Arrogant leader - Intro to digital writing on Genius [tekst, tłumaczenie i interpretacja piosenki]

Dear ENGL 110 students
As I mentioned on the first day, a type of composition growing in both importance and ubiquity is digital writing. Thus, I’ve decided to make it a part of this class. In truth, it only accounts for a small part of your grade, but you should feel free to explore it far beyond the requirements of this class
So what exactly is digital writing and why is it important? It’s nothing complicated, especially given that you’ve already done it to some extent if you’ve used Facebook or Twitter. Digital writing is composition done on some online platform. The primary benefits of learning it well are as follows:

• You can’t escape it. I suppose you could if you decided to live as a survivalist in the woods in Idaho; but if that was your chosen path you wouldn’t really need to be here in college. The chances are huge that you’ll be doing plenty of digital writing in your job—be it in nursing, marketing, journalism, history, biology, or basically any discipline we train you in at Augie. In fact, you’ll probably do plenty more digital writing during your time at Augie.

• It emphasizes close reading. We often read novels or texts and do our best to draw out the main themes, but there is also benefit to looking more closely at each word or turn of phrase in order to unpack deeper meaning

• We are all accustomed to crowd-sourced writing or social writing—Wikipedia being the prime example. But very few of us have actually contributed to it. Taking part in social reading is not only beneficial in that it makes you a knowledge producer instead of simply a knowledge consumer, but it transforms—deepens—the way you understand such media. That is, becoming a digital citizen makes you a smarter consumer of knowledge because you better comprehend how it is produced

• Related to social writing is social reading. Many of us love to make notes in the margins of our books as we read them. Imagine the social benefit of thousands of students offering their thoughts and augmentations to the same text. In essence, students from all over the world can read a text together and sharing our marginalia.

• Another benefit is that you have an expanded audience. I’ll never knock the value of the 5-page research paper that you spend hours on only to have it disappear into your folder at the end of the semester. This process includes you practicing and honing writing skills and me giving you valuable feedback. But we can do the same thing while giving you a broader public audience. In fact, one of the founders of Genius asked me to encourage you to publish your papers here

• Perhaps the biggest benefit is that you can bring the text—be it a novel, a song, a poem, an essay, a sermon, etc.—to life in new and innovative ways using creative formatting, hyperlinking to related texts, and inserting multimedia such as maps, videos, and photos.

So let’s get started and understand how Rap Genius can help facilitate our digital writing projects

First, let's take a look at this video Jeremy put together

Student’s guide to Rap Genius

After reading through the links there, let’s check out the style guide to this type of digital writing

Once you create an account and explore on here, go to the roster for this class and link your account to your name. Beef up your profile however you like. Afterwards, let's try to annotate a song together

Also note that many texts for this class are uploaded here and you may make five quality annotations instead of writing a response essay on Moodle. Simply search for keywords for the text (e.g. "Alger") or click on the tag ENGL110

Be proud too. We were one of the very first colleges to use the Genius annotation platform to analyze literary texts. Now we're one of scores of prestigious schools working towards making the authoritative online versions of important historical, literary, and musical texts