What This Site Can Do

This page has two audiences. Students: it shows why the notes look the way they do. Teachers: it is a working reference for everything a page here can hold, with the source of every example shown beside it.

Everything below is written in Markdown — plain text with a few marks of punctuation that mean something. If you can write a text message, you can write this.

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Text that carries meaning

You get bold, italic, struck through, and highlighted text. Highlighting is the one worth knowing: it draws the eye better than bold when you want a single key term to stand out in a paragraph.

How that was made:

**bold**, *italic*, ~~struck through~~, ==highlighted==

Keyboard keys look like keys: press ⌘ + K to search this site.

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Headings, and the table of contents

Every ## heading becomes a link in Navigate this page, on the right. Nothing builds that list by hand — it is made from the headings as the page is built, so it cannot fall out of step with the page.

Turning it off

A short page reads better without a contents panel. One line of frontmatter does it:

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enableToc: false
---

Every class page in All Classes uses this.

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Callouts

Callouts lift something out of the flow of the page. There are a dozen kinds, each with its own colour and icon, so students learn to recognise them at a glance.

Note

Neutral information worth setting apart.

Tip

A habit or a shortcut that makes the work easier.

Important

The one thing to take away if you take away nothing else.

Warning

Where people usually go wrong.

Question

Something to think about rather than something to know.

Quote

Used in this course for epigraphs and for lines worth sitting with.

At a glance

Used at the top of task pages for the format, the deadline, and what is assessed.

How that was made: a blockquote with the kind named in brackets.

> [!warning] Where people usually go wrong
> 
> The text of the callout goes here.

Foldable callouts

Add a - after the kind to start it collapsed — useful for answers, hints, and anything a reader should attempt before seeing.

A worked answer (click to expand)

The Prologue tells you the ending in fourteen lines, which means the play is not built on suspense. It is built on watching people walk toward something the audience can already see.

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Tables

How that was made: rows of text separated by |, with a line of dashes under the headings.

Device	What it does	Where we meet it
Simile	Compares using like or as	”A Secret Lost in the Water”
Allusion	Points at another text or event	Romeo and Juliet
Juxtaposition	Sets two things side by side to make a point	Moon of the Crusted Snow

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Quoting at length

But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

Two lines of Romeo and Juliet, set as a block quotation because verse is quoted line by line. Block quotations take no quotation marks — the indent does that job, and the line break is preserved because in verse the line break is meaning. The conventions are on Writing About Literature.

How that was made: a > at the start of each line.

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Checklists

How that was made: a list where each line starts with - [ ], or - [x] for one already done.

• Draft finished
• Read aloud once
• Checked against the criteria on the task page

On this site they are read-only — the boxes show what the page says, and clicking one does nothing. Copied into your notebook, they are useful for keeping your place.

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Diagrams

Diagrams here are written, not drawn, which means they can be edited in seconds and never need a graphics program.

graph LR
    A["Reading"] --> B["Talking about it"]
    B --> C["Writing about it"]
    C --> D["Reading better"]
    D --> A

How that was made: not a picture — these lines of text, between two fence lines that say mermaid.

```mermaid
graph LR
    A["Reading"] --> B["Talking about it"]
```

A timeline, which is useful when a course reads across a century:

timeline
    title Four texts, in the order they were published
    1595 : Shakespeare : Romeo and Juliet
    1979 : Roch Carrier : A Secret Lost in the Water
    1990 : Budge Wilson : The Leaving
    2018 : Waubgeshig Rice : Moon of the Crusted Snow

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Transclusion — one page inside another

![[Page name]] pulls a whole page in live rather than copying it. Here is this course’s help-session page, embedded:

Help Sessions

Mondays and Wednesdays at lunch, in this room. No appointment, and no need to have a specific question — “I have read it twice and I have nothing” is a completely normal way to start.

Bring the text, bring the draft, bring the assignment sheet. Twenty minutes here is worth two hours of staring at a document at midnight, and everybody who comes regularly says the same thing about that.

If Mondays and Wednesdays never work for you, tell me and we will find a time that does.

Link to original

Change the source page and every page that embeds it updates. That is how each section’s landing page always shows the current class, and how every task page shows the curriculum expectations it addresses without anybody maintaining two copies.

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Backlinks

At the foot of most pages is When did we do this? — every page that links here, gathered automatically. Open Narrative Perspective and you can see every class that used the idea, in order, without anybody keeping a list.

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Things this course does not need, which the site can still do

An English course has no equations and no code. The software supports both, and a teacher moving a different subject onto this site should know that:

Mathematics, set with the same typesetting system journals use:

$\text{marks}=\frac{\text{what you can do}}{\text{what was asked}}\times 100\%$

Code, with the language named so it is coloured properly:

words = open("essay.txt").read().split()
print(len(words), "words")

Neither appears anywhere else in this course. They are here because the question “can it do…?” deserves an answer you can see.

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Holding a page back

A page with publish: false in its frontmatter is skipped entirely when the site is built. That is how tomorrow’s class page can be written today and published when the class actually happens.

---
publish: false
---

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What all of this is for

Feature	The problem it removes
Transclusion	The same text copied into six places, five of them stale
Backlinks	”Where did we do this again?”
Callouts	Important things lost in a wall of paragraphs
Diagrams as text	Rebuilding a whole diagram to change one arrow
Holding a page back	Keeping unpublished plans in some other file somewhere

Write it once, link to it everywhere.