Writers Workshop: Embedding Quotations

Revisions

Revise your first blog entry, incorporating what we learned in Writers Workshop this week about embedded quotations. Have those revisions ready for our next class (be it Friday or next Monday).

Douglass

For Wednesday, complete one reading blog in response to Fredrick Douglass´s memoir.

What Is a Reading Blog?

Reading to Blog

What's more important the book or our interpretations of the book? Can there be a book without there being interpretation? We'll be able to answer some of those questions after we've recorded our relationships with the books we read.

In order to preserve paper, as well as to promote our communication with the academic world outside of CNG, we'll be keeping blogs about the books we read.

You will write your own blogs, and respond to your blogs as prescribed by your weekly homework blog entry. You should not approach each blog the same way. With variety comes varied thought; therefore, I hope you focus on different topics and take different approaches in each entry.

Imagine you have been assigned "The Three Little Pigs" for homework. To write a reading blog based on this reading here are some possibilities:

-Respond to the text personally: 

I never had my house blown down by a wolf, but I have felt loss. For example, I once abandoned my favorite apartment. I left most of my furniture there, some clothes, even a television!

-Connect text to another book, a film, work of art, a comic or any other creation: 

The Three Little Pigs reminds me of The Matrix. When the Wolf "huffed and puffed and blew his house down" he acted just as Morpheus did for Reeve's character. Suddenly, Reeves was without the security he once felt.

-Ask questions to later answer:

What might the grandmother represent? Why would the Wolf want to blow down the houses? How might I write a better ending? I would then maybe answer these questions in later blogs. 

-Visual Vocabulary 

Select the words you think it was important to define in the text. Match a picture to it on your blog post. 

-Hyperlink 

You might want to use the 21^st century's answer to footnotes when you're talking about something that is not common knowledge. We'll do a demo of how to insert a hyperlink in class.

You may use any combination of these, or you can write your own type of entries. Let your reading guide your entries. We'll take a look at them next week in class and in conferences.

Take a look at this example from a student last year.

Also, when we have assigned reading - whether in literary circles or class reading - you will read between 25-30 pages. You can decide where your reading begins or ends. 

Summer Reading Assessment

In preparation for our summer reading exam Thursday or Friday please annotate your summer reading novels. Be ready to cite from the text as it is open book. This also means you should bring in Half a Life by Darin Strauss. 

Questions for in-class discussion about Half a Life

See them here.

Create Your Reading Blog

1. Watch this video:

2. Go to www.blogger.com.

3. Follow the steps for create a blog. You'll want to use your CNG gmail account for this.

4. Use CCOA to come up with a title.

5. When finished you must comment on this blog post (and this blog post only). This will provide me with a link with which to enter your blog.

Capitalization Exercises

1. I read To Kill A Mockingbird when I was in High School. 
2. We went to Maui for vacation last year.
3. I don’t drink Coke, but I’d love a Diet Soda.
4. I hear you’re learning to speak french. I would love to go to France.
5. Jamie and Jonathon went to their high school dance together last May.
6. My Father-in-Law took me to a Chicago Cubs game; He doesn’t know I’m a White Sox fan.
7. Jessica’s dad, Dr. Johnson, wants her to be a Doctor as well.
8. Jeremy went to Alexander community college for two years. 
9. My sister’s new boyfriend is italian. 
10. We traveled South on vacation because my dad wanted to study Civil War history.

Welcome to the Unending Conversation

"Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress." Kenneth Burke

School Supplies

Above is a political cartoon - and as such, should not to be taken literally. These are the kinds of texts you'll find on the test.

Now, seriously you all need:

- 1 gluestick
- multi-colored post-its 
- preferibly some kind of electronic word processor for Writers Workshop.

Your first homework assignment will be to bring all of these to our next class, in addition to our summer reading.