Throughout the quarter, you will keep a commonplace book that focuses on representations of luxury. A commonplace book is essentially the grandfather of the blog. Before and even through the twentieth century, many people (writers especially) kept commonplace books that they filled with important quotes from books they were reading, personal thoughts and reflections, newspaper articles, photographs, advertisements, and so on. You should fill your commonplace book with interesting quotations from the course reading, and analysis of those quotations, as well as material from the news or pop culture that you find relevant to our topic and thought provoking. I will also assign small assignments throughout the quarter that will go into your commonplace books. Ultimately, the material you generate for your commonplace book will provide the basis for your final essay, so it is doubly to your advantage to work hard on gathering material. You should expect to write at least 1,000 words per week. Your final word count should be 10,000+ words by the end of the quarter. Since this is an online course, I highly recommend taking advantage of a blogging site you are already familiar with. Sites like Tumblr.com or WordPress.com are very easy for new bloggers to navigate. So I have already started, and I essentially have 4k words and need 6k more. My 4k words are on: minaeyango.tumblr.com , and the writing just needs to be ferreting on the topic of luxury. It would be preferred if the words could be split up in multiple posts. For example, 3k words could be about how the definition of luxury depends on the country you are in.. while another 3k words could be about the modern day definition of luxury and how its all about material.. If that is not possible than please just do 6k on one of the topics I just mentioned. Again, you can look at my tumblr to see what my viewpoint is on luxury.
