LA 4

2012 7.1

2011-12-15T15:51:00.000-08:00

PARALLELISM
The principle of parallel construction requires that expressions of similar content and function should be outwardly similar. The likeness of form enables the reader to recognize more readily the likeness of content and function. Unskillful writers often violate this principle, from a mistaken belief that they should constantly vary the form of their expressions. It is true that in repeating a statement in order to emphasize it writers may have need to vary its form. But apart from this, writers should follow carefully the principle of parallel construction.
Faulty Parallelism:
Formerly, science was taught by the textbook method, while now the laboratory method is employed.
Corrected Version:
Formerly, science was taught by the textbook method; now it is taught by the laboratory method.
The first version gives the impression that the writer is undecided. The second version shows the writer has made a choice and is abiding by it.
By this principle, an article or a preposition applying to all the members of a series must either be used only before the first term or else be repeated before each term.
Faulty Parallelism Corrected Version
The French, the Italians, Spanish, and Portuguese The French, the Italians, the Spanish, and the Portuguese
In spring, summer, or in winter In spring, summer, or winter (In spring, in summer, or in winter)
Faulty Parallelism Corrected Version
It was both a long ceremony and very tedious. The ceremony was both long and tedious.
Faulty Parallelism Corrected Version
My income is smaller than my wife. My income is smaller than my wife's.

Practice: Rewrite the following sentences, correcting the faulty parallelism:

1. Jackson promised to be more careful and that he would work more slowly.

2. No one enjoyed the haying, the milking or to plow except Bill.

3. Mark is not only talented as a musician but also at acting.

4. I’d rather go skiing than to sightsee.

5. Jenny is easygoing, soft-spoken and has patience.

6. To sing with a rock group and making lots of money was her big dream.

7. Steven will either enlist in the Navy or learning computer programming.

8. These pears are ripe, juicy and have a sweet taste.

9. The ranger warned us to dress warmly and that we should keep dry.

10. Making a decision and to stick to it was something Bob couldn’t do.

* This week you will choose a sentence from above that has not been posted and correct it.

2012 6.4

2011-12-15T15:49:00.000-08:00

There are many definitions of tragedy. In literature, a tragedy is a story that ends in the downfall of its main character and arouses pity or fear in the reader. In general, tragedy also expresses a tragic view of life—the idea that a noble person inevitably brings on his or her suffering or death through some failure or error. As
you complete your reading of Frankenstein, think about whether the novel fits this definition of a tragedy.

* post your response
* cite evidence from the text
* comment on a classmates post

2012 6.3

2011-12-15T15:35:00.001-08:00

Choose one of the following questions and post your response. Comment on the posting of one classmate.

1. Describe the ways in which literary devices (similes, metaphors, personification, imagery) are used to create mood in Frankenstein.

2. The definition of a "tragic hero" is a person who has amazing gifts and abilities, but encounters destruction because of a "tragic flaw" in his or her character that ensures that he/she will fail. Do you think Victor Frankenstein fits this description?Why or why not? Use text evidence.

2012 6.2

2011-12-13T15:17:00.001-08:00

1. Continue reading this semesters core literature.
2. Cite two more examples of allusions and their significance.
3. Comment on a classmate's post.

2012 6.1

2011-12-13T15:13:00.000-08:00

It's time for second semester core literature! This semester we will read - Frankenstein by Shelly.Please complete the following:

1) Get a copy of the book (free online at http://www.gutenberg.org/)
2) Start an analysis notebook
3) Enter the following notes in your notebook:
-symbol-a is a word, place, character, or object that means something beyond what it is on a literal level.
-symbolism- the act of using a word, place, character, or object in such a way.
-motif - a recurring object, concept, or structure in a work of literature. A motif may also be two contrasting elements in a work, such as good and evil.
4) Cite two examples of symbolism or motif.
example:
“What could not be expected in the country of eternal light?” asks Walton, displaying a faith in, and optimism about, science. In Frankenstein, light symbolizes knowledge, discovery, and enlightenment.
5) Comment on a classmate's post.

2012 5.4

2011-12-07T19:34:00.002-08:00

Midterms/ no post this week

2012 5.3

2011-12-07T19:34:00.001-08:00

Continue posting review topics.

2012 5.2 Mid-Term Review

2011-12-07T19:26:00.000-08:00

Midterm Review

Did you know founder of FACEBOOK set up a blog for a course he was taking and passed the class simply by reading the posts? Let's see how much we can help each other prepare for the midterm. Below are some areas you may want to post on. Please post 2-3 review items on 5.2 and 5.3. You may have one page of handwritten notes to reference on the midterm.The following are some key areas that you can expect to see on the exam:

1) Questions that test your understanding of a reading selection.

2) Questions that test your understanding of the way in which a selection is written.

Examples:

- The main purpose of the first paragraph is to...
- The main purpose of the essay is to...
- Identifying examples of irony, metaphor, hyperbole, simile,symbolism, and personification in the selection.
-Identifying the use of extended metaphor, hyperbole, logical persuasion, and sensory language.
- Which details support the idea that____?

3) Questions that ask you to analyze the way in which a selection is written.

Examples:
- How does the author organize and present ideas in the essay?
- How does the author support his ideas?
- How does the author's personality affect his writing?
- How does that author express his ideas? ( allusions, use of irony, persuasive argumnet,or use of allegory)
- What bias does the author reveal in his/her writing?
- Describe the mood in the first half of the story and tell how it changes in the second half.

4) Questions that ask you to analyze and evaluate a passage.
Examples:
- Is the author's argument still valuable today? In which ways is it archaic and outdated?
- Describe the tone of the essay.
- What theme is expressed in the first paragraph of the essay?
- Which statements show the use an emotional appeal to a person's conscience rather than an appeal to reason?
- Why does the author draw a comparison between ____ and ____?
- In your opinion, how persuasive is the author's argumnet and why?

5) Proofreading and Revision:
- subject/ verb agreement
- correct word usage ( that, which/ who/ whom)
- sentence structure
- correct capitalization and punctuation
- use of transitions
* For practice on revision and proffreeading, go to the textbook link from the Parkview website and select "High School Language Arts" and then "Test Practice."

Please begin to review for your semester exam. You may post examples from previouse lessons where you have practiced the above skills.

Other terms to know:
Allusions

Irony

Allegory

Simile

Personification

Hyperbole

Metaphor

2012 5.1

2011-12-07T19:25:00.001-08:00

Did you know using sentence variety can get you a higher score on your SAT essay?This week we are reviewing sentence types. Please review the information below and then compose one of each type. Comment back on a classmates sentences by identifying each sentence type.

Sentence Types

Structurally, English sentences can be classified four different ways, though there are endless constructions of each. The classifications are based on the number of independent and dependent clauses a sentence contains. An independent clause forms a complete sentence on its own, while a dependent clause needs another clause to make a complete sentence. By learning these types, writers can add complexity and variation to their sentences.
Simple sentence: A sentence with one independent clause and no dependent clauses.

*
My aunt enjoyed taking the hayride with you.
*
China's Han Dynasty marked an official recognition of Confucianism.

Compound Sentence: A sentence with multiple independent clauses but no dependent clauses.

*
The clown frightened the little girl, and she ran off screaming.
*
The Freedom Riders departed on May 4, 1961, and they were determined to travel through many southern states.

Complex Sentence: A sentence with one independent clause and at least one dependent clause.

*
After Mary added up all the sales, she discovered that the lemonade stand was 32 cents short.

While all of his paintings are fascinating, Hieronymus Bosch's triptychs, full of mayhem and madness, are the real highlight of his art.

Complex-Compound Sentence: A sentence with multiple independent clauses and at least one dependent clause.

*
With her reputation on the line, Peggy played against a fierce opponent at the Scrabble competition, and overcoming nerve-racking competition, she won the game with one well-placed word.
*
Catch-22 is widely regarded as Joseph Heller's best novel, and because Heller served in World War II, which the novel satirizes, the zany but savage wit of the novel packs an extra punch.

4.3 2011-2012

2011-11-17T18:40:00.000-08:00

New Year's Resolution

The start of a new year is a great time to reflect on your life. How are things going for you? Is there an area of your life that you would like to see some change in? Focus on one area and write a solid 5-7 sentence paragraph using at least 3 different sentence types.

4.2 2011-2012

2011-11-17T18:33:00.001-08:00

CONFLICT
Conflict is the essence of fiction. It creates plot. The conflicts we encounter can usually be identified as one of four kinds.

Man versus Man
Conflict that pits one person against another.
Man versus Nature
A run-in with the forces of nature. On the one hand, it expresses the insignificance of a single human life in the cosmic scheme of things. On the other hand, it tests the limits of a person’s strength and will to live.
Man versus Society
The values and customs by which everyone else lives are being challenged. The character may come to an untimely end as a result of his or her own convictions. The character may, on the other hand, bring others around to a sympathetic point of view, or it may be decided that society was right after all.
Man versus Self
Internal conflict. Not all conflict involves other people. Sometimes people are their own worst enemies. An internal conflict is a good test of a character’s values. Does he give in to temptation or rise above it? Does he demand the most from himself or settle for something less? Does he even bother to struggle? The internal conflicts of a character and how they are resolved are good clues to the character’s inner strength.

Often, more than one kind of conflict is taking place at the same time. In every case, however, the existence of conflict enhances the reader’s understanding of a character and creates the suspense and interest that make you want to continue reading.

Cite an example of conflict from your current readings by completing the following:

1) State the name of the work of fiction

2) Describe the situation in which conflict taking place

3) Label the type of conflict that is occurring.

Example

1) Into the Wild

2) Chris McCandless goes into the Alaskan wilderness with the goal of surviving off the land; however, his struggle to survive ends tragically.
3) man vs. nature
* note- several other forms of conflict also occur in this novel

4.1 2011-2012

2011-11-17T17:41:00.000-08:00

Thesis Statements

A good thesis statement will have the following:
1) Position: It will come at the end of the introductory paragraph.
2) Purpose: It will state the primary purpose of the essay.
3) Format: It will give a brief overview of the major ideas the essay will present. Each idea in the thesis statement will represent one body paragraph, and the order in which the ideas will be presented.
4) Parallelism: The three items should all be expressed with the same grammatical consistency.
5) Bias: It should be written in neutral terms if possible.

Example: The subject is firewood. You will deal with oak, willow, and fur. The end result will be a recommendation about their relative efficiency as a heat source.

Thesis statement based on the information above:

This paper will discuss willow, fir, and oak firewoods to decide which is the best to burn for fuel.
(Note the order; it goes from worst to best)

Write a thesis statement for the following topic.

1) Motivation is the subject. You will explain what it is by giving standard book meanings, explaining some differences between motivation and closely related words, and examining some closely associated ideas.

2) Give feedback to two classmates concerning their thesis.

3.4 2011-2012

2011-11-03T13:10:00.001-07:00

Active and Passive Voice

The voice of a verb lets the reader know if the subject is doing the action or receiving the action.

When the subject receives the action or is not personally doing the action, the voice is passive. Passive voice is generally wordier.

example- The pizza was eaten by the boys.
Example- The class was dismissed by the teacher.

When the subject performs the action;the voice is active.

example- The boys ate the pizza.
example- The teacher dismissed the class.

When changing the passive voice to active, the object of the preposition becomes the subject.

Active voice makes the writing more interesting.

Passive voice is usually weak and easy to recognize because of the "be" verb.

Post two examples of passive voice and then change them to active.

3.3 2011-2012

2011-10-31T20:02:00.000-07:00

The College Essay

Our focus for the next several weeks will be on revision. Below I have posted an essay and an outline from a college admission sample. Review the essay and outline. You will then create an outline from the essay posted at the end of this blog.

Essay:
It took me eighteen years to realize what an extraordinary influence my mother has been on my life. She's the kind of person who has thoughtful discussions about which artist she would most want to have her portrait painted by (Sargent), the kind of mother who always has time for her four children, and the kind of community leader who has a seat on the board of every major project to assist Washington's impoverished citizens.Growing up with such a strong role model, I developed many of her enthusiasms. I not only came to love the excitement of learning simply for the sake of knowing something new, but I also came to understand the idea of giving back to the community in exchange for a new sense of life, love, and spirit.

My mother's enthusiasm for learning is most apparent in travel. I was nine years old when my family visited Greece. Every night for three weeks before the trip, my older brother Peter and I sat with my mother on her bed reading Greek myths and taking notes on the Greek Gods. Despite the fact that we were traveling with fourteen-month-old twins, we managed to be at each ruin when the site opened at sunrise. I vividly remember standing in an empty amphitheatre pretending to be an ancient tragedian, picking out my favorite sculpture in the Acropolis museum, and inserting our family into modified tales of the battle at Troy. Eight years and half a dozen passport stamps later I have come to value what I have learned on these journeys about global history, politics and culture, as well as my family and myself.

While I treasure the various worlds my mother has opened to me abroad, my life has been equally transformed by what she has shown me just two miles from my house. As a ten year old, I often accompanied my mother to (name deleted), a local soup kitchen and children's center. While she attended meetings, I helped with the Summer Program by chasing children around the building and performing magic tricks. Having finally perfected the "floating paintbrush" trick, I began work as a full time volunteer with the five and six year old children last June. It is here that I met Jane Doe, an exceptionally strong girl with a vigor that is contagious. At the end of the summer, I decided to continue my work at (name deleted) as Jane's tutor. Although the position is often difficult, the personal rewards are beyond articulation. In the seven years since I first walked through the doors of (name deleted), I have learned not only the idea of giving to others, but also of deriving from them a sense of spirit.

Everything that my mother has ever done has been overshadowed by the thought behind it. While the raw experiences I have had at home and abroad have been spectacular, I have learned to truly value them by watching my mother. She has enriched my life with her passion for learning, and changed it with her devotion to humanity. In her endless love of everything and everyone she is touched by, I have seen a hope and life that is truly exceptional. Next year, I will find a new home miles away. However, my mother will always be by my side.

SAMPLE OUTLINE:
Paragraph 1 (Introduction)
I. Leading sentence: "It took me eighteen years to realize what an extraordinary influence my mother has been on my life."
II. Summary of main points: "I not only came to love the excitement of learning simply for the sake of knowing something new, but I also came to understand the idea of giving back to the community in exchange for a new sense of life, love, and spirit."
Paragraph 2 (First Supporting Point)
I. Transition sentence: "My mother's enthusiasm for learning is most apparent in travel."
II. Supporting point: Her mother's enthusiasm for learning.
III. Evidence: Learning through travel by using the example of a trip to Greece.
Paragraph 3 (Second Supporting Point)
I. Transition sentence: "While I treasure the various worlds my mother has opened to me abroad, my life has been equally transformed by what she has shown me just two miles from my house."
II. Supporting point: Her mother's dedication to the community.
III. Evidence: Her multiple volunteer activities such as helping at the local soup kitchen.
Paragraph 4 (Conclusion)
I. Transition sentence: "Everything that my mother has ever done has been overshadowed by the thought behind it."
II. Reiteration of main points: "She has enriched my life with her passion for learning, and changed it with her devotion to humanity."
III. Taking it one step further: "Next year, I will find a new home miles away. However, my mother will always be by my side."

Analyze and create an outline for the following essay:
Discovering and choosing a university that fulfills all of my needs was a rigorous yet exciting task. The Ivy U clearly emerged as the best choice for me and I, as a great match for the university. After visiting the campus, reading the information pamphlet, and researching the university Web site, I realize that Ivy offers what I hope to gain from my college experience. In return, I will contribute to the university as a person with leadership qualities who takes initiative and enjoys participating in school events.
As president of the student council, I have always promoted school spirit, and I intend to continue my enthusiastic involvement throughout my college career. My school places a large emphasis on test grades and homework, creating a serious mood throughout the school. As president, I have tried to enrich the school experience by planning events such as school lunches and interesting field trips. I have learned through my role as president to take charge, delegate responsibilities, be creative, innovative, exciting, and take responsibility. I hope to use these attributes to contribute to many of the clubs and activities offered at Ivy.
At the beginning of this school year, I took the initiative and single-handedly started a need-based tutoring service to pair weaker students with scholastically competent seniors and juniors. Approximately thirty students have been successfully paired and my school has permanently adopted this program. I am thrilled to know that Ivy has a tutoring service to help immigrants and political refugees in West Philadelphia where I can continue tutoring while in college.
In addition to academic breadth, there are a greater variety of extra-curricular activities available on the larger campus. I am excited about continuing my interests in sports and theater. I have played on my high school's varsity volleyball team for two years and I plan to play volleyball throughout college in Ivy's women's club volleyball. I also performed in The Sound of Music in high school and the Teatron will allow me to actively participate in theater.
I have chosen to apply early decision to the Ivy School of Nursing for I realize that Ivy is the perfect university for me. A college is ultimately as good as the students who attend, and as a well-rounded student who excels academically, socially, and in her extra curricular activities, I feel that I will add to and learn from Ivy and its flourishing environment. I function most effectively in a small academic setting and will derive all the benefits of the university's intimate yet rich campus. I truly believe that I will fulfill my potential by attending the University of Ivy.

3.2 2011-2012

2011-10-25T14:36:00.000-07:00

This is the last week that we will be discussing your first semester core literature choice. I will post your second semester choices in January. Reading the same book with your classmates gives you the opportunity to delve deeper into meaning and learn from each other. Make the most of this opportunity and be sure to check the board weekly.

Complete the following this week:
1) Read the "theme" lecture below.
2) Post 2 themes from your core literature selection.
3) Comment on another classmates post. Do you agree or disagree with the themes posted? Why?

THEME
To understand the author’s meaning of his/her work (“theme”), start with the literal level. Think about the PLOT (events in the story). Next, move up a notch and determine the subject or TOPIC of the work. Finally, infer the author’s THEME. Remember, your theme must be presented in a complete sentence, not a fragment.
Some examples:
“Love” is a subject. “Love can be painful” is a theme.
“Poverty” is a subject. “Poverty can be overcome” is a theme.
“War” is a subject. “War reflects man’s inhumanity to man” is a theme.

Do not use the same theme as a classmate who has already posted.

3.1 2011-2012

2011-10-20T19:12:00.001-07:00

Part 1

1. Read the lecture below
2. Respond to this post by stating the title of your book and the point of view in which it is written.

Part 2

1.Using your core literature selection, write one question for your classmates to answer concerning imagery, theme, or symbolism.
2. Answer one question posted by a classmate.

Definition of Point of View
All literature must be narrated or recorded by someone, and an author must decide who that someone will be. The decision is an important one, since the selection of narrator determines the perspective, or point of view, from which the story will be told, as well as the amount and kind of information a reader will be given. In discussing literature, it is most common to examine three different points of view.
________________________________________
First Person: A character in the story who speaks in the first person voice.
The first person narrator is a character in the story who can reveal his or her feelings and thoughts, or information that has been directly received by other characters. The first person narrator speaks in the first person, saying "I saw...," "I knew...," "I realized...," etc. The House on Mango Street, The Catcher in the Rye, and To Kill A Mockingbird are examples of books that tell a story from the first person point of view.
________________________________________
Third Person Objective: A narrator, not a character in the story, speaks in the third person voice and can tell only what, is observable through the five senses.
The third person objective narrator is not a character in the story: the reader would most often think of this narrator as "the author." The third person objective narrator refers to all characters in the third person, saying "He looked..." "She jumped...," etc. They are only able to make objective observations, however: they have no knowledge of what is going on in the mind of the characters, or anything else that would not be observable to the reader if they were to enter the story. Of Mice and Men is told from the third person objective point of view.
________________________________________
Third Person Omniscient: A narrator, not a character in the story, who speaks in the third person voice and can tell the thoughts and feelings of characters within the story.
Like the third person objective narrator, the third person omniscient narrator speaks in the third person and is not a character in the story. Unlike the third person objective narrator, however, the third person omniscient narrator has knowledge of the thoughts and feelings of characters in the story. The extent of this knowledge may vary somewhat, but it is more than would be observable to the reader, were they to enter the story. The Hobbit, The Scarlet Letter, and The Old Man and the Sea are books that tell a story from the third person omniscient point of view.

2.4 2011-2012

2011-10-14T21:33:00.000-07:00

Learning to properly cite the words of others is one of the most important skills you will ever learn. You will use this skill throughout high school, in every college class you take, and in professional writing. Using your literature readings this week, write two proper citations. Please study the examples below in bold.

Basic In-Text Citation Rules
In MLA style, referring to the works of others in your text is done by using what is known as parenthetical citation. This method involves placing relevant source information in parentheses after a quote or a paraphrase.

General Guidelines

•The source information required in a parenthetical citation depends (1.) upon the source medium (e.g. Print, Web, DVD) and (2.) upon the source’s entry on the Works Cited (bibliography) page.
•Any source information that you provide in-text must correspond to the source information on the Works Cited page. More specifically, whatever signal word or phrase you provide to your readers in the text, must be the first thing that appears on the left-hand margin of the corresponding entry in the Works Cited List.
In-Text Citations: Author-Page Style
MLA format follows the author-page method of in-text citation. This means that the author's last name and the page number(s) from which the quotation or paraphrase is taken must appear in the text, and a complete reference should appear on your Works Cited page. The author's name may appear either in the sentence itself or in parentheses following the quotation or paraphrase, but the page number(s) should always appear in the parentheses, not in the text of your sentence. For example:

Wordsworth stated that Romantic poetry was marked by a "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (263).

Romantic poetry is characterized by the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (Wordsworth 263).
Wordsworth extensively explored the role of emotion in the creative process (263).

Both citations in the examples above, (263) and (Wordsworth 263), tell readers that the information in the sentence can be located on page 263 of a work by an author named Wordsworth. If readers want more information about this source, they can turn to the Works Cited page, where, under the name of Wordsworth, they would find the following information:

Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads. London: Oxford U.P., 1967. Print.

This week you will choose a character from your core literature text and write a one paragraph character analysis. An example is provided for you below:
Katherine Anne Porter's "The Jilting of Granny Weahterall" shows us the thoughts and feelings of an elderly woman named Mrs. Weatherall. She is a stubborn, lonely woman who feels she is treated like a child because of her age, which in turn adds to her depression. Mrs. Weatherall's first and most obvious characteristic, stubbornness, is best personified by her remarks and speech in the story. Her inflexible personality makes her quite difficult to keep company with. One example of how Porter shows Mrs. Weatherall's stubbornness is when Cornelia has to ask her mother's permission to change the furniture arrangement (Porter 65). However, most of her pig-headedness is shown when she speaks. A prime example of this is when Mrs. Weatherall is urging the doctor to leave and says "Leave a well woman alone. I'll call for you when I want you. . ." (Porter 64).

2.3 2011-2012

2011-10-14T18:38:00.000-07:00

*If you did not cite examples from the book you selected last week, you will not get full credit. Please go back and follow the directions. If you are not sure how to cite, refer to next week's post.

This week you will be hunting for literary devices.

Complete the following in your post:

1.Find 3 of literary devices from your reading this week (I have provided a list for your reference). Cite and label the device used. See the examples listed at the bottom of this post. Do not list the same examples that other students have already posted.

2. Go back to week 2.1 and leave a comment to greet a classmate.

3. You should be about half way through your book this week.

LITERARY DEVICES
- alliteration: repeated beginning sounds in a series of two or more words (Bravely, the bright bulging beacon flickered.)
- anastrophe/inversion: reversing the natural word order (Into the clouds soared the eagle.)
- hyperbole: extreme exaggeration (He had the weight of the world on his shoulders.)
- irony: using words or ideas that have the opposite effect from what is expected (His worst enemy saved his life.)
- metaphor: to compare two unlike things without using “like” or “as” (Her smile was sunshine.)
- onomatopoeia: a word whose sound echoes its meaning (pop, fizz, buzz)
- oxymoron: two words paired that seem to contradict each other (jumbo shrimp)
- paradox: statements that seem contradictory but are really true
- parallelism: repeated pattern of phrases, but not with the same words (He searched here, he searched there, he searched everywhere.)
- personification: giving human abilities or characteristics to inanimate objects (The desk groaned in agony.)
- repetition: repeated regular pattern of words or phrases (Nevermore, nevermore, nevermore.)
- simile: to compare two unlike things using “like” or “as” (He was like a rock.)
- symbol/allusion: an object, person, situation, or action means more than what it is or refers to something in previous history or literature

Examples:

Repetition: In "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe, each stanza ends with "nothing more or nevermore."

Symbol: in "The Masque of the Red Death" by Edgar Allan Poe, the "mummer" or the "dark figure" is referring to the disease that was being spread before 20th century medicine.

Personification: "The Masque of the Red Death" describes the ebony clock as "having lungs and a face".

2.2 2011-2012

2011-10-05T19:43:00.000-07:00

Core Literature

1)Please select a book from the following list to read this month:
REQUIRED CORE - Author
1984-Orwell
Brave New World-Huxley
The Catcher in the Rye-Salinger

2) Please post the following:
- The book you selected

3) TONE
Use the words below to describe the way a writer conveys attitude (“tone”). Notice that they are grouped to give different degrees of each. Describe the tone citing text to support your claim.
- affectionate, nostalgic
- approving, admiring, worshipping
- candid, direct, incisive, informative
- complicated, pedantic, didactic
- disliking, patronizing, contemptuous, abhorring
- easy, friendly, comic, jovial
- flippant, cynical, sardonic, sarcastic, irreverent
- formal, elevated, grand, lofty
- insolent, antagonistic, hostile, inflammatory
- interested, benevolent, sympathetic, passionate
- objective, indifferent, apathetic
- serious, solemn, elegiac, lugubrious
- subdued, indirect, understated, evasive
- vibrant, dramatic, urgent, forceful
- whimsical, fanciful, effusive
- wistful, regretful, resigned, bitter, grim

1.1 2011-2012

2011-09-26T22:02:00.000-07:00

Comment Guidelines:

Always use correct spelling, grammar, and sentence structure. Comments with more than two errors will not be published.

When writing paragraphs for assignments or essays, use the following guidelines.

The paragraph has a topic sentence that tells the reader the main idea or concept of the paragraph. In other words, the topic sentence states what the paragraph is about.
The remaining sentences in the paragraph provide supporting details.
End the paragraph with a concluding or transition sentence.

Your first assignment: Please introduce yourself with a short biography.

10.3

2011-06-02T11:13:00.001-07:00

What do you see as your strengths? What would you like to work on next year?

10.2

2011-06-02T11:08:00.000-07:00

Do a quick write concerning what you consider to be the most important thing you learned this year. Comment on one classmate.

10.1

2011-04-16T08:59:00.001-07:00

Final exams are on 6/1/11 10:00-12:00 and 1:00-3:00.

9.4

2011-04-16T08:38:00.000-07:00

The final exam will give you an opportunity to show your mastery of skills that you have been practicing throughout the semester. The following are some key areas that you can expect to see on the exam:

1) Questions that test your understanding of a reading selection.

2) Questions that test your understanding of the way in which a selection is written.

Examples:

- The main purpose of the first paragraph is to...
- The main purpose of the essay is to...
- Identifying examples of irony, metaphor, hyperbole, simile,symbolism, and personification in the selection.
-Identifying the use of extended metaphor, hyperbole, logical persuasion, and sensory language.
- Which details support the idea that____?

3) Questions that ask you to analyze the way in which a selection is written.

Examples:
- What is the author's purpose in writing this article?
- What is the author's position?
- How does the author organize and present ideas in the essay?
- How does the author support his ideas?
- How does the author's personality affect his writing?
- How does that author express his ideas? ( allusions, use of irony, persuasive argument,or use of allegory)
- What bias does the author reveal in his/her writing?
- Describe the mood in the first half of the story and tell how it changes in the second half.

4) Questions that ask you to analyze and evaluate a passage.
Examples:
- Is the author's argument still valuable today? In which ways is it archaic and outdated?
- Describe the tone of the essay.
- What theme is expressed in the first paragraph of the essay?
- Which statements show the use an emotional appeal to a person's conscience rather than an appeal to reason?
- Why does the author draw a comparison between ____ and ____?
- In your opinion, how persuasive is the author's argument and why?

5) Proofreading and Revision:
- subject/ verb agreement
- correct word usage ( that, which/ who/ whom)
- sentence structure
- correct capitalization and punctuation
- use of transitions
* For practice on revision and proofreading, go to the textbook link from the Parkview website and select "High School Language Arts" and then "Test Practice."

Terms to know:
Allusions

Irony

Allegory

Simile

Personification

Hyperbole

Metaphor

I will be adding to this post over the next few weeks, so check back. Use this forum to study with your classmates. Share websites and how you prepare for finals and standardized tests.

9.3

2011-04-16T08:25:00.000-07:00

Go back to week 8.2.

Every author has a purpose for writing his passage. It might be to give information, explain something, solve a problem, sell something, persuade, or even simply to entertain. Authors support their purpose for writing with their position...their thoughts, feelings and beliefs.

Please repost in the following format:

1) The author's purpose is...

2) The author's position is...

Remember to support your answer by citing examples from the article. Do not state your opinion or summarize. You will see this type of question on the CST and SAT so let's get it right.

9.2

2011-04-09T13:31:00.001-07:00

The Elements of Drama
The performance of a play is much more than an occasion for the exchange of emotions between performers and audience. A play is a work of art composed of carefully selected words (like stories and poems), and they remain essential. Someone devoted a lot of thought to the selection and arrangement of those words. Watching a play, we usually don’t notice a playwright standing between the characters and us. If the play is excellent, it flows along before our eyes; we are not even aware that it is the product of conscious art. In a silent reading, the usual play consists mainly of dialogue—exchanges of speech punctuated by stage directions. In performance, however, stage directions disappear. And although the thoughtful efforts of perhaps a hundred people—actors, director, producer, stage designer, costumer, make-up artist, technicians—may have gone into a production, a successful play is likely to make us forget its artifice. Perhaps we even forget that the play exists as literature; gestures, facial expressions, bodily stance, lighting, and special effects may seem as essential as the playwright’s words. Even though the words are not all there is to a living play, they are the organized bones of it. And the whole play, the finished production, is the total of whatever transpires on stage.
The sense of immediacy we derive from drama is suggested by the root meaning of the word. Drama means action, or deed, from the Greek dran, to do. We use drama as a synonym for plays, but the word has several meanings. Sometimes it refers to a single play, or to the work of a playwright (dramatist), or perhaps to an entire body of plays written in a particular time or place. In yet another familiar sense of the word, drama often means a series of event that elicit excitement: “A real life drama…” is the way a lot of news stories are introduced. In this sense, whatever is dramatic implies suspense, tension, conflict, and resolution.
Plays are divided into acts, scenes, and lines. Some plays are one act, meaning that the entire play takes place in a single location and unfolds as one continuous action. As in a short story, the characters in a one-act play are presented economically and the action is sharply focused. In contrast, full-length plays can be three, four, five, or more acts, including many characters, and different settings in both time and place. The main divisions in a full-length play are called acts: their ends are indicated by lowering a curtain or turning up the house lights. Playwrights frequently employ acts to accommodate changes in time, setting,characters on stage, or mood. In many full-length plays, acts are further divided into scenes; according to tradition, a scene changes when the location of the action changes or when a new character enters. Acts and scenes are conventions that are understood and accepted by audiences because they have become, through usage and time, recognized as familiar techniques. Some other elements of drama include setting, exposition, etc.
Drama comes from religious ceremonies. Greek comedy developed from those phases of Dionysian rites that dealt with the theme of fertility, while Greek tragedy comes from the Dionysian rites dealing with life and death. Medieval drama arose out of rites commemorating the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ.
The word comedy is based on a word meaning revel, and early Greek comedy exemplified this. Comedy developed away from a primitive interest in fertility, and became for decorous and serious, although the so-called old comedy was very gross and coarse in character. Satire became an element of comedy as early as the 6C B.C., and led to classical comedy, which was practiced by many of the Elizabethan dramatists.
The word tragedy apparently means “goat song” and may reflect the Dionysian death and resurrection ceremonies in which the goat was the sacrificial animal. A chant was used in these religious ceremonies, perhaps the starting point of tragedy, developing into ceremonial songs. The songs became a primitive form of dialogue between a leader and a chorus, developing further narrative elements, where it became a story. Eventually there were two leaders instead of one, then there were more characters, and it evolved and evolved into what we know today. The great Greek masters of tragedy were Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides. The classical Greek tragedies produced by these playwrights influenced the writer’s of Renaissance tragedy, including Shakespeare.
It’s important to recognize the difference between tragedy, and literary tragedy. A child struck by a stray bullet is a tragedy. A volcano erupts killing hundreds of people—that is a tragedy. A manic depressive postal worker goes on a violent rampage—also a tragedy. These unexpected events of suffering are commonly and accurately described as tragic, but they are not tragedies in the literary sense of the term. A literary tragedy presents usually courageous individuals who confront powerful forces within or outside themselves with a dignity that reveals the breadth and depth of the human spirit in the face of failure, defeat, and even death.
Aristotle defined tragedy in the Poetics on the basis of plays contemporary to him. For the most part, this is still how we define tragedy today. The Protagonist of a Greek tragedy is someone regarded as extraordinary rather than typical; a great man or woman brought from happiness to agony. The character’s stature is important because it makes his or her fall all the more terrifying. In addition, Greek tragedy tends to be public rather than private, meaning that the fate of the entire community is often linked to the fate of the protagonist.
The protagonists of Greek tragedy, as well as those of Shakespeare, are often rulers of noble birth who represent the monarchical values of their periods, but in modern tragedies, protagonists are more like to reflect our democratic values, meaning that anyone is a suitable subject for a protagonist—a box boy, a corporate lawyer, a salesman, a housewife, a cab driver, ceo, etc.
What’s most important is not necessarily the social stature of the protagonist, but that the character continually confronts suffering, whether it comes from social, psychological, or supernatural forces. The protagonist usually has some weakness or frailty or flaw that brings about his or her misfortune. The term Aristotle used to describe this weakness was hamartia—the protagonist’s fall is the result of some internal tragic flaw such as excess arrogance, pride, ambition, passion, or some other character trait that often leads to disaster.
Hamartia can also be interpreted to mean a wrong act, a mistake based not on a persona failure but on circumstances outside of the protagonist’s personality and control. Many readers (and theater goers) that a combination of these two interpretations sheds the most light on the causes of the tragic protagonist’s fall. Both internal and external forces can lead to downfall, because the protagonist’s personality may determine crucial judgments that result in mistaken actions.
In classical Greek tragedy, the protagonist accepts responsibility for whatever has caused his or her downfall, displaying greatness of character. This greatness of character, this transcendence of human limitations usually makes the audience feel relief rather than hopelessness at the end of a tragedy. You know, when you cry and then feel better afterwards? Aristotle called this response a catharsis, or purging of emotions.
Nevertheless, tragedies are disturbing. Instead of coming away with the reassurance of a happy ending, we must take solace in the insight produced by the hero’s suffering. And just as our expectations are changed, so are the protagonist’s . Aristotle describes this moment in the plot when the change occurs as a reversal, or peripeteia, the point when the hero’s misfortunes turn in an unexpected direction. He more specifically defined this term as meaning an action performed by a character that has the opposite of its intended effect.

As you explore a play this week, keep all of these things in mind.
Rent a play, go get one at the library, watch "Our Town" from the Performing Arts link on our school webpage, or refer to one you have read. Which elements of drama can you identify? Is there a moment of catharsis? Reflect and then comment on a classmates post.

9.1

2011-04-09T13:30:00.001-07:00

Drama

Drama
Aristotle called drama “imitated human action.” Beyond this very simple definition, there are really three necessary elements in drama:
1. A story
2. Told in action
3. By actors who impersonate the characters of the story
Most plays, those literary works to which we give the collective name “ drama” are written not to be read in textbooks, but to be performed. Finding plays in a literature anthology, the student may very well ask: “Isn’t there something wrong with the idea of reading plays on the printed page?” “Isn’t that a perversion of their very nature?
True, plays are meant to be seen on stage, but equally true, reading a play may afford certain advantages. One advantage is that it is better to know some masterpieces by reading them than never to know them at all. Even though we live in an area with many theaters,and even though many colleges in the area offer theatrical productions, to succeed in your lifetime witnessing, say, all the plays of Shakespeare might well be impossible. In print, they are as near to hand as a book on a shelf, ready to be acted on the stage of your mind.
After all, a play is literature before it exists in a theater, and it might be argued that when we read an unfamiliar play, we meet it in the same basic form in which if first appears to its actor and director. If a play is rich and complex, or if it dates from the remote past, reading it enable us to study it at our leisure. Some playwrights even pay special attention to their silent readers. George Bernard Shaw and Edward Albee are only two of the modern playwrights who have sometimes prefaced their plays with remarks aimed only at the reader, while Shaw occasionally rounded out his play with an epilogue, too. Shaw was fond of the nuances lost upon the mere spectator. In Pygmalion, for example, this stage direction occurs: “He goes to the central window through which, with his back to the company, he contemplates the river and the flowers in Battersea Park on the opposite bank as if they were a frozen desert.” What he’ s contemplating, as well as the metaphorical “frozen desert” cannot appear on the stage, while to display all the flowers of Battersea Park would surpass the set designer’s ingenuity.
Sometimes, to read a play in print is our only means of knowing it in its entirety. Producers, far from regarding Shakespeare’s words as holy writ, sometimes omit speeches, or shorten them. Every actor who undertakes the role of Othello finds it necessary to make his own interpretation of the character. Some regard Iago as a figure of pure evil; others, as a madman; still others, as a human being consumed by hatred, jealousy, and pride. And the director of a production of Othello has to make certain decisions—shall Othello dress as Moor, or as a jet-set contemporary? Will he be black or white? Every stage version of the play is an interpretation; and so, after all is each reader’s silent experience with it. Therefore, it’s just as important to exercise active reading in a play, reading alertly, highlighting, annotating, and so on, as when you read a short story or a poem.
Play as Performance
Even though reading a play is better than not experiencing it at all, drama is ultimately a performance. Unlike a short story or a novel, a play is a work of storytelling in which all the characters are represented by actors. A play differs from a work of fiction in another essential way: a play is not addressed to a solitary reader but to a group of people seated together in a theater. To belong to such an audience is an experience far different from the experience of reading a story in solitude. Seated in a theater, the stage lights on, the house lights dimmed, we become members of a community whose responses affect our own responses. We, too, contribute to the community’s response whenever we catch our breath in excitement, murmur in surprise, laugh, sigh, gasp, and applaud. In contrast, when we watch a movie by ourselves, let’s say a comedy. We probably are moved to laughter far less often than we would be if we watched the same film in a movie theater. In a theater of live actors, another rapport exists; a sensitive give and take between the actors and the audience. While a professional actor may aim for a top performance on all occasions, it is nonetheless, natural for an actor to feel inspired in proportion to the responsiveness of the audience.

This week you are to read a play in your text and cite directions given to the actor. How does this give and enrich the meaning of the play?

8.3

2011-04-03T17:29:00.000-07:00

A figure of speech is a rhetorical device used to achieve a particular effect. An author will often use a word or phrase that diverges from its normal meaning. Such words and phrases are charged with a specialized meaning separate from the literal meaning. An author will use a figure of speech for emphasis, freshness, or clarity. However, sometimes the desired effect is ambiguity between a literal and figurative interpretation. Study the following examples and then post 3 examples of your own using 3 different rhetorical devices from the list.

Idiom –
An idiom is a word or phrase used figuratively to express a particular meaning understood by a common group of people. The meanings of idioms come from their usage among speakers of a particular language or dialect within a particular region or community.

Example: "A blessing in disguise" is something good that is not recognized initially. "Actions speak louder than words" is to say that what one does is more important than what one says.

Euphemism –
A euphemism is a substitution of an inoffensive term for one considered offensive. When a speaker uses one of these expressions, the intention is to have a less offensive or disturbing effect on the listener than what the word or phrase it replaces.

Example: "pre-owned vehicles" for "used cars"—"the big C" for "cancer"—"lost their lives" for "were killed"—"ill-advised" for "very poor or bad"

Hyperbole –
Hyperbole is an exaggeration or intentional overstatement that is most often used for emphasis or rhetorical effect.

Example: The path seemed to stretch on forever.
Example: There must be a million ways to explain the outcome.

Understatement –
Understatement is a figure of speech in which an author deliberately makes something seem less important or serious than it truly is, either for ironic emphasis or for politeness and tact. Whereas hyperbole exaggerates, understatement minimizes, saying less than what is really meant.

Example: "A soiled baby, with a neglected nose, cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty."—Mark Twain
Example: "The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated."—Mark Twain

Litotes –
Litotes is a particular form of understatement used by denying the opposite or contrary of the word which would otherwise be used. Litotes expresses an affirmative by negating its opposite.

Example: Heat waves are not rare in summer. (as opposed to "Heat waves are common in summer.")
Example: Hitting that telephone pole certainly didn't do your car any good.

Oxymoron – An oxymoron is an expression that uses contrasting images.

Example: The silence was deafening.
Example: "This fellow is wise enough to play the fool."—Shakespeare

Metonymy –
Metonymy is the substitution of an abstract or suggestive word for another, usually concrete, term. Metonymy is a figure of speech where the name of a thing is substituted for another word or term closely associated with it.

Example: "The White House" for the President and "creature" for person
Example: Idua liked to speak Kiowa because he could express himself better in his native tongue. (The term "tongue" is used to represent language)

Synecdoche –
Synecdoche is a kind of metonymy in which something is used for the whole. In synecdoche, a part is used to represent the whole or the whole is used to represent a part.

Example: "hands" to refer to workers, "wheels" to refer to cars, "head" for cattle, and "bread" for food
Example: "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat."—Winston Churchill, 1940

Antithesis –
Antithesis is a rhetorical technique in which words, phrases, or ideas are intentionally contrasted, usually through the use of parallel structure. Antithesis is the juxtaposition of contrasting ideas. The contrast may be in words or in ideas or both.

Example: "What if I am rich, and another is poor—strong, and he is weak—intelligent, and he is benighted—elevated, and he is depraved? Have we not one Father? Hath not one God created us?"—William Lloyd Garrison, "No Compromise with Slavery"
Example: "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice . . . moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."—Barry Goldwater

Rhetorical Question –
Asking a question not for the purpose of eliciting an answer but for the purpose of asserting or denying something. It is used for effect, emphasis, or provocation, or for drawing a conclusion from the facts at hand.

Example: "For if we lose the ability to perceive our faults, what is the good of living on?"—Marcus Aurelius
Example: "You say there is but one way to worship and serve the Great Spirit. If there is but one religion, why do you white people differ so much about it?"—Red Jacket, 1805

8.2

2011-04-03T17:21:00.000-07:00

What does the title, “It’s portion distortion that makes America fat” tell you about the authors’ position on who is responsible for America’s growing weight problem?
What do you think is the purpose of the article? Please comment on one your classmates thoughts too.

It’s portion distortion that makes America fat
The Sacramento Bee, Sunday, Jan. 5, 2003
By Shannon Brownlee
1 It was probably inevitable that one day people would start suing McDonald’s for making them fat. That day came last summer, when New York lawyer Samuel Hirsch filed several lawsuits against McDonald’s, as well as four other fast-food companies, on the grounds that they had failed to adequately disclose the bad health effects of their menus.
2 One of the suits involves a Bronx teenager who tips the scale at 400 pounds and whose mother, in papers filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, said, “I always believed McDonald’s food was healthy for my son.”
3 Uh-huh. And the tooth fairy really put that dollar under his pillow. But once you’ve stopped sniggering at our litigious society, remember that it once seemed equally ludicrous that smokers could successfully sue tobacco companies for their addiction to cigarettes.
4 And while nobody is claiming that Big Macs are addictive – at least not yet – the restaurant industry and food packagers have clearly helped give many Americans the roly-poly shape they have today. This is not to say that the folks in the food industry want us to be fat. But make no mistake: When they do well economically, we gain weight.
5 It wasn’t always thus. Readers of a certain age can remember a time when a trip to McDonald’s seemed like a treat and when a small bag of French fries, a plain burger and a 12-ounce Coke seemed like a full meal. Fast food wasn’t any healthier back then; we simply ate a lot less of it.
6 How did toady’s oversized appetites become the norm? It didn’t happen by accident or some inevitable evolutionary process. It was to a large degree the result of consumer manipulation. Fast food’s marketing strategies, which make perfect sense from a business perspective, succeed only when they induce a substantial number of us to overeat. To see how this all came about, let’s go back to 1983, when John Martin became CEO of the ailing Taco Bell franchise and met a young marketing whiz named Elliott Bloom.
7 Using so-called “smart research,” a then-new kind of in-depth consumer survey, Bloom had figured out that fast-food franchises were sustained largely by a core group of “heavy users,” mostly young, single males, who ate at such restaurants as often as 20 times a month. In fact, 30 percent of Taco Bell’s customers accounted for 70 percent of its sales.
8 Through his surveys, Bloom learned what might seem obvious now but wasn’t at all clear 20 years ago – these guys ate at fast-food joints because they had absolutely no interest in cooking for themselves and didn’t give a rip about the nutritional quality of the food. They didn’t even care much about the taste. All that mattered was that it was fast and cheap. Martin figured Taco Bell could capture a bigger share of these hard-core customers by streamlining the food production and pricing main menu items at 49, 59 and 69 cents – well below its competitors.
9 It worked. Taco Bell saw a dramatic increase in patrons, with no drop in revenue per customer. As Martin told Greg Critser, author of “Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World,” when Taco Bell ran a test of its new pricing in Texas, “within seven days of initiating the test, the average check was right back to where it was before – it was just four instead of three items.”
10 In other words, cheap food induced people to eat more. Taco Bell’s rising sales figures – up 14 percent by 1989 and 12 percent more the next year – forced other fast-food franchises to wake up and smell the burritos. By the late ‘80s, everybody from Burger King to Wendy’s
was cutting prices and seeing an increase in customers – including bargain-seeking Americans who weren’t part of that original hard-core group.
11 If marketing strategy had stopped there, we might not be the nation of fatties that we are today. But the imperatives of the market place are growth and rising profits, and once everybody had slashed prices to the bone, the franchises had to look for a new way to satisfy investors.
12 And what they found was …super-sizing.
13 Portion sizes had already been creeping upward. As early as 1972, for example, McDonald’s introduced its large-size fries (large being a relative term, since at 3.5 ounces the ’72 “large” was smaller than a medium serving today). But McDonald’s increased portions only reluctantly, because the company’s founder, Ray Kroc, didn’t like the image of lowbrow, cheap food. If people wanted more French fries, he would say, “they can buy two bags.” But price competition had grown so fierce that the only way to keep profits up was to offer bigger and bigger portions. By 1988, McDonald’s had introduced a 32-ounce “super size” soda and “super size” fries.
14 The deal with all these enhanced portions is that the customer gets a lot more food for a relatively small increase in price. So just how does that translate into bigger profits? Because the actual food in a fast-food meal is incredibly cheap. For every dollar a quick-service franchiser spends to produce a food item, only 20 cents, on average, goes toward food. The rest is eaten up by expenses such as salaries, packaging, electric bills, insurance, and of course, the ubiquitous advertising that got you in the door or to the drive-through lane in the first place.
15 Here’s how it works. Let’s say a $1.25 bag of French fries costs $1 to produce. The potatoes, oil and salt account for only 20 cents of the cost. The other 80 cents goes toward all the other expenses. If you add half again as many French fries to the bag and sell it for $1.50, the non-food expenses stay pretty much constant, while the extra food costs the franchise only 10 more pennies. The fast-food joint makes an extra 15 cents pure profit, and the customer thinks he’s getting a good deal. And he would be, if he actually needed the extra food, which he doesn’t because the nation is awash in excess calories.
16 That 20 percent rule, by the way, applies to all food products, whether it’s a bag of potato chips, the 2,178-calorie mountain of fried seafood at Red Lobster or the 710-calorie slab of dessert at the Cheesecake Factory. Some foods are even less expensive to make. The flakes of your kid’s breakfast cereal, for example, account for only 5 percent of the total amount Nabisco or General Mills spent to make and sell them.
17 Soda costs less to produce than any drink except tap water (which nobody seems to drink anymore), thanks to a 1970s invention that cut the expense of making high-fructose corn syrup. There used to be real sugar in Coke; when Coca-Cola and other bottlers switched to high-fructose corn syrup in 1984, they slashed sweetener costs by 20 percent. That’s why 7-Eleven can sell the 64-ounce Double Gulp – half a gallon of soda and nearly 600 calories – for only 37 cents more than the 16-ounce, 89-cent regular Gulp. You’d feel ripped off if you bought the smaller size. Who wouldn’t?
18 The final step in the fattening of America was the “up sell,” a stroke of genius whose origins are buried somewhere in the annals of marketing. You’re already at the counter, you’ve ordered a cheese burger value meal for $3.74, and your server says, “Would you like to super-size that for only $4.47?” Such a deal. The chain extracts an extra 73 cents from the customer, and the customer gets an extra 400 calories – bringing the total calorie count to 1,550, more than half the recommended intake for an adult man for an entire day.
19 When confronted with their contribution to America’s expanding waistline, restauranteurs and food packagers reply that eating less is a matter of individual responsibility. But that’s not how the human stomach works. If you put more food in front of people, they eat more, as studies have consistently shown over the last decade.
20 My personal favorite: The researcher gave moviegoers either a half-gallon or a gallon bucket of popcorn before the show (it was “Payback,” with Mel Gibson) and then measured how much they ate when they returned what was left in the containers afterward. Nobody could polish off the entire thing, but subjects ate 44 percent more when given the bigger bucket.
21 The downside, of course, is that 20 years of Big Food has trained us to think that oceanic drinks and gargantuan portions are normal. Indeed, once fast food discovered that big meals meant big profits, everybody from Heineken to Olive Garden to Frito Lay followed suit. Today, says Lisa Young, a nutritionist at New York University, super-sizing has pervaded every segment of the food industry. For her PhD, Young documented the changes in portion sizes for dozens of foods over the past several decades.
22 M&M/Mars, for example, has increased the size of candy bars such as Milky Way and Snickers four times since 1970, Starbucks introduced the 20-ounce “venti” size in 1999 and discontinued its “short” 8-ounce cup. When 22-ounce Heinekens were introduced, Young reported, the company sold 24 million of them the first year, and attributed the sales to the “big-bottle gimmick.”
23 Even Lean Cuisine and Weight Watchers now advertise “Hearty Portions” of their diet meals. Everything from plates and muffin tins to restaurant chairs and the cut of our Levi’s has expanded to match our growing appetites, and the wonder of it all is not that 60 percent of Americans are overweight or obese, but rather that 40 percent of us are not.
24 Where does it end? Marketers and restauranteurs may scoff at lawsuits like the ones brought this summer against fast food companies, and they have a point: Adults are ultimately responsible for what they put in their own mouths.
25 But maybe there’s hope for us yet, because it looks as if fast-food companies “Omnipresence” – the McDonald’s strategy of beating out competitors by opening new stores, sometimes as many as 1,000 a year – “has proved costly and self-cannibalizing,” say author Critser. With 13,000 McDonald’s units alone, most of America is so saturated with fast food there’s practically no place left to put a drive-through lane. Now, fast-food companies are killing each other in a new price war they can’t possibly sustain, and McDonald’s just suffered its first quarterly loss since the company went public 47 years ago.
26 The obvious direction to go is down, toward what nutritional policymakers are calling “smart-sizing.” Or at least it should be obvious, if food purveyors cared as much about helping Americans slim down as they would have us believe. Instead of urging Americans to “Get Active, Stay Active” – Pepsi Cola’s new criticism-deflecting slogan – how about bringing back the 6.5 ounce sodas of the ‘40s and ‘50s? Or, imagine, as Critser does, the day when McDonald’s advertises Le Petit Mac, made with high-grade beef, a delicious whole-grain bun and hawked by, say, Serena Williams.
27 One way or another, as Americans wake up to the fact that obesity is killing nearly as many citizens as cigarettes are, jumbo burgers and super-size fries will seem like less of a bargain.

8.1

2011-03-25T15:13:00.000-07:00

Write a review/ recommendation fo a book that you feel everyone should read.

7.4

2011-02-26T12:54:00.000-08:00

Choose one topic that we have studies thus far and explain it to your classmates using your own words and examples.

7.3

2011-02-26T12:47:00.001-08:00

Review Langston Hughes' poem "Harlem". The speaker in the poem begins by asking "What happens to a dream deferred?" To what dream or dreams might the speaker be referring? Following the questions, the speaker provides a number of responses. What type of figurative language is employed, and why do you think this particular figurative device has been used? What effect does the use of figurative language have on communicating the theme and tone of the poem?

Following your response please comment on at least one other response.

"Harlem" Langston Hughes- 1951

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

7.2

2011-02-23T21:50:00.000-08:00

Go back to the Frost poem last week and paraphrase it. Post your paraphrase and then comment on a classmates paraphrase.

7.1

2011-02-11T18:55:00.001-08:00

Review Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken". What might the two roads symbolize? What is the speaker's attitude toward them? What must he decide? How are the roads different, and which does the speaker choose and why? What does the speaker know about the unchosen road? What will be the effect of his choice? Consider voice, tone, diction, metaphor, simile, imagery, symbolism, sound, and rhythm in your response.

In your posting this week, you may answer any, some, or all of the above questions. Remember that there is no one, single, correct interpretation of any work of literature, including a poem. However, your interpretation must be supported by evidence from the work of literature. Review your active reading notes as you prepare your post.

Your post must be at least 100 words. You must also post a response to at least one of your classmates, of at least 50 words. Be sure to carefully proofread and edit your submissions before posting.

Robert Frost (1874–1963). Mountain Interval. 1920.

1. The Road Not Taken

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth; 5

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same, 10

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back. 15

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. 20

6.4

2011-02-11T18:43:00.001-08:00

Review the information below and then copy and paste the literary analysis form at the bottom onto your comment. Use your readings from this week to complete the form.

Guide to The Style Analysis Chart

I. THEME
To understand the author’s meaning of his/her work (“theme”), start with the literal level. Think about the PLOT (events in the story). Next, move up a notch and determine the subject or TOPIC of the work. Finally, infer the author’s THEME. Remember, your theme must be presented in a complete sentence, not a fragment.
Some examples:
“Love” is a subject. “Love can be painful” is a theme.
“Poverty” is a subject. “Poverty can be overcome” is a theme.
“War” is a subject. “War reflects man’s inhumanity to man” is a theme.

II. DICTION
Use the words from this list to describe an author’s choice of words (“diction”). In the right hand column of your chart, copy samples of text that support your claim.
- abstract
- bombastic
- colloquial, conversational
- cultured, polished
- emotional
- fiery
- generalized
- old-fashioned
- ordinary, plain
- pedantic, “preachy”
- poetic
- precise, specific
- pretentious
- scholarly
- slangy
- technical (uses jargon)

III. SYNTAX
Use the words from this list to describe an author’s sentence arrangement (“syntax”). Remember, syntax can affect a story’s pace, rhythm, suspense, tone, and theme. In the right hand column of your chart, describe the effect that syntax has on the reader.
- anastrophe/inversion formal tone to create a poetic effect
- balanced sentences using similar sentence lengths, structures
- exciting punctuation dashes, parentheses, italics, ellipses, all caps
- long, elegant lots of compound, complex sentences
- occasional fragments short blips to add tension or impact
- parallel arranging similar parts to give emphasis
- repetition using word(s) more than once for emphasis
- rhetorical questions asking questions not for an answer
- telegraphic brief, concise, tight

IV. TONE
Use the words below to describe the way a writer conveys attitude (“tone”). Notice that they are grouped to give different degrees of each. In the right hand column of your chart, tell how tone is expressed (through diction, syntax, imagery, punctuation) with copied text to support your claim.
- affectionate, nostalgic
- approving, admiring, worshipping
- candid, direct, incisive, informative
- complicated, pedantic, didactic
- disliking, patronizing, contemptuous, abhorring
- easy, friendly, comic, jovial
- flippant, cynical, sardonic, sarcastic, irreverent
- formal, elevated, grand, lofty
- insolent, antagonistic, hostile, inflammatory
- interested, benevolent, sympathetic, passionate
- objective, indifferent, apathetic
- serious, solemn, elegiac, lugubrious
- subdued, indirect, understated, evasive
- vibrant, dramatic, urgent, forceful
- whimsical, fanciful, effusive
- wistful, regretful, resigned, bitter, grim
V. LITERARY DEVICES
Use the words from this list to describe an author’s use of literary devices. In the right hand column of your chart, copy the text that supports your claim.
- alliteration: repeated beginning sounds in a series of two or more words (Bravely, the bright bulging beacon flickered.)
- anastrophe/inversion: reversing the natural word order (Into the clouds soared the eagle.)
- hyperbole: extreme exaggeration (He had the weight of the world on his shoulders.)
- irony: using words or ideas that have the opposite effect from what is expected (His worst enemy saved his life.)
- metaphor: to compare two unlike things without using “like” or “as” (Her smile was sunshine.)
- onomatopoeia: a word whose sound echoes its meaning (pop, fizz, buzz)
- oxymoron: two words paired that seem to contradict each other (jumbo shrimp)
- paradox: statements that seem contradictory but are really true
- parallelism: repeated pattern of phrases, but not with the same words (He searched here, he searched there, he searched everywhere.)
- personification: giving human abilities or characteristics to inanimate objects (The desk groaned in agony.)
- repetition: repeated regular pattern of words or phrases (Nevermore, nevermore, nevermore.)
- simile: to compare two unlike things using “like” or “as” (He was like a rock.)
- symbol/allusion: an object, person, situation, or action means more than what it is or refers to something in previous history or literature

Literary Response Form:

STYLE ELEMENT TEXT / REMARK

Diction is… (Copy text.)
________________
Syntax is… (Copy text.)
________________
Tone is… (How do you know?)
________________
Two Literary Devices: (Copy text.)
________________
________________
Other: __________ (Copy text.)

6.3

2011-02-03T15:00:00.000-08:00

Tone:

Tone, the attitude of the narrator or author of a work toward the subject matter, characters, and/or audience. Word choice and sentence structure can help to create a work’s tone, which may be intimate, or bitter, or sarcastic, or bittersweet, or affectionate, or immature, or condescending, or respectful, or any number of other things. Tone may also be ironic.
Something important to pay attention to when examining tone is the level of diction— that means whether the words that the author uses are formal, informal, conversational, or slang. Formal diction is characterized by elaborate, complex sentences; an educated vocabulary; and a serious, objective, detached tone. At its extreme, formal diction may be stiff and stilted, far removed from everyday speech. Think about what is communicated and suggested by a narrator or character who uses this kind of diction. Formal diction may indicate a superior social or professional position, or emotional detachment. When one character’s language is significantly more formal than another’s, he or she may seem old-fashioned or stuffy. When language is inappropriately elevated or complex, it may suggest that the character is pompous or ridiculous. Thus, the level of diction reveals a good deal about characters and about the narrator’s attitude toward them.
Informal diction is consistent with everyday speech. It is characterized by slang, contractions, colloquial expressions like “ you know,” and “I mean,” shortened word forms, incomplete sentences, and a casual, conversational tone.

* Write a 3-4 sentence example using Formal diction and a 3-4 sentence example using informal diction.

6.2

2011-02-02T17:11:00.001-08:00

Can you recognize Figurative Language (containing figures of speech such as similes or metaphors to add vividness to a description), Dialect,(language peculiar to a region or group of persons), or Colloquial Speech (conversational, informal language, slang)?

a) figurative b) dialect c) colloquial speech

___1. You want I should do it for you?
___2. In its anger, the crowd roared like a lion.
___3. You sure took off in a hurry.
___4. Jack Frost used diamonds to paint the windows last night.
___5. How come you’re not hungry?
___6, That’s a big 10-20.

On your own… write an example of one of the types of statements, the person that logs on after you will identify your sample and write one of their own. Let’s see if you can follow the directions.

6.1

2011-01-27T11:07:00.000-08:00

What is tone?

Tone is a particular way of expressing feeling or attitudes that will influence how a reader feels about characters, events, and outcome of a story.

The following can be used to convey tone:
Diction: individual word use
Images: Word pictures created by a group of words
Details: facts
Language- slang, scholarly, jargon
Sentence Structure: Short sentence are usually emotional or assertive; longer sentences are usually more reasonable or scholarly.

1) Write a paragraph of approximated 100 words that conveys tone. Some ideas include tension, fear, anxiety, warmth, nostalgia, and joy.
2) Then comment on a classmate's post by identifying the tone of the passage posted.

Here is an example:
1)
Tara bridled Smoke and led him out of the barn when a clap of thunder and a streak of lightening hit the ground. She turned to see Gulliver charging at her. The usually warm brown eyes were blinded with fear. Tara Screamed so loudly her mother heard her in the house. Tara’s mom jumped up and ran outside to find her. When she arrived at the stables, she found the fence broken and saw the horses running on the distance. Fear gripped her heart as she searched for her daughter. Then she heard a small strange sound coming from the stable.

2)
The tone conveyed in the above paragraph includes tension, fear, and suspense.

5.4

2011-01-15T15:39:00.000-08:00

This is midterm week, so there will be no Discussion Board. Study hard!

5.3

2011-01-15T15:32:00.000-08:00

Good job on the backwards outlining last week. Please write your own introductory paragraph on the same topic this week and then give feedback to at least one other student post.

5.2

2010-12-23T00:51:00.001-08:00

Our focus for the next several weeks will be on revision. Below I have posted an essay and an outline from a college admission sample. Review the essay and outline. You will then work backwards to create an outline from the essay posted at the end of this blog.

Essay:
It took me eighteen years to realize what an extraordinary influence my mother has been on my life. She's the kind of person who has thoughtful discussions about which artist she would most want to have her portrait painted by (Sargent), the kind of mother who always has time for her four children, and the kind of community leader who has a seat on the board of every major project to assist Washington's impoverished citizens.Growing up with such a strong role model, I developed many of her enthusiasms. I not only came to love the excitement of learning simply for the sake of knowing something new, but I also came to understand the idea of giving back to the community in exchange for a new sense of life, love, and spirit.

My mother's enthusiasm for learning is most apparent in travel. I was nine years old when my family visited Greece. Every night for three weeks before the trip, my older brother Peter and I sat with my mother on her bed reading Greek myths and taking notes on the Greek Gods. Despite the fact that we were traveling with fourteen-month-old twins, we managed to be at each ruin when the site opened at sunrise. I vividly remember standing in an empty amphitheatre pretending to be an ancient tragedian, picking out my favorite sculpture in the Acropolis museum, and inserting our family into modified tales of the battle at Troy. Eight years and half a dozen passport stamps later I have come to value what I have learned on these journeys about global history, politics and culture, as well as my family and myself.

While I treasure the various worlds my mother has opened to me abroad, my life has been equally transformed by what she has shown me just two miles from my house. As a ten year old, I often accompanied my mother to (name deleted), a local soup kitchen and children's center. While she attended meetings, I helped with the Summer Program by chasing children around the building and performing magic tricks. Having finally perfected the "floating paintbrush" trick, I began work as a full time volunteer with the five and six year old children last June. It is here that I met Jane Doe, an exceptionally strong girl with a vigor that is contagious. At the end of the summer, I decided to continue my work at (name deleted) as Jane's tutor. Although the position is often difficult, the personal rewards are beyond articulation. In the seven years since I first walked through the doors of (name deleted), I have learned not only the idea of giving to others, but also of deriving from them a sense of spirit.

Everything that my mother has ever done has been overshadowed by the thought behind it. While the raw experiences I have had at home and abroad have been spectacular, I have learned to truly value them by watching my mother. She has enriched my life with her passion for learning, and changed it with her devotion to humanity. In her endless love of everything and everyone she is touched by, I have seen a hope and life that is truly exceptional. Next year, I will find a new home miles away. However, my mother will always be by my side.

OUTLINE:
Paragraph 1 (Introduction)
I. Leading sentence: "It took me eighteen years to realize what an extraordinary influence my mother has been on my life."
II. Summary of main points: "I not only came to love the excitement of learning simply for the sake of knowing something new, but I also came to understand the idea of giving back to the community in exchange for a new sense of life, love, and spirit."
Paragraph 2 (First Supporting Point)
I. Transition sentence: "My mother's enthusiasm for learning is most apparent in travel."
II. Supporting point: Her mother's enthusiasm for learning.
III. Evidence: Learning through travel by using the example of a trip to Greece.
Paragraph 3 (Second Supporting Point)
I. Transition sentence: "While I treasure the various worlds my mother has opened to me abroad, my life has been equally transformed by what she has shown me just two miles from my house."
II. Supporting point: Her mother's dedication to the community.
III. Evidence: Her multiple volunteer activities such as helping at the local soup kitchen.
Paragraph 4 (Conclusion)
I. Transition sentence: "Everything that my mother has ever done has been overshadowed by the thought behind it."
II. Reiteration of main points: "She has enriched my life with her passion for learning, and changed it with her devotion to humanity."
III. Taking it one step further: "Next year, I will find a new home miles away. However, my mother will always be by my side."

Analyze and create an outline for the following essay:

Discovering and choosing a university that fulfills all of my needs was a rigorous yet exciting task. The Ivy U clearly emerged as the best choice for me and I, as a great match for the university. After visiting the campus, reading the information pamphlet, and researching the university Web site, I realize that Ivy offers what I hope to gain from my college experience. In return, I will contribute to the university as a person with leadership qualities who takes initiative and enjoys participating in school events.
As president of the student council, I have always promoted school spirit, and I intend to continue my enthusiastic involvement throughout my college career. My school places a large emphasis on test grades and homework, creating a serious mood throughout the school. As president, I have tried to enrich the school experience by planning events such as school lunches and interesting field trips. I have learned through my role as president to take charge, delegate responsibilities, be creative, innovative, exciting, and take responsibility. I hope to use these attributes to contribute to many of the clubs and activities offered at Ivy.
At the beginning of this school year, I took the initiative and single-handedly started a need-based tutoring service to pair weaker students with scholastically competent seniors and juniors. Approximately thirty students have been successfully paired and my school has permanently adopted this program. I am thrilled to know that Ivy has a tutoring service to help immigrants and political refugees in West Philadelphia where I can continue tutoring while in college.
In addition to academic breadth, there are a greater variety of extra-curricular activities available on the larger campus. I am excited about continuing my interests in sports and theater. I have played on my high school's varsity volleyball team for two years and I plan to play volleyball throughout college in Ivy's women's club volleyball. I also performed in The Sound of Music in high school and the Teatron will allow me to actively participate in theater.
I have chosen to apply early decision to the Ivy School of Nursing for I realize that Ivy is the perfect university for me. A college is ultimately as good as the students who attend, and as a well-rounded student who excels academically, socially, and in her extra curricular activities, I feel that I will add to and learn from Ivy and its flourishing environment. I function most effectively in a small academic setting and will derive all the benefits of the university's intimate yet rich campus. I truly believe that I will fulfill my potential by attending the University of Ivy.

5.1 Mdterm Review

2010-12-08T09:36:00.000-08:00

The first semester midterm exam will give you an opportunity to show your mastery of skills that you have been practicing throughout the semester. The following are some key areas that you can expect to see on the exam:

1) Questions that test your understanding of a reading selection.

2) Questions that test your understanding of the way in which a selection is written.

Examples:

- The main purpose of the first paragraph is to...
- The main purpose of the essay is to...
- Identifying examples of irony, metaphor, hyperbole, simile,symbolism, and personification in the selection.
-Identifying the use of extended metaphor, hyperbole, logical persuasion, and sensory language.
- Which details support the idea that____?

3) Questions that ask you to analyze the way in which a selection is written.

Examples:
- How does the author organize and present ideas in the essay?
- How does the author support his ideas?
- How does the author's personality affect his writing?
- How does that author express his ideas? ( allusions, use of irony, persuasive argumnet,or use of allegory)
- What bias does the author reveal in his/her writing?
- Describe the mood in the first half of the story and tell how it changes in the second half.

4) Questions that ask you to analyze and evaluate a passage.
Examples:
- Is the author's argument still valuable today? In which ways is it archaic and outdated?
- Describe the tone of the essay.
- What theme is expressed in the first paragraph of the essay?
- Which statements show the use an emotional appeal to a person's conscience rather than an appeal to reason?
- Why does the author draw a comparison between ____ and ____?
- In your opinion, how persuasive is the author's argumnet and why?

5) Proofreading and Revision:
- subject/ verb agreement
- correct word usage ( that, which/ who/ whom)
- sentence structure
- correct capitalization and punctuation
- use of transitions
* For practice on revision and proffreeading, go to the textbook link from the Parkview website and select "High School Language Arts" and then "Test Practice."

Please begin to review for your semester exam. You may post examples from previouse lessons where you have practiced the above skills.
Other terms to know:
Allusions

Irony

Allegory

Simile

Personification

Hyperbole

Metaphor

4.3

2010-12-07T18:54:00.000-08:00

This week we are reviewing sentence types. Please review the information below and then write one of each type.

Sentence Types

Structurally, English sentences can be classified four different ways, though there are endless constructions of each. The classifications are based on the number of independent and dependent clauses a sentence contains. An independent clause forms a complete sentence on its own, while a dependent clause needs another clause to make a complete sentence. By learning these types, writers can add complexity and variation to their sentences.
Simple sentence: A sentence with one independent clause and no dependent clauses.

*
My aunt enjoyed taking the hayride with you.
*
China's Han Dynasty marked an official recognition of Confucianism.

Compound Sentence: A sentence with multiple independent clauses but no dependent clauses.

*
The clown frightened the little girl, and she ran off screaming.
*
The Freedom Riders departed on May 4, 1961, and they were determined to travel through many southern states.

Complex Sentence: A sentence with one independent clause and at least one dependent clause.

*
After Mary added up all the sales, she discovered that the lemonade stand was 32 cents short.

While all of his paintings are fascinating, Hieronymus Bosch's triptychs, full of mayhem and madness, are the real highlight of his art.

Complex-Compound Sentence: A sentence with multiple independent clauses and at least one dependent clause.

*
With her reputation on the line, Peggy played against a fierce opponent at the Scrabble competition, and overcoming nerve-racking competition, she won the game with one well-placed word.
*
Catch-22 is widely regarded as Joseph Heller's best novel, and because Heller served in World War II, which the novel satirizes, the zany but savage wit of the novel packs an extra punch.

4.2

2010-12-02T18:36:00.000-08:00

4.1

2010-11-19T16:49:00.001-08:00

Thesis Statements

A good thesis statement will have the following:
1) Position: It will come at the end of the introductory paragraph.
2) Purpose: It will state the primary purpose of the essay.
3) Format: It will give a brief overview of the major ideas the essay will present. Each idea in the thesis statement will represent one body paragraph, and the order in which the ideas will be presented.
4) Parallelism: The three items should all be expressed with the same grammatical consistency.
5) Bias: It should be written in neutral terms if possible.

Example: The subject is firewood. You will deal with oak, willow, and fur. The end result will be a recommendation about their relative efficiency as a heat source.

Thesis statement based on the information above:

This paper will discuss willow, fir, and oak firewoods to decide which is the best to burn for fuel.
(Note the order; it goes from worst to best)

Write a thesis statement for the following topic.

1) Success is the subject. You will explain what it is by giving standard book meanings, explaining some differences between success and closely related words, and examining some closely associated ideas.

3.4

2010-11-15T10:12:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving Break. Enjoy your time off!Remember to answer 3.3.

3.3

2010-11-15T10:11:00.001-08:00

Changing Past Tense Verbs to Present Tense

- Whenever possible, you should write in the present tense. Read the example below and then rewrite and post the practice passage.

Past Tense
Sherry saw her boyfriend Greg at Lucy's house and her anger flared. She marched over to them, pushed Greg away, and then screamed at him.

Revision with Present Tense

Sherry sees her boyfriend at Lucy's house and her anger flares. She marches over to them, pushes Greg away, and screams at him.

Now you try:
I looked down on Main Street in New York from my hotel room window and noticed it was alive with activity. Horns honked and tires squealed as cars sped down the busy thoroughfare. Street vendors sold hot dogs, and musicians played their songs. Both worked for a meager existence.

3.2

2010-11-08T09:10:00.001-08:00

Active and Passive Voice

The voice of a verb let's the reader know if the subject is doing the action or receiving the action.

When the subject receives the action or is not personally doing the action, the voice is passive. Passive voice is generally wordier.

example- The pizza was eaten by the boys.
Example- The class was dismissed by the teacher.

When the subject performs the action;the voice is active.

example- The boys ate the pizza.
example- The teacher dismissed the class.

When changing the passive voice to active, the object of the preposition becomes the subject.

Active voice makes the writing more interesting.

Passive voice is usually weak and easy to recognize because of the "be" verb.

Post two examples of passive voice and then change them to active.

3.1

2010-10-28T23:08:00.000-07:00

Find 3 of the following literary devices from your readings this week. Cite and label the device used.

LITERARY DEVICES
Use the words from this list to describe an author’s use of literary devices. In the right hand column of your chart, copy the text that supports your claim.
- alliteration: repeated beginning sounds in a series of two or more words (Bravely, the bright bulging beacon flickered.)
- anastrophe/inversion: reversing the natural word order (Into the clouds soared the eagle.)
- hyperbole: extreme exaggeration (He had the weight of the world on his shoulders.)
- irony: using words or ideas that have the opposite effect from what is expected (His worst enemy saved his life.)
- metaphor: to compare two unlike things without using “like” or “as” (Her smile was sunshine.)
- onomatopoeia: a word whose sound echoes its meaning (pop, fizz, buzz)
- oxymoron: two words paired that seem to contradict each other (jumbo shrimp)
- paradox: statements that seem contradictory but are really true
- parallelism: repeated pattern of phrases, but not with the same words (He searched here, he searched there, he searched everywhere.)
- personification: giving human abilities or characteristics to inanimate objects (The desk groaned in agony.)
- repetition: repeated regular pattern of words or phrases (Nevermore, nevermore, nevermore.)
- simile: to compare two unlike things using “like” or “as” (He was like a rock.)
- symbol/allusion: an object, person, situation, or action means more than what it is or refers to something in previous history or literature

examples:

Repetition: In "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe, each stanza ends with "nothing more or nevermore", except for one stanza ends with forevermore".

Symbol: in "The Masque of the Red Death" by Edgar Allan Poe, there are many symbols or allegories. For example, the mummer or the dark figure is referring to the disease that was being spread before 20th century medicine.

Personifiication: "The Masque of the Red Death" talks about the ebony clock having lungs and a face.

2.4

2010-10-22T20:30:00.001-07:00

THEME
To understand the author’s meaning of his/her work (“theme”), start with the literal level. Think about the PLOT (events in the story). Next, move up a notch and determine the subject or TOPIC of the work. Finally, infer the author’s THEME. Remember, your theme must be presented in a complete sentence, not a fragment.
Some examples:
“Love” is a subject. “Love can be painful” is a theme.
“Poverty” is a subject. “Poverty can be overcome” is a theme.
“War” is a subject. “War reflects man’s inhumanity to man” is a theme.

Discuss the theme in a selection from this month's core literatue. Post your response. Do not use the same theme as a classmate who has already posted.

2.3

2010-10-19T18:31:00.000-07:00

Learn About Setting
Setting is the time and place that a short story, poem, or play occurs. You can think of setting as the total environment, or the created world, in which a work of literature happens.
To determine setting, look for word clues that tell where and when the story takes place. For example, look for specific words and phrases that describe the location and scenery of the story -- its time frame -- read for details that show the historical time period, season of year, and time of day. Remember, too, that story settings can change over time.
Setting is crucial because it can affect people and events in a story. Setting can force a character to act or feel in certain ways. For example, you would expect a person who is caught in a terrible snow storm to behave differently than one who is relaxing on a warm, sunny beach.

Skillbuilder
Writers use details to help the reader visualize a setting. Write a brief description of a favorite place and include vivid and specific details.

2.2

2010-10-10T21:23:00.000-07:00

Learning to properly cite the words of others is one of the most important skills you will ever learn. You will use this skill throughout high school, in every college class you take, and in professional writing. Using your literature readings this week, write two proper citations. Please study the examples below in bold.

Basic In-Text Citation Rules
In MLA style, referring to the works of others in your text is done by using what is known as parenthetical citation. This method involves placing relevant source information in parentheses after a quote or a paraphrase.

General Guidelines

•The source information required in a parenthetical citation depends (1.) upon the source medium (e.g. Print, Web, DVD) and (2.) upon the source’s entry on the Works Cited (bibliography) page.
•Any source information that you provide in-text must correspond to the source information on the Works Cited page. More specifically, whatever signal word or phrase you provide to your readers in the text, must be the first thing that appears on the left-hand margin of the corresponding entry in the Works Cited List.
In-Text Citations: Author-Page Style
MLA format follows the author-page method of in-text citation. This means that the author's last name and the page number(s) from which the quotation or paraphrase is taken must appear in the text, and a complete reference should appear on your Works Cited page. The author's name may appear either in the sentence itself or in parentheses following the quotation or paraphrase, but the page number(s) should always appear in the parentheses, not in the text of your sentence. For example:

Wordsworth stated that Romantic poetry was marked by a "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (263).

Romantic poetry is characterized by the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (Wordsworth 263).
Wordsworth extensively explored the role of emotion in the creative process (263).

Both citations in the examples above, (263) and (Wordsworth 263), tell readers that the information in the sentence can be located on page 263 of a work by an author named Wordsworth. If readers want more information about this source, they can turn to the Works Cited page, where, under the name of Wordsworth, they would find the following information:

Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads. London: Oxford U.P., 1967. Print.

In-text Citations for Print Sources with Known Author
For Print sources like books, magazines, scholarly journal articles, and newspapers, provide a signal word or phrase (usually the author’s last name) and a page number. If you provide the signal word/phrase in the sentence, you do not need to include it in the parenthetical citation.

Human beings have been described by Kenneth Burke as "symbol-using animals" (3). Human beings have been described as "symbol-using animals" (Burke 3).
These examples must correspond to an entry that begins with Burke, which will be the first thing that appears on the left-hand margin of an entry in the Works Cited:

Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley: U of California P, 1966. Print.

2.1 Welcome to Discussion Boards

2010-09-17T15:44:00.000-07:00

Comment Guidelines:

Always use correct spelling, grammar, and sentence structure. Comments with more than one or two errors will not be published.

When writing paragraphs for assignments or essays, use the following guidelines.

The paragraph has a topic sentence that tells the reader the main idea or concept of the paragraph. In other words, the topic sentence states what the paragraph is about.
The remaining sentences in the paragraph provide supporting details.
End the paragraph with a concluding or transition sentence.

Your first assignment: Please introduce yourself with a short biography. ( See paragraph guideslines above)

LA #33

2010-05-27T11:21:00.000-07:00

Analogies involve pairs of related words. In many analogy questions you are given two words and are asked to find another pair of words that are related in the same way.
Determine the relationship expressed in the analogy posted by your peers. Each of you must post at least four analogies and answer the four above your posting. The first student to log on to this weeks Discussion Board will “type” my analygies.
I will give you an examples:
Type of Analogy:

Cause to effect Part to whole
Object to purpose Action to object
Item to category Item to characteristic
Word to synonym Word to antonym
Time sequence Spatial sequence
Example:
Your post Next reader's post plus 4 of their own
Virus: disease :: carelessness :error 1 Cause to effect
owl: nocturnal :: lion: carnivorous 2 Item to Characteristic
ceiling: floor :: sky: ground 3. Spatial sequence
dribble : basketball :: push wheelbarrow 4. action to object

Hope you got the hang of it…

1. cold: hot :: arctic : tropic
2. finger : hand :: spoke : wheel
3. infant : child :: adolescent : adult
4. juice : orange :: milk : cow

LA #32

2010-05-27T10:40:00.000-07:00

Finals are right around the corner….Hopefully you have leaned many new literary terms and how they are used in literature. Comment on one literary devise and how you discovered its use in a piece of literature. Some examples could include but are not limited to-tone, author’s purpose, character development, style, metaphor, simile, epic, narrative poetry. Your discussion should include the title of the story and a literary analysis that was included in that piece of literature. Hopefully, each of you will have a different answer which will be a terrific review for all of us.

Example: I enjoyed reading Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt. The piece was a memoir-a form of nonfiction in which a person recalls significant events in his or her life. It is different than an autobiography, in that it describes one aspect of the author’s life.

Recognizing Language #31

2010-05-11T14:14:00.000-07:00

Can you recognize Figurative Language (containing figures of speech such as similes or metaphors to add vividness to a description), Dialect,(language peculiar to a region or group of persons), or Colloquial Speech (conversational, informal language, slang)?

a) figurative b) dialect c) colloquial speech

___1. You want I should do it for you?
___2. In its anger, the crowd roared like a lion.
___3. You sure took off in a hurry.
___4. Jack Frost used diamonds to paint the windows last night.
___5. How come you’re not hungry?
___6, That’s a big 10-20.

On your own… write an example of one of the types of statement, the person that logs on after you will identify your sample and write one of their own. Let’s see if you can follow the directions.

Week 30

2010-04-19T12:18:00.000-07:00

Interpreting Stories: Introduction

Lessons are learned or taught through many stories. Often these stories hold a special place in a culture or family. Bonds are often strengthened through the sharing of these stories. By now; hopefully you recognize the power that stories have in stimulating your feelings, imagination, and sometimes creating the ability to escape our everyday routine. Some literature allows us to see ourselves differently, see the world through another person's eyes, or give us insights into our inner most thoughts. An interpretation is an affirming of the meaning of the story. Reflecting on the theme(s) presented. Your goal will be to convince your peers that your view of the story is interesting and adds to the ongoing dialogue between you.

ASSIGNMENT for DISCUSSION: Choose a story that has fascinated, surprised, or puzzles you. List the titles of one or more of the pieces of literature you have read this year, be it from McDougal Littell text or a the Core Novel for next weeks Discussion board. Consider the introduction above when making your selection. I will choose a story that the majority of you have read and create some discussion questions based on that story for a discussion of your interpretations. You may comment on your classmates choices to help me make a selection.

Week 29

2010-04-13T10:58:00.000-07:00

"Mr. Eliot does not write for the lazy, the studpid, or the gross. Literature is to him a serious affair." E.M.Forster

T. S. Eliot, a poet, he transmuted his affinity for the English metaphysical poets of the 17th century (most notably John Donne) and the 19th century French symbolist poets (including Baudelaire and Laforgue) into radical innovations in poetic technique and subject matter. His poems in many respects articulated the disillusionment of a younger post-World-War-I generation with the values and conventions—both literary and social—of the Victorian era.

"The Hollow Men" contains some of Eliot's most famous lines, most notably its conclusion:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Why do you think these lines might be called Eliot's most famous? Explain your answer.

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." T. S. Eliot
Give your interruptation of this quote, or post one of the many T.S. Eliot quotes and give your reason for choosing.

2010-03-26T16:20:00.000-07:00

Thesis Statements

~ Your thesis statement should be specific—it should cover only what you will discuss in your paper and should be supported with specific evidence.
~ The thesis statement usually appears at the end of the first paragraph of a paper.
~Your topic may change as you write, so you may need to revise your thesis statement to reflect exactly what you have discussed in the paper.
Thesis Statement Examples:

Example of an analytical thesis statement:
An analysis of the college admission process reveals one challenge facing counselors: accepting students with high test scores or students with strong extracurricular backgrounds.
The paper that follows should:
explain the analysis of the college admission process
explain the challenge facing admissions counselors

Example of an expository (explanatory) thesis statement:
The life of the typical college student is characterized by time spent studying, attending class, and socializing with peers.
The paper that follows should:
explain how students spend their time studying, attending class, and socializing

If you are writing a text which does not fall under these three categories (ex. a narrative), a thesis statement somewhere in the first paragraph could still be helpful to your reader.
Your thesis statement should be specific—it should cover only what you will discuss in your paper and should be supported with specific evidence.
The thesis statement usually appears at the end of the first paragraph of a paper.
Your topic may change as you write, so you may need to revise your thesis statement to reflect exactly what you have discussed in the paper.

As seniors you will be invited to participate in the Parkview essay writing competition. The prompt will contain the question that asks "How has the homeschool experience influenced you and your future."

Write a sample thesis statement on this prompt. Fell free to write more than one.

Week 27

2010-03-18T13:27:00.001-07:00

Read the passage below and answer the following questions then post your response. Answers and discussion will appear next week.

TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF RENTAL AGREEMENT
These terms and conditions form a part of the Rental Agreement for the rental of the Vehicle described on the Rental document.
This agreement is between the Renter signing it (“I,” “Me,” or “My”) and Universal Car Agency, Inc. or an independent Universal Car Agency licensee identified on the Rental document (“Company,” “You,” or “Universal”). I, the Renter, agree to all Terms and Conditions of this Agreement, including the Rental and Return Documents.
I understand that I may not rent if I do not satisfy your current standard rental qualifications.
1.
Vehicle — I understand that you own the Vehicle. The Vehicle includes tires, tools, equipment, accessories, keys and Vehicle documents. The Vehicle is delivered to me in good operating condition solely for rental purposes. No one may service or repair the Vehicle without your prior approval. I AGREE THAT YOU MAKE NO EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTY AS TO ANY MATTER WHATSOEVER INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION THE CONDITION OF THE VEHICLE, ITS MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE. COMPANY SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, SPECIAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE RENTAL OF THE VEHICLE TO ME.
2.
Who May Drive the Vehicle — Authorized Drivers and Additional Authorized Drivers.
a.
I represent that I am a validly licensed driver, 25 years of age or older.
b.
The Vehicle shall not be operated by anyone except me, and any Authorized or Additional Authorized Drivers who are validly licensed drivers, 25 years of age or older. In addition,
c.
Authorized Drivers must be: 1) a member of my immediate family who permanently lives with me, or 2) a business partner, employer or regular fellow employee who drives the vehicle for business purposes.
d.
Additional Authorized Drivers must be a person who has signed the Rental document of this Agreement as an Additional Authorized Driver after qualification by the Company.
3.
Vehicle Returns — I agree to return the Vehicle in the same condition in which I received it, except for ordinary wear and tear. I understand that there will be a rate change or additional charge if I return the Vehicle to a different location, or at a different time or due date. If for any reason I cannot return the Vehicle at the time and location required by this Agreement, I will pay for all loss or estimated damages to Vehicle, including loss of use, claim processing fees, and administrative charges, as permitted by law.
4.
Prohibited Uses of the Vehicle — I agree that the Vehicle shall NOT be used by or for any of the following PROHIBITED USES, subject to applicable law:
a.
by an unauthorized driver
b.
by any driver under the influence of intoxicants, drugs, or any other substance known to impair driving ability
c.
for any illegal purpose
d.
by anyone who gives the Company a false name, address, age, or other false or misleading information
e.
in any abusive or reckless manner or if convicted of careless driving
f.
to carry persons or property for hire
g.
in any race, test, contest, or training activity
h.
on unpaved roads
i.
leaving the Vehicle and failing to remove the keys and the Vehicle is stolen
j.
for any use in a foreign country without the prior written permission of the renting location. All protection is void in a foreign country. Your written permission must be obtained and special insurance must be purchased before entering a foreign country.
I UNDERSTAND THAT IF THE VEHICLE IS OBTAINED OR USED FOR ANY PROHIBITED USE OR IN VIOLATION OF THIS AGREEMENT, THEN ANY LIMITATION OF MY RESPONSIBILITY UNDER THIS AGREEMENT SHALL BE VOID AND I SHALL BE FULLY RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL LOSS AND RESULTING DAMAGES, INCLUDING LOSS OF USE, CLAIMS, PROCESSING FEES, ADMINISTRATIVE CHARGES, COSTS, AND ATTORNEYS’ FEES, ALSO, WHERE PERMITTED BY LAW. THE LOW OPTION SHALL BE VOID AND THE LIABILITY INSURANCE SHALL BE VOID.

Complete the following statements:

1) The reference to and definition of “Authorized
Drivers” show that the rental company
demands to

2 The car rental agreement is divided into four
separate parts to

Select the best answer:

3. Writing certain parts of the agreement in all
capital letters suggests that
A certain parts are more difficult to read and thus are made in large print.
B these parts require special attention from the signer of the agreement.
C renters should not worry about other sections of the agreement.
D this section is often overlooked by renters who just want to get going.

4. Where may the rental car not be driven?

Week 26

2010-03-12T10:55:00.001-08:00

Learn About Rhyme and Stanza Form
Rhyme is the repetition of similar sounds, usually at the end of lines. It appeals to the senses by providing a pleasing pattern of sounds that you begin to expect. The sounds echo in your mind. They affect the mood of the poem, suggesting joy, sadness, or other emotions. Rhyme can make you feel exalted or dejected, depending on the words and the sounds of the words. Humor can be conveyed through rhyme by using surprising, impossible-sounding rhymes. When rhymes are fresh and unique, they can make you see things in new and different ways.
Rhyme is used to determine stanza form. Each stanza or verse has its own rhyming pattern. Thus, rhyme ties together the lines in a stanza.

Skill Builder
Choose a poem you have read this month. Which lines rhyme in each stanza? What kind of effect does the rhyme have on you? Does the rhyme add or detract from the message of the poem?

Week 25

2010-03-05T09:06:00.001-08:00

Please attend the WASC Committee Student Meeting from 1:00-2:00 Monday. You may post a feedback comment.

Week 24

2010-02-28T21:45:00.001-08:00

Using your reading from this week, find one example of one of the terms used below. Copy the example and label it in your comment. Do not use my examples.

Terms used in Rhetoric-Part 1

Anacoluthon: lack of grammatical sequence; a change in the grammatical construction within the same sentence.
*Agreements entered into when one state of facts exists -- are they to be maintained regardless of changing conditions? J. Diefenbaker
Anadiplosis: ("doubling back") the rhetorical repetition of one or several words; specifically, repetition of a word that ends one clause at the beginning of the next.
*Men in great place are thrice servants: servants of the sovereign or state; servants of fame; and servants of business. Francis Bacon
*Senatus haec intellegit, consul videt; hic tamen vivit. Vivit? Immo vero etiam in senatum venit. Cicero, In Catilinam
*Aeschines 3.133
Anaphora: the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses or lines.
*We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender. Churchill.

Anastrophe: transposition of normal word order; most often found in Latin in the case of prepositions and the words they control. Anastrophe is a form of hyperbaton.
*The helmsman steered; the ship moved on; yet never a breeze up blew. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Antistrophe: repetition of the same word or phrase at the end of successive clauses.
*In 1931, ten years ago, Japan invaded Manchukuo -- without warning. In 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia -- without warning. In 1938, Hitler occupied Austria -- without warning. In 1939, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia -- without warning. Later in 1939, Hitler invaded Poland -- without warning. And now Japan has attacked Malaya and Thailand -- and the United States --without warning. Franklin D. Roosevelt

Antithesis: opposition, or contrast of ideas or words in a balanced or parallel construction.
*Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. Barry Goldwater
*Brutus: Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
*The vases of the classical period are but the reflection of classical beauty; the vases of the archaic period are beauty itself." Sir John Beazley

Aporia: expression of doubt (often feigned) by which a speaker appears uncertain as to what he should think, say, or do.
*Then the steward said within himself, 'What shall I do?' Luke 16

Apostrophe: a sudden turn from the general audience to address a specific group or person or personified abstraction absent or present.
*For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar's angel.
Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar loved him. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Archaism: use of an older or obsolete form.
*Pipit sate upright in her chair
Some distance from where I was sitting; T. S. Eliot, "A Cooking Egg"

Asyndeton: lack of conjunctions between coordinate phrases, clauses, or words.
*We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardships, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. J. F. Kennedy, Inaugural
*But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. Lincoln, Gettysburg Address

Week 23

2010-02-19T11:08:00.000-08:00

This is a short week and so I have a special assignment for you.
1. Go to the Parkview Website at www.parkviewpylusd.org
2.Click on Forms
3. Select WASC
4. Read Chapters 4 and 5
5. Comment back on 3 things that you think are particular strengths of our program.

Week 22

2010-02-16T08:45:00.001-08:00

Poets use segments--vowel sounds and consonant sounds--in pattern: to link sounds with meanings or ideas. In descriptive poetry, segments may even combine with rhythm to imitate something being described. The most common ways poets use sound segments are alliteration, onomatopoeia, and assonance.

The repetition of the initial sound of words; for example, great grow the grizzlies. This technique is called alliteration, and its usage is standard in poetry. Also a word, when pronounced, can sound like the sound it is describing; for example, the splashing water. This technique is called onomatopoeia, and it, too, is a poetic standard. When a poet repeats a vowel sound in a line of poetry, he or she is using assonance. "Tis hard to say if greater want of skill."

Skill Builder
Use alliteration or assonance in a sentence describing something you have done recently. Write a follow-up sentence using onomatopoeia.

Week 21

2010-02-03T21:20:00.001-08:00

Let try the exercise from week 18 again. Please review the notes from week 18 and see
the model student response below.

From the Crucible by Arthur Miller:

Diction is:
Emotional, as in the following line said by Parris "Out of here!"

Syntax is:
Occasional fragments and short blips to add tension or impact as in the following line said by Mary Warren"I--I believe I did sir, I--"

Tone is:
serious, solemn, elegiac, lugubrious, as in the following line said by Hale "I believe him! This girl has always struck me as false! She has--"

Two Literary Devices:
repetition: repeated regular pattern of words or phrases such as in the following line by Abigail "I saw Goody Hawkins with the Devil", and the next line by Betty " I saw Goody Bibber with the Devil", and the next by Abigail again "I saw Goody Booth with the Devil".
Another example is:
hyperbole: extreme exaggeration, as in the following line said by Proctor "...I will bring your guts into your mouth but that goodness will never die for me".

Week 20

2010-01-28T16:05:00.001-08:00

As we start this new semester it is time to reflect and take another look at our schoolwide learning goals, aka ESLRs, and make some goals.
Please review our goals and think of how you can meet those goals this semester. Remember to leave a comment.

EXPECTED SCHOOL WIDE LEARNING RESULTS (ESLR’s)
Panther’s set the P.A.C.E.
Panthers are…..
1. Partners in Education who:
• Team with parents and teachers in order to reach their full
potential
• Achieve through a personalized learning program
2. Academic Achievers who:
• Self evaluate and reflect as life long learners
• Utilize technological skills to master content and efficiently
produce and publish assignments
• Collect, organize, interpret, analyze, and supply information to
make decisions and solve problems
3. Compliant with State and District Standards
• Complete assignments based on best practices
• Demonstrate mastery of grade level skills and concepts
4. Effective Communicators who:
• Organize, analyze, evaluate and deliver presentations
• Write and speak with a command of Standard English
conventions appropriate to their grade level

Week 19 1/25

2010-01-13T09:20:00.000-08:00

Midterms are this Monday 1/25 from 10:00- 12:00 and 1:00-3:00. Please contact your teacher with any questions. You may bring one page of notes, front and back, for each midterm you are taking.

Week 18

2010-01-11T20:34:00.001-08:00

Review the information below and then copy and paste the literary analysis form at the bottom onto your comment. Use your readings from this week to complete your response.

Guide to The Style Analysis Chart

I. THEME
To understand the author’s meaning of his/her work (“theme”), start with the literal level. Think about the PLOT (events in the story). Next, move up a notch and determine the subject or TOPIC of the work. Finally, infer the author’s THEME. Remember, your theme must be presented in a complete sentence, not a fragment.
Some examples:
“Love” is a subject. “Love can be painful” is a theme.
“Poverty” is a subject. “Poverty can be overcome” is a theme.
“War” is a subject. “War reflects man’s inhumanity to man” is a theme.

II. DICTION
Use the words from this list to describe an author’s choice of words (“diction”). In the right hand column of your chart, copy samples of text that support your claim.
- abstract
- bombastic
- colloquial, conversational
- cultured, polished
- emotional
- fiery
- generalized
- old-fashioned
- ordinary, plain
- pedantic, “preachy”
- poetic
- precise, specific
- pretentious
- scholarly
- slangy
- technical (uses jargon)

III. SYNTAX
Use the words from this list to describe an author’s sentence arrangement (“syntax”). Remember, syntax can affect a story’s pace, rhythm, suspense, tone, and theme. In the right hand column of your chart, describe the effect that syntax has on the reader.
- anastrophe/inversion formal tone to create a poetic effect
- balanced sentences using similar sentence lengths, structures
- exciting punctuation dashes, parentheses, italics, ellipses, all caps
- long, elegant lots of compound, complex sentences
- occasional fragments short blips to add tension or impact
- parallel arranging similar parts to give emphasis
- repetition using word(s) more than once for emphasis
- rhetorical questions asking questions not for an answer
- telegraphic brief, concise, tight

IV. TONE
Use the words below to describe the way a writer conveys attitude (“tone”). Notice that they are grouped to give different degrees of each. In the right hand column of your chart, tell how tone is expressed (through diction, syntax, imagery, punctuation) with copied text to support your claim.
- affectionate, nostalgic
- approving, admiring, worshipping
- candid, direct, incisive, informative
- complicated, pedantic, didactic
- disliking, patronizing, contemptuous, abhorring
- easy, friendly, comic, jovial
- flippant, cynical, sardonic, sarcastic, irreverent
- formal, elevated, grand, lofty
- insolent, antagonistic, hostile, inflammatory
- interested, benevolent, sympathetic, passionate
- objective, indifferent, apathetic
- serious, solemn, elegiac, lugubrious
- subdued, indirect, understated, evasive
- vibrant, dramatic, urgent, forceful
- whimsical, fanciful, effusive
- wistful, regretful, resigned, bitter, grim
V. LITERARY DEVICES
Use the words from this list to describe an author’s use of literary devices. In the right hand column of your chart, copy the text that supports your claim.
- alliteration: repeated beginning sounds in a series of two or more words (Bravely, the bright bulging beacon flickered.)
- anastrophe/inversion: reversing the natural word order (Into the clouds soared the eagle.)
- hyperbole: extreme exaggeration (He had the weight of the world on his shoulders.)
- irony: using words or ideas that have the opposite effect from what is expected (His worst enemy saved his life.)
- metaphor: to compare two unlike things without using “like” or “as” (Her smile was sunshine.)
- onomatopoeia: a word whose sound echoes its meaning (pop, fizz, buzz)
- oxymoron: two words paired that seem to contradict each other (jumbo shrimp)
- paradox: statements that seem contradictory but are really true
- parallelism: repeated pattern of phrases, but not with the same words (He searched here, he searched there, he searched everywhere.)
- personification: giving human abilities or characteristics to inanimate objects (The desk groaned in agony.)
- repetition: repeated regular pattern of words or phrases (Nevermore, nevermore, nevermore.)
- simile: to compare two unlike things using “like” or “as” (He was like a rock.)
- symbol/allusion: an object, person, situation, or action means more than what it is or refers to something in previous history or literature

Literary Response Form:

STYLE ELEMENT TEXT / REMARK

Diction is… (Copy text.)
________________
Syntax is… (Copy text.)
________________
Tone is… (How do you know?)
________________
Two Literary Devices: (Copy text.)
________________
________________
Other: __________ (Copy text.)

Week 17

2010-01-08T12:37:00.000-08:00

A bit about poetry:

Foot- he basic unit on measurement of a line of metrical poetry. Except for spondee, a foot has one stressed syllable(/) and one or more unstressed syllables (ˇ). There are five basic descriptions of metrical feet:

Iambic- ˇ/ (unstressed, stressed)
Trochaic- / ˇ ( stressed, unstressed)
Anapestic- ˇˇ/ ( unstressed, unstressed, stressed)
Dactylic- /ˇˇ ( stressed, unstressed, unstressed)
Spndaic- // (stressed, stressed)

Additionally, there are names for the line lengths.
One foot- Momometer
Two feet- Dimeter
Three feet- Trimeter
Four feet- Tetrameter
Five feet- Pentameter
Six feet- Haxameter
Seven feet- Septameter
Eight feet- Octameter

Simple example
An iambic foot is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The rhythm can be written as:

da DUM

A line of iambic pentameter is five iambic feet in a row:

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM

It's possible to notate this with a '˘'(Breve) mark representing an unstressed syllable and a '/'(Forward Slash) mark representing a stressed syllable[1]. In this notation a line of iambic pentameter would look like this:

˘ / ˘ / ˘ / ˘ / ˘ /

The following line from John Keats' Ode to Autumn is a straightforward example:

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

Please find and post one example of iambic pentameter.

Week 16

2010-01-04T14:30:00.000-08:00

As you read you should develop the habit of analyzing characters, identifying the time, and point of view. Select a passage from a recent readings and analyze one character and then discuss the time and point of view.

Week 15

2009-12-13T16:42:00.000-08:00

Take this week to catch up on your studies so that you can enjoy your two week break!

Week 14

2009-12-03T07:03:00.001-08:00

This week please analyze the characteristics of subgenres (e.g., satire, parody, allegory, pastoral) that are used in poetry, prose, plays, novels, short stories, essays, and other basic genres found in your assigned reading. Identify, define, and cite an example from your readings.

Week 13

2009-11-17T19:29:00.000-08:00

Complex- Compound Sentences

Let's try again on this one. Many of you missed the part about multiple independent clauses.

Complex-Compound Sentence: A sentence with multiple independent clauses and at least one dependent clause.

*
With her reputation on the line, Peggy played against a fierce opponent at the Scrabble competition, and overcoming nerve-racking competition, she won the game with one well-placed word.

While Toms reads comics, Jack reads novels, but Sam reads only magazines.

Tom reads comics, but Jack reads magazines because books are too difficult.

Week 12

2009-11-17T19:23:00.001-08:00

We are one third of the way through the school year. Now is a good time to reflect on what you have been learning and how it relates to our school's learning goals. Below you will find our school-wide learning goals. Choose two and connect them to your learning for this subject area. Comment on one classmate's comment.

Panthers are…..
1. Partners in Education who:
• Team with parents and teachers in order to reach their full
potential
• Achieve through a personalized learning program
2. Academic Achievers who:
• Self evaluate and reflect as life long learners
• Utilize technological skills to master content and efficiently
produce and publish assignments
• Collect, organize, interpret, analyze, and supply information to
make decisions and solve problems
3. Compliant with State and District Standards
• Complete assignments based on best practices
• Demonstrate mastery of grade level skills and concepts
4. Effective Communicators who:
• Organize, analyze, evaluate and deliver presentations
• Write and speak with a command of Standard English
conventions appropriate to their grade level

Week 11

2009-11-13T19:12:00.000-08:00

Week 10

2009-11-07T10:23:00.001-08:00

Good job last week on the embedded quotes. Please remember to place the period at the end of the parentheses.
Armstrong became "an international star famed for his gravel-voiced singing and broad comedy effects as well as his playing" (Harrison 288).

This week we are reviewing sentence types. Please review the information below and then write one of each type.

Sentence Types

Structurally, English sentences can be classified four different ways, though there are endless constructions of each. The classifications are based on the number of independent and dependent clauses a sentence contains. An independent clause forms a complete sentence on its own, while a dependent clause needs another clause to make a complete sentence. By learning these types, writers can add complexity and variation to their sentences.
Simple sentence: A sentence with one independent clause and no dependent clauses.

*
My aunt enjoyed taking the hayride with you.
*
China's Han Dynasty marked an official recognition of Confucianism.

Compound Sentence: A sentence with multiple independent clauses but no dependent clauses.

*
The clown frightened the little girl, and she ran off screaming.
*
The Freedom Riders departed on May 4, 1961, and they were determined to travel through many southern states.

Complex Sentence: A sentence with one independent clause and at least one dependent clause.

*
After Mary added up all the sales, she discovered that the lemonade stand was 32 cents short.

While all of his paintings are fascinating, Hieronymus Bosch's triptychs, full of mayhem and madness, are the real highlight of his art.

Complex-Compound Sentence: A sentence with multiple independent clauses and at least one dependent clause.

*
With her reputation on the line, Peggy played against a fierce opponent at the Scrabble competition, and overcoming nerve-racking competition, she won the game with one well-placed word.
*
Catch-22 is widely regarded as Joseph Heller's best novel, and because Heller served in World War II, which the novel satirizes, the zany but savage wit of the novel packs an extra punch.

Week 9- Embedded Quotes

2009-10-25T23:57:00.000-07:00

Whenever you use the words or ideas of another writer, you must give credit to that writer.Please study the examples below and then post one embedded quote and one paraphrase. This may be the most important skill you learn this year.

MLA Citations Within Essays
Embedded Quotes:
Armstrong became "an international star famed for his gravel-voiced singing and broad comedy effects as well as his playing" (Harrison 288).
In the late Renaissance, Machiavelli contended that human beings were by nature "ungrateful" and "mutable" (1240), and Montaigne thought them "miserable" and "puny" (1343).
Paraphrase:
For ten years in London, Franklin acted as an agent for several of the American colonies. During this time, he wrote letters and articles that were printed in British newspapers, explaining the position of the American people as they sought to avoid the taxes being imposed on them (Fleming 196).
Embedded Quote – No Author:
Armstrong became "an international star famed for his gravel-voiced singing and broad comedy effects as well as his playing" (Vogue 288).
Embedded Quote – Author’s Name in Text:
Ronald Banks called him the “greatest trumpet player ever” (331).

Week 8

2009-10-17T08:24:00.001-07:00

SYMBOLISM
A person, place or object which has a meaning in itself but suggests other meanings as well. Things, characters and actions can be symbols. Anything that suggests a meaning beyond the obvious.
Some symbols are conventional, generally meaning the same thing to all readers.
For example: bright sunshine symbolizes goodness and water is a symbolic cleanser.

Find 3 examples of symbolism in your readings this weeks.

Week 7- Irony Search

2009-10-17T08:16:00.000-07:00

IRONY

Irony is the contrast between what is expected or what appears to be and what actually is.
Verbal Irony
The contrast between what is said and what is actually meant.

Irony of Situation
This refers to a happening that is the opposite of what is expected or intended.

Dramatic Irony
This occurs when the audience or reader knows more than the characters know.

Find 3 examples of irony in your recent readings and post in the comments section.

Summary Statements- Week 6

2009-10-10T06:52:00.000-07:00

After looking at your posts last week, I would like to work backwards. This week I would like you to fine tune your summary statements. Choose three recent readings from our textbook and write a summary statement for EACH one.

example:
Summary Statement:

* Name the title, author and genre
* •Think-Who or what is the writing mostly about?
* •What the subject does or is
* Example: In the poem Fiddle Jones by Edgar Lee Masters, Fiddler Jones speaks from his grave to talk about how he lived his life.

Week 5

2009-10-01T22:05:00.000-07:00

In reviewing your essay writing this month, I have found one common area that needs to be improved- your introductory paragraphs. This week you will write an introductory paragraph using the following guidelines on any topic you choose.

Your introductory paragraphs should have the following:
1) Summary Statement
2) Plan sentence or sentences
3) Thesis statement.

Summary Statement:

Name the title, author and genre
•Think who or what is the writing mostly about?
•What the subject does or is
Example: In the poem Fiddle Jones by Edgar Lee Masters, Fiddler Jones speaks from his grave to talk about how he lived his life.

A plan sentence focuses your ideas and organizes your essay.

Think of three points or categories
Example: Because Fiddler Jones had the soul of an artist and a talent that he freely shared, he died without “a single regret.”

• A plan sentence focuses your ideas and organizes your essay.

The Thesis Statement:

• Identify the subject

• State what will be discussed, explained, or proved

• Finish the thought- must invite discussion

• What question are you trying to answer with your thesis?

• Example: Fiddler Jones’ unique approach to life teaches us that if we are true to ourselves, we will live a life without regret. Question: What does Fiddler Jones’ approach to life teach us?

• Example: Because Fiddler Jones had a unique approach to life, the theme of the poem is that if we are true to ourselves, we will live a life without regret.

• Example: We can choose to live our lives as others expect us to do, or we can heed the theme of “Fiddler Jones” and be true to ourselves.

Putting it all together;

• In the poem, “Fiddler Jones” by Edgar Lee Masters, the title character speaks from his grave to describe a life lived with joy. As he had the soul of an artist and a talent that he freely shared, he died without “a single regret.” Fiddler Jones’ unique approach to life teaches us that if we are true to ourselves, we will live a life without regret

Week 4

2009-09-22T20:53:00.001-07:00

Take this week to reflect on what you have learned this month. Has anything influenced you strongly? What topics or subjects would you like to see on this discussion board?

Week 3

2009-09-18T18:07:00.000-07:00

The Art of Rhetoric:

Learning How to Use the Three Main Rhetorical Styles

Rhetoric (n) - the art of speaking or writing effectively. (Webster's Definition)

According to Aristotle, rhetoric is "the ability, in each particular case, to see the available means of persuasion." He described three main forms of rhetoric: Ethos, Logos, and Pathos.

Go to : http://www.rpi.edu/dept/llc/webclass/web/project1/group4/index.html

In order to be a more effective writer, you must understand these three terms.

Ethos

Ethos is appeal based on the character of the speaker. An ethos-driven document relies on the reputation of the author.

Logos

Logos is appeal based on logic or reason. Documents distributed by companies or corporations are logos-driven. Scholarly documents are also often logos-driven.

Pathos

Pathos is appeal based on emotion. Advertisements tend to be pathos-driven.

Rhetorical appeals can be achieved through:

Visual Information Structure; this includes how the text looks on the screen. This is achieved through the appearance of such things as the titles and the headings.

Color; this includes the color of the text, the background, and the graphics. The contrast of the colors of each of these items is also important.

Graphic Images; this includes the other information in the document aside from the text. This is achieved through such things as icons, buttons, and photos.

See the Webster's Dictionary definitions of these three terms: Ethos, Logos, Pathos.

Explain the concepts of ethos, pathos and logos in your own words. Cite 3 examples from your readings this week.

Week 1 9/8/09

2009-08-26T23:02:00.001-07:00

Learning goal: Students will be able to identify key points of the article and determine the writer’s purpose through the use of the statements. Students will analyze how the writer’s statements and the writer’s purpose work together to get the reader to feel, think, or believe something.
1. Read the following article and then answer the following:
What is the writer SAYING?
Use quotes that tie into the main idea.
example-
¶6 “…businesses are openly seeking workers who are sexy, sleek, or simply good-looking.”
What is the quote SAYING?
Paraphrase the quote in your own words.
example-
Some companies are only hiring attractive, thin people and they aren’t trying to hide this fact.
What is the purpose of what the writer is SAYING? What is he DOING?
(persuading, arguing, stating, reporting, listing, supporting, informing, questioning, explaining, etc.)
The writer is…
example-
The writer is reporting the facts of what many businesses are doing nowadays.

Going for the Look, but Risking Discrimination
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: Sunday, July 13, 2003
A funny thing happens when Elizabeth Nill, a sophomore at Northwestern University, goes shopping at Abercrombie & Fitch.
At no fewer than three Abercrombie stores, she says, managers have approached her and offered her a job as a clerk.
''Every time this happens, my little sister says, 'Not again,' '' said Ms. Nill, who is 5-foot-6 and has long blond hair. She looks striking. She looks hip. She looks, in fact, as if she belongs in an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog.
Is this a coincidence? A fluke? No, says Antonio Serrano, a former assistant Abercrombie store manager in Scranton, Pa. It's policy.
''If someone came in with a pretty face, we were told to approach them and ask them if they wanted a job,'' Mr. Serrano said. ''They thought if we had the best-looking college kids working in our store, everyone will want to shop there.''
Abercrombie's aggressive approach to building a pretty and handsome sales force, an effort that company officials proudly acknowledge, is a leading example of what many industry experts and sociologists describe as a steadily growing trend in American retailing. From Abercrombie to the cosmetics giant L'Oréal, from the sleek W hotel chain to the Gap, businesses are openly seeking workers who are sexy, sleek or simply good-looking.
Hiring for looks is old news in some industries, as cocktail waitresses, strippers and previous generations of flight attendants know all too well. But many companies have taken that approach to sophisticated new heights in recent years, hiring workers to project an image.
In doing so, some of those companies have been skirting the edges of antidiscrimination laws and provoking a wave of private and government lawsuits. Hiring attractive people is not necessarily illegal, but discriminating on the basis of age, sex or ethnicity is. That is where things can get confusing and contentious.
''If you're hiring by looks, then you can run into problems of race discrimination, national origin discrimination, gender discrimination, age discrimination and even disability discrimination,'' said Olophius Perry, director of the Los Angeles office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which has accused several companies of practicing race and age discrimination by favoring good-looking young white people in their hiring.
Some chains, most notably the Gap and Benetton, pride themselves on hiring attractive people from many backgrounds and races. Abercrombie's ''classic American'' look, pervasive in its stores and catalogs and on its Web site, is blond, blue-eyed and preppy. Abercrombie finds such workers and models by concentrating its hiring on certain colleges, fraternities and sororities.
The company says it does not discriminate. But in a lawsuit filed last month in Federal District Court in San Francisco, some Hispanic, Asian and black job applicants maintained otherwise. Several plaintiffs said in interviews that when they applied for jobs, store managers steered them to the stockroom, not to the sales floor.
In interviews, managers like Mr. Serrano described a recruiting approach used by Abercrombie, which has become one of the most popular retailers among the nation's youth.
''We were supposed to approach someone in the mall who we think will look attractive in our store,'' said Mr. Serrano, who said he quit when told he would be promoted only if he accepted a transfer. ''If that person said, 'I never worked in retailing before,' we said: 'Who cares? We'll hire you.' But if someone came in who had lots of retail experience and not a pretty face, we were told not to hire them at all.''
Tom Lennox, Abercrombie's communications director, emphatically denied job bias but acknowledged that the company liked hiring sales assistants, known as brand representatives, who ''look great.''
''Brand representatives are ambassadors to the brand,'' Mr. Lennox said. ''We want to hire brand representatives that will represent the Abercrombie & Fitch brand with natural classic American style, look great while exhibiting individuality, project the brand and themselves with energy and enthusiasm, and make the store a warm, inviting place that provides a social experience for the customer.''
Retailers defend that approach to hiring as necessary and smart, and industry experts see their point.
''In today's competitive retail environment, the methods have changed for capturing the consumers' awareness of your brand,'' said Marshal Cohen, a senior industry analyst with the NPD Group, a market research firm. ''Being able to find a brand enhancer, or what I call a walking billboard, is critical. It's really important to create an environment that's enticing to the community, particularly with the younger, fashionable market. A guy wants to go hang out in a store where he can see good-looking gals.''
While hiring by looks has a long history, some sociologists and retail consultants agree that the emphasis has increased -- not at Wal-Mart and other mass marketers, but at upscale businesses.
The federal government has accused some of those businesses of going too far. The hotel entrepreneur Ian Schrager agreed to a $1.08 million settlement three years ago after the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission accused his Mondrian Hotel in West Hollywood of racial discrimination for firing nine valets and bellhops, eight of them nonwhite. Documents filed in court showed that Mr. Schrager had written memos saying that he wanted a trendier group of workers and that the fired employees were ''too ethnic.''
Last month the commission reached a $5,000 settlement with 36th Street Food and Drink, a restaurant in St. Joseph, Mo., after accusing it of age discrimination against a 47-year-old waitress. The waitress, Michele Cornell, had worked at the restaurant for 23 years, but when it reopened after renovations, it refused to rehire her because, the commission said, she no longer fit the young, trendy look it had adopted.
''The problem with all this image stuff is it just reeks of marketing for this white-bread, Northern European, thin, wealthy, fashion-model look,'' said Donna Harper, supervisory attorney in the commission's St. Louis office. ''We all can't be Anglo, athletic and young.''
Ms. Harper said an employer who insisted on hiring only athletic-looking people could be viewed as discriminating against a person in a wheelchair. Employers who insisted on hiring only strapping, tall people might be found guilty of discriminating against Mexican-Americans or Asian-Americans, who tend to be shorter, she added.
Stephen J. Roppolo, a New Orleans lawyer who represents many hotels and restaurants, said: ''Hiring someone who is attractive isn't illegal per se. But people's views on what's attractive may be influenced by their race, their religion, their age. If I think Caucasian people are more attractive than African-American people, then I may inadvertently discriminate in an impermissible way. I tell employers that their main focus needs to be hiring somebody who can get the job done. When they want to hire to project a certain image, that's where things can get screwy.''
Image seemed very much in evidence the other evening at the Abercrombie & Fitch store in Water Tower Place, one of Chicago's most upscale malls. Working there were a 6-foot-2 sales clerk with muscles rippling under his Abercrombie T-shirt and a young long-haired blond clerk, her navel showing, who could have been a fashion model.
''If you see an attractive person working in the store wearing Abercrombie clothes, it makes you want to wear it, too,'' said Matthew Sheehey, a high school senior from Orland Park, a Chicago suburb.
Elysa Yanowitz says that when she was a West Coast sales manager for L'Oréal, she felt intense pressure to hire attractive saleswomen, even if they were incompetent. In fact, she says, company officials sought to force her out after she ignored an order to fire a woman a top manager described as not ''hot'' enough.
''It was pretty well understood that they had to have magazine-look quality,'' she said of the sales force. ''Everyone is supposed to look like a 110-pound model.''
L'Oréal officials did not respond to a request for comment.
Melissa Milkie, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland who has written about perceptions of beauty, said: ''Good-looking people are treated better by others. Maybe companies have noticed that hiring them impacts their bottom line. Whether that's morally proper is a different question.''
Photos: The Gap and Benetton are among the retailers known for hiring attractive people from many backgrounds and races, as both models and clerks.; Elizabeth Nill says she has been offered jobs at three Abercrombie & Fitch stores in the Chicago area, apparently because of the way she looks. (Stephen Rose for The New York Times)

Finals

2009-05-07T07:31:00.001-07:00

Finals will be held June 1st from 10:00-3:00 with an hour lunch from 12-1:00. Please be sure all discussion board assignments for this semester have been completed by June 1st. No new posting will be made as STAR Testing and finals will satisfy your interaction requirements.

Conflict 3/23/09

2009-03-19T22:31:00.001-07:00

Conflict is the essence of fiction. It creates plot. The conflicts we encounter can usually be identified as one of four kinds.

Man versus Man
Conflict that pits one person against another.

Man versus Nature
A run-in with the forces of nature. On the one hand, it expresses the insignificance of a single human life in the cosmic scheme of things. On the other hand, it tests the limits of a person’s strength and will to live.

Man versus Society
The values and customs by which everyone else lives are being challenged. The character may come to an untimely end as a result of his or her own convictions. The character may, on the other hand, bring others around to a sympathetic point of view, or it may be decided that society was right after all.

Man versus Self
Internal conflict. Not all conflict involves other people. Sometimes people are their own worst enemies. An internal conflict is a good test of a character’s values. Does he give in to temptation or rise above it? Does he demand the most from himself or settle for something less? Does he even bother to struggle? The internal conflicts of a character and how they are resolved are good clues to the character’s inner strength.

Often, more than one kind of conflict is taking place at the same time. In every case, however, the existence of conflict enhances the reader’s understanding of a character and creates the suspense and interest that make you want to continue reading.

Cite an example of conflict from your current readings. by completing the following:

1) State the name of the work of fiction

2) Describe the situation in which conflict taking place

3) Label the type of conflict that is occurring.

Example

1) Into the Wild

2) Chris McCandless goes into the Alaskan wilderness with the goal of surviving off the land; however, his struggle to survive ends tragically.
3) man vs. nature
* note- several other forms of conflict also occur in this novel

Week of 3/16/09 Point of View

2009-03-13T09:30:00.000-07:00

Use your text or current readings to cite 2 examples of point of view. Also, identify which point of view it is. Remember that participation count for 10% of your grade.

POINT OF VIEW

First Person
The narrator is a character in the story who can reveal only personal thoughts and feelings and what he or she sees and is told by other characters. He can’t tell us thoughts of other characters.

Third-Person Objective
The narrator is an outsider who can report only what he or she sees and hears. This narrator can tell us what is happening, but he can’t tell us the thoughts of the characters.

Third-Person Limited
The narrator is an outsider who sees into the mind of one of the characters.

Omniscient
The narrator is an all-knowing outsider who can enter the minds of more than one of the characters.

Tone 3/9/09

2009-03-05T22:17:00.001-08:00

Assignment for the week of 3/9/09

The words below to describe the way a writer conveys attitude (“tone”). Notice that they are grouped to give different degrees of each. Using your current assigned reading, show how tone is expressed with copied text to support your claim. You will practice this activity four days this week, each time citing a different example. Read and comment on your classmates' postings for extra credit.
- affectionate, nostalgic
- approving, admiring, worshipping
- candid, direct, incisive, informative
- complicated, pedantic, didactic
- disliking, patronizing, contemptuous, abhorring
- easy, friendly, comic, jovial
- flippant, cynical, sardonic, sarcastic, irreverent
- formal, elevated, grand, lofty
- insolent, antagonistic, hostile, inflammatory
- interested, benevolent, sympathetic, passionate
- objective, indifferent, apathetic
- serious, solemn, elegiac, lugubrious
- subdued, indirect, understated, evasive
- vibrant, dramatic, urgent, forceful
- whimsical, fanciful, effusive
- wistful, regretful, resigned, bitter, grim

Learn About Imagery

2009-03-02T12:52:00.000-08:00

Poems are often filled with images, and stories frequently use images to contribute to character, setting, and theme. Imagery refers to the way an author uses words that appeal to any or all of the five senses. Images help you hear, see, touch, taste, and smell whatever is being described. They stir the imagination. In "The Interlopers," Saki writes "the whistling and skirling of the wind" and creates an auditory or sound image. The writing becomes more vivid in every way and, therefore, more enjoyable.

Imagery can make writing come alive. You can find images by looking for words that describe sounds and sights, or things you can taste, touch or smell.

Skill Builder
Writers use vivid words and phrases to create images. Write a brief description in which you use a sight and sound image.

Learn About Imagery

2009-03-02T12:42:00.000-08:00

Poems are often filled with images, and stories frequently use images to contribute to character, setting, and theme. Imagery refers to the way an author uses words that appeal to any or all of the five senses. Images help you hear, see, touch, taste, and smell whatever is being described. They stir the imagination. In "The Interlopers," Saki writes "the whistling and skirling of the wind" and creates an auditory or sound image. The writing becomes more vivid in every way and, therefore, more enjoyable.

Imagery can make writing come alive. You can find images by looking for words that describe sounds and sights, or things you can taste, touch or smell.

Skill Builder
Writers use vivid words and phrases to create images. Write a brief description in which you use a sight and sound image.

Learn About Foreshadowing

2009-02-24T11:15:00.001-08:00

Foreshadowing is the providing of hints or clues about what might happen later in a story. Foreshadowing encourages you to make predictions about what will happen in the story. The predictions either may or may not come true. Even if a story ends in a way that surprises you, if you read it again, you will often find that the author did provide hints about the way things would turn out.

Foreshadowing gets you more involved in a story because you are actively making predictions. Foreshadowing adds to the suspense because it makes you aware of what might happen.

Skill Builder
Think of something unexpected that happened to you or another person. If you were writing a story about it, how would you use foreshadowing: Write all the clues that could prepare your readers for what was going to happen.

Learn About Third-Person Point of View

2009-02-13T14:20:00.001-08:00

Every story or poem has a point of view--a position from which the work is told. The most common point of view in short stories is the third person. In the third-person point of view, the narrator is not a character in the story. When the narrator can tell the innermost feelings and thoughts of only one character, this is called the third-person limited point of view. When the narrator's knowledge is not limited to one character, but instead can enter the minds of different characters at different times, the story is told from the third-person omniscient point of view. Learn to recognize the poing of view when you read in order to better understand the author's purpose.

Skill Builder
Write two sentences describing a family member or friend in the third-person limited point of view. Include an inner thought or feeling of this person.

Learn About Point of View - First Person

2009-01-27T10:01:00.001-08:00

When everything that happened is told from one character's point of view, the story, the play, poem or essay is written in the first-person point of view. Sometimes the narrator is the main character. Other times, he or she is another character who is present when important events happen in the plot. Unlike third-person omniscient point of view, the first-person point of view can only show thoughts and feelings of ONE character, the narrator.

Although narrower and less objective than the third-person point of view, the first-person point of view has the advantage of communicating more directly and instensely with the reader. First-person point of view is easily recognized because the writing will contain the pronouns I, me and myself.

Skill Builder
Write a paragraph about a real or imagined experience in the first person. Don't forget to us the pronouns I, me, and myself.

Syntax

2009-01-26T07:49:00.001-08:00

SYNTAX

Use the words from this list below to describe an author’s sentence arrangement (“syntax”). Remember, syntax can affect a story’s pace, rhythm, suspense, tone, and theme. Cite examples from your readings that describe the effect that syntax has on the reader.

anastrophe/inversion-formal tone to create a poetic effect

balanced -sentences using similar sentence lengths, structures

exciting- punctuation dashes, parentheses, italics, ellipses, all caps

long- elegant lots of compound, complex sentences

occasional fragments-short blips to add tension or impact

parallel-arranging similar parts to give emphasis

repetition- using word(s) more than once for emphasis

rhetorical questions- asking questions not for an answer

telegraphic- brief, concise, tight

Learn About Autobiography

2009-01-07T16:34:00.000-08:00

An autobiography is the story of a person's life written by that person. Because the author is writing about himself or herself, an autobiography is usually written in the first person.
An autobiography may tell about a person's entire life, or it may focus on just a part of it. Short stories that are autobiographical usually tell about a particular event or incident in the author's life.
From an autobiography you learn about the author as a person. You also learn about the circumstances of the author's life.

Skill Builder
Choose an interesting or amusing incident that has happened to you during the past several weeks. Write a paragraph in which you recount the incident as if you were writing your autobiography. Be sure to include not only "the facts," but also your feelings about the incident.

Learn About Sonnets

2008-12-04T14:27:00.000-08:00

The sonnet is one of the major forms of English poetry. Almost every important English poet has tried writing sonnets. They are difficult to write because sonnets require order and discipline.

Sonnets have exactly fourteen lines. They have a fixed rhythm and rhyme scheme that must be followed precisely.

Some sonnets are divided into two parts. The first eight lines present a problem or a question. The final six lines offer a solution or reaction to the first part.

Other sonnets have four parts. Three parts express ideas about subject. The last two lines offer a conclusion.

All sonnets present personal feelings and thoughts about various aspects of life. Common subjects of sonnets are love, grief, and relationships.

Skill Builder
Write a word such as love, grief, or relationships on a sheet of paper. Write ten sentences that explore your feelings about the subject. Choose two sentences that could be expanded into a poem and post them here.

Ethos, Logos, Pathos Part 2

2008-11-29T15:08:00.001-08:00

Please cite some examples from your recent readings.