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

MLA Quiz

The MLA quiz SHOULD be available now to be completed by April 21.  The main goal of the quiz is for you to solidify your knowledge of MLA style for your essays and annotated bibliography.  You can take the quiz as many times as you want before April 21st in order to get a 100.  I encourage you to do so because it means you will be able to apply that information before you submit your subsequent assignments, especially your revised Fiction Portfolio II essay and your Annotated Bibliography.

Collins' Poem Reaction Reminder

Remember to read one of the poems by Billy Collins from the "Collection" in the "For Class Discussion" folder inside the "Poetry Readings" folder.
, write a reaction, then watch a video adaptation of that poem, and write a second reaction in which you respond to the adaptations interpretation as compared to yours.