Week 1 Seminar: Orientation

The first seminar --- no assigned cuts to argue over yet, just the semester's ground rules and a warm-up exercise in noticing them

24 February 2027

Before the seminar#

Bring one thing you made — anything finished, in any medium — and be ready to name one part of it you thought about removing.

In the seminar#

We go around the room once: what you brought, and the part you thought about cutting. No defending yet, just naming. Then a warm-up: everyone looks at the same short passage (a paragraph from a set text) and marks the one sentence they’d remove first, silently, before comparing notes. The disagreement is the point — if everyone marks the same sentence, the passage wasn’t testing anything.

We close by walking through how the semester’s three assessments build on each other, and what “commonplace book” means if you haven’t kept one before.

Afterwards#

Start the Commonplace Book this week, not next: the earliest entries are usually the easiest to find and the hardest to reconstruct later.