Introductions

Welcome, again, to English 103, summertime edition.  This English class is a bit different than many English classes that you may have taken before.  There aren't any novels.  There aren't many poems.  More than anything, this class should help you to think about reading and writing in the most general sense.  We read and write all the time.  We read each other.  We compose in a host of different ways, increasingly online, so there's a lot to be learned even by having this class digitally.

Each day on this blog, I'll have a post that goes over a few points, and has your blog assignment for the day, which will count as your class attendance for the day and count for participation grades based on the grade point worksheet.

I'll also usually have some kind of grammar review attached to each blog post that will help us remember some basic things, like where our commas are supposed to go.  At the college level, you're expected to know and do these things in your writing, but I find that most of the time, students like having different refreshers on that needlessly intimidating thing known as "grammar."  You know who to blame for grammar?  This guy.

Anyways, the foundation of reading and writing was studied by the Greeks and was known as rhetoric.  Rhetoric is a tricky word that most people only associate with politicians who lie, but we use rhetoric all the time.  We use rhetoric whenever we communicate, in our body language, in our drawings, in the way we dress, in printed or spoken language, in Youtube videos.  Check out the Wikipedia entry for rhetoric now.

An essay is quite another matter.  In French, the word essayer means "to try."  The etymologies of words can be really interesting.  Here in this class, each essay will be an attempt at conveying something.  Writing is tough.  But it can be fun if you can find a way of writing something that you care about in an interesting way.  That's the trick.  Compose about topics that you love or hate, and have fun with it.  That's what we'll try to do here.

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On a personal note, my mom's funeral was yesterday.  Things have been a little crazy with all of that, but  there's a lot of peace with my family here.  We know she's in a better place.  She fought cancer for eight years, and she was a feisty one, so most people wouldn't have ever guessed that she even had cancer, but in the end it was her time.  We'll miss her, but I'm going to try to be tough like she was, keep on keeping on, and enjoy this class with you guys.  Since, we'll be blogging, things can sometimes be a bit personal; that's good.  We'll create a community online together.  I look forward to it.

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Your Daily Assignment:

1. Read over the syllabus.  That's our class contract.
2. Write a blog post introducing yourself.  Include a picture that represents you.  Tell us something that you hate; it's important to know what you hate.
3. Read chapter one in your Envision in Depth book about rhetoric.  And in case you haven't gotten your teal copy of Envision in Depth yet, I've got a scanned pdf of the first chapter here.  And here's the second chapter.  But that's all I'm giving you!  Get the book!  (Aristotle's definition is in there, and that's the one we'll go by).  There are a lot of basic concepts for this class in that chapter, such as logos, ethos, and pathos... and kairos too.  Most of the time, I'll just have you skim a chapter, and then I'll point out specific things or have you do something related to a chapter's contents on your blogs.