Category: Writing

Posted in English 1103, Scrabble, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: Sample Literacy Narratives . . .

Posted on by janemlucas

This morning in class, after your Scrabble debriefing, we will examine “Creativity is Key,” which you read and annotated for today. In groups, you and two or three of your classmates will compose a brief written assessment of the essay and determine a letter grade for it, based on the assignment guidelines and grade criteria.

Once you have evaluated “Creativity is Key,” we will discuss it as a class. After that, I will distribute copies of a second student literacy narrative for you to read, assess, and grade.

For your reference, your group worksheet lists the literacy narrative’s guidelines and grade criteria, which also appear below.

Guidelines

The focus should be 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) challenging
  • A memento that represents an important moment in your development as a reader or writer
  • Learning a second language

The narrative should be a well-told story that includes the following elements:

  • Vivid detail
  • Some indication of the narrative’s significance
  • A minimum of 600 words
  • A title that offers a window into your essay (It should not be titled “Literacy Narrative.”)

All three major writing assignments for English 1103, including the literacy narrative, must comply with MLA style guidelines.

Grade Criteria

  • An A literacy narrative complies with all 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 assignment guidelines but may convey the significance of the story superficially, may have organization issues, or may be flawed by surface errors.
  • A C literacy narrative complies with most but not all assignment guidelines and may be flawed by organization issues and/or surface errors.
  • A D literacy narrative complies with only a few of the assignment guidelines and may also be flawed by organization issues and/or surface errors.
  • An F literacy narrative fails to comply with most or all assignment guidelines and may also be flawed by substantial issues of organization and/or surface errors.

Scrabble Debriefing, continued

Today’s Scrabble debriefing will continue with a study of some of the plays in the games pictured below. Answers to the questions that I pose about those plays are included at the end of the post.

Acronyms: To Act or Not to Act?

If you have the letters to form an acronym, should you act on it? Each of the following two games includes an acronym. In the first game, the acronym appears once. In the second game, the same acronym was played twice, once using a blank tile. What is an acronym, and are the acronyms below playable in Scrabble?

When You Draw a Blank

In the game below, a team used a blank on a bonus square to score a two-letter double-word play with the letter a. Although that play is permissible, it isn’t advisable. Why should the team have chosen a different play? The game also includes four unplayable words. The fourth unplayable word was formed by pluralizing (adding s) to an unplayable word.

Assessing S

In the game that follows, a team played two s tiles to form the single word toss. The play is similar to the play of blank in the previous game because although the play is permissible, it isn’t advisable. Why should the team have chosen a different play?

The Long and Short of It

The word vigorous in the game below was formed by adding “o-u-s” to vigor, yet another play that is permissible but not advisable. Why should the team have chosen a different play? Consider that the words duo and tour had already been played–and what letter had not been played?

Three Letters, Three Words

In the game below, in one play, a team formed one of the two-letter b words featured in Friday’s post, along with two other words for a total of forty-eight points. What is the two-letter b word and what are the other two?

Up Next

Wednesday will be devoted to revision work. I will return your literacy narrative drafts, and you will then have the remainder of the class period to begin revising on your laptops. You will have an additional week to continue revising before posting to Blackboard and WordPress. The due date for your literacy narrative is Wednesday, September 9, before class; the hard deadline is Friday, September 11, before class.

Answers

  • Acronyms: To Act or Not to Act? An acronym is a series of letters in which each letter is the first letter in a word. For example, NASA is an acronym for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Acronyms are not playable in Scrabble. MIA, which was played in the first game, is an acronym for missing in action. Note that the word bon–playable in French Scrabble but not in the North American game–was also played. IQ, which was played twice in the second game, once with a blank, is an acronym for intelligence quotient.
  • When You Draw a Blank: Though the blank tile followed by the a can form many permissible two-letter words, it earns the team only two points for the double-word play. In all likelihood, the team could have scored more points elsewhere by playing one or more lettered tiles. Keep in mind that a blank can be used as any letter, but it has no point value. Also note that four unplayable words were played in the same game: taft, ea, df, and tafts.
  • Assessing S: Playing toss for six points is permissible but not advisable because the team probably could have earned six or more points by playing other letters and saving the two s tiles for higher-scoring words. Also, the placement of toss offers the opposing team the opportunity to make a triple-word play on the bottom row.
  • The Long and Short of It: Playing vigorous was a risky move that only gained the team thirteen points. It was a risky play because two of the four u tiles had been used (to form tour and duo), and the q had not been played. Even if the team could not score as many as thirteen points elsewhere, a lower-scoring play would have been preferable to losing a u and an s for a gain of only thirteen.
  • Three Letters, Three Words: One team’s knowledge of the two-letter word bi in last Friday’s post enabled its players to form three words in a single play: fix, bi, and ox, which earned the team a double double-word score for fix and ox with the x on the double-word square. That double double-word score and the additional word bi earned the team forty-eight points for a turn in which they played only three letters. The unplayable word pedels–a misspelling of pedals, perhaps–was played later in the game.

Posted in English 1103, Reading, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: Lessons in Summary, Scene, and Dialogue from Harper Lee . . .

Posted on by janemlucas

Yesterday, before you began drafting your literacy narrative, we examined a page (pictured above) from Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. That page from the first chapter serves as a valuable model for three narrative elements: summary, scene, and dialogue–at least two of which will figure in your literacy narrative.

The first paragraph of the passage summarizes the characters’ circumstances, designating the “summertime boundaries” (12) within which the narrator, Jean Louise, “Scout,” Finch, and her older brother, Jem, may play outdoors. The short one-sentence paragraph that follows continues the summary, informing readers that the summer Scout has just summarized is the one in which Dill (Charles Baker Harris) first visits Maycomb, Alabama.

With the first words of the next paragraph, “[e]arly one morning,” Scout shifts from summary to scene (12). All of the remaining paragraphs except the final one continue the scene with dialogue. Scout returns to summary with the words “Dill was from Meridian” (12).

Note that Harper Lee begins a new paragraph whenever the speaker changes. Also note that every line of dialogue does not include a dialogue tag, such as “he said” or “she said.” If a passage of dialogue includes only two speakers, none of the paragraphs require dialogue tags after the speakers’ first lines because the start of a new paragraph signals to the reader that the other person is speaking. If a dialogue includes three or more speakers–such as Scout’s conversation with Jem and Dill–occasional tags are essential.

Lessons in Punctuation

The excerpt from To Kill a Mockingbird also demonstrates how to use a variety of punctuation marks, including em dashes, hyphens, and commas.

  • Harper Lee uses em dashes to set off “Miss Rachel’s rat terrier was expecting” (12) from the rest of the sentence because it is nonessential. It adds details, but the sentence can function without them. An em dash is used before and after phrases that are nonessential. Note that there is no space before or after the dash, which is made with two strikes of the hyphen key.
  • Jem asks if Dill is “four-and-a-half”? Hyphens appear between those words because multiple-word numbers, such as ages, are hyphenated. The numbers twenty-one through ninety-nine are hyphenated as well.
  • Near the end of the excerpt, “Mississippi” and “Miss Rachel” (12) are both set off by commas because those details are nonessential. Commas are used to set off single words and short phrases of nonessentials the way that em dashes are used to set off longer units of words.

Work Cited

Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. Lippincott, 1960. p. 12.

Next Up

Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Merriam-Webster Scrabble Word Finder page, and review your journal notes on the game and the blog posts devoted to Scrabble.

Posted in English 1103, Reading, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: A First Glimpse of Keller, Beginning Your Literacy Narrative . . .

Posted on by janemlucas

This morning at the beginning of class, we will examine the literacy narrative that you read for today, “The Day Language Came into My Life,” which is the fourth chapter of Helen Keller’s autobiography, The Story of My Life.

Together, Sedaris‘s essay and Keller’s chapter demonstrate two vastly different ways to present a literacy narrative. “Me Talk Pretty One Day” offers a quirky look at the challenges of learning French from a sarcastic, soul-crushing instructor. Keller’s story poignantly recounts learning to make meaning of the world through sign language.

After we discuss Keller’s chapter, you will begin planning and drafting your first essay assignment, a literacy narrative: an account of a learning experience involving reading, writing, or learning to speak a language.

Directions

Begin by asking yourself this question: What were some of my most formative experiences as a reader, a writer, or a language learner? Freewrite on those, then choose one to bring to life. Your aim is to recreate your experience on the page and 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) challenging
  • A memento that represents an important moment in your development as a reader or writer
  • Learning a second language

Your literacy narrative should be a well-told story that includes these elements:

  • Vivid detail
  • Some indication of the narrative’s significance
  • A minimum of 600 words
  • A title that offers a window into your essay (It should not be titled “Literacy Narrative.”)

Detailed instructions are included in the assignment handout that you will receive in class today. An additional copy is posted on Blackboard in the Major Paper Assignments folder.

Quiz Follow-Up

Rather than listing the answers to the questions on Monday’s quiz, I have followed each question below with a note regarding where to find the answer. By finding the answers yourself, you will learn more than you would from simply reading them in a list.

  1. How is David Sedaris different from his classmates, or how does he perceive himself as different from them? See pages 166-67 of “Me Talk Pretty One Day.”
  2. What style will you use for formatting files and documenting sources in papers for English 1103 and many other courses in the humanities (philosophy, classics, religious studies, art history, and foreign languages)? See the August 20 class notes.
  3. What is one of the formatting requirements for the style you will use for your papers in English 1103? See the August 20 class notes.

Your quiz also included a bonus opportunity. Possible answers for that bonus are found in the class notes for August 20 and 21.

Next Up

Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, review Merriam-Webster’s Scrabble Word Finder page, your journal notes on the game, and the blog posts devoted to Scrabble.

Postscript: Dolly Parton (January 19, 1946-August 25, 2026)

Dolly Parton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_Parton

It’s fitting that you began your literacy narratives on a day when we are remembering a woman who created one of the largest book-giving programs in the world. Although she is known primarily as a country music icon–and songwriter, actress, producer, and entrepreneur–she was also a philanthropist whose Imagination Library, founded in 1995, has given more than a million books to children in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, and Australia. Children enrolled in the program receive one book per month from birth to five years regardless of their family’s income. Rest in peace, Dolly. Your artistry and philanthropy have made the world a better place.

Posted in English 1103, Reading, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: A Second Look at Sedaris . . .

Posted on by janemlucas

Yesterday in class, after your Scrabble debriefing, we examined David Sedaris‘s essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” and you and two or three of your classmates collaborated on an exercise that involved identifying an instance of tension in the essay. Locating such a moment in another writer’s work provides you with a model for creating tension in your own story, which is key to maintaining the reader’s interest and propelling the narrative forward.

As models for you, I included the examples below on your worksheet.

Examples

  • In “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” David Sedaris introduces tension when he writes, “the students exhibited an ease and confidence I found intimidating” (167).
  • In “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” the author introduces tension when he writes, “the students exhibited an ease and confidence I found intimidating” (Sedaris 167).

I included two examples because the correct format for the citation is determined by the content of the sentence, specifically, whether the author is named. The first example includes only the page number in parentheses because the author is named in the sentence. The second example includes the author’s name in parentheses because he is not named in the sentence. Including the author’s name in both places would be redundant.

Here are some of the instances of tension that you identified in “Me Talk Pretty One Day”:

Moments of Tension in “Me Talk Pretty One Day”

  • The French teacher asks the Yugoslavian student if she “love[d] your little war” (Sedaris 169).
  • Sedaris conveys the underlying pressure in the classroom when he recounts how “the optimist struggled to defend herself” (169).
  • The author renders tension when he writes, “‘I hate you,’ she said to me one afternoon. Her English was flawless . . . I couldn’t help but take it personally” (Sedaris 171).
  • Sedaris notes, “The teacher, through word and action, conveyed the message that if this was my idea of an identity, she wanted nothing to do with it” (171).
  • The writer recalls that “[His] fear and discomfort crept beyond the borders of the classroom” (Sedaris 171).
  • The narrator observes, “the teacher hadn’t meant to stab the girl, but neither did she spend much time apologizing” (Sedaris 172).

Talking Points

Your groups also identified a minimum of three talking points in Sedaris’s essay, parts of the narrative you had questions about, or any passages that you deemed particularly interesting or revealing. Section one did not have time for post-exercise discussion. In section eight, a student addressed Sedaris’s use of gibberish, or nonsense words, such as “meimslsxp” (167), as an effective way to convey Sedaris’s utter lack of understanding of his French teacher’s speech.

Nonsense Words and Italics

If you include nonsense words in your literacy narrative or any words in a language other than English, those words should be italicized because MLA style requires that words in languages other than English be italicized. See the examples in “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” beginning on page 167.

Figurative Language

One of the notable features of Sedaris’s writing is his use of figurative speech, including metaphor (direct comparison), simile (a comparison using like or as), and hyperbole (extreme exaggeration):

  • Metaphor: “everybody into the language pool, sink or swim” (Sedaris 167).
  • Simile: “like a translation of one of those Playmate of the Month data sheets” (Sedaris 168).
  • Hyperbole: “front teeth the size of tombstones” (Sedaris 168).

Work Cited

Sedaris, David. “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Me Talk Pretty One Day. Little Brown, 2000. pp. 166-73.

“What’s in a Name” Follow-Up

Friday’s blog entry offered a bonus assignment credit to any student who posted a response identifying the classmates whose names are also common nouns, which makes them playable Scrabble words.

The playable names of your classmates appear below in bold, followed by the definitions in parentheses.

Section 1

  • Grace (ease and fluidity of movement) Duffy
  • Brenna Murphy (a potato)
  • Bridgett Murphy (a potato)
  • Hayden Porter (a person who carries baggage)
  • Will (used to express futurity) Roberts
  • Madi Stone (a piece of rock)

Section 8

  • Dev (deva, a Hindu god) Broomer
  • Parker (one who parks) Davenport (a small desk or large upholstered sofa)
  • Ariana Foy (a farewell feast or gift)
  • Devyn Jones (a craving)
  • Lance (a spear-like weapon) Morgan (a unit of distance between two genes)
  • Cole (a plant of the cabbage family) Wilhelmsen

Kudos to Avery Broadbent, Madison Haugk, Vivian Laliberte, Michael McNamara, Layla Rothberg, and Alexis Zavalashin for identifying your classmates’ playable names. For their efforts, they will receive bonus assignment credit in the short assignments and participation category.

I will offer additional bonus assignments, so be on the lookout for those. Reading all the notes that I post for you here, on my blog, will ensure that you don’t miss those opportunities.

Using AI Ethically for Your Literacy Narrative

Using generative AI to write your literacy narrative and presenting an AI agent’s words as your own violates High Point University’s Honor Code and is grounds for an F. However, there are ethical ways to use AI for your literacy narrative, such as for brainstorming topics.

As a model for your own possible brainstorming with AI, I prompted ChatGPT to ask me a series of questions to help me decide which one of two events I might be able to render more vividly in a literacy narrative: (1) “reading” the panels of the comic strip Henry (before I could read words) as a way of joining my family’s ritual of newspaper reading, and (2) memorizing my lines for a play in which my character, María, speaks solely in Spanish. The images below are screenshots of that conversation.

Screenshot of ChatGPT Plus conversation.

Review the screenshot above and note how many specifics I offer about the two topics I’m considering and how I ask the AI agent to ask me a series of questions. Developing your initial question and requesting multiple questions in response will lead to a more productive exchange of ideas.

Question six, pictured above, and my answer serve as a key turning point in the conversation. Earlier questions posed by the AI agent asked me for details about the two experiences. Here I turn from focusing on the setting of the first of the two (my family’s den) and the action (“reading” Henry) to the implications. What was the moment of recognition or revelation? What was the significance of the event? Those are questions you will answer–not necessarily explicitly but implicitly–in the conclusion of your narrative.

In response to my answer to question six, pictured above, the AI agent raises another important point: In addition to conveying the importance of the experience, I need to be able to enter the mind of that earlier self, that preschooler who could not read yet.

In response to my answer to question seven, pictured above, the AI agent clearly delineates the differences between the two experiences and notes that both “have a clear desire and obstacle.” When you are planning your literacy narrative, ask yourself, what did I want, and what might have prevented me from getting it? Desires and obstacles figure in all compelling stories.

Question eight, pictured above, asks me to make a “quick mental inventory” of the sensory details from each experience, another important step in the writing process. Those particulars will enable readers to enter into the memory with you, as if they are looking over your shoulder. You may not remember many sensory details now, but trust the process. The more you think about the experience and put your thoughts on paper, the more you will recall.

You are welcome to use ChatGPT, as I have here, or one of the other AI agents, such as Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft 365’s Copilot, or Google’s Gemini, but remember that the words of your literacy narrative must be your own. If you think brainstorming with an AI agent will tempt you to seek an AI-generated literacy narrative, do not use AI. Instead, brainstorm with a classmate or a consultant at HPU’s Writing Center.

Congratulations to Bridgett Murphy and Sophia Stewart for winning copies of Me Talk Pretty One Day in yesterday’s drawing.

Next Up

In class tomorrow, you will begin drafting your literacy narrative, an account of a learning experience involving reading, writing, or learning to speak a language. As part of your prewriting process, revisit “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and consider how you might incorporate some of the elements David Sedaris includes. Repeat the process with Helen Keller’s “The Day Language Came into My Life” when you read and annotate it.

Posted in English 1103, Scrabble, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: David Sedaris’s “Me Talk Pretty One Day” . . .

Posted on by janemlucas

This morning in class, after your Scrabble debriefing, we will examine David Sedaris‘s essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” and you and two or three of your classmates will collaborate on an exercise that involves identifying an instance of tension in the essay. Locating such a moment in another writer’s work provides you with a model for creating tension in your own story, which is key to maintaining the reader’s interest and propelling the narrative forward.

Your group will also identify a minimum of three talking points in Sedaris’s essay. Those points may concern any parts of the narrative you have questions about or any passages that you deem particularly interesting or revealing. I will include those points in tomorrow’s class notes.

Sedaris rose to prominence in 1992 after National Public Radio broadcast his essay “Santaland Diaries,” which chronicles his stint as an elf at Macy’s flagship store in New York. That essay is included in his collection Holidays on Ice (1997). “Me Talk Pretty One Day” is the title essay in his 2000 collection, which you will have the opportunity to win in today’s class drawing.

Sedaris’s current reading tour includes a performance at Greensboro’s Tanger Center on October 28.

Scrabble Debriefings

Starting today, at the beginning of class on Mondays, I will return your Scrabble score sheets from Friday, and you and your group members will participate in a Scrabble debriefing in which you will (1) review and discuss your game, and (2) individually compose journal entries on the game. Questions to address include, but are not limited to, the ones on the handout that I will distribute this morning in class. Those questions for consideration are also listed below.

  • Did you learn any new words from your teammate or from your opponents? If so, what were they? If you did not look up their meanings after class and record them in your journal, look them up and record their meanings now.
  • What plays involved analyzing multiple options? Did your team opt not to make the highest-scoring play possible in order to either (1) block your opponent, or (2) keep letters that might enable you to score more points later?
  • Where did creative problem-solving figure in the game? If your team had a rack of all consonants or vowels–or mostly consonants or vowels–how were you able to advance the game by playing only one or two letters?
  • What was the largest number of words formed in a single play and what were they?
  • Scrabble, like writing, is a process of composing, only the board game involves composing smaller units, words rather than sentences and paragraphs. What parallels, if any, can you draw between your Scrabble play and your writing process?

You will have the opportunity to draw on the journal entries that you write during debriefings when you compose your midterm and final reflections for the course. If you choose Scrabble as the focus of your annotated bibliography and preface, you may incorporate portions of your Scrabble debriefings into that assignment as well.

Next Up

In class on Wednesday, you will begin drafting your first major writing assignment longhand. The assignment, a literacy narrative, is an account of a learning experience involving reading, writing, or learning to speak a language. As part of your prewriting process, look back at “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and consider how you might incorporate some of the same elements David Sedaris includes.

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.