Writing 1 Class Notes -- September 13

Greetings!

What a wonderful group of thoughtful students this class is!  We started our class with the Quick Write:  "Honey, I have a confession.... " which was inspired by my husband's contrite apology for getting into my cache of candy for the writing classes.  Our Vocabulary Building exercises took us on a tour through 4 books in order to get a deeper grasp of words from the SAT Test Prep list:  abdicate, abhor, abridge & accelerate.  We used the Test Prep book, a book on word etymologies, a Latin dictionary, and a book of Latin-English derivatives.  Many times when you can unpack one word to find roots and derivatives, you end up adding many more related words to your working vocabulary.

We spent the bulk of our time going over the rough drafts that I handed back today.  As I go over the rough drafts, I make notes about common errors that students have made. Writing is the best way to take those grammar rules out of the realm of theory and into actual practice and use.  I cautioned the students to not panic when they saw a significant amount of red on their papers.  I make corrections AND positive comments.  I correct some sentences in order to give an example; others I leave for the students to correct themselves.  By and large, I was very pleased with these first papers.

We spent the remaining time in discussion about Animal Farm.  The students had very thoughtful responses to some challenging questions:  1) When should a government be overthrown; and 2) What qualities should a leader have.  As we continue through the book, we'll come back to those questions.  Not a lot has "happened" yet in the first 2 chapters.  We'll encounter more activity in the next chapters.

Next Week's Assignments
-- Turn the rough draft into a final copy.
-- Read Chapters III and IV.  (Read the study questions before reading the chapters.)
-- No written responses about Animal Farm this week.
-- Extra Credit:  find the origin of the phrase "rule of thumb."
-- Online reading:  blog entry about ending punctuation and blog entry about prepositions at the end of a sentence.

Have a great week!
Tammy Prichard