I'm will be evaluating Sarah Bown's blog, "A Midsemester-Night's Delusions."
Number of Posts: So far this semester, Sarah's posted 13 times. Since we've been in class about 6-7 weeks, this seems about on target.
Quality of Posts: Sarah has done some really substantial posts. Many of her posts refer to scholarly articles, analyze various film adaptations, and also include her personal take on each play. Basically, I feel she's done really well on gaining Shakespeare literacy, as well as beginning to analyze critically. She has a personal connection when she shares details of how she is learning Shakespeare, but a more specific reference to how she is sharing her knowledge meaningfully would be good to round out her overall quality.
A Strength: One strength that Sarah really has is arranging her posts in order to get the reader interested. Like this post, for example. Here she is reviewing The Taming of the Shrew and begins with a video clip of a fun scene from the movie (which always sucks readers in). She gives a short summary of her feelings about the movie, and then moves on to a critical approach by citing an article that she found about the play. Although the article wasn't exactly supporting her position about the play, Sarah discusses how it changed her perspective. She then ends by posing a question that led to several comments by other bloggers. I thought she did a great job!
Suggested Improvement: I think it would be good to focus more on formal writing and analysis, maybe getting deeper into the language. I know it's difficult to get too deep when we're reading a play a week, but now that we have more time it would be a good opportunity to do some more in-depth analyses of the texts.
