Writing 1 Class Notes -- Week 3 (January 27)

 Greetings!

This week's Quick Write prompts were taken from the list that the students in Writing 1 and Writing 2 contributed to last fall.  Here are the prompts for today’s Quick Write:

• What is a favorite childhood memory?

• What is one of the best days of your life?

• What was a highlight of your week?

• Whatever …..

Our Words of the Day came from Megan, Ike, and Grace:  and Kaylynn:

hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia  -- an extension of sesquipedalian (long words) with monstrum (“monster”) and hippopotamus (intended to exaggerate the length) and phobia -- the fear of long words

defenestration -- fr. Latin de, "down from" and fenestra, "window" -- to throw someone out of the window

kakorrhaphiophobia-- fr. Greek, kakos, "bad and evil," and phobia, "fear" --  a fear of failure

Students have handed in the Pre-Writes and Rough Drafts of their Narrative Essays.  Most of them enjoyed writing these because they could write about personal experiences.  I look forward to reading them.

We are 4 chapters into our book, The Thirty-Nine Steps, and most of the students are enjoying the story line.  Some aspects are unfamiliar because it was written for another time and place.  I reminded the students to look up unfamiliar words.  I divided the class into small groups to discuss these 2 questions:  Was Hannay a good or bad spy? and Why does he keep telling his story to people?

For the Grammar portion of class, we worked again on simple and compound sentences.  We reviewed the basic elements of a sentence (subject + verb + complete thought).  Many times students write sentence fragments and run-on sentences and comma splice sentences because they don't have a strong sense for these sentence elements.  We took time to do a few of the sentences on each worksheet.  [Note:  Remember to correct your grammar worksheets and to clearly mark that they've been corrected.]

Assignments for Next Week:

• No writing -- I'm correcting rough drafts this week

• Read Ch. 5 & 6 of The 39 Steps

• Week 4 – 3 Study Guide Questions

• Grammar – Compound Subject

• Grammar – Compound Predicate

• Grammar – Compound Subject & Predicate

 

Links for This Week

Writing 1 Class Notes -- Week 3 (January 27)

The Thirty Nine Steps audiobooks

Tamera M. Prichard

Writing Instructor at CHAT

Writing 1, Writing 2, Writing 3

ACT Prep, British Literature