ENGL 505A

I will have my students ask questions concerning their readings. I think I will also ask them to post ideas (not personal but rather ones they read/hear about) related to the upcoming election.

Here is my computer class assignment.
Maria Granic-White

Computer Assignment

1. Class exercise: Have students watch the video “Cry for Help: Stop Mutations in Rift Valley!” on Youtube.com.
2. Discuss with them the rhetorical devices in the video and have them identify the audience of the video.
3. Have them utilize a handout in which they check the appropriate boxes and comment bellow the table:

Questions V SO N
Was the thesis/ main idea of the topic clear?
Was the argument logical?
Did the presenter have good ethos?

I have attached the handout for the annotated bibliography assignment. Feel free to modify it in any way you find appropriate for your class.

Hey guys, here is what I used for my second 3-5 page paper.
Second Paper
Write a no less than 3 and no more than 5 page paper on one of the five topics which we selected in class. You may write either an expository essay or an argumentative essay. If you decide to write an argumentative essay, you may use one of the two following structures for the organization of your essay.
I.The Classical Arrangement
1. Introduction
 Introduce your debatable topic and capture the attention of your audience.
 Pathos (emotional appeal) offers a good introduction but you can employ any appeal.

Thank you CRIS (NO "H"). Sorry for the mistake.

Chris, I wanted to thank you for the handout you posted. My students worked hard on CORE and they seemed to enjoy it. I will utilize it next semester, too before I assign the research paper.
Thank you again.

In "Erasure of the Sentence," Connors refers to the sentence as an element of composition pedagogy that has almost disappeared from the textbooks. His review of the traditional rhetorical classification of sentences offers the three most important sentence-based rhetorics in order to set up the stage for his discussion in which he attempts to demonstrate the stages and the causes of what he calls "the erasure of the sentence." The main reasons for the erasure of sentence rhetorics, in Connors's view are: anti-formalism, anti-automatism or anti-behaviorism, and anti-empiricism.

To emphasize to my students the advantage and the resposibility that comes with writing, I tell them the Latin saying: "Verba volens, scripta manent," which means "The spoken word flies away, while what is written stays there." Then, I tell them what Sommers mentions on page 176, that "Writing has a spatial and temporal features not apparent in speech." Sometimes I have the students work in pairs and I ask them to "tell" their paper to their partner. Upon finishing, they are to write down comments about their peer's paper and hand the comments to him/her.

The exercise Booth mentions represents a good way to make students aware of the importance of writing for the intended audience and of the idea of writing what he calls "purposeful human communication" (141). I have employed variation of this exercise. I have asked my students to describe a phenomenon or a place for at least three different types of audience: interested in science, music, computer, sports, and/or a field of particular interest to them.

Rose's article reminded me how important it is to emphasize to my students that writing is a process and that they CAN change their minds during the writing process as long as they do not announce on the due day that they do not havea a paper because they have another idea. They need to be flexible if they want to improve. Class activities can help students overcome the writer's block, as they are designed to make students become aware of what works for them and what does not when they write.