chained up in a lion's den

Because Ms. Bookish has asked me to, I have decided to post some snippets from the paper that I am currently writing. I have about 1300-1400 words right now. The paper is expect to have a reading time of 15 minutes, but my partner in crime and I are 'playing with the politics of authorship' and providing a joint intro to our papers that we hope will eat up about 5-7 minutes of our time, so I am trying to adjust my paper accordingly. Right now the thing is a mess, full of holes and highlighting about word choice and paragraph order and the necessity of tring to translate what is in essence a specialist paper to a paper being given to a generalist audience. We are being marked on performance rather than content, which helps, but I feel that in order for me to perform well (as I am a notoriously uneven public speaker) I have to have content that is rock solid.

"First, a few words are perhaps necessary as to why I am approaching this topic from the supposition that weblogging can and should be considered autobiography. Weblogging, or more common blogging, can assume a variety of forms. There are blogs for students, teachers, knitters, rock bands, businesses, and dogs. While I do believe that each of these examples does engage the autobiographic on some level, I will be focusing primarily on the personal weblog for the basis of my analysis. A personal blog is written by one person, and is intended to be a general reflection on that author—unlike special interest blogs, which tend to focus on the author’s relation to one specific subject. The personal blog, which can also be referred to as an online diary, becomes autobiographic because it is the writing of a life story."

I'll post more as it gets better--and feed back is *always* appreciated.