Blog Assignment #9

By class time on Wednesday (3/5), look over your previous essays and drafts and describe your typical sentence errors. Give examples from those essays. You might even want to look to older essays from high school or reflect on what previous teachers have told you about your sentence-level problems.

Don't be shy. As a good-faith effort, I will post myself. Yes, all writers have sentence-structure problems. Good writers learn to identify their typical errors and edit them out.

Cordially,

Tom Burns

Blog Assignment #8

Find the sample essay (pp. 245 - 46?) responding to the New York Times assignment. Read it and criticize it, noting both its effective and ineffective qualities. We'll discuss the essay during the second half of class on Wednesday, so what you're really trying to do (I hope) is generate something to say during the discussion of the essay.

Think in terms of all the positive qualities you might expect in an argumentative, multiple-source essay. Does the essay have a precise, restricted, and unified argumentative point of view. Do the paragraphs develop that thesis? Do its arguments support the thesis. Are those arguments developed with analysis and detailed evidence?

Cordially,

Tom Burns

P.S. Have you completed Blog Assignment #7 yet? If not, please do so ASAP. We'll talk about it during the first half of Wednesday's class.

Blog Assignment #7

Read Ex. 19, pp. 258 ff. in Writing From Sources and blog it before class on Friday. Essentially, you're being asked to find the patterns/ arguments in a set of interviews on the question of the circumstances under which one should or should not give money to a homeless person.

The idea here is to learn how to find patterns in the evidence you find in your research on a multiple-source essay and to develop an argumentative point of view.

In class, we'll look at the arguments you have found and figure out the best way or organizing and developing such an essay, so when you blog, develop a point of view based on

1. the best available evidence from the sources in front of you and

2. your own opinion.

Note that if the evidence doesn't support your point of view, you'd have to go searching for more evidence or change your point of view.

Note also that you should be prepared to refute the opposite point of view based on the research materials you see before you.

Good luck. Have fun -- and don't worry about the grammar.

Tom Burns

Blog Assignment #6

Jillian Maruskin, our library liaison, will respond to this blog entry. Please post in response to her questions. Consider your response to be your official blog post for next week.

Post as soon as you can. Ms. Maruskin will use your comments to prepare for our first library lesson next week.

Blog Assignment #5

Before our conference on Monday, publish a draft of WA#2 to this blog. (Note that you might have to split it into two posts.) Also, email me or bring with you a copy of the draft so that we can discuss it in conference.

Don't worry about the sentence-level details. In conference, we'll talk about the big stuff -- argument and evidence.

Feel free to read each other's drafts. They just might give you an argument or two to respond to.

Alert!

Message from Molly:

There are copies of Writing from Sources in the bookstore for $67.

Thanks, Molly. Please go and buy one.

Tom B.