english easy course

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Assignment 2: Essentials of Good Writing and Getting a College-Level Engagement with Words (getting a CLEW).

Purpose

1. Continue to gain mastery of Principles of Reader Expectations (PRE).

2. Change one’s understanding of the writing process to an adult level.

3. Understand the significance of the sentence as the smallest basic unit for conveying meaning.

4. Continue to engage more deeply with one’s language.

5. Understand how one improves one’s vocabulary by perceiving the potential in the words one has written.

Objectives

1. Explain the “perfect writing process” and what makes it “perfect” 2. Identify infinitives and change them into verbs 3. Change passive voice verbs (PVV) into active voice verbs (AVV) and vice versa 4. Demonstrate a deeper engagement with one’s language

Reading Assignments (DETAILED READING INSTRUCTIONS BELOW)

1. Chapter 3: The Writing Process

2. Chapter 7: The Phenomena of Sentences

3. Appendix: Grammatical Terms Necessary for PRE Analysis

4. Inside front cover of textbook

(NOTE: please read this entire assignment explanation before reading the assigned pages) Instructor Comments

Chapter 3

Because this is a course on writing, I’d like you to read through this chapter carefully so that you can begin using the assumptions, attitudes and activities that I think will help you— in all your courses – become adept at producing college level verbal responses that your instructors will look forward to reading.

Again, I emphasize the idea of attitude – that you allow the first draft to be what we usually call it – rough. This means that you are not bummed out if the first draft is unorganized, or wordy or vague. Those are traits we associate with rough or first drafts, so if your first draft is rough, then you can say, “perfect!” You also know that the most

important stage of the writing process is revision, where you identify the nature of the messiness or wordiness or vagueness and then use revision tools to convert them into organized, efficient and clear writing.

Even more important, your revision activities are really thinking activities and so you can expect your revisions to lead you to a better understanding of the topic for which you write. You might see new aspects of your topic because of your revision techniques. You would even – eventually – encounter aspects of your Selfhood that you had not met before. I propose that these consequences of revision can be in your future if you get a CLEW now!

I hope you come to see that coming up with good revisions isn’t very mysterious – it begins with identifying the subjects and verbs you see in your sentences. But now in this chapter, we take the next step – we now name the “identities” of the verbs and we look to see if other words in the sentence could become verbs. We are on the hunt for the resourceful but shy “infinitive”! I hope to show you the veracity of the first faculty assumption that I state on p. 3 of the textbook.

This writing process also means that you don’t invest yourself in the drafts you write, whether they are first drafts or revised drafts. Not spending a lot of time laboring over any specific sentence or word will decrease the chances that you will get too attached to any sentence you labored over. In addition, you will increase the chances that you can see your wording realistically and so then make changes that are really imaginative.

If you are to take anything away from that chapter at first reading it would be 3 things:

• attitudes for invention and first draft stage (p. 43),

• the sequence of activities to follow during revision p. 45-47, and

• on p. 48 – Assumptions you should drop if they currently influence your engagement with writing assignments.

Please read Ch. 3 now and complete the Study Guide Questions you can access in the Writing Assignment section below. CH 7 ON THE STRUCTURE OF SENTENCES Remember that the college student must negotiate two readerships: the civilian readers and the academic readers. You come into college as civilian readers but then are asked to read texts that often are meant for academic readers, even though most students return to ‘civilian’ life after college. But academic expectations about sentence structure and wording are different from the civilian expectations, and I try to describe those differences in Ch. 7.

But now I’d like to add a third element: adult level thinking. Adult level thinking goes on in both readerships, and I’d like to think of adult level thinking as different from civilian thinking and academic thinking. This adult level thinking is linked to the use of words by the adult (whether a civilian or an academic). In Ch. 7, the things about words that I consider to be central to adult level thinking involve you recognizing possibilities for revision within the sentence itself, as we find ways to make verbs (and so invent subjects) out of infinitives, nominalizations, participles, even adjectives.

For example, when we change an infinitive into a verb, we then must create a subject, and that subject most often will be a person (since most sentences are about things

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that people do). We are then triggering two images in our minds and it might be that these images help us see other aspects of our topic.

Then there is a 3rd possibility – we can see the metaphors that we had been using without realizing it, and as we use metaphors deliberately, we do intellectual work that is relatively new to us, and this mental-verbal work, I suggest, energizes our mental life. I like to think that we cannot access some places in our intellect unless we use metaphors deliberately.

All of this intellectual growth can occur as experimental activity during revision, as we see what happens as we engage with the language, with something we’ve been submerged in since we were born and so we thought there was nothing new under the sun about them. That we now do something consciously that we had been doing automatically is often a definition of adult level thinking. Please read Ch. 7 now and complete the assignments in the Writing Assignment section below. Finally - There is an “exam” about the Appendix I would like you to take. The Appendix reviews basic grammatical terms but with an emphasis on how the parts of a sentence function in relation to other parts of the sentence. It is very important that you memorize what is explained about Subjects, Verbs, Nouns and Verb Voice. In addition, be sure to read about “Nominalizations” on p. 104. COMMENTS ON INSIDE FRONT COVER The Wedges on the inside front cover deal with the sense of “structure” that Northrop Frye refers to in his essay that you will read later. These are structures dealing with the single word, strings of words (the sentence) and strings of sentences (the paragraph).

Please watch the videos that explain these wedges by clicking on the link to them in the Assignment 2 folder: “Word Wedge Part 2” “Paragraph Wedge” WRITING ASSIGNMENTS NOTE: Click on the “Video for Assignment 2 Writing Assignments” link in the Assignment 2 folder to access a video about these writing assignments. Again, click the smaller box on the left to make that box fill the entire screen. Chapter 3 Assignment: Answering Study Guide Questions (10 points) Type your responses to this assignment using a word processing program and save as a file. If you are using a word processing program other than Microsoft Word, then please save the file as Rich Text Format. Submit as a file attachment.

Click on the “Study Guide for Ch. 3” link the Assignment 2 folder to access the study guide questions. Down load as a Word file and type in answers as instructed. Save and submit Chapter 3 Assignment: Infinitive Conversions (10 points) Type your responses to this assignment using a word processing program and save as a file. If you are using a word processing program other than Microsoft Word, then please save the file as Rich Text Format. Submit as a file attachment. NOTE: I’d like you to pay special attention to the section on Revision (p. 45 – 48) and then the section on “Rewriting in Response to Revision Analysis” (49 – 51). This activity deals with what I say on p. 50, at 2.b – converting infinitives into Verbs. I hope this activity shows that you don’t need a bigger vocabulary to write at the college (adult) level. Rather, you just need to see the resources in the sentence you wrote. Click on the “Changing Infinitives into Verbs” link in the Assignment 2 folder to access an assignment dealing with infinitives. Down load as a Word file and type in answers as instructed. Save and submit. Chapter 7 Assignment: Verb Voice (10 points) Type your responses to this assignment using a word processing program and save as a file. If you are using a word processing program other than Microsoft Word, then please save the file as Rich Text Format. Submit as a file attachment. Click on the “PVV to AVV” link in the Assignment 2 folder to access the assignment on Verb Voice. Down load as a Word file and type in answers as instructed. Save and submit. Chapter 7 Assignment: Creating Concrete Subjects (10 points) Type your responses to this assignment using a word processing program and save as a file. If you are using a word processing program other than Microsoft Word, then please save the file as Rich Text Format. Submit as a file attachment. Click on the “Subject Verb Revision for Traction” file in the Assignment 2 folder [here] to access the assignment on making sentences more direct. Down load as a Word file and type in answers as instructed. Save and submit by the assignment date. Appendix Assignment: Knowing Your Terms (10 points) Type your responses to this assignment using a word processing program and save as a file. If you are using a word processing program other than Microsoft Word, then please save the file as Rich Text Format. Submit as a file attachment. NOTE:

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Click on the “Appendix Exam” file in the Assignment 2 folder to access the assignment on grammatical terms. Down load as a Word file and type in answers as instructed. Save and submit by the assignment date.