• Week 6 Assignments

  • Each week, I will ask you to do four things:
  • 1/  Post an entry in your Learning Journal.  Entries in your Learning Journal (LJ) will most often be focused on Free Writing or Structured Free Writing, which is Free Writing in response to a specific topic, prompt, or question.  I will give you a weekly LJ assignment.  Please post entries in your LJ HERE.  This is a private journal that only you and your instructor can access.
  • 2/ Complete one or more Group Assignments (GA), which will require that you contribute either a BLOG POST and/or to our course Discussion Board.  These posts and discussions will be read by our entire class.
  • 3/ Complete one to two Reading and Writing Assignments (RWA), which, unless otherwise specified, you will submit as a separate entry/entries in your Learning Journal HERE.
  • 4/ Check in at least THREE separate times a week and respond at least ONCE to contributions by other student blog posts on the Home page of our course Web site AND to forums on the course Discussion Board

   

  • WEEK 6 ASSIGNMENTS:  DUE DATE:  Tuesday, OCTOBER 9  at 5PM.
  •  During our sixth week, we will be drafting and revising our personal essays.
  • LEARNING JOURNAL 6
    
  • Please spend 5 to 7 minutes free writing about your writing process.  Please describe EVERYTHING that happens from the moment you decide to begin a writing project or receive a writing assignment to your submission of the final draft. How and where do you develop your ideas? Do you write these ideas down? Do you write your ideas and drafts by hand or on the computer? Do you take a walk at some point to think about your writing? Do you take a nap at some point? Do you print out your drafts to revise them? And then what? And then…? And then…?  I am interested in knowing as many specifics as possible about how, where, and when you write and revise.  If there is a specific writing project that you would like to describe working on, that would be great.  If not, perhaps you can write about how you will approach our personal essay assignment.

GROUP ASSIGNMENTS

•  Group Assignment 12:   Defining Assessment Categories for the Personal Essay
• So I realize that GA9 (group responses to Bunn) was not exactly a success.  So let’s take a different take with this GA.  Each group now has a Group Leader (the name of the group leader for this assignment is IN BOLD), who is responsible for gathering input from other members of the group.  Once collected, the Group Leader will, in conjunction with the other members of the group, draft and publish a blog post on the Open Lab.   I leave it up to you as a group to figure out how you want to work together:  Google Docs, e-mail, via the Docs section of Open Lab.
• In this blog post, I would like you as a group to define the categories by which the Personal Essay should be assessed.  If you look at #2 in my eBook 10 Things You Need To Know About College Writing , you will see that the two major categories for assessing college writing are: argument and clarity.  OK, but that is kind of general, no?  What specific categories should be assessed?  I often use three categories:
• 1. Having something to say (e.g., effort/thought); 2. Attention to purpose:  Formulating and presenting what you have to say according to the guidelines of the specific purpose of the assignment and the disciplinary, generic, linguistic, structural, and formatting guidelines of that purpose; 3.  Attention to audience:  Clearly communicating what you have to say to your specific audience and saying it in an engaging manner
• • But are these the right categories?  Which categories would you choose?  Which would be most helpful to you in receiving feedback on this essay?  How much should each category be “worth” in terms of the overall assessment?
  • As a group, please review the guidelines for the personal essay and in light of these, as well as the above, please develop five categories by which the personal essay should be assessed and assign a percentage or points to each category.  These categories can have sub-categories, but please try not to have more than three sub-categories per category.
• Feel free to e-mail me with any questions.