Summarizing

Tuesday's class revolved, or at least was supposed to revolve before internet service failed, around the summary assessment, i.e. the perfect summary that incorporates the seven qualities of summation and provides strong mechanics. 

Summary Assessment Steps:

1. Head to Inside Higher Ed, a compilation of articles, blogs, and information regarding collegiate issues : https://www.insidehighered.com/

2. Select an article from the website that you would like to read and use for your summary assessment. The article should be at least 5 paragraphs. Each student will need a different essay.If you were absent, you will need to select an essay that has not been utilized by another student.

 These are the essays already selected that absent students will not be able to select:

• Poverty & Merit
• Historians as Futurists
• A Sense of Duty: Campus Safety & Veteran Students
• Do Students with Guns Save Lives?
• Bias Against Female Instructors
• Debate Over Debt
• Graded on Looks
• The Adjunct: Solution
• Putting Foreign Student Firsts

3. Write the perfect summary -- either as a Google document to share or a typed/handwritten hard copy. This is due by 10:45 a.m. on Wednesday. Absent students have an additional 24 hours -- Thursday at 10:45 a.m. to sign up for the essay and turn in by this deadline.

To end class was the vocab quiz covering the first 10 words. If absent, you will need to make an appointment before or after school to make up the quiz. We also copied down the next 11 words, which we will start on Wednesday. 

More Summation

A little enumeration for today's agenda...

1. Finish our vocab experts for this first round. Review on Monday and Mini Quiz on Tuesday.

2. Learn the qualities of a strong summary and use these to revise Sperber summary.

3. Read, annotate, and discuss Adjunct article.

For homework, write a summary for the Adjunct article. 

Annotating

For today's class, we discussed the techniques and purpose of annotating and how "marking up" your readings help comprehension, perpetuate questions, prepare for discussions, and aid in future studies. Homework this evening is to write a summary on the article for class analysis and revision tomorrow.

E-mails

Thank you for putting up with the sick version of me today. During today's class, we looked over the five elements that are needed in professional e-mails. These elements include the greeting, the introduction, the body, the closing, and the subject line. Your assessment will include 3 e-mails to me on any of these subjects: absence, questions on assignment(s), turning in work, setting up a meeting, clarification on policy/information/etc. These 3 e-mails are due by 11:05 a.m. on Thursday. Feel free to finish this assignment during class.

Advanced Composition Semester 2

Welcome to Advanced Composition! This class will help you fine tune your organization, content, originality, and mechanics in order to make you collegiate writers. I look forward to helping you improve your writing over the course of semester.

During today's class, we had a little chat time to break the ice, then we looked at the class syllabus, which you should keep nearby for any necessary information over the course of the semester. In addition, you were assigned our first group of vocabulary words from Lesson 1: words 1-11. For your assigned word, you will become an expert by sharing the definition, at least 2 synonyms (preferable not the ones given in the vocab book), and a memory trick. Examples of memory tricks are as follows:

• brackish = big rack of fish
• gumption = Forrest Gump
• lachrymose = lac "cry" mose

We will start vocab experts tomorrow, so make sure you have your expert work ready to share.

During our last moments, we looked at faulty e-mails from students to professors. During tomorrow's class, we will continue looking at poor and more successful e-mails and you will be writing your own for your first assessment.

Remember, this blog is to help you with the class -- whether to refresh your memory, review class content, or catch up after an absence.

Essay & Final Review

As noted in class, make sure that you are not using apostrophes, remaining in third person, formatting citations correctly, maintaining the same tense in a paragraph, and varying up verb selections by using more active verbs.

We are almost finished with the review for the final. During tomorrow's class, we will look at punctuation and grammar to prep for those components.

Only four days left of this class! I am thankful for your attention in Advanced Composition, your spirit to learn grammar and writing, and your participation in the random conversations that somehow hijack our class on a regular basis.

Final Format

Monday's class will be about your first drafts and a few items that you can do to edit your essays to a higher level. Tuesday's class will be the official review day, an review that was shared with you on Friday.

To give you a picture of the final, here are the components for evaluation.
1. A grammar edit of a paragraph. For this this grammar work, you will only make corrections to better the writing.
2. A punctuation edit for a paragraph. For this punctuation work, you will add and delete punctuation marks.
3. Given a broad topic, you will construct 1-2 paragraph writings for descriptive, narrative, and compare/contrast writing. For instance, on a former final, the topic was vacations. To prepare for this portion of the final, review the components of each writing style so that you can write about the same topic in three different modes.
4. Rhetorical terms. This will include the knowledge of the six rhetorical strategies that we studied in class (tone, diction, syntax, logos, ethos, pathos) and the differentiation of syntax types.
5. You will be given a text and will perform a rhetorical analysis that is not longer than 3 paragraphs.
6. You will define and construct examples of the six stages of argumentation (claim, evidence, warrant, counterclaim, rebuttal, conclusion).
7. For the same text from number 5, you will write a summary.

As you can see, you do not have to write an essay, but you will be utilizing all of the writing techniques to construct paragraphs that represent your understanding of the class.