I'm Not Sure...

After you read On Writing Well Ch. 1-3 for Thursday's class, I would like for you to post a comment that reflects on your own college essay. In this comment, copy sentences from your essay that are causing you problems, whether they be grammatical or syntactical. Do you have a sentence that seems wordy but you don't know how to improve upon it? Write it out in your comment box. Are you not sure if you need a comma or a semicolon? Write it out. Do you want to include a list in your essay but can't figure out how to use parallel structure correctly? Write it out.

In essence, this is your chance to get feedback on the writing part of your essay before you submit a draft for a grade on Friday.

List as many as you would like. Use this opportunity.

Draft Requirements

Your college essay draft #1 is due Wednesday. This draft should include:
1. a hook
2. thematic statements
3. powerful open or closed ending
4. 1st person viewpoint
5. a theme
6. a title
7. clear, focused tone
8. a story

You can do it...

Sample Hook Openers

All my life I've been told I am going to hell.

Welcome to Washington, D.C., where government nerds have all the power and senators are treated like rock stars.

Looking back at the last few years, I'm appalled at my education.

Sometimes dreams are deferred.

I can admit it now: I never accepted the theory, advanced in my childhood, that girls can do anything.

As strange as it may sound, I got my life's ambition from watching a Disney movie.

My first victim was a woman--white, well dressed, probably in her early twenties.

Given my blonde hair, blue eyes, and English pedigree, I would be a WASP poster girl. In fact, I've spent most of my life surrounded by people who look just like me.

My first real run-oin with sexism came when I was 17 after I told my grandfather I wanted to be a doctor. "Why don't you be a nurse?" he replied.

Hitting a tree at 70 mph was the best thing that ever happened to me.

College App Essay Proposal

In class today, I would like for you to narrow your focus for your college essay. To this end, your comment for this post should be in outline format and needs to include the following information:

I. First line:
Goals of Paragraph One/information to include:

II. Goals of the essay as a whole. What information about yourself do you want to convey?

III. List at least 10 details of your story.

IV. Conclusion: If possible, draft the final sentence of your essay. If you can't get there yet, paraphrase what point/impact you are going to strive to make at the end.

Choosing a Topic Tips (College App Essay)

Choose a topic that...

* gives insight into your character
* rounds out your application (if your resume screams musical theatre, consider writing your essay on something totally different)
* is "a small moment"--and then we will express it well
* lets down your guard a bit, lets others in
* shows you are aware of a world beyond your own home, school, grades, and scores
* enables you to be descriptive
* no one else could write (unique to you)
* enables you to be confident but not boastful
* enables you to tell a story
* has a clear focus
* responds thoughtfully to the exact wording of the prompt
* enables you to show your sense of humor--or a topic that is fun!
* is true to yourself (this isn't the time to reinvent yourself)

**You do not need to write about a "BIG EVENT."

College Essay Topics: Part 2

If you are having trouble posting your reply for tonight's homework, try posting it under this post rather than the original...I wonder if perhaps we hit the comment word limit? Is there such a thing?

Sorry for your troubles!

Interesting Article: Are college students studying less?

This "Room for Debate" article in today's NYTimes asks several authorities to weigh in on a supposed trend in college: studying less. I found the five voices featured here, along with reader comments, to be thought-provoking. Check it out here.

Grading the Blog

Our class blog will hopefully serve the following purposes:

1. Provide you with an accessible format by which you can write freely and easily about what we are discussing and reading and writing in class.

2. Enable you to read and respond to (and learn from) your peers' insights and reactions.

3. Enable our discussions in class to continue even after the bell rings.

4. Help you generate ideas for more significant writing responses.

5. Provide access to web links that relate to our studies.

6. Save paper.

Each blog response will be worth 10 points. I will grade them when I read them, but I won't email you or give you your grade every day; that will simply take too much time. Rather, I will keep a spreadsheet of the grade you earned on each blog post; you are welcome to ask me for your grades at any time. Here is how the 10 possible points break down:

1 - Original (different from everyone else's)

1 - Thought-provoking (takes discussion in a new direction)

1 - Well-developed (not too brief or confusing)

1 - Concise, smart use of diction

1 - Clearly demonstrates a thorough understanding and interaction with text

1 - Posted by the beginning of B period on Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays; by 7:30 on Wednesdays.

2 - Incorporates specific details/quotes from text to support point.

2 - Grammatically clean.

For the final two areas (each worth a possible 2 points), you can earn partial credit. For example, if your post is generally grammatically correct but includes a couple usage, spelling, or punctuation errors, you will receive 1 out of the possible 2 points. If it is riddled with errors (you clearly didn't proofread), you will receive 0.

Let me know if you have questions.

College Essay: Brainstorming

Isn't "brainstorming" a weird word? I just thought of that as I wrote it. Anyways...

Okay, team, let's get going on the focus for the first quarter and the piece of writing you will hopefully be proud to call your own for the rest of your life: the college application essay.

Don't think of this essay as stress-inducing, identity-defining, or fate-determining. Rather, view this essay as your chance to show those admissions officers that you are so much more than just a name or number or file. You are special, thoughtful, interesting, and dynamic (it's true--I am not just saying that), and this short statement is your chance to illustrate this to them. View this as an opportunity, not an obligation.

That said, this is also a chance for you to stop at this point in your life and capture in words who you are, what/who helped get you to this point, and perhaps where you want to go from here. You aren't writing a literary analysis of Huck Finn here, or a research paper on the floods in Pakistan; you are writing a personal essay about yourself. Get excited.

Okay, so you asked for a little help determining what you could write about for this essay. Tonight's blog post will hopefully help in this regard. Let's begin with the essay prompts. The following are the six essay options provided on the Common Application 2010-2011. Many schools accept the Common App, and these essays will usually also fit the essay questions of schools that don't use the common app.:

1. Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.

2. Discuss some issue of personal, local, national, or international concern and its importance to you.

3. Indicate a person who has had a significant influence on you, and describe that influence.

4.Describe a character in fiction, a historical figure, or a creative work (as in art, music, science, etc.) that has had an influence on you, and explain that influence.

5. A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.

6. Topic of your choice.

Your homework tonight is to brainstorm possible responses to these topics. You can do this in one of two ways:

1.) If you are already inspired and know what you want to write about, you can simply generate a list of ten possible essay topics. Each one should be detailed enough to give me and your classmates a good sense of what the essay would be about and how it reveals something significant about you.

2.) If you aren't there yet (and I don't blame you if you aren't), here is what I ask you to do tonight: Copy the following subject areas into your comment box and respond in bullet-point form. You are simply generating ideas here of who and what have impacted your life, what is important to you, and what makes you unique. You don't need to word your responses in essay topic format--simply take stock of your life and answer honestly and thoughtfully. You can divide your responses however you like, but to have a complete blog post, you need to list 20 total.

1. What experiences in your life stand out?

2. Who has had a significant impact on you, good or bad, and how?

3. Name the biggest lessons you have learned thus far and how you learned them.

4. Name a time when you were inspired.

5. What are you most proud of?

6. What are you most passionate about?

7. Name a time when you were humbled.

8. Name a time when everything came together for you.

9. Name a time when everything fell apart.

10. What are the best parts and worst parts about where and how you grew up?

11. Name a time when you had to make a difficult decision.

12. Name a moment when you knew you were changed forever.

13. What is your greatest strength?

14. What is your biggest weakness?

15. Name a time when you were successful.

16. Name a time when you failed.

17. What is your most satisfying accomplishment to date?

18. Name a time when an experience with a piece of art (book, music, visual art., etc.) impacted you.

19. Who do you most admire and why?

20. What risks have you taken in your life and how did they turn out?

21. What frustrates you the most?

22. What makes you feel the most alive?

World Newspaper Map Link

Put your mouse on a city anywhere in the world and the newspaper headlines pop up. Double click and the page gets larger....pretty cool!

http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/flash/

What we still want/need to work on...

· Coming up with essay topics
· Being creative
· Making a paper really interesting/engaging
· Putting passion into writing without putting too much of yourself into it
· Sound authentic
· Knowing how to understand poetry
· Knowing how to annotate a text meaningfully (non-fiction harder than fiction). Making a connection with text. How to be an intentional “happy highlighter”

What we know already about writing well...

Effective writing includes the following...

· Clear point, direction (know where it’s going)
· Engaging
· Concise
· Punctuation/grammatically correct
· Sentence variation
· Transitions that help paper flow
· Everything is related to point/thesis
· Detail (sensory, descriptive, concrete images). Want reader to visualize your subject. But not too much.
· Good word choices (variation, concise/intentional)

Checking In

Ernest Hemingway deemed the following his greatest work: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." This "6 word story" form has become very popular as of late, for like Twitter, it challenges writers to say a lot but in a concise way.

To begin our year, I thought I would "check in" with each of you to see where you are as a person right now. In a 6 word statement, describe how you are feeling or what you are thinking about at this particular point in your life.

Summer Reading Reactions

In preparation for 12th grade English, you read two pretty provocative books. Compare and contrast Zeitoun and Salvation on Sand Mountain. You can focus your response on any element of the two works (character, organization, tone, style, message, readability, etc.) but make sure to support your reactions with specific evidence from the text. Try to help us see these works from a new angle or in a different way.

For this and all future blog posts, please follow these guidelines:

1.) Post should be long enough to convey your point clearly, cohesively, and convincingly. You also want to be to the point, though--don't make us read more words than we need to.

2.) Proofread your post before submitting it.

3.) Keep in mind that you are writing for your peers. We are an educated audience (in other words, we have read what you have read, so don't waste time with plot summary or intros)

4.) Be original. Read what your peers have posted before you--and don't repeat what they said. You can build upon what they posted, responding to them by name, but you don't want to merely agree with them; add something new. Also, please don't post any ideas you found online. If you want to reference another work, great--but reference it. Your post should be what you are thinking...

5.) Posts should appear on blog by the beginning of B period on Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays; by 7:30 on Wednesdays.