Assignment for Tuesday [Friday section due on 12/7]

By now you've spent a significant time thinking about the state of Ferretland, and you should be coming to some sort of conclusion about the park's fate.  For Tuesday's class, please bring an informal outline that details your decision and provides the major reasons for this decision.  Your outline should answer the following questions:

1. What should the corporation do about Ferretland?  Close it?  Keep it open?  Some other solution?
2. Why is this the best course of action?  What reasons can you provide to support your decision?
3.  What are the strongest counterarguments to your decision?  Who will make them, and what reasons will they give to support them?
4.  How can you refute these counterarguments?  What reasons can you provide that will demonstrate that these counterarguments do not represent the best course of action?

Please bring this to class on Tuesday.  Let me know if you have any questions.

Assignment for Thursday (Friday section can disregard this post.)

During Tuesday's class, we discussed the wide range of places, people, and policies that an executive might observe while conducting an evaluation of Ferretland.  These include (but are definitely not limited to) the following:

• rides
• bathrooms
• sections of the park
• educational and other exhibits
• parking
• games 
• food
• prices
• employees
• bosses
• customers management
• civilians
• inspectors
• police
• rules
• policies
• uniforms
• prices
• training
• discipline
• pay

For Thursday's class, please do some brainstorming or freewriting to discover as much information about the park as possible.  Imagine that you are an employee of the park who has worked there for at least ten years.  What might you say about the park?  What stories can you tell?  What is your job?  What is the best and worst part of your job?  What does the park do well?  What would you change to improve the park?

The purpose of this assignment is to discover details about the park that you might use in your essay.  We will refer to this during Thursday's class, so please come prepared.  (Note: people absent on Tuesday are still responsible for this assignment).

Please email me if you have any questions.

Final Exam Review Terms

Although the final exam may include any concept we covered this quarter, I intend to focus on the following: 

I: Sentence level issues

            A. Commas

                        1. Separating items in a series

                        2. With coordinating conjunctions to form compound sentences

                        3. After introductory elements

                        4. With nonrestrictive elements

                        5. Comma splices

                        6. Fused sentences (run-ons)           

           

            B. Semicolons

                        1. To join independent clauses

                        2. To separate a series of items already containing commas

            C. Apostrophes

                        1. To indicate possession

                        2. With conjunctions

            D. Using punctuation with quotation marks

                        1. Placement of periods, commas, and question marks

                        2. Using ellipses to indicate omissions

                        3. Using square brackets to indicate changes

            E. Manuscript format           

            F.  Title format

                        1. Italics, underlining, quotation marks, capitalization

            G.  Pronouns

1. Unclear reference
2. Agreement 

            H.   Usage: its/it's, every day/everyday, affect/effect
             I.    Documentation/sources

1. You may be provided with information from an outside source and be asked to correctly document it using MLA guidelines. 
2. You may be asked about locating, evaluating, and integrating sources.

    

II. Paragraph and essay level issues

            A. Specific and concrete language

                        1. Avoiding generalizations and clichés

                        2. Using action verbs

            B. Paragraph focus

                        1. Topic sentences

                        2. Supporting examples and development

                                    a. Sensory details, analogies, facts, statistics, testimony, metaphors

            C. Essay focus and argument

                        1. Thesis/claim

                        2. Evidence/support

                        3. Counterarguments

                        4. Types of appeals: logical, ethical, emotional

Final Essay Assignment

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.  While closing the park may seem like the obvious choice from a financial perspective, this decision is likely to cause serious public relations problems for the company.  If Ferretland closes, numerous groups are likely to organize boycotts of the corporation's other parks.

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 1000 and 1500 words. Although a real business report would not be formatted according to MLA guidelines, please use MLA for this assignment. 

This essay's due date will be announced. Have fun!

Art Images

ENGLISH 200:

Link to "The Lottery"

Here is a link to "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson.  Please read this for our next meeting, along with "Hills Like White Elephants."

Links to Stories

"The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin

http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/webtexts/hour/

"Hills Like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway

http://www.asdk12.org/staff/grenier_tom/HOMEWORK/208194_Hills_Like_White_Elephants.pdf