Remember that your exam period begins at 3:30 p.m. on Monday, April 27, in the Hayworth Fellowship Hall.
Keep all of your required blog posts for the semester (your final essay and annotated bibliography, analysis, and literacy narrative) published (visible on your blog) until final grades have been posted. Also, make sure that you have line-edited them and deleted any placeholder posts. Since blog activity is a component of your coursework, I will review your blogs before I finalize your short assignments/participation grades.
If you have not done so already, submit course evaluations for ENG 1103 and your other classes.
Your short assignments/participation grade in Blackboard now denotes your preliminary final average in that category. Blog activity and attendance may raise or lower it. After 5 p.m. today, the Blackboard course site for English 1103, section eight, will no longer be available to students. Final grades for the course will be posted in eServices no later than noon on Tuesday, April 28.
Kudos
Three students took advantage of Monday’s bonus question regarding interviewee stances, specifically a couple of don’ts on display on HPU’s Career and Professional Development site.
Kudos to Jermaine, Madison, and Nicole. For their initiative, they have earned a bonus assignment credit.
Next Up
During the exam period, you will deliver your individual presentations and serve as the audience/intern selection committee for your classmates. See your assignment handout and the April 20 and April 21 class notes for details.
To mark the eve of the Bard of Avon’s birthday, April 23*, 1564, today’s Scrabble post–the last of the semester–features Shakespeare characters whose names are also playable common nouns.
Ariel: a gazelle found in Africa (Ariel, The Tempest, 1611-12)
Dogberry: the fruit of a dogwood tree (Dogberry, Much Ado about Nothing, 1598-1599)
Hamlet: a village (the title character of Hamlet, 1600-1601)
Lear: learning (the title character of King Lear, 1605-1606)
Puck: a disk used in ice hockey and other games (Puck, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1595-1596)
Romeo: a seductive lover, a male lover (one of the title characters in Romeo and Juliet, 1594-1595)
Shylock: to lend money with a high interest rate (Shylock, The Merchant of Venice, 1596-1597)
*The exact date of William Shakespeare’s birth is unknown, but church records show that he was baptized on April 26, and three days was the customary time to wait before baptizing a newborn. Shakespeare’s date of death is known, however. Coincidentally, he died at fifty-two on April 23, 1616, three years after his retirement.
Next Up
Although today’s class is your last for English 1103, I will post class notes tomorrow that include an end-of-semester checklist. Be sure to review that list for important details.
Coming Soon
You will complete your final assignment for the course, your individual oral presentation, during the exam period, which begins at 3:30 p.m. in the Hayworth Fellowship Hall on Monday, April 27. I look forward to seeing you then!
The page featured above, from HPU’s Career and Professional website, notes that “[y]our attire is a form of communication and can influence the impression of your boss, your coworkers and customers about your capabilities and professionalism.”
In The Language of Clothes, Allison Lurie writes: “For thousands of years, human beings have communicated with one another first through the language of dress” (3). As you prepare for your presentation, keep that in mind. We communicate with our clothes first, and what you wear will speak to the audience before you say your first words.
Closely examine the HPU Career and Professional Development page above and the one below. Pay attention not only to the clothes the models are wearing, but also to the accompanying written text.
Consider not only what the models are wearing, but also what they are not wearing. Some of the clothing don’ts are included in the bulleted points.
According to HPU’s Career and Professional Development Center, what should you wear “for nearly all job interviews”?
Other Forms of Nonverbal Communication
Just as we speak with our clothing, we communicate with our posture and gestures. Keep your hands out of your pockets to avoid signaling a variety bad traits:
A lack of trustworthiness. Standing with your hands in your pockets can indicate that you have something to hide.
Poor communication skills. Connecting with your audience involves effective gestures, which require the use of your hands.
A lack of confidence or interest. Keeping your hands in your pockets may be construed as a sign of insecurity or a lack of enthusiasm.
Distractability and an unprofessional manner. You may appear too casual if you are fiddling with items in your pocket, such as keys.
Indolence or arrogance. Audience members may perceive your hands-in-pockets stance as disrespectful
Proper posture is key. As I noted in your presentation assignment handout, your ears should be directly above your shoulders.
Also, do not shift your weight from one foot to the other. If that is a tendency of yours–a distracting habit called rocking the boat–stand with your feet perpendicular to each other. If you do, you will not be able to shift your weight from one foot to the other.
Do not stand with your arms crossed in front of your chest. That is widely perceived as a defensive posture.
When you walk to the front of the room, and when you return to your seat, do not shuffle your feet. Do not shuffle them at any other time, either. Like keeping your hands in your pockets, shuffling can project a lack of confidence. It can also make you more likely to trip, which you would not want to do in an interview. Some people have a tendency to shuffle when they wear such shoes as UGG Scuffettes/Tazzes and Birkenstock Zermatts. If you tend to scuff in your Scuffettes (or the like) be mindful of that tendency, and ask yourself this: Are these the shoes I should wear to my interview?
Verbal Communication
Paying attention to your nonverbal communication should not come at the cost of your verbal communication. Be concise and focused. Do not use filler words, such as um, like, and you know, indicates that you are neither.
Do not mispronounce important by omitting the sound of the first t(im-por-ANT, rather than im-por-TANT). Natural speech can be key to conveying authenticity, but that particular mispronunciation is not a dialect trait; it’s a trendy instance of t-glottalization, which replaces the t sound with a pause or catch in the throat, called a glottal stop. That phenomenon–prevalent almost exclusively among young women–has been popularized by social media and reality TV.
Some interview coaches–and HPU’s Career and Professional Development Center as well–recommend the STAR approach (Situation, Task, Action, and Result) as a method for presenting a point with an illustration. Though you are not required to use the STAR approach, it offers one effective way to show how a particular assignment or aspect of English 1103 demonstrates your qualifications.
Lurie, Allison. The Language of Clothes. Random House, 1981.
Kudos
Students who attended last Tuesday’s High-PURCS and completed the online assignment for the event not only showed their support for other High Point students’ scholastic endeavors but also took advantage of the opportunity to view poster displays and to hear discussions that may inspire ideas for their own projects. These classmates attended High-PURCS:
Jermaine Cain
Madison Davis
Sofia Marin
Kudos to Jermaine, Madison, and Sofia. For their initiative, they have a earned a bonus assignment credit.
Our final Wordplay Day of the semester will include a drawing for the vintage Scrabble game pictured above.
Bonus Assignment
Even though the images of the models in today’s blog post are featured in a guide for interviewing, some of the models’ stances are don’ts for interviewees. What are those stances, and why are they interview don’ts?
Directions
Determine which of the models’ stances are interview don’ts.
Compose a comment of one complete sentence or more that identifies the stances and notes why they are frowned upon in interviews. You do not need to include all the reasons. One for each stance will suffice.
Post your comment as a reply to this blog entry no later than 9 a.m. tomorrow, Wednesday, April 22. (To post your comment, click on the post’s title, and scroll down to the bottom of the page. You will then see the image of an airmail envelope with a leave comment option.)
I will approve your comments (make them visible) after tomorrow’s deadline.
This morning in class, you will receive the assignment for the individual presentation that you will deliver during the exam period. An additional copy is posted on Blackboard, and the directions are also included below.
Overview
As a finalist for a much-sought-after internship in your field, you are required to deliver a concise and engaging presentation that highlights your achievements in English 1103 and demonstrates your ability to effectively assume the responsibilities that the internship requires of you. Among the aspects of the course that you should address are one or more of your major writing assignments and the development of your critical thinking and collaboration skills. You are encouraged but not required to address additional aspects of the course.
Directions for Planning
Plan a brief presentation of approximately three minutes that highlights your achievements in English 1103 and demonstrates your ability to effectively assume the responsibilities that the internship in your field requires of you.
Address one or more of your major writing assignments and the development of your critical thinking and collaboration skills. You are encouraged but not required to address additional aspects of the course.
Include the following in your presentation:
An opening in which you state your first and last names and your major,
Details from your experiences in the course that illustrate the development of your writing, your critical thinking, and your collaboration skills
A close examination of one pertinent passage in your blog, and
A conclusion that provides closure and invites questions from the interview committee.
Look for presentation tips in tomorrow’s class notes.
Directions for Rehearsing
In preparation for rehearsing, write your notes on index cards. If your notes are in complete sentences, rewrite them to include only words and short phrases for your key points. If your notes are too detailed, you will risk relying heavily on them and making minimal eye contact with the interview committee. Make as much eye contact as possible and be sure to make eye contact with committee members throughout the room rather than fixing your eyes on one or two people.
Because you are required to project your blog on the classroom screen, you should familiarize yourself with the presentation station. Demonstrating that you are not adept at using the technology required for your presentation may jeopardize your chances for obtaining the internship. If you have not used the presentation station, I encourage you to devote part of today’s class period to familiarizing yourself with its setup.
Practice good posture. As you deliver your presentation, your ears should be directly above your shoulders. If you tend to shift your weight from one foot to the other—a distracting habit that’s sometimes called rocking the boat—stand with your feet perpendicular to each other. If you do, you will not be able to shift your weight from one foot to the other.
Avoid filler words, such as um, like, and you know. If you tend to use filler words, practice pausing at the points where you are likely to use fillers.
Optional: Rehearse with a classmate. Take turns delivering your presentations and offering feedback. Offer both suggestions for improvement and words of encouragement.
In class this morning, you will also receive a checklist for your WordPress blog. An additional copy appears below.
Blog Checklist
You will have the first half of class and the first few minutes of the second half to plan your presentation and edit your blog. In the remainder of the class period, you will compose a summary (one paragraph, minimum) of the work you completed. Will include specific examples of the details you plan to include in your presentation and/or changes you made to one or more of your blog posts.
Today’s Scrabble post features the names of authors and characters that are playable words. Learning them will not only increase your word power (and up your game), but also broaden your knowledge of literature. If you haven’t read some of the classics in the list below, I encourage you to check them out.
Eyre: a long journey (the last name of of the title character in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, 1847)
Dickens: a devil (Charles Dickens, 1812-1870)
Fagin: a person, usually an adult, who instructs others, usually children, in crime (from a character of that type in Dickens’ Oliver Twist)
Holden: the past participle of hold (Holden Caulfield, the protagonist in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye)
Huckleberry: a berry like a blueberry (the first name of the title character in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Hucklebery Finn, 1884)
Oedipal: describing libidinal feelings of a child toward the parent of the opposite sex (from the title character in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, c. 429 B.C.)
Quixote: a quixotic, or extremely idealistic person; also quixotry, a quixotic action or thought (the title character in Michael de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Part I: 1605, Part II: 1615)
Could the words in the hypothetical game featured in the image at the top of this post be the first plays in an actual game of Scrabble? They couldn’t be the first two plays, but they could be the first three. Huckleberry with the b on the center square/double-word bonus square would be worth fifty-eight points, but huckleberry has eleven letters, and the first player, or team, could not play more than seven letters. But the first play could be berry for twenty-eight points. The second player, or team, could follow with q-u-i-x-o-t to the left of the e in berry for twenty-five points. Then the first player, or team, could add h-u-c-k-l-e to berry for a total of twenty-five points.
Next Up
Monday morning in class, you will have time to plan and prepare the individual presentation that you will deliver during the exam period, 3:30 p.m., Monday, April 27. In the meantime, think about the major assignments you have completed and the skills you have developed over the course of the semester. Review your blog posts, your reflective writing, and your journal entries, and ask yourself, what accomplishments of mine in English 1103 best demonstrate the skills and habits of mind that not only benefit me as a writer and a student, but also in my life beyond the classroom?
(L-R): Peyton Bobersky and Daysha Vaughn with the poster for their project, “Heat Shock Induced Larval Color Plasticity in Vanessa Cardui.”
I hope many of you attended Tuesday’s High-PURCS (High Point University’s Undergraduate Research and Creative Works Symposium) at the Qubein Center. As I mentioned in the class notes for Tuesday, your attendance not only shows your support for other High Point students’ scholastic endeavors but also offers you an opportunity to view poster displays and hear discussions that may inspire ideas for projects of your own. And those of you who completed the High-PURCS assignment posted for attendees will earn bonus assignment credit!
Leland Sanders speaks to High-PURCS attendees about his project, “Hidden Influences: The Role of Childhood Trauma in Academic Engagement, Integrity, and Performance Among College Students.”Jackson Jones (right) speaks with a High-PURCS attendee about the project he co-authored with Brooke Kozak and Arielle McPhee: “Math, Writing, and Cognitive Profiles in Past and Present Student Athletes.”Madison MacDonald with the poster display for her project, “Break Type and Presence of Fidget Toys on Focus in College Students.”
Review the pictures above, and consider these questions:
How might a project such as Jackson Jones’s, Brooke Kozak’s, and Arielle McPhee’s, “Math, Writing, and Cognitive Profiles in Past and Present Student Athletes,” develop from one that began with “Back Story,” the opening chapter of Michael Lewis‘s The Blind Side?
The students’ projects featured above are notably different from the readings mentioned in my questions for consideration. Still, those readings that served as starting points for your research are tangentially related to High-PURCS and demonstrate how your readings for a freshman-level course can serve as both subjects and points of departure for future endeavors.
Monday morning in class, you will have time to plan and prepare the individual presentation that you will deliver during the exam period, 3:30 p.m., Monday, April 27. In the meantime, think about the major assignments you have completed and the skills you have developed over the course of the semester. Review your blog posts, your reflective writing, and your journal entries, and ask yourself, what accomplishments of mine in English 1103 best demonstrate the skills and habits of mind that not only benefit me as a writer and a student, but also in my life beyond the classroom?
Bonus Assignment
One of the components of English 1103 is well documented in both your journal and in photographs. For one of your last bonus assignments of the semester, you have the opportunity to earn credit for creating a blog post devoted to one of the assignments in that series.
Directions
Compose a WordPress blog post that documents your assignment with a photograph and two paragraphs of prose, one of summary and a second of commentary.
In your summary, include as many details as possible, such as when the assignment took place and with whom you collaborated on the assignment.
In your commentary, analyze part of the assignment illustrated in the accompanying photograph.
Publish your post on or before the afternoon of Tuesday, April 21. Email me no later than 5 p.m. on Tuesday, April 21, to notify me that you have published your bonus assignment.
This morning in class, you will compose a final reflective essay that documents your work in the second half of the semester, focusing on what you consider some of your most significant work and the feature or features of the course that have benefited your development as a writer and a student. Since you have already written a reflective essay on your final essay and annotated bibliography, your final reflection should focus on other assignments and features, including one, two, or three of the following:
Studying one of the texts we have examined in the second half of the semester, including “Blogs vs. Term Papers,” “A Break from Your Smartphone can Boost Your Mood . . . ,” The Competition, “How a Small North Carolina College . . . ,” “Scrabble is a Lousy Game,” Seedlings, “Skim Reading is the New Normal,” “Strawberry Spring,” “To Remember a Lecture Better, Take Notes by Hand,” or one of the sample final essays and annotated bibliographies (“The King of Storytelling,” “Scrabble as a Game Changer in the College Classroom”)
Writing for an online audience beyond the classroom/creating and maintaining a WordPress blog
Delivering your group presentation.
Collaborating with your classmates on in-class writing assignments
Playing Scrabble/collaborating with your teammates on Wordplay Day
Writing longhand
Limiting screen time
Keeping a journal
Focus on one, two, or three assignments or features of the course, and include in your reflective essay the following elements:
A title that offers a window into your reflection
An opening paragraph that introduces your focus and presents your thesis
Body paragraphs that offer concrete details from your work to support your thesis.
A relevant quotation from Writing Analytically or a relevant quotation from one of the texts that we have studied in the second half of the semester. Introduce your quotation with a signal phrase and follow it with a parenthetical citation.
A conclusion that revisits the thesis without restating it verbatim
An MLA-style works cited entry for your source. The April 10 guidelines for preparing for your final reflection include this note: “Be sure to record the work cited entry in the correct format in your journal. During the writing of your reflection, which is a handwritten assignment, you will not have the option of referring to any electronic resources. You may refer only to your journal, your textbook, and your class handouts.”
In class on Monday, you will receive the assignment for the individual presentation you will deliver during the exam period, Monday, April 27, at 3:30 p.m. You will have time in class both to plan your presentation and update your WordPress blog. Details TBA.
(L-R) Madison Kline, ENG 1103.19 Fall 2024, Kaitlyn Ngo, and Olivia Quinones with their poster display for their research project “Environmental Effects on Wing Shape in the Painted Lady Butterfly, Vanessa Cardui.”
If your schedule permits, attend today’s High-PURCS (High Point University’s Undergraduate Research and Creative Works Symposium) between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. at the Qubein Center. Your attendance will not only show your support for other High Point students’ scholastic endeavors but also offer you an opportunity to view poster displays and hear discussions that may inspire ideas for projects of your own. The picture above and the ones that follow feature former students of mine who have presented their work at High-PURCS. I hope to see you presenting your work at High-PURCS ’27, ’28, or ’29.
Molly McCarver, ENG 1103.19 Fall 2023, with her poster display for her research project “The Prevalence of Physical Problems and Overuse Injury Symptoms in Adolescent Athletes.”Madison Kline, ENG 1103.19 Fall 2024, (center) and her collaborators (right) discuss their project with a poster session attendee (left).Molly McCarver, ENG 1103.19 Fall 2023, discusses her project with a poster session attendee (left).
Next Up
In class on Wednesday, you will compose a final reflective essay that documents your work in the second half of the semester, focusing on what you consider some of your most significant work and the features in the course that have benefited your development as a writer and a student. Since you have already written a reflective essay on your final essay and annotated bibliography, your final reflection should focus on other assignments and aspects of the course.
Carefully review the guidelines for preparing, in the March 10 class notes, to ensure that you will be able to complete your reflection successfully.
Today in class, you will read and respond to the final essay and annotated bibliography written by one of your classmates.
Directions
Go to the class blog page, English at High Point, and click on the link for the student whose name you drew as the subject for your peer response
Read the student’s essay and bibliography and compose a response (75 words, minimum) that addresses two or more of these elements: the title, the introductory paragraph, the mention of a larger project that could develop from the research and the theoretical framework that would guide it, the bibliography’s commentaries. If the student’s assignment is not posted on his or her blog, choose another student and record the alternate’s name on your assignment sheet.
If you are concerned about completing your response by the end of the class period, limit your reading to (1) the essay, and (2) the commentary paragraphs in the bibliography. Also, if you do not have time to type your comment after you have written the longhand response that you will submit in class, take a picture of your handwritten response so that you can type your response to the blogger later.
Does the blog post include an image that documents part of the blogger’s writing process away from the screen? ___ (yes or no)
Does the post include a relevant embedded link? ___ (yes or no)
Compose your response on the assignment handout. Use additional paper if you need more space.
After you have composed your response, type it as a comment for the blogger. You should see a leave comment/reply option at the top or bottom of the post. If you do not see that option, click on the title of the blog post, and scroll down. You should then see leave comment/reply.
Submit your handwritten response at the end of class. That hard copy of your comment will verify your completion of the assignment because the blogger may not choose to make your comment visible.
Next Up
In class on Wednesday, you will compose your final reflection, focusing on what you consider some of your most significant work in the second half of the course and the features or aspects of the course that have benefited your development as a writer and a student. Since you have already written a reflective essay on your final essay and annotated bibliography, your final reflection should focus on other assignments and features. Be sure to the read the guidelines in the April 10 class notes to ensure that you will be prepared to complete your in-class reflection successfully.
Postscript: Happy National Scrabble Day!
April 13, the birthday of the game’s inventor, Alfred Mosher Butts, is National Scrabble Day.
Once upon a time, a writer lifted Cinderella out of happily-ever-after with the nib of her pen.
The world she was mining wasn’t new terrain for her. In one of her poems, for instance, she writes of “the ghost upstairs who hovered whenever / our mother read us fairy tales” (“Someone called,” lines 6-7). But rather than reflecting on happily-ever-after stories (as she does there), she was confronting a happily-ever-after with questions: What now? How does one proceed?—questions that we find ourselves asking over and over as our world threatens to vanish in a cloud of radioactive fallout.
Though young children cannot grasp the full implications of that existential crisis–or the others of our long, dark nights of the soul–they, too, are profoundly affected by the traumas of loss, of separation and death, that they encounter. For them, fairy tales, with their unambiguous messages, offer clear-cut pictures of right and wrong, and good and evil, to navigate their inner turmoil. In The Uses of Enchantment, psychologist Bruno Bettelheim wrote of fairy tales as purveyors of “ideas on how to bring [a child’s] inner house in order, and on that basis be able to create order in his life” (5). But what if, as adults, we are faced with leaders who themselves lack the moral development aided by the fairy tales of our childhood–people who have become the one-dimensional villains of those stories; and what if, consequently, the houses we must put into order aren’t our inner ones but the ones of Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol Hill?
Those are some of the questions that the writer, Debra Kaufman, may have asked herself when she brought Cinderella into the here-and-now, to create a sense of order–as she did when she picked “lentils, from cinders–” in an upended world growing less and less recognizable as our own.
Cinderella, in her numerous and occasionally contradictory iterations, remains part of our collective memory and frequent fodder for debate and deconstruction. In her dark critique of Cinderella, poet Anne Sexton left the title character and her prince hermetically sealed in the happily-ever-after, “like two dolls in a museum case” (line 34). Kaufman breaks the glass, liberating the couple to challenge the notion that their fates are sealed.
And so, Kaufman’s Cinderella leads us as adults, as her former self once guided us as children. She enters our world–ready to leave behind the after of the happily-ever, evolving from the naïve ingenue of central casting–to learn what she in turn reminds us that we must do ourselves: draw on inner strength.
Works Cited
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. 1975. Knopf, 1977.
Kaufman, Debra. After the Wedding, Revolution. Directed by Barb Young, Creative Greensboro Evening of Short Plays, No. 40, 9-l2 April 2026, Stephen D. Hyers Theatre, Greensboro, NC.
—. Outwalking the Shadow. Redhawk, 2023.
Sexton, Anne. “Cinderella.” The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton. 1981. Mariner, 1999. pp. 255-58.
Postscript
Writing of her adaptation of Paul Green’s anti-war play, Johnny Johnson, Kaufman likened her work to the title’s character’s labor as a stone carver: “My work would primarily be to chisel away parts that made the story lag or go off in directions that did not serve the play overall” (95). I am grateful to her for carving After the Wedding, Revolution–it, too, an antiwar play of sorts–and I am thankful for the opportunity to play a role in its premiere.
Jane Lucas 