Response to Delpit article

A few questions came up when I was reading Delpit’s article. One being, is the way that we speak varies from state to state, country to country, is this the correct way to speak, and who is to judge the way to speak? [a long sentence]. Is there really a right or wrong way to speak? Here in Washington it seems like we don’t have any accents. The way we speak sounds normal to us, but when we travel to different states they sound different to us. [Compound sentence + a fanboys] Delpit talks about how Oakland had an Ebonics debate about the African American language. Why is that race being targeted for the way they speak, because who is to say what the norm is for speaking? Another thing that Delpit brings up was when she was searching the Internet and read the comments about the African Americans during the Ebonics debate. The people that were making those comments, about how African Americans don’t know how to speak, are the people that are probably so ignorant to the fact that everyone in this country speaks differently than the next.  [A very long sentence] Reading this article will help me with my writing [a shorter sentence]. It really brings to life that you cannot judge a person for talking differently then you. To them, you also speak differently.

COMPLEX SENTENCES WOOP

This week our patterns were more focused on the structure of sentences. Mainly focusing on complex sentences. This week I learned many things that I didn’t know about sentences. I never knew what a subordinating conjunction as, until this week (I obviously knew what they were but I didn’t know that’s what they were called). Here are examples of my complex sentences:

Even in the small town of Wenatchee, Washington there are problems with gender roles in classrooms. I had the chance to talk to a teacher who taught at a school district in Wenatchee. This teachers name was Kelsey and even though she has only been teaching for two years she is well versed on the day-to-day happenings in the classroom, she also happens to be my cousin. After bringing up the subject of my paper, she told me a story of when she was teaching kindergarten [Independent clause, dependent clause, coordinating conjunction];

Or this sentence could look like this:

I brought up the subject of my paper after she told me a story of when she was teaching kindergarten [Independent clause, dependent clause, coordinating conjunction]; the principal took one of the White student’s out of her class and placed the girl in another class. They did this because the other class had too many Hispanic students in one class; the school needed a White student to make the class more equal in race. This story is specific to the topic of racism and gender roles. The issues of race and gender differences in classrooms are obvious, but are the correct things being done to fix the problem? Teachers should be focused on students having a fair chance at succeeding in school as every other student. Sharon Chubbuck author of the article titled, Individual and Structural Orientations in Socially Just Teaching: Conceptualization, Implementation, and Collaborative Effort asks the questions, if students will access more knowledge if they look at students needs individually or the needs of the whole classroom?

As you can see it changes the context of the paper. While the first one is of her telling me her story after I told her about the subject. The second is me bringing up the topic of my subject after she told me about this story.

patterns of the week, dol and all that jazz.

Last week in class we talked about some patterns that where a little different then the normal punctuation, colon, etc. It was interesting to me to use some patterns that had to do with the structure of the sentence. In school, when we were just starting to learn about sentences, we learned just the basic sentence (and I am going to use an example from class), “Amy hit the ball.” Period. Done. That was it, and here is your simple sentence. Now as I get older, I am learning that even though those simple sentences are crucial to writing, I want to challenge myself so that all of my sentences aren’t the same. As a professional writing major I want to be able to construct my sentences in many different ways; rhetorically this is going to be crucial to my writing. When you are trying to get a point across you want to be able to fill your paper/argument with as much diversity (writing wise) as you can. 

So the patterns of the week consisted of, a compound sentence with a FANBOYS, a rhetorical fragment, and a use of the objective-case pronoun. This week instead of taking writing from my previous assignments I want to write some things on my own.

As I walked to class trudging through the feet of snow that we received over the weekend I thought to myself, “how much longer is spring break?” Not that I am counting but it is 33 days until we are out for a whole week. I do not hate the snow, nor do I like being outside in it [Compound sentence with a comma and a fanboys] but after Christmas, it should melt because nobody likes the snow after Christmas. Yet it comes. [A rhetorical fragment] Not just a dusting of snow. It comes in buckets, and buckets of snow. I look around as I am slowly trying to maintain my balance on the slippery ground and think “whom would find me if I fell right now?” [The use of object-case pronoun]

For the DOL assignment my partner and I were assigned number eight which was, examining a corporate slogan or brand that uses grammar/spelling in an interesting way. Our concept is pretty straight forward, but what I think would be interesting would be to have the class make up a slogan on their own. Have them think of a brand that they like and then come up with one slogan that uses incorrect grammar/spelling in a rhetorical way to sell their company.

Week 3

So this week we focused on some things that were a little bit different then last weeks. We focused on parenthesis, dashes, “and” in a list, the use of a reflexive pronoun. [A list without the final and] see what I did there? When writing I always forget how many different rules there are. There are so many things to remember and so going over these things in class are so helpful because I didn’t even know that “a list without the final and” was proper grammar.

So this is an excerpt from one of my papers for English 302 on Walden:

 In the article titled Freedoms Through Critique: Thoreau’s Service to Others, Mason Marshall asks the question, “If his society corrupts its members and nature is restorative, why not leave the society behind and concentrate on just communicating with nature? (Marshall 1). Which is what Thoreau himself does [the use of a reflexive pronoun]. He moves from all the corruption and busyness of the city to break free from the negativity and have a cleansed mind. He builds a house instead of asking the bank for money. Thoreau wants his life to be simple – [the use of the dash to show emphasis] he can only achieve this by cutting all ties to the outside world.

This is another example from a paper:

Making a word cloud on the website TagCrowd.com (shown at the end) [use of parentheses for emphasis]. I can see the most frequently used words and get an image of what the story entails. When looking at the words in my word cloud, I decided to choose the words that seemed to have the most significance regarding the story. These words are names of characters, and describing words such as, beauty and eyes and worked and years [the use of and].  By looking at these words the reader can get clear insight that the story is based on the theme of love and the romance between two people.