The Other Essay for Nov. 27th…
Here’s the other essay for Nov. 27th…
Here’s one of the essays for Nov. 27th
Here’s the first of two essays for Nov. 27th:
Remember to check back later tonight or early tomorrow for the other essay!
Task Seven Form Here
I’ve finally gotten around to uploading the form you’ll need to complete Task 7, as outlined on the most recent Task List. It’s a PDF, and if you have trouble opening it, try using an older version of Adobe or any of the alterative PDF readers available online. (I recommend Foxit.)
Download the form here:
Task 7 Verification Form (PDF)
Working with Gimp Image Editor
Hi everyone.
I thought I’d make up formy somewhat useless tutorial on using Gimp today by sketching things out for you here.
We talked about the noise issue. The problem is that when we scan images in color, some small differences in coloring on the page become “noise” when we start trying to manipulate them in Gimp.
The solution is either to scan the image in Black & White — my computer calls it “line art” when I connect my scanner — or to use Gimp to convert the image this way. This won’t totally eliminate noise, but it will reduce it a lot.
For all the images I’m providing step by step, click on the image to see it enlarged.
Let’s assume you have an image already scanned in color:
You can change the image by adjusting the “mode” in Gimp. Go to the Image menu and look in the Mode submenu. (The Mode menu, inside the Image menu.) You should choose Indexed…. A popup box will appear, and in the popup box, select “Use black and white (1-bit) palette.”
This will convert the picture to a black-and-white image, ie. a picture containing no color, and not much of the color variance information. So not many of those nasty little spots that bugged us today:
Next, you’ll want to go to save the image (under a new name). You will be asked to export the image after this conversion. You can export it as a grayscale image.
After that, you may need to close the image and reopen it in Gimp. The next thing you should do is go to the Filters menu and find the Artistic submenu. The first filter you will use is the Cartoon… filter. This will help the image by sharpening or thickening some of the lines in the image. You’ll want to experiment with the settings, using the preview window, but since there’s not much grayscale, you can probably get away with high settings and still not have much noise.
After using the Cartoon… filter, the picture I’m working with looks like this:
The next step is to apply the Oilify… filter, which is also located in the Artistic submenu (under the Filters menu). You don’t want to set these settings too high — the effect is a very subtle one. For the picture I’m working with, I used settings very low on the scale — approximate 4 or 6 in the Mask Size and Exponent settings. You may want to experiment to see what gets the best results. After this step, my file looks like this:
Next, it’s a good idea to use the Eraser tool on the Gimp main tool palette to erase any noise-spots. I get this:
Finally, if you find some of the lines in the picture are still a little weird, you can use the Bump Map filter to thicken them up a little. Under Filters, find the Map submenu and click the Bump Map option. The settings I used were pretty high on the first three settings, with Azimuth at 320.5, Elevation 90.0, and Depth at 11. My result is this:
After you have your file done, save it. We can come back later to add text and so on.
Those are the basics. If you have any questions, let me know! Once I’ve proofread the script and the trailer is finished, I’ll put up a new tutorial about typesetting!
MOSAIC!!!
It’s that time of year again!
Mosaic is a variety show put on by students, involving dances, songs, acting, speeches, and more. This year’s Mosaic evening will be held on this Friday, November 21st, at 5pm. It’s happening in the auditorium in the Student’s Center building. (Check in front of the English Language & Culture Department office for more details.)
I will remind you that if you are enrolled in one of my classes, then your attendance at this event is required regardless of whether or not you are an English Language & Culture major. Your attendance will factor into your grade. But it’s the easiest grades you’ll ever earn: come and enjoy an evening of student entertainment for free.
Two more things:
- Remember to sign in — otherwise the free grade can’t be given to you.
- Judging by past Mosaic evenings, dress warmly. I am trying to make sure the room will be heated adequately, but in the past, thathas not worked well. Choose warmth over fashion, even if it means bringing extra warm socks in your school bag. Trust me, if the heater doesn’t work for some reason, you’ll be glad you did.
One-on-One Meetings
Hi there!
Our class will have one-on-one meetings: you, me, and your essay. (You MUST bring your midterm essay — the copy I gave back to you — and give it back to me. No essay, no meeting!)
You should prepare to discuss your essay. For example, we will discuss:
- Any comments you had trouble understanding.
- Your plans for the improvement and expansion of the essay.
- What kind of grade you think the essay deserves.
The grading scale I use for essays is roughly like this:
A/A+: Wow. You amazed me. I am extremely impressed. (A+: I actually learned something reading this!)
B/B+: Very good, but not absolutely outstanding. There is room for improvement, but it’s still quite good.
C/C+: Okay, but not quite good. If you didn’t proofread sufficiently (or at all), if you didn’t edit, if the essay was difficult to understand, but you seem to have made an effort anyway, then you’re in the C-range. Insufficient research will put you in this range. Good ideas combined with structural problems will put you here. No unique ideas will put you here. You cannot get above this grade without at least a significant amount of research.
D/D+: You handed something in. It was difficult to read, nonsensical, totally the wrong type of essay, very poor quality, or insultingly hastily done. No research will put you in this range.
F: You plagiarized (copied from a source). Your essay was unreadable, machine-translated, or otherwise undeserving of consideration for a grade.
Think hard about where you think your essay fits in.
Our meetings will be as follows:
Tuesday:
9:00am — Eon Joo
9:10am — Ji Hye
9:20am — So Young
9:30am — Ye Hyun
9:40am — Yoon Jung
Thursday:
9:00am — Han Goo
9:10am — Sook Jung
9:20am — Soon Jae
9:30am — Chang Ho
9:40am — Min Joo
9:50am — BREAK
10:10 am — Bo Young
10:20 am — Jin Joo
10:30 am — Jin Young
NEW! Guide to Formatting Your Written Work
I can’t seem to find my older formatting guides, so instead, I’ve written up a new one and added it to the Some Advice For Your Professor section of this site. You can see the link in the sidebar, on the text Formatting Your Written Work, but you can also just click the link here to see the page. This information applies to written work in all of my courses, not just in writing courses… and it may be helpful for courses taught by other professors as well, so make sure to check it out!
Updated Task List
Here’s an updated task list. This is the final task list for the course. I’ve added some links for This American Life, and two tasks, and also fixed a task that was badly explained in the original list (step 4). Check it out, and get back to work!
Partial Task List for English Listening & Speaking:
- Introduce yourself to to the class, while explaining what it is you hope to learn from the course, develop in the course, or get out of the course, and why you want that. It should be interesting and memorable.
- Tell the class a funny story which is also a true story. It has to be a true story (though you can “stretch the truth”), a good story, and it has to make us (ie. me) laugh at least ten times in five minutes or less. Your job here is to be funny by whatever means available to you.
- Upload a video of yourself “ranting” (that is, complaining in a conversational, not an academic way) about something that bothers you. It could be your noisy neighbor, a problem with your parents, or anything at all. But remember, it will be on Youtube forever! So carefully choose something you don’t mind other people seeing! You rant must be at least eight minutes long, and you must not stop talking for more than three seconds at any point. (You are, however, allowed to breathe.)
- Listen to an episode of This American Life, a famous radio show from National Public Radio (NPR) in the USA. (The newest podcast is online at the page linked above, and you can find the archives for This American Life here, or check out their favorite episodes. Or you can listen to one of their favorite episodes here.) This American Life usually features three or four interesting stories; choose one and write about your own reaction: why you loved or hated the story, what were the most interested sentences or words used, and what questions you wanted to ask the speaker after listening. EDIT: This following section has been edited, as I edited it improperly in the original list! Apologies for the confusion! Write about your thoughts and ideas and questions, and hand it in to me. A discussion of/reaction to the story you listened to, along with a link to the story (so I can find it if I want/need to do so), is what you must hand in for this step.
- Now, create your own mp3 in the style of This American Life. You should tell a funny story — your own, or the story of someone else you know. This story will be mixed with other students stories, three or four at a time, and podcast. Again, it will be put online forever, so don’t tell a story you don’t want permanently available in the world. But choose your funniest, most interesting story possible. If it’s boring, you’ll just have to try again! Make sure to include music you are legally allowed to use. You can find out more about music that’s legal to use in podcasts at the Creative Commons website, and there’s tons of music at Jamendo, as well. Lastly, for the audio software you need to make the MP3, I recommend Audacity because it’s free and pretty popular, but if you want to use something else, feel free.
- Collaborate with another student. You will walk around campus with the other student videotaping you, and you will speak ONLY in English to everyone you meet. You must try to get them to talk to you in English. When they do, you should interview them about whatever subject you find interesting. Your video should include both the interviews, but also the experience of walking around speaking only in English, and people’s reactions to it. By the way — you should not bug anyone who works at the University. Don’t visit professors or your friends to get this done: just walk around and try to talk to regular students and strangers — people who, like you, are not native speakers of English. Feel free to pretend you are a foreign student and cannot speak Korean, if you like. Also, you must only talk to the camera person in English. (The camera person can speak any language he or she wants.) At the end of your experiment, you will have a lot of footage. Choose the most interesting parts and make a video of at least 20 minutes long with these interesting parts, and add a short summary of your experience as a “English speaker” on campus, and how you feel about it. This video will be uploaded to the Internet and stored there permanently under a Creative Commons License.
- Visit one of your professors or instructors with whom you usually don’t speak in English, but who you know speaks English competently. (This means you should not choose a Westerner, since you usually talk to your Western professors/instructors in English.) Have something to talk about — a homework assignment, upcoming exam, concerns about the class, whatever you like. It must be a real concern that you really, truly want to discuss with this professor/instructor.Attempt to hold a polite conversation about this issue with your instructor… only in English. At no point should you tell the teacher you’re performing a task for a class: instead, find some other reason for having the conversation in English. No matter how impatiently the person tries to get you to switch to Korean (and even if he or she switches to Korean when responding to you), keep speaking in English.
The next day, you can visit the professor again with a form (which will be made available for download soon) which you will fill out. You can then confess that you had to speak English for a course requirement, but that you also really truly had a question. The instructor will sign your form to verify that the conversation in English actually took place, and that you managed successfully and politely to get/communicate the information you needed.
Note: The conversation does not need to be painfully long. Your professors are very busy people! Think about your objectives: to speak only in English for this one conversation, and to get a certain information or communicate a concern to your teacher. It shouldn’t be a mere one-minute conversation, but at the same time, it doesn’t need to be a two-hour meeting.
- Create a task more difficult than all the previous tasks so far. The task should address one of the weaknesses that you want to improve. When you have thought of an appropriate task, come and talk to me about it. After I have approved the task, complete it and present the result to the class. The objective here is that you design a task to challenge yourself, and then complete it. This is the final task, and it will difficult to pass it. However, if you do manage to complete it, you will have a top grade for your task completion segment of your grade.
Grading scale:
Completing task 1: D
Completing task 2: D+
Completing task 3: C
Completing task 4: C+
Completing task 5: B
Completing task 6: B+
Completing task 7: A
Completing task 8: A+
More information will be coming soon regarding your “final exam” soon!
Models and Conclusions
Today we talked about writing conclusions, sentence lengths, and more. I gave you two pieces of homework: the first, to sign out a book of essays from the library — essays on ANY topic that interests you — and read the conclusions for a few of them without reading the rest of the essay first. You should be able to guess what the essay was about, but the author probably won’t spell it all out for you (as if he or she was using the High School Essay Writing Template).
Then, choose the most interesting conclusion, and read the essay to see if you could guess right what it was about.
For those of you who are worried about sentence lengths, I’ve given you two assignments:
- Count the number of words in a series of sentences in the essay of your choice. You should see a constant variation in sentence length. (You can also count the number of sentences in each paragraph, and the number of commas in each sentence, the number of compound sentences vs. simple sentences, and so on. The same kind of variation will apply, though each writer will tend towards one or the other. I, personally, tend towards compound sentences, lots of commas, and longer sentences.)
- Check out one of the two following videos on Youtube. They’re of Miles Davis. You’ll see the same thing in his music that I’m talking about in the exercise above: variation of long and short phrases, of simple and complex, of harsh and gentle, and so on. A good writer makes music with words. So here’s some music!
Probably your weirdest homework ever. Well, there it is!
If you have more questions about conclusions, please post them on the website (so you don’t forget them) and we will discuss them in class next Tuesday. Please also think about what you want to focus discussion on next Tuesday.
By the way, apologies about the confusion with the homework. If you haven’t posted your rewrite of Soonjae’s introduction, please post it to the class discussion blog. (You don’t need to print it for me.) And make sure to hand in your rewritten personal essay on the exam period, which should include indirect description of your feelings about exams, and also use one of the disagreement templates we’ve worked with. (Feel free to take liberties with the templates: you needn’t follow them exactly.)
Speaking of taking liberties, here’s some more good music for you while you work on that homework:
Essays for Crit Thursday, Nov. 12th
Here are the essays for Thursday!
On Tuesday, we’ll be discussing the writing of conclusions. Your rewrite of the introduction for Soon Jae’s essay will be due on Tuesday, and so will your expanded personal essay using indirect expression of emotion and one of our “disagreement” templates.