Category: English 1103

Posted in English 1103, Teaching, Writing

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 yesterday in 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—along with analysis—you worked together in groups to find the answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about the course. Continue to review the syllabus, which is posted in the Content section of Blackboard. An additional copy of the syllabus is included at the end of this blog entry. If you have any questions about the assignments, the course policies, or the calendar, please let me know.

Textbook

All of you in sections 23 and 24 of English 1103 are required to have the paperback edition of the textbook, Writing Analytically, 8th 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 complete some of the exercises related to the reading.

Your first reading assignment in the textbook will be scheduled for mid-September, which will give you ample time to order and receive your copy before you are required to have it in class. (Unlike my copy, 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.

Posted in English 1103, Scrabble, Teaching

ENG 1103: Now Playable . . .

Posted on by janemlucas

Last month, Hasbro and Merriam-Webster published the seventh edition of the official Scrabble dictionary, which includes about five-hundred newly playable words, including these words featured in the November 16 National Public Radio story about the additions:

  • adorbs
  • adulted
  • adulting
  • allyship
  • atted
  • atting
  • babymoon
  • bae
  • convo
  • deadname
  • dox
  • doxxed
  • eggcorn
  • embiggen
  • fauxhawk
  • fintech
  • folx
  • guac
  • hogsbane
  • horchata
  • hygge
  • iftar
  • ixnayed
  • ixnaying
  • ixnays
  • jedi
  • kabocha
  • matcha
  • mofongo
  • onesie
  • oppo
  • pageview
  • pranayam
  • roid
  • slushee
  • spork
  • stan
  • stitch
  • swole
  • subtweet
  • thingie
  • torrented
  • torrenting
  • unfollow
  • unmalted
  • unmute
  • unsub
  • vaquita
  • vaxxed
  • vaxxing
  • verbing
  • vibed
  • vibing
  • wagyu
  • welp
  • yeehaw
  • zedonk
  • zonkey
  • zoomer
Posted in English 1103, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: The Writing Center

Posted on by janemlucas

As you continue to revise your final reflection, consider visiting The Writing Center. If you do so, you will earn five bonus points for consulting with a Writing Center tutor.

To schedule an appointment, visit https://highpoint.mywconline.com, email the Writing Center’s director, Justin Cook, at jcook3@highpoint.edu, or scan the QR code below. To earn bonus points for your final essay and annotated bibliography, consult with a writing center tutor no later than Thursday, December 1.

Posted in English 1103, Reading, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: Composing the Final Reflection

Posted on by janemlucas

Monday in class we examined Tetsuya Ishida’s painting Seedlings, which is one of the texts that you may address in your final reflection, which you began drafting in class on Wednesday. If you choose to include Seedlings, your works cited entry for the painting should follow this format:

Ishida, Tetsuya. Seedlings. https://artjouer.wordpress.com/2015/10/29/tetsuya-ishida-paintings/recalled-detail-painting-by-tetsuya-ishida.

Note that the second line of the entry should be indented five spaces.

Sample works cited entries for the other texts you may address in your reflection appear below.

Falconer, Ian. The Competition. Magazine Cover. The New Yorker, 9 Oct. 2000.

Fisher, Max. Prologue: “Consequences.” The Chaos Machine. Little, Brown. 2022.

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.

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, Stephen. Strawberry Spring. https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/literature/books_by_title/N%20-%20S/Stephen_King/Stephen%20King%20-%20Night%20Shift%20-%20Strawberry%20Spring.html

Lewis, Michael. Chapter One: “Back Story.” The Blind Side. 2006. Norton, 2009. pp.15-16.

Lucas, Jane. “Left to Our Own Devices.” Jane Lucas, 25 Oct. 2022, https://janelucas.com/2022/10/25/left-to-our-own-devices/.

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. “Analysis Does More than Break a Subject into Its Parts.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 4-5.

—“Making an Interpretation: The Example of a New Yorker Cover. Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 84-89.

—. “Integrating Quotations.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 231-33.

—. “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.

Posted in English 1103, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: Nine Basic Writing Errors, Part II

Posted on by janemlucas

Last Wednesday class, in you read one of your classmate’s analyses and composed a blog response to that student’s essay. This morning I asked you to revisit that exercise with a classmate’s final essay and annotated bibliography. As part of the assignment, I asked you to look for the nine basic writing errors outlined in Writing Analytically (342). Those errors are as follows:

  • Sentence fragments
  • Comma splices and fused (run-on) sentences
  • Errors in subject-verb agreement
  • Shifts in sentence structure (faulty predication)
  • Errors in pronoun reference
  • Misplaced modifiers and dangling participles
  • Errors in using possessive apostrophes
  • Comma errors
  • Spelling/diction errors that interfere with meaning

Continue to return to the textbook’s pages devoted to the nine basic errors as you work on your writing assignments for English 1103 and your other courses.

Posted in English 1103, Scrabble, Teaching

ENG 1103: Irritable Vowel Syndrome, Part II

Posted on by janemlucas

Two weeks ago, I published a blog post that listed twenty-four words with three vowels. Knowing those words, and others with multiple vowels, proves useful when you’re faced with a rack of mostly, or all, vowels. Here’s a list twenty more four-letter words with three vowels:

  • naoi: ancient temples (pl. of naos)
  • obia: form of sorcery practiced in the Caribbean (also obeah)
  • odea: concert halls (pl. of odeum)
  • ogee: an S-shaped molding
  • ohia: a Polynesian tree with bright flowers (also lehua)
  • olea: corrosive solutions (pl. of oleum)
  • olio: a miscellaneous collection
  • ouzo: a Turkish anise-flavored liquor
  • raia: a non-Muslim Turk (also rayah)
  • roue: a lecherous old man
  • toea: a currency in Papua, New Guinea
  • unai: a two-toed sloth (pl. unai; an ai is a three-toed sloth)
  • zoea: the larvae of some crustaceans
Posted in English 1103, Scrabble, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: Nine Basic Writing Errors

Posted on by janemlucas

This morning in class, as part of your blog response assignment, I asked you to look for the nine basic writing errors as you read your classmate’s analysis.

The authors of your textbook, Writing Analytically, identify these as the nine basic writing errors:

  • Sentence Fragments
  • Comma splices and fused (run-on) sentences
  • Errors in subject-verb agreement
  • Shifts in sentence structure (faulty predication)
  • Errors in pronoun reference
  • Misplaced modifiers and dangling participles
  • Errors in using possessive apostrophes
  • Comma errors
  • Spelling/diction errors that interfere with meaning

Next Up

Friday is Wordplay Day. To increase your word power and up your game, revisit the Tips and Tools on the Scrabble website and also review my blog posts devoted to Scrabble.

Posted in English 1103, Reading, Teaching

ENG 1103: The Horror, The Horror!

Posted on by janemlucas

Today in class we read Stephen King’s short story “Strawberry Spring,” which was published in Ubris magazine in 1968 and included in King’s first short story collection, Night Shift (1978).

For the collaborative exercise that you completed after we read the story, I asked you to determine whether you could identify any details that indicate why the narrator may have murdered any of his victims. Although there is no indication that the narrator knew Gale Cermann or Adelle Parkins, he did know Ann Bray, which he reveals after he tells the readers that she was editor of the school newspaper: “In the hot, fierce bubblings of my freshman youth I hade submitted a column idea to the paper and asked for a date–turned down on both counts” (paragraph forty-one).

I also asked you to identify words and phrases that illustrate how the story is not only a horror story but also a commentary on war, the Vietnam War in particular, and the Vietnam era. Some of the words and phrases you may have identified include these:

  • (Ice) sculpture of Lyndon Johnson . . . “cried melted tears” (paragraph four)
  • Civil War cannons (paragraphs five and seventy-four)
  • The dove “lost its frozen feathers” (paragraph five)
  • The fog (paragraphs seven, twenty, twenty-nine, thirty-one, forty-three, forty-four, fifty-two, sixty-four, sixty-six, seventy, seventy-five, and seventy-six)
  • “[W]ho had been drafted” (paragraph thirty-two)
  • SDS (paragraph forty-eight)
  • Quagmire (paragraph fifty)
  • “[A] series of draft protests and a sit-in” (paragraph seventy)

In addition to those questions on your assignment sheet, I asked you to try to identify the two literary allusions in King’s story. The first is an allusion to J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy: “You half expected to see Gollum or Frodo or Sam go hurrying past” (paragraph five). The second is an allusion to a poem by Carl Sandburg, titled–perhaps unsurprisingly–“The Fog.”

Posted in English 1103, Scrabble, Teaching

ENG 1103: I Haint Afraid of No . . .

Posted on by janemlucas

Since today is our last Wordplay Day before Halloween, today’s Scrabble blog post is devoted to words for ghosts. Four of the words are seven letters long, enabling you to Scrabble or bingo, earning you an additional fifty points for the play.

  • banshee: a female spirit in Gaelic folklore that wails to warn of a family member’s imminent death.
  • barguest: a goblin (also barghest)
  • bogy: a goblin
  • daimon: a spirit (also daemon and demon)
  • eidolon: a phantom or specter
  • fairyism: the quality of being like a fairy (not really a ghost but a great word)
  • haint: a ghost
  • kelpie: a water sprite in Scottish folklore known for drowning sailors
  • wraith: a ghost of a person, often appearing just before that person’s death
  • zombi: a zombie (zombify and zombification are both playable but not to be confused with zombiism, a West African and Haitiian belief system involving a rainbow serpent. See Wade Davis’s The Serpent and the Rainbow).
Posted in English 1103, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: The Writing Center

Posted on by janemlucas

As you continue to revise your final essay and annotated bibliography, consider visiting The Writing Center. If you–or one of your group members does so (if you’re collaborating)–you will earn five bonus points for consulting with a Writing Center tutor.

To schedule an appointment, visit https://highpoint.mywconline.com, email the Writing Center’s director, Justin Cook, at jcook3@highpoint.edu, or scan the QR code below. To earn bonus points for your final essay and annotated bibliography, consult with a writing center tutor no later than Thursday, November 3.