Project #2 Groups

Here are the groups I have determined for Project #2.  If you feel that you will not work well with someone in your group, please let me know by Monday (Oct. 1) so that I can rearrange.

1. Aubrey, Ally, JD, and Allison Shenk
2. Quinn, Aaron, and Wesley
3. Greg, Megan, Gina, and Abby
4. Maia, Taylor, and Peter
5. Allison Sharpe, George, and Michael

Sample Cover Letter

My essay is looking at the conversation of coordinating conjunctions. Many students are taught growing up that coordinating conjunctions are not suppose to be used at the beginning of a sentence. Later in their schooling students then learn that in fact coordinating conjunctions can be used at the beginning of a sentence. The purpose of my paper is to argue that students should be taught at a younger age the rules of coordinating conjunctions. My paper also reflects the teaching methods used to teach coordinating conjunctions and how they can be improved.

I thought this paper would be effective because the coordinating conjunction rule is one that I had learned growing up and I thought would be interesting to explore. I organized my paper into different sub categories. A situation a lot of students can relate to, the rules students are taught, breaking the rules students are taught, the teaching methods, and how they could be improved.  I think the teaching part is the strongest part of the paper.  I think the breaking the rules is the weakest. I would like my peers to comment honestly; about the organization, things that don’t make since, and things they thought were most effective. I would also like suggestions about editing mistakes.

While writing this paper I’ve learned a lot about my own writing process. Since this was the first paper that I’ve written without strict five paragraph essay guidelines I struggled at first to get ideas, I rearranged ideas, quotes, and whole paragraphs at times during the revising stage. When I was in the middle of writing I found a direction I wanted to continue with so I had to go research some more. The whole process was a lot freer roaming than high school papers. Before I would research write and then edit, with this paper it’s taken a lot more going back, rethinking, rewriting, and researching.  I have a better respect for writing after this paper.

Assignments: Week 6

Monday, October 1

READ:

• Chapter 3 Introduction, "Literacies:  How Have You Become the Reader and Writer You Are Today?" (p. 328)
• Brandt, "Sponsors of Literacy" (p. 331)

DUE:

• Reading response to Brandt:  
• 1 "Before you read" exercise  
• summary of article (please include audience)
• synthesis connecting to at least two other articles we have read
• dialectical notebook with a minimum of 5 quotations (please type the entire quotation)
• Meta Moment (p.352)
• Your thoughts:  try to connect to your own experience
• Bring a hard copy of your Works Cited page from Project #1
• PEER REVIEW
• Follow the directions for Peer Review as outlined on the assignment sheet
• Write a cover letter addressing what you thought worked well in the paper and what you had concerns about.  Again, follow assignment guidelines.

• NOTE:  You will want to turn on Track Changes under the Review tab in Word before you begin making comments.
• Partners:  email your essay and cover letter to your partner.  If you do not receive the email from your partner containing the essay, please let me know by midnight Friday, September 28.
1. Aaron and Allison Shenk
2. Aubrey and Megan
3. Gina and Micheal
4. Wesley and Greg
5. Allison Sharpe and Ally
6. George and Peter
7. JD and Maia
8. Quinn to Taylor; Taylor to Abby; Abby to Quinn
• Your Peer Review is due to be returned to the original author before the beginning of class on Monday, October 1
• When you email the Peer Review draft back, CC me (your instructor)

Wednesday, October 3

READ:

• bell hooks, "Writing Autobiography" ROW (p. 117)
• Malcolm X, "Learning to Read" WAW (p. 353)
• Sherman Alexie, "The Joy of Reading and Writing:  Superman and Me" WAW (p. 362)

DUE:

• do 1 "Before you read" exercise from either Malcolm X or Alexie
• Dialectical notebook for both Malcolm X and Alexie with at least 6 quotations (please include the full quotation)
• hooks (posted on Blackboard) 
• do 1 "Before you read" exercise
• summarize
• synthesize with at least 3 other authors
• dialectical notebook (minimum of 4 full quotations)
• answer AE 5 from the apparatus
• your thoughts
• Post personal literacy narrative (should be at least 300 words.  can be a "shitty" rough draft)

HANDOUT AND DISCUSSION GROUP: Malcolm X and Sherman Alexie (responsible for 40 minutes discussion and 2 handouts) (responsible for personal literacy narrative, not for the reading response)

• Gina
• Aubrey
• JD
• Taylor 
• Allison  

Friday, 5 October

READ:  Dennis Baron, "From Pencils to Pixels:  The Stages of Literacy Technologies" WAW (p. 422)

DUE:

• Baron
• 1 "Before you read" exercise
• Summary
• Synthesis (connect with at least 2 other authors; try to be thorough)
• Dialectical notebook (with at least 5 full quotations)
• QD 1
• Your thoughts
• Project #1 Final Essay due with Cover Letter for Instructor
• turn in via SafeAssign on Blackboard
• due by 5 p.m.
• any hand written materials used in your process that I have not seen should either be turned in during class or scanned and emailed

an image guide to posting your rough draft

After you log on to Blackboard,
go here:

then here:

third:

next:

and finally, post.

The following image is what it should look like when you go back to look at your report.  Please remember that SafeAssign does not have a lot of the authors or articles we are working with in the database and that we are not submitting works to the database.  We are using SafeAssign as a tool.  If you have cited your sources correctly, any highlighted areas should either be in quotation marks, from your Works Cited, or be fairly common phrases.

Turning in Project #1 for PEER Review

First, you need to do a cover letter.  Please do not forget.

Directions:

When you turn in your projects both for peer review and for my feedback (you must revise to reflect changes you made based on peer feedback), you will need to include a reflective cover letter that

• briefly states the main purpose you wanted to accomplish with the paper
• explains why you thought your project would be effective (the version for me also needs to explain what changes you made after peer feedback and why, and if you did not make recommended changes, why not;
• discusses what parts of your project you think are working well and which parts you think could be better, as well as anything you would like your peers to make sure to comment on; 
• reflects on what you think you’ve learned about writing (what it is, how it works, your own relationship to it) and attempts to articulate your developing theory of writing based in that reflection.

You need to make sure that your COVER LETTER, your DRAFT, and your WORKS CITED are all in one document before you submit to SafeAssign on Blackboard.

On Blackboard, go the the ASSIGNMENTS section.  Select the PROJECT #1 folder.  Click on VIEW/COMPLETE under "Project #1 Peer Review Draft," and submit your paper.

I look forward to looking at what you turn in.

PLEASE DO THIS...

I did not collect your practice peer reviews in class today.  Please EMAIL them to me at yb240212@ohio.edu.

Thanks

Synthesis activity

Here are the pictures for what we did in class this morning when we synthesized the readings so far.

AND...

We should do more of these as we read.

Peer Response

For Wednesday, you will need to read a sample essay (posted on Blackboard) and do a practice peer review.  The essay does not have a cover letter, so you can skip reading that.  What you do need to do, as per the instruction handout, follows:

1. Read through the entire essay once, 
1. highlighting sentences or paragraphs in yellow (or writing a squiggly line beneath them if you are reading a hard copy) that you found confusing in any way and 
2. highlighting in blue (or underlining with a straight line) any sentences or paragraphs that you think are really good.
2. Without looking back at the cover letter, summarize what you understood to be the essay’s main point and supporting reasons (try to do this without speculating about what you think the main point was supposed to be).
3. Go back over the essay and comment in the margin where you find each of the criteria from the “What I am looking for” section of the relevant assignment sheet.
4. At the end of the essay, note any elements you found missing.
5. Comment on any major problems you see with the essay, focusing on giving suggestions for what might make the essay more successful. 
6. Write a cover letter to the author in which you describe your experience reading the essay, starting by noting the things you think are working well, preferably by stating “I like the way the essay….” Give your assessment of how well the current essay meets the expectations of the assignment and how it is appropriate for the writing situation; note how well the essay has included the elements I will be looking for and which, if any, seem to be missing or inadequate; and discuss any other major problems you think are important and for which you can give suggestions. Make sure to take your audience, and her or his feelings, into consideration as you make choices about how you write your peer response; try to write the way you hope those who respond to your writing will write to you (or would want if you were a particularly sensitive person—just in case anyone likes blunt feedback).

Also keep the following from the assignment about what I will be looking for in essays in mind:

• An engaging introduction that introduces a problem relevant to a writing construct and suggests something new that your paper will say about it.

• A synthesis (grouping individual authors by their similarities and summarizing their common perspectives in relation to other groups) of what writing studies scholars have said about this problem/issue in the past.

• An indication of a problem, issue, gap, or need in the conversation that provides a niche for you to add something different.

• A well supported, but nuanced, argument that makes an original claim about the issue, states reasons that should appeal to readers of Young Scholars in Writing, and supported with evidence commonly accepted as valid by writing scholars.

• Fair and thorough discussion of alternative views and possible objections to your claim.

• Discussion of the implications of your conclusions for the larger ecology

• An organizational structure that connects the disparate parts of your paper together in a way that adds to the persuasiveness of your argument

• Language appropriate to the writing ecology including incorporation of the various writing studies terms we become familiar with in the course

• Appropriate citation of all source material and a complete list of all sources.

The author of this essay is unknown.  You may want to make up a name when you write out your cover letter.  Remember that the author is responsible for editing and formatting.  Please do not correct either of these.  I recommend that you give no more than three recommendations for changing the essay and that you keep your comments moderate--don't let them take over.  You may also want to identity the parts of the essay--introduction, summary of the conversation, synthesis of the conversation, statement of argument or niche, and conclusion--along with intended audience.

If you have any questions or problems, please let me know. 

Assignments: September 24 through 28

Monday, September 24

READ:

• WAW: Dawkins, "Teaching Punctuation as a Rhetorical Tool" (p. 139)
• ROW: Bryson, "Good English and Bad" (p. 61)

DUE:

• Dawkins:  
• One "Before You Read" activity
• Reading response, including summary of article, synthesis with at least 2 other articles, dialectical notebook for the article, answer QD 5 (p. 154) and MM (p. 155), and give your thought on the article and how you related to it
• Bryson:  (apparatus is on Blackboard) -- posted late.  do as soon as you find time.
• One "Before You Read" activity
• Reading response, including summary of article, synthesis with at least 2 other articles, dialectical notebook for the article, and give your thought on the article and how you related to it
• Project #1 in progress report:  write a 1-2 paragraph post (200 word minimum) about 
• where you are in you project
• what you have done so far
• what you plan to do
• how workshop went for you and how you would improve it

Wednesday, September 26

READ:  Sample research paper posted on Blackboard

DUE:  Peer review of the sample paper (bring hard copy to class)

Thursday, September 27

DUE:  Project #1 for Peer Edit.  Submit on Blackboard through SafeAssign by 8 p.m.

• This should be a complete draft, not something that you just threw out.  
• Remember to do some final editing.  Take time to read through your draft to check for any changes that you want to make before submitting it for peer review.
• Remember to include a Cover Letter.  See the assignment sheet for guidance.

Friday, September 28

READ:  Project #2 Assignment Sheet

Remember Scott McCloud...

Remember the TED talk with Scott McCloud?  He talked about how we could use technology to display and explore a continuous image.  I just looked at today's xkcd comic.  You should take a look.  Remember to click and drag on the large panel.

Beyond the Red Ink

You need to watch this video before class on Friday.

My Construct

I am not sure how aware you all are that I do the same or similar assignment to the ones that I assign you.  This means that I am reading the same articles and responding to them, plus some more for the class I am taking.  I am also working on Project #1.  My Topic Proposal details what I want to approach:

• I would like to explore how pronoun usage defines the writer's relationship with his or her audience.  I am unsure if any research has been done in this area.  But I often feel that when pronoun antecedents are clear, readers have a better understanding of their relationship to the work they are reading.  I think of Michael Moore, in particular, when I discuss pronouns in freshman English classes.  Michael Moore tend to run heavy in his usage of "you" as a general referral to his audience and as a way to connect to the audience members, but this general second person pronoun can also be recognized as limiting his audience to, possibly, those individuals with lower education levels.  The other reason I like (and ask for) clear pronoun antecedents is to help encourage a more academic tone in my students' writing.  I would like to see if any research exists on this topic and, hopefully, solidify my position on this issue.

As I have researched this topic, I have started looking at author identity, author persona, audience, and personal or first person pronouns.  I have found the following authors useful so far:

• Roz Ivanic
• Karinne W. Gordon
• Enrique Lafuente Millán
• Amy Burgess
• Nigel Harwood
• Ken Hyland
• Paul Kei Matsuda
• Christine M. Tardy
• Kate Pantelides 
• Mariaelena Bartesaghi
• Ramona Tang
• Suganthi John
• Bronwyn T. Williams

My first Introduction and Synthesis looked follows.  I tried two different approaches to the introduction because I was not sure how I wanted to connect with my audience.  Did I want to be conversational and funny, or did I want to come across as a professional academic?  The professional academic is the more standard voice for the discourse community, so I also wrote the synthesis in that tone.

Conversational/Funny Introduction:

• I will start at the beginning:  You, a middle or high school student, wake up at a desk.  Perhaps the situation is wrong because you should not be sleeping in class, or perhaps you are Scott Bakula in Quantum Leap and you have just jumped into this body teaming with adolescent hormones.  At any rate, your English teacher is elaborating on the proper use of personal pronouns and how you are now allowed to use "I," "me," "us," "we," and "you" in your essays as long as you are fairly clear as to the antecedents (a word you do not understand because you were sleeping) of the pronouns because you will (1) sound more authoritative in your essays, (2) connect better with your intended audience, and (3) at the very least and if you do a good job of producing a five paragraph essay, you will get a high score on the essay portion of the SAT you are planning to take next month.  However, your teacher fails to mention that academics across the academy, that scientists, and that even businessmen use personal pronouns in their writing fairly frequently and still manage to sound educated and professional. 

Professional Academic Introduction and Synthesis:

• Writers who have a sense of their identity/persona as writers, who have a familiarity of the writing that occurs in their genre or field, and who use personal pronouns intentionally within their writing do so as a means to connect with their intended audiences.   They demonstrate that a well-placed personal pronoun can sound authoritative, can be academic or professional, and can enable a conversational engagement of a reader.  Interestingly enough, intentional overuse of personal pronouns with the intent to connect in a conversational manner with a nonacademic audience can also be an effective devise and can be just as authoritative.
• The resultant problems of academic writers choosing to employ personal pronouns have much to do with education and intent.  To begin solving problems in education, especially those problems resulting from the (rescinding) complete ban of personal pronouns in secondary education, Karinne W. Gordon, in "Personal Voice in Academic Writing," advocates that "one of the best ways to help students develop an academic writing style that is forceful, direct, and honest, is to teach them how to use personal pronouns judiciously as they learn to develop their natural voice and accept ownership for the content of their writing" (44).  That educators should take the time to develop young authorial identities/personas within students and help them learn how to effectively use personal pronouns in not necessarily a well-liked idea because doing so causes extra work for educators.  However, developing students as writers who identify with their authorial identities/personas and who know how to use personal pronouns well will not only allow them to succeed on the written portion of the SAT, it will help them shift easily into Ivanic's three definitions of self—autobiographical self, discoursal self, and self as author—wherein during the time students spend in post secondary education, they will be refining their authorial identities/personas instead of beginning to form them.
• The instance of personal pronoun use that occurs for the most part in higher levels of post secondary education, in academia, and in other fields where authorial identities/personas are well formed and easily adapted to fit the conversation and that is not always intended as an engagement of the audience on friendly terms is the use of personal pronouns to market oneself, to stake a claim on the information or argument presented, and to forcefully insert oneself as an authority.  However, in some fields, this stake claiming is necessary:  "The adoption of a competent identity or persona is instrumental in order to make an article persuasive and this is partly achieved through the use of self-mention markers such as first person pronouns and self-citation (Hyland, 2001), inasmuch as they allow writers to emphasize their own contribution to the field and to gain credibility in the eyes of their peer readers" (Millán 37).  This type of self-insertion and self-mention, as an example, is evident in Roz Ivanic's Writing and Identity:  The Discoursal Construction of Identity in Academic Writing, which is her Ph.D. dissertation and in which she specifically uses personal pronouns in the introduction to engage and sway the reader.  Later, Ivanic mentions other research she has conducted and published, which, as Millán observes, is how becoming recognized in a sometimes crowded academia occurs.

I am in the process of revising my approach and my topic.  I am looking at how students writers gain authority and how they use personal pronouns to do so.  I do think that personal pronouns are an important part of obtaining identity as a writer.  I think that they also help new academic writers begin to understand how writing is a conversation and how to connect to audience through specific word choices, like personal pronouns.

I wanted to share.  This assignment can be a struggle.  Please let me know if you need help.

Announcements

1)  I fixed the apparatus for Bernhardt on Blackboard
2)  I posted the Argument Breakdown worksheet on Blackboard under the Assignments tab
3)  We talked about intertextuality today.  You might take a moment to watch the videos on the Everything Is a Remix website.  You might have to go through a couple of pages of blog to find the videos.  I found 3 on the bottom of the second page.  Just keep pushing the older button at the bottom of the page.

Assignments: September 17,19, and 21

Monday, September 17

READ:  WAW: Porter, "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community" (p. 86)

DUE:  

• New Response Format:  include summary, synthesis, dialectical notebook on the article, your thoughts on the article as a whole
• Remember to comment on your partner's reading response

Reading Response Partners:

1. Michael and JD
2. Wesley and Aubrey
3. Taylor and Ally
4. Quinn and Peter
5. Gina and George
6. Allison Sharpe and Megan
7. Allison Shenk and Greg
8. Abby and Aaron
9. Maia (respond to the blog of your choice)

Wednesday, September 19

READ:  ROW: Bernhardt, "Seeing the Text" (p. 35)

DUE:  (apparatus is posted on Blackboard)  

• Complete one "Before You Read" Activity
• Follow New Response Format (above)
• Answer the "After You Read" question 
• Comment on your partner's reading response

Reading Response Partners:

1. Michael (respond to the blog of your choice)
2. Wesley and JD
3. Taylor and Aubrey
4. Quinn and Ally
5. Gina and Peter
6. Allison Sharpe and George
7. Allison Shenk and Megan
8. Abby and Greg
9. Maia and Aaron

Friday, September 21

WATCH:  Beyond the Red Ink (posted on Blackboard or watch in a later post)

DUE:  Project #1 Introduction and Synthesis:  Introduce your topic and attempt to synthesize the conversation and the sources you have researched.  Try to come up with your niche or argument.  Bring 3 copies to class.  We will workshop this day.