The World We Write In: How Setting Affects Readers

As I've been reading Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, I have found it rather difficult to connect the story with Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass.  What I have noticed, though, is that both authors use a lot of in-depth descriptions to really put the reader into the story.  I'm not entirely sure if this is the direction I want to go, but I think it's a good starting point anyway.  Here's my working thesis statement:

The setting in Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd draws the reader in, allowing them to take the journey with the characters.  The crazy, upside-down world in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass has a similar effect on the reader.  Setting, therefore, is one of the most important aspects of writing because it has such an influence on how the readers interpret the story.

Update (March 12):  I've decided to change my thesis.  After discussing and doing some more research, I'm going to focus my paper on feminism in Far From the Madding Crowd and Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass or Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.  I'm going to research feminism in the time period of both authors, who Carroll and Hardy approached feminism, and how their female characters interact with their stories.

How Tagging Matters for Writers Who Blog

These are the labels or tags
used for this post.

As writers use blogging as a platform for developing and publishing their ideas, they should not omit using tags (also known as "labels" or "hashtags") with each of their posts. Why bother?

There is a practical angle for tagging: the instructor can find and sort student posts more easily. But tags play a greater role. Tagging has to do with ways of thinking and finding that go along with online writing. Bottom line: tagging helps both to automate and to socialize online content. And for writers perfecting their ideas, tagging helps you reflect on and focus your writing.

But first, what are these things? You can see the images I've inserted that show where labels are added when composing a post in Blogger, and how these appear at the bottom of a post.

Labels or tags appear below a post
(and sometimes via a widget on the side of a blog)

Tags are Metadata
Metadata is data about data. It is critical to helping machines sort and prioritize information. Whenever someone tags something, the computers give more emphasis to those words in search results. Tags get you found by machines, and by humans who have learned how to search for tags and to find content and users that are associated with tags. Interestingly, their usefulness isn't related closely to their formality. They actually work best when they are a casual part of posting content.