Happy Halloween!
Please make sure you have completed the form posted Monday. Once you’ve done that, I’ll give you your books and I’d like you to divide them up into three roughly equal chunks.
Then we’re going to spend some time using something called the question formulation technique to generate questions you can use to gather information as you read your literature circle novels.
Please remember your rough draft of your essay of argument or persuasive essay is due Friday.
Test day!
You have a test tomorrow on rhetoric, logic, and the essay of argument and persuasive essay.
Today I’d like you to select your literature circle novels. Before you do that, I want to talk to you about both of the novels:
The Great Gatsby (writing)
Indian Horse (writing)
What is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Today is the last day for working on your essay in class. Please see google classroom and/or the calendar on our blog for due dates.
Let’s start by reviewing the writing process. See yesterday’s post.
Then let’s work on how to use “state, illustrate, explain” to construct an effective paragraph. Let’s imagine I’m writing an essay arguing in favour of using cell phones in the classroom.
In my first paragraph, I want to talk about how people argue that cell phones are a distraction.
State your point:
Many people argue that cell phones should be eliminated from the classroom because they are distracting. This may be true, but if we don’t teach students how to manage distracting influences like cell phones, then how will they learn to manage the distraction when they leave high school and have no one to ban their technology?
Illustrate your point:
I didn’t have a cell phone when I was in high school because, while cell phones existed, they were gigantic monstrosities about the size of a brick. It wasn’t a thing teenagers used. Yet I still managed to find ways to distract myself when I was in class. I passed notes to my friends. I doodled. I hid trashy novels inside my history textbook. Now I’m a teacher and I have a cell phone and I find it very distracting when I’m trying to mark student assignments or plan my lessons. No one ever taught me how to manage my device use because they didn’t exist when I was in school.
Explain how this illustration supports your point:
I’ve developed strategies now, but it took me time to figure them out on my own. That being said, I was lucky because I didn’t have a cell phone in university either. If I had access to a cell phone in university, after never having been taught to manage my technology use effectively, would I have done as well as I did? Now, I did mention that I still found ways to distract myself in school, but my teachers knew strategies for managing my distraction, so it was kept to a minimum. There will always be something to distract students. You can’t eliminate all distractions. What you can do is allow teachers the opportunity to use these distractions as teachable moments to ensure students will be more successful once they leave high school.
Notice how I also incorporated a counter argument?
Here’s what the whole thing looks like as a complete paragraph:
Many people argue that cell phones should be eliminated from the classroom because they are distracting. This may be true, but if we don’t teach students how to manage distracting influences like cell phones, then how will they learn to manage the distraction when they leave high school and have no one to ban their technology? I didn’t have a cell phone when I was in high school because, while cell phones existed, they were gigantic monstrosities about the size of a brick. It wasn’t a thing teenagers used. Yet I still managed to find ways to distract myself when I was in class. I passed notes to my friends. I doodled. I hid trashy novels inside my history textbook. Now I’m a teacher and I have a cell phone and I find it very distracting when I’m trying to mark student assignments or plan my lessons. No one ever taught me how to manage my device use because they didn’t exist when I was in school. I’ve developed strategies now, but it took me time to figure them out on my own. That being said, I was lucky because I didn’t have a cell phone in university either. If I had access to a cell phone in university, after never having been taught to manage my technology use effectively, would I have done as well as I did? Now, I did mention that I still found ways to distract myself in school, but my teachers knew strategies for managing my distraction, so it was kept to a minimum. There will always be something to distract students. You can’t eliminate all distractions. What you can do is allow teachers the opportunity to use these distractions as teachable moments to ensure students will be more successful once they leave high school.
We’re writing today and we will discuss the due date for the essay.
The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.
Terry Pratchett
The concept that writing is a process is likely not new to you, but it’s important to review that process so that you can make your writing stronger and clearer.
Prewriting
| In this stage you brainstorm, plan, and organize your thoughts. Some people like using a graphic organizer like a mind map, while others prefer to make lists, or even launch into full paragraphs. It’s very important at this stage to keep in mind that many of the ideas you come up with in your prewriting may never make it to your final draft so don’t censor your ideas. A “bad” idea that you end up discarding may lead to a “good” idea that you keep. This is writing as thinking. You are not writing for anyone else at this point. It’s fine if it only makes sense to you. Think about your audience and purpose. By the end of this process you should know, based on your audience, purpose and topic, what type of essay you want to write (narrative, persuasive, argument, or descriptive), and you’ll have some sense of the different kinds of proof you plan on using. |
Drafting
| Good writers know that their best writing comes after multiple drafts where they play with structure, refine ideas, and experiment with words and phrases until they find the best possible way to communicate their ideas to their readers. In this stage, you will create your thesis statement. Bear in mind that if you’re choosing to write a narrative or descriptive essay, your thesis may be implied rather than explicit. However, if your thesis is implied, then you have to be even clearer about your thesis. The thesis, even if not explicit, is the foundation for the entire essay. |
Creating a Strong Thesis Statement
While the criteria for a good thesis statement may differ depending on the type of essay you are writing, it will still have the same general characteristics:
In addition to making a claim and defining the scope of the essay, the second statement, avoids the “so what?” factor by pointing out something surprising or unusual.
As you write your first draft, don’t be concerned with the mechanics of writing: spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure. Instead, focus on developing your ideas.
Revise
The writing process is not, strictly speaking, a linear process. You will often cycle back through different stages multiple times as you work on different drafts of your essay. As you revise your draft, check for the following:
|
 |
|---|
Proofreading and Editing
| At this point, you can start looking for errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Reading aloud at this stage or any other stage of the revision process can help you focus more carefully on your work.
Try the following steps: To proof for spelling…
To proof for sentence structure, punctuation, grammar, and phrasing…
To proof for overall tone and meaning…
Adapted from http://www.middlebury.edu/ and Think Literacy: Cross-Curricular Approaches, Grades 7-12 |
 |
|---|
Using Feedback to Improve Writing
| One of the reasons why it’s important to get another person’s feedback on your writing is because you know what you meant to say, but that may not come across in your writing. That’s a difficult thing to catch on your own. When incorporating feedback from your teacher and peers, don’t just focus on correcting the spelling and punctuation errors (proofreading), but pay attention to whether or not your teacher/peers were able to understand the main ideas you were trying to get across. Are there lots of places that seemed unclear to them? Ask yourself if you’ve overlooked important definitions or examples that would help improve the clarity of your writing (revising). If you don’t understand your peer or teacher’s feedback, then ask them if they can provide clarification. If you don’t understand their feedback, it will be difficult for you to make the necessary revisions. |  |
|---|
I’ve given everyone feedback on their brainstorming. Please see Google Classroom.
Your instructions for today and your work, which is due today, are posted in Google Classroom. I’ll see you tomorrow.
Essay Work period! Submit your brainstorming back to me again today. Monday we start working on the outline.
Today we’re going to talk MLA formatting.
And I was thinking to myself, I wonder if any English teacher has done a song to help students remember the details of MLA formatting. And OF COURSE someone has. And it’s….. awkward.
Here is my go-to resource for formatting a paper using MLA.
PS There is no point in memorizing any of this. I have written countless papers in MLA and APA and I still have to look it all up. What you do need to know how to follow a style guide.
So we’re going to practice this by trying to fix a really bad essay. See Google Classroom for more details. This is tricky. You won’t be able to fix everything. Do as much as you can so we can talk about it tomorrow.
When you feel like you just can’t handle fixing any more of the essay (don’t worry about the content–we’re literally just looking at formatting), start brainstorming idea for your essay. This can be done by mindmapping, googling essay topics, making lists, free-writing, or even talking to someone else. You must submit SOMETHING that shows evidence of your brainstorming. So if you’re brainstorming orally, record your discussion and upload your discussion to Google classroom.
Essay of Argument or Persuasive Essay Learning Goals:
We are learning to:
Today passive voice will be learned (do you see what I did there? Huh?…. Anybody?…)
But sometimes you might want to use passive voice. For example:
I’ll start with active voice because it’s simpler. In an active sentence, the subject is doing the action. A straightforward example is the sentence “Steve loves Mary.” Steve is the subject, and he is doing the action: he loves Mary, the object of the sentence.
Another example is the title of the Marvin Gaye song “I Heard It through the Grapevine.” “I” is the subject, the one who is doing the action. “I” is hearing “it,” the object of the sentence.
In passive voice, the target of the action gets promoted to the subject position. Instead of saying, “Steve loves Mary,” I would say, “Mary is loved by Steve.” The subject of the sentence becomes Mary, but she isn’t doing anything. Rather, she is just the recipient of Steve’s love. The focus of the sentence has changed from Steve to Mary.
If you wanted to make the title of the Marvin Gaye song passive, you would say “It was heard by me through the grapevine,” not such a catchy title anymore.
A lot of people think all sentences that contain a form of the verb “to be” are in passive voice, but that isn’t true. For example, the sentence “I am holding a pen” is in active voice, but it uses the verb “am,” which is a form of “to be.” The passive form of that sentence is “The pen is being held by me.”
Notice that the subject, the pen, isn’t doing anything in that sentence. It’s not taking an action; it’s passive. One clue that your sentence is passive is that the subject isn’t taking a direct action.
Passive voice isn’t wrong, but it’s often a poor way to present your thoughts.
Another important point is that passive sentences aren’t incorrect; it’s just that they often aren’t the best way to phrase your thoughts. Sometimes passive voice is awkward and other times it’s vague. Also, passive voice is usually wordy, so you can tighten your writing if you replace passive sentences with active sentence.
When you put sentences in passive voice, it’s easy to leave out the person or thing doing the action. For example, “Fred is loved,” is passive. The problem with that sentence is that you don’t know who loves Fred. Of course, maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe you want to emphasize the idea that Fred is just loved in general, in which case, that’s fine.
Politicians often use passive voice to intentionally obscure the idea of who is taking the action. Ronald Reagan famously said, “Mistakes were made,” when referring to the Iran-Contra scandal. Other examples of passive voice for political reasons could include “Bombs were dropped,” and “Shots were fired.” Pay attention to the news and listen for examples of passive voice.
Also, businesses sometimes use passive voice. It sounds better to write, “Your electricity will be shut off,” than “We, the electric company, will be shutting off your power.”
A recent study suggests that less educated people–those who dropped out of school when they were 16–have a harder time understanding sentences written in the passive voice than those written in active voice.
Source: http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/active-voice-versus-passive-voice
