So far as I know, the email test has gone through without any email bouncing. If not, I will send special messages to students if I mistyped their email address.
This is a 3-hour weekly class, but with only a two-hour class session. The third our is called a Conference Hour. Students will meet with me on a rotation basis in that hour.
I think I've solved the problem of that hour too: we'll meet after the regular two-hour composition class, during the lunch hour. Since I'm the only one who will have to stay the entire hour each week, it's more of a hardship on me than on you! Not that late lunches are a hardship anyway (often I have lunch at around 1).
Let me know if this solution is satisfactory with you.
As for the arrangement of the Conference hour, in the past I used to meet students individually. But in the last couple of years I started meeting students 3 at a time in my office. Decide which you prefer.
During the conference hour we discuss a wide range of issues related to writing, including your personal history, experience writing, past learning, your weaknesses, strengths, goals, and (after the first assignment) your specific paper, its problems, questions you have about how to make it better, etc.
Students should have a sign-up sheet by next Thursday, with the names of all students in preferred rotation. Finally, of course, it doesn't matter that much once the rotation starts. I will see all students before we start the next rotation.
Attached you will find book jackets of two books I strongly recommend you purchase (I used to require their purchase). No student who is serious about progressing in writing skills can do without the Hodges Handbook, a concise inventory of every writing issue, from basic grammar to finished style, including several style sheets. You'll certainly use this for the rest of your life. Since it's hardback it's not likely to wear out until your reach your 100th birthday. By then you wont' have much use for it anyway.
The other volume is called Vocabulary Builder, Students used to be assigned a unit a week! Then I changed to a unit every two weeks! This included quizzes. Now I don't assign the book at all but I strongly recommend its purchase. Students liked the book. It arranges words by common morphemes or word roots, scubas "psych," "fid," etc. listing all words with that root, an easy mnemonic (memory aid). The vocabulary is standard vocabulary for college students. There are only 2-3 words (technical terms for plants, as I recall) I thought unnecessary in the book. Otherwise it will help build your vocabulary if you use it well.
(NOTE: I included different book covers for the Hodges Harbrace Handbook so you will recognize its different editions. The library has a few copies of older editions. It doesn't matter that much, although very old editions might not be up to date regarding Internet citations.
As for my pedagogy, or philosophy of teaching composition, it's basically the same as my method of teaching speaking: listen, read. I like telling students, I can imagine someone who has never written in her life, but who has read a lot, suddenly writing a good novel at 31 years of age! But I cannot imagine the opposite. You can write from ten hours a day but you'll just be repeating your mistakes unless you have models engraved in your head.
This goes for any art form, and of course writing is an art form when done well!
I can give numerous examples from any art form. Painters carefully copy the works of the great masters (Van Gogh did this too) before painting their own masterpieces. Blues singers heard nothing but the blues when young. Gospel singers say they used to sing along with great Gospel records. Actors say the same thing. The actor Morgan Freeman was asked in an interview how did he learn to act. Freeman answered, "The same way you learned being a journalist: by studying others. I used to watch actors all the time, trying to understand how they spoke their lines, how they moved. I watched them again and again so I wouldn't miss anything." (I'm quoting loosely from memory, but that was Freeman's main point.)
Most of this reading you'll have to do yourself. Some of it, however, you'll do as you study models for the essays you plan to write. For example, if the assignment is to write a restaurant review, you'll study restaurant reviews from the Internet (so there's no money worries). Download several reviews. Study them carefully. Inventory a vocabulary list; learn how those words are used for that special purpose, etc.
If the assignment is a profile (narration of a person's life and vocation) you'll study profiles of famous people and learn that way. The only way to do it.
I must caution you at once: BE CAREFUL when you download writings. Don't think everything or even most things you find on the Internet in English is GOOD English! In fact it's the other way: most of what you'll find on the Net is poor English. So you have to be careful about the sites; be sure it's an established site of a major newspaper or magazine. Otherwise you're modeling after bad writing instead of good writing.
Also be careful about PLAGIARISM. Try to understand that's a serious offense, often resulting in expulsion in some colleges and a certain end to your career in a military academy where honesty is a main virtue.
Also try to understand that if it seems easy for you to copy writing from the Net it's even easier for a teacher to find your source! It takes often only seconds to find it. I've done that in previous classes, including Composition and Film classes. SO DON'T pass off another's writing as your own.
Apart from the Internet I can easily recognize what seems like copied language. Sometimes even a small phrase. Like if a film student writes about "early Keaton" it's a giveaway because it's unlikely a student would even know about the comic actor, Buster Keaton, much less know his entire work so well that he refers to "early Keaton" (or "early Hitchcock," "early Chaplin," etc.). I take that phrase, and google with it and in a few seconds my hunch is proved right.
Some students pretend not to know what plagiarism is, others are genuinely confused. Obviously common words are in the public domain. You can use the words in my last sentence without risk. In fact that's one way to learn; by repeating collocations (series of words) one's mother uses, one's teachers use, singers use, etc. Plagiarism, however, is taking distinctive collocations of words; words that the writer worked hard to put together in a special way. These words may be just two in a special relationship, such as "Hepburn's ebullient performance." Now you cannot borrow "ebullient performance," at least not in connection with that particular actress, Katherine Hepburn and that particular film. You may store it in your mind and later use it for another performance. That's okay. That's part of learning. But you cannot review that same film and use the phrase "ebullient performance," or even "sparkling performance" without quotes around that phrase and (if well written) a citation of where the phrase comes from. "As critic Edgar Adams wrote in his review of Ms. Hepburn's performance, it is indeed a 'sparkling performance' by any standard of good acting.."
Some words, phrases, ideas are considered part of public usage. For example, I'll check IMDB to find out an actor's name. I don't have to reference that! I'll check the speed of sound and don't have to say where I got that information from. Because that's part of public knowledge. But if I write that Alfred Hitchcock lost 80 pounds in 1955, that's not part of public knowledge. Some other writer did hard work researching that detail and deserves credit for his work. "Hitchcock's film shows the strain he was working under at the time. For according to Doug Adams, in his book, Hitchcock in the 1950s, the director lost 80 pounds in that decade."
Other collocations are also in the public fund of knowledge. Metaphors (like "piano legs") once invented by someone are now long considered part of public speaking and need no acknowledgment. The fact that Marlon Brando was a great actor, or Chaplin's The Gold Rush is a classic needs no acknowledgment. It's a fact or opinion everyone shares or knows. One doesn't have to write, "Christmas, according to Professor Smith of Princeton University, is the biggest holiday in the United States." Obviously that would be absurd because everyone knows this. We know it not because we take a survey but because it's shared knowledge.
Now to issues of writing.
The wonderful thing about essential knowledge in all fields is that the most important knowledge can be reduced to a few principles. This is true in morality, for example. As evidence I give the Ten Commandments: ten simple rules to live a good life, at least good by moral standards.
Orson Welles, the great American film director said everything one needs to know to make a film can be learned in a few hours. The difficult part is using what you know! In fact too much knowledge can sometimes interfere with performance. A good basketball player can learn only so much from books.
Now good writing can be reduced to a few principles.
One is the model called the Communication Triangle. That's 3 points to always keep in mind: your purpose (writer), your text (or speech), your audience (or reader). Simple. Doesn't sound too important. But if you truly apply it, it's a great tool. Every good speaker uses that model unconsciously. A child knows how to talk to her mother differently than to her father or her sister! She changes her vocabulary for each person. She convinces her sister to let her use her computer by using strong or "vulgar" language perhaps. She would never use the same words to her father. Her ideas will change too. If she wants money from her sister she'll say, "Remember when you went on that date with Bill and I loaned you some money for a taxi? So now I need money." But to her father she would write, "Remember how you told me to study hard, Dad? Well I need books to study hard. And books cost money. I want so much to live up to your expectations but I can't do that without an extra allowance this month to buy an important textbook. Other students have already bought it and I'm still in class without the book."
See how many good ideas are here: choice of words; comparison with other students, contrast (good student/bad student), cause-effect ("if I don't buy this book I will be a bad student"), contradiction (a good student without necessary books is a contradiction), etc.
But this young woman never thinks she's writing good prose. And when she's given an assignment in class she will do poorly; because she's not writing with a purpose as when she wrote to her father. She's writing just to follow a teacher's assignment.
So always consider the Communication Triangle whenever you prepare a speech or composition.
There are other practices, such as Aristotle's famous "topics" or "commonplaces."
These are common places in a text where one can add something to it. These include DEFINITION (explaining one's words), DIVISION (dividing up one's topic), COMPARISON (comparing one thing to another or contrasting them), CONTRADICTION (showing how something is not what it's supposed to be), EXAMPLE (giving examples of what you mean), TESTIMONY (quoting authorities), etc.
Other models include the famous newspaper model of the 5 W's and H: who, what, where, why, when, how. This is a very powerful model if used correctly.
Another model is the P/S model: state a problem and give a solution.
Or one can use the Q/A model: ask a question and give the answer.
Finally there's the READER/WRITER model. That is, every good writer must be a good reader of one's own work. One must learn to read what one has written and see it fresh, from another's point of view. Only then can one see what is missing in what one has written. In fact that's the very meaning of the word "REVISION." To "re-vise" mean to "see" again, a second vision of one's work. But many students see revision as just changing a few words or correcting spelling. That's not what true revision should be. It should be a careful reading of what one has written from a fresh point of view so that one sees it for the first time as a reader would. Only then can one find what is wrong with it.
In terms of style, there are only a few principles to consider. But these are very important.
Always go to lower levels of generality. In other words be more specific. Don't write "doctor" but "oncologist" or "cardiologist." Don't write "musician" but "percussionist." And so on. Simple, yes. But difficult to apply unless one is always careful to do so.
So that' the difference between "specific" and "general." But there's another important distinction, between "abstract" and "concrete."
Always choose the concrete noun. Don't write of "love" but of your b/f holding your hand. See the difference. One is interesting, the other isn't. And the better the writer the more concrete details. "He held my hand, caressing my fingertips as we sat on the bus." The good writer never stops adding more concrete details. "My father loves me" is uninteresting. Compare: "I was struggling to finish my paper for tomorrow's class, using an old ball point pen, when my father softly crept up to me at my desk and, smiling, placed a brand new laptop computer in front of me."
Of course there are times when being abstract is better than being concrete and being general is better than being specific! One can't clutter one's writing with too many details. A policeman doesn't want to know everything about a suspicious person, like "He reminded me of my cousin Bob." He just wants to know important information that will help find the suspect.
We'll discuss these matters throughout the year as we analyze your essays, when details are missing, when you're going into too much detail about something, etc. But always we'll come back to the Communication Triangle: is that what the reader wants to read, or is there something missing the reader needs?
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