Review of Week 11 and Preview of Week 12
Review of Week 11
[by Lillie]
This week in English we only had class discussion during Thursday’s class period after individual meetings with Dr. Seaman on Tuesday. Dr. Seaman gave us general feedback on our annotated bibliographies and introduced further description of our project proposal due on Tuesday April 3rd. She clarified the definition of common sentence structure errors: comma splice (joining two sentences with just a comma, as follows: “He wasn’t hungry, he had just eaten a feast.”), sentence fragment (an incomplete sentence, such as the second of these: “The clouds formed overhead. While the band played on.”), and run-on sentence (like a comma splice but without the comma, as follows: “He wasn’t hungry he had just eaten a feast.”). Comma splices can be repaired with the use of a semi-colon: “He wasn’t hungry; he had just eaten a feast.” Sentence fragments tend to happen when a sentence is begun with with “Because” or “While,” so use those structures carefully.
Dr. Seaman then addressed the project proposal and its relevance to project 4b. The proposal will serve as an aid to your research as you develop your ideas for your paper; it will keep the train of thought “rolling.”
For the remainder of the class we analyzed a project proposal by one of her former students titled “The Politics of Hip Hop.” This transitioned into the They say/I say reading on the “voice” of writing. It’s found that when a writer is given the opportunity to write in a relaxed tone then the quality of the writing is richer, revealing the character and personality of the author through word choice and structure. The structure of Kozol’s essay Preparing Minds for Markets was then discussed. Kozol does a nice job of not telling the reader what to think but by implying his opinion just enough that the reader agrees with his position.
Preview of Week 12
[by Dr. Seaman]
This week we will spend class time watching two movies that we will discuss at the start f next week. Detailed explanation of this can be found here (under the “Assignments” tab on the course blog menu).