Essay Writing Winter Session 2018-19
2019.01.11 (and Wrapping Things Up)
Friday we began class by discussing the places we wrote about overnight, from our sensory experience or from memory. Some of those places included the roof of a house where one student spent some of his best times and a P.C. room filled with scents and sounds.
From there, we moved on to read and discuss the first piece of student writing in the text, about a Turkish student's childhood memories of happy times spent near the sea at a marina in his hometown. We also read and discussed an essay by a Ukrainian Immigrant to New York City.
Please remember to complete your revised draft of the essay assigned in Chapter 3 and post it to the Canvas discussion area as the last comment underneath your first draft of that essay ASAP. Also, please write a 350- to 500-word first draft of the essay assigned in Chapter 4 (pages 111 & 112) and post it to Canvas by class time Monday. We will give a few people feedback on their essays in class.
The rest of the session Monday, and on Tuesday, we will continue with some reading and chapter exercises. You should give each other feedback on your Chapter four drafts online in Canvas before class time on Tuesday so people will have another day to finish off their final drafts.
Wednesday, I will ask you to hand in revised drafts of all three chapter essays, and we will write an essay test in class.
See you in class!
JBH
2019.01.09 & 10
On Wednesday, we spent some time giving live feedback to our classmates on their writing, looking at the Canvas discussion area in class on the big screen. Some members of the class got several good suggestions from classmates. Please continue making useful suggestions in Canvas for the rest of the class.
We also looked at some Common Problems share by the instructor, errors and challenges that students regularly have whenthey try to write in English. The list of Common Problems can be found in two places on the Writing Resources page of this website.
Thursday, we read and discussed the first reading in Chapter 4, as well as sharing ideas about places in our memories that were important or connected with events in our lives.
The homework assignment Thursday night is to complete either Task 4.2 on page 108 OR Task 4.4 on page 109-110 and share your writing on sensory details about a place with the class by posting it in the Canvas discussion area. After you have written about a place from real life or from memory, please bring a hard copy of your writing to class with you on Friday so you can share it with a classmate and talk about what you wrote.
Remember, you should also be looking ahead to have an improved draft of your Chapter 3 essay posted to Canvas by midnight Friday, and be thinking about your first draft of the essay from Chapter 4 to be done before we meet again on Monday.
Keep writing!
JBH
2019.01.08
After our one-on-ones on Monday when we talked about our first pieces of writing, this class session focused on another element to add to our Chapter 3 essays about people -- making metaphors. We went over exercises on pages 75 and 76 of the text, writing about people we knew using metaphors.
Our homework assignment for Wednesday (01.09) is first, to post the best Chapter 3 essay draft we can create to the Canvas discussion site as soon as possible (for sure by midnight tonight). Then, give thorough, helpful, and thoughtful feedback to at least on classmate on their Chapter 3 writing. Your feedback should be completed before class time Wednesday.
Please answer as many questions as possible using the the peer response form on pages 90 and 91 to help your classmates improve their writing.
We will share our Chapter 3 essays and suggestions in class tomorrow, as well as looking at some common problems and perhaps, moving on to Chapter 4.
See you in class!
JBH
2019.01.04
We started off our mid-term class session by scheduling appointment times for one-on-one consultations with the instructor on Monday. The schedule is posted below. Please meet me in my office, Room 404 of the Main Building.
We moved on to a reading about Rosita, a person who the writer had a lot of conflict with, discussing and freewriting about the reading. We finished the session off by going over the Chapter 3 Essay assignment together.
I look forward to talking about your writing with you on Monday. Please bring specific questions or ideas about what you want help with in your essays.
Have a great weekend!
JBH
2019.01.02 & 03
We worked our way through the first few readings and some activities in Chapter 3 in class these days, which is focused on writing about people. In addition to discussing and freewriting on student's essays about their mother and their grandmother, we did an exercise outside the classroom in which we observed people out in the real world.
Please post your writing about your people-watching experience under the Subject heading "Your Name/People Watching" in Canvas as soon as possible (by the end of the day Friday), and finish up your final draft of the Chapter 2 essay as well. You will need to turn it in for a score later, so it should be 450-700 words, double-spaced, Times New Roman 12 point font in a Microsoft Word document format. Copy and paste your essay and post it as the final comment under your first draft before the end of the day Friday.
We will continue talking about the readings and exercises in Chapter 3 in class Friday, and over the weekend, you should be writing a first draft of the Chapter 3 essay assignment on pages 77 through 79. Go a little longer with your first draft this time -- aim for 400 to 500 words or more.
See you in class!
JBH
2018.12.31
We started off this last day of 2018 with an oral peer response session on our first draft writing. It was a good chance to start sharing our writing in an easy way, and an introduction to peer response ("feedback"). We talked about how peer response worked for us and how we could make it work better.
As this class progresses, I will ask you to continue to comment on each others' writing, mostly in the class Canvas Discussion Area. Please comment on two classmates' writing using the peer response guiding questions on page 53 (item 3, questions a-e) before we meet again on Wednesday.
And although Tuesday is a holiday, we have a lot of material to cover quickly in this fast class so we can't take much time off. You should also be working on a final draft of your chapter 2 essay over the next few days. Please complete it and post it as the final comment under your first draft before we meet Thursday. We will be working on a chapter 3 essay soon at the same time, so keep your fingers moving!
새해 복 많이 받으세요!
JBH
2018.12.28
In class today, we continued on in Chapter 2, reading a couple more pieces of student writing. The first was about a student in the Dominican Republic who got a scary and exciting chance to be teacher for a day and the other, about a family's forced exile from their home during China
s Cultural Revolution. Both these stories were followed by discussion questions to help us look more closely at the readings and their message.
We again took some time in class for freewriting, and finished with a writing assignment for the weekend. Before we meet Monday, please write the first draft of the Chapter 2 essay assignment on page 50 abuot an experience in your own life. Read the instructions carefully.
Please write at least 250 words in this first draft. Eventually, you'll be looking for an essay of 500-750 words. Post your first draft to the class Canvas discussion area before we meet on Monday. We will wrap chapter 2 then with a little talk about proofreading and editing, and move on to Chapter 3 readings.
See you in class!
JBH
2018.12.27
Today, we really got going in the book, starting some reading and writing. If you have not yet received an invitation to the class Canvas discussion area, 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.
For next time, 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.
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 will be asking you to write the first draft of the Chapter 2 essay assignment on pages 50-51 before we meet Monday, Dec. 31st.
See you in class!
JBH
2018.12.26
Today, we shifted to freewriting and conversations with classmates to explore how we felt about writing, our experiences with writing, and look at our similarities and differences.
When you get your link to the class Canvas discussion area, please login ASAP (As Soon As Possible) and let everyone know you are in our online classroom. 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 (instructions below).
When you write about yourself, please also include information from your freewriting and thoughts about writing. In addition, please write a little about 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.
If you didn't hand in your typed responses to the survey on pages 24 and 25, please do so soon. It counts as homework.
In class tomorrow, we will wrap up Chapter 1 and start looking at the readings and activities in Chapter 2. Please get a book by then.
Thanks!
JBH
2018.12.24
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. Please get a copy as soon as possible. During this break session, we will be going at least through Chapter 4, perhaps into Chapter 5 before we are done.
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 what you wrote about the classmate interview questions in class, and bring your typed answers to the survey on pages 24 and 25 when we meet again Wednesday.
We will be talking more about our attitudes toward writing along with how to write and share our work with classmates online when we meet next time.
Thanks, and see you in class!
JBH
