Poll For Business Presentations, and Some Words About Your Interview

Here are the polls for you to vote on the Business Presentations we saw during week 12 (Nov 20th and 22nd). Please only vote one time in each poll. (That is, one vote for best, and one vote for second best.)

The winner and runner up will be calculated by giving two points for each first-choice vote, and one point for each second-choice vote. This means the poll result will not immediately decide the winner. I’ll post the math publicly so everyone can see the result.

Here’s the first poll:

Which Business Presentation/Product Was the Most Convincing?
View Results

And here’s the second:

Which Business Presentation/Product Was the Second-Most Convincing?
View Results

Finally, in class I promised a note about your interview. The most important thing in this interview is that you’re paying attention to the kinds of questions you ask. You have some freedom about how you can approach this. You could:

  1. Ask a question that you KNOW will be considered impolite or unusual, and see how the Anglophone you’re interviewing reacts.
  2. Ask questions you’re not sure about, and try to judge from the person’s reactions whether they find the question normal, unusual, or somewhere in between.
  3. Do your best to interview the person without any rude or annoying questions.

As I mentioned, one of the most important things is that you need to make the interview interesting! If it’s boring — say, consisting only of “Taxi Driver Questions,” the assignment will be considered incomplete!

You may record the interview if you like, and if the other person is willing. You may also take notes and write up the interview instead. Writing is optional, though, if you have recorded the interview. Please DO NOT email me gigantic MP3 files or video files. Please simply submit whatever media you have on a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM. I will set up an email account where you can send links to the files, if you prefer to host the file and let me download it instead.

Have a great weekend!

Poems for Week 12

Hi everyone. Here are the poems and songs you should look at for the coming week.

For Monday:

For Wednesday’s presentation:

The Essays for Nov. 15th

Here are the essays for critique next Thursday:

(Apologies for their lateness. I didn’t receive one of them by this morning — it had to be re-sent to me in .doc format instead of .hwp format, and I spent the day at the most recent MEMESAK conference.)

Your Writing Homework

I was asked to post about your current homework, to make sure everyone knows what you have to do and for when. Your latest homework is the following:

  1. A revision of your Writing-Development Plan (the midterm essay) — which was revised according to the notes I made, along with your own careful reading of your work, and consideration of our recent discussions about structure. Consider our discussion from today (Thursday, Nov 8th) and write a conclusion for your essay. This revision is due on November 13th.
  2. A description of a person discussing three very different aspects. You should consider our discussion of how to arrange and establish flow for body paragraphs when you prepare this. This assignment does not require an introduction or conclusion, but if you want to write one, it’s good practice. It will be due on November 20th.
  3. The CUF article assignment. If you don’t have a copy, go and find a current issue of the Catholic University Forum magazine, which is available at many spots around campus. Choose one major article from it. Summarize the article — that is, summarize all the major points or arguments of the article, along with a few important details — and then choose a section of the article and paraphrase it. (That is, rewrite it in your own words.) This assignment is due November 22nd. (Yes, that is an extension, as this assignment was originally due November 20th.)

There is more to come, so please try to stay on top of this homework. Remember: it’s a good idea to “finish” a writing assignment at least a few days, or a week, before it is due. This lets you put it aside for a while, so that you can see it more clearly for editing and proofreading, before you hand it in.

And by the way, don’t forget your blogging homework! I’m sure you can afford some time to make a few posts and/or comments each week, and  you can write about whatever you want.

Proposition for Debate next Wednesday!

The proposition up for debate is:

“People should not be allowed to post content anonymously on the Internet.”
Happy preparations!

The Song

Here’s the song for class.

New Readings Package

Sorry for the delay: I finally got the new reading package done. As I said last time, we’ll be looking at the song “I Don’t Love Anyone” on Monday. We’ll also look at a bilingual poem — one that exists both in an English and a Korean form, translated by the same poet who originally wrote it. (And one of my favorite Korean poets. The poem isn’t my favorite, but it’s appropriate to our class.)

If you haven’t done a presentation yet, have a good look at the poems in this package. I’ll be assigning a few presentations for the next couple of weeks from among them. Everyone else, have a look at see what interests you. I want to give you a chance to choose which poems you’d like to discuss at least some of the time.

Okay, here it is: Poetry Class Reading Package #3

Enjoy!

Midterm Debate Audio Files

Sorry for the delay — I had some trouble encoding the files with decent sound and small enough size to upload here. I think it’s solved now. Please download the file and use it in your self-evaluation. Also, please listen to all the debates and see if you can find a “Tipping Point” in each one (a moment when the debate is won or lost because of a specific argument, rebuttal, or other action).
Night Debate Midterm Exam MP3

Midterm Debate Audio Files

Sorry for the delay — I had some trouble encoding the files with decent sound and small enough size to upload here. I think it’s solved now. Please download the file and use it in your self-evaluation.

Please download both files: you will have some homework involving listening to, and (sort of) analyzing, all of the debates in the coming week.

Debate Day Class Midterm Exam Part 1

Debate Day Class Midterm Exam Part 2