Lauren on how the essay means ‘to try’. The essay is where you think in the writing and so is fluid, personal, subjective, but also uses evidence and makes an argument. The best work is highly erudite, yet personable. This doesn’t necessarily easy to read, but it has a voice which is grounded in a life world of a writing-thinkerer, so that writing is the lab or studio of ideas learning to dance, rather than reporting of some research that has happened somewhere else. It’s the difference between following a recipe slavishly because you don’t get how foods and flavours work, versus, well, getting that cooking is a game of anthropomorphic organic chemistry. What’s it got to do with the subject. We are taking this as a way to approach entries in niki. As a place to think in, not just report. That letting writing become the space of thinking is a good rule of thumb for a good blog. That in the subject we are trying some ideas and they will take us places. That the internet is a great big ideas bank, engine, swamp, so while it is good for answers, to go with its flow is not just to make answers but to ask better questions, and to begin to build connections between otherwise or once separated things. Finally, in this course you all know how to write (because of the English score you need to get in) so I know I can use writing as a way to get at other ideas, because you all ‘get’ writing, though you aren’t particularly aware you do. Writing is the way most of us make, all the time, blogging is just making. As is niki. Making is how the network happens.