Introduction to Composition Summer 2017

Hurricane Irma, 2017 G ood evening.  Hope all of you students and those you care about are safe from the storm. As I write, Irma has not yet reached Florida.  What a week it has been! Our week 10 scheduled class has been cancelled due to the storm, so we will have to make due with the final week of class to bring the course to a proper finish.  I will update the blog early next week to notify you of anything critical by week 11.  Papers due or overdue can be emailed me anytime, preferably in the next several days. See you soon. The Evacuees 

Labor Day Holiday

Flood Rescue, Hurricane Harvey (abcnews.com)    G ood evening.  Hope you are all well. Today we pick up where we left off last week, with a focus on pulling together the views and insights you and your classmate(s) have shared through informal exchange or interview (essay 6).  The focus was on what you like to read or where you go for news and entertainment, and what each thought and felt on watching Shel Silverstein's "The Giving Tree" on youtube.  The idea is to shape an essay expressive of the intellectual and cultural interests, opinions, and values you and other college students may share.  In this way, you will create a portrait of yourself and another, and form a few conclusions about the worlds of information and ideas available to people today.  We will continue with some verb  form practices, including a writing using the subjunctive mood.  Below I discuss this practice at some len...

                                                                 Art by Pablo Picasso     Over the last several weeks we've focused on using description and narration and last week summary and direct quotation to present the contents of a book chapter.  You were to join in, so to speak, conversation on the topic and ideas addressed in P.M. Forni's book Choosing Civility , specifically one of two chapters "Think the Best," or "Speak Kindly."  In these the author discusses the goodness to come of thinking well of others, of having high expectations, for example,  and of how we can moderate our speech to reflect our care for the feelings and well being of others.        Most of you were working on the first draft when class finished for the evening, and took the work home...

Welcome back  to class. Hope you had a good weekend. Today I'll return last week's graded narratives and the midterm work.  Those who missed the midterm will have to make it up, perhaps in the latter part of today's class. We will be composing a response of 350 words to one or another of the ideas P.M. Forni writes about in the chapters photocopied for you last week.  The idea is to present some of the content of his work in your own words and with a little use of direct quotation to support your reading and illustrate his writing.  Together we will read some of each chapter to look at the structure he is using and the sources of his ideas.  You will use your own experiences and observations in the presentation to convey what you think is most important, interesting, o...

Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day–like writing a poem or saying a prayer. What matters is that one be for a time inwardly attentive.   –Anne Morrow Lindbergh, b.1906 Good day, to you all.  Hope you are well. T oday we will  start by looking at past work and the narratives (#3) the  grammar of verbs, sentence punctuation, and use of quotations.   We will get through as much as we can, reserving the summary work described as homework below to next week's classwork.  There will be a short midterm essay composition after break of 250 words.  I will provide a topic list before break. -------------- There are modes of developing and arranging information, and we have looked closely at two thus far: narration and description.  Several other commonly used modes include  il...