Writing 2 Class Notes -- September 13

Greetings!

What a wonderful group of thoughtful students this class is!  We started our class with the Quick Write:  "Honey, I have a confession.... " which was inspired by my husband's contrite apology for getting into my cache of candy for the writing classes.

Our Vocabulary Building exercises took us on a tour through 4 books in order to get a deeper grasp of words from the SAT Test Prep list:  abdicate, abhor, abridge & accelerate.  We used the Test Prep book, a book on word etymologies, a Latin dictionary, and a book of Latin-English derivatives.  Many times when you can unpack one word to find roots and derivatives, you end up adding many more related words to your working vocabulary.

We spent the bulk of our time going over the rough drafts that I handed back today.  As I go over the rough drafts, I make notes about common errors that students have made. Writing is the best way to take those grammar rules out of the realm of theory and into actual practice and use.  I cautioned the students to not panic when they saw a significant amount of red on their papers.  I make corrections AND positive comments.  I correct some sentences in order to give an example; others I leave for the students to correct themselves.  By and large, I was very pleased with these first papers. 

We finished our class with a discussion about our book, Gulliver's Travels.  The students were to have read up to Chapter 6 for this week.  We briefly outlined the plot so far.  Lemuel Gulliver had been shipwrecked and found himself on the island of Lilliput and tied with stakes to the ground by Lilliputians.

The students are beginning to pick up some of Jonathon Swift's satire.  They noted how ridiculous it was that civil war had broken out over whether someone ate their egg from the big end or the little end.  They also saw the foolishness of determining positions of authority on a man's ability to jump over a rope.  This quote seemed to fit our conversation:  "The more serious the tone, the more laughable the situation appears."

Next Week's Assignments:
-- Final Copy (making corrections from your rough drafts)
-- Read Chapters 7 - 9
-- Read the Blog entries:  Ending punctuation and Prepositions at the end of sentences.

Have a great week!
Tammy Prichard