Finding Our Giants Project

Back in January I wrote about the digital project option that was offered for my Women Writers class. At the time I wasn't sure whether my idea of writing responses to all of the writers that we read, and a few additional ones that I felt were relevant, would be acceptable to the instructor. But in March we handed in prospectuses for our projects and mine was accepted.

So I kept on with what I had started, writing up my class notes and then reflecting on the writer's words. Or the speakers words since I wrote about the Distinguished Lecture from Margaret Atwood or the television show since we watched parts of Battlestar Galactica in class and I wrote about that too. The in class discussions were usually interesting, but I always enjoyed going deeper with my own reflections, taking what was said in class and challenging it while it challenged me. 

I ended up with a nice, round 80 entries in my blog project, categorized by labels. Plus two pages, one of which is a directory and the other a works cited page. So they don't really count. 

Several of my classmates wrote also wrote blogs for their projects, but mine, for better or worse, has more entries than all of them combined. Or it did at the time that the blogs were presented to class. More entries may have been added in the interim between presentation and the end of the class. But I still felt that I may have gone a bit overboard... 

I suppose I will know when I find out my grade for the class. While I'm quite pleased with my project, I did not include references to scholarly sources. I stuck with primary sources and analysis, a habit from St. John's that I've broken for traditional papers, but that seemed to fit perfectly with my project. This was not about analyzing analyses - it was about one woman writing about other women who wrote (and one token man). I might get dinged for that on the grade, and I am okay with that. 

Well, not entirely okay. But I'e accepted the possibility and chosen not to artificially add in scholarly citations. 

My husband Ambrose was my first reader, as usual, and I found his comments on this blog project very interesting. He found that the entries I wrote for that project all fit together with each other, even at the word level. Usually he has some comments on my word choice or usage, but not on this project. I believe that happened in large part to my writing the first entry of the blog as a framing statement for the whole thing. It set the tone and the purpose of the whole piece, and I managed to maintain a unity throughout by keeping that purpose in mind. 

The name of my project blog is Finding Our Giants. The class, on the whole, was a good one. An experience that I enjoyed as well as one that I learned from.