Announcements for 25 March

1.  Your assignments link for the week has been made active.

2.  We will not meet today in 206.  I gave much thought to meeting with you in class today, and I realized there was little to be gained, and you would learn more by getting started working on finishing your King research paper.  The way one learns proofreading--the only new topic for this week--is by practice and trying out techniques until one finds a set which works with where one is as a writer.  I've outlined the most common proofreading/editing techniques on a web page to which I've provided a link.  As you finish up the revisions of your King paper and come to the stage where you are satisfied with it, then proofreading begins.  Try out one or two techniques.  Do try the one which involves getting someone else to proof your work, but--in addition to asking them to proof--make sure you ask them, "What's the one thing I could learn to do in terms of grammar and usage which would make my writing clearer?"  This is the next thing you should work on fixing in terms of your grammar.  Ask me for help when you find your answer.

3.  Most of your week will be spent reading through, revising, and improving your King paper. Make sure to schedule your week with enough time to go through multiple revisions, format the paper in MLA style, create a Works Cited page, and have your printer run out of ink.  One of the tricks you should be learning in terms of writing process is to start early enough that you plan for problems to crop up and be fixed.  You've been working on this paper in stages all semester, just pull it out here at the end.

4.  One final note, whenever I have a physical paper due, especially one folks have been working on as long as you have the King paper, the universe seems to conspire to make absences jump through the roof on the day the paper is due.  Even if you don't have the paper done and ready to hand in, come to class on 1 April.

5.  The 6-8 April, I will be out of town presenting at New Horizons--a Virginia Community College Conference on teaching innovations.  [We won't have a physical class, but don't worry.  I'll have work for you to do.]  Many of you were in the "Getting a Clue" learning community last fall.  Miles McCrimmon, Jena Morrison, and I will be presenting on the course design at the conference, letting the rest of the system know about survivingsarge.pbworks.com, and maybe getting a teaching award.  As part of preparing for this award, we created a video presentation which stars some of your writing and the basic elements of the course design.  I thought those who were involved might like to view the video, so I've included a link to it below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuqAzlogdo0

As always, write with questions.

Steve