Essay Writing Fall 2018
2018.12.05
Wrapping Things Up
Weeks 13, 14, 15, and 16
These weeks we moved through chapter 5, talked about interviewing and quoting, and just kept on writing and revising.
I will meet with everyone for brief one-on-one conferences about your writing in my office, main building room 404, during Week 15 (Dec. 12th). We will not have regular class that day. The appointment schedule is in the photo below. If you did not make an appointment during class Dec. 5th, please contact me ASAP.
We will have a sit-down writing exam during exam week. Expect to write an in-class essay exam (250 words) on a topic selected by the instructor when we meet Week 16 (Dec. 19th).
When you arrive for your exam, please turn in hard copies of your final drafts from chapters 4 and 5. Each essay should be typed in Times New Roman 12 point font, double-spaced, and stapled. Please DO NOT staple both essays together. Staple the pages of each essay together separately. If you don't have them at exam time, turn them in by 5 p.m. that day in my mailbox, in Room 106 of the main building. Don't forget to put your name on your papers if you want credit for them.
See you in class!
JBH
2018.11.21
We started looking at a new type of writing today based on interviewing. First, we looked at an oral history of a Chinese student's elderly great-uncle.
We also talked about interviewing techniques and finding ways to use them to write an interesting essay. After looking at an interview transcript of an interview with a Puerto Rican grandmother on page 146 and 147, we turned to page 148 and did a practice interview with a classmate.
Please continue to follow the instructions for this practice interview (Task 5.2) and after thoroughly writing your own thoughts on question five, please respond with a few things worth sharing on questions five and six in the class canvas discussion area. Your subject line for this canvas entry should be "Practice Interview/Your Name."
We will continue in Chapter 5 next week and start moving toward an interview-based essay. Be thinking about the chapter and who you will want to talk to because it won't be long before you'll need to interview someone for class.
Thanks!
JBH
2018.11.14
Today's session was filled with returning work completed during the first half of the semester, so we could see where our scores were so far with quality of our writing.
The instructor shared with us his evaluation method using modified IELTS scores and averaging those totals for the two essays we had written during the first half of the semester together with our essay exam.
Together with similar quality scores for the second half of the semester, quality points will account for 50 percent of your final grade for this class. Homework, such as posting the blog and completing in-class assignments, will account for 40 percent of your grade, with the other 10 percent coming from attendance and participation.
Please complete your final version of the Chapter 4 essay and upload it as the final comment under your first draft. We will continue next week by looking at the readings and exercises in Chapter 5.
See you then!
JBH
2018.11.07
In Essay Writing today we shared our writings about a sense of place which was aimed at discovering more about a place through sensory description
Then we reviewed and discussed a couple more readings from Chapter 4: Reading 4, Community Culture about a Ukrainian immigrant to Brooklyn, and reading 6, about a Japanese student's visit to a small, beautiful chapel in the south of France.
Toward the end of the session, we looked over the Essay assignment on page 111 and 112. Please write an AMAZING first draft of an essay about a place that has meaning for you. Post your writing in the Canvas discussion area before the class early deadline (midnight Sunday night, Nov. 11th).
Comment on two classmate’s writing by responding to all six questions on the peer response form on pages 120 and 121 about what they wrote. Please try to give helpful peer response, as outlined on pages 112-114.
See you in class!
JBH
2018.10.31
Today in class we thought about and discussed some special places from our younger years, then looked at readings 1 and 2 in Chapter 4, the first about a tree that kept the secrets of a young girl’s life in the Dominican Republic and a Turkish student’s memories of his hometown on the Mediterraean Sea. We talked with classmates about metaphor, simile, personification, and sensory description that we found in these readings.
We then read pg. 107 Task 4.1, which discussed a short piece of student writing with lots of sensory descriptions about a ride on the subway.
For next week, please follow the instructions in task 4.2 on page 108 to write your own “Sense of Place.” Do NOT use any subway for your writing. Please post your writing in the Canvas discussion area before the class early deadline (midnight Sunday night, Nov. 4th).
Comment on two classmate’s writing with at least two good questions each about what they wrote. Feel free to say more, but please write at least two interesting questions about each classmate’s writing. Make it conversational if you can.
Be ready to look at more readings and tasks next week and start the chapter essay, as well as looking at some of our writing problems from the first batch of papers we handed in today.
Thanks!
JBH
2017.10.17
Hi class!
Good luck with your exams (including the one in our class).
Please continue reading the student writings and working through the tasks in Chapter 3 on your own this week, and go ahead to complete the Chapter 3 essay assignment on pages 77-87. Post your first draft of this essay on the class canvas page under the subject "Chapter 3 essay" before the early class deadline and use the peer response form to give helpful feedback to two classmates before regular class time next week (Oct. 24th).
Don't forget, you are being graded for your feedback to your classmates as well. It is part of your homework score. Please be sure to do more than write "very good," or, "I liked it," when reviewing your classmates' writing. You don't need to be harshly critical, but please do try to offer helpful suggestions for improvement.
Week 9 we will continue in the text, moving on to do more writing. Please bring with you hard copies of your best revised draft from Chapter 2 and a polished first draft from Chapter 3 to hand in for scoring,along with the essay exam you will write during our session mid-term exam week. Together with your exam essays, these writings will be evaluated to make up your quality points from the first half of the semester.
When we meet again as a class Oct. 31st, we will be moving on to Chapter 4. Please pre-read and be ready to discuss readings 1, 2, and 3 from this chapter before we meet on that day. You do not have to wear a Halloween costume if you would prefer not to.
See you in class!
JBH
2018.10.10
We started off our class reunion after two weeks away by getting back to the book and looking at readings 3 and 5 in Chapter two, which deal with the difference between excitement, fear, and sadness.
We also took a quick look at formatting academic papers for writing and other classes in English. The major points are pretty standard for almost all classes, and the linked page covers all the basics.
During the second part of the session, we had an oral peer-review session, talking about our first drafts of the essay assigned in Chapter 2.
For next week, please revise and submit your improved draft of the Chapter 2 essay to the Canvas discussion area. We will move on in Chapter 3 when we meet Oct. 17th.
See you then,
JBH
We started off our class reunion after two weeks away by getting back to the book and looking at readings 3 and 5 in Chapter two, which deal with the difference between excitement, fear, and sadness.
We also took a quick look at formatting academic papers for writing and other classes in English. The major points are pretty standard for almost all classes, and the linked page covers all the basics.
During the second part of the session, we had an oral peer-review session, talking about our first drafts of the essay assigned in Chapter 2.
For next week, please revise and submit your improved draft of the Chapter 2 essay to the Canvas discussion area. We will move on in Chapter 3 when we meet Oct. 17th.
See you then,
JBH
2018.09.19
Today, we made sure everyone had received an invitation to the class online discussion area in Canvas. If you have not yet received an invitation, or are having trouble figuring out how to get started, please get with someone who can help, either a classmate or me. I am very available to help you get started.
We next made sure we had covered all the highlights of Chapter 1, which the instructor noted will be a good reference chapter throughout this class for help with brainstorming and writing techniques.
Then we moved on to Chapter 2, looking at a reading about a child’s experience in Hong Kong learning to cook rice. We talked about the discussion questions for the story and wrote a bit about the journaling question (#4), as well as going on to look at memory chains, a story writing technique later in the chapter.
Though we have two holidays coming up to interrupt our classroom sessions, I will ask you to keep writing the next two weeks.
For next week, please complete the memory chain and time chunk activities and post your writing about an experience in your life that results from either or both of them. While there is no length requirement, it's pretty hard to tell an interesting story in just a few sentences. Give us a look at an experience or patterns in your life that might be worthwhile writing more about. Use these exercises as tools to help build your ideas for writing the essay in this chapter later, as well as the journaling ideas from the readings. Please write at least 250 words about your personal experience based on any of the topics in the chapter and post your writing to the class discussion area in Canvas by midnight Sept. 26th. Before we meet the following Wednesday, please reply to at least two classmates’ discussion posts with value-added comments (more than "I liked what you wrote"). Try to make it like an online conversation. Be specific about what you noticed about your classmate's writing and what you think about it.
Along with this writing, please be sure to look at the other stories and discussion/writing exercises in Chapter 2. All the readings are good, but we will probably be focusing on readings 3, 4 and 5 when we meet again. I would also like you to write the first draft of the Chapter 2 essay assignment on pages 50-51 before we meet Oct. 10th.
Please bring a hard copy of your first draft to class for oral peer review. Make sure your draft is typed, double-spaced, on 12-point font (Times New Roman preferred).
See you in class!
JBH
2018.09.12
This week in class we started with a “getting acquainted” session, mingling around as if we were at a cocktail party and asking each other interesting questions. Then we shifted to one-on-one conversations with classmates to look at our similarities and differences.
ProfJBH collected email addresses from everyone in class and will email a link to our Canvas discussion site for this class soon.
When you get that link, please login ASAP (As Soon As Possible) and let everyone know you are in our online classroom too. You can do that by posting a brief intro of you that may use elements from what you have already written about yourself, but may also be something totally new and different.
When you write about yourself, please also include information from your freewriting and thoughts about the questions on pages 9-11 to give us an idea how you feel about writing. In addition, please post a write-up on what you learned about your classmates. So basically, you will be telling us about yourself, your attitudes about writing, and what you know about people in the class so far. The subject of this discussion post should be your name and "first post" or "About Writing" or whatever you like that makes sense. We will see how things worked out when we meet next week and move on in the text.
Also, if you didn't hand in your typed responses to the survey on pages 24 and25, please do so soon. It counts as homework.
See you in class!
JBH
2018.09.05
The first week's session consisted of introductions and a brief class outline.
The textbook for this course will be In Our Own Words: Student Writers at Work, 3rd Ed., by Rebecca Mlynarczyk and Steven Haber, Cambridge University Press. It is available in the HUFS bookstore.
Please pre-read and give some thought to all questions in the book in Part I, Starting Out, as soon as possible. Please be ready to discuss the interview questions in class on pages 4 and 5 and bring your typed answers to the survey on pages 24 and 25 when we meet again next week.
We will be talking about Unit 1 and how to write and share our work with classmates online when we meet again next week.
Thanks, and see you in class!
JBH
