Final Reminders and Notes

All audio feedback for your Argumentative Synthesis essays has been emailed back to you. Please open the file as soon as possible to ensure that it works on your computer and that you are able to hear the feedback. I recommend using QuickTime Player, as it has proved to be most compatible. If you did not receive an email with audio feedback, then I did not receive a rough draft from you.
If you have any questions about the feedback or issues with the file, please contact me as soon as possible, so that I can get back to you right away. I will accept emailed questions until Wednesday night (December 10th). The deadline for submitting the final draft is 11:59pm CST on Friday (December 12th), as a dropbox submission. Please be sure that you receive a confirmation for the submission.

The gradebook in D2L is up to date. The only grade that still needs to be entered is for the submission of your revised synthesis essay. If you are missing any formal essays, please contact me as soon as possible. I cannot accept any missing/late work beyond Friday. The grades for your revised synthesis paper will be uploaded to the dropbox submissions, and you will have access to D2L until the end of the month, in case you would like to read the feedback for those papers. Final grades will be posted by December 18th.

Rough Draft Feedback

Just a reminder: I will be emailing you feedback for your rough drafts this week, and I will make a post here once I have completed all of the recordings. If you don't receive an email with an audio file containing your feedback, it means that I did not receive a copy of your rough draft. Once you receive my feedback, please listen to the file as soon as possible to ensure that you can hear/access it. If you have any questions, please contact me as soon as possible. I will be accepting emailed questions until Wednesday of next week. We are not meeting during finals week, and I will not be on campus, so the only way to contact me is via email.

The final draft of the argumentative synthesis paper is due on Friday, December 12th by 11:59pm CST. I will open the dropbox once all of the feedback has been emailed to you.

Homework for Wednesday, December 3rd

Please be sure to upload a copy of your Synthesis Rough Draft to the Discussion board (Synthesis Paper--Rough Draft) by the beginning of class on Wednesday, and please be sure it is in a compatible file format (.doc, .docx, .pdf). We will conduct a workshop, and I will have questions for consideration to help guide your readings/reviews. Please reference the assignment sheet, supplementary synthesis documents, and the rubric--located in the Content section of D2L--for more information on assignment guidelines. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Holiday Reminders

We are not meeting this Wednesday, November 26th. We are meeting again on Monday, December 1st, though, and I have moved the due date of the rough draft to Wednesday, December 3rd--please see the assignment sheet for more details. There is no reading/writing assignment due on Monday. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

I hope you all have a good Thanksgiving break!

Homework for Monday, November 24th

When reading the essay, "A Letter from a Birmingham Jail," please respond to the following questions in a blog post. This is in lieu of the reading response that was originally assigned, and your responses will be the basis for our discussion in class on Monday.

• What is the primary claim that Martin Luther King, Jr. is trying to make?
• What is the situation for writing this letter, and how do you believe it affects his writing?
• Who is MLK's direct audience?
• In what ways does MLK try to appeal to this specific audience? (Please provide examples)
• How/Where does MLK utilize the rhetorical appeals? (Provide an example of each)
• Please pay close attention to MLK's conclusion and be prepared to discuss the way he closes this letter.

Your responses should be posted to your blogs prior to class on Monday in order to receive full credit for the assignment. If you have any questions, please feel free to email me.

Homework for Monday, November 24th

Please read the essay, "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," by Martin Luther King Jr. for class on Monday. This essay can be found on page 736 in the Current Issues textbook. In lieu of a reading response, I will post questions to this newsfeed that I would like you to respond to on your blogs prior to our meeting on Monday. We will dissect this essay, along with a student example, in preparation for the final paper. The assignment sheet for the final paper is available for download/viewing in the Content section of D2L, along with the notes on basic research paper construction. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Here is a link to the Malcolm Gladwell essay,"Offensive Play," for those of you who are interested in seeing how to utilize anecdote in a synthesis paper.

Homework for Wednesday,, November 19th

Please read the two short essays about loan forgiveness in Chapter 14 (page 465) of the Current Issues textbook before class. We will discuss the writers' messages and how they put these pieces together. If you have any questions, please send me an email.

Homework for Monday, November 17th

Please remember that the final draft of your Compare/Contrast essay is due tonight (11/12) by 11:59pm CST as a dropbox submission. If you are unable to get it submitted by that time, email me a copy as soon as you are able.

The homework for Monday is to read Chapter 17 of the Current Issues book. There are two short essays about the death penalty in this chapter that we will discuss in class. I am not requiring that you write a response to these essays, but I highly recommend taking notes in preparation for the class discussion. I will post some questions here to direct your reading of these essays over the weekend. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

***Reminder about Class on Monday, November 10th***

Please remember that we do not have class on Monday, November 10th. You can take this time to work on revising your Compare and Contrast essays. I have emailed you all the feedback for your Compare/Contrast essay, so please check your University accounts for the file.

Also, please open the file as soon as possible to ensure that it works on your computer and that you are able to hear the feedback. I recommend using QuickTime Player, as it has proved to be most compatible. If you have any questions about the feedback or issues with the file, please contact me as soon as possible, so that I can get back to you right away. If you did not receive an email with an audio file, then I did not receive a rough draft from you.

Finally, I have extended the due date for the final draft of the Compare/Contrast paper to 11:59pm CST on Wednesday (November 12th), so that you have a little extra time to work on analyzing the sources, based on the workshop and (audio) conference feedback.

Weekend Reminders

Please remember that we are not meeting on Monday, November 10th. Over the weekend, I will be providing you with audio feedback in response to the drafts you posted to the discussion board today. The file will be sent to you via email. If you have any questions about that feedback, you will need to contact me as soon as possible to ensure that I am able to respond to you prior to the due date. The final draft of the Compare/Contrast paper is due by the beginning of class on Wednesday, November 12th as a dropbox submission. For more details on the assignment, please reference the assignment sheet and workshop questions for consideration in the Content section of D2L, or feel free to contact me.

Homework for Wednesday, November 5th

Please be sure to post a copy of your rough draft to the discussion board titled Compare/Contrast Workshop 11/5 prior to the start of class on Wednesday. For those of you who posted to the dropbox, you will need to repost the draft to the discussion board (I mistakenly created it for the rough drafts, when it was intended for the final drafts). Please select your Group within the discussion forum, then click on the Start a New Thread button. You will have an option to Add Attachments. Once you click on that link, you will be able to upload your draft. Please be sure that the file is in a compatible format (.doc, .docx, or .pdf). If you have any questions, please email me as soon as possible.

Weekend Reminders

There is no assigned reading over the weekend, but I highly recommend that you begin drafting your Compare and Contrast Essay in preparation for Wednesday's due date. The rough draft needs to be submitted to a Discussion Board (which will be available next week) prior to the start of class on November 5th. For more details, please see the assignment sheet that I have uploaded to the Content section of D2L. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

I will be posting to the content section a student example of a compare/contrast essay over the weekend, if you want to get some ideas for structuring and organizing this paper. We will go over it in class on Monday, along with some logical fallacies (which can be found in Chapter 9 of the textbook).

Homework for Wednesday, October 29th

Please read the essays, "Angels in America," by John Tierney (622) and "Our Brave New World of Immigration," by Victor Davis Hanson (624) for Wednesday. We have a reading response due by the beginning of class, and I recommend approaching this response with a focus on comparing and contrasting the two pieces (though you are welcomed to focus on only one, if you'd like).

As I mentioned in class, the rough draft of the Compare/Contrast essay will be due in one week (Wednesday, November 5th). I will cover the guidelines and assignment sheet in class this Wednesday. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Homework for Monday, October 27th

Again, please disregard the reading assignment listed on the course schedule. While we will be reading about fracking, we are going to examine the first two pieces in Chapter 20, instead of the ones originally assigned. For Monday, please read "Shale Drilling is a Disaster Waiting to Happen," by Don Carns Jr. (538) and "Unfounded Fears about Shale Gas Obscure Facts," by Scott Cline (page 541). Both pieces are short, and there's no reading response due on Monday. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Homework for Wednesday, October 22nd

Please disregard the reading assignment that is listed on the schedule. As I mentioned in class, we will be reading the pieces on the local food movement instead: Stephen Budiansky's "Math Lessons for Locavores," (476) and Kerry Trueman's response, "The Myth of the Rabid Locavore," (479). You also have a reading response due by the beginning of class as a dropbox submission.

You have the option of writing about either one of these pieces, or you can write about both, focusing on a few of the areas we discussed at the beginning of class--message, purpose, tone, evidence, reasoning, structure, the writer's motivation, genre, focus/clarity, etc. We will discuss the points each writer makes in preparation for the next paper. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Homework for Monday, October 20th

The readings listed on the Course Schedule are correct, but I'm pushing back Reading Response #5 until next Wednesday. The only homework you have over the weekend is to read the Thomas E. Ricks essay, "Let's Draft Our Kids," (on page 645 of the Current Issues textbook) and the Dave Eggers piece, "Serve or Fail," (on page 648). We will continue our research unit by looking at various perspectives on different issues, starting with public service. Please be prepared to discuss these essays in class.

October 13th Reminders

Please remember that we are not meeting in class today. I want you to take this time to work on revising your summary/response essays, in preparation for Wednesday's due date. I have uploaded audio feedback to the dropbox submissions, and there are documents--the Summary/Response Assignment Sheet, Questions for Responding, and the Quoting/Paraphrasing PowerPoint--in the Content section of D2L to assist you in your revisions. The dropbox for the final draft closes at the beginning of class on Wednesday, October 15th.

Also, please remember to post a tentative thesis statement to your blogs before midnight tonight. I have uploaded a document to the Content section to provide tips on composing a solid synthesized thesis statement. We will be workshopping them in class on Wednesday. If you have any questions, please contact me as soon as possible.

Homework for Monday, October 13th

While we will not be meeting on Monday, you still have an assignment. Based off the research you've conducted in class today and leading up to the summary/response, I would like you to post a tentative thesis statement to your blog. The thesis statement should be a claim that has three parts/concepts to it. I have posted a document to the Content section of D2L with some guidelines for composing a thesis that should be able to help you with this. Please make sure to have this posted by the end of the day on Monday, as I will be compiling them for an in-class workshop on Wednesday, October 15th.

I will be providing you all with audio feedback for the rough drafts of your summary/response papers this weekend, and I will send you an email once all the feedback as been uploaded to D2L. The revised draft of the summary/response paper is due on Wednesday, October 15th. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via email. See you all on Wednesday.

Homework and Reminders for Wednesday, October 8th

Please remember to turn in a rough draft of your Summary/Response paper to the D2L dropbox by the beginning of class on Wednesday. The focus of the response should be evaluating an internet source in preparation for the final argumentative paper. Please see the blog questions (posted to the content section), assignment sheet, Questions for Responding document, and Topic Breakdown Examples for more information.

We will be meeting in the library at 2pm on Wednesday, near the circulation desk. Please be on time, as we will be moving shortly after this initial meeting. As I mentioned in class today, we will not be meeting on Monday, October 13th. Please take this time to revise your rough drafts and compose a tentative thesis statement (to be posted on your blogs by next Monday). If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via email.

Homework for Monday, October 6th

Our reading assignment for the weekend is "The Story of an Hour," by Kate Chopin, found on page 438 of the Current Issues textbook. Please be sure to write a response to the story and submit it to the dropbox (Reading Response 4) prior to the start of class. We will discuss our interpretations of the story on Monday.

Also, as I stated at the beginning of class, you will need to submit a rough draft of your Summary/Response paper to the dropbox (Summary_Response Rough Draft) by the beginning of class on Wednesday, so that I can provide you with feedback. The final draft of the paper will be due the following week.

For those of you who are interested, tomorrow is a Good Thunder event. You can find more information about times and locations from the link on the class syllabus blog. Below, I have included a link to the Matthew Dickman poem we looked at, as well as a link to a video of a spoken word poet who Prince had mentioned during class.

Matthew Dickman "Ghost Story"

Shane Koyczan "To This Day"

Homework for Wednesday, October 1st

For Wednesday, please have the Robert Frost poem, "Mending Wall," (p. 426) read, along with the two response essays, "The Deluded Speaker in Frost's 'Mending Wall'," by Jonathan Deutsch (p. 429) and "The Debate in Robert Frost's 'Mending Wall'," by Felicia Alonso (p. 432).

While there is no written assignment due, please take notes on the text and be prepared to discuss them in class. I have uploaded the Questions for Responding document to the Content section of D2L, as well.

Homework for Monday, September 29th

Please read the essay, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," by Ursula Le Guin in our Current Issues textbook. You have a reading response due 2:00pm on Monday (submitted to the dropbox titled Reading Response 3); please be prepare to discuss the essay in class.

The focus of your reading responses should align with the guidelines of the next paper (please see the Summary/Response Assignment sheet for more details), since my feedback for this reading response and the next one will be applicable to the Summary/Response paper.

To clarify what we covered in class, you should be conducting exploratory research of a broad topic that you want to write about and continue researching for the remainder of the course. Ideally, you have narrowed down the broad topic (using the student example from class, which is available for downloading in the Content section of D2L) to a focused research question and are gathering sources related to that topic.

For the Summary/Response paper, you will be selecting one source that you've located and write a short summary of the article, followed by a critical analysis/evaluation to determine whether or not it can/will be useful to your final paper. In class yesterday, I wanted you to compile a list of potential sources for this paper, copy/paste the links to your blog, and practice summarizing the contents from one of the links. I know there was some confusion about this, and I wasn't as clear about these directions as I should have been in class, so I wanted to clarify the directions of the exercise here. If you still have questions about the assignment, please email me as soon as possible.

Homework for Wednesday, September 24th

For Wednesday, please read Chapters 1 (pages 3-11) and Chapter 8 (pages 337-348) in the Current Issues textbook and be prepared to discuss these approaches to writing and analyzing texts. There is no written assignment due; just the reading.

Here are the links to the video and accompanying article that we viewed/referenced in class today:

Native Advertising
Response Article

Also, I have uploaded to the content section the Topic Breakdown that we looked at in class today for you to review at your convenience.

***UPDATE TO WEDNESDAY'S CLASS***

We will not be meeting in the classroom this Wednesday, September 17th, since this week will be devoted to audio feedback/conferences. This will help to ensure that I get feedback emailed to you all by Thursday, so that you have plenty of time to revise your narrative by Monday, September 22nd.

***THERE IS STILL HOMEWORK*** Please review the contents of Chapter 7 in our Current Issues book, and generate a list of topics in a blog post that interest you/that you are passionate about. We will discuss topic breakdowns in class on Monday, when we will reconvene.

If you have any questions, please feel to contact me.

Workshop Notes and Homework for Wednesday, September 17th

For class on Wednesday, we'll be discussing the content from Chapters 2 and 7 in the Current Issues textbook. Please read over the material and be prepared to discuss the concepts that are covered (we won't be looking at the example essays in these chapters).

Just a reminder for the in-class Workshop: be sure to have your workshop feedback posted in response to your peer's post (please see the PN Questions for Consideration document in the Content section of D2L for more details), and make certain to update your blogs with your workshop reflections (1. What revisions do you feel need to be made to your narrative draft? 2. How do your thoughts on your revision compare to the feedback you received from your peer?).

I will be emailing you with audio feedback for your drafts this week. Please be sure to open the file as soon as possible to ensure that it works. If you have difficulties opening the file, please email me as soon as possible so we can remedy the situation. The final draft of your narrative will be due Monday, September 22nd.

Homework for Monday, September 15th

Your only homework for the weekend is to draft a version of your personal narrative essay. Please reference the assignment sheet and the student example--both located in the Content section--for details on what's expected for this assignment. At a minimum, the rough draft of the paper should be half of the page count of the requirement for the final draft. This weekend, I will create discussion boards to which you will post your drafts, and we will discuss workshop guidelines and policies in class on Monday.

A few people have expressed interest in the short video we watched this week, as well as the essay on Happiness vs. Meaning that I briefly referenced. Here are the links to those materials, in case anyone else would like to review them:

David Foster Wallace: "This is Water"
Emily Esfahani Smith: "There's More to Life than Being Happy"

Homework for Wednesday, September 10th

As per the course schedule, the reading for Wednesday is the Justin Cronin essay, "Confessions of a Liberal Gun Owner," found on page 203 of the Current Issues textbook. You will need to write a response to the essay, which is due at the beginning of class in the dropbox titled, Reading Response 2. Guidelines for the reading response can be found on assignment sheet in the Content section of D2L.

Also, I have posted the assignment sheet for the Personal Narrative to the Content section of D2L. We will cover this in more detail on Wednesday, but it is available for you to view/download/print if you want to get a head start on composing the rough draft. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via email.

Questions for Consideration 9/8

In class tomorrow, we'll be discussing the Stephen Marche essay on Facebook and loneliness. Think about your own experiences with Facebook and social media. How do they compare with some of the anecdotes in this essay? Given that this essay was published a few years back, do the observations and insights the writer makes about Facebook still apply today? In what ways? How does the point-of-view affect your reading of the piece? We will discuss these topics, among others, during class.

Homework for Monday, September 8th

Please be sure to read the Stephen Marche essay, "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely," on page 600 of our textbook, and be prepared to discuss its contents in class on Monday. While there is not a formal writing assignment due, I will be posting questions for consideration here (over the weekend) that will guide our discussion. If you need to contact me for anything pertaining to the class or the reading assignment, I can be reached through my school email address: daniel.dewolf@mnsu.edu.

Homework for Wednesday, September 3rd

Reminder: we do not have class on Monday. Our next meeting is Wednesday, September 3rd.

Our first Reading Response is due at the beginning of class on this day as a D2L dropbox submission. The response will need to be about the George Orwell essay, "Shooting an Elephant," found on page 721 of our Current Issues and Enduring Questions textbook.

Please review the Reading Response Assignment Sheet (located in the Content section of D2L) for guidelines. I have posted an example Reading Response, written by a student, to show you what the paper can look like. This example and a .pdf copy of the essay being referenced are available for viewing/downloading in the content section of D2L.

If you have any questions about the assignment, please feel free to contact me via email.

Announcements and Homework for Wednesday, August 27th

I have uploaded .pdf copies of the Course Syllabus and the Course Schedule to the Content section of D2L. You are able to view, download, and print these documents for future referencing.

If you haven't sent me your blog information, please email as soon as possible. The first post needs to be on the topic of Happiness. As I mentioned in class, you can write about anything you want in connection to this topic. Aim for about one paragraph or a solid list (if you're composing a list of some sort) for this post, and please have it up by midnight tonight (8/25).

The reading assignment for Wednesday (8/27) is listed on the Course Schedule. Please read "Inner Contentment" by the Dalai Lama on page 791 of our textbook, as well as "I Want a Wife" by Judy Brady on page 801, and be prepared to discuss the essays in class.

Course Schedule (ENG 101-07) Fall 2014

Week 1	Monday 8/25 Course Introduction/Setup Blogs	Wednesday 8/27 Discuss Dalai Lama/Brady
Week 2	Monday 9/1 *No Class – Labor Day*	Wednesday 9/3 Discuss Orwell; Response 1 Due
Week 3	Monday 9/8 Discuss Marche	Wednesday 9/10 Discuss Cronin; Response 2 Due
Week 4	Monday 9/15 *Rough Draft Personal Narrative Due	Wednesday 9/17 Discuss Chapters 2 & 7
Week 5	Monday 9/22 Personal Narrative Paper Due	Wednesday 9/24 Discuss Chapters 8 & 9
Week 6	Monday 9/29 Discuss LeGuin; Response 3 Due	Wednesday 10/1 Discuss Frost/Deutsch
Week 7	Monday 10/6 Discuss Chopin; Response 4 Due	Wednesday 10/8 *Summary Response Rough Draft Due
Week 8	Monday 10/13 Discuss Chapter 1	Wednesday 10/15 Summary/Response Paper Due
Week 9	Monday 10/20 Discuss Ricks/Eggers; Response 5 Due	Wednesday 10/22 Discuss Murray & Letters of Response
Week 10	Monday 10/27 Discuss McClendon/Barth; Response 6 Due	Wednesday 10/29 Discuss Tierney & Hanson
Week 11	Monday 11/3 *Compare/Contrast Rough Draft Due	Wednesday 11/5 Discuss Chapters 5 & 6
Week 12	Monday 11/10 Compare/Contrast Paper Due	Wednesday 11/12 Discuss Chapter 3
Week 13	Monday 11/17 Discuss MLK essay; Response 7 Due	Wednesday 11/19 Discuss Applebaum & Wolfers
Week 14	Monday 11/24 Discuss Budiansky/Trueman; Response 8 Due	Wednesday 11/26 *No Class*
Week 15	Monday 12/1 *Synthesis Rough Draft Due	Wednesday 12/3 Assignment TBD
Finals Week	Thursday 12/11 Scheduled Meeting 12:30pm – 2:30pm Argumentative Synthesis Due