, and all quotes, direct reference, and paraphrasing of work other than your own must be thoroughly and accurately cited according to MLA guidelines.  
  • Proofread and Edit
    • Leave time to adequately revise and edit your work. Make use of your resources (style guide, spellcheck, writing centers, friends, etc). When possible read your work out loud (preferably, to a friend) before you submit it. When you read your work out loud you are more likely to catch awkward phrasing and unclear sentences.  
    • Ultimately proofreading involves more than just running spellcheck, but I expect that at the very least, you can spellcheck your work and try to attend to the red and blue edit flags that Microsoft Word (and other word processing applications) automatically makes. Unless I’m provided with a viable alternative, I will assume that if you submit your work without taking advantage of the spellcheck suggestions, you don’t mean to respect your work or your readers (and depending on the error, your sources).

Blog Posts

  • Blog posts should be posted at least 36 hours prior to the class date your group has been assigned to post on the syllabus. To see when your group is scheduled to post, see the far right column on the syllabus.
  • When submitting you blog post make sure that you :
    • TITLE YOUR POST: Each post should include an original, creative title that illuminates some aspect of the post content and makes folks actually want to read and remember the post.
    • CHECK RELEVANT CATEGORY BOXES: Make sure you put a check mark in any and all relevant category boxes. Using the menu on the righthand side of your post window and locate the “categories” menu. Check all relevant category boxes. Above all else make sure you check the category box that corresponds to the your post group and the main text about which you’re posting. In addition to providing a quick reference for you and your peers, clicking the appropriate category boxes helps me grade. At the end of the semester, checking these boxes is equivalent to putting your paper in the correct faculty mailbox in the English Department. Even if you finish the paper and turn it in, I cannot count it if you put it in the wrong mailbox.
    • PUBLISH YOUR POST. In order for us to read your post, you must publish it. To publish your post, you should click the “Publish” button in the upper right hand corner of the screen. When you click this button, your post will not automatically post. After your first click on the “publish” button, the site will ask you if you really want to publish your post. You must confirm by clicking the “Publish” button again in the upper right hand corner. When your post has published, a message should pop up either at the top of the screen or at the bottom left hand part of the screen with the option to “view post.” You can also double check, by going back to the site, clicking on the discussion menu, and seeing if your post shows up.
  • Handwritten Posts
    • For this class, you also have the option of writing your post response out by hand and uploading an image of your writing. If you do so make sure that your handwriting is very legible (even if that means you have to rewrite it in print or a more legible script). Please select the smallest size option for your media file.
  • Saving your work
    • While the site will autosave, don’t rely on that option. Consider crafting your post in a saved Word Document and cut and pasting it into a post once you’ve completed the post. Doing so will also allow you to check your word count.
    • You can edit your posts after you publish them, however . . .
    • DO NOT EDIT AFTER THE DUE DATE. You should not edit your post after the due date except to correct an inaccurate citation. Making changes to your post after the deadline is not fair to the folks reading your work and preparing for class. You can always develop your idea further in your journal entries or in an another assignment.

Other Written Assignments

  • Unless indicated otherwise on the syllabus, written assignments other than blog posts, should be emailed to the professor’s BC email address as a Word Document.
  • Do not send a pdf or a google doc invitation. If you do so, the assignment will be marked as incomplete until it’s received in the proper format. All Word documents should be formatted as follows:
    • 1 inch margins (header, footer, left & right margins)
    • 12 point Times New Romans Font (please no crazy fonts).
    • Double Spaced (please use the double space feature; do not manually space your document).
    • Page numbers included in the FOOTER (not manually at the bottom of the page)
    • Last Name (required) and First Name (optional) in the HEADER.
    • Any title, course information, or date, should be listed in the HEADER or FOOTER, not in the body of the text.
    • If you need to break pages, please use the insert page break feature (under the insert menu). Do not use the return key to manually make page breaks.

Submitting Visual, Audio, and other Non-Written Assignments

Some assignments in this class involve work that is not written. As noted above even some of your written work might need to be shared as an image if you’re posting a handwritten document to the site. Typically speaking all the rules above apply in terms of the difference between submitting work to me directly by email and posting work to the class site.

The difference will arise in file format and document size. There are limits to the file sizes that can be uploaded to the site. If you find that your file exceeds the limit, you should first, publish as a place holder, a small portion along with an explanatory note on the site (think an image still from a video or a twenty second sound bite from a 5 minute audio). Then you should email me the file. If I am able to email the file to the group I will.

If the file is too big to email me, consider compressing the file and/or breaking it into smaller parts with notes about the viewing order in the body of the email. If this option does not work, you can try using google file drive on the BC Google suite (you should see it in your bc gmail dashboard). If you send me a file via google file share or google drive, make sure you also email me alerting me that you are sending a file this way.

Last Minute Tech Issues?

Certainly you should let me know as soon as you can if you are experiencing difficulties accessing the class site or email etc. But know that since I assume you’re not waiting to the last minute to finish the work, the mere occurrence of a temporary slow or stalled internet connection or an account blocked due to not updating your password, will not count as a valid excuse for late work. Generally speaking there are as many work-arounds to the average tech/internet problem (i.e. sending an email from a smart phone or putting your document on a flash drive and asking a friend to send the documents via their computer). Of course emergencies do happen, and I will take such emergencies in consideration once you have contacted me, but you should not assume that common place tech. issues will count as an emergency.