For this assignment you will be introducing yourself to your group members, familiarizing yourself with blogging on our course website, and writing a little bit about Shakespeare’s language. Since this is the first blog post of the semester I will be grading it Pass/Fail for everyone.

In your post, please do the following:

-Introduce yourself–tell your blogging circle about your major, interests, hobbies, intellectual passions, music tastes, pets, whatever! Feel free to make this as informal and personal as you like.

-Choose a passage from our reading so far that you found particularly difficult, hard to understand, or puzzling. This can (and maybe should!) also be a passage that you found curious or interesting and wanted to know more about. Quote from the passage in your post (you can refer to my style guide for details on how to quote from Shakespeare in your blog posts and papers). The section should be no longer than 3-5 lines…it can even be a single word!

Spend some time with the passage and do everything you can to figure out its meaning: use the notes and glosses (definitions) in your text, consult the Oxford English Dictionary (an amazing resource that gives you historical meanings of words–available only through our library’s webpage), watch a scene on YouTube or other video service of the lines being acted out, consult a plot summary, read it out loud to a friend and discuss it…you needn’t do all of these, but try to use a few strategies for developing a better understanding of the line(s) you chose.

In your blog post, then, write up a brief discussion (no longer than 500 words) of your experience grappling with this section you were working with. What was most helpful to you (consulting reference works, watching the scene acted out)? What wasn’t helpful? What was the experience like spending this much time with the text?