English 1301
YOU and some old dude…
Week of 8
September 2014
Week 3
Posted to angryverbs.blogspot.com on Sunday, 7 September.
An attempt to post this to BlackBoard will be made on
Sunday, 7 September.
As always, begin work when you enter the work area. Put away the little Orwellian telescreen that
tells you how to feel, take up your journal and pen, note the prompt on the
board, and write. Have your books and
notes ready. Don’t wait to be told to
begin here or in any part of your life: passivity is your enemy.
This week we will consider descriptive writing via an
excerpt from an essay by George Orwell, which you have already read. We will then look carefully at the descriptive
essay assignment itself and at the grading matrix. You, of course, have already read all of
this, which was given to you on the first day of class two weeks ago.
Your essay is due no later than roll call on (“Oh…wait…I’m
printing it out in the library” = 0) our last class day of next week, and is
certainly welcome earlier. If you come
to class after roll-call on a due date, the paper is a zero. This is not grade school. Now think about the concept of a due date. What does that mean?
Give the paper to me.
If you give your paper to your cousin Cletus to give to me, is there a
possibility that your work will repose alone and ignored in his pickup truck in
a repair shop in Louisiana? I cannot
read and grade a paper which I do not have.
No ‘net submissions; this is not a distance class. Give the paper to
me. Give the paper to me on or before
the due date. Do not embarrass yourself
by asking for an extension.
As for that old “I gave you my paper; don’t you remember?”
thing – it won’t work. I always checkmark
submissions on the attendance sheet before dismissal. Get it right.
Rough Drafts
I am available to give your rough draft a look during
office time before and after class, but not on the day a paper is due. The operative word in “rough draft” is “draft.” I cannot sort out disconnected notes,
thoughts, and ideas, nor will I try to read hand-written manuscripts. A draft for any consideration is always typed
and double-spaced; there may be, of course, many hand-written corrections and
such.
A consultation over a rough draft is in no way
contractural, nor will I proof-read your paper.
I will give indications of problem areas, but I will not resolve them
for you; writing the paper is your job. The
minister does not hover over your courtship patterns. The police officer does not ride with you to
tell you not to drive over the limit (or that your inspection is nine months
out of date). The welding instructor
will not take your welding exam for you at the shipyard. This is not grade school. The (metaphorical) training wheels are off
the (metaphorical) bicycle – you are going to have to pedal (metaphorically).
MLA Format
When writing papers for this class follow the MLA Format,
not some nebulous concept of free to be you and me. I gave you a model of the MLA format in your
handouts, and there are more examples in your expensive textbook.
Test? Did He Say “Test?”
Tests are always possible.
Grouchy Remarks
Listen to the old teacher instead of to the diffuse
noises and flickering colors on your little Orwellian telescreen. Some of the letters I received over the weekend
(the attempts at formatting should be better) indicate that some of your
classmates were inattentive in class – until this moment I had not set a due date. Communicate accurate information, not panicky
gossip, to each other.
The good part about this is that if you worried about a
due date that had not yet been made and wrote a draft of your first essay, you’re
ahead of everyone else.
First Itty Bitty Bits
of Writing
This week I will return to you your personal surveys,
which were generally pretty bad.
Personal Surveys –
A Few General Observations
You and your classmates are funny, smart, industrious,
cheerful, and optimistic, and a joy to work with every day. However, your many positive qualities seldom
manifested themselves in your surveys. Most
of these were carelessly and hastily accomplished in sentence fragments and in
substandard usage that would embarrass even Cousin Cletus from Buna. When you work any assignment you should not
take early retirement and schlub through it as if idly responding to anti-social
media on the Orwellian telescreen. Construct
your work professionally.
Here are some very general notes on some common failings:
Pencils are great for marking lumber and for sketching
(we won’t mention mathematics). The
always-and-forever directive for this class, however, is to write in black or blue
ink anything meant to be read by others.
An in-class test or essay written in pencil is a zero. A test or paper begun in pencil and then
overwritten in pen is a zero. This
grouchy message is brought to you from experience: to indulge someone is to
cripple him or her.
Most everyone misused the adverb “hopefully.” To write “Hopefully, I will attend the
University of Bob” is technically correct if the intent is to say that you will
be hopeful about anything while attending the University of Bob. If you are unsure
of your admissions status, then write “I hope to attend the University of Bob.”
When all else fails, read the instructions. Write in complete sentences. A sentence is not complete without an
end-stop.
Don’t be prompt-dependent. If the question is “What three adjectives
would your friends use to describe you?”, “They would say that I am pretty,
brave, and talented” is incomplete because “they” is an unreferenced
pronoun. Write “My friends would say…” When in doubt, write it out.
Never begin a response with “it,” and seldom with any
other pronoun.
One among you wrote a marvelous prediction in shifting
tenses: “5 [sic] years from now I do not
know where I will be.” Is the writer
saying that in five – not 5 – years he will not know where he is? Read your
sentences again – do they say what you intend them to say?
Some of the poor structure is rather like a recent
headline in The Drudge Report: “Sharks
are Ten Times More Likely to Kill Men Than Women.” Does this mean that sharks are more likely to
kill men than women are? Or does this
mean that sharks find men tastier than women?
Think about what you are writing – does it communicate what you intend?
Please look at your table-mate’s paper. If he or she
wrote in pencil, give him or her a really mean look. Be warned – the next time any exercise is
submitted in pencil, the grade is a zero.
No excuses, no rewrites.
Answer the question that is asked; do not drift away on a
mellow sea of free-floating dreams. When
you take college admissions exams, graduate school exams, and professional
exams you will be penalized for not answering the question that was asked. This penalty might involving having to run
laps around your English instructor.
“Family time” or “being with family” is vague – what do you
and your family do? Do you water ski
together? Do you discuss the symbolism
of the third murderer in Macbeth? Do you kill and dissect skunks for amusement?
Titles of books in manuscript (handwriting) are
underlined (The Brothers Karamazov) ; when typed they are italicized (The Brothers Karamazov).
The titles of short works are in quotation marks (“Ode on
a Grecian Urn,” by John Keats) or inverted commas (‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ by
John Keats).
Small numbers, those of one or two syllables, are usually
spelled out, such as five instead of 5.
Do not begin a response with a pronoun.
Do not in write in passive voice, as in “The passive
voice is to be avoided.”
Pronouns replace nouns, and so must have antecedent
nouns. Don’t assume the reader knows
what “it” is.
“N/A” is not appropriate.
Answer the question.
A blank space is not appropriate. Answer the question.
“The real world” is a cliché and, worse, a negative one. Whether you approve or disapprove of your
current circumstances, you live in reality.
Does anyone here remember apostrophes?
Avoid the second-person “you.”
“Get my degree” – please write this as “earn a degree.”
Some among you, growing tense because even informal
writing is in some sense formal discourse and requires organization and
thought, wrote stiffly and artificially, not unlike Henry David Thoreau’s
occasional attempts at verse. We tend to
speak in fragments, but these fragments are also usually effective. When writing your thoughts as effective
sentences, you complete the fragments.
Don’t invert the sequence or employ an unaccustomed vocabulary.
In responding orally in a conversation, you might say “To
town.” If you were writing that as a
sentence, you would make the thought clear to the reader with “Cletus and I drove to town.” Don’t botch it as “Town is the place to which
Cletus and I drove.”
A sentence is not complete without an end stop. If you respond to a test question with an
incomplete sentence, that is a zero because the complete sentence is in itself
part of the correct answer. Get it
right. This is not an arbitrary whim;
this is part of your preparation for your profession (that famous “real life”
one hears about so often).
Never begin a response to a test question with a
pronoun. A pronoun is an incomplete
thought – and thus a zero - unless there
is an antecedent noun.
Punctuation is for clarity, not decoration. Consider the following sentence:
Woman without her
man is nothing.
Now consider this version of the same sentence:
Woman – without her,
man is nothing
Now go to work.
