Summer Reading...Writing...Dreaming

Dear Writing and Composition III students,                                                                                                                         

You all have done very well this year and made much progress in writing. In order to be well prepared for classes next year, it is so important to continue reading, writing, and thinking throughout the summer. Reading and writing are the best ways to maintain your English reading skills as well as improve in grammar, fluency, comprehension, etc. For your classes next Fall, you will have assigned summer reading to complete, but I urge you to also read for pleasure in English and read for information in English as much as you can.  And it is so crucial to keep your writing skills in good shape too!

A few suggestions to help you stretch and grow this summer:

1)      Read news in English online (if you can access npr.org or nytimes.org or other news websites, you can read and often watch video or listen to broadcasts – listening to spoken English over the summer is a good practice to keep up also).

2)      Watch movies or TV shows in English!

3)      Read blog posts about anything you are interested in (in English).

4)      Don’t leave your summer reading to the week before school. Read (and take notes!) on your books throughout the summer.

5)      Write reviews of the books you read and movies you watch.

6)      Write letters and emails to your friends from CA that you don’t see over the summer.

7)      Write poetry! Write songs! Write a love letter to a secret crush (even an imaginary one)!

8)      Keep up your blog and write about what you’re doing over the summer.

9)      Start a new blog about something else.

10)   Choose a new 30-Day challenge and write about that!

11)   Keep a paper journal to reflect on your life in writing.

12)   Keep a journal with a list of inspirational quotes and write a little about them each day.

13)   Make a family tree and write a little about what you know about each family member’s history, personality, and any other interesting facts or memories.

14)   Take photos or draw pictures and write captions, articles, or stories to go with them.

15)   Keep a dream journal that records the dreams you have (while asleep or awake).

16)   Send me emails over the summer, share what you are working on, and I will be sure to respond.

Lastly, I leave you with this quote from William Faulkner, an American writer:

“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.” 

Have a great summer: read, relax, enjoy, and be ready to come back in the Fall and work!  --Ms. Guarino

30-Day Challenges

Many of you are writing or talking about how difficult it is to blog about your 30-Day Challenges, and my response (of course) is "Yes! That is good! It is supposed to be a challenge." But -- my second response is that for many of you, this is certainly the best writing you have produced all year: interesting, reflective, engaging with your audience, telling a story, doing a lot of personal examination. I am very much enjoying reading about your progress (and failures), and I think you will learn a lot about 1) the topic of your challenge, 2) writing, and 3) yourself through this project. Keep up the good work!

Also, these Challenge Writing Portfolios will be excellent writing samples to link to for your college admissions process -- so think of those future admissions officers as other potential readers.

Newspaper Article Using Sources

Review the following sources and take notes:

1. http://www.cheshireacademy.org/page/News-Detail?pk=973582&fromId=206150

2. http://www.myrecordjournal.com/news/latestnews/7199843-129/ben-jerrys-official-to-give-commencement-for-cheshire-academy.html

3. http://benandjerrysfoundation.org/who-we-are.html

Find one other source on your own. Also find a few good images for your post.

Write a short article about the upcoming speaker at CA (brief biography, details of the event such as date, location). Gear your article to teenagers -- make sure you have an engaging hook that will appeal to them. 500 words. Post on blog. Use at least 2 good quotations and 2 good paraphrases in your article. Also include a works cited list.

Final Portfolio

Final Portfolio Assignment for Writing and Composition

1.      In assembling a final portfolio for this class, you will choose 5 pieces of writing that represent your “best” work this year; choose pieces that show how you challenged yourself as a writer, not just pieces that are the most grammatically correct.  

2.      Then, you will significantly revise these 5 pieces. Revision does not simply mean editing and fixing grammar mistakes. To truly show that these represent your best writing, you need to address higher order level of revision as well as sentence level revision: revise for thesis, structure, organization, interesting language, creativity, critical thinking, a catchy opening hook, a strong conclusion, etc. as well as grammar, spelling, and clarity of ideas.

3.      To show that you have significantly revised your work, please identify all additions and changes you made in a different color, bolded, or underlined. I expect that you will have at least ¼ of your writing identified as revised in some way.

4.       Write a 600-800 word introduction to the portfolio that reflects on what you have accomplished this year and what the portfolio of your work shows about your growth and progress. For example, you might discuss your strengths and weaknesses at the beginning of the year and how those have changed – be sure to show specifically where you see those changes in the pieces you have included in the portfolio. You are making an argument about your own writing and using that writing as evidence to prove that argument. Be honest about how you have progressed and where you need more work.

5.      This introduction is the last piece of revised writing you will complete for this class, so make it your very best! Be sure to have an original title, strong thesis, detailed body paragraphs, and a conclusion that leaves readers with something interesting to take away from reading your piece. Because this is a personal reflection, this piece should also showcase your own ideas and your unique writing voice. Finally, make sure you proofread carefully for sentence level errors.

6.      Print out and assemble all of your writing into a portfolio. Include a title page and table of contents. The introduction should come first followed by the 5 revised pieces. This work counts as your final exam and is due on the last day of classes.

** For Ms Guarino’s Writing and Composition class, you need to choose 5 entries from the 30-Day Challenge posts. One must be the first entry, one must be the last, and choose any other 3 pieces in between. Make sure you include any photos as well citations from the blogs. You will need to also put these 6 revised pieces on your blog in the same order as in the physical portfolio.  

Paraphrase vs. Quotation

Original:

CA is a college-preparatory school that challenges its students.

Quotation:

CA is academically rigorous; the homepage describes it as "a college-preparatory school that challenges its students" (cheshireacademy.org).

Paraphrase:

According to the homepage, students at CA take courses that are designed to push them academically and ensure their future success in college (cheshireacademy.org).

**Note that both of these versions need to include the citation so that they acknowledge where the ideas came from. Neither of these could stand alone without citation or else it would be plagiarism of ideas.

Which Versions are Correctly Cited?

Original:

There is little evidence to suggest that people are refusing to learn English. According to a 1985 study by the Rand Corporation, 95 percent of the children of Mexican immigrants can speak English. By the second generation more than half can speak only English. There is after all a huge inducement in terms of convenience, culture, and income to learn the prevailing language. (Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way. New York: Avon, 1990, page 241)

Version 1:

It is clear that immigrants want to learn English. As Bill Bryson notes in his book The Mother Tongue, there is after all a huge inducement in terms of convenience, culture, and income to learn the prevailing language (241).

Version 2: It is clear that immigrants want to learn English. There is a large advantage to learning the dominant language due to jobs, ease of living, and adapting to society (Bryson 241).

Version 3: It is clear that immigrants want to learn English. As Bill Bryson notes, “There is after all a huge inducement in terms of convenience, culture, and income to learn the prevailing language” (241).

Version 4: It is clear that immigrants want to learn English. After all, there is a huge inducement in terms of convenience, culture, and income to learn the prevailing language.

Version 5: It is clear that immigrants want to learn English. As Bill Bryson notes, people who come to another country will have an easier time finding work and getting along with others if they learn to speak the same language as everyone else is speaking (241).

Version 6: It is clear that immigrants want to learn English. People who come to another country will have an easier time finding work and getting along with others if they learn to speak the same language as everyone else is speaking.

Correctly Documenting Source Material

1. The following worksheet was adapted from materials created by the Writing Center at The University of Delaware:

Practice Spotting Plagiarism

Directions: Read the source material below. Then compare each of the versions written by student writers to the original source. How many of these writers are guilty of plagiarism? Why?

Below is a quotation from J. M. Roberts, History of the World (New York: Knopf, 1976). Compare this original quotation with the three other paragraphs.

How many of these writers are guilty of plagiarism? Why?

Source paragraph

The joker in the European pack was Italy. For a time hopes were entertained of her as a force against Germany, but these disappeared under Mussolini. In 1935 Italy made a belated attempt to participate in the scramble for Africa by invading Ethiopia. It was clearly a breach of the covenant of the League of Nations for one of its members to attack another. France and Great Britain, as great powers, Mediterranean powers, and African colonial powers, were bound to take the lead against Italy at the leag ue. But they did so feebly and half-heartedly because they did not want to alienate a possible ally against Germany. The result was the worst possible: the league failed to check aggression, Ethiopia lost her independence, and Italy was alienated after all.

Writer 1

Italy, one might say, was the joker in the European deck. When she invaded Ethiopia, it was clearly a breach of the covenant of the League of Nations; yet the efforts of England and France to take the lead against her were feeble and half-hearted. It a ppears that those great powers had no wish to alienate a possible ally against Hitler's rearmed Germany.

Writer 2

Italy was the joker in the European deck. Under Mussolini in 1935, she made a belated attempt to participate in the scramble for Africa by invading Ethiopia. As J. M. Roberts points out, this violated the covenant of the League of Nations (Roberts 845). But France and Britain, not wanting to alienate a possible ally against Germany, put up only feeble and half-hearted opposition to the Ethiopian adventure. The outcome, as Roberts observes, was "the worst possible: the league failed to check aggression, Ethiopia lost her independence, and Italy was alienated after all" (Roberts 845).

Writer 3

Much has been written about German rearmament and militarism in the period 1933-39. But Germany's dominance in Europe was by no means a foregone conclusion. The fact is that the balance of power might have been tipped against Hitler if one or two thing s had turned out differently. Take Italy's gravitation toward an alliance with Germany, for example. That alliance seemed so very far from inevitable that Britain and France actually muted their criticism of the Ethiopian invasion in the hope of remaini ng friends with Italy. They opposed the Italians in the League of Nations, as J. M. Roberts observes, "feebly and half-heartedly because they did not want to alienate a possible ally against Germany" (Roberts 845). Suppose Italy, France, and Britain had retained a c ertain common interest. Would Hitler have been able to get away with his remarkable bluffing and bullying in the later Thirties?

2. https://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/QPA_paraphrase.html