Evidence: "Not All Evidence is Created Equal."

We've spoken about how, at least in academic writing, one uses evidence to support claims and opinions. As a way of helping you "get" how evidence works in the relationship between opinion and support, I thought I might ask you to explore this site:

http://www.exploratorium.edu/evidence/index.html

In particular, I want you to look at the link "Can you believe it?" Note the various questions scientists ask of scientific articles to find out if the evidence is worth anything.

Steve

Assignment One: Due Thursday, 30 October.

It looks as if everyone who is going to get caught up has, so it's time to move on to the final stages of the writing process--proofreading. You should be fairly well integrated with your group now. One of the main lessons of the class is when it is appropriate to use others as part of your writing process. Proofreading and editing is such a time, and your group is there to help.

As I said in my previous blog post on proofreading, the main trick to seeing errors is getting enough "distance" from the text to not read through the errors you produce. One of the easiest ways to get such distance is to get other sets of eyeballs looking at your work.

In this assignment you will learn and practice several new proofreading/editing techniques, and you should come out of it even more comfortable working with your group and collaborating through google docs.

1. You have used google documents to get help from your group with the revision of your King rhetorical analysis. The last stage of the process in producing a polished document that is ready to publish or turn in is proofreading. For this assignment, you need to make sure your group has your latest revision, and they are added in the google document as collaborators.
2. Go back into the blog and re-read my post entitled, "Notes on Proofreading." You can find this post by looking at the top of this page, where you will find a search box. Enter "Proofreading" in the search box, and hit the button, "Search Blog." This process should call up all the posts where I mention the word, "Proofreading." Scan down and look for the one called, "Notes on Proofreading." (By the way, this method is how you can search the class blof for specific keywords.)

My post on proofreding should introduce you to a few new proofreading techniques. If you already have tried them all, research proofreading and find a technique you haven't tried and which isn't listed. If you find one and share it via the email list for the class, you'll receive extra credit for class participation!

My "Notes on Proofreading" should also teach you the place of proofreading in the writing process, that is, the last step prior to turning in your writing for publication. This is exactly where you are with your King essay. The reason we wait so late to proofread is because we assume you'll be making changes to your writing as you revise, like you have on your King analysis based on the feedback you've received from your group and on your own reading of their work.

Here is the important point: If you proofread and polish the surface features of writing you then revise, you've wasted effort; so, it makes sense to proofread and edit almost last.

3. Read each of the revised drafts produced by your group members. As you do, employ a technique from my "Notes on Proofreading" which is new to you. This means you'll try out one new method of proofreading per member of your group. Not every method works for every editor, but you have to try them out to figure out which methods work well for you.

4. As you read, look for grammar, spelling, or usage which you think might be improved. As you find them, you are to do two things:

A) fix the first five mistakes you find in each draft; and,
B) go down to the bottom of the revised draft and make a note to the author of the errors you fixed.

Step B is designed to leave the author of the revised draft on which you are working additional information for their "Error List." If you remember, authors use such Error Lists to figure out which surface level feature of writing, that is, which grammar, usage, or spelling mistake, they will next learn to recognize and fix in their own writing. If you get used to working on one error from your list at a time, you soon find yourself able to recognize and fix most of the common errors to which you are prone. Over time, you will find yourself less and less reliant on others--like your group or me--to read and fix your work for you.

4A. Some notes on how to handle the Error List with multiple proofreaders:

i) If you haven't already done it. Pick a color of text in which to work. This is *your* color of text, and no one else can have it. Talk to your group members before each of you begins editing, and decide on which color each member will use.

You produce text in a specific color by selecting the text you want to change, and then using the "A" tab next to the underline, italics, and bold tab on the google docs editing page. Pick a color you like, as I am going to ask you to use it for the rest of the semester. My own is red, the ucky color traditionally used by editors and English teachers; so, pick another color besides red. By having your own color of text in which to edit, I'll be able to recognize your work and so with the authors with whom you work. (Side note: The reason English teachers have bled red on your papers in the past is that early editors assumed it was an easy color to see, it contrasted with most early inks, which were black or brown, and there is a traditional association in English society with danger.]

ii) Make the changes to the draft in which you are working in your color of text, and, as you list the errors you fix, write your contribution to the Error List in your color. Being able to go into the document and see the surface level errors you are catching will let me better grade your work, that is, I can see what you have done; but, more importantly, it may provide me with a clue as to what I should suggest you work on in terms of your own writing, and it lets the author recognize the work of each editor.

iii) Make sure to include a section of the revised draft just after the error list you produce, in which you leave me and your team member a note saying something like:

"Color Code:
1) This is Steve Brandon, and I'm editing in red. In this document I used the proofreading technique of reading out loud. It felt a little weird, but I did see errors I normally would have missed."
2) ...."

iv) Finally, if you find yourself fixing the same kind of error someone else has fixed, place a star beside this error in your own color. Seeing one or more stars will tell the author, "This error occurred more than once; it's one I produce regularly in my writing; so, it's one I might consider learning how to recognize and fix on my own."

v) Remember, when you proofread, you aren't trying to offer suggestions about how to change anything but the surface level polish of the piece. You are looking at grammar, usage, and spelling--nothing else.

vi) Also remember, no one expects you to be an expert on grammar, usage, and spelling. You are a student writer offering another author in your group an opinion and some advice on how to fix problems you see in their writing. Adults aren't required to follow the advice they receive from others, and it's not uncommon to receive contradictory advice on a piece of writing. You work with the advice editors give you in the same way you work with any advice, that is, you listen, you weigh it, and you follow it if it makes sense; otherwise, you don't follow it.

vii) Regardless, each time you practice reading to proofread, you will learn to recognize more-and-more which could be fixed. This is one reason English teachers make such picky readers, we've read thousands of texts, and each time we've gotten better at spotting possible problem spots. Just as with your group, however, when an English teacher marks something to fix, they offer you their opinion. Remember, anyone can make mistakes. You are the author; you weigh an English teacher's opinion along with everyone else who reads and helps you improve your work.

By the way, "usage"--a term you should learn--refers to using a word like "their" when you meant "there" or "they're" or to using a weak, vague verb instead of a strong, precise one. In any event, the assumption is that by the time the author has asked for someone else to edit their work, the deep level work, like organization, development, etc. has already been done.

Finally, I've left a few errors in this post for you to find and fix. Send me an email with the errors you find in this post, and I'll offer a point of extra credit. You only need to list three errors to qualify for the extra credit.
As always, write with questions.

FYI: Four Year College Transfer Days

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Community College
4 Year College
Transfer Days

Tuesday, Oct. 21st (Burnette Hall- PRC) & Thursday, Oct. 23 (1st Floor Lobby- DTC)
11am until 1pm
Meet with Admissions Representatives
Learn about Guaranteed Admission Agreements
and Transferability of Classes

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and many more!

An example of a good, solid rhetorical analysis.

A few students have asked I post an example of the kind of rhetorical analysis for which I am looking each week. Below is a good, solid example. It could be improved, but I am impressed with how the author has placed himself in the rhetorical place of the person he is analyzing. The author of the analysis does a good job of identifying his rhetor's audience, and looking at a specific problem the rhetor is facing and how the rhetor crafts his message to overcome these problems. There are even specific examples. I would prefer the author had taken a few extra minutes to proofread, but over all, I would give the following example an "A."

Here's the example:

Watching preist perform the mass is an excellent example of Rhetoric. His ethos is established by the clothes he wears, the logos can be simply achieved by backing up your statements with scripture, and pathos can easily be achieved when people come to church, looking and expecting to feel better about themselves. The audience is generally the same group of people. Old people who come from habit, young people who come because they're forced to, and people in the middle looking for answers about life. The message stays pretty consistent from week to week: live right, but if you can't you can be forgiven. The thing that makes their job difficult is keeping the attention of this audience week to week when you need to send the same general message. They try to do this by varying the stories and examples they use. I cannot imagine this is as easy to do as it sounds. The three groups I described which compose the congregation are very diverse. Many of the stories I can relate to do not apply to many of the near-deads who sit up front. Very frequently the situations they find humorous don't do anything for me. Our priest seems to have discovered the secret to making everyone pay attention. His Homilies often conist of you might be a redneck if jokes and comparisons to professional football. Everyone likes these.

Reading: Kaizen and Process, Take Two

Now you are getting your head around the basic elements of communications---the sender, the message, the receiver, noise, and feedback, it's time to talk some down and dirty about how to improve your writing. The basic notion of how to make improvements in any process (like writing), can be found in the industrial management philosophy of Kaizen.

If you do a quick google of "Kaizen," you'll learn it's the industrial management philosophy which led to Japan being the technological and industrial powerhouse it is. This way of approaching process brings together the best of Western ideas about motion study and efficiency and Japanese notions of how communities and individuals work. It's one of a handful of the most powerful ideas to emerge from the 20th C, and it came into being at the end of WWII.

The US wanted to build a working democracy out of the wreckage of Japan at the end of WWII. Japanese industry was geared up for war, and the US had learned from how it had handled Germany at the end of WWI that for democracy to work, you had to have a certain amount of wealth flowing through out a viable economy; so, the US sent in some of our best industrial engineers to help Japan to build a consumer industrial base.

These folks were well grounded in how to set up a factory to mass produce, but they didn't have a clue as to how Japanese culture functions. The upshot was they tried to impose the latest 1930s/'40s motion and process theory and failed miserably. Japanese culture sees work holistically. It tends to see the individual as part of a community, and the function of work not so much as a means of producing a product but as a means of maintaining the viability of the community and the pride and sense of status of the individual within the community. Luckily, the Japanese were able to work with the well intentioned Americans to come up with a theory of industrial process which combined the best of both ways of working.

From the US, they took the notion of process, that is, when you do something over and over (like writing a sentence, paragraph, or email), you tend to follow the same steps and tend to need the same stuff. If you break down such repeatable activities into set steps, you can focus on one aspect of the process at a time and work to improve its efficiency. You might, for instance, make sure the tools you need for a task are at your workstation instead of stored across the room, saving you the time needed to get up, loose your train of thought, and go across the room to get a pencil or keyboard. The idea is as you improve the efficiency of the individual steps, you improve the overall efficiency of the process and your ability to compete.

Now American thought tended to think of process efficiency as a means to an end. You get a factory up to a certain level of productivity per man hour, and you can compete. The Japanese had the brilliant insight---based on Zen notions of work based meditation--that one never reaches a perfect process; instead, one can just improve the process at hand; but, and this is a big but, you can make small, continuous improvements to whichever processes is in place. Literally, one's focus isn't on the end product, but on the doing or the work necessary to a task. You practice and perfect the doing of a task, not the product of the task. The upshot is they created the notion of continual small improvements to process or Kaizen. It's quite literally a continuous focus of improving how the task is done and assuming that a good process will produce a good product which can compete.

There are some additional flourishes. Kaizen rewards workers who come up with a means to improve how their task is done. It creates time in a production schedule to have regular meetings of the workers, management, and sales folks to discuss process and product. The idea is everyone needs to understand the big picture, so they can understand their part. In any event, small groups meet to make decisions about which improvements to process to implement and to judge if a change in process is an improvement or not. There's also the notion of low hanging fruit vs. high hanging fruit. That is, one always begins work on a process from the process already in place. This process already allows you to receive some gain or, to use the Kaizen metaphor, pick the lowest hanging fruit. As you make improvements, you add to your gains by being able to pick the lowest hanging fruit and some higher hanging fruit. The upshot is your return in the investment of improving process is always increased return.

Kaizen can be applied to any process, from coding to writing to your morning routine. Let's talk about writing. You currently use a series of processes when you write. As you write and revise your inventory of WPA Outcomes, think how you produce writing currently and give these processes your attention. Break writing down into the steps you follow as you produce. For instance, how do you proofread? How do you draft? Do you build in time for revision? We'll be discussing how composition and rhetoric has broken down the task of writing and making speeches, but my goal here is to just give you some language for thinking about the processes you use as you create and write. I encourage you to think about processes in the work you do or want to do. Once you begin noticing the steps you follow and can accept the notion of improving how you produce through making small, continuous changes in these processes, you'll be half-way to becoming a writer.

Here are the tricks of Kaizen:

1) Pat yourself on the back. Whatever process you are now using is picking the lowest hanging fruit.
2) Know your goals.
3) Take small steps toward your goals by improving the process.
4) Pat yourself on the back for picking higher hanging fruit and moving toward your goals.
5) If a step doesn't work out, figure out why and make another change. Use the loss as an opportunity to learn. You are still picking fruit.
7) Keep the pace of change slow but steady. Every few weeks, figure out your next change and keep implementing the change until it becomes habit and routine.
8) Take time to review. Know you are making progress and picking higher fruit than you were. As you review, reward yourself and internalized your success. It is only from success that you gain confidence.
9) Include others in your goals and work toward them. Listen to their insights. Often, from outside, they will see those things which you cannot from the inside. Let these others share in and celebrate your success. Again, you gain confidence from public acclimation.
10) Don't expect the moon; instead, move toward it. As change and improvements accumulate, you will eventually obtain the moon.
11) Usually, when you reach the moon, you find out it wasn't about being there; it was about the journey, the successes along the way, your own growth, and the confidence you have gained for the next project.

Write if you have questions, comments, or observations.

FYI: Proofreading/reading tool

Proofreading is easier the more distance you can get from your work. One way to do this is to get someone else to help you proofread by reading your work out loud. This proofreading method works best when both you and your reader have a copy of your work; this way, whenever something sounds odd or off, you can put a check off to the side and use these checks as an index to things in your paper you want to check. Asking questions of your reader, like, "What was the main point of my paper?," "What would you improve?," or "Did I stay on topic?, is also a good way to get cheap feedback on your writing.

What do you do, however, if you can't get another reader to read your paper out loud? There's tech. While a computer reader won't be able to answer questions about your writing--at least, not yet. It will read you back your words EXACTLY as you wrote them. Add in a hard copy and a pen with which to put check marks off to the side, and you have a workable part of a decent proofreading system.

Check out this free text-to-speech web based converter:

http://readthewords.com/

Catch up on missed election speeches and debates.

Going for the extra credit for discussing the election with your classmates? Looking for a subject for this week's rhetorical analysis? Tired of not knowing about the speech about which everyone is talking?

Follow the following link to legit online access to tonight's debate, past speeches, etc.:

http://lifehacker.com/5059937/catch-tonights-presidential-debate-on-hulu

Thanks to lifehacker...

FYI: Real World Advice on Acquiring Better Study Habits

One of my favorite blogs, AskMetafilter, does nothing more than act as a place where folks can write in with a question and get good suggestions on how to answer it.

Recently, a graduate student wrote in asking how to acquire better study habits than those which got him his initial degree, and he got some good advice--advice I wish I had heard long before graduate school.

Please note: the question was posed by a graduate student, who was suddenly looking at the task of preparing for comprehensive exams. Think of all the classes you've ever taken and an exam where any question from any class is fair game, and you have a good idea of what comps are like. One reason folks with a masters or a doctorate know how to study is most of us had to sweat comprehensives at one time or another, but the skills I had to learn then would sure have made my life as an freshman much, much easier.

Here's the link:

http://ask.metafilter.com/103544/Help-Ive-fallen-and-I-cant-get-up

FYI: Apostrophes

Apostrophes are the bug-a-bear of many writers, not just students learning the ropes. If apostrophes give you fits, you might follow this link:

English Apostrophe Society

The society is dedicated to stamping out the over use and misuse of apostrophes in English. They have some truly funny pictures of places where folks used an apostrophe or six where they shouldn't have. More important, they have some easy to follow rules for when and when not to use apostrophes in your writing.

Today's post is thanks to Instructify.

Steve

Assignment: Get together with your group.

Since groups are still getting to know one another and there are folks still looking for a group to join, I am going to focus this week's work on your getting to know your group better, an evaluation of your performance as a group member, and everyone setting up some shared expectations about how group work will be done.

1. All groups with five or fewer members should advertise on the class list for additional members. There are a few folks still looking. Don't go over six members. If you are one of the folks looking for a group, advertise your need.

2. I would like you to set up a meeting with your group for this week. I *strongly* success you make this an in-person meeting, but a conference call--a far worst choice--might suffice. Knowing and having faces to go with the folks on whom you depend is important. In your meeting, review your performance as a group to date. Talk about ways you can improve group interaction, getting your assignments done and in on time, and establish ways to set mid-week due dates and keep one another accountable. You might also spend some time getting everyone up to speed on using google documents.

3. Using google docs, co-author a group authored review of your performance. By sharing this document with me once you finish it, let me know of specific plans to improve your group performance and to mutually support one another. This isn't about critiquing specific members, focus your review on ways members can improve overall group performance.

4. Use one of your rhetorical analysis for this week to write about how you have communicated with your group and how you might make your efforts more successful. Be honest. You're going to be working with groups throughout the rest of your career. What you learn now will pay off.

The secret to working with a group is to meet and/or communicate regularly. Communication is essential. You know how successful any relationship is without clear and regular communication. When you communicate: 1) establish clear expectations and known responsibilities; 2) set realistic deadlines and share these, in writing, with one another; 3) if work isn't getting done, give one another permission to check in via phone, email, IM, etc.; and, 4) give each other permission to contact me if a problem occurs which your group can't or shouldn't handle.

I'll be happy to attend subsequent group meetings, but not this first one.

Since much of your class participation grade is tied to how your group performs overall and what you learn about working with and using groups to help you write better, your time and effort are well spent. The upshot is I'm not going to make anything else due, but get your group in shape, as you'll soon be learning more from interacting with them than from me.

Notes on Proofreading.

Below you'll find my notes on various tips and tricks to help you proofread better. Over the rest of the semester, try out as many of the techniques I discuss as you can. Not every technique will work for every writer, but I'm confident you will find three or four which will help you catch surface level issues you are now missing.

Remember, proofreading differs from revision. When you proofread, you're looking at the surface level and polishing grammar, spelling and usage. When you revise, you're concerned with clarifying what you say, perfecting the organization, adding to your text, and cutting. In short, in revision, you want to deal with meaning and deep level issues. You proofread *after* you revise; otherwise, the effort you put into proofreading may well be wasted. One last note: one difference between editing and proofreading is that one edits another's text while one proofreads one's own.

On texts of some length, proofreading/editing is often the final step in the writing process prior to publishing your text. Proofreading usually takes place nearer the end of the revision process than at the beginning. Why? Because it doesn't make sense put in the effort to proofread every sentence and word level issue until your draft is fairly solid. In other words, why proofread and edit sentences and words which might still be cut or changed?

You can also waste time proofreading haphazardly. Once you've learned how to proofread systematically, your prose will be more successful and polished, and you'll save effort and time over haphazard, disorganized means you may currently be using.

In any event, here are my own notes on proofreading. You can now update your writing inventory on learning various techniques involved with different stages of the writing process.

Those notes just below are the main ones to remember:

It's nearly impossible to effectively proofread your own work. You know what you mean to say. When you read your own work, you often read over mistakes. My best piece of advice is to get others to proofread your work. Try to get at least three people to look at your work prior to turning it in. If necessary, hire someone or create a writer's group to help you with proofreading.

EVERYONE makes mistakes. Don't kick yourself for your mistakes, learn to recognize them and how to fix them. Even then, you'll still make mistakes.

I once worked for an academic journal. Four sets of eyes proofed each article--the professor who wrote it, myself, the departmental secretary, and the editor. Still, EVERY time we got the journal back from the printers, I opened it to a random page and found at least one mistake. EVERYONE, even professionals, make mistakes. I know, for instance, there are more than a few errors in these notes.

When you proofread, you're trying to do something called breaking set. This means you want to change the set or usual way you read, so you don't read over mistakes. Most of the proofreading tricks I list below have to do with changing how you read, so you can see what you've written.

1. Give yourself time to proofread. It's easy to find yourself adding the last sentence to a text at the last possible minute. As we finish drafting, the last thing we want to do is acknowledge there's yet more work to do. We want to be done. Resist the temptation. Give yourself time to proofread. Your final product will be better for the time. To give yourself time, set your deadline for finishing your draft in time to revise the draft for content and structure and to still have time to proofread.

2) Read backwards from the last sentence to the first. When proofreading for spelling, read backwards one word at a time. Learn to isolate each word, even those which have been passed by the spell check. It doesn't catch every misspelling. When proofreading for sentence issues, read backwards one sentence at a time.

3) Read slowly and out loud. You'll be surprised how reading something out loud, as opposed to silently, will let you hear errors you'd otherwise overlook.

4) Read to someone else. Reading your paper to someone else forces you to take an audience into account. Not only can the person you're reading to ask questions about content, they can mark places in a copy of your paper where they're confused or they hear an error as you read. When you hear a mistake or a piece of awkward phrasing, you can mark it and come back later to fix it.

5) Print out your text. If you usually read your papers on the screen, make a hard copy. As you find errors, mark them, and later revise your electronic copy. When we're drafting and hit the creative zone, we often work quickly and have a hard mental focus on meaning. These habits of reading quickly and thinking in terms of meaning and adding or cutting content can track over into efforts to proofread on the screen. Remember, when you're proofreading, you're not so much worried about content or organization (hopefully, each of these elements was polished earlier in the writing process), when proofreading you're looking at mechanics, usage, spelling, and grammar and only at mechanics, usage, spelling, and grammar.

6) Get someone else to read your work to you. Print out two hard copies. Get a friend to read your work to you. Both of you mark places which don't make sense or appear to be problematic. Use both copies as an index when fixing your text. Go back and look at each place which was marked and try to figure out what caused the area to get marked.

7) Have the computer read the text two you. Make a hard copy and set up the computer to read the text out loud. It will read what's there. Every time you hear an error, mark your hard copy. Use your marked copy as an index to what needs to be fixed. You can find many free text to speech readers by just googling.

8) Give yourself time. Breaking set isn't just about reading backwards or reading out loud. You get close to a text when you draft it and work on content and structural revision. If you try to proofread after working this closely with the text, you'll find yourself seeing what you meant to say rather than what you're actually saying. Horace, a Roman rhetorician, recommended putting what you write away for nine years, that is, until it reads as if someone else wrote it. We don't have such luxury, but giving yourself a day or two to let the text set, even just doing something else between finishing your content revisions and proofreading, gives distance enough so you're can bring fresh eyes back to your text. So, finish your draft and reward yourself with a night's sleep, a night out, or a workout prior to proofreading.

9) Give yourself time to proofread. Slow down. You're not in a race to get through, you're trying to look closely at multiple things, and the process takes time. Slow down. Read slowly. Take the time it takes to truly see and truly edit every sentence and word.

10) Physically touch every word. Talk about breaking set! Read backwards. Read out loud, and touch every word to make sure you're seeing and proofreading each and every word and sentence.

11) Use the grammar and spell checker. The state of the art in grammar and spell checkers isn't quite there yet, but they can help you see some errors. Just don't their word as law. Use them for the things at which they're effective. They can isolate "to be" verb constructions and give you an index to possible passive voice constructions. They can show you long sentences. They can usually recognize subject verb disagreements. They can sometimes help with punctuation. The real trick with using grammar and spell checkers is to learn their weaknesses and to learn how to customize them to the style of writing you want to reproduce.

12) Boo-boo or demon words. You know these words. They're the ones which sneak through the spell checker. Usually they're jargon or proper names you misspell or forget to capitalize. You can customize autocorrect to make corrections for your most typical boo-boo words.

13) Use a ruler or a piece of paper to isolate the sentences you're proofreading. This practice forces you to look at the sentence you're proofing, not the next sentence, not the previous sentence, the sentence you're supposed to be looking at.

14) Learn your problem areas. Everyone is prone to making different mistakes. If you or someone else sees a pattern in your mistakes, put it on a personal "list of things I have to look at when proofreading." (This is why it's a good idea to read the papers you get back from teachers and proofreaders. Often your professor will mark errors. Use their work to help develop your list of "things at which I have to look.") By learning to recognize the problems you're prone to introducing into the text and how these errors can be fixed, you'll soon find yourself making fewer errors. Every once in a while, take your copy of "things at which I have to look" and find your worse error. Spend some time researching how to recognize and fix your worse error. Eventually, you'll find your list of common errors getting shorter and your sentence level writing improving in proportion.

Adding Collaborators Seems to be Fixed

Reports from most students say the problem with adding collaborators seems to be fixed. Here's what to do if you have trouble:

1. Clear your browser's catch of cookies and temporary files.

If step one doesn't allow you to add collaborators, try:

2. Add collaborators one at a time.

When you share your google doc with a group of collaborators (Shart tab ===> Share with Others ====> Add collaborators window), you have two choices, adding folks as full collaborators or adding folks as viewers. Add your group and me as a full collaborator. This will allow us not only to read and view your document, but it will allow us to leave comments, suggestions, etc. I've had some reports of students not being able to edit once they open a document shared with them, my best guess is that this is because they've been added as a viewer rather than a full collaborator.

Steve

Problems with adding collaborators in google docs.

After touting the wondrous simplicity and ease of use of using google docs to collaborate, Google has picked now to prove me wrong.

If you've tried to add several folks as collaborators, and you've received an error message to the effect, "The server encountered an error. Try again later." You are far from alone. It's a google issue and isn't limited to this class, but is happening all over the web. Here is what I know about the problem and what is being said online about it:

The problem with the server is not you or your machine. There is something else going on, as the same problem is happening with other students and on my machine. From what I've been able to gather, folks are often able to add one collaborator at a time, but trying to add more sometimes--not always--is giving the google servers fits. I've read reports online that faster connections are getting through better, so I suspect some folks are just being timed out by google. The good thing is that google knows of the problem, but it has been unusually slow in fixing it.

For right now, try the trick of adding one collaborator at a time.

Resource Post: "Punctuation Made Simple."

Follow the link to an approachable discussion of punctuation: "Punctuation Made Simple."

List of Assignments and My Comments

A student took the time to go back and read the blog actively noting each assignment. She started with a list of questions, and she made notes as she read for each assignment. The list is valuable enough, I decided to share it with you. Her notes are in black, my responses, corrections, and comments are in red.

As always, write with questions.

Stev

The only assignment I see you've left out is the one working with Google Docs this week and those associated with introducing yourself and forming groups.

Unless I correct you below, assume your understanding of an assignment jives with my own.

Keep asking the excellent questions. With your permission, I would like to share your synopsis and my responses with the entire class. It is a helpful summary.

Weekly Rhetorical Analysis (Correct)

Due Sun @ midnight
Write 2 rhetorical analysis using magic questions or explore one question in depth using 250-500 words
• Send to entire class (Later these will be shared with only your group using Google Docs.)
  

Extra Credit for Weekly Assignments - Write about the election (This is ongoing for the semester. In addition to writing about the election and its rhetoric on the class list, you are to discuss the election and its rhetoric with other students, again--for right now--via the list. One tactic is to use some or all of your weekly rhetorical analysis and focus them on the election.)

Critique Others' Weekly Rhetorical (Read each of the rhetorical analysis and offer feedback. Double check the assignment on the blog. In some classes--depending on the other writing and feedback load--I suggest responding to each rhetorical analysis. This would have you doing six per week rather than to one per student.)

• Due Wed @ midnight
• Read one rhetorical analysis from each group member (since we have 4 people in our group, this means that I should read 3)
• Note what they did well
• Make 2 suggestions on improvements
• Send to entire class

Error List for MLK -- (Keeping the error list is an ongoing assignment begun with the King feedback. As you gain feedback from other assignments--like the weekly rhetorical analysis-- you'll be updating the list and using it as an index for issues on which you can focus to improve your writing. I haven't had you update the error list as of yet, but the work is coming.)

• Is the error list only for MLK or is it a repository for all of the feedback we receive? If it's not then would you point out in the blog where you state that his is for all writings? This will help me discover how I'm overlooking details of the assignments.
• Send to entire class ALONG with our (King Analysis) revisions based on the error list

King Draft Revision (Correct. At least one group decided to share feedback with the entire group, not just send it to the author. This is fine, but it is not required. In fact, the tactic gives everyone the chance to see feedback and learn from it; but, some students may not yet be comfortable with sharing such specific and detailed criticism. Yes, I did want a compilation email of the criticisms you gave to the members of your group. The only way to complete this entire assignment prior to 5 October is to coordinate with your group to complete portions of it during the week.)

• Revise draft based on feedback and error list
• Send revision to group only (not entire class)
• Critique each group member's newly revised draft (for my group that means that I provide feedback on 3 draft - revisions)
• Provide feedback on 2 paragraphs and how they can be improved
• Due BEFORE Sun, Oct 5th (coordinate with members)
  
• Send feedback to the author, not the group, not the class
• Send YOU the criticisms that I gave to each group member
• Sign my name to the email
• State ENG 112 in the email

The Ben Franklin reading assignment was nothing more than a reading assignment, correct? We had an option to use this in our weekly rhetorical. Is this correct? (Correct. My understand of New Federal Law requires colleges which receive federal funding to develop course work relating to the Constitution. The Franklin assignment was a way to show the class even the Constitution and Declaration of Independence went through a long revision process.)