class_topics: April 2008 Archives

In small groups, you will give an informal presentation on how the sources you have found in your research are helping you to develop your thesis statement.

Focus on finding peer-reviewed academic articles and scholarly books. Note that you might not find a whole book or article on your chosen literary work. If so, you will need to look for brief references to your chosen work in publications on related subjects.

Wikipedia, SparkNotes, and other online study guides are not appropriate sources -- they simply summarize what you can find by reading more credible sources directly. Everything you learned in STW about finding peer-reviewed sources applies in English, but note that I will expect you to draw on literary scholarship. It's OK to use an article published in an education journal, or a criminology journal, or even (if you have a good reason) a scientific journal; but your thesis should be an argument about a work of literature, not about an educational theory, or a government policy, or a fact about the natural world.

In class Friday, after I realized that students weren't as familiar with prefixes, roots, and suffixes as I had expected (I had four years of that stuff in high school), I decided to add a quick unit on that subject. We might not get as far into the ongoing changes that English is experiencing, but if you know more about the raw material of language (that is, the pieces that make up our vocabulary), you'll be able to make more sense out of new words you encounter.

Prefixes are important, as in this label for an "AB NORMAL" brain.