Clarification

Hi, everyone.

I just want to make sure people are clear about certain expectations regarding the submission of written work.

Unless you've made other arrangements, written work is expected at the beginning of class on the day it is due.  In exceptional circumstances, professors will sometimes accept an emailed copy as a placeholder until a hard copy can be delivered.  These circumstances include sudden illness or other emergency; excuses like running out of printer ink or file compatibility problems will not be accepted by most professors.

When an electronic copy of an assignment is submitted in lieu of a hard copy, a student should: 1) Submit the electronic version by the assigned due date, and 2) Deliver the hard copy as soon as possible.

I've been pretty lenient so far about deadlines, and I'm afraid I'm giving some people the wrong idea about what other professors will expect.  Now that I've made this clarification, I'm going to be a bit more strict about accepting late work.

Let me know if you have any questions.  See you tomorrow.

PS: Please don't forget to arrive at least five minutes early for your scheduled conference.

Target Commercial Article

For October 29, please follow the link below, watch the video, and read the article.  Think about what the author's thesis is and the evidence he uses to support it.  Do you agree with this thesis?  Why or why not?  Be prepared to discuss the essay in class.  A quiz is possible.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/scocca/archive/2010/10/19/target-despises-homemade-halloween-costumes.aspx

ESSAY II ASSIGNMENT--PERSUASION

For this assignment, each member of the class will write an essay based on the same hypothetical situation.  Please imagine the following scenario:

You work for a corporation that owns several amusement parks.  Last week, you were sent to Ferretland--a ferret-themed amusement park in Zanesville, Ohio, which has been losing money for years.  The purpose of your visit was to inspect the park and decide whether it should remain open.  Zanesville residents are against closing the park because it has been a Zanesville landmark for over 85 years, and because the closing would cost the city over one hundred jobs.  You interviewed dozens of employees and local residents and found many of their stories very moving.  Upon completing the inspection, however, you determine that the park is riddled with problems that will make it next to impossible to keep open.  These problems include: 1) the buildings and grounds are very old and in need of costly repairs, 2) the rides have been poorly maintained and their operators are not very well-trained, 3) the ferret theme does not generate enough interest to draw people to the park.

Your assignment is to write your report to your bosses, detailing a specific course of action.  The bosses expect you make a final decision on the fate of the park, and provide reasons to support this decision.  You will need to invent the details you use to support your conclusion.

Remember to use the skills we've discussed in the class so far: strive to write clear sentences, and well-developed paragraphs that provide focused support for the essay's thesis.  Your essay should also demonstrate awareness of your rhetorical situation; your language, tone, and examples should be appropriate for your purpose and audience.  You may choose to acknowledge and refute any counterarguments.

Length should be between 800 and 1000 words.  Although a real business report would not be formatted according to MLA guidelines, please use MLA for this assignment.  

This essay is due on Friday, October 29.  Please post any questions about the assignment in the comments field.

Have fun!

Pleasure Reading Assignment

Here's this week's online assignment.

As I've said many times, extensive reading (it doesn't matter what, at first) is one of the best ways to become a more effective writer.  In fact, I'll go as far as saying you can't become an effective writer without extensive reading.  This assignment, then, is intended to help you discover and experiment with material you might like to read for pleasure.

The assignment is this: Find something to read that might interest you.  This might be a novel, a short story, a magazine article, some poems, a biography, a non-fiction book--anything at all that you wouldn't otherwise be reading.  You don't need to finish an entire book, but pick something substantial enough to spend a minimum of an hour reading.  (If you choose a book, hopefully you'll finish later on your own.)

Once you finish about an hour's worth of reading, write a paragraph length (200 words or so) introduction for the rest of the class to read.  Your purpose is provide a quick overview of the work that will help others in the class determine whether they might be interested in reading the work themselves.

In addition, your paragraph should utilize the skills we've been discussing in class.

• It should be focused and use detailed examples to support its claims.
• It should include the work's title and author (remember we refer to authors by last name).
• It should maintain consistency of verb tense (we'll talk about a possible exception to this in class).
• It should follow all other guidelines for grammar, mechanics, and punctuation we covered in class so far.
• Most importantly, your introduction should do more than summarize.  A fair amount of summary will be required, of course, but your paragraph's primary purpose is to make and support some claim about the work (e.g. it was easy to read, it was gory, it was funny, it gave me nightmares, it might be confusing to someone who knows little about fishing, etc).

Please publish your paragraph to the comments area of this post.  This is not an academic research paper, so there is no need to follow MLA format guidelines from your handbook (in fact, I don't think blogger will let you).  As long as you mention the work's author and title, there is no need for citations.  Please post any questions about this assignment in the comments field as well.  Also, feel free to post questions and comments about each other's posts.

Pick something fun, and have fun writing about it.

REMINDER

When submitting your revision tomorrow, you should give me the following:

1. The copy of your first draft with my comments on it.

2. A clean copy of your revised draft.

3. The completed worksheet you received from a classmate.

If anyone has any last minute questions about the revision, please post them in the comments field of this post.  I'll check back a few times throughout the day.  Good luck.

See you tomorrow.

jf

Online Discussion for Week of 10/4

Please read the poem "Hands" by Jean Sprackland, posted here last week.  I'd like for us to look at it in the same way we looked at "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio."

For starters, let's make sure we're clear on the poem's basics: Who is speaking to us and where is she speaking to us from?  I'll give you a hint: she is in a specific location at the beginning of a poem and it causes her to remember an event from earlier in her life.  At the moment, I'm interested in the starting place.  Where is she?

Here's a mostly unrelated question: The author's first name, Jean, could be a man's name or a woman's, but the speaker of the poem is surely a woman.  How do we know?

Please respond in the comments section of THIS POST (not the comments section of the post containing the poem).  Thanks.  I look forward to what you've got to say.

"Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio"

Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio

by James Wright 

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

Link to poem: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15590

Hands

by Jean Sprackland

She peels cod fillets off the slab,
dips them in batter, drops them
one by one into the storm of hot fat.
I watch her scrubbed hands,
elegant at the work,

and think of the hands of the midwife
stroking wet hair from my face as I sobbed and cursed,
calling me sweetheart and wheeling in more gas,
hauling out at last my slippery fish of a son.
He was all silence and milky blue. She took him away
and brought him back breathing,
wrapped in a white sheet. By then
I loved her like my own mother.

I stand here speechless in the steam and banter,
as she makes hospital corners of my hot paper parcel.

Link to poem: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2007/07/09/070709po_poem_sprackland#ixzz117D7Hha6