Author: kcrowther

Weekly Write Up #6: 9/26 & 9/28

kcrowther on

by

Lena Levette and Erin Evans

Reading for class:

For class this Tuesday we were assigned to read Scenario 19 “Repurposing a Text” and take notes. This scenario asks the reader taking on the role of a writer who works for the online magazine, Perspex. You are asked to recreate the style and structure of an article for an audience that is not specialized on the topic. In order to accomplish this task you must be able to reorganize the text while still conveying the message. In addition to this you must avoid plagiarism or copyright. Coinciding with this reading, we were also asked to find a scholarly article and bring it into class. Scenario 19 goes along with our class discussion because we will have to use this example to help us take on the challenge of writing essay 2.  The first step in this process should be pretty clear, start off with a topic that interests you and find an article that correlates to it. Keep in mind that once you have found your article it is important to read between the lines and draw a deeper conclusion so that your new audience can be informed and entertained.

For Thursday we were asked by Dr. Crowther to read Chapter 1:  Introduction to Writing (SCC) –1.3. This section of the text discussed how to properly use a source and what it really is. In college a source is simply anything that is not your own work that you will use for your writing. Anything from a poem to an online editorial can be categorized as a source. Majority of the assignments you will and have been given require a source.  To briefly state why they are necessary in academic work, sources help the writer take part in a fundamental conversion of knowledge that has long preceded you and will long succeed you. The knowledge you will need to engage in academic dialogue must come from a certain understanding that can only be obtained from a higher viewpoint.

After using quotes, paraphrases, and summaries you must give credit to the original creator to avoid plagiarism. The first guideline for using a source is to first have permission to use the source. Next comes the citation of the source using MLA or APA format. This is a highly important step because it gives the reader a chance to locate the source. Lastly include the citations at the end of your work. Also remember to properly introduce your use of sources in your writing by explicating it. In order to do this you may use quotes such as, “In other words”, to signal a phrase and justify how it supports the argument being made. Overall good source usage is prevalent to your writing because it provides concrete evidence for your audience.

Class Lecture:

In English 1101 we were lectured to about better writing strategies and how to properly construct an essay. In order that you must first create an outline to better construct a paper, because it helps you organize your ideas and paper. We also talked more about outside sources and how to put it in your own writing. When using outside information it is important that you give the most accurate credit to wherever you got the sources from not only that but, it’s highly recommended that you use a scholarly/ peer reviewed document because the source is more accurate and stronger. While going through the source you want to highlight keys ideas or quotes except they must be in your own words, which falls back on the plagiarism side. At the end of your essay you want have a work cited page so that if your reader wanted to check you on your quotes, then they can find the quote exactly where you found it at.

For Tuesday’s lecture we started off with the Daily Grade number 7. We were asked to write about the process of writing essay 1. What went well? What strategies were helpful? What was challenging and why? What would you do the same or choose to do differently next time? Once our daily grades were completed Dr. Crowther then let us share and we all got feedback on our responses. Many students had trouble with their organization skills and Dr. Crowther went back to stress the importance of writing an outline, which are essential to any writing project.  Included in this discussion she also showed the class her dissertation to show us that when you write as long as you have organization, from writing an outline, you can always complete the assignment at hand no matter how long it is. Other answers and suggestions such as brainstorming and writing sloppy rough drafts came up in the discussion as well. After that we began the introduction on essay 2 which is all about how we use outside information when we are writing. For our editorial we mainly relied on our own opinion but moving forward, outside information will be necessary for majority of our writing. When you are trying to add knowledge to your writing you must do it responsibly. This means giving full credit to the place where you received your information. Dr. Crowther explained that scenario 19 models this very well. She then went on to explain the summary and paraphrase assignment we will do for the scholarly article we chose for our topic. But first we need to know if the article we choose is reliable or not because there is a plethora of access to information and not all of it is true. To test this she broke the class up into groups of three to think about the author, place of publication, date, and where they are getting their information from as well.

For Thursday’s class we started off again with the daily grade which was to write 2-3 sentences describing what happens about a movie or book without naming it. Then we were asked to pick a scene and describe it in detail. This daily grade assignment went along with our paraphrasing and summary discussion because it showed us that you should have already have a good understanding of the information instead of just simply changing a few words from your source and calling the work your own. To fully understand the text you must first read and annotate the text. Then what Dr. Crowther recommended was to read it again and take notes. It is important for your notes to be your own words because if you use another person’s words it makes it more difficult to avoid plagiarism in your writing. As you’re writing you should add your own ideas to the research you found. If you use a quotation you must use an in-text citation, which is the author’s last name and the page number in parenthesis, so you can reference your source. To make the lesson clearer, Dr. Crowther showed the class three summary examples from Purdue owl’s website and had the class work on them in groups of three. Each group chose an example to work on and completed their summaries individually. Once they were done everyone in the group came together to create one summary with all their ideas. This task helped the class get more practice on summarizing and collaborate on ways to make our work better.

Weekly Write-Up #2: 8/29 & 8/31

kcrowther on

This week’s write-up is brought to you by Peter McClary and Devante Jones.

Reading for class

Just Mercy

For the class days of August 29th and 31 of 2017 Dr. C asked the class to read the Introduction of Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, as well as Changing Writing Chapter 1 pp 3-14 then pp 15-30 along with Chapter 8 pp 200-204.A young woman smiling and holding a copy of the book Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

For starters while you should have read these pages I’m going to summarize them for you. There are no spoilers, I repeat NO SPOILERS (Maybe). In Just Mercy Introduction Bryan Stevenson is a Law Student who felt completely bizarre while attending Harvard Law School as he knew nothing compared to his classmates. However he stood tall and made it through his first year and shortly after became an intern at SPDC.  One day he was asked to go and inform a death row inmate that they did not have a lawyer but that he would not be executed within the year. After his talk with the inmate, Bryan Stevenson saw how rude the guard was towards the inmate and began to think. People of this world are treated to badly for simple things and sometimes even no reason. Children are thrown into prison and tried as adults at the at of 12 yet no one appears to be bothered. The introduction first talks about a short piece of Stevenson’s life and what encouraged him to get into the line of work he is in today. It later goes over the faults of the American justice system, such as imprisoning children for life without parole. He talks about privileges and how not everyone gets the the same ones fairly, those who start high up with money and good parents have a better chance to succeed. Yet those who start in the foster care system who have a mindset that no one loves them and are poor and have been to 7 different schools within the past 2 years do not have that great of a chance to become a lawyer or doctor, for example. To sum this up Stevenson knows that the world is not a fair place but can be if people knew the truth about the prison system, how death row inmates are treated and how people thrown into jail are sometimes falsely accused or not given a fair fighting chance. Stevenson knows and he wants to share that.

Changing Writing

This is the changing writing section pp 1-30 (Chapter 1). This will include not much about the actual reading or in general, but more so focused on the basis of PACT analysis. To begin, there are different levels of reading, these include: Skimming, or reading on the surface level to get the main idea, 2nd level being a deeper level for more understanding and digging deeper, but not as deep as the 3rd level where critical reading comes into play and the reader wants to know why the author did this and this. This 3rd level includes PACT analysis. PACT stands for Purpose, Audience, Context, and Text. These are the four fundamentals in any writing piece no matter what. Without PACT these is no reason to write, it’s rather impossible as with every piece of writing there is a Purpose and Text and Context. To explain a bit more, Purpose is the reason for a piece of writing to be written and the way it could potentially change the reader’s beliefs. Audience is the people who the text is written for.  All writers target a specific audience and usually base this off the context.

Context is the larger situation and the location of the writing including newspapers, television, or different articles and websites. For example if someone is watching shows for children 2-3 years old, the commercials target Audience would be mothers so the commercials would be for diapers, kids toys, etc., but if an ad is placed in a newspaper, it would target older people so the products would be lawyers or people who work with taxes. All of these elements of PACT link in some way. Lastly is Text which can be anything concerning the way something is written to how it is said. It is “a document or other designed object”. In the video above there is information on Purpose, Audience, and Context while giving many examples for that the PACT analysis could be used on to help for more understanding.

Class discussion/activities

At the beginning of class, we had our daily writing, and the topics were “what is social justice? And what issues are you interested in?” After a few mins of writing what we thought, we broke out into groups of 4 and discussed the topic. Dr.C then put the questions on the dry erase board and asked what our groups thought of the two issues. Here’s a photo of the board after we were done adding to it:

We started a class discussion about what we compiled together on the erase board, Dr.. C started the debate with a question, did we miss anything? We did. Somebody said whitewashing, but which began a serious discussion about a group of people that always gets over looked “disabled people.” Did you know what word is used when you discriminate against disabled people, it’s called ableism.  Dr. C got more in depth with it and here’s a snippet:

We talked more and more, and we hit on more serious topics from police brutality and immigrants to global warming which is another serious topic that affects everyone equally. We added more to the board which meant we needed another picture just to show the topics we came up with as a class.


Thursday’s class opening was about advertisements, do you remember any ads? Most of the students either chose a serious commercial like driving while texting and others picked a funny commercial. One young lady referenced a Sprite commercial with Vince Staple and how in the commercial he was aware that it was a commercial and used that to make sly comments like “oh turn the label towards the cameras.” Dr.C then asked why do we remember these advertisements, most of us guessed because it was either funny or it impacted us one way or another, then she asked did it work? When you saw that Sprite commercial, did you want to buy a Sprite? The majority of us were indifferent, I mean we like the Sprite, but the commercial didn’t make us want to get up and just buy one. Dr. C said to apply the PACT chart (purpose, audience, text, context) once we did that we had a better understanding of the commercials. Now we tried to apply the PACT chart advertisement in our Changing Writing text book to this ad. We read and looked at it, and we determined that the purpose was to sell cigarettes to women, the audience was women and radio viewers, the context was around 1940s and they used a radio because it was a prevalent media form during that time, and lastly the text was strange because even though it was a cigarette advertisement, there were no cigarettes in the ad.  We theorized that the cigarette companies knew that cigarettes are unattractive, but a white woman in the 1940s with a lovely smile was.

During the end of class, we discussed our homework and an article that was in our school newspaper. The title was “The race problem in U.S. universities.” Read it. Do you agree or disagree? I like it! It expresses a serious issue with universities, I want you to read it for yourself. I don’t want to spoil it, so please, please read it.

Weekly Write-Up #1: 8/22 & 8/24

kcrowther on

Welcome to our course blog!  In this English 1101 class “Changing Writing, Changing the World” we will be recording the progress of our class, publishing our writing on social justice, and creating a resource for future students.  Every week we will include a “Write-Up” of what we’ve been doing.  Here is our first one.

Reading for Class:

We started the week by reading a very important document — the course syllabus!  Dr. Crowther impressed upon us the importance of the syllabus as both an informative text and a “contract” in which the expectations of the students and the professor are explained.  As a contract, we are all held to the syllabus which is why it is so important to understand and be familiar with all the policies and requirements it describes. In order to check that we all had read and understood the syllabus, Dr. C put a quiz on iCollege for all students to complete. Students were also asked to sign a contract declaring that they had read and understood the syllabus, and also granting or denying permission for the professor to use their work in other classes or publications.

The second reading assignment was taken from our course textbook, Changing Writing.  The introduction “How Writing is Changing” introduced several key concepts for the course.  The first was the idea that writing always does something.  Writing is usually “to convince others to think or act differently” (Johnson-Eilola 3). Although this idea of writing is always true, the way we write has been evolving and transforming over the centuries.  Not only the tools we use — from pen and paper to typewriter to computer — but also the kinds of texts we draft, write and publish.  Now we all have access to the internet with its overwhelming amount of information that requires us to search for the most relevant and reliable sources to support our ideas.  We also can work collaboratively on documents using online tools, and we can publish our work online to a worldwide audience. The next section in the chapter discusses how this book can help us become better writers.  The question it poses is “How can I learn a universal, flexible way to write any kind of text” (5). The book explains that students learn strategies and frameworks for understanding texts and creating their own.  It introduces the four key aspects of writing:

  • PURPOSE: the change you want to make in readers’ thinking, feeling, or acting
  • AUDIENCE:  people within a context who are making meaning
  • CONTEXT:   a location in a space and time or even an online space
  • TEXT:  a document or other designed object

Finally, the chapter discusses that writing is messy!  Although we like to think that writing is an easy, linear process, it actually requires lots of drafts, mistakes, revising, etc.  We have to be ready to get messy and learn!

Class lecture/discussion/activities:

In class on Tuesday, we spent time introducing ourselves and learning more about our professor and the class. Every student gave a short introduction and we learned an “interesting fact” about each other.  Dr. Crowther went over the syllabus and discussed some of the important policies covered in the syllabus.

On Thursday, we completed our first “Daily Grade” free-write in which we discussed how we feel about ourselves as writers.  Many students shared that they feel stressed or anxious about writing, while some enjoyed specific types of writing situations.  Dr. Crowther began talking about how we are all writers even if we don’t realize it.  She discussed how we take into consideration the four elements of composition and rhetoric — Purpose, Audience, Context, Text — every time we write an email or send a text.  Using a funny example of a text with emojis, Dr. C explained how important tone is when we consider how we want to communicate to our audience. We continued to discuss the writing process and how then we talked in groups about a “text” we had brought to class that represents something we read everyday. Some students discussed websites that they read and others brought books, magazines, text messages, and social media.  We noticed that there is usually a specific audience for a text but that now, with social media, articles can be shared and so might end up in a more general audience than the original context intended.

Additional Resources:

Here is a useful video on Rhetoric and the Rhetorical Triangle: