Tuesday, October 5: Evaluating your writing

Today we took a look at the calendar and talked about setting yourselves up for spending some time in the writing center and we talked about your persuasive writing assignment, but we spent most of the class working on how to figure out what kind of grade you will get on your writing assignments. Different teachers take different approaches, but the rubric we developed covers the main features that influence grades. Our rubric included: genre considerations, focus, organization + development.

After talking through the grades you gave to a sample essay, you evaluated your own essay in terms of our rubric, and sent the numerical grade to me in an email. If your grade matches the teacher's grade (mine), you will earn an extra 5 points.

The assignment sheet for the Project 1: Persuasive essay is posted under "writing assignments." We looked at the purpose + description and talked (very briefly) about some ideas for this essay.

For Thursday:

Write: Brainstorming for Project 1=> send to me as an attachment. The name of the file & subject line should be LastNameBrainstormProject1

This writing may include one or more of the following: listing, detailed listing (where you associate to or add more ideas beside items on your list); freewriting, clustering, researching (looking up ideas and making some notes about them); talking (and jotting some notes on ideas that came up in conversation); taking a walk or run or doing some other activity that can put you in the zone - and jotting notes on ideas that come up.

Read: Chapter 3, HTWA => Arguments (yes this is a long chatper. Skim the examples but focus on learning the vocabulary for talking about arguments: claims, assumptions, ethos, counterarguments).