Monday night, April 7

Prepare for Tuesday's I-CE by (1) adopting a position on the curatorial criteria you will discuss in your synthesis essay; (2) coming up with a rational basis for each criterion (i.e., your reason(s)!!); and (3) selecting the passages you will quote.

You can and should write this stuff down!  In other words, you can and should elaborately pre-write this essay at home, creating a thesis statement, an outline for your body paragraphs, and a series of evidentiary quotations you'll be likely to use on Tuesday.

Here is a link to the 2007 Form B synthesis prompt:

http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/repository/ap07_englang_formb_frq.pdf

For Monday, April 7

1.  Read THEY SAY / I SAY (Handout, pp. 55-76 - "I Say").

2.  In LOC, read pp. 592-593 ("Concise Diction"), and complete Exercise #1 (1-15).

3.  Enroll in TurnItIn.com and re-submit your Debate based Research Paper online.

To enroll, go to TurnItIn.com and create a Student Account.  Then enroll in our class by entering the appropriate Class ID # (4th Period:  7899520 // 5th Period:  7900007) and the relevant Class Enrollment Password (4th Period:  analogy4th // 5th Period:  allusion5th).

Once you have created your account and enrolled, you will see the "Debate based Research Paper" assignment.  It's the only option on TurnItIn.com for this submittal.

4.  Vocabulary Quiz - ten highly accessible words.  (See RH corner of this blog.)

Writing Day on Thursday, April 3

Please remember to have access to a draft of your research paper at class-time on Thursday.  You'll be able to work on a school computer -- or, if you can bring one, your own laptop -- during English class.

Clarification for Tuesday's class, April 1

Please focus on your research paper on the Crimea, the elimination of tobacco in America, or background checks.  There will be time to finish the two paragraphs on Educational Technology during Tuesday's class.

Change in the Calendar of Assignments

Please note that you should be up to p. 51 in They Say / I Say by Monday's class.  (Orchestra trip / Choir trip / Baseball trip -- I'll give you an alternative deadline if you didn't get the TS/IS packet this week.)

Also, please finish the Cumulative and/or Periodic sentence imitations.  I'm entering missing imitations as Zeros as of Friday, 3/28; but I'll be happy to change these for AP English students who get caught up by Monday.

The Periodic Sentence -- imitating the syntax of professional writers.

A periodic sentence “builds toward and ends with the main clause.”  (LOC, Glossary, Shea et al., Eds.)  For example:  Arching his back, his white teeth sparkling, his tail curled low between his legs, my cat scowled at the little dog.

For Friday, March 28:

Compose imitations of each of the following five (5) periodic sentences, just as you did for five cumulative sentences on Wednesday.  Choose your own subject, even as you maintain the syntax of the original.

1.  ““To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius.”  

                        ~  from “Self-Reliance,” by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841).

Imitation:

2.  "For the sake of the children, for the Republic in which these children will vote after we are dead, and for the sake of our cause, we should enlist the workingmen voters, with us, in this task of freeing the children from toil!"

                        ~  from Florence Kelley’s Speech to the Philadelphia Suffragettes (1905).

Imitation:

3. “Full of his beliefs, sustained and elevated by the power of his purpose, armed with the rules of grammar, the writer is ready for exposure.”

                        ~  from The Elements of Style, by E.B. White (1918).

Imitation:

4.  In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for a bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant.     

~  from "Shooting an Elephant," by George Orwell (1936).

Imitation:

5. “In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy....”

                        ~  from Dune, by Frank Herbert (1965).

Imitation:

Rehearsing the Cumulative Sentence, imitating the syntax of professional writers.

 FOR WEDNESDAY, MARCH 26:

Reenact the structure of the original sentence in a sentence you create.

EXAMPLE::  "He drove the car carefully, his shaggy hair whipped by the wind, his eyes hidden behind wraparound mirror shades, his mouth set in a grim smile, a .38 Police Special on the seat beside him, the corpse stuffed in the trunk."  ~  Univ. of Iowa Writing Lecturer Brooks Landon (2005)

 Imitation:  “She brushed the wolfhound arduously, her strong hand undeterred by the task, her eyes watery on account of the dog’s strong smell, her mouth locked in a firm grimace, her purse on a nearby table, the Greenie wrapped in a wad of Kleenex inside the closed purse.”

Imitation exercises:

1. “For a time he fussed with the dishes, whistling to himself as if the subject had been settled.”

                                              ~ from The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien (1990)

Imitation:

2.  “The Pacific is no place for rowers, especially when they are weak and blind, when their lifeboats are large and unwieldy, and when the wind is not cooperating.”

                                                ~ from Life of Pi, by Yann Martel (2001)

Imitation:

3. “It is a wilderness that is beautiful, dangerous, abundant, oblivious of us, mysterious, never to be conquered or controlled or second-guessed, or known more than a little.”  

                                          ~  “An Entrance to the Woods,” by Wendell Berry (1981)

Imitation:

4. “At night I’d toss and turn around in bed, half awake, half asleep, imagining how I’d sneak down to the beach and quietly push one of the old man’s boats out into the river and start paddling my way to Canada.”                 

                                       ~  from The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien (1990)

Imitation:

5.  “There is a valley of ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.”  (ß Championship round!)

                                                        ~ from The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

Imitation: