WR115
An Introduction to College Writing
Through Critical Reading:
A Community of Scholars Examines Sports in Society
Monday, July 16, 2012
Subjects & Verbs in Sentences
Blueprints, First Drafts, & Unity
Order of Business
10:20-10:40
Reflective Freewrite & Homework Check
10:40-11:00
Review of Preposition Homework
11:00-11:30
Finding Subjects & Verbs in Sentences
11:30-11:35
BREAK
11:05-12:05
Essay 1: Race, Ethnicity, and Gangs in Sports
12:05-12:10
Homework Review
Reflective Freewrite &
Homework Check
• Place your homework on the work area where you sit. Fold
your Implicit Bias homework so it cannot be seen, but have all
other items available for inspection.
• Reflective Freewrite 1: Inspect your preposition homework.
Prepositions are potent little words that relate a noun or a
pronoun to any part of a sentence. Some sentences are
mostly made up of prepositions. Reflect on your experience in
completing the preposition worksheet. Did you reach a point
at which you “got it,” meaning that you could almost
instinctively spot prepositions in a sentence?
Preposition Homework Review
• Homework Review: Work with one or two other
people to compare your answers on the
prepositional phrase homework. Discuss why
you selected the phrases that you did. Come to
consensus, if possible; if not, save your questions
for class discussion.
• Class discussion: Finding verbs and their
subjects in sentences once you have found and
eliminated all of the prepositional phrases.
Finding Verbs & their Subjects
in Sentences: The Tense Test
• Homework Review: Work with one or two other
people and compare your answers. Discuss why
you identified certain words as the verbs of a
sentence and why you identified other words as
the subjects of those verbs.
• Discussion
Visual Literacy
• Visual Literacy Review
Take a Break
• But keep it short!
• http://timer.onlineclock.net/
Essay 1: Assignment Directions
• For each essay you write for this class and for
most courses in college, you will receive detailed
directions about how the essay is to be written,
documented, and formatted.
• This essay will discuss your thesis (an opinion—
yours!) on some aspect of race, ethnicity, and
gangs in sports. You can narrow the topic down
or you may write a paper that discusses your
ideas in broad strokes.
• Let’s review the directions.
Overview of the Essay-Writing Process
YOU’RE DONE! Turn in your paper on time!
6. PROOFREAD. This means checking your work for typos, spelling, formatting errors, and
other mechanical errors (punctuation, capitalization, etc.)
5. REVISION AND PEER REVIEW. These two processes go hand-in-hand. Read your work with a
critical eye beaded on organization, clarity, and coherence. Where do you need to further
flesh out your ideas? What do you need to explain in greater depth? Where do you need to
provide examples, illustrations, interviews, personal accounts, scenarios, and case studies to
make your ideas crystal clear to a reader? Where do you need more support in the form of
facts, statistics, authoritative statements, and expert opinions? You should put your paper
through at least two serious revisions, producing second and third drafts. Use a peer
reviewer, and if you like, have a tutor read your paper aloud to you so you can detect and
correct your sentence errors. Use the tutor only to help you detect errors that you missed
and to help you understand and correct stubborn errors.
4. WRITE THE FIRST DRAFT. Use the Blueprint Outline and/or your second or most elaborate idea map to
sketch out your first draft. Make sure that you write complete sentences, and make sure that each
paragraph has a topic sentence.
3. ORGANIZE. Establish in your own mind how your ideas are related to one another. Write linking sentences that
explicitly state what the relationships are between your idea pairs. Or, freewrite in response to specific
questions that you write about the relationships between your ideas. Evaluate these ideas for the strength
of their relationships to your other ideas. Look for an idea that is central to your other ideas, or, look for your
most well-connected idea. This idea will be your best candidate for a thesis. Map your ideas and transfer
them to the Essay Blueprint.
2. DEVELOP SOME IDEAS. Read more; discuss more, and freewrite, freewrite, freewrite. Examine your freewrites, reading
and discussion notes, and underscore key ideas that jump out at you. Make a list of your ideas.
1. LEARN ABOUT A TOPIC. Read, discuss, observe, learn a vocabulary specific to your topic, and take notes.
Essay 1: Finding your Thesis
Statement
• First, let’s revisit Kitam Hamm, Jr. through the eyes of
Jeff Benedict, who was one of the authors who wrote
“Straight Outta Compton”:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/writers/jeff_benedict/12/01/gan
gs.compton/index.html
• Discussion: This story demonstrates how sports can
focus young people in a way that helps them avoid gang.
What else must be present in the young athlete’s life for
sports to work this kind of magic?
The Blueprint (Outline)
• Once you have formulated your thesis statement, it’s
time to complete a blueprint.
• The blueprint is a virtual first draft. It shows how
you are going to develop your thesis statement.
Your three or four topic sentences will each develop
your thesis in some significant way.
• The topic sentences should be drawn from your
linking sentences worksheet, where you wrote out
sentences detailing how your different ideas are
related.
• Once you reach to this stage, you have organized the
basic framework of your essay.
A Word to the Wise
• Remember, first drafts are first drafts.
• They are meant to be revised, which means that
you look at your ideas at least two more times,
each time with “new eyes”– those of your
reviewer(s).
• Just to drive this point home, we will read “Shitty
First Drafts” by Anne Lamott.
Homework Assigned
• Aplia, complete by Sunday, July 22nd ,
11:45 p.m.
• Blueprint of Essay 1
Due Wednesday, July 18th
• “Shitty First Drafts”: Read & Annotate
Due Monday, July 23rd