Am I the person who will teach your English 1103 class? I posed that question this morning at the beginning of class as a starting point for our critical thinking, one of the key features of the class and of your other college courses.
To begin the collaboration and inquiry that will figure prominently this semester, you worked together in groups today to find the answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about the course. After class, continue to review the syllabus. (An additional copy is posted in Blackboard.) If you have any questions about the assignments, the course policies, or the calendar, please let me know.
Textbook
All of you in section 8 of English 1103 are required to purchase or rent the paperback edition of the textbook, Exhalation and Other Stories by Ted Chiang. Bring your copy to class on the days when the title, Exhalation, appears in bold on the course calendar. On those days, we will examine portions of the chapters in class, and you will address passages in the textbook in your own writing.
Your first reading assignment in the textbook is scheduled for October 19, which will give you ample time to order and receive your copy before you are required to have it in class.
Other Required Materials
Writer’s notebook/journal, bring to every Monday and Wednesday class.
Loose leaf paper (for drafts and short in-class assignments), bring to every Monday and Wednesday class
Pen with dark ink, bring to every class
Pocket portfolio (for class handouts), bring to every class
WordPress Blog
As practice in developing your web literacy and writing for a broader online audience, you will maintain a free WordPress blog for the class. As soon as possible, create a free blog at wordpress.com. After you create your blog, email the address, or URL, to me, and I will link your blog to our class page, English at High Point. If you encounter technical difficulties creating your blog or publishing a post, email help@wordpress.com or contact the HPU Help Desk: helpdesk@highpoint.edu, 336-841-HELP (3457).
You will post the revisions of all your major writing assignments both to your blog and to Blackboard. The posts that you publish for class will be public. You are welcome to create additional posts on your own. If you prefer for some of those posts to be private, keep them in draft form or choose the private visibility option.
Mandatory Student Safety Training Video
If you were absent on the first day of class, be sure to watch the safety training video we viewed on Monday.
Next Up
On Wednesday, you will continue to compose the introductory reflective essay that you began in class today.
For weeks, my reading and writing have been limited almost exclusively to Shakespeare’s sonnets sixty-four and ninety-eight, along with parts of eighty-four, which I will perform at Creative Greensboro’s second annual Sonnet Fest, August 7-9.
I marvel at my actor friends who can sit backstage and lose themselves in the pages of a novel only minutes before they make another entrance and speak the words they have committed to memory. For me, those words I will speak on stage must remain in the forefront of my mind–a necessity I put at risk if I crowd my brain with the words of a book-length narrative.
The importance of focusing on the lines I will speak on stage grows greater when those words are Shakespeare’s. I am not a quick study, so learning lines is difficult for me and even more so when the diction and syntax are centuries removed from my own.
But after weeks of listening to my lines–in my car and on my morning walks–and writing and rewriting them in my journal, I once again witnessed the effects of the process that I am repeatedly doubtful of trusting.
With the knowledge that the hardest part of my line work was behind me, two days ago, as a birthday gift to myself, I began reading a novel I had avoided because of my focus on the lines.
To stave off a line backslide, I decided to return to my lines whenever I completed fifty pages of Shelby Van Pelt‘s Incredibly Bright Creatures, which found me toggling between late sixteenth-century England and early twenty-first-century Pacific Northwest.
The two began to intermingle in my mind. As I found myself inhabiting the small (fictional) town of Sowell Bay on the Puget Sound, the words of Sonnet 64 turned over in my head: “When I have seen the hungry ocean gain / Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, / And the firm soil win of the wat’ry main, Increasing store with loss and loss with store;” (lines 5-8).
For anyone who hasn’t read Van Pelt’s novel, I don’t want to spoil it, so I won’t offer any of the particulars I am tempted to detail. I will simply say this: If anyone had told me that I would be captivated by a narrator who is a giant Pacific octopus, I would have been incredulous. Then again, whenever I am faced with lines of iambic pentameter that are centuries removed from my own speech, I am similarly incredulous, convinced that I cannot learn them. And then slowly, I do, as I give them the attention they require.
Shakespeare would appreciate Marcellus, the octopus, and his human friend, Tova, both haunted by the same loss that pervades Sonnet 64. In his last brief chapter of narration, Marcellus reflects that “not a day passed when I did not ruminate on my own death” (349). I will stop there (to reveal no more) and turn to the bard’s words the octopus echoes. Meditating on the rise and fall of the tide, the poet notes that such “interchange of state” (9) has taught him “thus to ruminate, / That Time will come and take my love away” (11-12).
With the words he pens, Shakespeare strives to make sense of that loss. When Cameron, another of Van Pelt’s characters, asks Tova how she recovered from her own grief, she says, “You don’t recover. Not all the way. But you do move on. You have to” (346). Tova, too–a lover of language, like her non-speaking friend, Marcellus–is sustained in part what is written, spoken, and in one instance, etched: words.
My discussions with students about generative AI have been limited to plagiarism and academic integrity. But an end-of-semester faculty summit and a follow-up seventeen-day AI bootcamp led me to realize that I need to devote more attention to GenAI and model its responsible use.
How could I achieve those goals without increasing students’ screen time in the classroom? In the digital age, requiring students to compose drafts longhand and to read and annotate texts on paper seems anachronistic, but cognitive neuroscientists have identified those analog practices as vital. To provide students with a classroom experience that fosters the learning that screens can impede, my students will continue to draft their essays longhand and read on paper, but they will turn to GenAI for exercises in planning and brainstorming.
That series of exercises—which the students will complete outside of class—begins with asking an AI assistant for guidance on selecting a topic for their literacy narrative. Rather than starting with the simple question, what should I write about?, the students will instead present three topics and ask the AI assistant to ask them a series of questions to determine which one has the most narrative possibilities.
Although the students may not agree with the AI’s suggestions—just as they might not agree with a classmate’s or mine—the process itself will likely generate ideas that will lead to starting points. If they don’t, false starts will be steps in the journey, as they often are.
To prepare students for that initial exercise, I will conduct it myself, with three topics of my own, and take screenshots of the questions and answers. That documentation of my own process will enable me to lead students through the process step by step without opening an AI application in the classroom.
Though the students will not turn to AI in the classroom—and will turn only occasionally to their screens—AI will remain at the forefront of their classwork through our study of a sequence of science fiction that explores the nature of artificial intelligence: Isaac Asimov’s “Runaround,” which introduces his Three Laws of Robotics, followed by Brian Aldiss’s “Supertoys” stories and Ted Chiang’s “The Lifecycle of Software Objects.”
I chose those sci-fi stories not because I am naturally drawn to the genre but because of the ways the writers of those narratives use their imaginations as testing grounds for questions about humanity and the future. At the beginning of Ted Chiang’s “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” a young woman, Ana, sits in front of her computer, waiting for a videoconference job interview that she learns moments later has been canceled. The company has decided to hire someone else.
Ana’s interview-that-wasn’t would have been her first in months to reach the videoconference stage. Trying to recover from her disappointment, Ana sends queries to other companies and receives automated rejections.
For current college students, that doesn’t seem like science fiction. Contemplating such circumstances now in the classroom, their own testing ground—and trying to make sense of them through their own writing—may help them face a future with AI that we cannot know.
In 1978, when I first saw a Peanuts comic strip featuring Sally Brown’s new friend—a girl she’d met at summer camp—the name Charles Schulz had given the character wasn’t a familiar one. The name wasn’t one I’d even remember, at least not until recently, when I read Simon Beecroft’s The Peanuts Book: A Visual History of the Iconic Strip.
When I spotted her in Beecroft’s book, I immediately recognized the girl with the long brown hair capped with a purple tuque, but I had no memory of her name. Undoubtedly, her name had escaped me because eight years had passed between the time I had first encountered her in the panels of Peanuts and my introduction to the writer who inspired her name.
In 1986, I enrolled in my first creative writing class at UNC-Chapel Hill, English 23W, Introduction to Fiction Writing, taught by James Seay. The textbook Professor Seay had chosen for the course was an anthology that included “Why I Live at the P.O.,” a short story that delighted me with the narrator’s description of her uncle, “suddenly appear[ing] in the hallway in one of Stella-Rondo’s flesh-colored kimonos, all cut on the bias” (Welty 48). The woman who wrote those words became—and remains—one of my favorite writers. When I saw her first name in my sophomore textbook, I thought I was seeing that name for the first time. Only recently, forty years later, was I reminded that my first glimpse of the name Eudora was in a speech balloon penned by Charles Schulz. Seeing Sally Brown’s friend Eudora for the first time since 1978 prompted me to wonder whether that brown-haired girl in the purple tuque was named for Eudora Welty.
Beecroft answers my question in his book, noting that Schulz referred to meeting Welty as “really one of the great moments of my whole life” (158). Beecroft also mentions that Welty held Schulz’s “writerly qualities” (158) in high regard: “[T]he way he had imagined the inside of Snoopy’s doghouse but left it to the reader’s imagination. ‘That’s so good,’ Welty said. ‘A writer has to know all about the inside of a thing even if he is just going to show a little bit of it’” (158).
Long before I developed an appreciation for literary fiction, I was enamored with the comic art of Charles Schulz. Was the future writer in me drawn to something in Schulz’s panels that led to my devotion to the written word, some “writerly qualities” I could not yet name?
In her memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings, Welty distinguishes chronological time from the order that we as storytellers give to events: “[I]n their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily—perhaps not possibly—chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow” (69).
Though I first met her namesake eight years before I read Welty’s fiction, the chronology of my writer’s narrative places Schulz’s Eudora second. Only after rediscovering her in the pages of Beecroft’s book did I remember her name. And now she and Welty remain bound in my mind by what Welty would call “the continuous thread of revelation” (69).
Works Cited
Beecroft, Simon. The Peanuts Book: A Visual History of the Iconic Strip. DK/Penguin Random House, 2020.
Welty, Eudora. One Writer’s Beginnings. Harvard University Press, 1984.
—. “Why I Live at the P.O.” 1941. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. pp 46-56.
Congratulations to Mark Epstein (ENG 1103.23, Fall 2022), who will commence his life after graduation as a corporate analyst for Morgan Stanley. You can read more about Mark’s achievements at HPU on the Career and Professional Development’s Success Stories page and in the social media post below.
Mark Epstein (far right) in 2022 with his ENG 1103.23 classmates (l-r) Parker Pignataro, Shelby Scott, and Jack Rhynning.
Please keep me updated on your own achievements, so I can celebrate your success stories and share them with the students who follow in your footsteps.
McKayla Flood (ENG 1103.20, Fall 2023), recipient of the 2026 Outstanding Education Fellow award.
As you leave our English 1103 class for the last time, aim to continue the practices you have cultivated this semester, including blogging. Although you may prefer to delete your major writing assignments from your blog, I encourage you to maintain your WordPress site. Tailoring it to showcase your writing and other projects in your major—and posting your resume on it too—will serve you well when you apply for internships and jobs. In your application cover letters, you can direct employers to your blog by writing, To learn more about my work, please visit my website: [yourblogname.wordpress.com].
For many of you, composing longhand isn’t preferable to typing—and often it isn’t for me either—but I recommend putting pen to paper at least occasionally, especially when you find yourself struggling to move forward with a piece of writing. The words you are now reading—and those in the other posts I composed this semester—all began as scribbles on paper. Also, remember that putting pen to paper offers us an opportunity to turn away from our screens, a practice that not only benefits our writing but also our overall well-being.
Envision how the papers you wrote for English 1103 and your other classes may evolve into larger projects for upper-level courses or conference presentations. Look back at those assignments and ask yourself the same questions that you addressed in your final essay for English 1103: What larger project might develop from it? What would serve as its theoretical framework?
The photograph at the top of this post features my former student McKayla Flood, a junior who received the 2026 Outstanding Education Fellow award. Congratulations to McKayla on her success in the Stout School of Education.
Please share the news of your own successes, so I can celebrate them with the students who follow in your footsteps.
Superlatives
Congratulations to the students who have earned the highest preliminary averages and to those who achieved perfect attendance.
Students who do not enroll in a course until after the first, second, or third class meeting are eligible for perfect attendance because their attendance records commence only after they have added a course.
Congratulations to Aidan Berlin on winning the vintage Scrabble game (pictured above) in last Wednesday’s drawing.
Parting Thoughts
The essayist Susan Sontag advised writers to “[l]ove words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.” As you commence life after English 1103, keep those words in mind.
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.
Jane Lucas 