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archetype-online-blog · 6 years ago

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Crash Course in Dialogue, Part I

Writers tend to stress a character’s actions as the most important way to show who they are, but creating effective, interesting dialogue is just as important to a great story. Good dialogue can illustrate interpersonal relationships, reveal fears characters don’t even know they have, show development, and so much more. At the same time—and maybe more importantly—bad dialogue sticks out like a sore thumb, making readers uncomfortable and unwilling to get invested in your narrative. Your prose might be amazing, but if your characters can’t communicate, it’s going to put people off.

But never fear! Here are a few handy tricks to writing amazing dialogue that will get your characters saying what they mean or misdirecting like a pro, all while drawing your reader successfully into the story.

Creating Unique Voices

When you start writing dialogue, one of the most important things to keep in mind is that your characters should all sound different from one another. Just based on their words alone, a reader should be able to tell whether your character’s personality is bubbly or gloomy, if they feel comfortable with the people around them, if they’re in pain, what kind of education they have, and so much more. You want these factors to be unique for each character, even if they were raised together or come from a similar background.

A great test is to write down only the spoken part of your dialogue, without any speech tags (he said/she said, etc.). Does each character sound distinct? Can you tell whose lines are whose just based on what they say, without the surrounding context clues?

If not, try some of the techniques below. There are so many ways to say the same thing differently—and reveal your characters’ history, personality, and quirks at the same time!

Techniques

Using lots of big words like abysmal, paramount, satiate, ubiquitous, etc.

This can make a character sound more educated, imply a wealthier upbringing, or show the care he puts into communicating. Or, it can make him sound pretentious, and become a trait that annoys your other characters. Just be careful your character doesn’t come off like a weirdo carrying around a thesaurus in their pocket (unless that’s what you’re going for, of course!)

Character 1: His rant was just the shameful rambling of a crazy old man. Character 2: The display was simply the ignominious drivel of a deranged geriatric man.

Using clipped speech—only a few words at a time, monosyllabic answers

Quiet characters, characters who don’t like their companions, characters who are in pain, and characters with something to hide might not want to have long conversations where they bare their soul to others.

Character 1: I really don’t think so. I’m sure I’d remember an intense reaction like that. Character 2: No.

Using terms of endearment or pet names—babe, sweetheart, bro, dude, pal

Depending on how these are used, your character can come across as warm and fuzzy, sarcastic, flirty, or evil and taunting.

Bonus: if your character is angry or distracted, they can leave off the pet names they usually call their friends. This is a good way to reveal to a reader—and other characters—that something fishy is up.

Character 1: Can you toss me that pencil? Character 2: Hey babe, be a sweetie and toss me that pencil? Character 3: Uh, that’s my pencil, pal. Character 4: Toss me that pencil, bro!

Speaking formally versus informally with contractions

Is your character uncomfortable around present company? Are they trying to act extremely professional to prove they’re qualified for their job, or still recovering from a strict, affectionless upbringing? If so, making their speech more formal can help convey what’s going on.

Character 1: Admittedly, I have been wondering much the same thing. I will look into it. Character 2: Yeah, I’ve been wondering that too. I’m gonna check it out.

Swearing

Depending on context, characters who curse can sound meaner, rougher, cooler, more laid-back, and even funnier than the people around them who don’t.

When using curse words, be aware of your audience. If you’re writing for kids or younger teens, you may get some pushback.

Remember that these words are sometimes at their most powerful when they’re not overused. When your sweet character finally snaps and mutters something really strong under her breath, you’ll know she’s at the end of her rope.

Think of Simon finally confronting Martin in the movie Love, Simon—if Leah (who swears all the time in the book’s sequel) told Martin to f*ck off, it wouldn’t have anywhere near the same impact.

And yet, in The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater, Ronan’s glee at swearing is one of the things that sets him apart from the more polite Gansey and Adam.

Try this:

Sit in a public place where people talk—a coffee shop, a food court at the mall, a break at school—and listen to a conversation. Write down what you hear—every little um or ah, pronunciations, pauses, stutters, repetitions. How do words, fillers, and phrases shape the distinct voices of the people you’re listening to?

Using Accents and Dialects

Another great way to make characters sound different is to give them accents or let them speak in dialects. If your character is from the South, he’d have a Southern drawl; if she’s from the India, she’s not going to sound like your classmates from Connecticut. But how can you capture a voice like that without making your writing sloppy or distracting (or exaggerating it into an offensive caricature)? Passages like the following, from Huckleberry Finn, certainly take a lot of concentration to read:

“Oh, Huck, I bust out a-cryin’ en grab her up in my arms, en say, ‘Oh, de po’ little thing! De Lord God Amighty fogive po’ ole Jim, kaze he never gwyne to fogive hisself as long’s he live!’ Oh, she was plumb deef en dumb, Huck, plumb deef en dumb—en I’d ben atreat’n her so!”

A general rule, using features other than phonetic spelling to show how characters speak differently can communicate the same information in a less distracting way:

Diction/word choice: Taylor from New York eats fries for lunch and chips as a snack, but Henry from London eats chips for lunch and crisps from the vending machine during his break at work.

Syntax/word order: Someone whose native language is English will likely say “the brown shoes” or “the white fence,” but if your heroine was born in France and learned English not long ago, she might say “I was wearing my shoes which are brown” or “the fence that is white stands behind the house”

Idioms: Different places have different expressions that mean more than what they look like. While you’d say you’re “buttering someone up,” someone who speaks Spanish might say they’re “stroking his beard.” Research idioms that would be a natural part of your character’s speech—or, make up your own!

Some phonetic spellings and slang, every once in a while, do a great job of signaling a continuing accent: s’pose, ain’t, ya, dahlin’. But if what you’ve written takes any amount of real concentration to decode, it’s going to be annoying, not helpful or cool. In other words, if your main character has a lisp, tharting every thentence like thith ith going to get really fruthtrating, really fatht. An’ writin’ an o’er-exaggera’ed Cockney accen’, owr a loooong Suthen draaaawl, is sure to get on your reader’s nerves as well.

If your protagonist’s baby sister with three lines has a lisp and says, “Thamantha, read me a thtory” or her great-auntie from Georgia bemoans, “Lawdy-me, it shaw is hawt in hea today” once in 300 pages, though, you’re probably good.

If you want an example of dialects and pronunciation done really well, check out the Chaos Walking series by Patrick Ness. Protagonist Todd Hewitt grew up in a primitive settlement and can’t read—while always completely understandable, he does say “ain’t” all the time, and occasionally throws in misspellings like “creacher” and “recognishun.” The sections narrated by his friend Viola are more grammatically correct, because while Todd was doing farm work, she was attending school. And people Todd meets with even less schooling than him talk like this: “Ah kin give y’all a ride thrus. If ya want.” (But these characters don’t pop up very often, so the style doesn’t become distracting—instead, it highlights the differences between outsiders and the protagonists.)

A note of caution:

Remember that African American Vernacular English, American Sign Language, and other variations/translations of English have their own complex rules. If you aren’t familiar with a dialect you’re writing, don’t just simplify standard English, throw in an extra “be,” or take out some helping verbs. If your character uses one of these, do some extra research to make sure your dialogue is accurate.

Include the Right Kind of Content

So now you’ve decided how your character talks—but what should they say? Here are a few things to avoid: small talk, excessive info dumps, drawn-out background information, and background conversations. (Like most rules of writing, these can and should be broken if you have a good reason, but in general, they can be helpful in moving a story along and keeping it interesting.)

Instead of the characters taking up valuable space and audience attention on pleasantries, focus on the real meat of the conversation. Alfred Hitchcock once said something to the effect of, “Drama is real life with all the boring parts cut out.” Which would you want to read about? A character describing her brunch of thick, fluffy pancakes to her mother in mouth-watering detail?* Or the moment she asks her mother for $500—the third time this month—to cover her outrageous credit card debts? As the writer, you have the privilege and responsibility to pick the important moments to pass on to the reader—the ones that are important to the plot later, that develop the characters, that are memorable and exciting. Be kind to them—and yourself—by carefully judging what’s worth everyone’s time.

This then gives you an opportunity to work something else essential into your conversation—conflict. It’s very hard to make a compelling conversation where each character agrees with everything said before them. Just because “yes, and” works for improv, doesn’t mean it’s the best strategy for dialogue in fiction—instead, put your characters against each other. If they have opposing goals, or even slightly different takes on a situation, you’ll be able to flush out both viewpoints and push them to an interesting breaking point much easier than if they simply build on whatever the other says.

It can also be tempting to save long, detailed explanations for dialogue—especially when it comes to worldbuilding in sci-fi or fantasy. If you have a physics professor who’s perfected time travel or an old witch who’s worked out everything about magic, it would be easy to give them a few pages to give the specifics to your clueless protagonist. But unless you can’t get your story to work any other way, try not to do this—long descriptions tend to end up pretty boring, and hard to follow and remember. Instead, let your reader pick up fewer details at a time from different people, or see how things work for themselves. In the first Harry Potter, Hagrid doesn’t explain everything about being a wizard to Harry—readers get to experience the many magical details firsthand through Harry’s eyes in Diagon Alley, and then later at Hogwarts.

*Note: If your character is a cook and criticizes the pancakes because he could obviously do better, or if she grew up in poverty and is promising her mother she’ll move back home and take her to brunch every morning once she gets one more paycheck, this is obviously fine. So is her describing how great she thought the pancakes were if it turns out they were actually poisoned, and next thing she knows she’s waking up from a 10-year coma. And so on... Find exciting exceptions!

Try this:

Listen to a scene from your favorite movie and think about what’s included and what’s not. Do both characters greet each other and ask how the other has been, or do they jump right into the deal they need to make? Does one character agree with everything the other says, or do they disagree frequently?

Have more questions about writing dialogue? Leave us comments for Part II, coming soon!

#archetypeonline #blog post #writing style #dialogue #creative writing #writing advice #young writers #genre fiction

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nic-and-annie-in-france · 7 years ago

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Elementary School in France: First Impressions

Today was my first full day of observation in my elementary school. I had a lot of fun finding similarities and differences between the French and American school. Here are some of my observations.

Similarities:

1. The disruptive kids sit at desks by themselves either behind or in front of everyone else.

2. French boys love Fortnite.

3. French teachers love stoplight-themed behavior charts, just like American ones.

4. The things that students do to misbehave are the same. They mess around with their school supplies to avoid working, they invent a thousand reasons to get up and wander around the room, and they turn around in their seat to distract the kid sitting behind them. I saw several students prop up their binders to create a divider between them and their bothersome deskmate.

5. Several teachers had responsibility charts posted in their classrooms, with one student assigned to a small chore or role. The concept of line-leaders, though pointless, apparently has traveled across the Atlantic Ocean.

Differences:

1. The floor plan of each classroom varies a lot in America, but not here. Almost all the classrooms I visited had students sitting in pairs facing the board, with the pairs arranged in a 3x4 grid.

2. 4th and 5th graders write in (erasable!) pen when they do their schoolwork. Younger ones write with pencils.

3. French kids are chatty, but they love to participate. I don’t think I ever witnessed a teacher ask a question without at least three kids raising their hand.

4. French kids actually don’t just raise their hand, they raise their pointer finger to show that they have something to say.

5. Probably the weirdest thing to me is the amount of cutting and pasting into a notebook that French students are instructed to do. For example, in one class each student had one sheet of paper with 6 activities on it. They would cut out the instructions for the first activity, glue it into their notebooks, complete the activity on the notebook paper, then cut and paste the next activity in it. How they decided this was the best way to do things, I have no idea.

6. The students struggle with French too, but in different ways than an adult second-language learner does. In a grammar activity, 5th graders were supposed to come up with the infinitive that corresponds to a conjugated verb (e.g. If “I brought” is the conjugated expression, they had to write down “to bring”). This wouldn’t have been terribly difficult for my French students at UK because the infinitive is usually the first form of the verb that they learn, but the French students struggled. The strategy they were supposed to use was to transform the verb so that it fit into the sentence “I like _____.” This would never have helped my UK students because they don’t have the sense of what sounds natural that French kids do. It just goes to show that the experience of learning your first language as a child is totally different from learning a second language artificially at school.

7. When it comes to discipline, French teachers seem more willing to be confrontational than American ones. They draw the whole class’ attention to the misbehaver, threaten to call parents, or physically intervene (pulling by the wrist, for example) to combat bad behavior. They also praise their students less.

8. Memorization plays a bigger part of French education. I watched one class of 4th graders where several students volunteered (!) to go to the front of the class and recite the poem that they memorized for homework. The teacher and classmates then critiqued the student’s delivery of the poem. I remember my entire 9th grade English class moaning about having to recite (privately, not in front of the class) a passage from Romeo and Juliet, the play that most people already know at least a few lines of!

9. Grades aren’t really a private matter here. After the poetry recitations, the teacher announced each student’s letter grade to the class.

10. The most common classroom posters were: a timeline of world history, classroom behavior rules, a poster reading “you have the right to make mistakes,” the kings/queens/presidents of France, number lines, and the cursive handwriting alphabet.

11. Everyone writes in cursive, in a style that is a little different from what is standard in the US. And everyone has almost exactly the same handwriting; you don’t see the variation in writing styles that you do in America. I feel like my handwriting sticks out compared to everyone else’s.

12. One classroom had one abacus for each student. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a real abacus in my life, let alone 24 of them!

13. Generally there is less emphasis on interactivity in the classroom here. The teacher talks while the students listen or answer questions, and then students work on their activity independently. I didn’t see very much group work, hands-on activities, or multimedia use.

It’s also worth mentioning that none of these comparisons mean that French schools are better or worse than American ones. When I say things like “more confrontational” or “less hands-on,” those sound like bad things, but it is only because I’m used to the way Americans do things, for better or for worse. A French person observing American schools would look at the same differences and say that American teachers sugar-coat everything and overcomplicate their lessons with flashy materials. It’s all a matter of perspective.

In some of the classes, I just sat in the back of the room without the teacher giving any explanation of who I was. In others, the teacher introduced me, or had me introduce myself and field questions from the students. Every time a class heard the word “American” for the first time, there was an audible gasp. They asked me how old I am (24), how long I’ve been in France (2 weeks), what language people speak in the United States (English), whether people speak French in the US (not many, mostly immigrants), what an immigrant is, whether the Queen lives in the US or England (England, the US is independent from England and has a president), whether we’ve had any female presidents (not yet), what the weather is like where I’m from (about the same as here), what the most popular restaurant is in the US (probably McDonalds), whether I have brothers or sisters (a brother), and whether my brother speaks French too (nope, just me). It was fun to be an object of curiosity and start to get an idea of their conceptions of American culture. Lots of students said “bonjour” to me in the hallway afterwards or would tap me on the shoulder to ask another question. I know that they’ll get tired of me once I start giving them work to do, but for now I’m enjoying their enthusiasm!

#annie #tapif #travel #france

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whoisblackamerica · 7 years ago

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Possible Solution?

The Ethnic Discovery Project

As a young girl, I grew up in a loving household where my parents made sure that my siblings and I were cultured and knew where we came from. As much as they, my parents, could. And I, being the typical naive, young child, I thought that what they told was all there was to our heritage and culture. That my family’s history began with slavery and we’ve always been from the United States. Once I started getting older, I noticed that classmates of mine, white and other people of color, were able to trace back their lineage and family trees miles farther than I was able to. Other African American youths suffer from this confusion too, and in turn can affect them in different ways.

In the black community, there is an issue with self-identification, in which we don’t know where we come from because of the culture lost during the slave trade. More specifically, Black people in America face an identity crisis through loss of ancestry, negative stereotypes and images, and low self-esteem. The issue developed once the first Africans were brought to America in 1619. Along with being forced into labor, they were also forced to drop their African customs and cultures. This issue became more prevalent during the civil rights movement because that was, arguably, the birth of Black Nationalism. Black people in America face an identity crisis through loss of ancestry which was scientifically proven to contribute to low-self esteem. I propose that we create a non-profit organization of people who will dedicate time to searching archives and documents, specifically those that are made by, kept by, and created by other African Americans, for people to discover more about their personal heritage, thus finally filling the void that was created by slavery. We could build our own genealogy site, or offer to work with existing ones. This resource would be a cheap, maybe even free, source for curious people who want to know where their family is from, and who right fully deserves it. I think that people who have faced hundreds of years of oppression, racism, and discrimination are owed a lot for their perseverance. However, this resource wouldn’t be limited to only people who identify as African-American, but it would also be for the benefit of all mixed-raced people.

Black America has dealt with a lot of oppression since slavery, before and after it was abolished. Some significant events to note are the L.A. riots that were triggered by the brutal beating of Rodney King, the recent police brutality against black people in the past decade, and the gang violence within the black youth, across the country. With the constant fighting within the community and outside of it, it’s very difficult for things to get done to positively uplift out people. Thus, the self-esteem and mental well being of our people is affected. It’s no secret in the black community that our racial identity directly affects our dignity and self-respect. I have known plenty of people, including myself, who felt as if they were worth less because they were born black or a person of color, almost as if being white was so much easier and our lives would actually be worth living. The Encyclopedia of Race and Racism agrees and propose that, “Understanding identity, or individuals' beliefs about the groups to which they belong can help explain variation in their physical and mental health, educational attainment, income levels, and wealth.” (Mason) A general definition of Identity would be a distinguished idea of an individual through certain traits and qualities. The difference between being black in America and being black in Africa is that Black America is only color but Black in Africa is surrounded by language, cuisine, and customs, that many people of my generation and many generations before us haven’t gotten the chance to experience or discover. The Encyclopedia of African American Society states that, “The earliest studies that measured racial identity among African Americans were originally attempts to study black self-esteem. These studies were based on the concept of "reflective appraisal"—the idea that people develop a self-concept based on the way that other people view them.” (Jaynes)

To go further into the actual source of this self-hatred, we can discuss the role that stereotypes and the false representations of African Americans in the United States. White people further influenced the questioning of who we are, by making us feel like less than people. Things like the Three-Fifths compromise (which was a decision agreed upon in 1787 that stated that for population counting purposes for the House of Representatives, slaves would count as 3/5ths of a person or 3 out of every 5 slaves as a person) and not being able to vote in a country we were forced in are just a few examples. Additionally, black youth aren’t being taught the whole truth about slavery. They are learning the watered-down version of American History that is meant to spark patriotism in young one’s minds. I viewed a film in my African American history classed titled: Ethnic Notions: Black Images in the White Mind. The film’s narrator mentioned

“Contained in these cultural images is the history of our national conscience striving to reconcile the paradox of racism in a nation founded on human equality - a conscience coping with this profound contradiction … through caricature. What were the consequences of these caricatures? How did they mold and mirror the reality of racial tensions in America for more than 100 years?” (Notions)

Now think about this. How could this nation have been founded on equality, when it literally was not founded on equality. Additionally, The Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History by Colin A. Palmer explains,

“In the history of race relations in the United States, stereotypes preceded and accompanied the origins and legalization of slavery. Equipped with stereotypes, whites fastened the dogma of inferiority on Africans and African Americans. With the termination of slavery, stereotypes were then extensively employed to legitimate segregationist policies. Throughout the course of American history, such ingrained stereotypes have subverted black identity and seriously undermined the formation of a biracial society based on egalitarian practices. “ (Palmer)

Images like the Mamie, and exaggerated black face were prevalent before the 1960s. After that, black people stopped viewing themselves under the white’s eyes. Because of the civil rights movement, black people began to care more about their people as a whole rather than an “every man for himself” type of mentality. The Encyclopedia of African American Society found that “In fact, when black researchers began to develop their own theories of racial identity, they found that African Americans' sense of self came mainly from the messages they received from parents and friends, not the negative views of whites.” (Jaynes)

To address this issue, I suggest we create a non-profit organization, that’s goal is to search the archives, documents, and records of African Americans from 1619 (the first slaves brought to America in Jamestown, Virginia) to now, to help people discover more about themselves, the families they came from, and the cultures they may have lost during history. The difference between this organization and other ancestry and genealogy sites (ancestry.com, 23andme.com, etc.) is that this won’t stop with finding out where these people’s DNA leads to and is made up of but it will also teach them about the cultures of that area, and hopefully connect them with other people from there. It would be ideal if this organization could partner with a genealogy website, to provide these people with discounted DNA tests or maybe even free. If that is unable to happen, it would be in our best interest to find a laboratory or a scientist willing to do this for little to no money/profit. This organization would mostly have to rely on government funding, fundraisers, and donations because they wouldn’t be selling anything or making a profit. This would be specifically a non-profit, because its main goal would be to enrich the lives of our people and make them more comfortable in their own skin, even when surrounded by the constant negativity around them. This organization could have many benefits, such as creating a larger sense of community, because its black people helping other black people discover themselves and open their minds to a whole new side of them that they hadn’t discovered. There could be offices in place with high populations/concentrations of black people and mixed-race (with black) people, for convenience for them. The amount of offices would depend of the money and revenue that the organization gathers. If they were only able to have a few, let’s say 6 offices with one being the headquarters, would be 1)New York, New York, that has the highest number of black people (at 8,175,133 people!) 2)Detroit, Michigan, which has the highest percentage of the total population of the city at 84.3%, 3) Jackson, Mississippi, 4) Miami Gardens, Florida, 5) Beaumont, Texas, and finally 6) Los Angeles, California. Unfortunately, the West coast would only have only one official office because the majority of black Americans live in the southern part of the United States and the East coast. Los Angeles, like New York, is a “melting pot” (for lack of a better term), with many different kinds of people, such as mixed-race people and immigrants living there. The headquarters would be in New York, because I feel as though by serving the most amount of black people in America, they would dedicate a lot of time to the cause. We could collaborate with AfricanAncestry.com, which is a genealogy website dedicated to find African DNA lineages. On their website they claim that, “African Ancestry uses the world’s largest database of African DNA lineages to determine your country and ethnic group of origin, all with a simple swab of your cheek.” (AfricanAncestry.com homepage) Having a black-owned and black-ran genealogy testing service would provide more credibility to the organization, and attract more black people.

Unfortunately, African Ancestry’s tests range anywhere from $274.00 (for 2 or $299.00 for one) to $680.00. That is an astronomical price to pay for something that should be in your right as a human being to know. On the website, 23andme.com's services’ prices range from $99 for just the ancestry service to $199 for the “Health + Ancestry” Service. Though, along with ancestrydna.com, they are known for giving somewhat vague results occasionally. ( i.e. broadly sub-Saharan African, or broadly East Asian) The main issues with genealogy test is that it doesn’t address the whole issue that we are presented with. Sure, we get the satisfaction of learning a little about where our ancestors we’re from up until today, but it doesn’t connect us to the culture in anyway. There are also things that have nothing to do with genealogy, but more about the identification itself and not the physically scientific aspect of things. The Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity, or the MIBI for short, is a tool used to asses racial and ethic identity among African Americans in the United States. Patrick L. Mason, a Professor and the Director of African American Studies at the University of Florida states that, “According to the MIBI and the model on which it is based, the Multidimensional Model of Racial Identity (MMRI), the unique sociocultural history of black Americans both psychologically unifies the group and creates variability in the ways blacks identify with their race. To capture similarities and distinctions across blacks, the MIBI measures racial identity along three dimensions: (1) centrality, (2) regard, and (3) ideology” (Mason). The issues with this test and others like this is that it only focuses on blacks personal identification in comparison to other blacks, which doesn’t really have anything to do with the issue, which is not knowing the actual places we come from. These tests only asses the effect of the problem. That doesn’t change the fact that it could be very eye opening and interesting to observe, it just isn’t enough.

Overall, we have plenty of resources to make this proposal happen, however, our current political climate might prevent this from being an easy task. As long as we keep advancing through history and fighting for each other and our rights, anything is possible. Obviously, the psychological well being of African Americans wouldn’t magically become 100% better after my proposed solution, but, it is a huge step in the right direction, and hopefully others think so too.

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perfectlyloudbouquet-universe · 6 years ago

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Class 1/31

Class began with a brief information session about the Art Education and Community Arts Practices Department from a peer advisor, Michael. He talked about the flexibility of peer advising meetings, how to prepare for future testing and encouraged us to take full advantage of the advising office as a resource. Next week will be our first discussion on field experience journals, and we will touch upon visual journals and Postmodern Principles from this week.

We then began to investigate the process of lesson planning by working in small groups to interpret how our self representation ornaments could be re-worked into a K-12 project. Each group decided what grade level they felt the project was best suited for and considered the lessons that could emerge. While discussing our thoughts with the entire group common themes of material exploration, color theory, symbolism, and self-expression arose. Overall, giving a student the flexibility to interpret a project in their own way seemed to be of importance to everyone.

We also formed groups to cover the importance of creating prompts that engage students socially and environmentally, rather than sticking to classroom decorations and gift oriented projects. Kate showed us a group that learned to use recycled water bottles to make flowers, and then exchange them with the public for conversation. We discussed the entrepreneurial learning benefits of a project like this for children and the importance of being aware of our material usage.

To review the article Understanding the Learner, each of us selected an age group from 2-4, 5-7, 7-9, 9-11, and 11-13 years old. Entering the mindset of one of these ages, we drew and painted what we felt a child that age would create. We were also prompted to include a brief description of what children in this age group are typically working towards in art. This activity placed us in the perspective of our future students and challenged us to consider different ways to engage them, and what kind of exercises they might find most interesting.

To wrap up class we got a glimpse into everyone’s studio practice (excited to see Manny’s :)). Starting with Greta, we learned about her interest and love for painting, the recent incorporation of glass into her work, and experimentation with spray paint. Katie talked about the process of making and community in her work, investigating fiber and sculptural elements. Del’s practice explores a lot of fun color and personal experience, like her recreation of an album cover into a quilt. Ashleigh discussed revisiting and reusing work, also showing us an example of her gorgeous book binding practice, a series of sibling portraits, and how to utilize an eraser as a printmaking device, which can be used as a cool lesson plan. Rebekah talked about her interest in photography and capturing unlikely scenes in her surroundings. Kyrie discussed making work that brings her happiness, through a lot of fiber explorations. Carrion discussed work in sculpture and engaging an audience through performance. Scout talked about inviting and modifying language through difference processes of glass and printmaking.

Reflection

Katie- After reading Understanding the Learner, it made me reflect on the lack of variation of material use in my own art education. I can remember some paper projects that used fiber materials, but not much utilization of 3D elements, with the exception of a few flexible assignments in high school. Putting myself into the mindset of these younger age groups, I would have liked to have these elements introduced before a later age. I think its is important to be encouraged to work with new and exciting materials, straying from classic painting and drawing prompts, to familiar students with different methods of expression. It was also really interesting to learn about the different interpretations of mark making development in younger ages and the power they carry, rather than being written off as scribbling. I also liked breaking down the purpose of the the material exploration ink exercises and considering how it would function amongst different age groups and conditions.

Carrion- This class we really started to dive into what being an art teacher entails. The lesson planning activity felt like an exciting way to get my feet wet and start thinking about what kind of projects I might want to do with future students. I was also reminded throughout the class to start thinking about what I want my students to get out of a lesson both formally and conceptually. It was great to see some of the things Kate has done with her students to get gears turning about material use and the vast possibilities of what an art project can be. To see my classmates try to employ the mindset of K-12 students to make art was entertaining and I do wonder how accurate we were. Ending the class with presentations of our practice gave me even more insight about my peers and I’m eager to see how our varying interests will come together to drive class discussions and project ideas. They are an excellent source of inspiration and varied knowledge. Between all of us there’s nothing we can’t do!

Links

https://psmag.com/education/participation-in-the-arts-driven-by-education-not-class

This article explores the socioeconomic significance that strong, influential art education carries for students in different environments. It relates to this lesson by considering different factors that affect students environments and need for art education.

https://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/classroom_qa_with_larry_ferlazzo/2014/06/response_the_role_of_arts_education_in_schools.html

This link leads to a lot of internal articles with interesting quotes and interviews about the holistic importance of art education.

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reomanet · 7 years ago

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Science Has Begun Taking Gluten Seriously – The Atlantic

Health Science Has Begun Taking Gluten Seriously New research from Harvard and Columbia says gluten does not cause heart disease. Why is that even a question? James Hamblin May 18, 2017 Shutterstock / Ratikova / pirke / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic Every year more money is being spent studying the now-infamous plant protein gluten. The studying raises more questions. That leads to more money being spent. And then more questions. If there was more than one lecture in medical school where gluten came up, I don’t remember it. The one I remember was in 2007, in the context of celiac disease. After the lecturer mentioned “gluten,” a classmate raised a hand and asked him to repeat himself. People who eat what? Make your inbox more interesting. Each weekday evening, get an overview of the day’s biggest news, along with fascinating ideas, images, and people. Email Address (required) Sign Up Thanks for signing up! Please check your email to confirm your subscription. Your newsletter subscription preferences have been updated. An unknown error occurred. Of course gluten, which comes from wheat, rye, and barley, was all around us then, as it is now. It’s a sort of mortar in the walls of the modern food system, in so much of what we eat or otherwise ingest and apply to ourselves. But we were barely, if at all, aware of it. More Stories How Much of an Herbicide Is Safe in Your Cereal? Angela Lashbrook AI-Driven Dermatology Could Leave Dark-Skinned Patients Behind Angela Lashbrook Swim Caps Are Keeping Black Women Out of Pools Marissa Evans Treating Teens’ Depression May Be Great for Parents’ Mental Health, Too Angela Lashbrook When someone with celiac disease eats gluten, it causes an immune reaction that destroys the lining of the small intestine. But as long as people with celiac disease avoid gluten, they’re fine. Got it. And like most medical doctors, that’s what I remember learning about gluten. Cut to a decade later, and this month there is a headline that says eating gluten doesn’t cause people to develop heart disease. Heart disease. I don’t actually have a “no shit” folder but my trained impulse was to commandeer a file cabinet and start one. I’d also put a study there that said gluten doesn’t cause rickets or global warming. Why or how would gluten cause heart disease? In fact, not only does gluten not cause heart disease in the general population, but people who go gluten-free seem to actually be putting themselves at an increased risk of heart disease, insofar as it means eating fewer whole grains. This discovery is among those slowly painting a picture of a diverse array of harms that come with blindly avoiding gluten. The finding comes from a group of prominent nutrition and gastrointestinal researchers at Harvard and Columbia. In a prospective cohort study in the latest BMJ , they concluded that people without celiac disease “should not be encouraged” to adopt gluten-free diets. In the language of academia, that’s a stern admonition. It’s coming late, though, and it’s less compelling than the myriad promises in glossy magazines and miracle books and celebrity-endorsed facial creams. The scientists’ advice is at odds with the fact that gluten-free diets are promoted everywhere and Googled more frequently than any other diet. By my own rough estimate, in April some $700 quadrillion in gluten-free products were sold in California alone. Still, the new research is among the most meaningful to date on the relationship between gluten intake and health outcomes in people without celiac disease. It is based on data from more than 100,000 people over almost two decades. Outside of this, the few small trials that have been done to study the effects of gluten intake—in which blinded participants are divided into gluten-free and gluten-containing diets and then monitored for symptoms—have been short-term and small. A study like this new one can look at dietary patterns in real life and health outcomes over the course of decades. The strongest evidence in gluten’s favor is that the longest-lived, healthiest populations on Earth have long eaten diets that include grain products. No study has yet suggested that gluten causes heart disease. So why was this being studied at all? The lead researcher is Benjamin Lebwohl, a gastroenterologist with the Celiac Disease Center at Columbia University. He has spent more time thinking about the societal role of gluten than anyone I’ve met before. “If we’re going to consider science as orthogonal to whatever the public is doing, it’s just going to worsen polarization,” he said. “We’ll just continue to talk past each other.” In talking to patients , he notes an important difference between saying that there’s no proof that gluten has health effects in the general population and saying that there is proof that gluten has no health effects in the general population. To a concerned patient, that distinction can be huge. I talked with Lebwohl one morning recently in the hours before he started scoping , as he put it, or performing endoscopies and colonoscopies , looking through a fiberoptic tube at the parts of us most of us never see. There he has come to understand that celiac disease––and the effects of gluten––are still largely mysterious. The textbook take on celiac disease is still that it’s an autoimmune condition. It is usually diagnosed by testing for antibodies called tissue-transglutaminase, and by taking a biopsy of a person’s small intestine after the person has eaten gluten. If a person has celiac disease, then Lebwohl expects to see that the finger-like villi of the intestinal wall have been obliterated, flattened like a mowed lawn. But sometimes things get strange. Some of the people Lebwohl sees who have severe atrophy of their intestinal villi eat gluten and feel totally fine. It’s only when they stop eating gluten, and then are exposed to it at some later point, that symptoms arise. He and the rest of the celiac team at Columbia also see many, many cases of the inverse: people with normal-looking bowel walls who feel horrible when they eat gluten. “Why is gluten making people without celiac disease ill?” Lebwohl asks rhetorically. “And why is there such variability in symptoms among people with celiac disease when they eat gluten? There are people that appear to have symptoms that are triggered by gluten, but they definitely do not have celiac disease. This is likely because it’s a new disorder, one for which we don’t have good biomarkers [lab tests] and don’t have an understanding of its mechanism.” The condition likely involves some degree of placebo and nocebo effects, and variations in intestinal flora probably also play a part. He also notes that symptoms may actually be related to FODMAPs—an increasingly popular acronym for a group of carbohydrates that some believe are actually the cause of the symptoms that many people attribute to gluten (or to dairy or soy, et cetera, or simply chalk them up to “ irritable bowel syndrome ”). And nothing about these explanations is mutually exclusive. “There’s also a good chance that there’s a distinct clinical entity out there we just haven’t discovered yet,” he said. “If that’s the case, we have a choice. We can roll our eyes and say this isn’t in the medical textbooks, which often then drives patients to ‘alternative’ practitioners, and they start taking multiple supplements, or we can listen and study these patients.” Lebwohl spent his undergraduate years at Harvard studying music. After four years of medical school, four years of residency, and three years of fellowship, he did a masters degree in patient-oriented research at Columbia, and a post-doctoral fellowship in cancer-related population sciences. He came out the other end less developed than he imagined—less prepared to care for people who exist in the real world than he imagined. “After all that, I realized that people were asking me about ‘leaky gut’ and candida,” he said. “I had zero exposure to any of these concepts, or how to approach patients who are coming to you with concepts that are totally foreign to medical training.” I’ve felt the same, and I know my classmates have. When I write about these things that people ask about—like cryotherapy or chelation therapy or lectin-free dieting—I inevitably hear from science-minded readers who are concerned that these subjects are not worthy of any coverage at all. The best course is to simply ignore them. Lebwohl’s team—which includes veteran researchers like Harvard’s Walter Willett —see it otherwise. They decided to devote their time and money to studying the relationship between gluten and heart disease not because it seemed that they could be plausibly related, but simply because people believe them to be. And they believe this because of a monstrously popular 2011 book called Wheat Belly , which includes the implication that eating gluten has adverse cardiovascular effects. The book was written by William Davis, who is a cardiologist based in Milwaukee, but whose concern about grains is substantially out of proportion to that of academic medicine on the whole. For example, he has likened eating wheat to smoking. One post on his blog warns: “Whole grains are indeed healthier than white flour products—just as filtered cigarettes are healthier than unfiltered cigarettes.” Though blindly avoiding gluten is not recommended by any body of cardiologists or preventive-medicine experts, the outsider status of Davis’s alarmist hypothesis was promoted as the angle that seems to have made his book enormously successful. He promised readers secrets that few others were willing to tell them, and superiority to the sheep who had been played by the system. This narrative tends to sell. I’ve previously traced the modern multi-billion-dollar gluten-free obsession to Wheat Belly , which is published by Rodale, along with subsequent spinoff books in the franchise. ( Wheat Belly Total Health: The Ultimate Grain-Free Health and Weight-Loss Life Plan ; Wheat Belly 30-Minute (Or Less!) Cookbook: 200 Quick and Simple Recipes to Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health; Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox: Reprogram your body for rapid Weight Loss and Amazing Health , and Wheat Belly Cookbook: 150 Recipes to Help You Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health .) In all, five books to tell people to stop eating grains. The accomplice to Wheat Belly was the comparably fictive 2012 Grain Brain , the author of which has called gluten “this generation’s tobacco,” and which also became a number-one bestseller by promising secrets that no one else was willing to tell us, namely that avoiding grains would prevent and reverse dementia. It’s also based on the idea that gluten sensitivity causes inflammation throughout a person’s body, which has not been shown to be true. The idea has been picked up by theorists and presented as certainty, though, even the founder of The Ultrawellness Center and embattled doctor to the Clintons, Mark Hyman, who has written that even in the absence of celiac disease, gluten “creates inflammation throughout the body, with wide-ranging effects across all organ systems including your brain, heart, joints, digestive tract, and more.” According to his web site, he has written ten books that were number-one bestsellers. Davis’s publicist said he was unavailable for comment in time for this story, as he was doing a radio interview and then driving to Cleveland as part of a press tour for his new book. This new one is a break from the franchise in name, but not in subversive tone. It’s called Undoctored: Why Health Care Has Failed You and How You Can Become Smarter Than Your Doctor . The title is not hyperbolic. The text literally sells superiority: “Let’s be absolutely clear: I propose that people can manage their own health safely and responsibly and attain results superior to those achieved through conventional health care—not less than, not on par with, but superior.” This is the same anti-establishment, outsider spirit that sent Davis’s first book to the number-one spot on The New York Times bestseller list and brought “gluten free” to such a pitch that it can now be found as one of very few nutritional distinctions on restaurant menus around the world. At a time when some best-selling books sell just a few thousand copies, Wheat Belly has sold more than a million. “In that book, a lot of the science from celiac disease has been sort of co-opted and extrapolated into the general population,” said Lebwohl. “Like the notion that gluten is intrinsically pro-inflammatory. That’s something for which we have very shaky data.” But since people believe the story, these ideas are now the topics of serious study. They came to popularity among crowds that felt alienated and unheard, and so were susceptible to demagoguery, and now a medical establishment that has long been seen as elitist and closed-minded is paying for the power dynamic it created. The funding for the new gluten-heart-disease study came from grants from the American Gastroenterological Association, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the National Institutes of Health. Any entrenched system is going to have a backlash; in the case of gluten, the rebellion is now leading the discourse. The team at Columbia is now working on another study looking for any relationship between gluten and cancer. (They have no reason to think that gluten causes cancer. But some people do believe this.) “I believe we need to research and study rigorously the things that patients are interested in,” said Lebwohl. “This is, in my view, a necessary part of science’s mission—to go to where the public is interested and provide sound analysis. If the public is barking up the wrong tree, we shouldn’t ignore that.” Some find this concerning—that we’ve entered a cycle of buying and belief that will require so much research that science will never catch up, but only ever be chasing whatever people have already chosen to believe gluten is doing to them. Others say this is exactly how science is supposed to work. In the meantime, Lebwohl tells gluten-wary patients to be wary, rather, of “any practitioner who is telling people that the problem is that their gut is leaking.” And as a general rule, “beware of any lab tests that tell you what foods you can’t tolerate. If there is a lab that does tests that can’t be paid for by conventional means––insurance companies––maybe that lab is testing things that are totally unproven. There are countless people who will take advantage of those who are looking for answers right now.” James Hamblin , MD, is a senior editor at The Atlantic . He hosts the video series If Our Bodies Could Talk and is the author of a book by the same title . | More Facebook Logo Facebook Twitter Logo Twitter Email Icon Email

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hypestcypress-blog · 7 years ago

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Waiting Room

When I first started writing, I was resistant to the page. I did not want to defile it. The paper is holy, and each word must be chosen with extreme prejudice. I don’t want to come off pretentious or stupid or like someone other than myself. Maybe I am too cautious. Maybe I restrain myself too much.

I think, if I want to write at all, I should be a tentative writer. I want to be proud of my work. I want it to sing to me. I want to read a paragraph and know that work has gone into the placement and the degree of specificity of each word. Each word has a role, a rhythm, a note to hit. Every word has another waiting to take its place. The writer’s job is to pick and choose the right word from among the word’s brothers. Writer’s call upon words, and bring them out of little waiting rooms behind the paper, and arrange them on the page.

For example, in the previous sentence, I could have said “place” instead of “arrange.” These differences (choices, deviations, variations) may be subtle (small, insignificant, unimportant) or grand (devastating, big, worlds apart) but ultimately shape the mood of the work. The author is always examining the waiting rooms in which synonyms are gathered together. The words sit there together, waiting to join the choir.

Imagine a navy blue hat. In describing such a hat, an author has to choose the right words. The author could just say blue, or they could say indigo or cyan or azure or baby blue or celeste or aquamarine or turquoise or navy blue or however many other variations of the color blue there are. Synonyms crowd the waiting room. But the hat is only one type of blue. The author must choose, and they choose navy blue. Writing then becomes a process of choosing that specific word from among its peers and plucking it from the waiting room while the rest of the blues look on. Imagine a school of fish watching their classmate being pulled from the fish tank by the omnipotent hand of the author.

The author takes “navy blue” and places it between “a” and “hat” on the page. “A” gets chosen from its waiting room often. It waits with “of” and “the” and “so” and “if” and all the other necessary stilts on which our language stands. Those words bear the weight of writing and allow the other words to stand on their shoulders. In the chorus of writing, they are the bass that keeps everything together, so consistent you hardly hear it underneath the melody of nouns and verbs unless you are looking for it.

“Imagine a navy blue hat.” Maybe “hat” was harder to choose. The author could have said “cap” or “beanie” or “baseball hat” or “lid” or “fedora.” But just “hat” was selected. It is important not to overwrite. “Hat” is hastily scrawled on the page. Then there is a general commotion. The author tries out different words, changes the order, and deletes whole ideas.

But in the end, the author hopefully has created a new blend of words. The words should sing a new song, chosen for their specific combination of notes and rhythm to work together. Each word from its own waiting room comes to work together on the page. And when the author is done, all they can hope for is that the words sing.

#writing

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lhight-mtsac-eng68-430to635 · 8 years ago

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ENGLISH 68: PREPARATION FOR COLLEGE WRITING

Mount San Antonio College, Walnut, CA

CRN # 21515

Spring Semester 2017

Mondays & Wednesdays

4:30 pm to 6:35 pm, Rm. 3821, Bldg. 26A

Instructor: Lisa Hight

[email protected] OR [email protected]

Office Hours: Mondays & Wednesdays from 12:15 pm to 1:15 pm

Office Location: English Dept. - Bldg. 26D, Room 1471

Tumblr Page: http://lhight-mtsac-eng68-430to635.tumblr.com/

Course Objective

Analysis: breaking down a whole element (an idea, concept, object, process, etc.) into several parts, and examining how those corresponding parts reinforce and make up the whole element.

Welcome to English 68. As a student, you will learn how to write college-level essays, and the key to this skill is analysis. The goal of this class is to give you the tools to absorb, process, and explain complex, abstract ideas. The reading material and writing assignments will offer you a chance to really break down various types of writing in order to explain the complex, abstract ideas in each essay or story.

This course will also focus on the mechanics of writing. You will get the opportunity to strengthen your grammar and vocabulary, but you will also learn how to write clear and concise language that is eloquent and sophisticated.

Required Reading

50 Essays (4th Edition); editor: Samuel Cohen; publisher: Bedford St. Martin’s

I will also provide essays and/or stories that are not published in the textbook.

Although it is not required, I strongly urge that you purchase a portable dictionary. In order to really comprehend all assignments, you need to be able to understand the language, whether you are reading a story or you are writing your essay.

Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs)

By the end of the semester, the student should be able to complete the following requirements.

Expository Essay. In response to one or more assigned texts, students will write an expository essay.

Sentence Writing. Students will be able to punctuate a variety of sentence types.

Grading Policy

Essay #1 = 15%

Essay #2 = 15%

Essay #3 = 15%

Essay #4 = 15%

Essay #5 = 15%

Final = 15%

Homework= 5%

Class Particip. = 5%

Total = 100%

Grade Range for Individual Essays

15% - 13.5% = A

13.4% - 13.3% = A-

13.2% - 12.9% = B+

12.8% - 12% = B

11.9% - 11.4% = C+

11.3% - 10.5% = C

10.4% - 9% = D

8.9% - 0% = F

Final Grade Breakdown

The final grade scale is calculated as follows:

100% - 89% = A

88% - 79% = B

78% - 69% = C

68% - 59% = D

58% - 0% = F

Please note: your percentage total will be rounded up or down to create a whole final grade percentage. For example, if your percentage total is 88.5% or higher, I will round it up to 89%. If your percentage total is 77.4 or lower, I will round it down to 77%.

Attendance

Attendance is crucial, and you need to attend every class (unless you have a medical emergency or other difficult circumstances). In addition, I will drop any student who has accumulated more than four absences before the 11/3/2017 drop deadline. Please note: if I drop you or if you drop the class after 9/11/2017, you will receive a “W” on your record. All students who are still enrolled after the last drop deadline (11/3) will receive a letter grade. Please note as well: if a student is enrolled in this class and does not show up for the first two days of class, he or she will be dropped from the class. If I do add any students, I will first add students who are on the roster's wait list. If there are any open slots on the roster list after I have added any students from the wait list, then I will add any other students according to registration date. If you are not enrolled or on the wait list and you want to add, then you must provide proof that you are eligible to take ENG 68.

If you miss any classes and assignments, it is your responsibility to get the necessary information from another classmate. In order to make this policy easier on everyone, I will be passing out a sheet that will list each enrolled student's Mt. SAC email. I want every student to be able to contact someone from the class in case of any absences.

Due Dates for Essays and Homework

Unless otherwise noted, homework assignments are due the next class session. Due dates for all essay assignments will be printed in the prompts. For the first essay, you will be required to write a rough draft. I will make comments on your rough draft and hand it back to you. You will revise your rough draft and then hand in a revision or final draft. Please note: I only grade final drafts, and please keep in mind: you will only turn in one draft for Essays #4 and 5. Therefore, these drafts are considered final drafts. As for late assignments, I will enforce the following policy:

Late Homework: please see me about late homework assignments. I usually accept late homework if you speak with me.

Rough Drafts: I do accept late rough drafts. However, I will deduct 3% points from the final grade that the late rough draft receives. Please note: the late penalty applies even if you turn in a revision for your late rough draft.

Revisions & Final Drafts (one draft only): I also accept late revisions. However, I will deduct 4% points from the final grade that the revision receives. Please note as well: if you turn in a first draft on the due date for the revision, it will be considered a late rough draft and the 3% point deduction will be applied to the late paper.

If you do not turn in any drafts, you will receive 0% points for that essay assignment.

In-class Essay: You will be required to complete one in-class essay. If you are absent on the day this essay is scheduled, you will not be allowed to complete a make-up essay unless you provide a valid written excuse such as a doctor's note. Please note: I will not allow any make-up final exams due to unexcused absences.

Plagiarism Policy

What is plagiarism? Plagiarism occurs when a student takes sentences or phrases from another writer and inserts these sentences or phrases into his or her writing and does not acknowledge or indicate that these are from another writer or outside source whether it is an essay, article, book, blog, etc.

You must be careful in how you present outside sources. If you turn in any work that uses unacknowledged ideas or concepts from other writers, you will receive an F grade (0 points) with no option for a re-write. I will also report any instance of plagiarism to the school; this means that the school will investigate the report and will take appropriate action against the plagiarist.

Cell Phone Policy

If you receive a call on your cell phone, please take it outside the classroom. Texting is not allowed inside the classroom, and if I find you texting inside the classroom, I reserve the right to confiscate your cell phone till the end of the class session.

Grading Criteria

In order for you to understand my criteria, I will outline my grading policy below:

A grade: the writing is insightful, thoughtful, and original. It addresses the topic fully and analyzes said topic fully as well. This means that the writing explains everything in great detail. The organization is clear and has a solid structure, so there is no confusion on the part of the reader. The writing is almost free of any grammatical errors. Plus, the writing goes beyond simple sentence-structure and contains language and sentences that are eloquent and sophisticated.

B grade: the writing clearly addresses the topic and analyzes it to some degree. It is effectively organized and is well developed with supporting detail. The writing is mostly free from grammatical errors, and the writing has a good amount of variation in language and sentence structure.

C grade: the writing adequately addresses the topic, shows some good organization, and shows some sort of analysis. The writing may fail to go into detail when it comes to analysis, and it may rely on unsupported generalizations. There also may be some errors that show inadequate understanding of the subject matter. The language and grammar tend to be awkwardly constructed so that it muddies the writer’s intent.

D grade: the writing has no clear thoughts or analysis, and it tends to be more in a simple book report style that only summarizes. There are significant errors in grammar and mechanics and many unsupported generalizations.

F grade: the writing fails on all aspects.

CLASS SCHEDULE (FALL 2017)

Please note: this is only a rough schedule. There may be changes to the schedule due to time constraints and other unforeseen circumstances, so please pay attention to any announcements about any changes to the schedule.

Week 1 (8/28 – 8/30): introduction to class; introduction to symbolism and deeper meaning

Week 2 (9/4 – 9/6): Monday (9/4) is Labor Day, so there will be no class; more on symbolism and deeper meaning; mechanics: dependent clauses and proper comma usage; Saturday (9/8) is the last day that you can add the class.

Reading Assignment: “Feet in Smoke” by John Jeremiah Sullivan (pages 399 – 406 in 50 Essays)

Week 3 (9/11 – 9/13): essay structure (intro & conclusion); Monday (9/11) is the last day that you can drop the class without incurring any penalities.

Reading Assignment: “Safe” by Cherylene Lee (hand-out)

Week 4 (9/18 – 9/20): introduction to theme and thematic analysis; review of symbolism and deeper meaning; more on dependent clauses & writing with complexity; the rough draft for Essay #1 (analyzing symbols and key lines in “Safe” by Cherylene Lee is due) this week.

Week 5 (9/25 – 9/27): review of essay structure; review of symbolism and deeper meaning; more on thematic analysis

Reading Assignment: “Shooting An Elephant” by George Orwell (pages 295 – 302 in 50 Essays)

Week 6 (10/2 – 10/4): more on theme and thematic analysis; focus on mechanics: correcting run-ons; the revision of Essay #1 (analyzing symbols and key lines in “Safe” by Cherylene Lee) is due this week.

Reading Assignment: “Balto” by T. Coraghessen Boyle (hand-out)

Week 7 (10/9 – 10/11): more on theme and thematic analysis; review of dependent clauses

Week 8 (10/16 – 10/18): introduction to rhetoric: the three appeals; review of theme and thematic analysis; mechanics: sentence variation; the final (and only) draft of Essay #2 (thematic analysis of “Balto” by T. Coraghessen Boyle) is due this week.

Week 9 (10/23 – 10/25): more on the three appeals; introduction to rhetoric: evidence; focus on mechanics: correcting fragments

Film to be viewed: Frontline's “Football High”

Week 10 (10/30 – 11/1): more on rhetoric: the three appeals and evidence; review of dependent clauses and proper comma usage; review of essay structure; Friday (11/3) is the last day you can drop the class (you will receive a “W” on your record).

Film to be viewed: Frontline's “The Vaccine War”

Week 11 (11/6 – 11/8): more on rhetoric; Essay #3 (rhetorical analysis of Frontline's “The Vaccine War”) is scheduled for this week—please note: Essay #3 will be an in-class essay.

Reading Assignment: “Why Bother?” by Michael Pollan (pages 312 – 320 in 50 Essays)

Week 12 (11/13 – 11/15): analyzing the rhetoric in an essay (readings to be determined); review of colons, semi-colons, and other punctuation

“The Siege of Miami” by Elizabeth Kolbert (hand-out)

Week 13 (11/20 – 11/22): analyzing the rhetoric in an essay (readings to be determined); introduction to formulating your own argument; introduction to MLA citation and researching outside sources; the final (and only draft) of Essay #4 (rhetorical analysis of “The Siege of Miami” by Elizabeth Kolbert) is due this week.

Week 14 (11/27 – 11/29): Monday (5/29) is Memorial Day—no class; more on formulating your own argument; more on MLA citation and researching outside sources.

Week 15 (12/4 – 12/6): review of grammar and sentence structure

FINAL EXAM: THE FINAL IS SCHEDULED FOR MONDAY, 12/11, FROM 4:00 PM TO 7:30 PM. Class will not meet on Wednesday. The final (and only draft) of Essay #5 (argumentative essay) is due on Monday (12/11) as well.

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lhight1-msac-english68 · 8 years ago

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ENGLISH 68: PREPARATION FOR COLLEGE WRITING

Mount San Antonio College, Walnut, CA

CRN # 21153

Spring Semester 2017

Mondays & Wednesdays

2:15 pm to 4:20 pm, Rm. 3821, Bldg. 26A

Instructor: Lisa Hight

[email protected] OR [email protected]

Office Hours: Mondays & Wednesdays from 12:15 pm to 1:15 pm

Office Location: English Dept. - Bldg. 26D, Room 1471

Tumblr Page: http://lhight1-msac-english68.tumblr.com/

Course Objective

Analysis: breaking down a whole element (an idea, concept, object, process, etc.) into several parts, and examining how those corresponding parts reinforce and make up the whole element.

Welcome to English 68. My name is Professor Hight. As a student, you will learn how to write college-level essays, and the key to this skill is analysis. The goal of this class is to give you the tools to absorb, process, and explain complex, abstract ideas. The reading material and writing assignments will offer you a chance to really break down various types of writing in order to explain the complex, abstract ideas in each essay or story. This course will also focus on the mechanics of writing. You will get the opportunity to strengthen your grammar and vocabulary, but you will also learn how to write clear and concise language that is eloquent and sophisticated.

To help you succeed in this class and help you reach the next step, English 1A, this course will allow you to develop critical thinking skills through a method created by Humanities professor and co-founder of the Foundation for Critical Thinking, Dr. Richard Paul. This will allow you to break down reading material and help you with your essay writing in a clear and methodical fashion. In fact, when you have developed a more critical eye in examining ideas, systems, and so forth, you can apply these skills in your personal and professional lives well beyond your career here at Mt. SAC.

Required Reading

50 Essays (4th Edition); editor: Samuel Cohen; publisher: Bedford St. Martin’s

I will also provide essays and/or stories that are not published in the textbook.

Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs)

By the end of the semester, the student should be able to complete the following requirements.

Expository Essay. In response to one or more assigned texts, students will write an expository essay.

Sentence Writing. Students will be able to punctuate a variety of sentence types.

Grading Policy

Essay #1 = 15%

Essay #2 = 15%

Essay #3 = 15%

Essay #4 = 15%

Essay #5 = 15%

Final = 15%

Homework= 5%

Class Particip. = 5%

Total = 100%

Grade Range for Individual Essays

15% - 13.5% = A

13.4% - 13.3% = A-

13.2% - 12.9% = B+

12.8% - 12% = B

11.9% - 11.4% = C+

11.3% - 10.5% = C

10.4% - 9% = D

8.9% - 0% = F

Final Grade Breakdown

The final grade scale is calculated as follows:

100% - 89% = A

88% - 79% = B

78% - 69% = C

68% - 59% = D

58% - 0% = F

Attendance

If you miss any classes and assignments, it is your responsibility to get the necessary information from another classmate. In order to make this policy easier on everyone, I will be passing out a sheet that will list each enrolled student's Mt. SAC email. I want every student to be able to contact someone from the class in case of any absences.

Due Dates for Essays and Homework

Late Homework: please see me about late homework assignments. I usually accept late homework if you speak with me.

If you do not turn in any drafts, you will receive 0% points for that essay assignment.

Plagiarism Policy

Cell Phone Policy

Grading Criteria

In order for you to understand my criteria, I will outline my grading policy below:

F grade: the writing fails on all aspects.

CLASS SCHEDULE (FALL 2017)

Week 1 (8/28 – 8/30): introduction to class; introduction to symbolism and deeper meaning

Reading Assignment: “Feet in Smoke” by John Jeremiah Sullivan (pages 399 – 406 in 50 Essays)

Week 3 (9/11 – 9/13): essay structure (intro & conclusion); Monday (9/11) is the last day that you can drop the class without incurring any penalities.

Reading Assignment: “Safe” by Cherylene Lee (hand-out)

Week 5 (9/25 – 9/27): review of essay structure; review of symbolism and deeper meaning; more on thematic analysis

Reading Assignment: “Shooting An Elephant” by George Orwell (pages 295 – 302 in 50 Essays)

Reading Assignment: “Balto” by T. Coraghessen Boyle (hand-out)

Week 7 (10/9 – 10/11): more on theme and thematic analysis; review of dependent clauses

Week 9 (10/23 – 10/25): more on the three appeals; introduction to rhetoric: evidence; focus on mechanics: correcting fragments

· Film to be viewed: Frontline's “Football High”

Film to be viewed: Frontline's “The Vaccine War”

Week 11 (11/6 – 11/8): more on rhetoric; Essay #3 (rhetorical analysis of Frontline's “The Vaccine War”) is scheduled for this week—please note: Essay #3 will be an in-class essay.

Reading Assignment: “Why Bother?” by Michael Pollan (pages 312 – 320 in 50 Essays)

Week 12 (11/13 – 11/15): analyzing the rhetoric in an essay (readings to be determined); review of colons, semi-colons, and other punctuation

“The Siege of Miami” by Elizabeth Kolbert (hand-out)

Week 14 (11/27 – 11/29): Monday (5/29) is Memorial Day—no class; more on formulating your own argument; more on MLA citation and researching outside sources.

Week 15 (12/4 – 12/6): review of grammar and sentence structure

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lhight1-eng1c-summer2017 · 8 years ago

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ENGLISH 1C: CRITICAL THINKING AND WRITING (Mt. SAC, Walnut, CA)

Instructor: Lisa Hight

CRN# 10420

Summer Session 2017

MTWTH

1:30 pm – 4:20 pm

Rm. 3821, Bldg. 26A

Email: [email protected] [email protected]

tumblr address: https://lhight1-eng1c-summer2017.tumblr.com/

Course Objective

Pre-requisite: ENG 1A or ENG 1AH

Welcome to ENG 1C. This course will help you develop your critical thinking skills as well as your writing skills. The foundation to solid critical thinking and writing is analysis, and ENG 1C will be exploring the world of rhetoric where eventually you will be able to break down and evaluate an author’s argument (both written and visual arguments) and where you will be able to develop your own argument and cultural critique.

Student Learning Outcomes for ENG 1C:

· SLO 1: In conversation with multiple texts, whether assigned by the instructors or chosen by the student, students will write a formal argument.

· SLO 2: Students will evaluate the soundness of arguments.

Required Reading

Reading Pop Culture; 2nd edition; editor: Jeff Ousborne; publisher: Bedford St. Martin’s

In addition to the required material listed above, I may provide outside reading material as hand-outs.

Grading Policy

Essay #1 (analyzing advertisement) 15%

Essay #2 (analyzing the horror genre)** 15%

Essay #3 (analyzing online culture)** 15%

Research Paper 25%

Final Exam (analyzing a documentary)** 15%

Homework 10%

Class Particip. 5%

Total = 100%

**in-class assignment

Grade Breakdown for Each Essay

15% - 13.5% A

13.4% - 13.3% A-

13.2% - 12.9% B+

12.8% - 12% B

11.9% - 11.4% C+

11.3% - 10.5% C

10.4% - 9% D

8.9% - 0% F

Grade Breakdown for the Research Paper

25% - 22.5% A

22.4% - 21.5% B+

21.4% - 20% B

19.9% - 19% C+

18.9% - 17.5% C

17.4% - 15% D

14.9% - 0% F

Final Grade Breakdown

100% - 89% A

88% - 79% B

78% - 69% C

68% - 59% D

58% - 0% F

Please note: your total percentage points will be rounded up or down accordingly to determine your final grade. For example, if your total is 77.5%, it will be rounded up to 78%. If it is 88.3%, it will be rounded down as 88%.

Attendance

Attendance is crucial, and you need to attend every class (unless you have a medical emergency or other difficult circumstances). In addition, I will drop any student who has accumulated more than three absences before the 7/18/2017 drop deadline. Please note: if I drop you or if you drop the class after 7/18/2017, you will receive a “W” on your record. All students who are still enrolled after the last drop deadline (7/18) will receive a letter grade. Please note as well: if a student is enrolled in this class and does not show up for the first two days of class, he or she may be dropped from the class. If I do add any students, I will first add students who are on the roster's wait list. If there are any open slots on the roster list after I have added any students from the wait list, then I will add any other students according to registration date. If you are not enrolled or on the wait list and you want to add, then you must provide proof that you are eligible to take ENG 1C.

If you miss any classes and assignments, it is your responsibility to get the necessary information from another classmate. In order to make this policy easier on everyone, I will be passing out a sign-up sheet that will ask for your email address. This will then be typed up and passed out to the entire class. If you are uncomfortable about giving out such information to the entire class, you must choose one or two classmates and exchange any contact information with them. I want every student to be able to contact someone from the class in case of any absences.

Due Dates for Essays, Research Papers and Homework

Unless otherwise noted, homework assignments are due the next class session. Due dates for essays will be printed in prompts for each essay and the research paper handed out in class. Most importantly, only hard copies handed to me in class are considered to be on time. Anything given to me after that class session will be considered late even if you turn in your work the same day.

My late policy is outlined as follows:

Late homework: will be either accepted or rejected on a case-by-case basis. You must turn in late assignments by the very next class date. Please note: if you miss any assignments, you first need to contact a fellow student for information on any assignments.

Late essays: I reserve the right to turn in your essays any time I want, and this includes turning in any late essays on the last day of class. In addition, I date stamp all essays. Lastly, I will apply the following penalties:

· Late essay: I will deduct 3% points from grade that the late essay would have initally received. For example, if your late essay would have been 14% (A) it it was turned in on time, it will drop to 11% (C).

· Late research papers: I will deduct 4% point from the grade that the late research paper would have initially received. For example, if your late research paper would have been 21.4% (B) if turned in on time, it will drop to 17.4% (D).

· In-class essays: Essays #2 and 3 will be in-class writing assignments. If you are absent on the day the essay is scheduled, you will not be allowed to complete a make-up essay unless you provide a valid written excuse such as a doctor's note. Please note: I will not allow any make-up final essays due to unexcused absences.

Plagiarism Policy

Cell Phone Policy

Grading Criteria

In order for you to understand my criteria, I will outline my grading policy below:

F grade: the writing fails on all aspects.

CLASS SCHEDULE (SUMMER 2017)

Please note: the schedule is subject to change. For instance, I may replace a reading assignment listed on the schedule with another reading, or I may push back a due date on the first essay (or a scheduled date for an in-class essay).

WEEK 1 (6/22): introduction to the class

WEEK 2 (6/26 – 6/29): analyzing advertisement; Monday (6/26) is the last day that you can add the class; Thursday (6/29) is the last day that you can drop the class without a “W”.

reading assignment: “Overselling Capitalism with Consumerism” by Benjamin Barber (pgs. 22 – 24 in Reading Popular Culture); additional reading TBA

Various print ads and commercials will be presented in class and analyzed.

WEEK 3 (7/3 – 7/6): analyzing the horror genre; Essay #1 is due on Monday (7/3); Tuesday (7/4) is the 4th of July holiday (no class).

reading assignments: “The Apocalyptic Strain in Popular Culture: The American Nightmare Becomes the American Dream” by Paul A. Cantor (pgs. 279 – 292 in Reading Popular Culture); possible additional reading assignment: “My Zombie, Myself: Why Modern Life Feels Rather Undead” by Chuck Klosterman (pgs. 422 – 426 in Reading Popular Culture)

Film to be viewed: TBA

WEEK 4 (7/10 – 7/13): further analysis of the horror genre; analyzing online culture (comparison/contrast); Essay #2, which is an in-class assignment, is scheduled for Tuesday, 7/11.

reading assignments: “Impression Management in a Networked Setting” by Danah Boyd (pgs. 122 – 127 in Reading Popular Culture) and “IRL Fetish” by Nathan Jurgenson (pgs. 191 – 197 in Reading Popular Culture).

WEEK 5 (7/17 – 7/20): further analysis of online culture (comparison/contrast); starting on your research paper; Essay #3, which is an in-class assignment, is scheduled for Tuesday, 7/18; Tuesday (7/18) is the last day to drop with a “W”.

WEEK 6 (7/24 – 7/27): more on the research paper; preparation for the final exam (analyzing a documentary)

film to be viewed: I Touched All Your Stuff

WEEK 7 (7/31 – 8/2): The research paper is due Monday, 7/31; the in-class final exam is scheduled for Wednesday, 8/2.

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newstfionline · 8 years ago

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The Founding Fathers Encrypted Secret Messages, Too

By Rachel B. Doyle, The Atlantic, March 30, 2017

Thomas Jefferson is known for a lot of things--writing the Declaration of Independence, founding the University of Virginia, owning hundreds of slaves despite believing in the equality of men--but his place as the “Father of American Cryptography” is not one of them.

As a youth in the Virginia colony, Jefferson encrypted letters to a confidante about the woman he loved. While serving as the third president of the newly formed United States, he tried to institute an impossibly difficult cipher for communications about the Louisiana Purchase. He even designed an intricate mechanical system for coding text that was more than a century ahead of its time.

Cryptography was no parlor game for the idle classes, but a serious business for revolutionary-era statesmen who, like today’s politicians and spies, needed to conduct their business using secure messaging. Codes and ciphers involving rearranged letters, number substitutions, and other now-quaint methods were the WhatsApp, Signal, and PGP keys of the era.

Going into the Revolution, Americans were at a huge disadvantage to the European powers when it came to cryptography, many of which had been using “black chambers”--secret offices where sensitive letters were opened and deciphered by public officials--for centuries. It was not uncommon for the messages of Revolutionary leaders and, later, American diplomats in Europe, to be intercepted and read by their enemies, both at home and abroad.

As a result, early Americans “operated in multiple secret languages during the Revolution,” says Sara Georgini, the series editor of The Papers of John Adams, at the Massachusetts Historical Society. “They didn’t throw away those habits once the new nation got formed.” The Founding Fathers continued to rely on encryption throughout their careers: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, John Jay, and James Madison all made ample use of codes and ciphers to keep their communiqués from falling into the wrong hands.

But no one went as deep into the encryption game as Jefferson. Born in 1743 in Shadwell, Virginia, Jefferson was learning Latin, Greek, and French by the age of 9. He went to the College of William & Mary at 16, to study physics, math, and philosophy, and by early 1764, Jefferson, then 20 years old, was writing letters in code. At first glance, a cryptic letter he sent that year to John Page, a close college classmate, is difficult to parse: It drops Latin phrases in the middle of what sound like emotional ultimatums about an upcoming contractual agreement with some man, whose name is written in Greek characters.

“My fate depends on ad???eß’s present resolutions: by them I must stand or fall,” Jefferson writes. But the Greek characters are in fact an anagram for Rebecca Burwell, a 17-year-old from Yorktown he wanted to marry. Four days later, Jefferson decided that his earlier code was too obvious. “We must fall on some scheme of communicating our thoughts to each other, which shall be totally unintelligible to every one but to ourselves,” he told Page.

Although most encrypted letters were a mixture of cipher and “plaintext,” deciphering them could be a patience-straining process. It was easy to mess up during the encoding or decoding process. Letters using dictionary and book codes--where the writer provided a set of numbers that indicated the page, column, and position where the word they wanted could be found in an agreed-upon book--could become garbled by line-counting errors.

The alternative was having secrets stolen and--then as now--even leaked in an embarrassing scandal. As some of the colonists grew more radical following the Boston Massacre, a cache of private letters by Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson and his lieutenant were leaked and published in newspapers up and down the Eastern Seaboard. In the letters, Hutchinson said that colonial Americans were owed only a fraction of the rights English citizens could expect. Americans took to the streets to burn effigies of the two men.

On Christmas Day in 1773 none other than Benjamin Franklin copped to being the source of the leak, a sort of colonial Julian Assange. He lost his job as deputy Postmaster General of North America, but things accelerated quickly toward revolution and war, raising the stakes for secret communications even higher. Soon, similarly compromising documents emerged from the offices of colonial governors in New York, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina--duly stolen and leaked to newspapers.

During the Revolutionary War, American leaders had “an informal and amateur approach to espionage,” says Georgini. Some relied on dictionary codes. George Washington, a code enthusiast himself, used an invisible-ink formula devised by John Jay to communicate with the members of his spy cell, the Culper Ring, in British-controlled New York City. “If deciphered, the British could identify the senders, arrest them, and hang them,” says Alexander Rose, the author of the book Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring (now a TV series, Turn: Washington’s Spies).

Even after the war was finished, Washington remained suspicious of sending letters by mail. “By passing through the Post offices [my sentiments] should become known to all the world,” he complained in a 1788 letter to Marquis de Lafayette.

As the newly formed United States entered the world of diplomacy, invisible ink and book codes were no longer going to cut it. Forced to hold its own against sophisticated European players, American cryptography evolved in tandem with U.S. diplomacy, explains Georgini. Its foreign ministers communicated in a riot of different secret methods, and the deluge of codes and ciphers sailing across the Atlantic was a chaotic assemblage of individualized systems. The diplomatic corps in Europe generally relied on variations of the clunky, medieval-era nomenclator system, which saw statesmen lugging around long code lists, where hundreds or thousands of words and syllables--from “a” to “Amsterdam” or “Aaron Burr”--were reassigned as combinations of digits. Still, it is estimated that more than half of all U.S. foreign correspondence ended up in British hands.

Back on U.S. soil, domestic surveillance was still a major concern heading into the 19th century. “The infidelities of the post office and the circumstances of the times are against my writing fully & freely,” Jefferson concluded in 1798, when he was vice president. His concern, says James McClure, the general editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Princeton, “was the opposition getting a hold of something he wrote: They would put it in the newspapers and use it against him.” But even writing in code was not a failsafe. Jefferson understood that the popular nomenclator system was vulnerable to security breaches; all it took was a code list falling into the enemy’s possession. So he decided to go a step further. “Jefferson got interested in encipherment systems that didn’t rely on lists,” says McClure.

Sometime in the 1790s, Jefferson designed a “wheel cipher,” which was “so far ahead of its time, and so much in the spirit of the later inventions, that it deserves to be classed with them,” writes David Kahn in his seminal cryptography book, The Codebreakers. Jefferson’s device, which included 36 turning wooden wheels with the letters of the alphabet marked on their edges, was remarkably similar to a device the U.S. Army adopted more than a century later, in 1922.

“Had the President recommended his own system to Secretary of State James Madison, he would have endowed his country with a method of secret communication that would almost certainly have withstood any cryptanalytic attack of those days,” Kahn writes. “Instead he appears to have filed and forgotten it.”

Many of the other methods that Jefferson was most enthusiastic about, such as the “perfect cypher,” designed for him by the mathematician Robert Patterson, just never caught on. As with privacy-minded people trying to get their friends to use PGP keys today, sometimes the newfangled inventions felt like too much trouble. Jefferson’s U.S. minister in Paris, Robert Livingston, simply refused to use Patterson’s complicated transposition cipher--where plaintext is reordered and transformed--while negotiating the Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson developed a specialized non-list cipher to be used by Meriwether Lewis for his expedition into the Louisiana territory that hinged on the keywords “antipodes” and “artichoke.” Lewis did not appear to share the president’s enthusiasm, or was just too tired from crossing the continent on boat, foot, and horseback. He never ended up using it.

The best method of keeping encrypted messages completely secure appears to have been losing or destroying the translation key. To this day, scholars are still working to piece together decoded passages in diplomatic letters from the revolutionary generation. “There are at least three codes for which no key has been found,” says McClure.

A couple of years ago, a cryptographer at Princeton finally managed to crack Patterson’s supposedly “indecipherable” code. It turns out, an encoded block of text that Patterson sent to Jefferson in 1801 as an example of an unbreakable code was the Declaration of Independence.

#Thomas Jefferson #founding father and cryptography #cryptography and Jefferson

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lhight-eng68-monweds-645to850 · 8 years ago

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ENGLISH 68: PREPARATION FOR COLLEGE WRITING

Mount San Antonio College, Walnut, CA

CRN # 43378

Spring Semester 2017

Mondays & Wednesdays

6:45 pm to 8:50 pm, Rm. 3881, Bldg. 26A

Instructor: Lisa Hight

[email protected] OR

[email protected]

Office Hours: Mondays & Wednesdays from 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm

Office Location: English Dept. - Bldg. 26D, Room 1471

Tumblr Page: https://lhight-eng68-monweds-645to850.tumblr.com/

Course Objective

Analysis: breaking down a whole element (an idea, concept, object, process, etc.) into several parts, and examining how those corresponding parts reinforce and make up the whole element.

Required Reading

50 Essays (4th Edition); editor: Samuel Cohen; publisher: Bedford St. Martin’s

I will also provide essays and/or stories that are not published in the textbook.

Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs)

By the end of the semester, the student should be able to complete the following requirements.

Expository Essay. In response to one or more assigned texts, students will write an expository essay.

Sentence Writing. Students will be able to punctuate a variety of sentence types.

Grading Policy

Essay #1 = 15%

Essay #2 = 15%

Essay #3 = 15%

Essay #4 = 15%

Essay #5 = 15%

Final = 15%

Homework= 5%

Class Particip. = 5%

Total = 100%

Grade Range for Individual Essays

15% - 13.5% = A

13.4% - 13.3% = A-

13.2% - 12.9% = B+

12.8% - 12% = B

11.9% - 11.4% = C+

11.3% - 10.5% = C

10.4% - 9% = D

8.9% - 0% = F

Final Grade Breakdown

The final grade scale is calculated as follows:

100% - 89% = A

88% - 79% = B

78% - 69% = C

68% - 59% = D

58% - 0% = F

Attendance

Attendance is crucial, and you need to attend every class (unless you have a medical emergency or other difficult circumstances). In addition, I will drop any student who has accumulated more than four absences before the 5/4/2017 drop deadline. Please note: if I drop you or if you drop the class after 3/12/2017, you will receive a “W” on your record. All students who are still enrolled after the last drop deadline (5/4) will receive a letter grade. Please note as well: if a student is enrolled in this class and does not show up for the first two days of class, he or she will be dropped from the class. If I do add any students, I will first add students who are on the roster's wait list. If there are any open slots on the roster list after I have added any students from the wait list, then I will add any other students according to registration date. If you are not enrolled or on the wait list and you want to add, then you must provide proof that you are eligible to take ENG 68.

If you miss any classes and assignments, it is your responsibility to get the necessary information from another classmate. In order to make this policy easier on everyone, I will be passing out a sign-up sheet that will ask for your email address. This will then be typed up and passed out to the entire class. If you are uncomfortable about giving out such information to the entire class, you must choose one or two classmates and exchange any contact information with them. I want every student to be able to contact someone from the class in case of any absences.

Due Dates for Essays and Homework

Late Homework: please see me about late homework assignments. I usually accept late homework if you speak with me.

If you do not turn in any drafts, you will receive 0% points for that essay assignment.

Plagiarism Policy

Cell Phone Policy

Grading Criteria

In order for you to understand my criteria, I will outline my grading policy below:

F grade: the writing fails on all aspects.

CLASS SCHEDULE (SPRING 2017)

Week 1 (2/27 – 3/1): introduction to class; introduction to symbolism and deeper meaning

Week 2 (3/6 – 3/8): more on symbolism and deeper meaning; mechanics: dependent clauses and proper comma usage; Friday (3/10) is the last day to add the class using an add code and is the last day to drop the class with a refund; Sunday (3/12) is the last day you can drop the class without incurring any penalties such as a “W”.

Reading Assignment: “Feet in Smoke” by John Jeremiah Sullivan (pages 399 – 406 in 50 Essays)

Week 3 (3/13 – 3/15): essay structure (intro & conclusion)

Reading Assignment: “Safe” by Cherylene Lee (hand-out)

Week 4 (3/20 – 3/22): introduction to theme and thematic analysis; review of symbolism and deeper meaning; more on dependent clauses & writing with complexity; the rough draft for Essay #1 (analyzing symbols and key lines in “Safe” by Cherylene Lee is due) this week.

Week 5 (3/27 – 3/29): review of essay structure; review of symbolism and deeper meaning; more on thematic analysis

Reading Assignment: “Shooting An Elephant” by George Orwell (pages 295 – 302 in 50 Essays)

Week 6 (4/3 – 4/5): more on theme and thematic analysis; focus on mechanics: correcting run-ons; the revision of Essay #1 (analyzing symbols and key lines in “Safe” by Cherylene Lee) is due this week.

Reading Assignment: “Balto” by T. Coraghessen Boyle (hand-out)

Week 7 (4/10 – 4/12): more on theme and thematic analysis; review of dependent clauses

Week 8 (4/17 – 4/19): introduction to rhetoric: the three appeals; review of theme and thematic analysis; mechanics: sentence variation; the final (and only) draft of Essay #2 (thematic analysis of “Balto” by T. Coraghessen Boyle) is due this week.

Week 9 (4/24 – 4/26): more on the three appeals; introduction to rhetoric: evidence; focus on mechanics: correcting fragments

Film to be viewed: Frontline's “Football High”

Week 10 (5/1 – 5/3): more on rhetoric: the three appeals and evidence; review of dependent clauses and proper comma usage; review of essay structure; Friday (5/4) is the last day you can drop the class (you will receive a “W” on your record).

Film to be viewed: Frontline's “The Vaccine War”

Week 11 (5/8 – 5/10): more on rhetoric; Essay #3 (rhetorical analysis of Frontline's “The Vaccine War”) is scheduled for this week—please note: Essay #3 will be an in-class essay.

Reading Assignment: “Why Bother?” by Michael Pollan (pages 312 – 320 in 50 Essays)

Week 12 (5/15 – 5/17): analyzing the rhetoric in an essay (readings to be determined); review of colons, semi-colons, and other punctuation

“The Siege of Miami” by Elizabeth Kolbert (hand-out)

Week 13 (5/22 – 5/24): analyzing the rhetoric in an essay (readings to be determined); introduction to formulating your own argument; introduction to MLA citation and researching outside sources; the final (and only draft) of Essay #4 (rhetorical analysis of “The Siege of Miami” by Elizabeth Kolbert) is due this week.

Week 14 (5/29 – 5/31): Monday (5/29) is Memorial Day—no class; more on formulating your own argument; more on MLA citation and researching outside sources.

Week 15 (6/5 – 6/7): review of grammar and sentence structure

FINAL EXAM: THE FINAL IS SCHEDULED FOR MONDAY, 6/12, FROM 7:30 PM TO 10:00 PM. Class will not meet on Wednesday. The final (and only draft) of Essay #5 (argumentative essay) is due on Monday (6/12) as well.

0 notes