Welcome to WordPress. If this is your first time making a WordPress site, try checking out Getting Started with WordPress to orient yourself. You should have received an email (be sure to check your Spam folder) with your username and a link to set your password.
If you enter the site rgsinpop2025.cmoore.sites.carleton.edu and scroll to the bottom, you will see a place to log-in.
Beyond your personal username and login, I have also created a password for the blog as a whole, which you will need to type in to initially enter. This keeps our blog posts limited to our classroom community. I have listed the blog password on Moodle, underneath the link to the site. If you ever see a request for the password, without a request for your username info, this is probably the password to use.
Your first blog post of a minimum of 350 words (about a page and a half of double-spaced text if you are thinking about the size of an essay) is due on Sunday 4/20 by midnight.
The prompt from 4/15 offers you a suggested process for approaching the first post rather than a list of things you must do–there’s no way to answer all of those questions in such a short post, so please just think of them as possible questions to consider when you analyze the form and content of popular culture (there are many questions that could just as usefully be asked). The gist of the assignment is to spend half or less (approximately 100-175 words) of the post describing a scene and the second half or more (approximately 175-250 words) bringing an intersectional analysis to bear on what you observed. Choose anything you like!
In order to post, my advice is to write your content in a word file that you save to your computer so that you do not lose it in the process in case there is a problem with uploading. Then go to your dashboard on the blog: http://rgsinpop2025.cmoore.sites.carleton.edu/wp-admin, log-in, and press “new” from the top of the page. You can title your post, paste in your content, and add any links or images you wish. Here’s what the dropdown looks like:
If you highlight all of the text you’ve written in the entire post, you can see how many words you’ve written on the right hand side. It is always fine to go over word count, but please do try to make the minimum word count.
In general: Write blog posts that you would click on and read all the way through if you saw them linked on social media. Write about TV that gets you curious, while stretching your critical muscles and keeping it relevant to the class!
Here’s an example of one online platform for pop cultural criticism, if you want to get a sense of the rhetorical style common to this medium: https://www.avclub.com/
And here, by the way, is how to make a link. Hover over the content you want to link and click the link button shown below:
Please contact me if you have any problems with the technology. Looking forward to reading your first posts soon! Happy blogging!