Wednesday's Email Announcement

I hope your semester is going well. I enjoyed the office visits, since it's a chance for me to connect on a personal level and put a face and a personality to the writing I already know.

This message has several parts.

 

1) No office hours today
2) Active / passive verb follow-up
3) Yesterday's peer review exercise
4) Upcoming assignments

 

 

1) I have a faculty meeting this afternoon during my regular office hours, so I'll have to cancel that slot. I will of course be happy to take questions by email, through a comment posted on the course website, or an appointment at a time that works for both of us.
 
2) I've posted a review of active and passive verbs, including links to good resources that I didn't actually use in class. We'll spend more time on this concept. The key thing to remember is that passive sentences are not wrong, but they are usually less precise and more wordy than active sentences.
 
http://jerz.setonhill.edu/LA100/2010/09/active_verbs/index.php
 
 
3) I was very pleased by the peer review exercise so far.  I have not yet flipped the switch that will make the peer responses visible. I aim to do that during class Thursday, so that once again I can see what you see and troubleshoot any problems that occur.
 
Some of you have noticed that even if you provided an answer for every question, you might see a message saying something like "85% complete."  I believe that message is telling you that you haven't reached the minimum word count in some of the boxes. (I see red asterisks next to some of the questions.)
 
But I also see that some students who didn't write long answers in the required boxes often wrote many helpful comments -- and the work you put into making those comments does not get counted towards the minimum word count.
 
Past versions of Turnitin.com did not make it very easy for students to leave peer comments, but I can see from the work you folks did that you had no trouble posting comments.  I want to encourage you to keep leaving comments, so next time we do this exercise, I will revise the questions in order to work the excellent comment capability into the assignment.
 
As far as evaluating this particular exercise, so long as you made a good-faith effort to answer the questions in the boxes, you can ignore what the computer says about your answers being "incomplete." I will give you credit for your constructive criticism, whether you answered the question in the box or in the comments.

4) I've adjusted the course website slightly, giving us a little more time to work on some of the assignments. 

• Thursday, we will start on Essay 2, and you will also have time to start revising Essay 1. 
  
• Tuesday Sep 28, a revision of Essay 1 is due (you will have my feedback before then), along with Paragraph 4 "My Secret." (Details are on the page for Sep 28.) 
• On the 30th, I'm asking for a draft of Essay 2, along with an "ILP Midterm Reflection" (more details to be announced).