For today’s class, you read the first chapter from Michael O’Shea’s The Brain. The book from which this chapter was taken is “A Very Short Introduction” published by Oxford University Press. These books are meant to give readers a brief introduction to major subjects. In this case, the subject is the human brain.

During the first ten minutes of class, I would like you to turn to a clean page in your notebook and write a summary of what you read. You may look at the chapter while you are writing your summary, but it is not necessary. This is meant to help you organize your thoughts and give you some practice with writing in complete sentences. I will not grade this writing in terms of content. I am looking for your best effort to use all 10 minutes for writing. If you run out of things to write about from the reading, you can write about what you have planned for today, what you are doing in your other classes, what you are doing this weekend, etc.

Before our next class, I would like you come to our OpenLab site and type up your in-class writing as a comment to this blog post. When you do this, I would recommend that you revise your writing–make it better–when you type it up. This might involve improving your sentences’ structure, correcting grammar, choosing a variety of words (diction), etc. In addition to helping you remember your summaries, this extra writing–typing instead of writing by hand–will help you improve your writing ability overall!