Essays for Crit Dec. 10th
Here they are!
Essay for Crit (Dec. 9th)
Here’s the essay for December 9th:
Next Semester’s Courses
For those interested, I’ve posted a list of courses I’ll be teaching next semester, along with a brief description of each course. It’s available on the front page of this website.
Critiques this week…
Due to pathetically poor attendance last Thursday, the critiques from last week will be happening this Tuesday and Thursday. Eon Joo’s essay (linked in an earlier post, below) will be discussed on Tuesday. On Thursday, we’ll look at Ye Hyun’s essay, and at the following essay by Han-goo:
Make sure you’re ready to give critiques for all three essays this week. Non-attendance without a good reason will have an especially (ie. more than usually) detrimental effect on your participation mark for the class.
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!
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!
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: