Category Archives: assignments

Assignments – Week #5

assignments

1. Congratulations on completing your first “formal” essay of the semester!  Before we move on, please take 30 minutes to compose a “Dear Reader/Dear Writer” letter to reflect on the experience of crafting your Personal Narrative.  You can think about it as a letter to me, or to some anonymous reader, or as a letter to yourself, the author.  When you have completed your letter, please name the file (in a way that will make sense to you and to me), and place it in the Google Drive folder that holds your finished essay.  Please share your essay with me by Monday, March 1st.

In your letter, you may want to address the following questions.  They are meant as suggestions, so don’t feel like you need to respond to all of them.  Be sure to compose your letter in paragraphs.

–What were you trying to accomplish with this essay?

–What went particularly well in this process?

–What aspects of the process were a struggle?

–How did the peer review process go?  What did I learn from reviewing my partners’ essays? What was it like to get and give feedback?

–Identify one line or one detail from your essay that you feel particularly proud of.  What do you love about it?

–What do you wish you had done differently during this essay writing process?

–What did you learn about yourself through this process?

–What else do you want your reader to know?

 

2. Continue to work on the “I Recommend Eating….” essay you began on Wednesday.  You can find your work HERE.  Your completed essay should be approx. 500 words.  Remember that this piece is an opportunity to be playful and exploratory.   Let curiosity be your guide.  What’s in your chosen food? Where does it come from? Who invented it? How did it find its way to you? What does it look like?  How/where/when did you first encounter it?  How does it figure into your story, your life, your identity, your routine???  Be creative!  Please share your finished piece on the blog together with an accompanying image (again, feel free to select whatever seems right to you!) by Friday, March 5th.

 

3.  This week we will be discussing David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster.”  Please read the essay (which you can find under the “Texts” tab), and come to class on Monday, March 1st  ready to discuss it.  As part of your preparation for Monday’s class, once you have read the essay, please add two selected passages and two discussion questions  to a group “NOTES” document that we will use to guide our discussion.  You can find that document HERE.

Assignments – Week #4

assignments, essays

Our focus this week is on your Personal Narratives.  By the time you read this, you should have received some feedback from the members of your writing group via the peer review process and should be turning your attention to the REVISION process.  Please keep in mind that REVISION  is not the same thing as EDITING or PROOFREADING.

REVISION is the process of rethinking and reshaping both the structure and the content of your essay.  As you gain greater clarity about what it is that you really want to say, you will often find that you need to eliminate large chunks of your original draft, create new material to respond to important questions that have arisen, and reorganize the essay in order to make it more effective.  Very often, when we begin drafting an essay, we are focussed on meeting the length requirement and on simply unlocking our creative energy by getting our writing going; this usually means focussing less on content, style, and structure and more on simply getting our thoughts down on the page.  When we revise, we take a step back from our draft, review the goals and purpose of this writing project, and use this as an opportunity to refocus and refine our plan.  In short, revision (which literally means “seeing anew” focuses on the big picture of our essay’s ideas and execution.

EDITING is the process of making our writing as effective as possible.  It is during the editing process that we turn our attention to word choice, sentence structure, tone, and other elements that might fall under the loose category of “style.”  Here too we might find ourselves moving things around in our essay in order to make our paragraphs more effective.   A great strategy to employ during this stage of the process is reading aloud.  When we read our work aloud, we can hear awkwardness, errors, and stylistic issues that our eyes simply don’t catch.   Through the editing process, your writing should get brighter, sharper, and clearer.

PROOFREADING is the last step that you take before submitting work to your professor, before pressing send on an email, or printing an important document.  During the proofreading process, we look for typos, spelling errors, spacing problems and anything else that might detract from the polished quality of our finished work or distract our reader.  It is often really useful to swap papers with an eagle-eyed friend for the proofreading process.  Sometimes we have a hard time spotting our own errors.  Do NOT rely on spell-check to find all your errors for you.

On Monday, February 22nd, you will be meeting with me in your Writing Groups according to the schedule listed below.  Additionally, you should be connecting with your Writing Groups without me in order to go over the feedback from the Peer Review, get additional advice, and formulate your next steps.  Your group should decide how it would like to meet.  (Some options are Slack, group chat, facetime, or Zoom.  I am happy to schedule and host zoom meetings for you.)

11:30 – 12:00  Group 1: Geselle, Kaylen, Abdu

12:00 – 12:30  Group 2: Samantha, Gianni, Nicole

12:30 – 1:00  Group 3: Melanie, Mokhitobon, Sydney

1:00 – 1:30  Group 4: Lorraine, Danna, Brian

1:30 – 2:00 Group 5: Destiny, Lelani, Mindy

To prepare for your conference, please do the following:

  • Read your peer review feedback carefully and connect with your partners if you need further clarification.
  • Begin your revision process (as described above) and be prepared to discuss it on Monday.
  • Add an update to the #essays channel in our Slack workspace in which you share one piece of particularly helpful feedback that you received about your draft and describe how you will be addressing it through your revision.  You can also use this update as an opportunity to share whatever aspects of the process you are having difficulty with.  Keep an eye on this channel, and respond to your classmates’ updates where you think you can be helpful or encouraging. (If you still haven’t joined our class’s Slack workspace, go to the “Technology” tab at the top of the blog.  You can find a link for Slack in the information posted there.)

For Wednesday, February 24th:  Please read Sam Anderson’s essay “I Recommend Eating Chips” which you can find on the blog under the “Texts” tab.  Before class, please post to the blog:

–One word you had to look up from Anderson’s essay, together with its definition.

–A line that made you LOL or at least smile.

–If you were assigned an essay like this – a love letter to a particular food or eating experience, what would it be? Why?

For Thursday, February 25th:. Your essays are due by midnight.  As I explained in the essay assignment, you will create a folder with your name plus English 2150 in its title and share the folder with me.  Add your finished version of the essay to the folder.

Chang-Rae Lee, “Coming Home Again”

assignments

Please respond to any two of the following questions about “Coming Home Again.”  Your responses should be posted by Thursday, February 18th.  Compose your answers in complete sentences, and where appropriate, use specific examples from the text to illustrate your response.  Your responses can be shared as “comments” on this post.

1.What meaning does cooking take on for the author during his mother’s illness?

2. Choose a line in the essay that you find particularly moving or illuminating.  What makes it so effective?

3. What role do food and cooking play in the life of the mother?

4. How does Chang-Rae Lee handle time in this essay?  Give an example to illustrate your response.

5. What important things do we and/or the narrator learn about his mother through this essay?

6.  How do you understand the meaning of the essay’s title, “Coming Home Again”?

7. Was there anything in Lee’s essay that resonated for you personally? How might you connect your own experience to the one that Lee explores here?

8. What is the significance of the final story Lee reflects on in this essay about his parents’ dropping him off at boarding school as a teenager?

 

 

Assignments – Week #3

assignments

— Remember that we will NOT be having our regular class on Monday, Feb.15th.  The college is closed in honor of Presidents’ Day.

–Your most important work this week is drafting your Personal Narratives.  Your drafts should be shared with me via Google Docs by midnight on Tuesday, Feb. 16th.

— I will be available on Friday and Monday afternoons for those of you who want to meet with me to discuss your essay.  If you would like to make an appointment with me, please either message me on slack or email me at [email protected].

–By Sunday, February 14th, please post a “progress report” to the channel #essays in our Slack workspace.  Your progress report should include the following:

I am writing about ______________________________.

So far I have ___________________________________.

My next steps are ______________________________.

I’m most concerned about ___________________________.

–In a separate post, I have shared some questions about Chang-Rae Lee’s essay, “Coming Home Again.”  Please respond to any two questions by Thursday, February 18th.

Assignments – Week #2

assignments

–Please read Gabrielle Hamilton’s essay “Killing Dinner” before class on Monday.  You can find her essay under the “Texts” tab at the top of the blog.

-Before our class on Monday, February 8th,  please share a post on the blog in which you do the following:

  • Identify and define one word from Hamilton’s essay that you had to look up.
  • Copy one passage from the essay that struck you as important or interesting.  This could be a single sentence or a group of sentences.  Provide your analysis of this passage.  This might include addressing the author’s stylistic choices ( word choice, figurative language, imagery, etc…), thinking about how she has chosen to organize this essay, and reflecting on the meaning and implication of the passage you’ve chosen.  What questions do you have about the passage you’ve selected?
  • Offer one discussion question that you’d like to raise about this essay.

–Please read your classmates’  “food memories” posted to the blog.  Select three posts you’d like to respond to.  For each, write a response that acknowledges two or three things that you particularly liked about their post,  shares a thought or experience of your own that connects to the one the author has described, and asks two questions that might help the author develop the piece more fully or think about it in a different way.  Your comments should be posted by Friday, February 12th.

–For Wednesday, February 10th, please read Chang-Rae Lee’s “Coming Home Again,” and have the text available to you during our zoom session at 12:30.