Commonplace Book
Commonplace Book (40%, 40 points)
The commonplace book is a document where you will write each week, post notes in two distinct formats, and collect bits, fragments, and orts germane to the theory and practice of teaching college composition, your emerging interests as a prospective teacher, and ideas you have for pedagogy, research, or further inquiry into matters only provisionally introduced in this course. Your commonplace book will be stored in your Google Folder (it's already there; created for you!), where you will add to it each week, being careful to add new entries in reverse chronological order (new entries at the top of the document) and being careful to label entries for clear identification. When you add a new entry, make sure it includes the following:
1.Title (Date, Type of Entry)
The number is the week. It will match with the week shown on the course schedule.
The title may be attention getting, descriptive, or both.
The date is the date you wrote the entry.
The type of entry will be Brooke Notes, Triple-entry Journal, Amp&ersand, or something else)
Open your Commonplace Book, and you will find a sample already queued up for your reference.
The commonplace book may include in-class writing, writing prompted by your classmates' discussion leads, end-of-class exit tickets, reflection statements, and a host of other variations on these. Note that most of these will be prompted. It may also include any other writing you wish to include in it: questions (pragmatic, idealistic, exploratory), postulations, rants, worries, experimental forms, embedded clips, noticings, found art, jokes, definitions, and so on.
But the commonplace book must include in weeks 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13 at least one Brooke Notes entry or two Triple-entry Journal entries, and one Amp&ersand entry. For the entire commonplace book, then, that's 10 weekly reading notes entries (5 Brooke notes; 5x2 triple entry journals) and 10 amp&ersands. Fair point: that's a lot to sort through. Consider it another way. For Week Three (September 11), you will write either a Brooke Notes entry on one of the starred articles on the class schedule, or you will write two triple-entry journals on any of the reading. You will also write at least one amp&ersand entry.
On Grading
Each week, into your commonplace book:
1 Brooke Notes entry on a starred article from the schedule OR 2 triple entry journals on any reading from the schedule; AND at least one amp&ersand entry. If you have this much, you'll be on track for earning full credit, or four points. Is something missing, late, incomplete, done in a hurry, or otherwise reflective of middling quality? In these cases a grade reduction may apply for that week. The week's entries will receive comments, and grades will be posted in Canvas on a scale of Exceptional, Acceptable, Needs Improvement, Below Expectations, or Not Completed.
What about Brooke Notes, Triple-entry Journals, Amp&ersand Entries, and Coding for Stases?
Brooke Notes (~45 minutes)
Brooke Notes are a note-keeping system designed to be routine, generative, usable, and accumulative throughout and beyond your graduate program of study. This approach to note-keeping, which I credit to Collin Brooke, takes as its first principle that if it warrants reading, it warrants annotation. Even more, scholarly and curricular reading warrants annotation that is right-sized (i.e., neither excessively thorough nor too thin to be useful later on) and built-up in a database that you can search later on. Whether or not that database is kept publicly is up to you; there are strong arguments on both sides of the decision to post such notes publicly or, instead, to keep them privately, and we will discuss some of these considerations in class.
Here are a few general provisions for Brooke Notes:
- Develop your notes entry while the reading is reasonably fresh, preferably within a few hours of reading and never more than a day later.
- Set a timer. Try to keep the development of your notes entry to under an hour.
- An entry's scope should be between 400-1000 words. Longer entries make sense for complex or inspirational articles and book-length works. Briefer entries are appropriate for most scholarly articles.
- Such note-keeping practices are habitual and accumulative; they will over time amount to a personal archive invaluable to the development of lit reviews and a reliable, lasting resource of personal knowledge.
Learn more about the rationale for this approach and the basic guidelines for developing a Brooke Notes entry over here: http://www.cgbrooke.net/2014/01/16/reading-notes/. Each entry should—at a minimum—include the following:
- A title. Lastname, Firstname. Title of article, abbreviated, if necessary.
- A full citation adhering to MLA or APA style. This should be complete and correct, ready to copy into a bibliography, references list, or works cited.
- A one- or two-sentence summary, or an abstract. This should capture concisely what is the focus of the reading. If an abstract is already available, it is fine to copy/paste it into your notes. But writing your own abstract is excellent practice, too, as such summaries are challenging and require a thorough sense of the reading.
- Keywords/tags. A list of 5-10 keywords or phrases that index the entry in terms of important terminology, methods and methodologies, sites/materials/objects of analysis, and theoretical underpinnings. Present these as a comma separated list (i.e., not running vertically down the page)
- 2-3 citations. These are sources cited in the reading that you consider especially important, insightful, and possibly worthy of your tracking them down as reading cascades into further reading. Include the full citation information.
- 2-3 quotations. These are gem passages, either for the ways they capture striking ideas, pose questions, or connect with things you are thinking about, working on, or considering important. Include a parenthetical page or paragraph number to make the quotation easy to locate later on.
- 1-2 questions. These are questions you formulate that articulate the edges of wonder and prime further exploration. Code each question with one of six rhetorical stases [fact, definition, cause, action, value, jurisdiction]
A complete Brooke Notes entry will include all seven of these elements.
Triple-entry Journals (~45 minutes)
A triple-entry journal appears as a table with three columns. In the first column, give the source and a quotation you find to be especially significant, interesting, curious, or note-worthy. In the second column, interpret the quotation, elaborating on its significance and offering a response. In the third column, present a question for discussion and exploration--a question you consider to be relevant to your emerging research interests or otherwise connected to the course's key premises, theories and practices of teaching college composition.
| Source Direct quotation, including page or paragraph number. |
Interpretation or the quotation. | An emerging question appropriate for discussion and exploration. Code the question with one of six rhetorical stases [#fact, #definition, #cause, #action, #value, #jurisdiction] |
Amp&ersands
Think of these as an open, pluralistic category for at least one more entry. Amp&ersands are an addition; use them as a reflection on your semester, for unpacking some event or intention related to your professionalization as a graduate student in English, for drawing connections to other work you are doing (or interested in doing), for drafting conference proposals or speculating about possible publications you want to work on. Each week, your Commonplace Book must have one Amp&ersand entry.
Coding Questions for Stases (Applies to Brooke Notes and Triple-entry Journals)
The questions you develop in your Brooke Notes entries and Triple-entry Journals should be developed with care. They should be questions you have a genuine interest in exploring because they have the potential to be brought in for class discussion. Developing effective questions can be challenging. It may be helpful to think in terms of basics (journalist's W's): Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How. As you pose questions, also do the provisional work of sorting through how someone would go about answering it, really. Is this a question that could be refined through research? What sort of research? How long would it take? What forms of knowledge would clarify or complicate the pursuit of understanding? Develop questions, as much as possible, that are cognizant of these qualities.
And finally, as you create questions for Brooke Notes entries and Triple-entry Journals, add with a #hash the stases you believe corresponds with the question. Rhetorical stases, or sticking points, are designations for purposes (or named intentions). Oftentimes, when discussants become stuck, it's because they are addressing different stases or because they have skipped first order stases and moved too hastily on to second order stases. First order stases are premise-establishing, while second order stases advance action, value, and jusridiction. As such, your questions will be complete when they are coded with one of the following:
First order stases:
#fact - Is x demonstrably true?
#definition - What is x?
#cause - What caused x?
Second order stases:
#action - What should be done about x?
#value - Is x good or bad? Is x important or unimportant?
#jurisdiction - Whose purview is x? Whose jurisdiction is x?
Generally, second order stases can be difficult to engage mutually until first order stases are established. For more on rhetorical stases, see Fahnestock and Secor, "The Stases in Scientific and Literary Argument" (Written Communication, 1988).
Contact Information
Derek N. Mueller, PhDAssociate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing
Director of Composition
Department of English
Virginia Tech
Office: 315 Shanks Hall
Spring 2020 Office Hours: T, 12-3
Phone: +1-734-985-0485
dmueller@vt.edu
http://derekmueller.net/rc/
