Journal Assignment: The Future of Your Topic

Thus far, you have provided an introduction, a discussion of the debates, and a discussion of the major voices in your subject. Now, with some expertise on this subject, you can confidently say where future attention should be focused. This is not a place for you to argue with the sources. It is a place for you to recognize where they—as a whole—have not covered everything about this topic that there is to discuss. As you write, make sure that you do not enter into debate. Your task is to describe what still needs to be explored.

Instructor Evaluations

Hi Guys,

It's that time of the semester again! Instructor Evaluations are up and ready for you. If you wouldn't mind getting in and giving an evaluation of me. None of this will affect your grade, and your name won't be attached to anything you write.

Follow this link, and sign in with your eWeber to complete the evaluation. Thanks
https://chitester.weber.edu/

Argumentative Essay Helps

As promised, here are a few things to help you as you start to write your argument essay. We will talk through most of these in class tonight. But feel free to ask any questions you might have.

As you can see there are a lot of different ways to go about writing the essay. All of these are good. There is not one right or wrong way. There is only good, better, and more better. (hehe. I wanted to say best, but I don't know that there is a best way.)

And lastly one small table on how to go about writing a thesis statement. I see now that this one might have been helpful for your last paper, but I have only just recently found it. So hopefully it helps for this one. 

Oh and a pdf from another university's writing center. It looks like a good one.
https://depts.washington.edu/owrc/Handouts/Argumentative%20Paper%20Format.pdf

Don't forget you can click on the images to see them larger. Some of the type on these is quite small.

Restaurants and Technology

I came across this today on Facebook. Read it and share your thoughts in the comments.

http://themetapicture.com/people-kept-complaining-this-restaurant-sucked-look-what-they-found-out/

Major Writing 3: Argument Essay

For this assignment, you will be writing an argument essay. You will state a claim or argument and support it with research, personal opinions, stories, and statistics. You may use your research and support from your first two major writing assignments. Your argument essay will have a strong thesis, an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion.

In this essay, I will be grading on the following things:

• An introductory paragraph that gets readers’ attention, clearly indicates the argument of the essay, and makes a point about that argument.
• Multiple body paragraphs which: 1) support the main argument, 2) use supporting information from your research, and 3) fully support and explain how everything in the essay relates to the point you are making.  
• These paragraphs should each contain a topic sentence to guide the reader and hold the paragraph together.
• A concluding paragraph that restates your point about the theme (in a new way), does not bring up any new supporting information, and answers the "So What?" question.
• Clarity, meaning that your sentences should make sense and be clear to read.
• Spelling, meaning that you check for all misspelled words including words that are often confused with others that sound the same (homonyms).
• Accurate grammar and mechanics. You may want to visit the writing center if you need help with grammar.
• Formatting, using the MLA or APA style guidelines.

Your essay should be 5-7 pages, have a works cited or references page, and be formatted correctly with APA or MLA style formatting. Refer to our book, Writing Matters, for help with that. 

This paper is due to me in class on Wednesday, August 6th. You will then post your paper on your blog. You will not get your paper back from me with corrections or a grade, because your paper is due to me on the last day of class. 

Simplifying your Writing

We will discuss simplifying your writing in class. Some of the following are helps for you as you write; some of them are helps for me while we learn about this tonight. But all of them are good.

This link goes to a webpage with an embedded video. It is science writing based, but the information given in the video is useful to everyone writing about anything. And bonus, it's only 3 minutes long.
http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/careers/college-to-career/video/simplify-sentences.html

This one gives a concise review of wordiness.
http://www.suu.edu/hss/english/writingcenter/pdf/updated/tipsheet_wordiness.pdf

Here is a blog that gives 5 tips for simplifying your writing.
http://gettingpastpr.wordpress.com/2012/07/25/5-ways-to-simplify-your-writing/

Here are the sentences we will use in class to practice wordiness.
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/exercises/6/9/24

This one gives some examples on passive voice and wordiness.
http://writingcenter.unlv.edu/writing/wordiness.html

Word Crimes

I came across this video yesterday, and I must have really needed a good laugh, because this is the funniest thing I have seen in a long time. But maybe it's just an english teacher thing.

What do you guys think?

Literature Review Flow Charts

As promised, here are a few images to help you as you organize your Literature Review. I hope they will help.
NOTE: if you click on the images you can see it larger.

Basic Essay Format

Here are a few links that we will use in our discussion tonight on Basic Essay Format, for your future reference.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7mb7BBiWHaVbXFjM3o1ZmtNTHM/edit?usp=sharing

http://www.screencast.com/t/echZ6F2ZnSHs

How to Write the Literature Review

There is a lot of information out on the World Wide Web (hehe) about how to go about writing the literature review, what it is, what is isn't, what it looks like. This post here only has a small sampling. All I did to find this stuff was search google for "literature review examples".

It's amazing what people are doing and sharing in the world. This is one of the greatest examples I have seen for the reason the internet is such a good thing for education.

Have fun searching and learning how to write your Literature Review.

Here are two examples of literature reviews:
The first one is probably the best, even though the topic is random
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7mb7BBiWHaVT2xUNlJpemJMbWc/edit?usp=sharing
Note: you don't need to do the first page of this example; you have already done it when you did the annotated bibliography.
The other example also has its annotated bib at the beginning. And it is more informative on how to go about writing the literature review and the decisions she made.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7mb7BBiWHaVTU1yTlQwNFhnQUk/edit?usp=sharing

Here are a few How-to webpages and videos:
http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/literature-reviews/
http://guides.library.vcu.edu/lit-review

That is what I have found for now. Let me know if you have any questions or comments by commenting below. Good luck!

Parents saying NO to electronics...thoughts?

I found this gem of an article on Facebook today. It is very relevant to what we were talking about in class last night. So get in, read it, and share your thoughts in the comments.

http://renee-robinson.com/a-letter-to-my-boys-the-real-reason-i-say-no-to-electronics-repost/

Photo credit: Renee Robinson blog

Major Writing 2: Literature Review

Your task in this assignment is to demonstrate how the texts you have read participate in an ongoing conversation. In order to accomplish that, you will survey and describe the topic, provide a detailed summary of the conversation around it, identify the various camps involved in that conversation, and describe how the participating voices in that conversation interact with one another. 
A successful literature review will do the following:

• Demonstrate an understanding of the parameters of the topic.
• Demonstrate an understanding of why the topic is important.
• Demonstrate an understanding of how the various authors are engaged in an ongoing conversation about this topic.

This is not an argumentative essay in which you stake out a position and defend it; you are not stating your opinion or evaluating/critiquing your sources. Instead, what you are doing here is writing about the debate that the authors are having—without offering any personal opinion or comment.

NOTE: The term "literature" is not used here to mean fiction; rather, literature is the body of research and writing on a given topic. In other words, the literature is the conversation. For this assignment, you will review the literature or describe the conversation about a topic.


The literature review should be 5-7 pages. Please use 12-point Times New Roman and double-space throughout. Your literature review must include a complete and accurate Works Cited (MLA) or References (APA) page.

You will turn in your final printed out paper to me in class on Wednesday, July 23rd. You will then publish your final literature review on your blog. 

Digital Nation on PBS.org

One of our discussions lately reminded me of this web series. It is called Digital Nation. It is not just a small video. It has even expanded from when I first introduced it to my classes years ago. This is an ongoing project PBS is doing. A lot of what they discuss in these videos is very relevant to our topic of the class. We will watch a video or two from this website in class tonight. But I wanted you to have the link so that you can use it for your papers, and see what is being researched and talked about on these topics. 

Whole Website:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/

Multitasking at MIT Video

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/living-faster/split-focus/multitasking-at-mit.html?play

Online, all the time Video

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/living-faster/digital-natives/online-all-the-time.html?play

Life, Sped Up Video

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/living-faster/where-are-we-headed/life-sped-up.html?play

So get on the website and bring your opinions to your journals and to class and we'll see where everyone stands. 

Journal assignment: See all sides

From time to time I will provide you one of your topics for your journals. This is all in preparation for your next Major Writing Assignment. For this one just follow the directions below. I will post your next assignment soon. 

Here is the journal assignment:

With some topics, the conversation will be presented as a series of arguments while in others it might be presented as a series of questions. Your job in this journal is to describe the debates or questions that comprise your topic.

You have probably heard the old cliché that every argument has two sides. This is not the best way to approach a topic, since most arguments have more than two sides. Think about something like the abortion debate. Are there only two sides—those for it and those against it? Hardly. There are people who want it to be illegal in any circumstance. Others argue it should be illegal except in cases of rape, incest, or when there is a threat to the life of the mother. There are people who want it to be legal but want to provide disincentives (e.g. mandatory counseling) to women considering one. Some people want it to be legal only in the first trimester, while some who want it to be legal want to make sure it happens very rarely. There are people who want it to be legal without restriction.  

Do you see how there are many sides to this debate? Do you see how these sides can translate into groups or camps who all take part in the discussion? 

In this journal assignment, discuss the various debates or questions associated with your topic. You will need to describe how the conversation is made up of multiple camps and sub-topics reflecting the variety of opinion on this topic.

This journal will prepare you for the more in-depth discussion of commentary, like we will do for our next major writing assignment. 

I will post the assignment details for the 2nd Major Writing Assignment soon. 

Summarizing

I have been thinking that we need to discuss summarizing in class. Let's take some time in class tonight to do that. Here are a few images that might help if you are struggling with summarizing. 

Unfortunately they all came from the same person, as far as I can tell. But they are good anyway. I hope it helps.

And this article is the one we will be using to practice summarizing tonight. It's called "The Bounty of the Sea" by Jaques Cousteau.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7mb7BBiWHaVSWJEMVFfOVRTSGs/edit?usp=sharing

MLA Format

I am sure most of you are fully involved in making your Annotated Bibliography by now. So this might just be unnecessary info, but I wanted to share my favorite hand out for MLA Format. We will talk about this in class tonight, so don't worry about it too much I just wanted you all to have a copy of it without me having to make copies.

I used google drive to share it. I hope it works. If it does it opens up the doors for me to share other pdf files and things that I have collected over the years.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7mb7BBiWHaVcDR6UEgtd3dFMzQ/edit?usp=sharing

How to Google like a Boss!!

Hey Guys,

I wanted to share this photo with you again. There are so many tricks to researching and searching on google and other search engines. But really, there are too many to remember them all. So find what works for you and share it with the class here.

Where do you go to find the best stuff for your papers? What kind of things do you type in to the search bar to get the right kinds of articles? Many will benefit from your experience.

Due Date Change!!!

After discussing with the class today, we decided to change the due date for the Research Summary/Annotated Bibliography to July 9.

So bring your printed out paper with you to class on Wednesday, July 9.

Also don't forget to format your paper using MLA. Meaning, 12 pt font, Times New Roman, double spaced. Also don't forget to include your name, date, teacher, assignment (all double spaced) on the first page, left aligned.

Here is an example of formatting for MLA

Here is one citation close up: notice the hanging indent and paragraph formatting

This is another example. It's just a screen shot, and it's not double spaced, but it's formatted correctly

One last one. Notice the shorter paragraphs and hanging indents

I hope these examples will help you as you write and format your annotated bibliographies.
Happy 4th everyone!

Journal topic ideas

I've been thinking that we should do some online brainstorming like we did in class last week. This is my way of helping you figure out what to write about in your weekly journals. So I did a basic search about journaling on Pinterest and here are a few pics of what I found. They might not all work because some of them are about art journals. But take what ideas work for you and don't forget to share some ideas of your own in the comments.