Two examples of failed access

one

two

If you do not set the permissions in the "share" menu to "everybody with the link", we cannot see your document. Please, yall, fix that now. cheers Roland
... Problems fixed. Thank You!

Jan 31 - a shorter meeting due to elections.

You have done the exercises on the Diane Hacker site.

1. Please describe what you found there in a short 200 word description of this experience. Give me three examples of things you learned. Yes, you can use the examples from the Hacker site.
Post your description on the blog when it's done. You have 30 minutes for this task.

2. For next week, post twelve questions you may want to ask of an interviewee: which topics interest you? Family? Sports? Education? Relationship? Food? Pick at least three topics (your own or the one listed before) and formulate four questions each. Put it in a post called: Interview questions (raw)

3. Lastly, peruse the LEO site and pick a topic you would like to present to class. (The list is long, please review it all.) For the presentation, have a blog post ready, and a handout. I will ask students to present for 3-4 minutes each next week.

Tue 1-24 We will start at 6PM - one hour later

Please be sure that you have all elements of your work so far displayed on your blog: Who am I, Inventory, Story-in-a-box, When is a story good, and the evaluation of all stories in a box by peers, using the parameters from last week. You will have a little bit of time to finish this by tomorrow evening when we'll quit ... time to read and evaluate!
The question: "When is a story good" received many answers from the different groups. Now I am asking the groups to read and consider all student input and create a final list that can be adopted by the entire class. For that purpose, I have posted a document that all students can write into and edit. It is found: Here.
--The unsorted results from the groups are:
--Good choice of words but has to make sense
--Transition from one point to another
-- Introduction: Needs to catch your attention and make you want to keep reading to find out what happens.
--Mystery: don't make the topic be extremely obvious. allow the reader to actually think about it and try to figure things out for themselves.
--Clear and intresting ending
--Grammar and Structure
--Imagination: Being creative makes it more interesting to read, and more engaging.
--Personalized stories with your own words and ideas are more meaningful and interesting
--Creative: Should be something new that makes story more interested and different
--Creative body could make readers not loose their interests in your story
--Be logical: a story should make sense
--Has a good hook in the beginning
--Conclusion that summarizes main points of the story
-- When it is made for the reader to understand. Target audience.
--Using good resources to find legit information.
--Put facts from least to most important.
--Attractive clues that makes you want to read more.
--Pace: How fast the story moves shouldn't be to fast or to slow
--Emotion: The ability to connect to the emotions of what is happening
Each student is asked to now prioritize these ideas from 1 - 20 and put their list onto their blog. How can you indicate in your blog posting that this is a class list and not your own?

Now it is time to visit the free Hacker pages on clear sentences. http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/bedhandbook7enew. It Can be tricky to get into the pages needed. Click on the brown picture of Grammar and it will pop up bigger: "Grammar exercises and results". Click on the brown button again. When asked to input your student data, choose the middle button to cancel... and you will get there. I will show you in class. Please complete all exercises you find here for next week Tuesday.
Today in class, go to this document to find group assignments.
The groups need to create posts to explain their grammar topic, and report back to the entire class.

Homework for next week, Feb 1: each student completes all Hacker topics under "clear sentences" and creates a blog "Hacker Review of <Clear Sentences>" that shows: the topics reviewed, a statement whether this is valuable to you, or not, and why. For example:
Topic 1 active/passive This was not helpful to me because I understand the difference already.
Topic 2 active vs be-verbs: This helped me a lot because I tend to use many be-verbs,
etc.

E-ex 8-1 Active vs. passive verbs

E-ex 8-2 Active vs. be verbs

E-ex 8-3 Active verbs  (edit and compare)

E-ex 9-1 Parallelism

E-ex 9-2 Parallelism

E-ex 9-3 Parallelism  (edit and compare)

E-ex 10-1 Needed words

E-ex 10-2 Needed words  (edit and compare)

E-ex 11-1 Mixed constructions

E-ex 11-2 Mixed constructions  (edit and compare)

E-ex 12-1 Misplaced modifiers

E-ex 12-2 Misplaced modifiers  (edit and compare)

E-ex 12-3 Dangling modifiers

E-ex 12-4 Dangling modifiers  (edit and compare)

E-ex 13-1 Shifts: person and number

E-ex 13-2 Shifts: tense

E-ex 13-3 Shifts

E-ex 13-4 Shifts  (edit and compare)

E-ex 14-1 Choppy sentences

E-ex 14-2 Choppy sentences  (edit and compare)

E-ex 14-3 Subordination


Furthermore, go back in this post and prioritize the 20 parameters of "Good writing" from most to least important to you. Put it in a post.

When is a story "good" - what are the parameters?

Some stories read very well, others seem a drag. Work with two other students (be sure not to work with students you already know and mix the cultural background of members to get a variety of experience) on a list and explanations to the question: When is a story good?
Then post your observations. Each group members posts the same. We will listen to all groups in class today.
1. Form groups of three.
2. Discuss the topic.
3. Determine your answers and parameters
4. Post your results.
5. Present your results.
Groups
1. Neset Furkan Akbas, Justine Barron, ZhaoYang Zhang
2. Zhongmeizi Li, Tiffany Purfeerst, Abdullah Alkalthami
3.Nicholas S, Joseph Reece, Hao Xu
4. xingyi zhang, Tyler Patterson, Mengyao Ding
5. Wenting Cai, Janaka R Farrukh Abdullaev
6. Kelsey Reinke, Abdullah Aldablan, Lianlin Liu
7. Janvier Byiringiro, Boshi Chen, Tiffany Smith
8. Ashley Karna, Gu Yi, Faisal Alali, Yue W

Jan 17, 2012 Editing

Your blog must be up and running by now and your Story-in-a-box posted. In many cases the story is written as one block of text, no headers, etc. Let's now change the appearance of our story to feature the following:
Introductory paragraph: explain in abstract form what will follow. "This story is about..."
Then some white space.
Then a title
Story-in-a-box (new line)
title of your story
Then create paragraphs. Most students have about one to one and a half pages of text. Break it up into five to six paragraphs.
How does it look now? Turn to your classmates and get their critique.

--------
You already read a few stories. But now, after the editing has been completed, we need to establish criteria for evaluation and read and rate them all. The winner will get the bonus.

Criteria: ___ examples and entry form for group suggestions for final parameters to be used by all:
Criterion 1: Creative use of the 12 items (5 Points)
Criterion 2: Interest (3 Points)
Criterion 3: Organization/Structure (3 Points)
Criterion 4: Flow (transitions from idea to idea) (2 Points)
Criterion 5: Grammar/Spelling (2 Point)

Entry form for all student scores: here
Entry form for the three highest scores: here
--------

Homework for next week: peruse the LEO website and select a topic that interests you. Find the same or a similar topic at the University of Ottawa link. Study it and create a blog post with examples of the topic. Be prepared to show all of us what you posted, and explain what you learned about your "problem" topic. Please note: We will start at 6PM next week, not at five PM. Same location one hour later (due to my work in the Twin Cities until 4PM).
Please be sure to post the homework at all times. When I ask you to pick a topic from LEO, you are expected to peruse the topics, read many of the offerings, and pick what you may need for your personal improvement. Then you have to post that choice and the reason why you picked it on your blog.

Day 1

Introduction, handouts, discussion of pre-writing considerations and techniques. All students need to create a google account id and start a blog. The naming of the blog must be: en191s12+firstnamelastname and please consider using a picture of yourself. When asked, come forward to link your blog to this class blog.

Homework for next week:
"Who am I" - What did people write who were asked this question? Write a short report and post it later today on your blog
Story-in-a-Box: Make an inventory list of 12 items. Name the item and describe it. Two to three sentences per item. Then create a story linking the items in a plot that you  fabricate. 350-700 words. Have fun.

Syllabus (in-progress)

Dr. Roland Specht-Jarvis, LH 116
320 224 2341
rhspechtjarvis@gmail.com
This blog serves as an extended syllabus.
Theme of this class: Cultural Heritage: The Stories within.

Course ID: 002799 ENGL 191 22 Intro Rhetorcl/Analyt Wrt

The class meets one evening per week in MC 206 on Tuesdays from 5-8:20.

The class will require you to

            - keep track of the class blog at all times. Announcements appear there.

            - create your own google blog and tell the instructor the url.

            - name the blog en191s12+your name, e.g. en101s12RolandSpechtJarvis

            - I would appreciate if you would be willing to post a mug shot of your face on your blog. It would help me greatly since we only meet 15 times and I have over 100 students this semester.

We will use the first four meetings to address select writing problems, and create a new story from scratch: The Story in a Box. Students will read and evaluate each others blogs and stories throughout the semester. All your blogs and entries are due at noon of the day we meet: Tuesday (unless otherwise indicated). This class depends on active student participation and will reduce lectures to a minimum because they have shown not to sink in as well as peer-to-peer discovery. The instructor's explanations and suggestions will serve your own discovery more than anything else.

Book, resources, guidelines

Recommended book: Diana Hacker, Nancy Sommers, Rules for Writers, student edition, Bedfort/St. Martin's Boston-New York 2012

The course objectives

Reading, writing, and critical reasoning based on different text types and situations related to Global Cultures & Communications. We will explore the creative as well as analytical side of writing, discourse, and structure together. You will write short and longer papers and learn to edit your writing, improve your arguments, and become more effective communicators using blogs. All the while you will learn about other countries and cultures and explore the otherness of non-US speech, text, discourse and argument.

The semester will be structured as follows:

Part I: Five meetings January-February we will cover handouts, LEO and writing topics from the

University of Ottawa Writing Center.

Part II Preparing for interviews with class mates students, conducting interviews,

and writing interview and country reports. This will cover February until early April.

Part III You personal Final Project. This could be an additional interview with a "foreign" person not in class, a comparison of several interviews generated in this class, a research paper, or anything else we agreed on. The day of finals

is May 3. Your final project is due that day in your blog by 9PM. Please consider that

-- Several drafts are needed until a paper or presentation reads well .

-- Writing and researching improves as you allow others to critique your

work, and make editing suggestions to you.

-- If in doubt about a sentence, paragraph, or page of your text and its role for

the entire paper, just cut it out.

-- Less is usually more, if less was edited and revised intelligently.

-- Any text element in your paper that is not your own writing and expression,

needs to be referenced as the work or idea of others.

-- Use of technology cannot make up for lack of reflection and poor writing design.

-- You can only write about what you know; resist writing about things

you do not understand. 

Journal or Blog

You are expected to keep a google blog and paste any homework, presentations, and papers into new posts. If working in a group, state all members' names and the url totheir part of the presentation. Linking URLs is very easy in our working envirnment using gogle blogs (which we use because they are free, and allow all students to use the same page authoring design). Whenever you freewrite, list,

research, or keep records of books and urls used, paste it into your journal/blog. The journal is

supposed to show evidence of how you went about tasks, which books and

homepages you used, etc. Every time you search for a topic (e.g. www.google.com)

I require you to record and post the urls used and the date you visited that page. 

Use a word-processing program or an editor simultaneously with the browser to

keep records. Save your work to your personal disk, USB storage card,

or Husky account and keep a second copy in your google documents. If you do not complete homework from week to week, you cannot work effectively in class that day. 

A person without a correctly kept journal/blog (complete and timely posting) cannot achieve

better than a B even if everything else is A+.

Grades will be based on:

Completeness and appearance of blog 30%

Post assignments, homework, interviews 50%

Class participation, presentations 20%

Best paper (or post or interview) in class gives you a 10% bonus for the final grade on select tasks, as announced. Missing a meeting without talking with me ahead of time costs you 5% on the final grade. Missing more than 25% of total class time, by department policy, forces me to fail you in this class.