Tag: English 011/111

Posted in Teaching, Writing

ENG 011/111: Revisiting Your Reflection

Posted on by janemlucas

Directions:

  1. Compose a short commentary (fifty words or more) on your reflection, and submit it as a response to this blog post. For recommended starting points for your commentary, see the list of questions below.
  2. After you post your response, read the reflective essay written by the classmate whose name precedes (not follows) yours on the class page, and post an assessment of twenty-five words or more on the student’s blog. If that classmate’s blog post is not accessible, comment on the post by the student whose name precedes that classmate’s. If your name is first on the list, comment on the reflection of the student whose name is last.

Questions to consider include the following:

  • Which assignments of yours and which features of the course served as the focus of your reflective essay? In the process of drafting your essay, did the focus change? If so, how?
  • How did you organize your reflection? Did you begin by defining or describing your subject, or did you start with an anecdote or observation? Is your essay a series of reflections that together create an overall impression?
  • Did Westover’s memoir, Educated, or one or more of the essays that you read in The Norton Field Guide to Writing serve as a model or source of inspiration? If so, which one? See the list below.
  • At what point in the process did you decide upon a title? Did you change the title during the writing process? If so, what was the original title?
  • What image that documents part of your writing process away from the screen did you include in your blog post? (Is it a photo of a page of your journal or part of your draft? Is it a photo of you reading, drafting, or revising?) Why did you choose that particular image?
  • What do you consider the strongest element of your essay?
  • If you had more time to devote to your final reflective essay would you have addressed additional assignments or features of the course? If so, which ones?

Reflections and Memoirs in The Norton Field Guide to Writing

  • Barrientos, Tanya Maria. “Se Hable Español.” The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings and Handbook. 5th ed., by Richard Bullock, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Francine Weinberg, 2019, pp. 693-96.
  • de la Peña, Matt. “Some Times the ‘Tough Teen’ is Quietly Writing Stories.” The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings and Handbook. 5th ed., by Richard Bullock, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Francine Weinberg, 2019, pp. 688-91.
  • Dubus III, Andre. “My Father was a Writer.” The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings and Handbook. 5th ed., by Richard Bullock, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Francine Weinberg, 2019, pp. 891-99.
  • Feslenfeld, Daniel. “Rebel Music.” The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings and Handbook. 5th ed., by Richard Bullock, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Francine Weinberg, 2019, pp. 81-84.
  • Kassfy, Ana-Jamileh. “Automotive Literacy.” The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings and Handbook. 5th ed., by Richard Bullock, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Francine Weinberg, 2019, pp. 84-86.
  • Lepucki, Edan. “Our Mothers as We Never Saw Them.” The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings and Handbook. 5th ed., by Richard Bullock, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Francine Weinberg, 2019, pp. 256-59.
  • Sedaris, David. “Us and Them.” The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings and Handbook. 5th ed., by Richard Bullock, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Francine Weinberg, 2019, pp. 883-89.
  • Tan, Amy. “Mother Tongue.” The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings and Handbook. 5th ed., by Richard Bullock, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Francine Weinberg, 2019, pp. 697-703.
  • Vallowe, Emily. “Write or Wrong Identity.” The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings and Handbook. 5th ed., by Richard Bullock, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Francine Weinberg, 2019, pp. 75-81.
  • Yousafazai, Malala. “Who is Malala?” The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings and Handbook. 5th ed., by Richard Bullock, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Francine Weinberg, 2019, pp. 900-04.
Posted in Teaching, Writing

ENG 011/111: Revising Your Reflection

Posted on by janemlucas

As you revise your reflection for Wednesday, review the pages of The Norton Field Guide to Writing that cover key features (259-61) and methods of organizing a reflective essay (262-63).

If you find yourself stuck, browse the opening paragraphs of the reflections in the textbook. The first lines of one may give you an idea for your own starting point. Try the same browsing exercise for your concluding paragraph. Since conclusions can be particularly challenging, I have included a link here to Harvard’s excellent guide on closing paragraphs, “Ending the Essay.”

Below you’ll find a comprehensive list of the reflections as well as literacy narratives and memoirs (both forms of reflection) in The Norton Field Guide to Writing. One of the essays, “Us and Them,” is part of David Sedaris‘s* book-length memoir Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, which is featured in the photograph in this post.

Young adult author Matt de la Peña, who wrote one of the literacy narratives we studied in early February, has posted a series of thoughtful blog entries for home bound students. If you have children or younger brothers and sisters at home, I encourage you take a look at “Dear Stuck-at-Home Student #1-#12.”

You are not required to comment on this blog post. Your online assignments for this week are (1) post your revised reflection to the 111 Blackboard site, (2) post your revised reflection to your blog, and (3) complete the 011 quiz on MLA documentation.

*Note that the possessive form of the last name Sedaris appears above as Sedaris’s with an apostrophe followed by an additional s. AP (Associated Press) style, which most newspaper use, omits the second s. MLA (Modern Language Association Style), which we use in the humanities (English, history, philosophy, religion, and art) includes the second s. For more information on apostrophes and possessive, see the MLA Style Center and Merriam-Webster

Remember to check your CVCC email and Blackboard regularly for updates and assignments.

Reflections and Memoirs in The Norton Field Guide to Writing

  • Barrientos, Tanya Maria. “Se Hable Español.” The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings and Handbook. 5th ed., by Richard Bullock, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Francine Weinberg, 2019, pp. 693-96.
  • de la Peña, Matt. “Some Times the ‘Tough Teen’ is Quietly Writing Stories.” The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings and Handbook. 5th ed., by Richard Bullock, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Francine Weinberg, 2019, pp. 688-91.
  • Dubus III, Andre. “My Father was a Writer.” The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings and Handbook. 5th ed., by Richard Bullock, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Francine Weinberg, 2019, pp. 891-99.
  • Feslenfeld, Daniel. “Rebel Music.” The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings and Handbook. 5th ed., by Richard Bullock, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Francine Weinberg, 2019, pp. 81-84.
  • Kassfy, Ana-Jamileh. “Automotive Literacy.” The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings and Handbook. 5th ed., by Richard Bullock, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Francine Weinberg, 2019, pp. 84-86.
  • Lepucki, Edan. “Our Mothers as We Never Saw Them.” The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings and Handbook. 5th ed., by Richard Bullock, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Francine Weinberg, 2019, pp. 256-59.
  • Sedaris, David. “Us and Them.” The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings and Handbook. 5th ed., by Richard Bullock, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Francine Weinberg, 2019, pp. 883-89.
  • Tan, Amy. “Mother Tongue.” The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings and Handbook. 5th ed., by Richard Bullock, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Francine Weinberg, 2019, pp. 697-703.
  • Vallowe, Emily. “Write or Wrong Identity.” The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings and Handbook. 5th ed., by Richard Bullock, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Francine Weinberg, 2019, pp. 75-81.
  • Yousafazai, Malala. “Who is Malala?” The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings and Handbook. 5th ed., by Richard Bullock, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Francine Weinberg, 2019, pp. 900-04.
Posted in Reading, Teaching, Writing

ENG 011/111: Readings for Reflection

Posted on by janemlucas

Your third and final essay for English 111 will be a reflection on your work over the course of the semester. Think about what you’ve accomplished, and ask yourself what element or elements of our class have contributed the most to your development as a writer, a reader, and a thinker. You are welcome to focus on one component of the course—such as studying Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated, or planning, drafting, and revising one of your previous essays—or you may reflect on a variety of features, including the ones I just mentioned as well writing for an online audience, studying model essays in The Norton Field Guide to Writing, writing in your journal, drafting longhand, writing snail mail, or playing Scrabble.

In your essay, you will cite at least one text that’s relevant to your reflection. For example: If your reflection addresses how the study of Educated benefited you as a writer, you might quote a short passage of Westover’s memoir that you found particularly instructive. If you reflect on developing your word power and creative problem solving skills through Scrabble, you might quote The New York Times article “New Scrabble Words Get the ‘OK’ (Now Worth 6 Points).”

As an opportunity for you to think about the aspects of the course that you may address in your reflection and for additional practice in introducing quotations with signal phrases, I developed the following exercises for this week:

Option One:

  1. Read the article “Blogs vs. Term Papers” by Matt Richtel.
  2. Compose a short passage of twenty-five words or more that addresses your experience maintaining a blog this semester and includes a relevant quotation from the article.
  3. If you name Richtel in the signal phrase, do not include a parenthetical citation. If you do not name him in the signal phrase, include a parenthetical citation with his name alone: (Richtel).

Sample: Here’s what I would write if I were reflecting as an instructor on your blog requirement.

In “Blogs vs. Term Papers,” Matt Richtel reports that Andrea Lundsford’s students who maintain blogs for their composition classes at Stanford, “feel as if they’re actually producing something personally rewarding and valuable, whereas when they write a term paper, they feel as if they do so only to produce a grade.” That value some students find in writing for a broader online audience is one of the reasons that I require my students to maintain blogs. It gives their writing a life beyond the classroom.

Option Two:

  1. Read the article “Skim Reading is the New Normal” by Maryanne Wolf.
  2. Compose a short passage of twenty-five words or more that addresses your experience reading away from the screen this semester (primarily before remote instruction began) and includes a relevant quotation from the article.
  3. If you name Wolf in the signal phrase, do not include a parenthetical citation. If you do not name her in the signal phrase, include a parenthetical citation with her name alone: (Wolf).

Sample: Here’s what I would write if I were reflecting as an instructor on our time spent reading away from the screen.

Psychologists’ studies that indicate “students who read on print [are] superior in their comprehension to screen-reading peers” (Wolf) have led me to devote more class time to reading on the page rather than the screen.

Remember to check your CVCC email and Blackboard regularly for updates and assignments.

Works Cited

Richtel, Matt. “Blogs vs. Term Papers.” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/education/edlife/muscling-in-on-the-term-paper-tradition.html, 20 Jan. 2012, Accessed 20 Apr. 2020.

Wolf, Maryann. “Skim Reading is the New Normal.” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/skim-reading-new-normal-maryanne-wolf, 25 Aug. 2018, Accessed 20 Apr. 2020.

 

 

 

 

Posted in Reading, Teaching

ENG 011/111: Wordplay Days

Posted on by janemlucas

Our Wordplay days in class gave us opportunities to build our word power, collaborate, and engage in creative problem solving. Now they offer us a way to forget our sense of isolation. I hope that games, whether table-top or digital, continue to lift your spirits.

With that hope in mind, I designed this assignment devoted to word games.

Directions:

Choose one of the options below, and post your response as a comment by 5 p.m. on Friday, April 17.

Option One:

  1. Imagine that the first seven letters of your name (all first, or first plus part of last) are seven tiles on a Scrabble rack.
  2. Go to the Scrabble Dictionary, click the Scrabble Word Builder tab (to the right of Scrabble Dictionary), enter your seven letters, and click “Go.”
  3. Post a blog comment of twenty-five words or more that includes (1) the seven letters that you entered, (2) the number of playable words that you can spell with those letters, (3) at least one of the words in the list that was unfamiliar to you, and (4) the definition of the word.

Sample: Entering the first seven letters of my name, J-A-N-E-L-U-C, into the Scrabble Word Builder yields fifty-one playable words. Two that I wasn’t familiar with are fish: “alec,” a herring, and “luce,” a pike.

Option Two:

  1. Reread the The New York Times article “New Scrabble Words Get the ‘OK’” that you read and summarized for February 7.
  2. Post a blog comment of twenty-five words or more that includes (1) one of the newly playable words, (2) its definition, and 3) whether the word was familiar to you.

Sample: The New York Times article “New Scrabble Words Get the ‘OK’” includes the newly playable word [insert word here], which was unfamiliar to me. [Insert word here] means [insert definition here].

Do not use the word “OK.” In other words, “OK” is not okay. It’s in the title of the article, and you already know its definition.

Let the play begin!

Remember to check your CVCC email and Blackboard regularly for updates and assignments.

Posted in Reading, Teaching, Writing

ENG 011/111: Educated, Chapters 25-28

Posted on by janemlucas

Reading your textual analyses demonstrated that an exercise in integrating quotations would be a valuable follow-up assignment. In academic writing, sentences never begin with quotations. Instead, they’re introduced with signal phrases, such as these:

  • According to Tara Westover,
  • Tara Westover writes that
  • In Westover’s words,

As an example for the comment you will post this week, I have turned back to the comment that Madison wrote last week. First, here is her comment as it appears word for word:

Deep down, past her internal struggle of accepting vulnerability, Westover realizes that she, too, has her own voice. This is revealed in her conflicting journal entries where she writes about a violent event involving Shawn assaulting her and her uncertainty about what to think about it. She bounces back and forth between reasoning that the attack was her fault and Shawn being in the wrong. Her doubt is disclosed as a turning point in the perceiving of her thoughts compared to her family’s.

Here’s my revised version, which introduces three lines from the end of the chapter:

Deep down, past her internal struggle of accepting vulnerability, Westover realizes that she, too, has her own voice. This is revealed in her conflicting journal entries where she writes about a violent event involving Shawn assaulting her and her uncertainty about what to think about it. She bounces back and forth between reasoning that the attack was her fault and Shawn being in the wrong. Readers witness her predicament as she reflects on her journal entries. In Westover’s words, “[t]he second entry would not obscure the words of the first. Both would remain, my memories set down alongside his. There was a boldness in not editing for consistency” (197). The bold act of writing her own memory to counter Shawn’s serves as a turning point, a place where her perceptions diverge from her family’s.

What I’ve done with Madison’s comment is what I’m asking you to do with your own response to a passage in our reading for this week.

Directions

  1. Write a short response to a passage in Chapter 25, 26, 27, or 28 of Educated.
  2. Include in your response a short quotation with a signal phrase and a parenthetical citation.
  3. If you name Westover in the signal phrase, include only the page number (216).
  4. If you do not name Westover in the signal phrase, include her last name (Westover 216). Note that there’s no comma or page abbreviation.
  5. Post your comment/reply no later than 5 p.m. on Wednesday, April 8.

For more information on signal phrases, see The Norton Field Guide to Writing and (551-57) and OWL‘s Signal and Lead-in Phrases page.

Remember to check your CVCC email and Blackboard regularly for updates and assignments.

Works Cited

Seagle, Madison. Comment on “ENG 011/111: Educated, Chapter 22.” Jane Lucas, 31 Mar. 2020, 11:36 a.m., https://janelucas.com/2020/03/30/eng-011-101-educated-chapter-22/#comments. Accessed 6 Apr. 2020.

Westover, Tara. Educated. Random House, 2018.

Posted in Reading, Teaching, Writing

ENG 011/101: Educated, Chapter 22

Posted on by janemlucas

Chapter 22, “What We Whispered and What We Screamed,” marks a change in Tara Westover‘s journal writing.

Reread the final pages of the chapter, 195-97, and write a short response that describes the change.

Post your response of twenty-five words or more as a reply. Next week we will turn back to your responses as a starting point for our conversations about Educated and the craft of writing.

Remember to check your CVCC email and Blackboard regularly for updates and assignments.

Posted in Teaching, Writing

ENG 011/101: The Norton Field Guide and OWL

Posted on by janemlucas

Your revised readings in The Norton Field Guide to Writing will prepare you for the six quizzes that you will complete during the remaining weeks of the semester. I selected the six subjects for the quizzes (words often confused, punctuation, precise words, active and passive voice, main points and support, and MLA documentation) based on patterns that I have identified in your essays. Most of the readings that will prepare you for the quizzes are in the yellow-edged Handbook section of Norton.

Each weekly quiz should be completed by Sunday at midnight except the quiz on precise words for the week of April 6-10. That quiz should be completed by midnight on Thursday, April 9, so you will not have a quiz to complete during Spring Break, April 10-15.

To supplement the material in The Norton Field Guide to Writing, I am including a link to the general writing section of OWL, Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab. It’s one of the most helpful and user-friendly writing sites I’ve found. OWL’s PowerPoint “Conquering the Comma” may be particularly helpful as you prepare for the quiz on punctuation.

To the left, on the menu bar on my blog, there’s a link to OWL’s home page.

Remember to check your CVCC email and Blackboard regularly for updates and assignments.

 

Posted in Reading, Teaching

Welcome Back to English 011/111

Posted on by janemlucas

Wherever you are in your reading of Educated, I encourage you to look back at the pages where Tara Westover recounts her first days on campus at Brigham Young University (155-58). Stepping into the unfamiliar–as she was then and we are now–is always difficult.

As we continue our study of Educated, consider not only what Tara Westover’s memoir reveals about the craft of writing but also how her resiliency can serve as a model for us in this time of uncertainty.

Remember to check your CVCC email and Blackboard regularly for updates and assignments.

We will get through these days.