Comments and Advice: September 2011

Hello, everyone! Welcome back to the Writing Studio Blog.

In the left column of the table below is a collection of comments that I'd posted on individual blogs during or just after the summer recess, including a number of suggestions for revising and improving posts. Those without dates and links were pending moderator approvals when I collected them (from previews). They are all in chronological order (earliest to latest). In the right column are generalizations from those comments to advice for all of you to continue to follow. So please read this entire post carefully.

Then, if you have any concerns or questions about those comments, either on your own posts or on those of your classmates or peers, please voice them in class or spell them out in comments on this post. The same goes for the advice and suggestions for everyone. Last but not least, please keep checking your blog dashboards for comments awaiting moderation, and show and tell me in class if you get any that you think are comment spam.

Thank you for your continuing cooperation.

Comments for Individuals	Advice for All
Hi Sakurako, If what you have in this post is a quotation (possibly a preface for a book review), you need to mark the quotation as such (and shorten it), for example, "...[O]ne day, a dazzling new songbird arrives..., and the Emperor has eyes for nothing else" (p. n). Book reviews also need APA-style references. Cheers, PB 2011年8月5日16:13	Start book reviews with brief quotations that are likely to attract readers attention. Mark them clearly as a quotations; Follow them with short citations in parentheses; and Provide a complete APA-style reference, with the authors' given names spelled out, at the end of the review. See the Writing Studio Blog, BR 2-01: Robin Hood (Swan, 1989) (September 22, 2011) for an illustration.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot! The "n" in parentheses in my previous comment is a placeholder for the number of the page where you got the quotation. I'd also like to    remind you that book reviews you do now (Aug. – Sep.) will count for fall semester, and, last but not least, ask you [to] share what you learn from comments like this with your classmates and peers. Cheers, PB 2011年8月5日16:21	For an explanation of factors scores for book reviews you post early this semester, please review the Writing Studio Blog, Book Reviews: Factors to Consider (August    1, 2011).
pab さんのコメント... Hi, Yudai! It is a pleasure to see you tackling serious topics here on your blog. Your remark at the end about discussing such things with your friends lead me to wonder whether there is any place special that you like to go to do that. Cheers, PB. 2011年9月20日火曜日10:21:00 JST ...2011/09/big-earthquake-in-japan	Include information you expect readers to need or want to know. Provide details and give examples.
pab さんのコメント... Takahiro, Is this some sort of machine translation? Please let me know in a follow-up comment ASAP. Cheers, PB [Sep 22, 2011]	Open your blog at least every other day. Please approve comments waiting for moderation within 48 hours, and respond in follow-up comments. [Note: Takahiro has  responded to my question in a follow-up comment.]
pab さんのコメント... Shiori's right! You should use three or more labels on every post. Other possible labels for this post would be composition and free-writing. You also need to include word counts on every post. Counting words when you post will make it easy to tally them up for your Proto-Portfolio entries each month. Please put them in square brackets, aligned flush right, on the last line of every post. Cheers, PB 2011年9月22日13:42 ...2011/09/reflections-on-writing-iii.html	Include word counts and labels on every post. See the Writing Studio Blog for model posts showing where to put word counts (last line, aligned right). Choose labels suited to each post. If you're not sure about which labels to use, please ask for suggestions in class.
pab さんのコメント... Hi Natsumi, It sounds like you took some sort of nation-wide certification or qualification exam. I gathered it was challenging, but I couldn't figure out who or what the exam was for. So please let us know more. For example, what subjects where on the exam, and how long did (each part of) it last? Cheers, PB 2011年9月27日火曜日13:38:00 JST	Include information readers will need or want to know. Organize that information in a way that makes it easy to understand how one topic relates to the next. For example: General to specific, for example: Kind of test, Parts of test, Length of parts, & Difficulty of parts. Other organizational schemes you can use are: Time sequence Starting with earliest, or Starting with latest; and Order of importance Starting with the most important, & Repeating the most important at the end.

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