One of the readings we assigned this week was How To Write Up Assignments Like a Blogging Champ, in which blogmaster Alan Levine describes in detail how to write up assignment posts. Everyone should read it. Click the links The Three Parts of a Great ds106 Blog Post, Telling the Story Behind the Story, The Work Itself, and Narrating the Process and read what’s there. I’m going to highlight some points here, but I won’t be doing it justice.

What you say about it is worth more than the work itself

I see many people posting their work, and a lot of it is great stuff, but we ned more than that. It’s the thought that went into the work, and what you went through to make it, that really count. Maybe you tried to do an assignment and it came out a disaster. If you write about what you were trying to do, what inspired you, how you went about it, where you think it went wrong, and what you learned from it all, you will get full credit for doing it. You can learn through that process. Your classmates can learn through it as well. Maybe someone will offer ideas that can help you out and turn the project into a success. On the other hand, if you create a masterpiece but don’t say anything about it, we don’t know what kind of thought or effort went into it. We don’t know what you got out of it. It is harder for anyone else to learn from it.

Linking and tagging the assignment

Each assignment has two tags. You have to tag your blog post with both of them. You should also use the #ds106 and #noir106 tags, of course. Those tags get the blog post to feed through to the proper places.

You should also link to the original assignment in your write up. That way a reader can easily get back to the prompt and see what it’s all about. Maybe they want to see how other people approached the assignment. Maybe they’ll want to try it too.

You should link to anything else appropriate too. More links make for a stronger web. The Noir106 adventure is off to a great start! Let’s make sure we’re doing it the ds106 way.