Monday, April 28th, 2014--5 pm

Hello,

a few things:

1. Below you will find the handout from our class discussion today. Those who were absent may want to get additional notes that are not on the handout from a fellow student.

2. I realized after section 7's class today that I did not mention the issue of tense. Just a reminder that you always want to remain in present tense unless it is illogical to do so. Specifically, in out of class essay 3, you want to stay in present tense when referring to a scene. Example: Walter destroyed Tuco's headquarters. Better: Walter destroys Tuco's headquarters.

3. If you are unable to submit a rough draft of essay 3 today, I will still accept rough drafts during this week.
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English 20---C. Fraga

Thinking back over out of class essay 2…

This is just a partial list of issues that continued to show up in many final draft student essays from the out of class essay 2 assignment. The majority of these errors are ones that we reviewed in class after I returned out of class essay 1.

Please consider the following when conducting your final editing and proofreading of out of class essay 3. (Obviously, you will ALSO study my comments on your previous work.)

(We will review sentence structure issues on Wednesday)

·      Check the Unacceptable Errors handout—both the unacceptable errors listed AND  the information that follows the list.

·      One main idea per paragraph.

·      A topic sentence of a paragraph introduces the main idea of the paragraph. This means that the topic sentence cannot be a question or a quotation.

·      Follow MLA format exactly. I realize that it means having to pay close attention to details; however, this is one of the best preparations for working in the “real world,” no matter your area of interest. Having to follow protocol from an employer is something you will find yourself having to do very often.

·      For every general statement that you write in an essay, be sure that a specific statement closely follows.

·      Using an abundance of words to state something that can be written in a lot fewer words REALLY impacts clarity and readability and retention. If I have noted wordiness as an issue in your work, please take the time to review my editing. I always provide at least one example for you of how to eliminate excess words.

ANNOUNCEMENT!

NEW UNACCEPTABLE ERROR

BEGINNING WITH YOUR THIRD OUT OF CLASS ESSAY.

If there is any evidence that you did not run a spell check program, I will deduct 10 points from your earned score. In other words, the first time I encounter a word that is misspelled and a spell check program WOULD have caught it, 10 points will be deducted. (if I encounter more than one word that a spell check program would have caught, I will not deduct any MORE points—just 10 points for the first one I come across.