Only Daughter Pronouns

Today was focused on the narrative sampling "Only Daughter" and theme, time, character, dialogue, and imagery. After gaining a little participation points, we moved onto pronouns and reviewed subjective/objective differentiation including who/whom and the lack of apostrophes in possessive pronouns.

Second Month of the 2016

The time is moving fast on this school year. As a result, we are diving into our second mode of discourse: narrative writing. After sharing dialogue and guessing age and gender of your characters, we completed a mini vocab quiz and copied down the next 10 words. For the last part of class, we read "Coming to an Awareness of Language" by Malcolm X and identified the key components of narrative: theme, time, character, dialogue, and imagery.

Dialoguing

After a brief question & answer regarding your descriptive essays -- remember the deadline is Monday at 12: 45 p.m. -- we finished the last three vocabulary words of unit 2/3. The mini verbal quiz over those 10 words will be on Monday. Resuming activity, we looked at common verb issues with subject verb agreement and split infinitives. To add in something new, we discussed the five elements of narrative writing: theme, imagery, character, time, and dialogue. And with that, we started our dialogue activity, in which you are to create a dialogue with other "character" without directly revealing your age or gender. We shall continue on Monday...

Verbage

While it may seem like an insignificant part of the speech hierarchy, verbs create tone, specificity, and descriptive elements in writing. As noted in class, "to be" verbs engender passivity and reflect less mature writing. By using more engaging verbage, you writing takes on a distinct level. For instance, the difference between marched and trudged indicates the mood of the characters. When writing, always pay attention to your verbs.

For the descriptive writing assessment, you will complete a final draft of your family description. The deadline for this assignment = Monday @ 2:40 p.m. Hard copy only. If absent for the day's entirety, send/share your essay by the deadline and bring in a hard copy the next day.

Nounage

Our beginning was in the field of the vernacular and adding four vocabulary words to your mature diction. Our middle was reviewing noun rule issues including capitalization, plurals, and possessives. Remember, apostrophe usage or lack thereof may cause massive distractions in your writing. Apostrophes are for possessives and contractions; these are not used for plural nouns (desk's) or verbs (raise's). Our ending was focused on descriptive body paragraphs, the structure, and the accumulation of details that create a full picture of a person. Remember, similes, metaphors, personification, alliteration, and other forms of figurative language assist in creating a memorable description. That tea kettle analogy is still my favorite!

During tomorrow's class, we will work on concluding paragraphs and verb usage.

Time for Essays!

After working on e-mails, summaries, and descriptive work, we are graduating to full blown essay writing for the remainder of the course. First up is the mighty introduction, a paragraph with a great deal of responsibility on its shoulders. An introduction requires a hook to engage the audience, to set your essay apart from other writings, and to exhibit your writing prowess. Once the hook is in place, you need a transitional element -- phrase, sentence, multiple sentences -- to set up the ending better known as a thesis statement. A thesis may be a map (look - here are my three body paragraph topics in order) or an overall statement that will be clarified throughout the essay. At the end of class, you began the process of composing an introduction for a family-based essay.

Other items of note were copying down the next 10 vocabulary words, which we will start tomorrow, and completing our grammar prep. We will start rules and practices tomorrow -- with nouns.

Mystery Description

Today began with a review of vocabulary -- you will have a pen and paper quiz tomorrow.

After partner reading and discussion of your subjective/objective paragraphs, you wrote a description of a celebrity without revealing his/her name. For the most part, your classmates did very well with guessing the celebrity.

For homework, you have a few items to do:
1. Review for quiz
2. Prep grammar terms
3. Select 3 relatives and write a descriptive paragraph for each one. The purpose is to describe your relative -- physicality, behavior, and so on -- to an audience without any ethos on your family.