Today in class you will compose a short final reflection essay that documents your work over the course of the semester, focusing on what you consider your most significant work and the feature or features of the course that have benefited your development as a writer and a student. Fetures to consider include the following:
- Planning, drafting, and revising your literacy narrative and/or your analysis. You are welcome to address your final essay and annotated bibliography, but since you recently composed a refelection for it, you should address it only briefly in your final refelection.
- Keeping a journal
- Completing Check, Please! assignments
- Delivering your group presentation on one of the Check, Please! lessons
- Studying one of the readings examined in class, including “Blogs vs. Term Papers,” “The Case for Writing Longhand,” “Skim Reading is the New Normal,” “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” “The Day that Language Came into My Life,” “Back Story” (from The Blind Side), “The Falling Man,” and “Scrabble is a Lousy Game.”
- Writing collaboratively with your classmates
- Completing follow-up revsving and editing exercises for your collaborative writing
- Writing for an online audience/creating and maintaining a WordPress blog, and/or reading and responding to your classmates’ blog posts
- Playing Scrabble/collaborating with your teammates on Wordplay Day
- Writing longhand
- Limiting screen time
You are welcome to focus on more than one feature but no more than four.
Include in your reflective essay the following elements:
- 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 quotation from Writing Analytically, a quotation from one of the class readings, or a quotation from one of the sources included in your final essay and annotated bibliography. Introduce your quotation with a signal phrase and follow it with a parenthetical citation, if needed.
- A conclusion that restates your thesis without restating it verbatim
- An MLA-style work cited entry for your source
Sample MLA Works Cited Entries
Bahr, Sarah. “The Case for Writing Longhand.” New York Times, Jan 21, 2022. ProQuest, https://libproxy.highpoint.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/case-writing-longhand/docview/2621453011/se-2.
Junod, Tom. “The Falling Man.” Esquire, vol. 140, no. 3, Sept. 2003, pp. 176+.Gale Academic OneFile Select,https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A106423422/EAIM?u=hpu_main&sid=bookmark-EAIM&xid=ce48797f.
Kay, Jonathan. Review. “Scrabble is a Lousy Game.” The Wall Street Journal, 4 Oct. 2018. ProQuest,https://libproxy.highpoint.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/scrabble-is-lousy-game-why-would-anyone-play/docview/2116081665/se- 2?accountid=11411.
Keller, Helen. “The Day Language Came into My Life.” Chapter Four. The Story of My Life. https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/keller/life/life.html.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/sites/mlk/files/letterfrombirmingham_wwcw_0.pdf.
Lewis, Michael. Chapter One: “Back Story.” The Blind Side. 2006. Norton, 2009. pp.15-16.
Richtel, Matt. “Blogs vs. Term Papers,” The New York Times, 20 Jan. 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/education/edlife/muscling-in-on-the-term-paper-tradition.html.
Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. “Integrating Quotations into Your Paper.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 231-33.
—. “Ways to Use Sources as a Point of Departure.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. p. 218.
—. “Writing on Computers vs. Writing on Paper.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 124-25.
Sedaris, David. “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Me Talk Pretty One Day. Little, Brown, 2000. 166-73.
Wolf, Maryanne. “Skim Reading is the New Normal. The Effect on Society is Profound.” The Guardian, 25 Aug. 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/skim-reading-new-normal-maryanne-wolf.
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To up your game and increase your word power, review the tips and tools on the Scrabble website as well as my blog posts devoted to the game.
Jane Lucas 