I returned your rough drafts of your literacy narratives with
my comments. Remember I only carefully checked the first two pages of
your draft for grammatical errors so be sure to go through your entire
draft carefully and you complete your final revision.
Here were a couple of common errors I saw in most of the papers that we talked about in class and ways you can avoid them.
- Italicize the titles of books and make sure that you include the author's name. I need to know whether or not you're talking about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or Dean Koontz's Frankenstein.
- A lot of you have a double space between each paragraph. What you need to do is open your document in Word, highlight the entire document, go to Paragraph on the toolbar and click the option that says "Do not leave a space between each paragraph." I will take points off if you do not do this.
- Watch your tenses. If you start your piece in past tense you should stay in past tense. Do not randomly shift to present tense. Many of you will write one sentence in present tense and then the next one would be in past and vice versa. I've even seen two different tenses within one sentence. Here's an example: She cried all day long and then she is fine.
- Run-on sentences! A run-on sentence is a sentence where you string two or more ideas together without proper punctuation you just keep going and going, it doesn't matter that you've already stated 2 very complete thoughts you decide to go ahead and add a few more just for dramatic effect and you end up with a sentence that is over four lines long. The previous sentence is a run-on. Here is that sentence corrected: A run-on sentence is a sentence where you string two or more ideas together without proper punctuation. You just keep going and going. It doesn't matter that you've already stated two very complete thoughts. You decide to go ahead and add a few more for dramatic effect, and you end up with a sentence that is over four lines long.
- Avoid the phrase "would have been."
- Do not start sentences with conjunctions. Because, but, and, or etc are conjunctions
- Do not start sentences with verbs that start in -ing. "Walking to the store, they saw a stray dog." Just say "They saw a stray dog while walking to the store."
- Follow the above tips and you will have caught most of the common grammatical and formatting errors of our class.
We then discussed the short story "Sonny's Blues" and after our discussion we created potential thesis statements for an analysis of the piece. I asked you questions to get you thinking more about the characters' motives and how the setting (Harlem, late 50s early 60s) affect the characters. I asked you to look at certain terms and phrases the reoccur in the piece and to question the author's motives. Why does he keep talking about darkness? What is the darkness? You used these questions to form your thesis statements.
Thesis Statements
The best way to start forming a thesis statements is to start by asking yourself very specific questions about the piece. Try to ask more in-depth questions that go beyond the surface of the piece. Question the choices the creators made. Why do you think they chose to make the piece go that way instead of another way? Ask yourself how different societal factors affect the piece. Question a character's actions or their motives. If you see recurring patterns in the piece ask yourself why they are there? And then try to answer them to the best of your ability based on your knowledge of the piece. You will then have the beginning of a good thesis statement.
Homework
- Come to class with an idea of what you want to do your second project on. (Due Thurs 10/18)
- Write a 1-2 page analysis on Sleep Deprivation Chamber by Adrienne Kennedy (Due Thurs 10/25)
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