August 30 2024 - 8/30/2024

Types of essays:

  • Persuasive
  • Research
  • explanatory

What is an essay?

  1. investigates, informs and/or argues for a particular way to understand something
  2. can help “answer” a question
  3. told in an interesting way

Introduction

Includes:

  • name of text and author
  • studies
  • relevant dates
  • specify or define terms
  • major conflicts and events
  • symbols or concepts
  • thesis

Framing, tone and language

Popular: style, exposition, expressive, anecdote, personal, subjective (More opinionated)

Academic: form, argumentative, informative, analysis, study, technical, objective (More factual)

Thesis

The thesis statement is a sentence that clearly states a position and briefly mentions the supporting reasons that will follow throughout the paper

Claim - This should be the stance you take on a subject
Stakes - Prove to the
Support

Paragraphs

Includes:

  • Topic sentence
  • main idea
  • support
  • transition into a new idea

elements of the essay

  • Topic sentence
  • Supporting evidence
  • transitions
    • Causation
    • Chronology

Conclusion

Recap main ideas in one paragraph keep the language simple and consider the implication of what you learned

Tips

Read essay guidelines carefully review your notes remember to write with an audience in mind stay on topic decide which ideas are simple or complex

today

Point of View 1st: I - Me - Myself 2nd: You23 3rd: They - Them - She - He

September 16 2024 - 9/16/2024

Intuition: Your unconscious guide, and instinctive suspicion that believes in structure and meaning

What makes being a human so special?*

*affect - a fekt: an experience of emotion that produces some change

Affect is perhaps the most difficult plane of human life to describe.

“Infer” Information

What happens in your head when you read?

  • Authors seldom tell uou exactly what they mean
    • suggest, avoid and imply
  • Figurative language
    • Symbolism, Metaphor & Simile, Personification, Hyperbole, Irony
  1. Think about the occasion of her visit. Is it significant?
    • j
  2. Does the title help us understand anything?
    • a
  3. What can you infer from her memoir?
    • m

Grammar & Style

Figurative language - a figure-of-speech is a language tool that we use to help readers visualize what’s happening in a story

Personification - to attribute human qualities to some-thing
metaphor - compares two unlike things without using “like” or “as”
simile - compares two unlike things using “like” or “as”
hyperbole - an extreme exaggeration

Metaphors & Similes

  • Make simple ideas more vivid
  • Convey complex ideas in a few words
  • Confusing concepts in simple terms

September 20 2024

Sentence type example
Independent Simple His truck is way to noisy
Independent
+
Independent		 Compound it was getting dark in the small town and the moon was rising fast
independent
+
Fragment		 Complex when they hired her last year, the team knew about this problem

Run-on sentences Fused sentence - has no punctuation to mark the break between complete ideas comma splice - use a comma to connect two complete ideas

How to correct a run-on , - separate with puncuation since - subordination conjunction , and - add comma & conjunction ; - add semicolon

September 23 2024

Rhetorical Devices Symbolism - where a word, character, object or image, is used to represent something beyond it’s literal meaning

  • technique to produce complexity
  • meaning on ‘different levels’ allegory - where characters, events, objects or settings are used symbolically to represent real-life thematic ideas, mnoral qualities, or concepts.
  • help convey moral lessons
  • depict social commentary indirectly

September 25 2024

lottery notes

really old tradition
not many in the village are opposed to it
Maybe for entertainment in the past
multiple villages had this tradition
some villages have stopped the tradition
maybe serves some religious purpose

lottery questions

  1. Just a tradition that their ancestors created, perhaps for entertainment
  2. Maybe entertainment or to prevent overpopulation
  3. probably Mr. Summers

MLA

Quotes - validate your arguments, add depth, and introduce authoritative voices.

Short Quote - less than 4 lines of text
Box Quote - longer than 4 lines
Double quote - a quote that is quoting something else (use a pair of apostrophes ‘ ‘ inside the quote)
periods, exclamation marks and question marks go on the inside of the quote

  • Provide context
  • Vary your introductions
  • blend with your voice

Entire quote - james baldwin writes “not everthing that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed intil it is faced”
partial quote - as james baldwin suggests, “not everthing that is faced can be changed”
fragment - baldwins idea that little “can be changed until it is faced” proves the…

Follow-up

always follow up a quote with

common mistakes

Quote dumping over-quoting incorrect citation

September 30 2024

The Memoir

preface memory change meaning future
define your main idea is this a process or event interpret how you changed after this moment can you tie it to your interpretation of a story suggest what this means for you

October 7 2024

Hyperbole

it is another figure-of-speech that stretches the truth to emphasize a point

October 9 2024

verse - a lyric that refers to the entire poem or a single line
stanza - a grouped set of lines in a poem, separated by a space

{ Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair. ]- Verse
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor-
Bare. }- Stanza

Enjambment - “To stride over,” or a line that continually flows into the next
Caesura - a pause set in the middle of a line: comma, dash or period

October 18 2024

Active vs. Passive Voice

Active voice: the subject of the verb performs the action – The car struck the pedestrian
Passive voice: the subject reveives the verbs action – the pedestrian was struck by the car

Avoid passive voice

October 28

In-text Citations

Purpose - To credit sources directly in your text
Format - information placed in (parenthesis)
Placement - Typically placed at the end of a sentence, before a period

Information found in citations

1 - last name 2 - page number 3 - “Titled work” 4 - Completed work

Single
authors last name and page number
(Williams 260)

Multiple
both last names
(Smith and Johnson 120)
(Smith et al. 2) for more than 2

No Author
shortened title or work
(“Impact of Global Warming” 28)

Paraphrase- you still need to cite Punctuation - periods go outside the parenthesis

November 4 2024

Modernism isn’t just a literary movement, it’s an umbrella term that encompasses a radical shift in expression from 1890s-1940s.
It’s characterized by a deliberate and pronounced break from traditional ways.

Consciousness & The Mundane

What defines reality? What value is there in being realistic?

November 13 2024

Primary - foundational information
Secondary - interpreted information
Tertiary - generalized information

Peer Review - your paper goes through a ton of experts in your field who will be very critical about it
Academic sources get peer reviewed, popular sources do not.

Researching Websites

[ Credo ] - Brainstorming
[ ProCon ] - Brainstorming
[ Gale ] - Data. Statistics
[ jstore ] - Rhetoric
[ Access World News ] - Newspapers
[ El Paso Times ] - Newspapers

December 2 2024

How to correct a run-on sentence: [,]
[because]
[, so]
[;]

Vocabulary

Uncanny - The familiar but somethings off, tilted
Macabre - the gore, skeleton
Critique - Opinion
Modernism - “Make it new”
Allegory - having a moral message about real life
Genre - Sci-fi
Trope - laser guns; outer space travel
Cliche - overcomplicated explanations with big words followed by “english please!”

Verse - the lyric construction of words
Caesura - the pause in the middle of a line

Frame - a single image in a movie
Shot - where the camera’s placed
Lighting - use of color and shadow /

Readings

“On Going Home” by Joan Didion
“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson
“Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe
“Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway

Film Analysis

Punch Drunk Love (2002)
Las Marthas (2014)

Questions

If you had the power to enforce one change that would affect vaccines, what would you do? What is a suprising fact about vaccines that most people are unaware of? Why is this information useful? When the public thinks about vaccines, what is the first thing they imagine, and why might that be? This might be a stigma, event or concept.