Reading Project — Ross Laird

The reading project represents your efforts to craft — with text, but also perhaps through images and videos interwoven with the text — content that might be of interest to someone browsing the internet. What you read is entirely up to you; after all, pretty much everything is on the web these days, so every subject enjoys extensive online coverage.

As this is a course in Creativity on the Web, here are a few suggested readings (both books and websites) that focus on those interconnected themes: creativity and the web. Feel free to utilize any of these readings or to choose your own. The important thing is to choose what interests you; reading out of interest is really the only valid perspective from which to write something interesting.

Web Culture and New Storytelling

Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (or anything by Lanier)
Newport, Cal. Digital Minimalism
Gladwell, Malcolm. Talking to Strangers
Cain, Susan. Quiet
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs
Weiner, Anna. Uncanny Valley
Levy, Stephen. Facebook: The Inside Story
Jackson, Sarah. Hashtag Activism
McNeil, Joanne. Lurking
Manji, Irshad. Don’t Label Me
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Skin in the Game
Giridharadas, Anand. Winners Take All
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me (or The Water Dancer, or anything by Coates)
Coyle, Daniel. The Little Book of Talent
Levitin, Daniel. A Field Guide to Lies (or anything by Levitin)

Digital Publications

This list represents a wide range of digital publications in a variety of fields. Each of these sites offers a distinct voice and writing style as well as a multitude of articles on many subjects. You should be able to find something to interest you on each of these sites.

Reading online publications in a range of fields is the best way, hands down, to learn how to write online. We learn to write online mostly by reading online. (For example, I would never expect to see the phrase hands down in a print publication or academic essay. But writing online is often less formal than print; so, I can use that phrase here, in this digital space.)

As I said, visit all of these sites if you can. This collection offers storytelling from pretty much every possible angle (pretty much is another phrase that is frowned upon in print but common online). You will, no doubt, find something that interests you. (Hint: if this list seems overwhelming, just start with the first two: Wired and Salon. You will find almost the entire universe of web culture and new storytelling on those sites. In particular, the culture sections on both Wired and Salon are great places to start. Then go to Aeon. But really, do try to visit them all.)

Details and Possible Content

This project is focused on your responses to the reading you have been doing. What has been interesting to you? What has made you think, or feel? And, since you are a unique person, your responses will be unique to you. There are no right answers or secret criteria here. You are not making an argument in this project, not passing along some version of the main points of what you read. No, you are simply reading, absorbing, reflecting, and then writing. In that order. The essence of what you write about in this project is your reflections on the reading.

I am not asking you to prove that you’ve read anything. Instead – and again, just to make this really clear – I’m asking you to reflect on your reading. Here are some examples of the kinds of things you might reflect upon:

Why did you choose this particular reading?
How does this reading make you feel?
What metaphors or symbols stand out for you, and why?
Does the reading remind you of something inside yourself? What? And how?
What does this reading teach you about your life?
Why do you react to the reading in the way that you do?
What do these reactions tell you about yourself?
How might you use the knowledge or insights from your reading to grow as a person or to improve and deepen your relationships with others?

These are just examples. They are not intended to be prescriptive or compulsory. You will learn your own thing, in your own way. But let’s hope that you’ve learned something from your reading. The reading assignment is to write about your reflections (again, in case you missed it the two other times).

Do not write an academic essay! If you do, I will send it back and politely ask you to resubmit the reading assignment. No essays. No five-paragraph boilerplate. No thesis statements. No bibliography. No statements to the effect that you “will demonstrate in this essay”, or that “further, this shows that”, or “in conclusion.” Nope. You have probably learned to write slightly different versions of the exact same essay, over and over again, in your educational journey. If that’s the case, then this assignment will perhaps be anxiety-provoking. I’m asking you to abandon a particular writing skill – traditional essay-writing – and instead try something that might be completely new.

What to write instead of an academic essay? If you’ve been reading a book (or books) for this class, or if you've been following the suggested online readings, you will have noticed that you don’t see a lot of essay-writing in these readings. You don’t see thesis statements and concluding paragraphs and weasely academic language. Instead, what you see is storytelling. Good writing tells a story – fictional or nonfictional or some strange blend. And the stories we are most drawn to? What do they do? They teach us about ourselves. That’s why we’re drawn to them.

Don’t summarize your reading, or do a book report, or an essay based on what you think I want to hear. This assignment is about you, and your reactions to what you read, and how those reactions percolate around inside you until you know just a bit more about yourself and the world. This is a complex, deep, and somewhat mysterious process that sometimes goes by the name creativity.

This is a straightforward project. And yet, many people struggle with it because I am not telling you exactly what to do. Instead, I am suggesting a direction you might go (reading) and I am encouraging you to follow it wherever it may lead. I don’t know where it will lead; neither do you. In the study of creativity there’s a hifalutin’ word for this process: the liminal space, or liminal zone. Or liminality. The area of uncertainty, ambiguity, and perhaps even disorientation. The place of edges and peering over them.

The description of this assignment is supposed to be vague. That’s the point. All the assignments are going to be like this. It’s your path, your creative journey. You need to follow it (or not) to where it takes you.

How long should it be? Good question. How long do you think? If you spend some time reading, and you learn something really interesting – maybe about yourself, or your relationship with the world – how many words would it take you to write down your reflections about what you’ve learned and what they mean? More than a hundred? For sure. Five hundred? More, probably. More than a thousand? Probably. Ten thousand? Maybe not that much. See how it goes.

I get a lot of assignments that are 1004 words long, or 1002, 1008, or 1033. You get the idea: just over the edge of what I’ve specified as the minimum. Please don’t do that. Write until you’ve reached the point that you’ve said all you need to say. It’s impossible to specify in advance how long that should be – and equally impossible to do it well the night before it’s due. If you rush through this assignment, writing madly at 88 miles per hour to get it submitted before the clock tower signals 10:04 and you’re outta time (you get that pop culture reference, right?), then you will probably not be happy with the result. Instead, take your time. Write this assignment over the course of a week or two, in several shorter writing sessions of maybe an hour each. That should do it.

Storytelling – whether you are writing about your life, or your readings, or the maintenance you do on your motorcycle – is as varied as writers. The more of them that you read (writers as well as stories), the more you will get glimpses of what you could do. It won’t help for me to specify in great detail what the form of your project should be. The more formulaic this project is, the less creative you will be. Your job is to think about how you might create something on your own, and do it. This might be very hard. Try hard – and try not to spend time figuring out what I might want. This assignment is not for me; it’s your creativity, and it’s for you. Remember that if you can.

If you get stuck with this assignment, feel free to reach out to ask questions. But really, getting stuck is part of the process. Getting unstuck is how you activate your creativity.

Example Narratives

Writing about reading is a colossal genre with ancient roots. The conversation between readers and writers is one of the most robust and persistent aspects of literature. Sometimes the responses of readers are philosophical and complex (such as Alberto Manguel's response to Walter Benjamin's ruminations on unpacking his library); often they are interwoven with cultural and personal themes (such as Annelie Chen's reflections on Walter Deakin's book about swimming); and sometimes they explore the resonance of personal themes in the writing process (such as Ta-Nehisi Coates' Why I'm Writing Captain America — and why it scares the hell out of me). I don't expect you to craft narratives that are equivalent to these examples, which are written by highly skilled professional authors (Anelise Chen is an accomplished author, essayist, and writing instructor at Columbia University; Alberto Manguel is one of the most renowned and respected authors of our time; and Ta-Nehisi Coates is an influential cultural commentator and author). But we want our aims as writers to be aspirational, right? So, let's take encouragement from the great Arthur Ashe: start where you are, use what you have, do what you can. Read the examples, reflect on what you might do, and go from there.

In addition to the examples shown above, the Moodle site contains many further narratives that offer a sense of the breadth and scope of online writing.

A Note of Caution

You can write about anything you want. But please consider that any subject that is challenging for you to talk about openly (such as personal trauma) is a subject you should probably not write about — especially on a public platform such as this. On the other hand, powerful personal experiences often provide excellent source material for writing, so it may be difficult for you to decide what to do. First, please use your judgment about how best to keep yourself emotionally safe within and beyond the classroom. Second, please discuss your plans (or your concerns) with me if you decide to write about personal or provocative subjects. In particular, be cautious of subjects involving violence, abuse, trauma, death, mental illness, and related themes (whether they happened to you, happened to someone else, or are imagined). These subjects reliably activate strong emotions and are often unsafe if not handled properly. While no subject is absolutely off-limits in this class, there are many subjects for which there is a risk of harm to you, to me, to others in the class, or to our shared communities. We must be respectful and careful of ourselves and our relationships with others. Please ask me for guidance if you are uncertain.

How to Submit this Project

Ideally, use a modern text creation tool (Ulysses, Craft, Obsidian, iAWriter) that is based on Markdown. The vast majority of writing for the web starts out as Markdown text, so it's a good idea, in a class like this, to provide opportunities for learners to become familiar with Markdown (and to begin migrating away from Word). Another option is to use the export function of the tool that you are using (Ulysses, Craft, Obsidian, and iAWriter all have excellent export capabilities). This will create a PDF (or Word) file that you can then upload to Moodle.

If you already have a website or a blog (Medium if you enjoy the simple approach; Ghost if you are entrepreneurial, and Wagtail if you are awesome), feel free to use that and just provide a link on Moodle.

Use Word if you must (in that case, upload a file and feel your shame).

Ask for Feedback (or not)

Please remember to ask for feedback if you want it. If you do not ask for feedback, you will not receive feedback. (For further details, please review the feedback page.)