Now that various technical problems have been resolved, I’m slowly loading my fall 2008 material into my wiki and getting the various syllabuses (6! different! ones!) ready to go.
This semester, I’m teaching for the first time our intro-to-the-major course, which is asking me to think a bit about what English majors need to know. Some of that is conceptual and intellectual, and some of it is just gruntwork. One of the latter is MLA style, which more or less standard in our department, though students frequently assert that they’ve never been shown it. (Sometimes they have been, but not under that specific name, sometimes they’ve just forgotten, and sometimes they really haven’t been.)
I’ve decided that I’m going to require them to turn in a correctly-formatted Lorem Ipsum paper before submitting any other graded work. You can see the full assignment here.  The Lorem Ipsum generator lets them focus on getting the various details down, without worrying about content. (And this way, later in the semester, when they turn in work for a grade–and there’s a rubric which includes formatting stuff–then they will have some muscle memory to draw upon.)
If you have suggestions, do please comment here. The assignment doesn’t go live until Wednesday, so there’s still time for tweaks.
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