Reading Reflection Weekly Assignment Overview
Women and Religion – Reading Responses Weekly Assignment
The purpose of writing these responses to the reading is to help you reflect personally on the concepts and issues you are being exposed to, and to prepare you to contribute to group learning through your later responses to others’ ideas. This writing will require between 30-60 minutes each week. The reading response is due for full points no later than NOON each Thursday that the reading is due, posted as instructed on the course Web site. The "grace period" for postings with one point lost is noon the following Thursday.
Writing reading responses is intended to help you:
- reflect on, clarify, question, and respond to class readings
- understand these concepts and issues in light of your own life experience
- raise questions about women’s experience in religion to share with others in the class.
How to Begin
1. You may want to hand write your entries initially, but will need to record them electronically via word processing to post on the Web.
2. When you are done with your reading (use the "Reading Discussion" questions as a guide to reading in depth), start writing in response to the Reading Reflection question for the week. Set aside enough time that you can spend 30-60 minutes in thoughtful writing on the question. You may also wish to add some reflection on events happening in your life or in the public realm that connect to class discussion and readings, as long as you pay some substantial attention to the reading reflection question posed for that week.
3. Your comments can be personal, drawing upon memories and observations from your experience, but they should relate to things we are working on in the class.
4. Please write in complete sentences, not bullet-points or lists. I won’t be expecting polished academic prose in these reading reflections, but clear writing does communicate your thoughts better than garbled or "stream of consciousness" writing. Also, since others in the class will be able to read your thoughts, you want to make them coherent and interesting.
5. Please conform to the rules governing good usage of quoted material. Don't write down information from a text without using quotes and giving a page number. If you are paraphrasing ideas from the text, you need to mention this informally (as in, "Jones describes. . . . , Smith suggests that. . . ."), rather than having it be ambiguous as to whether this is your thought or a thought from the reading. (In a more formal paper, you would need to add a footnote for paraphrases as well.)
6. Even though this is relatively informal writing, I will be checking for instances of plagiarism. Here’s what I would suggest: If you are responding to an article, PUT IT ASIDE as you write, so you don’t inadvertently “borrow� language from the text in your own response. That will encourage you to really put your ideas into your own language. If there is something striking that you want to quote directly, do so, using quotation marks. However, it is best to keep any direct quotations to a minimum, as the important thing here is what YOU think about the ideas you have just been exposed to.