The Final Essay Assignment

During today's class, you received the argumentative research essay assignment. After selecting a casebook from our class textbook, you began the research process by reading and taking notes regarding four related essays. We will continue this tomorrow during class and will move to the library for additional research starting December 2.

Argumentation Steps

When we return from break, you will be assigned your final essay assessment: the argumentative research essay. To give you an example on how to organize your essay, albeit an abridged one, you worked in groups to do the following items:
1. brainstorm several possible claims (you want to have options for research)
2. select your working claim (this may be changed, but you want to have a direction)
3. list all examples of evidence
4. group "like" evidence together
5. construct a warrant for each evidence grouping
6. write a counterclaim or select one from the brainstormed claims
7. provide evidence supporting the counterclaim
8. use a rebuttal with additional evidence supporting the original claim
9. construct a concluding statement

As you can see, there are many elements to an argumentative essay, and you will use the nine steps above to construct your essay.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Honey Boo Boo

No better way to review claim, evidence, and warrant and learn about counterclaim and rebuttal than using Honey Boo Boo as a topic. Remember, a counterclaim is another position that you could make regrading the given topic and you can add evidence to support it. It is not the opposite of the claim. A rebuttal is the opportunity to explain why the original claim is stronger than the counterclaim. It is not to show how the counterclaim is wrong.

For homework, annotate the articles regarding the women in the military. We will work on building a full argument in a group environment tomorrow.

Argumentation Half Review

As we start our last unit, we need to review the components of argumentation. For today's class, those components were the claim, evidence, and warrants. Remember, a claim meets this criteria: not obvious, engaging, specific, logical, debatable, and hypotactic. Evidence can be facts, statistics, historical documentation, expert opinion, and person anecdote. Warrants are the analysis, or the connection, between the claim and evidence. In math, it would look something like this: claim + evidence = warrants.

Next week will be the other parts of argumentation.

Rhetorical Assessment

What an impressive array of rhetorical analysis today! Each group analyzed the required logos, ethos, pathos, diction, tone, and syntax with specific evidence and explanation of purpose. However, what made these presentations impressive was the introductory measures to gain the audience's attention, the natural transitions from one speaker to another, the little dashes of extra strategies to further analysis (such as the parallelism examples), and the ability to communicate with mature, specific, measured diction.

I am so proud of all of you for utilizing your preparation time to construct such intelligent, engaging presentations. On Friday, we begin our last unit: argumentation.

Rhetorical Analysis Presentation Prep

After the official assignment, you were assigned a group to complete rhetorical analysis of the Meryl Streep Commencement Speech to Barnard College. During tomorrow's class, you will have the first hour for prep time and the last half hour for presentations.

Eponine, Food, & Meryl

After much technical difficulty, we began class by watching the performance of "On My Own" from Les Miserables. As we noted, Samantha Barks adjusts the tone of the repetitive phrase "I love him" to show the character's lugubrious melancholy and eventual bittersweet hopefulness.

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Next, we read an essay on food and identified how the author uses ethos, pathos, and logos to create his purpose. Pay attention to when persuasive appeals are used in a text and why the author is directing this particular order for the audience.

During the last half of class, we began the rhetorical analysis assessment -- a verbal group presentation. The text for this assignment is the commencement address at Barnard by Meryl Streep. I have a copy of the transcript for your annotations, but you may watch and listen to her speech at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-a8QXUAe2g .

In class tomorrow, we will go over evaluation expectations and components for a successful presentation. You will also be split into two groups and utilize the remainder of the hour to assign individual assignments and how the presentation will be.

On My Own

Our hour concentrated on the tone map of "On My Own" from Les Miserables. Partnerships created a tone map on construction paper and then wrote a paragraph detailing one pattern from the map and analyzing why the author uses this pattern. If you were absent, you are expected to complete this activity solo.

Logos, ethos, pathos will be the start of next week.

Tone Mappage

Today we witnessed "desperate" circles of pain, "seductive" winks, and "dreamy" detentions. No, this was not a soap opera; it was our group tone identification skits. Team positive, team negative, and team neutral dazzled us with words and actions befitting their chosen tone words.

From there, we transferred our tone analysis to the written word by reading "Siren Song" and creating a class tone map on the board. Remember, a tone map begins with identifying the shifts of a given text, identifying each section with a specific tone word, indicating two words as the range, and then plotting the points on the map.

At the end of our abbreviated hour, we began "On My Own," in which you identified its tone shifts. During Friday's class, you will create a partner tone map and its additional analysis.

Team Diction and Tone

To wrap up our mini diction unit, you worked in groups to construct a team essay on Emerson's "Education."

For the second half of the agenda, we played with tone and how we can identify varying tones verbally. For next class, we will continue with this step when you "perform" your conversations and your classmates guess your specific tones. Then, we will move into the written word with tone shifts and tone maps.

Diction Rhetorical Analysis

To begin class, partnerships shared their diction analysis of the assigned reading for Emerson's "Education." I used too many prepositional phrases in that last sentence, but I accept and acknowledge the fault.

Then, students were assigned groups to make a team essay answering this prompt: How does Emerson use diction to reflect his purpose? Students should have a draft of their individual assignment, i.e. paragraph, for the start of class tomorrow.

*If you were absent, you will be need to write a paragraph on your own answering the above prompt. While this paragraph should be detailed and quite lengthy with evidence, do not feel that you need to analyze all of the diction present in the text. Select a specific type or pattern and concentrate on that for the paragraph. You are creating, in essence, a strong body paragraph.

Diction

After an impromptu writing time, we began work on our next element for rhetorical analysis: diction. Utilizing quotes and paragraphs, we broke down the usage of diction via patterns, shifts, repetition, and parallelism. The key to analyzing diction is look at each word or phrase and magnify its significance to the text as a whole.

Your syntax essay is due on Monday.

Syntax Evaluations

During today's class, you self-evaluated your syntax essays by focusing on the following essentials:

• Providing an original, related hook
• Incorporating the author and title into the introduction
• Answering the prompt in the thesis
• Constructing paragraphs with topic sentences and concluding sentences
• Specifying types of syntax (simple, complex, interrogative, exclamatory)
• Adding evidence from the text with a citation
• Explaining the "why" for every syntax example
• Writing a memorable concluding paragraph
• Writing in present tense
• Writing in third person
• Writing clean, detail-oriented essays

The final draft of the essay will be due on Monday. Tomorrow, we will have a brief question session for you. Then, we will be moving onto diction analysis. 

Syntax Prompt

After reviewing syntactical patterns in "Superman & Me," you were given the rest of the hour to complete a 3-4 paragraph mini essay on the following prompt: How does Sherman Alexie use syntax to reflect his purpose in "Superman & Me"? For class tomorrow, bring in a hard copy, which we will be using for self-evaluation purposes.