What follow are some tips to help us acclimate to discussion-base course work:

• Use cited textual details more.  Use here means to integrate them, setting up summaries, paraphrases, and quotes with signal phrases before source use, citing properly, and—most importantly—commenting on what you share.  If you quote, deal with the specific quoted words.  Presumably, that is why you chose to quote rather than to summarize.  But remember that summaries do require citing.  We know our subject is liable to ever-spiralizing generalizations, so counter that with specifics.
• Tone should not be a problem, but some people are always only ever generalizing.  Yes, that’s an intended phrasing sort of mimicking the effect.  We should not write in tones of outrage, cliched wording, and strings of generalizing.  Those combine for vague, chatty posts of the social media sort.
• Switching registers means using appropriate tone and word choice for the writing purpose.  A posting differs from an essay or an academic resume.
• Many times, we’re only quoting properly.  In academia, remember that the default source use is paraphrase, not quoting.  We only ever quote if it’s really well-worded (actually a rarity in writing on education), if the quotes are the signature opinions of an expert in the field, or if the author’s words counter widely-held opinion in that subject area.  So, Freud writing about the oral and anal stages would probably fit two or three of those criteria at that time period.  Note that summaries, if specific-enough, must get cited.
• Readers are more interested in your use of the material than the cited material.  Set it up and interpret it.  One need not use I or you too much in interpreting because filtering everything through the self can be limiting.
• As a grader, if I see that a student has one or two posts using the book, I’m not being supplied with enough information about whether they read.  The onus is on the student to reflect the extent of their reading.  That is the counterbalance to the fact that you can determine where the discussions lead, so own that through detail use.  Remember, strings of generalizations aren’t useful and we have to elevate academic arguments.
• APA, not MLA. . . use the models correctly.  This is another code switching behavior.
• Adopt the idea that readers are skeptical and need reasoning and examples.  I recognize that we live in a culture of people thinking they are correct because they think so, but that’s not the case here.  In using personal examples, also think about the extent to which they are typical or representative of the category you’re trying to discuss.  It may be that they are entirely atypical, mere attention grabbers designed to elicit fear, anger, or the like.
• Consider readers near the ends of posts.  We often started with really big questions in posts (see the subjects) and never narrowed those.
• Readers would rather see you focus on a specific detail than string together generalizations.
• Read aloud, one’s writing yields up these issues and can be fixed.  Reread what you write before submitting.  You will hear areas where no detail is present or where the tone is a preachy, vague, or editorial.