What are your paragraphs doing, anyway? (30 min)

Last class, we looked at an information literacy narrative that had a pattern of using anecdotes and reflection to build a story of a changing mindset about something before landing on a conclusion about what they learned. They also did a good job building narrative tension in their storytelling.

They accomplish this by having paragraphs doing either mostly storytelling or mostly reflection in ways that help build toward an argument of some kind about what they learned from analyzing their personal experience. The arrangement of these moves contributed to an engaging and coherent story that was told.

Do you do something like that, too? Something different? What would you say is the logic in the way you organize your information literacy narrative draft?

Just like last class, I’m going to ask you to label each paragraph of a draft, but this time I want you to do it for your in-progress draft that is due tonight (if you already turned it in, do this for your complete draft—you can email it to me later if you’d like to revise it again).

Take 10 minutes to do this. Give each paragraph a word, phrase, or sentence that explains the function of the paragraph. That is, what it is doing.

After you complete your labeling, finish by writing one sentence that explains what the story of change is that emerges from that organization of paragraphs. Just like the draft we saw on Thursday, October 6, that paper had paragraphs focus on and do specific things that contribute to telling a story of change.

After doing this labeling and writing your sentence, you are going to partner with someone to explain your labels + sentence and then get feedback from your partner about your strategy in organization. Each of you should come up with, together, one strength of the organization strategy and one possible area for revision for your drafts.

Information-as-pattern and an argument for information (30-45 min)

Definition. In groups of 3, in half the class: Go back to the reading. Find every moment where the author, you think, is defining or contributing to a definition of “information as pattern.” Do your best here and it’s okay if you don’t fully understand things—however, you must have evidence from the text to link to any claims you are making about what you think Love’s definition is here.

Proposal. In groups of 3, in the other half of class: Go back to the reading. Find every moment where you think the author is making a case for the best way information should be circulated, processed, consumed, etc. Do your best here and it’s okay if you don’t fully understand things—however, you must have evidence from the text to link to any claims you are making about what you think Love’s proposal is here.

Write notes like “page 2, paragraph 3” and then circle or highlight something or write a note about what is going on in relation to either information as pattern or the proposal of the way things should be.

Once you mark these moments, start to talk about what you found as a group to come to a synthesis of a definition or proposal.

After 10 minutes of this, take 5 minutes to summarize your findings to be ready to share them with a counterpart group. Make sure someone writes this down.

Take 10 minutes in combined groups to share findings.

I’m going to go around to each group and ask them to share their definition and proposal for about 10 more minutes to save in a Google Doc. This will be important! As we will talk about on October 13, you’ll need to use this text (and others) to do some analysis work in your next paper.

Fun Sentences! (20 min)

A few classes ago, we started to talk about style, mostly in terms of sentence types and length. However, there is more to style than those two things (e.g., word choice, punctuation, repetition, figurative language like metaphor). Choose your fighter! Pick your favorite sentence and explain why in terms of the way the sentence is ordered or structured, the word choice used, the punctuation used, how repetition is used effectively, or the use of metaphor (or other figurative language you know about).

Candidates:

1. “While their comments might come from a loving or protective place, some words land in the wrong place.”
2. “My mom tells her to be quiet and calm down but she spends most of the day sleeping and at night she has all of her energy to waste. She ends up playing with her but Sash makes her way around to everyone in the house so they play with her. Walks right into my room to do that same thing and then to my sister’s room.”
3. “Winter break took my obsession to a whole new level. 10 days, no homework, just relaxing. Throughout the semester, I was pretty consistent with the material; I took notes and did homework with the same pace as the rest of the class. However, I felt as if I was going too slow. I wanted to progress faster and learn more. In fact, I did. Throughout winter break, I decided to watch and take notes on every single lesson video my teacher posted. After doing that, I felt I attained a certain mastery in the course, although some of the topics seemed a bit unclear to me.”
4. “Gaming gets me through life–being a young kid always sitting in front of the tv playing games. Whether it’s from me playing on my computer or my phone, it is always there to let me have fun with friends or to pass the time.”
5. “What do my five feet and seven inches have compared to the 1,046 feet of a Chrysler building? Or the 1,250 feet of the Empire State Building, 1,131 feet of The Edge?”
6. “A student saw me with the fake shoes during recess and pointed them out. My heart pounded in fear as every student laughed at me because my shoes were fake. To stop being made fun of, every time I went to get something for school, I had to clarify to my best friend from middle school whether I should buy them or not; he provided me with information that would help better my clothing.”
7. “But it wasn’t until I traveled outside the country where I had to revoke my coffee diploma.” and “What I mean by specialty drink is a drink that is more for the glamor, a drink that is “instagramable.”
8. “Making use of the materials in an innovative way for the reliefs was tricky enough, but we also had the pleasure of incorporating not one, but two architectural periods.”
9. “Whether it was the TikTok algorithm forcing astrology on me or my nature to find ways to learn more about myself and relate to things, I was obsessed.”

Take a sentence from your draft. Change it! Use what you liked in your favorite sentence above and revise a sentence to do something similar. When ready, put it up on those Google Doc. It’s okay if it is a little rough! It’s a first draft. Let’s try some stuff out. If nothing else, I want you all to walk out of this class ready to try some new things in your writing.

Learning Community Ideas (5 min)

Make sure you fill out this survey!

I think we will have to put this off again. But. Part of the idea behind Learning Community sections is that it gets you all to go out in to the city and connect the city to your own learning. A few people in the survey mentioned possibly doing things other than attending the lecture on memory and the senses or going to Antigone.

I think I want to open up to things beyond these two, but I think they are good ones to do. On October 13, we will talk more about creating a prompt for a writing assignment and presentation guidelines for our November event where we will talk more about what we are learning about information finding, evaluating, and using as thinkers and writers.

Next Time (2-5 min)

• Complete your Information Literacy Narrative Draft + Cover Letter by 11:59pm tonight.
• For Thursday, October 13 by 9:55am: read Carillo and Horning
• For Thursday, October 13 by 9:55am: make at least 5 annotations on Carillo and Horning
• For Thursday, October 13 by 11:59pm: update your Labor Log
• For Thursday, October 13 by 11:59pm: write your Journal Post