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Unit One, Day 3 - Tuesday, August 29

What they'll do today in class:

Connection to course goals: The first two activities stress responding to the context of a writing assignment (in this case the need for an audience to understand how the student "read" the essay s/he will be reacting to), while the prewriting activity begins to show writing as an ongoing and recursive process.

INTRODUCTION: Today we'll work with skills necessary to meet the expectations ofthe context of Essay 1. Given what you're trying to do in thatassignment, we'll be working on finding main ideas in a text andpracticing reacting to those ideas, both of which would be expected to meet the context effectively. Then we'll move on to dosome pre-writing for Essay 1 to help you start generating ideasand focusing for your first essay.

  1. WTL: Take about 5 minutes to summarize a recent TV show or movie that you've seen.
  2. See who they summarized - pick the most popular one

(NOTE: The point of the activity is that in a personal context, you'd summarize the events of a movie or TV show - you're just trying to tell your friend or whoever what happened in the movie. In an academic context, you try to summarize the ideas from a text. What does the text mean? What ideas are conveyed by the events? Be sure to emphasize CONTEXT here. We're not saying that event summaries are inherently bad or wrong, just not what an academic context demands.) (15-20 min)

Transition to next activity: For the first essay you'll need to find the main ideas of an article before reacting to be sure you're accurately and fairly representing the author's points.

  1. Group Activity: Practice finding the main ideas of essays…
  1. Have each group present their OH. Make sure they're providing an accurate representation of the essay's main ideas. You might want to encourage students to take notes so they can have a list of the main ideas of each essay. Be prepared to deal with readings that may be a little inaccurate. It's probably best to try and head these readings off by wandering during the group work time. However, if they do have misreadings in their presentations, a few helpful suggestions for how to deal with these would be:
  2. (10 min)

  3. Discuss the essays… here we're trying to make sure they do understand the main ideas and then get them started on reacting to those ideas.
  4. (15-20 minutes)

    Transition: After reacting to the essays as a group, let's move more toward your first essay and get you started on reacting to a main idea from a text in writing.

  5. Prewriting activity - We've flushed out the main ideas of these three essays, so now let's practice reacting to those ideas by writing. Take about 5-7 minutes to freewrite your personal reaction to one of the main ideas from one of these authors. Pick one, and keep writing. Don't stop. Just generate any thoughts or feelings you have about what they're saying, and experiences that might relate, any observations that seem to comment on the idea, etc. (5 minutes)
  6. LOOPING: Look back at your prewriting. Underline any points you think you could use as a focus for your first essay. Underline any examples you might be able to use. Choose one point, and begin a new freewrite. Choose one example, and describe it in detail and then explain how it relates to the author's point. (5 minutes)

Assignment:

Read in PHG:

Wong, "The Struggle to be an All-American Girl," p. 26-28

Write:

A one-page reaction for 2 of the 3 essays we've read so far that includes: The main idea you're responding to, your reaction, and some explanation of why you think you react that way.