The January 21 Scrabble blog post featured the sixteen playable two-letter words beginning with “a.” Learning those two-letter words, as well as the others that follow in the alphabet, will enable you to see more options for play and increase the number of points you earn in a single turn.
Here’s a list of the playable words beginning with “b,” “d,” and “e.”
ba: the soul in ancient Egyptian spirituality
be: to exist
bi: a bisexual
bo: a pal
by: a side issue
de: of; from
do: a tone on a scale
ed: education
ef: the letter f
eh: used to express doubt
el: an elevated train
em: the letter m
en: the letter n
er: used to express hesitation
es: the letter s
et: a past tense of eat
ex: the letter x
Next Up
This morning in class we will study a sample essay as a model for your analysis, and in groups of three and four you will collaboratively work on an exercise that focuses on the sample essay’s thesis statement and its conclusion.
Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. Chapter 1: “The Five Analytical Moves.” Writing Analytically,8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 2-37.
This morning in class you began planning and drafting your analysis. Next Wednesday, I will return your handwritten drafts, and you will have the class period to begin revising your analysis on your laptop. In the meantime, continue to study Matt Richtel’s article “Blogs vs. Term Papers.”
The more you examine Richtel’s words, the more details you will notice about its content and form. What meaning does the article convey, and how does the writer’s work with words build that meaning?
Keep in mind that your assignment is an analysis, not an argument. Your aim is not to present your stance regarding the benefits of writing term papers or blogs. Instead, your goal is to develop a detailed study of the article that focuses on the elements that interest or intrigue you the most.
The authors of our textbook, Writing Analytically, distinguish analysis from argument this way: “Argument, in which a writer takes a stand on an issue, advocating for or against a policy or attitude, is reader-centered; its goal is to bring about change in its readers’ actions and beliefs. Analytical writing is more concerned with arriving at an understanding of a subject than it is with either self-expression or changing readers’ views” (5).
For more guidance with your analysis, read the section of Chapter 1 under the heading “Analysis Does More Than Break a Subject into Its Parts” (4-5).
Next Up
Friday, January 28, marks our third Wordplay Day of the semester. To prepare for your team Scrabble games, review the Tips and Tools page on the Scrabble site. Also browse my blog posts devoted to Scrabble. To view those posts, click the Scrabble link in the yellow categories square (below the pink pages square) on the right side of the screen.
Work Cited
Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. Chapter 1: “The Five Analytical Moves.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 2-37.
Helga (Jane Lucas) in Creative Greensboro’s production of The Wolves of Ravensbruk (2021) / Sam McClenaghan
I wrote the blog post that follows as a sample for your own introductory post. You are required to write only one-hundred words and feature one relevant photograph, but I encourage you to write more than the minimum and include additional pictures.
Though I began performing in community theatre as a teenager in the 1980s, I was away from it—focusing on my teaching and writing—for more than twenty-five years. Becoming an acting student in my forties—enrolling in classes in Richmond, Virginia, in 2011 and 2012—rekindled my passion for the craft. I fell in love with acting all over again, and I found myself wondering how I’d ever left it.
(L-R): Rosa (Beth Strader), Gizela (Nicole Weintraub), Zofia (Mary Quagliano), Helga (Jane Lucas), Ilse (Camille Wright), and Gertja (Rebecca Stanifer) / Sam McClenaghan
(L-R): Helga (Jane Lucas) and Jozefina (Cass Weston) / Sam McClenaghan
Most recently, I appeared on stage as Helga, the Nazi prison guard in the premiere production of The Wolves of Ravensbuk by Sally Kinka, which was received the New Play Project Prize awarded annually by the Creative Greensboro’s Playwright’s Forum.
(L-R): Zofia (Mary Quagliano), Helga (Jane Lucas), Jozefina (Cass Weston), and Gizela (Nicole Weintraub) / Sam McClenaghan
Performing the role of Helga proved to be one of my most challenging roles. Along with the difficulty of playing a despicable character who commits barbarous acts and barks mean-spirited words, the work of playing Helga was rigorous because of the length of her monologues and alterations in my voice required for me to convey some semblance of a German accent. Though Helga did not speak more lines than any other character I’ve played, she spoke more words in each speech, or monologue, than any other character I’ve played. That volume of words coupled with the difficulty of speaking in a foreign voice–one in which my “th” sounds morphed into “z”’s–made me more vocally tired than I’d ever been.
Though the role was tiring, I am grateful that I had the opportunity to play it. For me as a writer, acting is another way of working with words, a process of transporting them from the page to the stage and transforming the language into the utterances of a living, breathing character—someone who isn’t me but in whom I can live truthfully, as the acting teacher Sanford Meisner said, under the given imaginary circumstances.
Next Up
At the beginning of class on Wednesday, January 26, you will turn in your completed work sheet for the first lesson in the Check, Please! course. You may handwrite your assignment on the back of the worksheet, or staple a typed copy to it. If you did not receive a copy because you were absent today, you can download the worksheet below or from Blackboard.
Also, in class on Wednesday, you will begin your preliminary work on your first paper assignment, your analysis. You will receive a copy of that assignment at the beginning of the class period.
Parallel play increases your score through the points you earn by spelling more than one word in a single turn. In the first play of the game pictured above, the team scored sixteen points by spelling “enact” with the “t” on the center double word square. With the second turn, the other team took advantage of the opportunity for parallel play. Because the team knew that “aa” is a type of lava, they earned twenty-four points with four words: “whoa,” “he,” “on,” and “aa.”
Two-Letter Words Beginning with A
“Aa” is one of sixteen playable two-letter words beginning with “a.” Learning these two-letter words, as well as the others that follow in the alphabet, will enable you to see more options for play and increase the number of points you earn in a single turn.
aa: a type of stony, rough lava
ab: an abdominal muscle
ad: an advertisement
ae: one
ag: agriculture
ah: an exclamation
ai: a three-toed sloth
al: a type of East Indian tree
am: the first-pesron singular present form of “to be”
an: an indefinite article
ar: the letter “r”
as: similar to
at: in the position of
aw: an expression of sadness or protest
ay: a vote in the affirmative
Next Up
In class on Monday, January 24, you will create your WordPress blog and begin work on your introductory blog post. Bring your laptop to class.
In the class blog post for Friday, January 14, I assigned you Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Although I could have asked you to listen to a recording of it, I required you to read it instead. King’s gift for oratory is well known, but for students of writing, closely examining his words on the page is a more pertinent exercise than listening to his voice.
What makes King’s letter an effective piece of writing? With that question in mind, consider these words in the eleventh paragraph: “Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait.’” Here King is addressing his initial audience, the eight white Birmingham-area clergymen who criticized his protest as “unwise and untimely.” He suggests to those men that waiting to act isn’t difficult when you yourself aren’t the victim of injustice, when you haven’t, in King’s words, “felt the stinging darts of segregation.” The sentence is notable not only for the contrast it illustrates between King’s reality and the lives of his readers but also for the words that King uses to show that contrast.
Consider King’s sentence and the paraphrase that follows:
Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.”
Maybe it is simple for people who have not experienced segregation to say, “Wait.”
King’s sentence is stronger than the paraphrase that follows it because of the “stinging darts.” Writing that someone has not “experienced segregation” is abstract. Readers do not feel the general experience in the second sentence, but they feel King’s “stinging darts.” Sensory details strengthen sentences by appealing to readers’ senses, and figurative language invigorates writing by making the unfamiliar familiar. King’s white readers have not been the victims of segregation, but his choice of words makes them feel the sting.
While King’s “stinging darts” sentence—a relatively short one—is laudable, the long, winding sentence that follows is nothing short of staggering.
It starts with these words: “But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim.” King presents those atrocities in an introductory dependent clause, one whose full meaning depends on an independent clause that follows. But rather than immediately turning to an independent clause to complete the thought, King expands the sentence with this series of dependent clauses:
[b]ut when you have seen vicious mobs mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at willand drown your brothers and sisters at whim;
when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters;
when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society;
when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people;
when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you;
when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”;
when your first name becomes “n—,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”;
when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments;
when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–
The independent clause that readers have been waiting for, the statement that completes the thought is this: “then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.” Those words could have immediately followed the first dependent clause, but instead King offers nine more dependent clauses, ten darts that sting his readers.
Ten dependent clauses connected by semicolons followed by a dash and an independent clause, a total of 316 words: That is not a structure I recommend for the sentences you write in English 111, but it’s a valuable model, nevertheless.
Now, only days after the one-year anniversary of the violent insurrection at our nation’s Capitol, King’s message of civil disobedience may be more critical than ever. As a citizen, I hope you will continue to study the words of his letter. As your writing teacher, I hope that you will return to the sentence that I have examined in detail here. Along with showing his readers why his nonviolent protests could not wait, that sentence of King’s demonstrates how to develop a piece of writing through the accumulation of detail—not just the when, but the when and when and when . . . .
Although you may not think of playing Scrabble as an act of writing, when you play the game, you are engaged in the process of composing words. Scrabble not only benefits your writing by building your word power, it also cultivates critical thinking and creative problem solving.
On future Fridays, keep your journal at hand to make note of any details of the game that you may want to address on Monday. You will collaborate again with your Friday group for a short post-game debriefing.
Questions to address in your debriefing include these:
Did you learn any new words from your teammate or from your opponent? If so, what were they?
What plays involved analyzing multiple options? Did your team opt not to make the highest-scoring play possible in order to either (1) block your opponent, or (2) keep letters that might be enable you to score more points later?
Where did creative problem-solving figure in the game? If your team had a rack of all consonants or vowels (or almost all consonants or vowels), how were you able to advance the game by playing only one or two letters?
What was the largest number of words formed in a single play and what were they?
You will have the opportunity to draw on the notes that you write during Scrabble games and debriefings when you compose your midterm reflection for the course.
Next Up
For next Wednesday, January 19, read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and write in your journal a one-paragraph summary followed by a one-paragraph response. You do not need to print a copy of King’s essay. I will distribute copies for us to examine in class.
Today in class, you wrote two paragraphs about a significant learning experience of yours that occurred outside of school. In the first paragraph, you recounted the experience with specific details. In the second one, you addressed the significance of the experience.
After you wrote those paragraphs in your journal, you and three of your classmates collaboratively planned and composed a paragraph that mentioned each specific learning experience and the qualities that they shared.
Takeaways
That sequence of two exercises (journal writing followed by group discussion and writing) offered you the opportunity to reflect on both your individual learning and the commonalities among your learning experiences as a group of people with whom you are developing a learning community.
Focusing in the classroom on your learning outside of the classroom underscore the differences between the two. We frequently enjoy learning and find it rewarding, but in an institutional setting, it often becomes a chore, a requirement to be endured.
Look back on today’s journal writing and group exercise as starting points for thinking of your college classes as opportunities for significant learning experiences rather than drudgery.
Habits of Mind
In the second half of class, you began working on a series of short pieces of writing focusing on four habits of mind cultivated by successful college students: curiosity, openness, engagement, and persistence.*
Next week you will begin working on a series of short pieces of writing focusing on four additional habits of mind cultivated by successful college students: persistence, responsibility, flexibility, and metacognition.
Next Up
Friday, January 14, marks our first Wordplay Day of the semester. To prepare for your team Scrabble games, review the Tips and Tools page on the Scrabble site. Also browse my blog posts devoted to Scrabble. To view those posts, click the Scrabble link in the yellow categories square (below the pink pages square) on the right side of the screen.
*In 2011, the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and the National Writing Project (NWP) identified eight habits of mind that successful college students adopt: curiosity, openness, engagement, creativity, persistence, responsibility, flexibility, and metacognition.
This morning in class you worked collaboratively with four of your classmates to find in the syllabus the answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about the course. Those questions and their answers appear below.
How many major assignments will we write and what are their length requirements?
Analytical Essay (750-word minimum)15%
Midterm Reflection (750-word minimum)10%
Final Essay (1,800-word minimum) 25%
Final Reflection & Portfolio (750-word reflection, portfolio length will vary)15%
Creative project, length will vary, minimum TBD 10%
Where do we post the revisions of our major assignments?
All major assignments will be posted both to Blackboard and to your WordPress blog.
What are Check, Please! and WordPress, and how do they figure in the course?
This course meets face-to-face for the equivalent of a 3-credit course. However, as a 4-credit course, it is designed to require 8 hours of out-of-class preparation, or 2 per credit hour. This means more out-of-class preparation is expected in ENG 1103, and to earn that 4th-hour credit, students will be required to complete the Check, Please! Starter Course, based on Mike Caulfield’s Web Literacy for Student Fact Checkers, and create and maintain free WordPress blogs as platforms for sharing information and knowledge.
May we use our phones, tablets, and laptops in the classroom? If so, when?
Occasionally you will have the opportunity to use your tablet or laptop in class, but often your work will require the sustained focus that working online inhibits. Therefore, unless instructed otherwise, please leave your phones, smart watches, laptops, and tablets stored in your backpack or bag.
May we make up short in-class assignments that we miss? How will missing them affect our grade?
If you are absent on the day that such an in-class assignment is graded, you will not be assigned a grade of F (or zero). Instead, the daily assignment average will be based on the in-class assignments that you were present to complete.
Textbook
If you haven’t already purchased or rented your copy of the textbook, please do so as soon as possible.
Note that different sections of English 1103 require different textbooks. Be sure that the textbook you rent or purchase is Writing Analytically, the required textbook for sections 05 and 21.
Since our screen time in class will be limited, all students in sections 05 and 21 of English 1103 are required to have the paperback edition of the textbook, not the electronic edition. You will frequently use your textbook during Monday and Wednesday classes.
Additional Required Materials
The additional required materials listed in your syllabus (and below) are also featured in the image at the top of this blog post.
Writer’s notebook—bring to every class
Loose leaf paper (for drafts and short in-class assignments)—bring to Monday and Wednesday classes
Pocket portfolio (for class handouts)—bring to every class
Up Next
For Wednesday’s class, continue to review the syllabus and make note of any questions you have.
Jane Lucas 