Last Minute MLA Reminders

 MLA Formatting from Purdue OWL


MLA Work(s) Cited from Purdue OWL


Complete MLA Format Guide from Purdue OWL

Final Revisions

As you gear up for the final revision of your essay of choice, remember the advice that I gave you in class this week when choosing which essay to revise: pick the essay that has the most potential, not necessarily the essay that received the best grade OR the one you "liked" the best.

Make sure you approach your revisions logically (recalling that your efforts account for 33% of your final grade), focusing on the global revisions first and the sentence-level revisions last.  Your Bedford Handbook provides these suggestions when making global revisions (2b & 2c):

Revision Guidelines

Global Revisions

Sentence-level Revisions

SHARPENING THE FOCUS (Purpose) Look for opportunities to clarify the introduction (especially the thesis) to delete text that is off the point IMPROVING THE ORGANIZATION Look for opportunities to add or sharpen topic sentences to move blocks of text to reparagraph and perhaps to add headings STRENGTHENING THE CONTENT (Development) Look for opportunities to add specific facts, details, and examples to emphasize major ideas to rethink your argument or central insight CLARIFYING THE POINT OF VIEW  (Language) Look for opportunities to make the point of view more consistent to use a more appropriate point of view ENGAGING THE AUDIENCE (Language) Look for opportunities to let readers know why they are reading to motivate readers to read on to use a more appropriate tone

STRENGTHENING SENTENCES (Usage) Look for opportunities to use more active verbs to prune excess words CLARIFYING SENTENCES (Usage) Look for opportunities to balance parallel ideas to supply missing words to untangle mixed constructions to repair misplaced or dangling modifiers to eliminate distracting shifts INTRODUCING VARIETY (Language) Look for opportunities to combine choppy sentences to break up long sentences to vary sentence openings REFINING THE STYLE (Language) Look for opportunities to choose language more appropriate for the subject and audience to choose more exact words

Revision Checklist

Global Revisions

Sentence-level Revisions (Usage)

FOCUS (Purpose) Does the introduction focus on the main point? Is the thesis clear enough? (If there is no thesis, is there a good reason for omitting one?) Are any ideas off the point? ORGANIZATION Does the writer give readers enough organizational cues (such as topic sentences or headings)? Should any text be moved? Are any paragraphs too long or short for easy reading? CONTENT (Development) Are there enough facts, examples, and details to support major ideas? Are the parts proportioned sensibly? Do major ideas receive enough attention? How might the argument be strengthened? POINT OF VIEW (Language) Is the draft free of distracting shifts in point of view? Is the point appropriate? AUDIENCE APPEAL (Language) Does the draft accomplish its purpose to inform us, to persuade us, to entertain us, to call us to action (or some combination of these)? Does the opening paragraph make us want to read on? Do we know why we are reading? Is the tone appropriate?

GRAMMAR Sentence fragments Run-on sentences Subject-verb agreement Pronoun-antecedent agreement Pronoun reference Case of nouns and pronouns Case of who and whom Adjectives and adverbs Standard English verb forms Verb tense, mood, and voice ESL problems PUNCTUATION The comma and unnecessary commas Quotation marks End punctuation The semicolon The colon The apostrophe Other punctuation marks MECHANICS Abbreviations and numbers Italics (underlining) Spelling and the hyphen Capital letters

Adaptations Presentations . . .

The first video adaptation of this semester is Alyssa Cheeseman's adaptation of "A Rose for Emily":

In Ten Play Festival @ 7:30 in E Auditorium

Thursday, Friday, & Saturday; attending and writing a reaction for each play can earn you up to five (5) extra credit or make-up reactions.

Cancelled Thursday Classes, Poetry Drafts, & Presentations

Cancelled Thursday Class

For those who were NOT in class on Tuesday or in case you forgot, remember that we will NOT be having class tomorrow.  Instead, I encourage you to be working on your Poetry Essays and your Adaptation Projects.  Consider going to the writing center for help during this time.

Poetry Essays

The drafts for the Poetry Essays are due Sunday night at 11:55pm.  MAKE SURE that you focus on how your selected poem(s) relates to YOU.  The thesis/body should NOT be telling the reader what the poem means or how it applies to the rest of the world; this is YOUR relationship with the poem and how it affects or relates to your own life.  You can (in fact are encouraged) to include experience from your own life, which mean use of narrative.

Adaptation Projects

Beginning Tuesday, we will be watching the presentations in class.  If you are making a video, either upload it to YouTube for easy access or bring it on a flash drive.  The instructions are relatively simple, but remember that you must "present" for five minutes, either through the actual adaptation or an explanation of the process that you went through to create it.  This assignment is an easy A if you follow the minimum requirements.  Forgetting the assignment is a guaranteed zero (not an F, a zero); so make sure you are a participant!!  We will be going in the order of volunteers then random selection, so make sure you are ready to go!!!!

Useful Guide for Reader Response

If you missed either Tuesday's or Wednesday's overview of the upcoming Reader Response Poetry Essay, see this Sample Reflective Response Essay.  Although the writer is using a song for this response, you can see a strategy for setting up your analysis.  The one thing you do NOT need to do is use the headers (the instructor is using these to show the role of each paragraph in the essay, but the transitions at the start of each paragraph should provide the logical connection, suggesting what that paragraph is doing in the essay).  This is a somewhat informal essay, but that is fine because you are using first-person perspective.  

Warning: This essay is incomplete, so it does not actually get into the full analysis.  Make sure that in working your way through the poem, you do NOT just give the equivalent of a synopsis--simply retelling the reader what the poem says--literally.  It should be your REACTION to the poem and its various elements that make up your analysis, with a general overall assessment of the poem as it applies to YOU, not me, not students, not scholars, but YOU.

Friday Office Hours & Monday/Tuesday Homework

Friday Office Hours

I am having extra office hours tomorrow (Friday) from 9 to 2pm for anyone who want to go over drafts or have me look at your annotated bibliographies.

Homework

The reactions for Monday/Tuesday are a little different for your LAST homework assignment of the semester.  Read T. S. Eliot's "Love Song for J. Alfred Prufrock" in the poetry readings for class discussion, and do a line-by-line assessment of all of the elements of poetry that you can find.  This is simply an identification exercise, which we will discuss in class.  The purpose of the assignment is twofold: 1) it will help prepare you for doing the same with your poem of choice for your reader-response Poetry Essays, and 2) it will prepare you for the Poetry Quiz (I can guarantee you will do well on the quiz if you correctly identify all of the "parts."

Adaptation Projects

Don't forget to think about what you will be doing for your adaptation project the last week of classes. As I suggested in class, you can kill two birds with one stone if you use the same poem for your Poetry Essay for your adaptation.  As I have stated earlier in the year, this project is meant to be fun and you should be able to earn an easy A, but you MUST follow the basic criteria in the Adaptation Projects folder in the Assignment section of Lessons.  You should be posting a proposal to the Instructions & Proposals for Your Adaptation Projects to make sure that you are on the right track.  We will discuss these further in class next week, but READ the instructions!

Citations for Texts Supplied in Course

Based on many of the texts that I supply in the course web site, it is important to know WHAT is included in a citation and why.  Note that all of this information is identical to the guides in your handbook or Bedford's guide for works cited pages. However, you will not see a specific example that will match with these texts.  Learn to ADAPT your entries based on the information you know about a source.  I have added publication dates and information for all of the fiction in the Fiction Readings folder. Here are two examples of how to cite texts provided in the course with explanations:

Faulkner, William. "Barn Burning." Harper's Magazine. June 1939. Ed. Randolph Handel. ENC1102 Writing About Literature. Course home page. Spring 2012. Dept. of English, Santa Fe College. Web. 1 April 2012.

Crane, Stephen. "Experiment in Misery." New York Press. 22 April 1894. Ed. Randolph Handel. ENC1102 Writing About Literature. Course home page. Spring 2012. Dept. of English, Santa Fe College. Web. 1 April 2012.

1) This is the main publication entry and should be done according to whatever format is called for with the original publication. In the cases above, you know that the Faulkner short story is from a magazine and the Crane story is from a newspaper, so you provide all of the information that you know. However, you sometimes might only know the publication date, in which case you put down as much as you can and leave the rest. Essentially it is up to the web publisher to supply all relevant publication information from the original. YOUR job is to simply repeat that information in the proper format and then adequately cite the web publisher as part of your source (see 2 below). 

2) This is the information for the web publisher--which in this case is the course web site itself.  If you have used anything from the databases, you will notice a similarity, but with some significant additions. Although some online-based courses might have editors outside of a course, most of the time it is appropriate to use the instructors name for the editor.  Following my name in this citation is a) the name of the course, b) its function, c) its publication date (in this case, the semester that you are taking or accessing the course), d) the department from which the course is given, and finally e) the college where the course is offered.

3) This should be familiar; it is the medium where you accessed the information.  MOST of your entries are likely coming from the web, but if you consulted a book or a had copy of a magazine, then you should be using "Print."  And if you end up revising your Macbeth essay for the revision and included sources from film or a DVD, your medium should reflect that.

4) This too should be familiar; it is the access date, and ANY source coming from online should include this because you are basically informing the reader that on THIS date the information was there, even if it is removed the next day.

Wednesday/Thursday Reminder

Reactions for a different Billy Collin's poem and adaptation than you did the first part of the week is due at the beginning of class.  Remember that you CANNOT choose the poem that we discussed in class after the group work ("The Dead" for 11am Monday and 12:30pm Tuesday, and "Walking Across the Atlantic" for 11am Tuesday). While doing your reactions, think about the various elements of poetry that we identified during class and apply them to the second Collin's poem.

This exercise will help prepare you for writing your third and final portfolio essay, which is a Reader Response explication of a poem of your choice (ideally from one of your bi-weekly reactions).  The main difference between a standard explication and this assignment is the focus on your own, subjective reaction and analysis rather than a more objective analysis. To help you anticipate that essay, here is the assignment, which can also be found in Portfolio Assignments folder:

Write an essay which focuses on your personal interaction with a poem (i.e. reader response), analyzing WHY you think the poem works the way it does for you.  In order to support this analysis, you will need to incorporate the various Elements of Poetry to help explain the reaction that you had from the poem (simply stating "it made me feel happy" would be too vague and nondescript).  Break down the language to understand specifically what caused your reaction, essentially providing a personal explication of the poem. IF you happen to have looked up any information about the poet, poem, etc. discuss how that effected your initial interpretation, if relevant.  The MAIN thing to consider in this essay is the creation of a cohesive argument, not simply a random collection of disconnected interpretations; in essence, what was the overall impact on you (e.g. the imagery brought back memories of playing baseball with your dad)--then explain in detail why by using the elements for support.

Extra Credit?

Have you missed reactions and home work assignments--or peer reviews--throughout the semester?  (These are the no-brainer points that you should NOT have lost, but you did for various reasons.)

OR

Do you want an extra boost to help you in the end when your final revision of your essay of choice counts for so much?

Take advantage of the following extra credit assignments:

• Extra Credit Peer Review for the Fiction Essay (Do an extra peer review for one more credit) DUE: April 10th @ 11:59 pm
• Five (5) Extra Credit Peer Review for the Historical Context Bibliography
  DUE: April 10th @ 11:59 pm
• Five (5) Extra Credit Reaction Assignments for Reviewing In Ten Play Festival Performances April 18-20. (For each play you review/react to, you will receive a reaction credit.  These should be full paragraphs addressing issues of drama and not some of the sentence reactions I have been seeing lately for homework). DUE: April 22/23 in class
• Extra Credit Peer Review for the Poetry Essay (Do an extra peer review for one more credit) DUE: April 23rd @ 11:59 pm
• Three (3) Extra Credit Peer Review for Final Essay of Choice
  DUE: April 30th @ 11:59 pm