Today’s class is a lesson on “Intros and Conclusions”  (from Amy Guptil’s Writing in College). Here’s our activity: 

First, look at the paragraph beginning “Throughout time….” in pairs. Highlight and annotate in Hypothes.is what you notice the writer doing well, and where you might ask for more specifics. Think of this as a peer edit.

Then, look at the paragraph beginning “Religion is an Endeavor” in the same pairs. Again, highlight and annotate using Hypothes.is what you see the writer doing well and what questions you’d pose as a peer editor.

Back in the main room, we’ll talk about some differences between what Guptil calls “the five-paragraph theme” and the “organically-structured thesis.” There’s more on this elsewhere in her textbook. 

After this, we’ll look in groups of 4-5 at two more introductory paragraphs from more advanced student essays (from students who have declared majors, I think): “Abelard” and “Staphylococcus aureus”

“Abelard”: What in this intro’s 1st sentence is “substantial?” How are its next sentences “indispensable”? How/is the thesis “surprising”?

Independent work: Now you try! Using these principles—making sentences substantial, indispensable, & surprising—compose an introductory paragraph of your own. I’d suggest composing these in the same Docs where you were working on Tuesday activities, so that you can draw on your prior work more easily.

(If you want, play around with pastiche — an imitation of the writer’s sentences, right down to their word choice, syntax, sentence structure, paragraph organization, etc).

If time: We’ll do the same activity (probably a shortened version of it) with the section on conclusions

Today’s lesson closes the circle on my Zoom-thwarted images lesson. After that, we’ll do a little practice with linking out, another blog post “basic” we could do some work with.

We’ll practice by linking out to each other’s work. These don’t need full citations for the moment. Hopefully by the end of class we’ll have moved on to open-internet sources or library sources from outside out class community. All that is positioning us for next week’s work getting ready for Essay 3.

Here’s the basic timetable for the rest of the month (this is basically the same as the syllabus but a little more detailed):

• T, Nov 16: “Work Day”: Come ready to produce an outline for Essay 3 in Google Docs. The prompts are basically the same as the ones in the post for Class 16. I’ve also updated the Assignment Sheet page for Essay 3 You’ll mainly work in groups with others who have read the same book. For this week, the blog post (your last one!) is due on Thursday (though you can get it done early).
• H, Nov 18: Blog posts due; portfolio work in class; sourcework assignment
• T, Nov 23: Peer Editing Day, Essay 3
• H, Nov 25: THANKSGIVING
• T, Nov 30: Essay 3 due to Google Forms. You’ll publish it to your portfolio once I return it with comments.

Good morning, all. I’ll apologize at the outset for being a little tired this morning.

I’m going to have us spend some time looking at blog posts, and some time thinking about the structure of those posts, probably in pairs. Then I’ll put you in big groups before we come back to the main and turn toward a little task I’ll ask you to do between this week and next: an outline of the kind of essay you might be writing for Nov 22/29.

First, a little talk on the “basics” of blog posts. Last week we looked at titles, and this week’s are much better! So I’m going to walk you through (on the Chalkboard) some aspects of images: their purpose for readers; resources for writers; and conventions around their use.

After that, we’ll pair up to look at posts. That’ll kind of be an audible, for better or worse, so buckle up.

Then, on to big book groups for the balance of class.

Heavy posts

• “The Challenges of Early Adulthood,” by Rosalio
• “Self Worth,” by Yingrong
• “Real Change,” by Luis
• “Set Ups and Failure,” by Ashley
• “Heavy Part Two: A New Passion,”* and “Heavy Part One: Grandma’s Duty”* by Peter 
• “The Reality,”** by Diana H
• “Am I a Sellout?”** by Demetrios

Ordinary Girls posts

• “The Feeling of Home is like a Boomerang,” by Megan
• “The Pride of Survival,” by Zoe
• “Invisibility,”* and “Life in Puerto Rico”* by Ashanti

Fairest posts

• “Fairest: Social Norms,” by Yaminah
• “Gender Expectations Suck,” by Kevin

As always, we’ll start with reactions: What big questions are emerging from this section of the book? What small details, phrases, and sentences help you dig into them?

* From an earlier section of the book

** Posted mostly on time but after I made the chalkboard list of blog posts last week.

We’ll start class with a freewrite–an actually free one–in which you review your notes on today’s pages. Some guiding questions: What passages are still interesting to you after Tuesday’s work? What did the replies you posted generate in terms of new questions and reactions? What’s proving true about your reading experience based on what you thought you might have when you picked the book? About book clubs? In short, where do you want to start today in your book clubs? Write until 9:45.

After you talk in groups for a while, we’ll approach two topics in mini-lessons. One is using personal experience as evidence. The other is something I call “thinking in circles.” It’s something some of you are doing naturally, and that all of us will do as we start moving slowly towards Essay 4 and the portfolio.

***

Like I said in class Tuesday. I do want to introduce a little “series” of lessons we’ll run for the balance of book clubs. One is about “the basics” of blog posts and how we can use some “features” of that genre to focus our ideas more. Those features are the ones I use to see if your posts are “complete”: title, tags, images/links, quotes, and citations. We started this Tuesday with titles (THANKS ROSALIO!)

Now for a little “next step” lesson. These, again, will be a secret series of little lectures that will run through book clubs, and they’ll basically be about ways to take blog posts and other informal genres of writing to the next level up. (Note: there are a ton of levels.) Today we’ll be talking about using personal experience in an academic essay. I’m sure this is a topic that will come up again.

Here are the instructions for a thing I had to write. (I’m getting a PhD in English, blah).

I go on for about a page or so–you can read the whole thing here if you’re so inclined–before dropping in the personal experience.

Note that this paragraph functions the same way an argumentative paragraph normally does. There’s a claim at the outset — “knowing” is suspicious to me, which you’d think wouldn’t the case for a “scholar.” But it is, because of a range of personal experience all related to disability, embodiment, etc. That evidence is organized using patterns (all those parentheses). Then, the key term — “knowing” — appears again (with italics just for overkill). The reputable source of another more senior scholar in a relevant field (in this case, disability studies) is cited and quoted. Audience gets engaged (prodded, really) with the “we?” and then a very different source, a postmodernist creative writer, is cited defining the very act I’m engaged in from a non-scholarly point of view. So by the numbers, we have one key term mentioned at the beginning, middle, and end; a single personal example in three parts; and two quotes from divergent sources developing that idea. The “I” is present at the outset and the end; importantly (“now”) there is a change over time. That’s crucial for any evidence you want to prove using story.

We’re going to work on replies to blog posts today. The handout we’ll be using includes all the posts that were up by this morning. If any more come in, it’d be great to have folks comment on them as well.

In class, we’ll work in big groups focused on your books. We’ll look at passages from the first section of the books you’ve read, and start thinking about the kinds of issues that are emerging.

*

Some of the passages that we looked at focused on the grandmothers (Diaz 51, Talusan 24) and the way the offer care or don’t. Other people in caretaking roles, like Laymon’s mother, grandmother, and Renata (24), also came up.

Among the topics we discussed were

• the beauty standard and how it’s shaped by race and racism and colonization;
• the impact of such standards on individuals, even within affected communities (ie: colorism; one student’s comment about hair shaping their relationship to a racial identity in ways that were hard)
• the coping mechanisms of people in dysfunctional systems, including when to “draw a line,” and the role of social science in understanding that

For Tuesday, read the next section — pages are on the Chalkboard Doc and the syllabus. As you read, think about the stages in life these writers are going through. Are they becoming more independent? What kinds of choices do they have and what do they decide to do? What larger social forces do we see at play in these pages? What connections can we make to earlier parts of the book? To other texts?

Hello & good to see all of you on campus again.

Think of today as “Day 0” of our book clubs. We’re going to do a little work in what I’m calling “stations.” Each of these gets us going on the kind of work that will be typical for Module 3 (book clubs proper) and Module 4 (reflective writing and portfolio making).

To that end, I’ll have you cycle through class today in three stations. At the start of class, I’ll describe them and ask you which station you’d like to start at. Each person will go through each station, ideally.

For descriptions of the stations and the list of who will start there, see today’s entry in the “Chalkboard” Doc.