This morning in class you will read one of your classmate’s literacy narratives, compose a response to it, and post your response as a comment on the student’s blog.
Directions
Go to the class page, and click on the link for the blog of the of classmate whose name follows yours on the roster. If you are last on the list, go to the blog of the student whose name is first on the list.
If the student’s blog is not accessible, email the student and ask that he/she/they email you a copy of his/her/their literacy narrative.
Read the classmate’s narrative and compose a response (seventy-five words, minimum) that addresses one or more of these elements: the title, vivid details, dialogue, the use of scene and/or summary.
Does the blog post include an image that documents part of the blogger’s writing process away from the screen? ___ (yes or no)
Does the post include a relevant embedded link? ___ (yes or no)
Write on the lines provided on your worksheet and use the back of the sheet if you need additional space.
After you have composed your response longhand on your worksheet, type your response 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.
Submit your worksheet at the end of class today. You will submit your paper copy of your comment because the blogger may not choose to make your comment visible. You will receive credit for this assignment only if you submit your worksheet at the end of class today.
In the last few minutes of class (or on your own if you’re still completing your blog comment at the end of class): Begin reading your other classmates’ literacy narratives, and take notes on them in your journal. After you have read and taken notes all of the essays, compose a brief comment that states which of the narratives is the strongest and why. Include in your response the title of the narrative, the writer’s first and last name, and the section number. Post your response as a comment on my February 13 blog post no later noon on Thursday, February 15.
Next Up
In class on Wednesday, you will begin planning and drafting your analysis longhand. The following Wednesday, February 21, I will return your handwritten drafts with my notes, and you will have the class period to begin revising on your laptops and tablets. After that, you will have an additional two weeks to continue working on your analysis before posting it to Blackboard and to your WordPress blog. (You have an additional week because of Spring Break, February 24-March 3.) The due date for your analysis is Wednesday, March 6 (before class); the hard deadline is Friday, March 8 (before class).
This morning in class you will compose a short essay in which you reflect on the processes of planning, drafting, and revising your literacy narrative. Questions to consider include the ones below. You don’t need to address all of these questions, focus on the ones whose answers reveal the most about your work.
What aspect of the writing seemed the most challenging? Determining the focus of your narrative? Developing the story? Crafting the conclusion? Why did that aspect of the writing seem the most challenging?
Did you change the subject of your narrative? If so, what was the original subject? What did you change it to? Why?
Did you change the organization of the narrative? For example: Did you initially present the story chronologically, then change it?
Did any of the sample essays we examined (“Me Talk Pretty One Day,” “The Day Language Came into My Life,” “A Bridge to Words”) prove helpful to you as a model? If so, how? (Offer one or more concrete details to support your claim.)
What do you consider the strongest element of your literacy narrative?
At what point in the process did you decide on a title? Did you change the title during the writing process? If so, what was the original title?
What image did you include that documents part of your writing process away from the screen? Why did you choose that particular image?
What relevant website did you link to your blog post. Why is that particular site relevant to your narrative?
In addition to metacognition, did any of the other habits of mind of successful college students play a significant role in your writing process? If so, which one? The other seven are curiosity, openness, engagement, creativity, persistence, responsibility, and flexibility.
Students who have their physical copies of Writing analytically have the option to earn a bonus point by integrating a quotation from the textbook into their reflection. See the directions and the example below.
Directions
Read the section of Writing Analytically titled “Writing on Computers vs. Writing on Paper.”
Choose a short passage from the section that is relevant to your writing process and include it in your reflection.
Introduce the quotation with a signal phrase and end the sentence with a parenthetical citation. At the end of your reflection, include an MLA-style work cited entry. See the example below.
Example
The authors of Writing Analytically note that beginning a piece of writing on a computer can “lock you into a draft or a particular idea too soon” (Rosenwasser and Stephen 124). Early in the process of writing my literacy narrative, I found myself locked into an idea that I was able to discard only after I resumed writing longhand.
Work Cited
Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. “Writing on Computers vs. Writing on Paper.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. 9th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. 2024. pp. 124-25.
Note that the title of the textbook section and the page numbers in the ninth edition may differ from the those in the eighth edition. Make changes as needed in your parenthetical citation and work cited entry.
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review the blog posts devoted to Scrabble.
Carl Thomas Anderson’s comic strip character Henry
Yesterday in class we examined the model literacy narrative “A Bridge to Words,” and you and two or three of your classmates collaboratively composed a piece of writing that addressed one of these elements in the essay:
concrete details
figurative language
scene (see paragraphs two through five)
the adult retrospective narrator
the writer as a child
As you continue to revise your own literacy narrative, review David Sedaris’s “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” Helen Keller’s “The Day Language Came into My Life,” and “A Bridge to Words.” Note the use of concrete details, figurative language, and scene in all three. As you review Keller’s essay and mine, examine the dual roles of the central figure: the adult retrospective narrator and the child that she recollects.
Consider how your study of the narrative elements listed above can enhance those story components in your own essay.
Hilaire Belloc’s “Rebecca,” illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen
Narrative Don’ts
I also asked you to consider what the narrative doesn’t do (because it shouldn’t). Here are the two narrative don’ts that I covered in class:
Don’t write, “It made me the reader I am today,” “It made me the writer I am today,” “It made me the person I am today,” or any variation on those. Such statements are common in speeches, but they are trite and should be avoided in writing because they tell readers nothing about your particular experience. Rather than writing, “It made me the reader/writer/person . . . ,” show the readers that person.
Don’t write, “I became a better reader (or writer, or person) because I persevered, and that’s what you should do.” Don’t tell readers what they should do. Instead, let them see your experience and draw their own conclusions.
Next Up
In class on Wednesday you will compose a short reflective essay that chronicles the process of planning, drafting, and revising your literacy narrative.
Hilaire Belloc’s “Rebecca,” illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen
Today in class we will examine the model literacy narrative “A Bridge to Words,” which appears below, and you and two or three of your classmates will collaboratively compose a piece of writing that addresses one of these elements of the essay:
concrete details
figurative language
scene (see paragraphs two through five)
the adult retrospective narrator
the writer as a child
As you continue to revise, consider the role of those elements your own literacy narrative, and ask yourself what changes may enhance them.
A Bridge to Words
To a small child, the pages of a newspaper are enormous. Looking far back through the years, I see myself, not yet school age, trying to hold up those long, thin sheets of newsprint, only to find myself draped in them, as if covered by a shroud. But of course, back then, my inability to hold a newspaper properly was of little consequence. Even if I could have turned the pages as gracefully as my parents did, I couldn’t decipher the black marks on the page; thus, my family’s ritual reading of the newspaper separated them from me. As the youngest and the only one who couldn’t read, I was left alone on the perimeter to observe. My family’s world of written words was impenetrable; I could only look over their shoulders and try to imagine the places where all those black marks on the page had carried them—these people, my kin, who had clearly forgotten that I was in the room.
My sister, who was three years older, had her very own news source: The Mini Page, a four-page miniature paper that arrived at our house as an insert in the Sunday edition. While our parents sat in their easy chairs poring over the state and local news, my sister, Jo, perched at the drop-front desk and occupied herself with articles, puzzles, and connect-the-dots.
Finally, one Sunday, someone noticed me on the margin and led me into our family’s reading circle. Whether it was one of my parents or my sister, I don’t know. I remember only the gesture and the words: someone handing me the Sunday comics and saying, “You can read part of the funny pages, too. You can read Henry.”
I took the giant page and laid it flat in the middle of the oval, braided rug on the floor of the den. Once I situated the page, I lay on top of it with my eyes just inches above the panels of the comic strip. To my parents, my prone position was a source of amusement, but for me it was simply a practical solution. How else was someone so small supposed to manage such a large piece of paper?
As I lay on the floor and looked at the comic strip’s panels, I realized what the voice had meant. I could “read” Henry, the comic with the bald boy in a red shirt, because it consisted entirely of pictures. In between panels of Henry walking, there were panels of him standing still, scratching his hairless head. I didn’t find Henry funny at all. I wondered how that pale forerunner of Charlie Brown had earned a prime spot in the funnies. Still, I was glad he was there. He was the bridge that led me to the written word.
Reading the wordless comic strip Henry for the first time was the beginning of a years-long habit of stretching out on the floor with newspapers and large books—not thick ones but ones that were tall and wide, among them one of my childhood favorites: The Golden Book of Fun and Nonsense. My sister and I spent hours lying on our bedroom floor, the pink shag carpet tickling our legs as we delighted in the antics of Rebecca, the mischievous title character of one of the poems.
Carl Thomas Anderson’s comic strip character Henry
“Rebecca”—which my sister read to me before I could read it myself—introduced me to the word “abhors,” the very sound of which appealed to me. Sometimes before Jo had finished reading the opening lines, my uncontrollable giggles collided with her perfect mock-serious delivery. As the last word in the first line, “abhors” serves as a lead-in to an enjambment: the continuation of a sentence or clause in a line break. It would be years before I learned the term “enjambment,” but I was immediately swept away by its effect in the opening lines: “A trick that everyone abhors/ In Little Girls is Slamming Doors” (Belloc 61). The first line lured me into the second one, and so on and so on. I was drawn both to the individual word “abhors”—with its side-by-side “b” and “h,” rare in English—and the way the words joined, like links in a chain, to yank me giggling through Rebecca’s cautionary tale:
It happened that a marble bust Of Abraham was standing just Above the door this little lamb Had carefully prepared to slam, And down it came! It knocked her flat! It laid her out! She looked like that.
Her funeral sermon (which was long And followed by a sacred song) Mentioned her virtues, it is true, But dwelt upon her vices too, And showed the dreadful end of one Who goes and slams the door for fun. (61)
Why these particular early memories visit me now, I don’t know. Perhaps rereading Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus with my students has roused the wordless Henry and the word-filled Golden Book of Fun and Nonsense from the corner of my brain where they’ve slumbered. The former wakes and stretches out in my mind as a bridge to the latter: a spot in the world of words I’ve inhabited ever since.
At the beginning of class on Wednesday, you will submit your worksheet for the second lesson in the Check, Please! course. After that, I will return your handwritten drafts, and you will have the remainder of the period to begin typing your revisions on your laptops. You will have an additional week to continue revising before you submit your literacy narrative to Blackboard and WordPress. The due date is Wednesday, February 7; the hard deadline is Friday, February 9.
This morning, after I collect your Check, Please! worksheets for lesson two, I will return your drafts, and you will have the remainder of the class period to begin revising your literacy narratives on your laptops. You will have an additional week to continue your revision work before you submit the assignment to Blackboard and publish it as a WordPress blog entry. The due date is next Wednesday, February 7 (before class). The hard deadline is Friday, February 9 (before class). Directions for submitting your literacy narrative are included on your assignment sheet and on the Blackboard submission site.
As you continue to revise your literacy narrative, consider visiting The Writing Center. If you do so, you will earn five bonus points for the assignment.
To schedule an appointment, visit https://highpoint.mywconline.com, email the Writing Center’s director, Professor Justin Cook, at jcook3@highpoint.edu, or scan the QR code below. To earn bonus points for your literacy narrative, consult with a Writing Center tutor no later than Thursday, February 8.
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website and review the blog posts devoted to Scrabble.
Tomorrow, at the beginning of class, I will collect your worksheets for the second Check, Please! lesson. If you were absent on the day that I distributed copies of the worksheet or you have misplaced your copy, download the file from Blackboard and print it.
In preparation for submitting your assignment, review the notes below.
A summary is a third-person objective synopsis. In the first paragraph of your assignment, your summary, you should not use first- or second-person pronouns, singular or plural. In other words, “I,” “me,” “we,” “us,” and “you” should not appear in your summary. Your summary should also be free of commentary. If you use such words as “effective,” “useful,” and “instructive,” you have shifted from summary to commentary. Turn to commentary in your second paragraph.
Check, Please! is a nonprint source, which means that you do not include parenthetical citations with page or paragraph numbers (because, after all, there are no paragraphs or page numbers). Think of citing a website such as Check, Please! the way you would cite a film. Any lines that you include verbatim are enclosed in quotation marks, and the reader knows from the context that the lines are spoken in the film. The works cited entry at the bottom of the text provides the reader with the necessary source details.
Not all lists require a colon. Use one only if the clause (a group of words containing a verb) that precedes the colon makes sense on its own.
Consider the difference between these two sentences with lists:
In lesson two, Mike Caulfield continues his instruction in the four-step approach to determining the reliability of a source, which he terms SIFT: (1) “Stop,” (2) “Investigate,” (3) “Find better coverage,” and (4) “Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context.”
The steps of SIFT include (1) “Stop,” (2) “Investigate,” (3) “Find better coverage,” and (4) “Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context.”
The second example above does not include a colon because the clause before the list does not make sense on its own.
A work cited entry has a hanging indent, which means its appearance is the opposite of a paragraph’s. The first line of a paragraph is indented five spaces or one-half inch, and the remaining lines of the paragraph are flush left. In a works cited entry, the first line is flush left, and the remaining lines are indented.
Include concrete details. Specificity not only enables the reader to see your subject, it also demonstrates to the reader that you have examined your subject carefully.
Consider the difference between the two passages below.
Lesson two includes two websites that show how similar two can be even though one is propaganda.
Perhaps the most memorable portion of lesson two is the side-by-side comparison of the websites for the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Pediatricians. Though at first glance the two appear comparable, using the Wikipedia strategy reveals their profound differences. While AAP is the premiere authority on children’s health and well-being, ACP was founded to protest the adoption of children by single-sex couples and is widely viewed as a single-issue hate organization.
The two passages above address the same websites featured in lesson two, but the first example provides the reader with no specifics.
Next Up
At the beginning of class on Wednesday, I will collect your worksheets for the second Check, Please! lesson and return the drafts of your literacy narratives. You will have the class period to begin revising on your laptops, and you will have an additional week to continue your revisions. The due date for posting your revision to Blackboard and to your WordPress blog is Wednesday, February 7 (before class); the hard deadline is Friday, February 9 (before class).
Today in class we will examine two literacy narratives written last semester. After you read and annotate the essays, you and two or three of your classmates will collaboratively compose a short assessment of each narrative.
In each assessement, consider whether the essay focuses on one of the following options for topics:
a memory of a reading or writing assignment that you recall vividly
someone who helped you learn to read or write
a writing-related school event that you found humorous or embarrassing
a particular type of writing that you found (or still find) especially difficult or challenging
a memento that represents an important moment in your development as a reader or writer
Also determine whether each essay fulfills the requirements listed below.
a well-told story
vivid detail
some indication of the narrative’s significance
a minimum of 600 words
After you have composed your assessment, you will review the grade criteria listed below, and assign a letter grade to each narrative.
An A literacy narrative complies with all of the assignment guidelines: it presents a well-told story, includes vivid details, and conveys the story’s significance in a way that demonstrates a depth of understanding. An A literacy narrative is also well organized and relatively free of surface errors.
A B literacy narrative complies with all of the assignment guidelines but may convey the significance of the story in a superficial way, may have issues with organization, or may be flawed by surface errors.
A C literacy narrative complies with most but not all of the assignment guidelines and may also be flawed by issues of organization and/or surface errors.
A D literacy narrative complies with only a few of the assignment guidelines and may also be flawed by issues of organization and/or surface errors.
An F literacy narrative fails to comply with most or all of the assignment guidelines and may also be flawed by substantial issues of organization and/or surface errors.
Next Up
At the beginning of class on Wednesday, I will collect your workshseets for the second Check, Please! lesson and return the drafts of your literacy narrative. You will have the class period to begin revising on your laptops, and you will have an additional week to continue your revisions. The due date for posting your revision to Blackboard and to your WordPress blog is Wednesday, February 7 (before class); the hard deadline is Friday, February 9 (before class).
Today is class you will begin planning and drafting your first essay assignment, a literacy narrative, which is an account of a learning experience involving reading, writing, or learning to speak a language.
Begin by asking yourself some of these questions: How have you come to think about yourself as a reader or writer? What were some of your most formative experiences as a reader or writer? What are some of the do’s and don’ts you have learned about writing? How has what you have learned about reading or writing enhanced your confidence and skill in that role? You don’t need to respond to all of those questions. Try picking one or two as a starting point, then begin bringing one of those experiences to life.
Your aim is to recreate your experience on the page and then to reflect on its significance. Your focus may be any one of the following:
a memory of a reading or writing assignment that you recall vividly
someone who helped you learn to read or write
a writing-related school event that you found humorous or embarrassing
a particular type of writing that you found (or still find) especially difficult or challenging
a memento that represents an important moment in your development as a reader or writer
Detailed instructions are included in the assignment handout that you will receive in class today. An additional copy of the handout is posted on Blackboard in the essay assignments folder.
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, review the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website. Also review tomorrow’s Scrabble post.
Today in class we will examine David Sedaris‘s essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” and you and three of your classmates will collaborate on an exercise that asks you to examine–and subsequently address in writing–these elements of his literacy narrative:
scene and summary–you will examine how and where Sedaris shifts from one to the other
hyperbole
metaphors and similes
Each of these elements can play an important role in a narrative, none more so than scene, which is vital to a story’s life. Without it, a narrative falls flat. With summary, a writer compresses time to offer an overview of events. Through scene, a writer lets time unfold in front of the readers’ eyes, which is what readers prefer. They are drawn into a narrative when they can see for themselves what is happening.
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review tomorrow’s Scrabble post.
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.
