Category: Writing

Posted in English 1103, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: Observations on Your Reflections

Posted on by janemlucas

In the first half of today’s class, we will review the syllabus questions that you answered on Monday and address any other questions you have about the course. In the second half of the period, we will discuss the reflections that you began composing, and you will have an opportunity to continue working on them.

When I return your reflections in class, they will include a copy of the notes on diction, mechanics, grammar, and style that are included in the bulleted list below.

Summary

The reflection that you began on Monday required you to begin with a one-paragraph summary. As I noted in the directions, summaries are by nature objective. If you expressed your opinion about your high school English courses, the course readings, or the writing assignments, you shifted from summary to commentary or analysis.

If you had time to begin a second paragraph, that is where your commentary or analysis should have entered your writing. There you had the opportunity to address such questions as these:

  • Were those recent courses similar to or different from your previous English classes? How?
  • Did the courses contribute to your development as a writer, as an analytical reader, as both, or as neither?
  • How did those courses shape your attitude towards writing and/or reading?
  • How do you anticipate that English 1103 may be similar to or different from those courses?

Whenever you are faced with a writing assignment, be sure you understand the requirements. If the assignment calls for a summary to proceed your own take–your commentary or analysis–beginning with your opinions will undermine your credibility. That misstep will tell the reader that you lack rhetorical awareness.

Diction, Mechanics, Grammar, and Style

  • &: Do not use an ampersand (&) in place of the word and in formal writing.
  • Abbreviations should often be avoided in formal writing. Do not write vocab for vocabulary. On first reference, spell out Advanced Placement in the name of a course. In subsequent references, AP is acceptable.
  • A lot: Don’t use a lot a lot. There are a lot of better ways to express that idea, such as many, often, considerable, etc. If you use a lot in your writing, I will mark it with a d, which denotes diction or word choice.
  • Compound modifiers are linked with a hyphen. Write twelve-page paper, not twelve page paper.
  • Do: What specifically did you do? (There is almost always a stronger verb than do.) Drafted, revised, edited, reviewed, studied, and memorized are all verbs that denote a particular action. Use action verbs whenever possible.
  • English and the names of other languages are always capitalized. If you write English with a lower-case e, I will underscore the letter with three vertical lines. Those three lines are the proofreader’s mark that denotes the need for a capital letter.
  • Like and such as: Such as is used for specific examples. Like is used to indicate a similarity to or make a comparison. Such as introduces true members of a group; like shows resemblance.
  • Modifiers: Place modifiers and modifying phrases as close as possible to the words they are meant to describe. Consider this sentence: As a fifteen-year-old, my English teacher inspired my interest in poetry. In it, the person who is fifteen is the teacher, which makes no sense. (Unless he or she was a child prodigy.) The sentence should be revised to read something like this: As a fifteen-year-old, I was inspired by my English teacher to develop my interest poetry.
  • Numbers that can be expressed as one or two words are written as words, not figures, in MLA style, which is the style used in English courses as well as some other courses in the humanities. Write twenty-five, not 25.
  • Paragraphs: Business writing calls for block paragraphs, but English 1103 and many of your other classes will require you to indent the first lines of each paragraph five spaces or one-half inch.
  • Passive voice should often be avoided in formal writing. The subject should perform the action. Write, we read several nineteenth-century novels, not several nineteenth-century novels were read.
  • Separate: an easy way to remember the spelling of this often-misspelled word is to tell yourself, there’s a rat in separate.
  • That/Who: The relative pronoun who, not that, refers to people. (That refers to things.) Do not write He is the teacher that taught me how to develop my writing. Instead, write He is the teacher who taught me how to develop my writing.
  • That/This: The relative pronoun this refers to something at hand or occurring now. That class is the one you’re writing about in your reflection. This class is English 1103.
  • Then/Than: Than is used in comparisons; then refers to a point in time.
  • Titles: In MLA style, the titles of book-length works are italicized. If you are writing longhand, the titles of book-length works are underlined. The titles of shorter works—such as essays, short stories, and poems—are enclosed in quotation marks.
  • Whether/If: Whether introduces alternatives or a choice. If introduces a condition. Write, I don’t know whether my sophomore or junior English class was worse, and, If my pen runs out of ink, I will write in pencil instead.

Next Up

Wordplay Day! If you haven’t played Scrabble before, this short video tutorial will provide you with a helpful overview of the game. Also, I will be offering a brief introduction to the game at the beginning Friday’s of class and during gameplay I will answer your questions, except these: (1) Is this a word? and (2) Is this a playable word? For the answers to those questions, you must rely on your own knowledge and that of your teammate.

For helpful tips, visit the Merriam-Webster Scrabble Word Finder, and review the blog posts devoted to Scrabble, beginning with tomorrow’s.

Posted in English 1103, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: Looking Ahead to Our Second Class

Posted on by janemlucas

Before tomorrow’s class, be sure to complete the following tasks.

Review yesterday’s blog post as well as the syllabus. If you added the class after our first meeting on Monday, you can download the syllabus from Blackboard. In your journal, jot down any questions you have about the course.

Also, if you added the class after our first meeting on Monday, begin composing a reflection focusing on your most recent experiences in literature and/or composition courses. Begin your essay with a one-paragraph summary. Keep in mind that summaries are by nature objective. Do not comment on the courses, simply offer an overview of them.

Follow those paragraphs with your observations on the courses. (Here is where your personal observations enter the writing.) Points to address include the following:

  • Were the courses similar to or different from your previous English classes? How?
  • Did the courses contribute to your development as a writer, an analytical reader, both, or neither?
  • How did those courses shape your attitude towards writing and/or reading?
  • How do you anticipate that English 1103 may be similar to or different from those courses?

If you haven’t purchased or rented it already, order the textbook, the paperback edition of Exhalation by Ted Chang. You are required to have a physical copy of Chiang’s book, not the ebook, because your screen time will be limited in class. Your first reading assignment in the textbook is scheduled for October 19, which will give you ample time to order and receive your copy before you are required to have it in class.

Bring your journal to class along with your other required materials, which are listed in the syllabus and pictured in yesterday’s post.

Also, as soon as possible, create a free WordPress blog at wordpress.com, and email the URL to me so that I can link your blog to the class page.

Because writing longhand and limiting screen time are essential components of the class, I am including below some notes that illustrate why those practices, which may seem quaint, are vital to our work.

Writing Longhand

One practical reason for writing longhand: What we mark through remains on the page. Sometimes what we cross out can be useful later on, elsewhere in our writing. More importantly, research in cognitive neuroscience indicates that writing longhand has these benefits:

Simply put, writing longhand sharpens our minds in ways that typing doesn’t.

Limiting Screen Time

When we use our phones and laptops, it’s difficult for us to give our undivided attention to one endeavor, but often that singular focus is critical.

When we type on our phones, we often aim to convey as much as we can with as few characters as possible. Texting and emailing–both of which now feature predictive text–do not foster the vital skills of developing our writing and producing original thought.

Limiting our screen time not only helps us improve our writing skills, it can also benefit our overall well-being.

The research cited in the links that I’ve included above isn’t definitive, but it makes a strong case for the value of limiting our screen time and putting pen to paper. I encourage you to continue these practices after the semester ends.

Next Up

On Wednesday, we will review the syllabus question questions that you answered in class, and I will return the reflective writing that you began on Monday.

Posted in Reading, Theatre, Writing

An Octopus’s Garden of Verse

Posted on by janemlucas

For weeks, my reading and writing have been limited almost exclusively to Shakespeare’s sonnets sixty-four and ninety-eight, along with parts of eighty-four, which I will perform at Creative Greensboro’s second annual Sonnet Fest, August 7-9.

I marvel at my actor friends who can sit backstage and lose themselves in the pages of a novel only minutes before they make another entrance and speak the words they have committed to memory. For me, those words I will speak on stage must remain in the forefront of my mind–a necessity I put at risk if I crowd my brain with the words of a book-length narrative.

The importance of focusing on the lines I will speak on stage grows greater when those words are Shakespeare’s. I am not a quick study, so learning lines is difficult for me and even more so when the diction and syntax are centuries removed from my own.

But after weeks of listening to my lines–in my car and on my morning walks–and writing and rewriting them in my journal, I once again witnessed the effects of the process that I am repeatedly doubtful of trusting.

With the knowledge that the hardest part of my line work was behind me, two days ago, as a birthday gift to myself, I began reading a novel I had avoided because of my focus on the lines.

To stave off a line backslide, I decided to return to my lines whenever I completed fifty pages of Shelby Van Pelt‘s Incredibly Bright Creatures, which found me toggling between late sixteenth-century England and early twenty-first-century Pacific Northwest.

The two began to intermingle in my mind. As I found myself inhabiting the small (fictional) town of Sowell Bay on the Puget Sound, the words of Sonnet 64 turned over in my head: “When I have seen the hungry ocean gain / Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, / And the firm soil win of the wat’ry main, Increasing store with loss and loss with store;” (lines 5-8).

For anyone who hasn’t read Van Pelt’s novel, I don’t want to spoil it, so I won’t offer any of the particulars I am tempted to detail. I will simply say this: If anyone had told me that I would be captivated by a narrator who is a giant Pacific octopus, I would have been incredulous. Then again, whenever I am faced with lines of iambic pentameter that are centuries removed from my own speech, I am similarly incredulous, convinced that I cannot learn them. And then slowly, I do, as I give them the attention they require.

Shakespeare would appreciate Marcellus, the octopus, and his human friend, Tova, both haunted by the same loss that pervades Sonnet 64. In his last brief chapter of narration, Marcellus reflects that “not a day passed when I did not ruminate on my own death” (349). I will stop there (to reveal no more) and turn to the bard’s words the octopus echoes. Meditating on the rise and fall of the tide, the poet notes that such “interchange of state” (9) has taught him “thus to ruminate, / That Time will come and take my love away” (11-12).

With the words he pens, Shakespeare strives to make sense of that loss. When Cameron, another of Van Pelt’s characters, asks Tova how she recovered from her own grief, she says, “You don’t recover. Not all the way. But you do move on. You have to” (346). Tova, too–a lover of language, like her non-speaking friend, Marcellus–is sustained in part what is written, spoken, and in one instance, etched: words.

Works Cited

Shakespeare, William. Sonnet 64. Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/ 45096/sonnet-64-when-i-have-seen-by-times-fell-hand-defacd.

Van Pelt, Shelby. Remarkably Bright Creatures. 2022. Ecco, 2025.

Posted in AI, Reading, Teaching, Writing

Plotting a Course in the Shadow of GenAI

Posted on by janemlucas

My discussions with students about generative AI have been limited to plagiarism and academic integrity. But an end-of-semester faculty summit and a follow-up seventeen-day AI bootcamp led me to realize that I need to devote more attention to GenAI and model its responsible use.

How could I achieve those goals without increasing students’ screen time in the classroom? In the digital age, requiring students to compose drafts longhand and to read and annotate texts on paper seems anachronistic, but cognitive neuroscientists have identified those analog practices as vital. To provide students with a classroom experience that fosters the learning that screens can impede, my students will continue to draft their essays longhand and read on paper, but they will turn to GenAI for exercises in planning and brainstorming.

That series of exercises—which the students will complete outside of class—begins with asking an AI assistant for guidance on selecting a topic for their literacy narrative. Rather than starting with the simple question, what should I write about?, the students will instead present three topics and ask the AI assistant to ask them a series of questions to determine which one has the most narrative possibilities.

Although the students may not agree with the AI’s suggestions—just as they might not agree with a classmate’s or mine—the process itself will likely generate ideas that will lead to starting points. If they don’t, false starts will be steps in the journey, as they often are.

To prepare students for that initial exercise, I will conduct it myself, with three topics of my own, and take screenshots of the questions and answers. That documentation of my own process will enable me to lead students through the process step by step without opening an AI application in the classroom.

Though the students will not turn to AI in the classroom—and will turn only occasionally to their screens—AI will remain at the forefront of their classwork through our study of a sequence of science fiction that explores the nature of artificial intelligence: Isaac Asimov’s “Runaround,” which introduces his Three Laws of Robotics, followed by Brian Aldiss’s “Supertoys” stories and Ted Chiang’s “The Lifecycle of Software Objects.”

I chose those sci-fi stories not because I am naturally drawn to the genre but because of the ways the writers of those narratives use their imaginations as testing grounds for questions about humanity and the future. At the beginning of Ted Chiang’s “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” a young woman, Ana, sits in front of her computer, waiting for a videoconference job interview that she learns moments later has been canceled. The company has decided to hire someone else.

Ana’s interview-that-wasn’t would have been her first in months to reach the videoconference stage. Trying to recover from her disappointment, Ana sends queries to other companies and receives automated rejections.

For current college students, that doesn’t seem like science fiction. Contemplating such circumstances now in the classroom, their own testing ground—and trying to make sense of them through their own writing—may help them face a future with AI that we cannot know.

Posted in Reading, Writing

Eudora Fois Deux

Posted on by janemlucas

In 1978, when I first saw a Peanuts comic strip featuring Sally Brown’s new friend—a girl she’d met at summer camp—the name Charles Schulz had given the character wasn’t a familiar one. The name wasn’t one I’d even remember, at least not until recently, when I read Simon Beecroft’s The Peanuts Book: A Visual History of the Iconic Strip.

When I spotted her in Beecroft’s book, I immediately recognized the girl with the long brown hair capped with a purple tuque, but I had no memory of her name. Undoubtedly, her name had escaped me because eight years had passed between the time I had first encountered her in the panels of Peanuts and my introduction to the writer who inspired her name.

In 1986, I enrolled in my first creative writing class at UNC-Chapel Hill, English 23W, Introduction to Fiction Writing, taught by James Seay. The textbook Professor Seay had chosen for the course was an anthology that included “Why I Live at the P.O.,” a short story that delighted me with the narrator’s description of her uncle, “suddenly appear[ing] in the hallway in one of Stella-Rondo’s flesh-colored kimonos, all cut on the bias” (Welty 48). The woman who wrote those words became—and remains—one of my favorite writers. When I saw her first name in my sophomore textbook, I thought I was seeing that name for the first time. Only recently, forty years later, was I reminded that my first glimpse of the name Eudora was in a speech balloon penned by Charles Schulz. Seeing Sally Brown’s friend Eudora for the first time since 1978 prompted me to wonder whether that brown-haired girl in the purple tuque was named for Eudora Welty.

Beecroft answers my question in his book, noting that Schulz referred to meeting Welty as “really one of the great moments of my whole life” (158). Beecroft also mentions that Welty held Schulz’s “writerly qualities” (158) in high regard: “[T]he way he had imagined the inside of Snoopy’s doghouse but left it to the reader’s imagination. ‘That’s so good,’ Welty said. ‘A writer has to know all about the inside of a thing even if he is just going to show a little bit of it’” (158).

Long before I developed an appreciation for literary fiction, I was enamored with the comic art of Charles Schulz. Was the future writer in me drawn to something in Schulz’s panels that led to my devotion to the written word, some “writerly qualities” I could not yet name?

In her memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings, Welty distinguishes chronological time from the order that we as storytellers give to events: “[I]n their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily—perhaps not possibly—chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow” (69).

Though I first met her namesake eight years before I read Welty’s fiction, the chronology of my writer’s narrative places Schulz’s Eudora second. Only after rediscovering her in the pages of Beecroft’s book did I remember her name. And now she and Welty remain bound in my mind by what Welty would call “the continuous thread of revelation” (69).

Works Cited

Beecroft, Simon. The Peanuts Book: A Visual History of the Iconic Strip. DK/Penguin Random House, 2020.

Welty, Eudora. One Writer’s Beginnings. Harvard University Press, 1984.

—. “Why I Live at the P.O.” 1941. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. pp 46-56.

Posted in English 1103, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: Writing Beyond the Classroom, Superlatives . . .

Posted on by janemlucas
McKayla Flood (ENG 1103.20, Fall 2023), recipient of the 2026 Outstanding Education Fellow award.

As you leave our English 1103 class for the last time, aim to continue the practices you have cultivated this semester, including blogging. Although you may prefer to delete your major writing assignments from your blog, I encourage you to maintain your WordPress site. Tailoring it to showcase your writing and other projects in your major—and posting your resume on it too—will serve you well when you apply for internships and jobs. In your application cover letters, you can direct employers to your blog by writing, To learn more about my work, please visit my website: [yourblogname.wordpress.com].

For many of you, composing longhand isn’t preferable to typing—and often it isn’t for me either—but I recommend putting pen to paper at least occasionally, especially when you find yourself struggling to move forward with a piece of writing. The words you are now reading—and those in the other posts I composed this semester—all began as scribbles on paper. Also, remember that putting pen to paper offers us an opportunity to turn away from our screens, a practice that not only benefits our writing but also our overall well-being.

Envision how the papers you wrote for English 1103 and your other classes may evolve into larger projects for upper-level courses or conference presentations. Look back at those assignments and ask yourself the same questions that you addressed in your final essay for English 1103: What larger project might develop from it? What would serve as its theoretical framework?

The photograph at the top of this post features my former student McKayla Flood, a junior who received the 2026 Outstanding Education Fellow award. Congratulations to McKayla on her success in the Stout School of Education.

Please share the news of your own successes, so I can celebrate them with the students who follow in your footsteps.

Superlatives

Congratulations to the students who have earned the highest preliminary averages and to those who achieved perfect attendance.

Highest Preliminary Averages

Perfect Attendance

Students who do not enroll in a course until after the first, second, or third class meeting are eligible for perfect attendance because their attendance records commence only after they have added a course.

Congratulations to Aidan Berlin on winning the vintage Scrabble game (pictured above) in last Wednesday’s drawing.

Parting Thoughts

The essayist Susan Sontag advised writers to “[l]ove words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.” As you commence life after English 1103, keep those words in mind.

Posted in English 1103, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: Planning Your Individual Presentations . . .

Posted on by janemlucas

This morning in class, you will receive the assignment for the individual presentation that you will deliver during the exam period. An additional copy is posted on Blackboard, and the directions are also included below.

Overview

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 approximately three minutes 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,
  • Details from your experiences in the course 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.

Look for presentation tips in tomorrow’s class notes.

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. Because you are required to project your blog on the classroom screen, you should 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. Optional: Rehearse with a classmate. Take turns delivering your presentations and offering feedback. Offer both suggestions for improvement and words of encouragement.

In class this morning, you will also receive a checklist for your WordPress blog. An additional copy appears below.

Blog Checklist

You will have the first half of class and the first few minutes of the second half to plan your presentation and edit your blog. In the remainder of the class period, you will compose a summary (one paragraph, minimum) of the work you completed. Will include specific examples of the details you plan to include in your presentation and/or changes you made to one or more of your blog posts.

Next Up

Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website or the Merriam-Webster Scrabble Word Finder page, and review the blog posts devoted to Scrabble tips.

Posted in English 1103, Reading, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: Composing Your Final Reflection

Posted on by janemlucas

This morning in class, you will compose a final reflective essay that documents your work in the second half of the semester, focusing on what you consider some of your most significant work and the feature or features of the course that have benefited your development as a writer and a student. Since you have already written a reflective essay on your final essay and annotated bibliography, your final reflection should focus on other assignments and features, including one, two, or three of the following:

  • Studying one of the texts we have examined in the second half of the semester, including “Blogs vs. Term Papers,” “A Break from Your Smartphone can Boost Your Mood . . . ,” The Competition, “How a Small North Carolina College . . . ,” “Scrabble is a Lousy Game,” Seedlings, “Skim Reading is the New Normal,” “Strawberry Spring,” “To Remember a Lecture Better, Take Notes by Hand,” or one of the sample final essays and annotated bibliographies (“The King of Storytelling,” “Scrabble as a Game Changer in the College Classroom”)
  • Writing for an online audience beyond the classroom/creating and maintaining a WordPress blog
  • Delivering your group presentation.
  • Collaborating with your classmates on in-class writing assignments
  • Playing Scrabble/collaborating with your teammates on Wordplay Day
  • Writing longhand
  • Limiting screen time
  • Keeping a journal

Focus on one, two, or three assignments or features of the course, and 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 the second half of the semester. 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. The April 10 guidelines for preparing for your final reflection include this note: “Be sure to record the work cited entry in the correct format in your journal. During the writing of your reflection, which is a handwritten assignment, you will not have the option of referring to any electronic resources. You may refer only to your journal, your textbook, and your class handouts.”

Next Up

Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website or the Merriam-Webster Scrabble Word Finder page, and review the blog posts devoted to Scrabble tips.

Coming Soon

In class on Monday, you will receive the assignment for the individual presentation you will deliver during the exam period, Monday, April 27, at 3:30 p.m. You will have time in class both to plan your presentation and update your WordPress blog. Details TBA.

Posted in English 1103, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: High-PURCS

Posted on by janemlucas
(L-R) Madison Kline, ENG 1103.19 Fall 2024, Kaitlyn Ngo, and Olivia Quinones with their poster display for their research project “Environmental Effects on Wing Shape in the Painted Lady Butterfly, Vanessa Cardui.”

If your schedule permits, attend today’s High-PURCS (High Point University’s Undergraduate Research and Creative Works Symposium) between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. at the Qubein Center. Your attendance will not only show your support for other High Point students’ scholastic endeavors but also offer you an opportunity to view poster displays and hear discussions that may inspire ideas for projects of your own. The picture above and the ones that follow feature former students of mine who have presented their work at High-PURCS. I hope to see you presenting your work at High-PURCS ’27, ’28, or ’29.

Molly McCarver, ENG 1103.19 Fall 2023, with her poster display for her research project “The Prevalence of Physical Problems and Overuse Injury Symptoms in Adolescent Athletes.”
Madison Kline, ENG 1103.19 Fall 2024, (center) and her collaborators (right) discuss their project with a poster session attendee (left).
Molly McCarver, ENG 1103.19 Fall 2023, discusses her project with a poster session attendee (left).

Next Up

In class on Wednesday, you will compose a final reflective essay that documents your work in the second half of the semester, focusing on what you consider some of your most significant work and the features in the course that have benefited your development as a writer and a student. Since you have already written a reflective essay on your final essay and annotated bibliography, your final reflection should focus on other assignments and aspects of the course.

Carefully review the guidelines for preparing, in the March 10 class notes, to ensure that you will be able to complete your reflection successfully.

Posted in English 1103, Reading, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: Responding to a Classmate’s Final Essay and Annotated Bibliography

Posted on by janemlucas

Today in class, you will read and respond to the final essay and annotated bibliography written by one of your classmates.

Directions

  1. Go to the class blog page, English at High Point, and click on the link for the student whose name you drew as the subject for your peer response
  2. Read the student’s essay and bibliography and compose a response (75 words, minimum) that addresses two or more of these elements: the title, the introductory paragraph, the mention of a larger project that could develop from the research and the theoretical framework that would guide it, the bibliography’s commentaries. If the student’s assignment is not posted on his or her blog, choose another student and record the alternate’s name on your assignment sheet.
  3. If you are concerned about completing your response by the end of the class period, limit your reading to (1) the essay, and (2) the commentary paragraphs in the bibliography. Also, if you do not have time to type your comment after you have written the longhand response that you will submit in class, take a picture of your handwritten response so that you can type your response to the blogger later.
  4. Does the blog post include an image that documents part of the blogger’s writing process away from the screen? ___ (yes or no)
  5. Does the post include a relevant embedded link? ___ (yes or no)
  6. Compose your response on the assignment handout. Use additional paper if you need more space.
  7. After you have composed your response, type it as a comment for the blogger. You should see a leave comment/reply option at the top or bottom of the post. If you do not see that option, click on the title of the blog post, and scroll down. You should then see leave comment/reply. 
  8. Submit your handwritten response at the end of class. That hard copy of your comment will verify your completion of the assignment because the blogger may not choose to make your comment visible. 

Next Up

In class on Wednesday, you will compose your final reflection, focusing on what you consider some of your most significant work in the second half of the course and the features or aspects of the course that have benefited your development as a writer and a student. Since you have already written a reflective essay on your final essay and annotated bibliography, your final reflection should focus on other assignments and features. Be sure to the read the guidelines in the April 10 class notes to ensure that you will be prepared to complete your in-class reflection successfully.

Postscript: Happy National Scrabble Day!

April 13, the birthday of the game’s inventor, Alfred Mosher Butts, is National Scrabble Day.