Author: janemlucas

Posted in English 1103, Teaching

ENG 1103: Habits of Mind

Posted on by janemlucas

College writing offers you the opportunity to develop skills, such as supporting arguments with evidence, writing effective thesis statements, and using transitions well, but it also gives you the opportunity to develop habits. Successful college students develop certain habits of mind, a way of approaching learning that leads to success.

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.

In class on Monday, you began an exercise focusing on four of the eight habits of mind. Today in class, you will address one of those habits in a collaborative piece of writing.

The paragraphs that follow include the descriptions of the habits that you examined (and the ones you will examine today), as well as the questions that you answered in writing (and the ones you will answer in writing today).

Curiosity

Are you the kind of person who always wants to know more? This habit of mind will serve you well in courses in which your curiosity about issues, problems, people, or policies can form the backbone of a writing project.

WRITING ACTIVITY: What are you most curious to learn about? What experiences have you had in which your curiosity has led you to an interesting discovery or to more questions?

Openness

Some people are more open than others to new ideas and experiences and new ways of thinking about the world. Being open to other perspectives and positions can help you to frame sound arguments and counterarguments and solve other college writing challenges in thoughtful ways.

WRITING ACTIVITY: In the family or the part of the world in which you grew up, did people tend to be very open, not open at all, or somewhere in the middle? Thinking about your own level of open-mindedness, reflect on how much or how little your own attitude toward a quality like openness is the result of the attitudes of the people around you.

Engagement

Successful college writers are involved in their own learning process. Students who are engaged put effort into their classes, knowing that they’ll get something out of their classes—something other than a grade. They participate in their own learning by planning, seeking feedback when they need to, and communicating with peers and professors to create their own success. Write about a few of the ways you try (or plan to try) to be involved in your own learning. What does engagement look like to you?

WRITING ACTIVITY: Write about a few of the ways you try (or plan to try) to be involved in your own learning. What does engagement look like to you?

Creativity

You may be thinking that you have to be an artist, poet, or musician to display creativity. Not so. Scientists use creativity every day in coming up with ways to investigate questions in their field. Engineers and technicians approach problem solving in creative ways. Retail managers use creativity in displaying merchandise and motivating their employees.

WRITING ACTIVITY: Think about the field you plan to enter. What forms might creativity take in that field?

Persistence

You are probably used to juggling long-term and short-term commitments—both in school and in your everyday life. Paying attention to your commitments and being persistent enough to see them through, even when the commitments are challenging, are good indicators that you will be successful in college.

WRITING ACTIVITY: Describe a time when you faced and overcame an obstacle in an academic setting. What did you learn from that experience?

Responsibility

College will require you to be responsible in way you may not have had to be before. Two responsibilities you will face as an academic writer are to represent the ideas of others fairly and to give credit to writers whose ideas and language you borrow for your own purposes.

WRITING ACTIVITY: Why do you think academic responsibility is important? What kind of experience have you already had with this kind of responsibility?

Flexibility

Would your friends say you are the kind of person who can just “go with the flow”? Do you adapt easily to changing situations? If so, you will find college easier, especially college writing. When you find, for example, that you’ve written a draft that doesn’t address the right audience or that your peer review group doesn’t understand at all, you will be able to adapt. Being flexible enough to adapt to the demands of different writing projects is an important habit of mind.

WRITING ACTIVITY: Describe a situation in which you’ve had to make changes based on a situation you couldn’t control. Did you do so easily or with difficulty?

Metacognition (Reflection)

As a learner, you have probably been asked to think back on a learning experience and comment on what went well or not well, what you learned or what you wished you had learned, or what decisions you made or didn’t make. Writers who reflect on their own processes and decisions are better able to transfer writing skills to future assignments.

WRITING ACTIVITY: Reflect on your many experiences as a writer. What was your most satisfying experience as a writer?  What made it so?

Next Up

Friday marks the first Wordplay Day of the semester. To prepare for class, review the Scrabble Ground Rules posted in Blackboard, as well as the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website. Also review the Scrabble blog entry that I will post tomorrow. Most weeks of the semester, usually on Thursday, I will publish a post devoted to Scrabble.

Posted in English 1103, Teaching

ENG 1103: First-Day Follow-Up

Posted on by janemlucas

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 analysis, one of the key features of the course.

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 sections 19 and 20 of English 1103 are required to have the paperback edition of the textbook, Writing Analytically, 9th edition, by David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen. Bring your copy to class on the days when the title, Writing Analytically, 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 for the course.

Your first reading assignment in the textbook is scheduled for September 11, 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 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 of 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. 

You may also be asked to post comments to your classmates’ blogs and to mine.

Next Up

On Wednesday, you and two or three of your classmates will collaborate on an assignment fousing on the Habits of Mind worksheet that you completed for Wednesday’s class.

Posted in Reading, Writing

Reconstructing Jim: Percival Everett’s James

Posted on by janemlucas

When readers of Percival Everett’s James first encounter the title character’s daughter, James is teaching her and the other six children in his cabin how to speak the crude dialect that whites expect to hear from the mouths of slaves. Is Lizzie reading her father’s lips? That’s a question some readers may ask, remembering how in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Jim tells Huck that his daughter lost her hearing to scarlet fever.

Maybe Lizzie—called Lizbeth in Mark Twain’s novel—recovered her hearing. Otherwise, what accounts for the discrepancy? Whatever the answer may be, the variances in James’ and Huck’s stories don’t end there. In Huckleberry Finn, Jim is bitten on the leg by a rattlesnake; in James, he is bitten on the hand. In Huckleberry Finn, Huck keeps two men from discovering Jim by telling the men that the hidden man with whom he is travelling is his father, who has smallpox. Perhaps to assuage their guilt for abandoning a boy whose father lies ill with a contagious disease, the two men each give Huck twenty dollars, half of which he gives to Jim. In James, it’s Huck’s uncle whom he says has smallpox, and one of the men gives Huck ten dollars.

Those inconsistencies are secondary to the grave dangers faced by the runaway slave, but they demonstrate the primary role of point of view in fiction and prompt readers to meditate on the nature of narrative itself. Though published eighty-five years before William H. Gass coined the term metafiction, Huckleberry Finn (1885)—like Don Quixote, Part II (1615) and Tristram Shandy (1759)—departs from novelistic convention, identifying its central figure as a character in a book. In conventional fiction, characters don’t know they are characters, but in Huckleberry Finn, Huck identifies himself as a character in the first sentence and credits Twain in the second:

“You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of  ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly” (32).

In contrast, Everett’s Jim doesn’t refer to his character-turned-writer status initially. Instead, one-third of the way into the novel, readers learn that the words Jim has penned—or, more accurately, penciled—are the words they are reading. In Chapter 15, Jim recounts how reading—which he taught himself to do by studying the books in Judge Thatcher’s library—leaves him dissatisfied; the words that he needs to see on the page are the ones he will put there himself:

I read and I read, but I found what I needed was to write. I needed that pencil. I could not keep track of my thoughts. I could not follow my own reasoning after a while. This was perhaps because I couldn’t stop reading long enough to make space in my head. I was like a man who had not eaten for a season and then gorged himself until sick. And my books, once read, were not what I wanted, not what I needed. The so-called self-related story of Venture Smith became infuriating the more I examined the work, wondering how a five-year-old could have remembered so much detail that made such neat sense. I had already come to understand the tidiness of lies, the lesson learned from the stories told by white people seeking to justify my circumstance. (89-90)

Jim receives the pencil he needs from a slave called Young George, who is brutally whipped for stealing the pencil from his master. When Young George hands Jim the pencil, he says to him, “Tell your story” (91).

But with pencil finally in hand, Jim still lacks paper. How he acquires the pages he needs requires some backstory:

After the King and the Duke discover that the blacksmith-slave, Easter, has unlocked the shackle on Jim’s leg, the Duke whips Easter, rendering him unable to work. When Wiley, Easter’s owner, sees that the Duke has damaged his property, he confiscates Jim from the King and the Duke and forces him to forge the horseshoes that Easter is too weak to make. As the wounded Easter guides Jim through the process of pumping the bellows, he tells Jim that there’s been a lynching up the river: A slave was hanged for stealing a pencil.

While Jim is still forging his first horseshoe, his new owner, Wiley, returns and asks him to sing while he works. Jim’s singing is overheard by the members of a travelling minstrel show, the Virginia Minstrels, whose owner, Daniel Decatur Emmett, buys Jim to serve as the group’s replacement tenor. Fearing that an audience member will realize that he is a runaway slave rather than a white man in blackface, Jim sneaks away from the minstrel show, taking Emmett’s leather journal with him.

Jim’s reason for stealing the journal is practical: he needs paper. But taking Emmett’s pages into his own hands is also a vital act of revision. What was once a collection of compositions born of blackface minstrelsy will become an account of escaping the slave-holding South, a region whose moral failing was enabled and perpetuated in part by the grotesquerie of the blackface tradition. Notably, the epigraph for James consists of lyrics penned by Daniel Decatur Emmett, who is not merely a character in the novel but the real-life leader of the first blackface minstrel troupe and the composer of “Dixie.” By composing his story on the pages that follow the lyrics of “Old Zip Coon,” Everett’s Jim is both literally and figuratively rewriting the book.  

In the journal, Jim writes of himself as “a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written” (93). That distinction may account for the recollections of his that differ from Huck’s; Jim’s primary interest isn’t writing his own story but reclaiming the story of thousands of other fugitive slaves. And perhaps he restored Lizzie’s hearing so she could hear that story, one that he could finally tell in his own words.

Works Cited

Everett, Percival. James. Doubleday, 2024.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. 2nd ed. ,edited by Gerald Graff and James Phelan, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004.

Posted in Reading, Writing

The Poetry of “There is Always Light” and the Prose of “What Came to Me”

Posted on by janemlucas

When an author follows a collection of personal essays, or columns, with one of autobiographical poetry, or vice versa, she leads readers of both volumes to consider how she depicts some of the same people and themes in a different genre. Such was the case with Arlene Neal’s book of poems There is Always Light (2023), the follow-up to her first book, What Came to Me (2020), a collection of her weekly columns from The News-Topic.

The poem “God help me not to hate” echoes the column “New Shoes and Self Esteem,” in which a thoughtless classmate observes that the writer’s loafers are “not Bass Weejuns” (48). The girl who speaks those words could easily be one of the girls who “wear / pink pearl nail polish and wear / pleated skirts and new shoes” (lines 4-6). But those girls in the Sunday school class are not the antagonists of the poem; rather, it’s the Sunday school teacher, herself, who treats the speaker of the poem as an object of scorn. The speaker—what we call the narrator of a poem—does not actually speak. She refrains from answering the teacher’s questions, sitting, in her words, “on both hands / so she [the teacher] won’t see my black nails / and fingers stained yellow / from working in tobacco” (lines 7-10).

That girl who hides her tobacco-stained fingers is the girl on the bus in “New Shoes . . . ,” but the silent speaker of the poem is not the adult retrospective narrator of the column. At the end of the poem, she still sits in Sunday school, while the girl who was humiliated on the bus has grown up “to understand the value of [her] personhood” (48). Yet even though the speaker in the poem lacks the adult perspective of the writer of “New Shoes . . . ,” she gains insight—not from the lesson that the teacher attempts to impart but from her own epiphany: her recognition of the teacher’s hypocrisy.

Just as “God teach me not to hate” recollects “New Shoes and Self Esteem,” “A Baseball Poem,” “End of the Season,” and “World Series 1966” all recall the column “The Longest Game and Life Lessons.” The baseball-playing father and daughter of the column figure in all three poems, but it isn’t the bat and ball of “The Longest Game,” the first half of the column’s title, but instead the “Life Lessons” of the latter half of the title that resonate in the trilogy. At the end of the third poem, the speaker notes, “I really / cannot remember what the movie / was about, or who won that game” (38-40). She doesn’t remember because the events unfolding on the TV screen that her father watches intermittently and the action on the drive-in movie screen that her date aggressively prevents her from watching are not what she has carried with her from that night—and subsequently brought to the poem.

In a sense, the destination of none of the three baseball poems is the ballpark: the first leads us to post-traumatic stress disorder; the second, to the twilight of childhood; the third, to unwanted sexual advances. As the writer notes in “A Baseball Poem,” “To write baseball poems / is really the yearning to see” (lines 1-2). The products of Arlene Neal’s “yearning to see” shine through the lines of her poems and the sentences of her columns. This reader hopes—as do others, I’m sure—that more volumes of her poetry and columns will follow.

Works Cited

Neal, Arlene. There is Always Light. Redhawk Publications, 2023.

—. What Came to Me. Third Lung Press, 2020.

Posted in Reading, Theatre

Through a Glass Darkly: “Girl at Mirror” and Grover’s Corners

Posted on by janemlucas
Rockwell, Norman. “Girl at Mirror.” The Saturday Evening Post. 6 March 1954.

Seven years ago, when my students at Lenoir-Rhyne University were studying Thorton Wilder’s Our Town, I wrote this essay as a model for their own analyses. Before we opened tonight, I gave copies of it to my castmates and the production team. In the letter that accompanied the essay, I noted, “When I wrote ‘Through a Glass Darkly: Girl at Mirror and Grover’s Corners,’ I was an adjunct professor writing about Mrs. Webb, among other characters, with no inkling that seven years later I’d find myself playing Professor Willard and Mrs. Webb. As George says, ‘What do you know!'”

Through a Glass Darkly: Girl at Mirror and Grover’s Corners

In Norman Rockwell’s painting Girl at Mirror, the face that viewers see is the girl’s reflection—not her face itself, but the one she sees in the glass. What does she see in herself, and what do the painting’s observers see, as we witness this private moment? Does her lace-trimmed petticoat evoke in her, or in us, thoughts of the wedding gown that she may wear one day? For Rockwell’s detractors—and for those who consider him a guilty pleasure—Girl at the Mirror and his other covers for The Saturday Evening Post present a sentimentalized depiction of American life, the same picket-fenced cliché that many who find fault with Our Town perceive as the prevailing image of the play. As theatre scholar Donald Margulies writes in his foreword to Our Town, many people who dislike it have “dismissed [it] as a corny relic of Americana and relegated Thornton Wilder to the kitsch bin along with Norman Rockwell and Frank Capra” (xi). Yet a close look at Our Town and Girl at Mirror reveals portraits of American life that are far from idyllic.

As she gazes pensively in the mirror, the girl in Rockwell’s painting might be asking herself the same question that Emily Webb asks her mother: “[A]m I pretty?” (31). Though Mrs. Webb tries to reassure her daughter, Emily seeks an answer that her mother’s words fail to provide.

Both Emily and the subject of Girl at Mirror occupy that awkward space between childhood and adulthood—a notion that Rockwell emphasizes with the composition of his painting, placing the girl between her childhood toy, the doll that she has cast aside, and her new grown-up object of interest, movie star Jane Russell, who gazes up at her from the page of a magazine. Will I ever be beautiful and desirable, the way you are? the girl might be asking of Russell. Or, as Emily asks her mother: “Am I pretty enough . . . to get anybody . . . to get people interested in me? (32). Though Mrs. Webb answers Emily, she doesn’t provide the answer that her daughter seeks. Telling Emily, instead, that she has “a nice pretty young face” (31) and that she’s “pretty enough for all normal purposes” (32), she avoids the subject of adult desire that underlies Emily’s questions.

Though the audience feels the frustration in Emily’s voice as she says, “Oh, Mama, you’re no help at all” (32), only later in the play do we feel the full weight of those words when Mrs. Webb confesses in the wedding scene that she has never talked to Emily about sex: “It’s cruel, I know, but I couldn’t bring myself to say anything” (76). Mrs. Webb’s monologue turns the scene of her daughter’s wedding into a reminder of the vulnerability and pain that will come as a consequence. That same darkness at the edge of a seemingly quaint picture appears in Girl at Mirror. Consider the doll, just beyond the mirror—and the viewer’s focus—innocently cast aside, perhaps, but backed up to the edge of the mirror’s frame. To the adult eye, the doll’s posture is one of sexual submissiveness.

Both Wilder’s and Rockwell’s visions are more complex than what many of their critics give them credit for—or more accurately deny them—rendering the trouble that lurks below the surfaces of our daily encounters. And while the sexual innocence of Emily Webb and Rockwell’s Girl at Mirror may seem distant to us, the silence that endangers their innocence pervades our lives. Now as revelations of celebrities’ and politicians’ transgressions saturate our news streams, the silences of Wilder’s characters seem eerily prescient. Can anyone now hear Mrs. Webb say, “I couldn’t bring myself to say anything” (76), without thinking of our own culture of silence—and of Roy Moore and Louis C.K. and Kevin Spacey and Harvey Weinstein—and of all the predators in our own towns, places supposedly so far removed Grover’s Corners?

Meanwhile, back in Our Town, Mrs. Gibbs says of Simon Stimson’s alcoholism that “the only thing the rest of us can do is just not to notice it” (40). And Constable Warren says, “‘Twant much” (104), of a Polish immigrant nearly freezing to death, another way of saying that some lives don’t matter as much as others, a prejudice that we know all too well as no mere relic of the past. Those moments in Our Town not only belie the notion of Grover’s Corners as a saccharine portrait of America but also demonstrate that the play critiques the very parochialism that its detractors denounce as its stock-in-trade.

In his reassessment of Rockwell’s paintings, Richard Halpern observes that “[a] false belief in our own sophistication or knowingness is just another form of innocence” (par. 17). The same innocence may prevent us from seeing Our Town with real clarity, the way that Emily only truly sees her twelfth birthday when she revisits it after death. As she says to the Stage Manager, “I can’t look at everything hard enough” (105). Perhaps in our own innocence, neither can we.

Works Cited

Halpern, Richard. “Manufacturing Innocence,” excerpt from Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence, U. of Chicago P., http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo3750655.html, Accessed 16 Nov. 2017.

Margulies, Donald. Foreword. Our Town by Thornton Wilder. 1938. Harper Perennial, 2003, xi-xx.

Rockwell, Norman. “Girl at Mirror.” The Saturday Evening Post, 6 Mar. 1954. Norman Rockwell Museum, 2016, http://www.nrm.org/MT/text/GirlMirror.html, Accessed 16 Nov. 2017.

Wilder, Thornton. Our Town. 1938. Harper Perennial, 2003.

Posted in English 1103, Teaching

ENG 1103: End-of-Semester Checklist

Posted on by janemlucas
  • Remember that your corrected exam period time is posted on the updated syllabus calendar and in the announcement that I posted on Blackboard and emailed to you. For students in section twenty, that is noon on Monday, April 29; for students in section nineteen, that’s 8 a.m. on Tuesday, April 30.
  • 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 corrected errors of grammar, punctuation, mechanics, and style, and deleted all placeholders/sample posts. Since blog activity is a component of your course assignments grade, I will review your blogs before I finalize those grades.
  • If you haven’t done so already, submit course evaluations for ENG 1103 and your other classes.

Today or tomorrow your course assignment grade will be updated to its preliminary final average; exemplary blog activity may raise it. If you wish to check that preliminary grade, please do so before 4 p.m. on Friday, April 26. After that, the Blackboard course site for English 1103, sections nineteen and twenty, will no longer be available to students. Final grades for the course will be posted in eServices on the afternoon of Tuesday, April 30 or on Wednesday, May 1.

If you have any questions regarding your individual presentation grade or your final grade for the course, please email me the third week of August. I will be out of the office from the afternoon of April 30 until the morning of August 19.

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 22 blog post for details.

Posted in English 1103, Reading, Teaching

ENG 1103: Literary Letter Play

Posted on by janemlucas

This final Scrabble post of the semester features the names of authors and characters that are playable words. Learning these will not only increase your word power (and up your game), it will also broaden your knowledge of literature. If you haven’t read some of classics listed here, 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, 1838)
  • holden: the past participle of hold (Holden Caulfield, the protagonist in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, 1951)
  • 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)

Next Up

Your final assignment for the course will be your individual oral presentation, which you will deliver during the exam period. See my April 22 blog post, and the handout I distributed that day, for detailed instructions.

Posted in English 1103, Teaching

ENG 1103: Planning and Preparing for Your Presentation

Posted on by janemlucas

Today’s class period will be devoted to planning and preparation for your individual oral presentations, which you will deliver during the final exam period: noon, Monday, April 29, for section 20 students; 8 a.m., Tuesday, April 30, for section 19 students.

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

  1. Plan a brief presentation of three minutes or fewer 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Include the following in your presentation:
  • an opening in which you state your first and last names and your major,
  • concrete details in your blog 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.

Directions for Rehearsing

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. Rehearse with a classmate. Take turns delivering your presentations and offering feedback. Offer both suggestions for improvement and words of encouragement.

Next Up

Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review the posts on my blog devoted to Scrabble tips.

Posted in English 1103, Scrabble, Teaching

ENG 1103: The Bard and the Board

Posted on by janemlucas

Today’s Scrabble post 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)

Next Up

Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review the posts on my blog devoted to Scrabble tips, including this one.

Posted in English 1103, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: Composing Your Final Reflection

Posted on by janemlucas

This morning in class you will plan and draft a short final reflective essay that documents your work in the second half 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. Features to consider include the following:

  • Studying one of the texts we have examined in the second half of the semester, including “The Case for Writing Longhand,” The Competition, “Scrabble is a Lousy Game,” “Skim Reading is the New Normal,” or the sample final essay and annotated bibliography (“Scrabble as a Game Changer in the College Classroom”)
  • Writing for an online audience beyond the classroom/creating and maintaining a WordPress blog
  • Collaborating with your classmates on in-class writing assignments
  • Playing Scrabble/Collaborating with your teammates on Wordplay Day
  • Writing longhand
  • Limiting screen time
  • Planning, drafting, and revising your final essay and annotated bibliography. Since you recently composed a reflection on this assignment, it should not be the main focus of your final reflection.
  • Keeping a journal
  • Delivering your group presentation on one of the lessons in the Check, Please! course

Focus on two, three, or four features of the course (but no more than four).

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 class. 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

Sample 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. 

Kay, Jonathan. “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.

Lucas, Jane. “Scrabble as a Game Changer in the College Classroom.” Jane Lucas, 9 Apr. 2024, https://janelucas.com/2024/04/09/eng-1103-model-final-essay-and-annotated-bibliography-scrabble/.

Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. “Arriving at an Interpretive Conclusion: Making Choices.” Writing Analytically, 9th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2024. pp.111-12.

—. “Integrating Quotations into Your Paper.” Writing Analytically, 9th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2024. pp. 343-46.

—. “The Idea of the Paragraph.” Writing Analytically, 9th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2024. pp. 307-313.

—. “Two Methods for Conversing with Sources.” Writing Analytically, 9th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2024. p. 325.

—. “Ways to use a Source as a Point of Departure.” Writing Analytically, 9th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2024. p. 326.

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 prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review the posts on my blog devoted to Scrabble tips.