Last Friday’s blog post offered you the opportunity to earn bonus points if you posted a response that identified the names of students in sections nineteen and twenty with first and last names that are also common nouns, making them playable Scrabble words. The lists below include those students’ names with the playable names in bold.
Section 19
Kira Booker (one who books)
Annika Brown (brown color or pigment)
McKinnley Coles (pl. of cole, a plant of the cabbage family)
Jess English (to fasten straps around the legs of a hawk)
Jack Hutchins (to raise with a type of lever)
Jack Madigan-Green (to raise with a type of lever, green color or pigment)
Larisa Shaw (stalks and leaves of root plants)
Hannah Smith (a metal worker)
Simone Smith (a metal worker)
Olivia Wall (an upright structure that encloses an area)
Section 20
Ava Gaudioso (of all)
Santino Hall (a corridor or a large room for assembly)
Lily Murphy (a potato)
Regan Shea (an African tree)
Chaning Smith (a metal worker)
Autumn Spaulding (the season between summer and winter)
Renae West (the direction opposite of east)
Continue to review last Friday’s blog post, both to increase your word power and to put your classmates’ names with faces.
Next Up
Tomorrow in class we will examine an excerpt from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” one of your pieces of collaborative writing from January 10, and David Sedaris‘s “Me Talk Pretty One Day.”
To honor Martin Luther King, Jr., today, I am asking you to you engage in a close study of his epistolary essay “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Although I could ask you to listen to a recording of it, I ask that 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: “Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait” (par. 14). Here King is addressing his initial audience, the eight white Birmingham-area clergymen who criticized his protest as “unwise and untimely” (par. 1). 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” (par. 14). 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:
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”–(par. 14).
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” (par. 14). 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 1103, but it’s a valuable model, nevertheless.
I hope that you, as citizens, 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 . . . .
In class on Wednesday we will return to “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and examine David Sedaris’s essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day” as a model for the literacy narrative you will begin drafting next week. Before class, read Sedaris’s essay (posted in the readings folder on Blackboard), and compose two journal entries, one for “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and a second for “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Each entry should consist of (1) a one-paragraph summary of the essay, and (2) a second paragraph of commentary. In your commentary, address the elements that make the writing effective. Consider how you can draw on those same features in your own prose.
To help us put names with faces, I have included in this post pictures of all of you in sections 19 and 20 with picture captions that list your names. I encourage you to review this page frequently. In between the pictures, I have included lists of first names that are also common nouns, making them playable in Scrabble.
Not pictured in section 20: Courtney Faber, Ava Gaudioso, Gracie Lare
Bonus Point Opportunity!
Students who correctly respond to the playable first names and last names question below will earn five bonus points for his/her/their first Check, Please! assignment.
How many students in English 1103.19 and 20 have first and/or last names that are playable Scrabble words? Keep in mind that only playable first names appear in the lists above. Some students in each section have playable last names.
Section 20, L-R: Alex Campos, Ella MacGlashan, Kenzie Van Cleef
Directions for Finding and Submitting Your Answer
Review the list of playable first names, compare it with the students’ first and last names in the photo captions above, or on the class page, and determine which of the students’ first and last names are playable in Scrabble. If you aren’t sure whether a name is also a common noun, you can consult the Scrabble website’s dictionary
Compose a response of one or more complete sentences that includes (1) the number of students with playable names, and (2) the first and last name of each student with a playable name. Indicate which name, first or last, is playable.
Post your comment as a reply to this blog post by noon on Monday, January 15.
To post your comment, click the title of the post, “What’s in a Name. . . . ,” then scroll down to the bottom of the post. There you will see the image of an airmail envelope with a white rectangular box for your comment. Type your comment in the box and hit return. Voila! You have submitted your answer. Good luck! I will make the comments visible before class on Wednesday, January 17.
Next Up
Although class will not meet on Monday, to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. and his legacy, I have assigned his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” which is linked both to its title here and to its title on your course calendar at the end of your syllabus. After you read King’s essay, compose a response to it in your journal that includes a one-paragraph summary, followed by a second paragraph of commentary (your response to King’s writing). When our class resumes on Wednesday, we will examine excerpts from the King’s essay.
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 hypothetical game pictured above, the first player or team would score sixteen points by spelling enact with the t on the center double-word square. With the second turn, the other player or team could take advantage of the opportunity for parallel play. If the team knew that aa is a type of lava, they could earn twenty-four points with four words: whoa, he, on, and aa.
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-person 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
ax: a type of cutting tool (also axe)
ay: a vote in the affirmative (also aye)
Important Note about Challenges
The game rules inside the Scrabble box top do not specify that a player or team that challenges a playable word will lose a turn, but David Bukszpan’s book Is That a Word? notes that the player or team does lose a turn. According to Bukszpan:
“[I]f a word is challenged and found not to be legal (called a phony in Scrabble parlance), the player that set it down loses a turn. Conversely, if a challenged word is found to be playable, the challenger loses his turn” (19).
Work Cited
Bukszapan, David. Is That a Word?: From AA to ZZZ, the Weird and Wonderful Language of SCRABBLE. Chronicle, 2012. p.19.
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, look to the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review this post devoted to Scrabble tips.
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.
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 will be scheduled for the first week of February, which will give you ample time to order and receive your copy before you are required to have it in class. Note that on the class calendar you should omit Writing Analytically from January 24. The first day you will need to have your textbook in class in February 7.
Unlike my copy of the textbook, pictured at the top of this blog entry, your textbook will not be in a binder. Your textbook’s cover looks like this:
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.
Set an alarm to ensure that you will not sleep through your final exam period. For students in section twenty, that’s 8 a.m. on Saturday, December 9; for students in section nineteen, that’s 8 a.m. on Wednesday, December 13.
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 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.
Your course assignment grade has been updated to its preliminary final average; exemplary blog activity and class participation may raise it. If you wish to check that preliminary grade, please do so before 4 p.m. tomorrow, December 8. 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 Wednesday, December 13.
If you have any questions regarding your presentation grade or your final grade for the course, please email me the second week of January. I will be out of the office from the afternoon of December 13 until the morning of January 8.
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 December 4 blog post, and the handout I distributed that day, for detailed instructions.
Yesterday in class, we examined Tetsuya Ishida’s painting Seedlings (1998), and you composed in your journal a one-paragraph summary followed by a paragraph of commentary or analysis. My version of the assignment, which I wrote as a sample for you, appears below.
Summary
Tetsuya Ashida’s Seedlings depicts a classroom of uniformed Asian teenagers, all males, whose teacher, seen only from the shoulders down, holds a textbook in one hand. He drapes his other hand on the head of one of the pupils, one of two students presented as microscopes with human faces.
Commentary
Although the subject at hand is biology, the study of living organisms, the student seedlings barely seem alive themselves as they stare blankly into the distance. The uniformity Ishida depicts with their haircuts, crested blazers, striped neck ties, and rows of desks, takes a surrealistic twist with the images of the two pupils who have transformed into microscopes. By placing the teacher’s hand on one of the students-turned-microscope, Ishida indicates that the instructor—himself objectified by the absence of his head—approves of the metamorphosis, that for him, the goal of education is for the individual to be consumed by the subject itself, becoming merely a cold metallic instrument.
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.
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: 8 a.m., Saturday, December 9, for section 20 students; 8 a.m., Wednesday, December 13, 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
Plan a brief presentation of five 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.
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,
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
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.
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.
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.
Jane Lucas 