ASSIGNMENTS

I have placed my copy of the DVD with "Hush" on reserve in the library. You can check it out for an hour and watch it in the library.

December 13, 3:30-5:30 (Wednesday)

Final Exam:

You will be asked to write an essay on Judgement. I will give you specific topic choices at the final. You should anticipate probable topics and prepare for them.

Suggested Preparation:

• Review your exploratory writing and your group’s collage.
• Review what you have learned from the first two assignments—especially the Buffy essay, which is based on a similar source.
• You might want to watch the film again.

Click here for the link to Judgement.

Your final essay will be due at the final. Click here for the instructions.

December 6

1. Since most of you didn't turn in your Buffy essay, completing it should be your first priority. You can turn it in by the end of the week. You will turn in only the final draft.
2. Your last essay will be a revision of the reflective essay you wrote based on the process of writing your song essay. For the revision, you will also discuss your process of writing the Buffy essay. We will discuss this in class on Wednesday.

December 4

Click here for the revision workshop from today's class.

1. If you haven't already, turn in your song essay revision by 2:30 Friday.
2. Keep revising your Buffy essay, making it as good as you can. We will work on some final editing in class. You will have the option of turning it in on Monday so that you can receive it back graded on Wednesday or turning it in later in the week and receiving your grade on it at the final exam.

November 29

1. Read pages 549-563 in The Curious Writer.
2. Make final revisions to your song essay to get it ready to turn in to receive a new grade. Turn in your final draft, the draft that I graded previously, and the higlighted rubric describing the grade levels that I returned with your graded essays. I must have all of these. You can take until about 2:30 Friday to turn in the essay.
3. Revise your Buffy essay--paying particular attention to your use of sources.

November 27

1. Revise your essay using the feedback from the peer review.
2. Write a reflection that describes how you applied the feedback from peer review in revising. Describe the best revision you made.
3. Evaluate your draft and decide what the most important improvement that needs to be made, and then complete the most relevant of the following revision strategies: 14.5, 14.9, 14.15, 14.16, or 14.17. (Only one is required.)
4. Write a reflection that describes your revision, explains why you made the choice of strategies you did, and describes what you think still could be done to make your essay better.
   

• If you send me your best body paragraph, along with your thesis, before 2:00 PM on Tuesday, November 21, I will give you feedback on it by class next Monday.
• If you e-mail to me your thesis and topic sentences before noon on Monday, November 27, I will have some feedback for you by class Monday night.
  To receive the feedback, you must give me exactly what I have asked for.

November 20

1. Revise your Buffy essay, incorporating details based on our discussion and at least one idea from Why Buffy Matters.
2. Write a specifically developed reflection on that revision.
3. Revise your Buffy essay again, focusing on what you think is most important to make your essay as good as you can--ready for peer review. (If you haven't focused on structure--topic sentences and thesis--in a revision, include that as a part of one of these two revisions--or make it a third revision.)
4. Write a specifically developed reflection on that revision.
5. Bring enough copies of the draft for all the members in your group.
   

November 15

1. Revise your song essay, using your new topic sentences.
2. Write a ½ to 1 page reflection on that revision.

3. Revise your Buffy essay, focusing on structure: good topic sentences and thesis; adjust the support appropriately, make notes on what you need to notice when you re-watch the episode/discuss the episode.

4. Write a ½ to 1 page reflection on that revision.

5. Read the chapter from Why Buffy Matters, and mark ideas that you might use in your essay, including anything that is similar to what you have already said.

November 13

1. Finish your collage:

Choose your best passages from your exploratory writing, ones you might want to include in an essay:

• Interesting ideas
• Well-expressed ideas
• Chunks of good details**

Assemble these parts into a collage. You may have a potential thesis in mind, but don’t let it have total control yet. Go with any interesting track your mind has taken you on.

2. Turn the collage into an essay: (First and Second drafts):

1. Write a thesis that reflects what is most fully and interestingly expressed in your collage. Use this thesis to focus a rough draft using the pieces from your collage/exploratory writing. Cut and paste (or type up) the relevant parts of your collage together in a word file—put in necessary transitions and clarifications and print. (You can handwrite this rough draft if you want and type it in Word for Step 3.)
2. Write ½ to 1 page reflection: Describe the process. What is good? What needs to be done to turn this draft into a complete essay?
3. Make revisions to move it more clearly toward a focused essay: Add details, examples if necessary, using relevant invention strategies: listing, fastwriting, brainstorming. Then print.
4. Write a ½ to 1 page reflection: Describe what revisions you made and how you think the draft is going. What needs work?

3. Bring the following to class next time:

• your graded copy of the song essay (highlighted, with grammar corrections),
• your latest revision (if you have completed any revisions),
• your completed topic sentence exercise from 9/25 (if you did it).

4. Over the next couple of weeks, spend some time revising your reflective essay.

November 8

1. Complete the exploratory writing assignment on "Hush." Click here for the assignment.

If you need the handout I gave before we watched the video, with the in-class writing, click here.

Click here for the link to the page where you can read a transcript of the episode.

November 6

No new assignment. It would be a good time to make some revisions on your first essay and save them in anticipation of a revision opportunity later.

Click here for the link to Judgement, the film we watched in class.

November 1

1. Meet in lab again. Prepare for quiz. Sit at a computer away from your group. Log in and be ready to type your quiz response.
2. Read pages 601-606 in your handbook (56b and 56c).
3. Write an Evaluation/Reflection on the finished collage:

• What parts seem good in some way? Which don’t?
• What would have made this exercise work better? What could you have done? What could your peers have done? What could the instructor have done?
• What do you think the point of this exercise was supposed to be?
  

October 30

1. Write about this week's group activity: creating a collage. What was interesting, useful, dumb. Do you think you learned anything from it? Write for about a half hour; produce about a page.
2. Complete your grammar corrections and plan for essay 1 (See #2 below.)

October 25: meet in the lab

1. Revise your exploratory writing. Focus especially on the areas that were identified as best by your group. Before Wednesday’s class, e-mail your exploratory writing to your group members and to me. It needs to be accessible by class time Wednesday.
2. Begin making Grammatical Corrections and a Plan for Learning for next Monday:

1. Look up and correct all of the grammatical errors (marked in red ink) on your essay. Correct these errors on the page where they are marked by crossing out incorrect forms and writing the correction in the space between lines or in the margin. Write the corrections in ink a different color from any I used on your essay.

2. Classify your errors into three groups (note the quantity of each type of error):

• Errors that you understand completely without further practice. These are errors that you won’t repeat.
• Errors that you are pretty sure you can come to understand by practicing.
• Errors that you don’t understand. (Don’t try to correct errors you don’t understand.)

3. Write a plan:

• What actions will you take to be sure that you don’t repeat the first group of errors?
• How will you practice the concepts that you can learn?
• How will you get help with the concepts you don’t understand?
  

October 23

1. Read through Chapter 3 in The Curious Writer. Spend about a half hour. Focus on what is relevant to what we are doing in class right now.
2. You might want to watch Judgement again while you are working on the exploratory writing about it. Use the link above.
3. Click here for the handout that has the assignment.

October 18

There will be no class on October 18, so complete the assignments for October 23 below.

You can click here for a copy of the handout from before break for the assignments for the week of October 16.

October 4

1. Complete the steps in the editing workshop that you didn’t get to during class.
2. Complete Revision Strategies 14.18, 14.20, 14.21, and 14.22 (pages 659-665).

3. Optional: Revision Strategies 14.17 and 14.19. (Ignore the order of information in Step 3 of 14.17).

4. E-mail me with any final questions about this essay. I will be out of town Wednesday through Friday, but will answer e-mails Tuesday and over the weekend.

5. Turn in your essay to be graded by Monday, October 9. Papers turned in after Monday will be reduced one letter grade. Turn in only the final draft of the essay this week. You can turn it in to me in any of the following ways:
   • Turn a printed copy after class Wednesday, if you believe it is ready.
   • Turn in a printed copy to Cheryl McKendree in AD 211. You can give her the essay before 4:30 Thursday or Monday or before 4:00 on Friday. She will be out of her office from 10:00 until about 3:00 on Friday and will be at lunch from 12:30 to 1:30 the other days.
   • Attach the essay to an e-mail and send it to me by Monday midnight. (It must be attached as a Word document or I may not be able to open it.) To be safe, I recommend copying the paper into an e-mail as well as attaching it. Your paper isn’t “turned in” until I can access it.
     
     

October 2

1. Complete the evaluation on page 679 on paper. You will discuss the evaluation with your group.
2. Write a reflection that evaluates your own effort in Tuesday's peer review: What were your contributions to the group? (Be specific.) Did you bring a good draft to the review? Did you stay engaged--listening to what everyone said? What did you do to help the group work together? How could you improve your own contribution to the group in the future? (For this reflection I don't care what you think about how other members did.)
3. Revise your essay. Use any useful advice you received in the peer review.
4. Complete Revision Strategy 14.14 on pages 652-653.
5. When you have completed the revision, write a 10-15 minute reflection.
6. Bring your handbook to class next time.

September 27

1. Complete the evaluation on page 679 in preparation for discussing it with your group before you begin the peer review process.
2. Complete a revision of your essay to be shared in a peer review. Use my comments as a focus for the revision, but make any other revisions you think are appropriate before being critiqued by your peers. Bring enought copies of the draft for each person in your group to have one.
3. When you complete the draft, write a 10-15 minute reflection about your revision and how it went.
4. Read pages 669-681.
5. Before this essay is turned in for a grade (probably Oct. 2), complete the dialectical process you began in the letter you wrote in class on Monday. (Doubt what you agreed with; Believe what you doubted.)

September 25

1. Write topic sentences for all of the body paragraphs in the most recent draft of your essay.

September 20

1. Complete a revision: Spend at least 30 minutes, no more than an hour, of focused effort. Try something creative—explore, experiment. The most important thing about this revision is to break away from any thought that you have to have my feedback before you do anything else.
2. Write a 10-15 minute reflection on that revision (include a specific description of what you did). I will collect these.
3. The other hour that you would usually be spending on work for this class: take a break from everything.
   

September 18

1. Click here for the handout with Thursday's assignment.

• Click here for a copy of two paragraphs transcribed from the Bob Dylan essay.

September 13

1. Revise your essay with a focus of making sure that the reader sees your personal stories as they relate to the song and to your thesis: incorporate specific lyrics and general descriptions of the son. (Click here if you want to listen to the essay about Bob Dylan songs again. It downloads quickly even on my dial-up at home.) Of course, continue to develop your personal stories.
2. Reflection: After completing the new draft, spend about 15 minutes evaluating your revision--What you did (process) and what the result was (product).

3. Read pages 37-54 in The Curious Writer. This will not relate to your current writng task, but you should relate it to our previous discussions and assignments concerning readings.

4. Bring a CD with your song if you want to share it and talk about it for a couple of minutes.

September 11

1. Spend 10-15 minutes reflecting on and evaluating your group discussion. Use the evaluation form on page 679 as a starting point.
2. Revise your essay, continuing to add and develop personal stories. Write the specific stories without worrying about exactly how they might fit in or even whether they will appear in the final draft.
3. Reflection: After completing the draft, write for 15 minutes about your revision:
   • What do you like, not like?
   • What is giving you trouble?
4. Read pages 617-626. (Read with a goal in mind.)
5. Bring a CD with your song if you want to share it and talk about it for a couple of minutes. We should have time for a couple.

September 6

NOTE: To print the handouts referred to below, you will need to click the print icon on "Macromedia Flashpaper" toolbar--second from the right.

1. Click here for the handout with the assignment.
2. Click below for each of the handouts we used in class for exploratory writing. If you want to see a written version of the exercise we did in class, look at page 647 in The Curious Writer.

Brainstorming Questions

Grocery List of Experiences

August 30

1. Write for 5-10 minutes about doubting the information that you agreed with in Chapter 1. (See #4 for August 28 below.) You might also spend a few more minutes writing about believing the information you disagreed with.
2. Complete a Learning Styles Inventory at the website that you will be directed to at the end of this description. Answer the questions quickly; don't study them. Once you have answered all 44, submit your responses, and you will receive your results almost immediately. Print your results. (I will collect these, so you may want to print a second copy for yourself.) You can go to the link to read the descriptions of the different learning styles, or use the copy I handed out in class. Click here to get started.
3. Using your results and the descriptions of learning styles, make a list of new studying/writing ideas to try this semester to take advantage of your learning styles. Try to find one idea for each of your learning styles.
4. Finish reading Chapter 1 in The Curious Writer, and complete the survey on pages 22-24.
5. Reflecting on everything you have done so far in this class, make a list of 3-5 things that you want to learn this semester. (This is the same question I asked you on the first day of class; I hope your answer has evolved!)

August 28

1. Before starting the reading assignment below, begin writing a letter to someone close to you wome you haven't seen in a long time. You won't have to send the letter, so it could even be to someone who has passed away. Write long enough that you feel as though you are actually writing to the person.
2. Read Chapter 1 in The Curious Writer. Read for about two hours--that's time focused on the reading, not just with the book open. After you have spent two hours, you can stop even if you haven't finished the chapter.
3. As you read Chapter 1, mark passages that stimulate your thinking. (If you don't want to mark your book, you can write the passages on paper.)
4. Choose two of the marked passages: one you agree with and one you question or don't agree with. Write each of these passages at the top of a sheet of paper and fast write for 5-7 minutes about why you agree or disagree with the passage. (You can do both of these writings after you finish the reading or you can stop and write as soon as you read a passage that gets you thinking. If you don't fast write, write long enough that you have thoroughly explored your agreement/disagreement.)

August 23

Write an essay about how a particular song has been meaningful to you. Spend about two hours. The essay should be approximately 500 words.

August 21

First day of class: show up on time with your books and writing tools.