The purpose of Genius is to provide annotations (or to comment on existing annotations) for poems, song lyrics, and other texts that we will be reading in this cla**.
Ideally, your annotations should do one of the following things (please click on any orange highlighted text for a fuller explanation):
1. Define words, names, places, etc. that would likely be unfamiliar to the majority of readers.
2. Clarify pa**ages that are unclear to you.
3. Comment upon pa**ages that seem thematically significant.
If your annotations are not doing any of the things above then they will likely get deleted from the site, which means they will not be helping you earn credit for the course.
Now, a few tips for creating good annotations:
1. Use proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
2. The pa**ages that you don't understand are the ones that you really need to annotate.
3. Use proper names and specific nouns rather than pronouns when annotating a text.
4. Look for metaphors, similes and other forms of figurative language.
5. Include links to sources that provide you with factual material about the text you are annotating.
6. Include pictures or video.
And, lastly, for those of you who are interested, a few points concerning your professor's rationale for using a software program that you might initially find confusing and difficult:
1. Learning how to navigate an unfamiliar website exercises your critical thinking sk**s.
2. Rap Genius asks you to write in a way that takes advantage of all the affordances of Web 2.0 technology, thereby enhancing your media literacy.
3. The public nature of the website allows you to see the work that your peers are doing in the cla**, to comment on their work, to receive feedback, and, thus, to learn from each other.
4. The ability to write good annotations requires you to develop sk**s that will translate directly into writing better research papers.