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Both Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope were attuned to the controversial issues of their day, and they didn’t shy away from addressing those issues and trying to win others to their way of thinking. When you care deeply about a controversial issue, it’s only natural to take a stand on it and to defend your position against objections. That’s the essence of writing a persuasive essay.
Persuasive writing will force you to draw on a wide range of writing skills; speculating about causes and effects, recounting autobiographical incidents, reporting information, and evaluating points for refuting objections to your arguments.
For today:
Choose an issue.
Take a stand.
Target your audience (tap into their feelings, reason with them, earn their trust).
Cope with counterarguments.
Then, write an introduction to define the issue (1 paragraph), a body to develop your argument (3 paragraphs), and a conclusion to drive your message home (1 paragraph). For today.
Values Activity
HOW TO TREAT OTHERS WITH RESPECT
Treating people with respect makes your world a nicer place to live in, whether it’s at home, at school, or out in your community. And it’s easy – all you have to do is treat people the way you like to have them treat you. Here are a few ideas.
• Don’t insult people or make fun of them.
• Listen to others when they speak.
• Value other people’s opinions.
• Be considerate of people’s likes and dislikes.
• Don’t mock or tease people.
• Don’t talk about people behind their backs.
• Be sensitive to other people’s feelings.
• Don’t pressure someone to do something he or she doesn’t want to do.
We live in a diverse nation made up of many different cultures, languages, races, and backgrounds. That kind of variety can make all our lives a lot more fun and interesting, but only if we get along with each other. And to do that we have to respect each other. In addition to the list above, here are some ways we can respect people who are different from us.
• Try to learn something from the other person.
• Never stereotype people.
• Show interest and appreciation for other people’s cultures and backgrounds.
• Don’t go along with prejudices and racist attitudes.
WRITING ASSIGNMENTS (Answer in your blog)
1. Imagine that some day you will have a child. Write a letter of advice for that child to open when he or she reaches the age you are right now. Tell the child about the way kids in your school or other groups treated each other at this age, and how you hope he/she will treat people.
2. How is the issue of respect portrayed on television or in the movies? Watch a movie or TV show and write about how the characters interacted with each other. In what ways did they treat each other with respect or disrespect? (Give some specific examples.) Do you approve of the way they treated each other? Did you feel different toward characters who treated others with respect than those who didn’t? Which did you like better? Why?
3. Are some kids ridiculed at your school? Why? What do they get picked on about (height, weight, appearance, disability, accent, skin color, etc.)? Exactly how are they picked on? How do you think these kids feel about this? How do you feel about it? How does that kind of behavior affect the climate in your school?
4. Have you ever been made fun of for something that you couldn’t change? Can you give some examples? How did (do) you deal with it? How did it make you feel?
5. In what ways do you treat people with respect? Are there any ways in which you don’t?
6. Have you ever seen anybody mistreated for being different. Describe the incident. How did it make you feel? What would it take to prevent things like this from happening again?
Hey there!
If you finished your other posts, you may work on these topics for extra credit. Choose one, two, or all of them and write away….
1. If you were the principal of this school, what would you do?
2. If your job were to decide what shows can be on TV, which would you choose and why?
3. What would you do if you found a magic wand?
Enjoy!
Extra Credit:
Write an anecdote.
A form of expression, an anecdote is a short, entertaining account of a personal experience. Focusing on a single event, an anecdote is usually shorter than a personal essay (think 700 to 800 words). It hints at the story’s significance early but not revealing its full meaning until the end. Often humorous, an anecdote does not aim at deep meaning but may still illustrate some truth or understanding about life.
Prewriting: Have you ever acted with the best of intentions but had something go wrong? Or have you ever been on the receiving end of a good intention gone bad? If you haven’t, brainstorm for another entertaining experience you’d like to relate. Select one that’ll be relatively short and amusing.
Writing, Evaluating and Revising: Introduce your anecdote with a general comment or phrase whose meaning will be completely understood at the end. Present your story’s narrative details in chronological order and add descriptive details that reinforce your story’s humor. You may want to repeat your introductory comment or a slight variation of it at the end. Revise your draft to make the action clearer and the humor stronger.
Publishing: After checking for and correcting any errors, publish it on your blog. You may choose the title.
Tips: Use descriptive and narrative detail. If you have trouble thinking about an experience that’s appropriate for an anecdote, think back at the last time you told a funny story about yourself, or think back to gifts you received that were thoughtful but useless. There may be good material for an anecdote in one of these experiences.
(For Monday)
An elegy is a type of lyric poem of mourning or lamentation for the dead. Usually it expresses sorrow over the death of someone the poet admired or loved or respected; sometimes it simply mourns the passing of all life and beauty.
Extra Credit:
Compose an elegy for a deceased person you loved or highly admired, or a person whose death has brought great sorrow to people’s hearts, like Princess Diana, Martin Luther King, etc.
Here’s some inspiration:
O Captain! My Captain! by Walt Whitman
Because I could not stop for Death by Emily Dickinson
Elegy by Robert Seymour Bridges
In memoriam by Lord Alfred Tennyson
(You have to finish reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to understand this assignment)
Extra:
While the lord of the mysterious castle is out hunting, his wife is at home on her own hunt. What might she have to say about the situation? In a diary entry written from the wife’s point of view, describe her feelings about entrapping Gawain. How does she feel about Gawain? Does she resent or enjoy carrying out her wifely duty?
400 words minimum, due Monday in Computer Lab.
Just for fun:
You can find a paper doll set on the web here, if you want to cut it out and play with it at home…
In the story we read today, Federigo’s Falcon, from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, Federigo and Monna Giovanna live in fourteenth century Italy. Their customs and their ways of speaking are different from ours, but we share with them some basic human problems.
Extra:
Retell their story as the tale of Joan and Fred (or Juana and Federico), reset in the early twenty-first century (500 words min).
Try to find some contemporary examples of these lovers’ problems. Think about how the lovers in this story might be treated by a contemporary writer or filmmaker. How are the problems faced by Federigo and Monna Giovanna both similar to and different from the problems faced by lovers today?
“Few experiences are more painful than falling in love with someone who couldn’t care less. We get over it -most of us- and it never -well, almost never- does us serious damage. But while we’re suffering, we suffer intensely. It’s hard to think about anything else; we can’t do our work; food, if we bother to eat, is tasteless; we find ourselves staring into space, missing everything going on around us. Worst of all, we’re likely to do something, maybe many things, so foolish that we make matters even worse and embarrass ourselves in front of that one person who wouldn’t have noticed us at all if we hadn’t made ourselves look so ridiculous.
But you never know how it will turn out. In most painful moments, when you think that things can’t get worse, they very well might. Or they might, surprisingly, turn around…” (taken from your British Literature textbook)
You have until Friday.
Extra:
Try writing a folk ballad in four-line stanzas on a subject of your choice. Look for possible subjects in the newspaper or on television. Your ballad should tell a brief story, perhaps about some domestic or historic tragedy, and should include at least four ballad characteristics. You might imitate Lord Randall and Edward, Edward, and tell your story in dialogue.
Ballad characteristics:
1. Supernatural events
2. Sensational, sordid, or tragic subject matter
3. A refrain
4. The omission of details
5. Incremental repetition, to build up suspense. A phrase or sentence is repeated with a new element added each time, until the climax is reached.
6. A question-and-answer format, in which the facts of a story are gleaned little by little from the answers. Again, this device builds up suspense.
7. Conventional phrases, understood by listeners to have meaning beyond their literal ones. “Make my bed soon” in Lord Randall is an example. Whenever a character in a ballad asks someone to make his bed, or to make the her bed narrow, it means that the speaker is preparing for death.
8. A strong, simple beat, with verse forms that are relatively uncomplicated. Ballads were sung for a general, rather than an elitist, audience. Only latere, in the era of so-called literary ballads (more sophisticated poems that artfully evoked the atmosphere of the original), did the rhyme scheme (abcb) and meter of the ballad stanza become standard.
For inspiration: Frankie and Johnny, a song which comes out of the Midwest and the Mississippi River region, with words by Boyd Bunch. Like most ballads, it tells of love gone wrong.
You have all weekend to get creative, but it must be finished before your Computer Lab on Monday!
THREE DEAD SONS VISIT MOTHER FOR DINNER…
SLIGHTED WOMAN SPURNS LOVER’S DEATHBED REQUEST…
MAIDEN HEADED FOR GALLOWS; FAMILY REFUSES HELP…
These aren’t the latest tabloid headlines or current soap opera summaries; they’re the plots of medieval ballads. In the Middle Ages, just as today, certain forms of popular entertainment tended toward the sensational.
Since ballads were the poetry of the people, just as popular music today, their subjects were predictably popular –domestic tragedy, false love, true love, the absurdity of husband-wife relationships, and the supernatural. Unlike today’s music, the ballads were not copyrighted by a singer, but were passed down orally from singer to singer. Using a strong beat and repetition, the ballads were a gift of story passed from performer to performer, from generation to generation.
Extra:
Suppose a historian from the future were to analyze today’s popular songs.
How would the historian describe the music you and your friends enjoy?
What subjects dominate the songs?
Are popular songs sensational the way the ballads are?
What inferences would the historian draw about us and our culture from the analysis of the songs and the stories they tell?
Record your thoughts on these pop music questions in a brief (300 words) entry in your blog.
Oh, and by the way…
Here’s a clip from the film Lord Randall by Scott Allan Stubbe, adapted from the traditional murder ballad we’re reading tomorrow in class. If you want to get a head start, watch this video before we read it tomorrow.
Extra:
Create a collage of photos that visually represent the speaker’s attitudes in “The Seafarer”. Put your imagination to work, and gather images and words from the Internet (at least 7 images). Paste them onto a post in your blog, and explain why you included each picture.
If you want to refresh your memory, read the poem again here.
Note: You have all weekend to do this, and I’ll check it Monday in Computer Lab. You may not do any of the extra assignments already posted after Monday. (You will have more extra credit posts in the following weeks, but there are deadlines)
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