How to Use Word Press

How to sign up for Word Press.

1. Check your Normandale email.

2. Accept the invitation to the wordpress blog History at Normandale.

3. Create your account as directed by the link.

4. After you’ve created your account and signed in, go to https://historyatnormandale.wordpress.com . Please give yourself the name you go by in this class for your username.

5. Click on the pencil icon with a + sign in the upper right hand corner of the page to write your post.

Write and tag your post.

Your post should be fewer than 500 words, including all quotations and citations for any images.

You do not need to post images to earn an A, but you do need to post links to your contemporary source and your historical primary source.

A composition window, very similar to Microsoft Word, will pop up and let you write you post. To add a link to your text, highlight the text and hit command and K (Mac) and CRTL and K (Windows) to make that word a link. Or you can click on the “Insert/edit link” button.(1)

Your post should do the following things:

• Explain your four sources to a general audience.
• Explain how your four sources relate to each other
• Explain what issue the four sources raise for you.
• Explain what is interesting about this issue as it relates to a contemporary Minnesotan.

Style guide: Your post should be conversational, much like you’d talk to a friend and a coffee shop. You don’t start conversations with “In this conversation I argue that …” or finish friendly chats with “In conclusion, points, a, b, and c all point to …” Nor do you speak in bullet points. You tell a story. See my example on the blog (all the way at the start of the blog) for conversational style.

Be sure to give your post a title.(2)

Please tag your post (tagging is adding a keyword) on the left hand side. Please add “MN History,” “1133,” and “Fall 2018” as your tags.

Publish your post.

Once you’ve written, edited, titled, and tagged your post, click on “Publish” to add your post to the blog.

Note: I use this blog for multiple classes, you’ll see blog entries on other subjects from other students.

Don’t miss!

This is as close to traditional history paper as you get in this class. 500 words is about two pages, which is not easy to write well. Give yourself time. When students have succeeded on this assignment in the past is when they broke it into chunks and worked and though about it over an entire week. Students that dumped a couple of hastily found sources into a rambling “this is what I think about things on the internet” have struggled to earn decent grades.

Grading Criteria

See the original Exhibit Assignment for the Grading Criteria.