HW for Friday, 5/6: Portfolio

1. Friday is Portfolio hand in.

• Two revised essays, with the Portfolio Checklist filled out

• I will place your final in the folder

• On the left side, graded versions of Essays 1, 2, and 3, with all of my comments

2. Also on Friday, we will discuss the optional  1-on-1 conferences.

• Walk ins, no appointments
• Monday, 5/9: 11:00am-12:50pm (I have scheduled  individual conferences with my 002 class  that start at 1pm

Preparing for Monday

1. Write your outline in class on Friday, using your Outlining Questions handout.

2. Type or write out one page of notes, but do no have pre-written paragraphs unless you want an automatic 0 for the exam.

3. Monday: bring in outline and the one page of notes, typed or written, to help you write essay. NO PRE-EXAM DAY written paragraphs (automatic 0, if done).

• You will hand in notes and essay progress on Monday after 45 minutes.

3. Wednesday: You will be given back your notes and progress. Finish second half of essay in remaining 40 minutes.

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Other questions help you study and brainstorm content for the essay (whether a topic point, reason, or example):

• What is one thing that you do or try to do every day to make yourself feel good?
• What are other things you do to improve yourself? What could you do if you don't think about daily self-improvement (besides thinking about improving!)? 
• Why is writing hard for you, and what are two or three actions you take or can take to make your writing improve?
• Where do you see is the biggest area for you to improve as a scholar?
• Do you think it is more important to be practical or to be a dreamer and why?
• What do you think will make you happy in your life? How do you expect to attain that?
• What are your hobbies and how do you think they help you in your life?
• What is your biggest prejudice, and how do you think you will overcome that prejudice? What can you do and what can others do?
• What is your best advice for listening even when you don't want to listen?

Self Reflection Final Essay Basic Structure

Problem, Struggle, Epiphany, Resolution: These stages are generic and, within a larger memoir...

Structure of the Personal Narrative Essay

How should you structure your personal narrative essay. Adair Lara, who has written countless personal essays and taught creative writing, and who is the author of the bestselling text, ”Naked, Drunk, and Writing”, suggests that the structure of a personal narrative essay or memoir essay include the following:


Problem, Struggle, Epiphany, Resolution: These stages are generic and, within a larger memoir

Problem Your goal is to describe an educational problem (including a life problem that gets in the way of education) in vivid details. 

• What is a significant writing/educational/personal problem that has impacted your learning?

• What is one educational assignment/project that illustrates your problem?

Struggle This problem creates conflict, which can be external (the outside world) and internal (within your mind or psyche) obstacles or setbacks

• How did the problem create conflict with the educational assignment? What were the SPECIFIC struggles (including your worries and actions) with the assignment?

Epiphany Your problem and struggle results in an epiphany or flood of new understanding. The epiphany transforms your story from merely an anecdote to a personal narrative that has significant meaning to you, and shared meaning with others.

• What do you realize about the problem and about yourself: about what you want, about what you have, about what abilities and skills you have, about goals, about your personality...........that will allow you to work through the problem?

• What knowledge of “the writing process” or as a scholar have you learned since that moment that you COULD NOW APPLY to your working through that specific problem? (Here is your sense of reflection, this second half of essay)

Resolution: Like a New Year’s resolution, you are not done. You are not perfect. You will likely relapse. What is your process for overcoming relapses?

• What steps are you taking as a scholar to make sure that problem does not come back to haunt you in the future?

• What are some things you’ve since learned about through your education that you are taking to solving similar problems? 

How Will You Work On Transferring Knowledge?

I want us to read some passages from a The Chronicle of Higher Education series article called "Why Don't They Apply What They've Learned," Part 1 and Part 2, and then respond to the questions I've posed under each excerpt:

"Ambrose and her co-authors point to two reasons for the failure-to-transfer that all of us see sometimes in our students. First, they might tie whatever knowledge or skill we are teaching too closely to the context in which they learned it. Thus, students can write innovative opening paragraphs in my freshman-composition course, but in their other classes they continue to rely on the same strategies they learned in high school. Second, the inability to transfer a skill or information to a novel context might indicate shallow levels of learning. If students are capable of solving problems, writing essays, or answering questions according to some formula they have learned, they might not have grasped the underlying principles of our course content. Without that deeper knowledge of what lies beneath the formula, they can't pick up what they are learning and put it back down in an unrelated context."  [from Part 1]

• How have we, this semester, tried to gain "deeper knowledge of what lies beneath the formula"?

• How do you think you will take the "far transfer" writing and thinking we have don't this semester to your future? 

• Can you give me a few examples?

...

"For example, one pattern he found among highly successful college students was the willingness to embrace and learn from failure. The comedian and talk show host Stephen Colbert, one of Bain's more famous subjects, describes how improvisational theater taught him to see the value of failure—to learn from the experience and then move beyond it. "You haven't done it before," Colbert says, speaking about how he learned to embrace failed first-time learning efforts, "how could you possibly get it perfectly right?"

• One of our core messages: failure is part of growth. 
• How do you deal with failure--what are some of the things you do when you fail at things?
• How may you change how you deal with failure going forward, starting this summer?

But the pattern that struck me most forcefully in Bain's subjects related to the subject of far transfer. The very first story he tells in the book, after his introductory chapter, describes a student who entered college with four major questions he wanted to answer—deep, profound questions, the kind that it would take a lifetime of learning to understand, much less answer. The first of them was "Why does anything exist?"; the last was "What's the nature of intelligence?"

That student, unsurprisingly, "took a deep approach to learning, asking in every field why and how, and trying to connect everything together." His own words describe a thinking skill—building theoretical models—that he learned and then transferred to multiple disciplines: "You could build models in math," he said to Bain, "but you could also do it in music, in business, and in engineering." 

Transfer occurred for that student because he was seeking answers to his own questions. Every learning experience he had was automatically filtered through the lens of the big questions he wanted to explore, and the habit of seeing across courses and disciplines led him to the kind of connected educational experience that we want for our students.

Bain heard something similar from Colbert, who "took control of his education and began to decide what areas he would explore when he was 10 years old." Bain heard the same thing from an investigative journalist who would earn his fame working with students to help overturn death-penalty convictions, and whose big college questions "centered around justice and how to maintain it and create it." He heard it from a doctor who "chose every course at Boston University with one goal in mind: getting into medical school and becoming a physician." And not just pre-med courses: "She majored in social psychology because she thought it would help her become a better physician."

Those students transferred knowledge and skills from course to course because they brought their own questions and interests to their college experience. Whatever they might have been asked to learn in any one course, they sought to understand how everything they learned connected to their overarching questions and interests. They were able to see how a problem-solving skill learned in one class could help them in another, or how a piece of knowledge from one course connected to another, because they oriented themselves toward some larger question, challenge, or problem. That orientation encouraged them to transfer learning across contexts, to make connections, and to see the bigger picture." [from Part 2]

• What types of questions do you have for your own education? Come up with two, for now.
• How will you try to connect what you learned in our course to other courses?
• Have you already used ideas and texts used in here to discuss work in your other courses?

HW for 4/25: Strategies and Elements of Scholarly Argument

Argumentative essays are one common mode. One thing I have discussed with you is that analysis essays involve argument, too.

Your essay thesis statements and topic sentences--your main ideas--should all hold a position on the larger subject being written about.

• Read through your thesis and topic sentences. 

• Are your ideas based on the prompt subject matter?  Do your words connect to the prompt in any explicit manner? We hope they do! 

• Do you do more than state an obvious truth or basic fact in your thesis and topic sentences?...

• Does your points risk "taking a side"? 

• Would a college scholar find your ideas to be well-inferred* "opinions"--or, educated "guesses"?  (*infer: to deduce or conclude based on evidence and solid reasoning rather than on from explicit statements)

Below Are Common Elements of A Scholarly Argument (Think of Anytime You Use Sources)

·     Tactful, Courteous Language: 

·      Avoid large, sweeping statements (Everyone, Nobody, All, . . .)

·      Avoid boxing in you, your readership, or those with differing viewpoints into overly general teams/categories.

·      Avoid personal attacks (ad hominem) or bold judgments of anyone you are speaking about! However, one might consider a persuasive way of describing the action of a person/group in regards to TONE

·     Point Out Common Ground: if there is something within the larger argument that you agree with, it is effective to make reader see your open-mindedness.  Discussing in your argument where you agree with others will logically be followed by your contrasting interpretation of what sides agree upon.

·     Acknowledge Differing Viewpoints: start with the different viewpoint and use a change in direction transitional word/phrase (however, while, although, in contrast, …) and then go into your viewpoint.

·      You may also start with the proper transitional phrase and differing viewpoint, insert the comma at the end of that point, and then go into your viewpoint

·     Make Reader Aware of the Merits of Differing Viewpoint: beyond just stating different views, adding some of the positives of that other view will enable you to compare and contrast the positives of the other side with the positives of your side! 

·     Rebut Differing Viewpoints (even published critics/authorities): Many large issues have common arguments made for either side. After acknowledging a differing view, make arguments for why the view is less valid than your own.

Precision and Concision Decisions

Our jobs as writers is to be as close to the exact idea we mean as we can and to state what we mean as clearly and as formally as is required.

Your challenge as a writer is to make the language as simple as it can be, while also making the words chosen as effective in providing a clear and powerful message.

For example, there is a difference between "He cut her" and "He sliced her stomach open." Which is more effective in giving the reader a clear image?


Rules for Writers already gives some pretty valid and thorough advice, so let's just go through those suggestions, and ask any questions along the way:


1. Look for and cut any redundant word or phrases (156).

2. Look for a cluster of words in which you repeat a phrase. Sometimes, it is helpful to replace the repetition with a synonym or synonymous phrase (example 2, 157), and sometimes it is good to look for a way to cut down the sentence structure by eliminating words and/or punctuation (example 1, 157).

3. The implied phrases are a big issue, especially those "I..." phrases that show up in 3rd person analysis. Yes, you are the writer, so your "I..." is in each sentence you write on the subject. Cut these filler phrases that distract from the true subject.

4. Make a simpler sentence structure. Look for overly conjugated verb phrases (had been sleeping=slept; had thought long and hard=pondered) and replace them with either the simple present/past or with a stronger verb. (Remember that verb list we reviewed? Use it!)

5. Always look for phrases and words to cut away from phrases. Read the sentence over and over without those words, and cut the ones that don't screw up the clarity (159).


Standard Academic Language:

1. Avoid jargon in non-specialized course essays.

2. Avoid pretentious words and phrases that have a replacement phrase. If she died, she died. You don't have to fill the page with "She went to a better place" or "Her soul flew off to that heavenly light" or sometime that distracts from the point of the essay.

• Don't get overly creative with single sentences and single phrases. Think of the PURPOSE of your essay. Unless you are writing a piece of narrative or are exemplifying something that a character/person might say: AVOID mellifluous prose!

3. Avoid slang phrases, dialects, regionalisms, and any cliches. We know what they generally mean, or we don't. Either way, such language is not meant for most academic essays--especially when analyzing academic and nationally prestigious authors' works.

4. Avoid sexist language or sexist perspectives. Look for places in which you find yourself assuming gender roles--and try not to use those words. Instead, use the subject itself, perhaps with an appropriate adjective, to avoid monotony.

• Smith postulates
• The postal worker
• John Gardner's The Art of Fiction

HW for 4/22

Read the following. Again, bring your printed essays to Friday's class to work on them.

Editing

Here are some common areas where students need to grammatically improve:

1. Run-ons: both fused sentences and comma splices. Review the blog post from this week and Rules for Writer for techniques and examples.

2. Fixing pronoun references and pronoun agreement issues, including replacing confusing or weak usages with synonymous, more accurate word choice.

3. Test all sentences for subject-verb agreement issues.

4. Verb tense shifts and mood shifts. Get rid of them! See pages 136-138 in Rules for Writers for help!

5. Work on subordination of ideas, using run-on techniques discussed earlier this term. Look for places in essays where two ideas exist back-to-back, and this is where you will want to spend time considering and trying out subordination (and coordination, if necessary).

• See pages141-145 in Rules for Writers for how to do so, and pages 146-152 for considerations when to subordinate and when not to...

Revision

Here are major content areas where an essay may need improvement in the writer showing authority and supporting ideas. To strengthen authority, look at:

1. Your illustrations of ideas.  Do they fit the point? Are they specific enough, descriptive, and more than one sentence when needed?

• Are they placed effectively within paragraphs as hooks in intros or as supporting examples in PRE formed body paragraphs?  

• Are they appropriate examples for the prompt's purpose and point of view? 

• Do you have enough examples to support a larger point? Is one enough? Try to use 2-3 quotes per body paragraph for rough estimate of having adequate support.

2. Context for subject matter. 

• Do you give enough background on your subject that you can use or do address in essay? 

• Do you spell out who people are or what things or places are? 

• Do you give a framework of important factor, or do you assume too much? 

• Think more about individual qualities that your subject has in relation to the essay prompt. Try and match what you say about your essay subject to the essay questions or requirements given to you on the handout.

• Look at any pre-writing questioning and other exercises done or suggested, too, for help in what context your essay may need.