Fall Semester

Some of you who are taking this class this semester also took the class in the spring and some of you are beginning today. I would like to welcome those of you who are new to the class. I'm also happy to see those of you who are returning.

Whether you are new to the class or returning, all of you will need to use a blog to keep a record of your study this semester. I will help those of you who are new make your blogs in our first class. Each post to your blog should include the following:

• Information about what you were reading
  
• Notes on a few new words that you learned
• A brief summary and or comments about what you read
• An estimate of the number of words you read

Estimating the number of words you have read may seem odd to you. As I will explain in class, however, this is a very common way indicating the length of something in English. It is better than pages because some pages (especially web pages) contain many words while other pages have very few words. This semester, I want everyone to try to read as many thousands of words per week as possible. Reading a few hundred words each week will not be enough.

I will give you more information about how to write your blog entries in class. For those of you who are new to class this fall, please begin by reading what I wrote in this blog during the spring semester. You may write in your blogs about what I have written in my blog.

I'm looking forward to getting to know you this semester.

By the way, this blog entry contains 295 words.