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TODAY IS OUR CRITICAL LENS CRUCIBLE TEST.
**Remember: I will give you your essays back with a grade. If you don't like your grade, you have an opportunity to REWRITE the essay by the next day to get a better grade. If your grade is not BETTER, I will not change it to the lower grade. Critical Lens Essay: Introduction: **Quote the critical lens quote. Example: F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, "insert quote here". **Restate the quote in your own words and explain it. **Decide whether you agree or disagree with the author of the quote. **Write a thesis, or basic POINT of the essay. Example: "F. Scott Fitzgerald can be proven to be correct in The Crucible when John Proctor...." Body: **This is where you are using the text (in this case, The Crucible) to prove your POINT. Give details from the storyline that support your opinion. REMEMBER to explain how these details connect the QUOTE to the TEXT. Conclusion: **This is where you restate your thesis, then move away from the text and the details of the book. At the end of your essay, you should be talking about how the quote fits in to real life. End with a profound thought about the idea behind the quote. You have TWO days - today and tomorrow - to write this. BRING A BOOK tomorrow in case you finish and have extra ti This is the week for five-week reports, so I reviewed each student's grades with them yesterday. While one of the classes needed some time to make up missed work (for a drastically reduced grade), the others moved on to add another brush stroke. No matter which class YOU were in, you will need to know this brush stroke AND the others (see previous blogs) when we read our next book, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck.
Brush Stroke 4: ADJECTIVES OUT OF ORDER Normally when we speak, we use the adjective in front of the noun to describe the noun: Brown dog But now we are going to switch it up to give a little skill to our sentence. Plus we are going to use either two or three adjectives. (Remember that adjectives describe nouns and pronouns.) The happy puppy, cute and furry, hid under the trailer for shelter from the sun. Now THAT is a good sentence! Have a good day. Hug your Mom and your friends Yesterday, I was laying on my couch all day sniffling and trying to get rid of a headache. For class, the substitute teacher, a wonderfully helpful woman, told you to practice your brush strokes while writing a story about your holiday shopping experience, and then another paragraph summarizing your previous text.
Today, however, we dove in to yet another brush stroke: the PARTICIPLE. To form a participle, you want to think of an ABSOLUTE PHRASE WITHOUT THE NOUN at the beginning. Instead of EYES WATERING (an absolute), you'd write, "Watering up with tears, her eyes showed me just how proud she was of her daughter." Basically, a participle is an ING PHRASE before a sentence. Another way you can create a participle is by writing three ING words in a row, all describing the main subject of the sentence. Examples: *Trembling, shaking, crying, the boy walked home in the dark. *Laughing, spinning, reeling, the young bride thought of her beloved husband and how much she loved him. See if you can create your own sentences about a car moving along a road. Create sentence #1 with a PARTICIPLE PHRASE. Then create sentence #2 with three participles in a row. Have a good day! -Mrs. Coller Let's say that you see WILHELM standing over by his locker. You could write in your diary, "WILHELM is so cool. I really like him. He is the captain of the chess team."
But the problem is that these are third grade sentences. Your writing would be okay, but not excellent, and certainly not skilled. So how do you fix this? Let's think of some other ways we can talk about WILHELM without saying the name WILHELM.
All of those (1-4) are NOUN PHRASES which are a group of words that, together, act like a NOUN. Now, don't forget that we are learning BRUSH STROKES here, which will help us to write on a more sophisticated level. Let's take the noun WILHELM and add a noun phrase from the list. We'll put BOTH of them in the sentence together, and then we will seem RIDICULOUSLY INTELLIGENT to whoever happens to read the diary. Sample: I really like WILHELM, THE CAPTAIN OF THE CHESS TEAM. You stated the noun - WILHELM - and then you put a comma and RENAMED the same noun - the captain of the chess team. Other examples: Mrs. Coller, my English teacher, forces us to write using brush strokes. The Bills, the best football team out there, will probably go to every Superbowl for the next fifteen years. The kid with the green sweatshirt, my brother, tried to trip me in the hallway. I tend to take after my grandfather, a man who has been gone for twenty years now. George Washington, the leader of a brave troop of soldiers, faced may troubles during his presidency. So... do you think you have it? To TEST YOURSELF: Cover up the FIRST use of the noun or noun phrase. If the sentence is still grammatically correct and makes sense, you can be POSITIVE that you have an APPOSITIVE! This is an example of a sentence that DOES NOT use an APPOSITIVE: The boy, tall and handsome, looked my way. In this case, if you cover up the first noun or noun phrase, you end up with: **Tall and handsome looked my way. This DOES NOT WORK, so you do not have an appositive, even though the original sentence is a good sentence. To practice, see if you can make up sentences like this.
Have a great day! -Mrs. Coller As I told you at the beginning of the year, there are 6 TRAITS OF GOOD WRITING:
Today we began learning 5 BRUSH STROKES that will help you enhance your sentence structure.
An ABSOLUTE (in equation form): ABSOLUTE = Noun + ing adjective OR ABSOLUTE = Noun + ed adjective Use TWO absolutes at the beginning OR two absolutes at the end of your core sentence to increase your skill in writing sentences. Samples:
If you were not in class, try this on your own. Find a good image on Google, and write a sentence about it. Baby steps: *Determine your basic sentence. *Think about what parts of the image you would zoom in to if you had a camera. These will be the nouns you use for your absolutes. *Determine an -ING word or -ED word for each of your two nouns. Put them together to form your AWESOME ABSOLUTE sentence. *Be happy that you ROCK. We will work on more brush strokes tomorrow and all next week. Then we will use these types of sentences to answer quiz questions and write papers, not only in ELA, but also in LIFE!! Have a great night. -Mrs. Coller You have to know the following:
The format of the test is as follows: |
ELA11R
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