Jane Lucas

As you continue to revise your final essay and annotated bibliography, 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 final essay and annotated bibliography, consult with a Writing Center tutor no later than Thursday, November 21. The due date for posting the assignment to Blackboard and to your WordPress blog is Wednesday, November 20 (before class); the hard deadline is Friday, Novemeber 22 (before class).

The number of students who met with Writing Center consultants to receive feedback on their analyses was significantly lower than the number of students who met with Writing Center consultants to receive feedback on their literacy narratives.

Analysis Consultations

• Section 19: 13 of 20 students, 65%
• Section 20: 4 of 19 students, 21%

Literacy Narrative Consultations

• Section 19: 18 of 20 students, 90%
• Section 20: 7 of 19 students, 36.8%

Please take advantage of the opportunity to receive feedback from a Writing Center consultant and earn five bonus points for your assignment.

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Next Up

Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review the posts on my blog devoted to Scrabble tips.

Monday in class, after your Scrabble debriefing, you read a sample final essay and annotated bibliography written by a student in a previous semester. After you read and took notes on that sample assignment, you and two or three of your classmates collaboratively composed a one-paragraph assessment of it. Among the points that some of you addressed in your assessments include these:

• The writer does mention her interest in whether writing longhand is more beneficial that typing, but she does not move beyond the simple either/or notion of the subject. A more substantive introduction would find her posing such questions as, in what contexts might writing longhand prove more beneficial than typing, and in what other contexts might the opposite be the case? The choice of sources might shed light on that, but her bibliography lacks a variety of perspectives. All of the sources except her interview with a classmate focus on published authors’ pereferences for beginning the writing process by composing longhand.
• The final essay does include the minimum requirement of two quotations (one quotation from one source, a second from a second source), but the quotations are not followed by parenthetical citations.
• The bibliography does meet the five-source minimum, but the sources are not presented in the correct order. They should be alphabetized by the authors’ last names.
• One of the bibliographic entries does not include the author’s name.
• The publication/interview information for each source is followed by a paragraph of summary and a second paragraph of commentary, but the commentaries are insufficient. Rather than offering some assessment of the source (explaining its usefulness, comparing it to another source), the commentaries primarily reiterate the ideas presented in the summaries that precede them.
• The final essay and annotated bibliography is marred by errors of diction, grammar, punctuation, mechanics, and style. The mistake of writing the word cancer, instead of the intended word, chance, is an egregious error of diction (par. 4).

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Additional Research and Writing

Wednesday morning we will review the points outlined above, and you will have the remainder of the class period to conduct additional research and compose additional portions of your final essay and annotated bibliography. Tasks to undertake include these:

• Using the HPU Libraries databases to locate additional sources.
• If the subject of your final essay/annotated bibliography has a Wikipedia page, locating that page, scrolling down to the list of references, and identifying one that might serve as one of your sources.
• Using Google Scholar to locate a potential source.
• Composing an annotation for one of your sources.
• Reviewing the sources you have gathered and noting what similarities and differences you can identify among them. Those similarities and differences may serve as material for your essay or your commentaries.
• Continuing to draft or revise your essay.

Next Up

Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review the posts on my blog devoted to Scrabble tips. hen class resumes next Wednesday.

Today in class, after your Scrabble debriefing, you will read a sample final essay and annotated bibliography written by a student in a previous semester. After you read and make notes on it, you and two or three of your classmates will collaboratively compose a one-paragraph assessment of it. Questions to consider in your assessment include these:

• Does the essay answer the questions included in the first bullet point in the key features section of the assignment?
• Does the essay include quotations from at least two of the sources in the bibliography? Are the quotations introduced with signal phrases? Are parenthetical citations included where needed?
• Does the bibliography include a minimum of five sources, an interview with a classmate and at least four print sources?
• Are the sources in the bibliography listed in the correct order?
• Does the bibliographic entry for each source include complete MLA-style publication or interview information?
• Is the publication or interview information for each source followed by a paragraph of summary?
• Is each summary followed by a paragraph of commentary?
• Does each commentary answer some of the questions included in the third bullet point in the key features section of the assignment?
• Is the final essay and annotated bibliography marred by errors of diction, grammar, punctuation, mechanics, and/or style? If so, note at least one specific example in your assessment.

After you complete your assessment, review the grade criteria on your final essay and annotated bibliography assignment handout, and assign a grade.

For those of you who are absent today, the sample student paper is posted on Blackboard.

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Next Up

In class on Wednesday, you will have additional time for locating sources and composing annotations for your own final essay and annotated bibliography.

This morning in class you will read one of your classmate’s analyses and post a comment on his or her blog. The complete assignment appears below.

1. Go to the class blog page, https://janelucas.com/english-at-high-point/,and click on the link for the blog of the of classmate whose name precedes yours on the roster. If you are first on the list, go to the blog of the student whose name is last on the list.  
2. If the student’s blog is not accessible, email the student and ask that he/she email you a copy of his/her literacy analysis.
3. Read the classmate’s analysis and compose a response (75 words, minimum) that addresses one or more of these elements: the title, the thesis, textual evidence, a quotation from the text.
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. Identify one or more of the “Nine Basic Writing Errors” (see Writing Analytically, 423-44). In your response identify the error by name and number, and also quote the writer’s error. If you cannot identify one of the nine basic errors, include a sentence in your response that quotes a sentence of your peer’s and identify by name and number the error that he or she avoids.

Examples

• An instance of BWE (Basic Writing Error) 3: Errors in Subject-Verb Agreement occurs when you write, “Mr. Zylberberg’s head and torso appears” (par. 2). The singular verb “appears” should be “appear” because the subject, head and torso, is plural.
• You avoid an instance of BWE (Basic Writing Error) 7: Errors in Using Possessive Apostrophes when you write, “Spiegelman further emphasizes the mourners’ identification with the hanged men by extending two of the nooses’ ropes upward” (par. 3). Both “mourners” and “nooses” are correctly presented as possessives with the addition of an apostrophe after the final “s” in each.

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Next Up

In class on Wednesday, we will review a sample final essay and annotated bibliography, and you will have the remainder of class to devote to your own research and writing.