comm207fall06

Here, for convenient reference, is your assignment for next week's class ... along with some "monkey-see-monkey-do" tips on beginning to use HTML tags when you post your stories to the blog.

First, here's the assignment again:

Find a well-written story on a newspaper website. Post a link to the blog, together with your analysis of why you like it. Be sure to quote from the story to give examples of good writing in it. (That's important, because newspapers don't archive their websites forever, and the links will probably go dead in a few days.) Blogging for COMM 207 is just like any other writing -- a generalization that's unsupported by evidence, quotes in this case, is sudden death.

HTML, monkey-see-monkey-do style

If you don't feel comfortable yet with the basics of HTML, just click on the tab that says "Compose" at the upper right of this field. You can just paste in the links, and we can copy them and paste them into the address field on our browsers.

But if you're feeling adventurous, click on the tab that says "Edit Html" just to the left of the "Compose" tab. Type what you want to say in the same field. It'll look like a typewriter instead of a printed text, but the big difference is you can type in HTML tags. I'm going to link here to a good HTML summary at North Carolina State. Read it through a time or two, and it'll get you started. Especially at first, you can also copy the tags and paste them into the blog writing field.

One big thing you want to know about 99 percent of HTML tags: They're enclosed in angle brackets, and they come in pairs. So the HTML for a link looks like this:

<a href="URL of the website you're linking to ">words you want underlined to activate the link </a>

An example: If I want to link to the SCI/Benedictine homepage,, like I just did here, I write the opening tag like this.

<a href="http://www.sci.edu/">

Then I type in the words I want in the link, and I end with the closing tag:

</a>

Put it together, and it looks like this:

<a href="http://www.sci.edu/">the SCI/Benedictine homepage,</a>

Clear? If it is, give it a try. After blundering around for a while (which is part of the learning process, right?), you'll get it. If it isn't, don't worry. You'll get it in them.