Week three: sentences and paragraphs
in the context of your rain garden memo. Some of this is review for you but consider this strategic review. You can use sentences not only to carry content BUT as designed structures to help your reader enter the material, take up information easily, and leave the document better for having read what you wrote.
Let's look at examples of topic sentences useful in the rain garden memo:
Rain gardens, or bioretention ponds, are a kind of low impact development. Low impact development....
Rain gardens have two components: layers of percolation material and carefully chosen plants.
Rain gardens protect the local environment by absorbing water run-off from impervious surfaces and by sequestering pollutants.
Dr. Allen Davis studies rain garden effectiveness. Davis, a civil engineering professor, has been studying bioretention for more than twenty years.
Let's also think about sentences generally. General advice to you? Write shorter sentences than those you are familiar with in literature and many of your textbooks.
Now, let's think about sentences (MS Word docs (1 pagers) that will likely download to your machine, depending on how your browser is arranged):
MONDAY's OHitS/AMA link here. As ever, I host from 9-12. Show up and ask a question. Lurk to see what others ask. If you are busy, you can look at that document later. If you have a question off hours, you can ask me the next class day in the new OHitS/AM document. You can also email me. In this way, we are trying to be together apart. In Testudo, this class is identified as synchronous, as in we would be f2f in real life. I am trying to honor that structure and give all of you more control over your days.
Hint: are you unclear about the level of the detail you need about rain gardens? Visiting today's document will help you. In the sentence types we try out, you can see detail. And, you can ask about the level of detail and I can answer in sample sentence structures. Learning contextually is more powerful than having you do ten pages of sentence worksheets.
Other tasks for you (labor grades in effect): how is your reading going of your chosen article? Recall Raul Pacheco-Vega's guidance on reading? Here is a Google doc I made for you to copy to your drive to keep track of reading this article. The frame is a bit simpler than the one he advises and previews the content I need for you to prepare for your March/April assignment of reviewing the article.
By the way, read his entry on cognitive overload in online higher ed courses. I feel similarly. Consequently, I am trying to design for this. Read your article in bits and parts all this month. This means that you will have a head-start on meaning before you write that third assignment.
Marybeth Shea
Good morning. We will stay in the same OHitS/AMA google doc and work on sentences, especially topic sentences and transitions. Here is a good reading by Raul Pachego Vega on the combined technique of thinking about topic sentences and paragraphs. You can skim and parse that blog post, dwelling on the images.
I am preparing a short table of practical take-aways from this reading. Note the citation style of Pachego Vega in that blog post: he notes the work of Patrick Dunleavy in this link. One additional writing/reading frame we use all year is that of the power of hypertext. That readers can choose their own adventure in many digital occasions of reaction.
Another person that he recommends and acknowledges is Eve Ewing, who uses the five-paragraph essay as a familiar structure to many writers. You may know this genre as the (famous) Extended Constructed Response.
Note: I like that RPV -- Raul Pachego Vega -- gives you the ethos clue that Dunleavy and Ewing both hold PhD degrees. THat is a kind of credibility move but I wish he would preview the platform too.
For example, how about this way to introduce linked material:
Dr. Eve Ewing is a Chicago-based sociologist who speciazes in learning and cognition, as well as cultural critique of education. One of her projects concerns writing from k-12 but extending that frame into college and career. She also writes comic books for Marvel. Here is Outlawed.
Marybeth Shea
Happy Friday. Here is the inaugural post in Eli Review for your first assignment, due Monday at 11;45 PM. Between 9-12, I host in this OHitSAMA.
The link to Eli Review is in your ELMS calendar, too. I am checking/rechecking the rest of the semester and will post links soon. Subscribe to that feed in ELMS so you can have pingy reminders.
Happy Lunar New Year. Wish we could celebrate in class with moon cakes or some other treat. Cooking gear goal, link in picture to Amazon.
Like a cookie press but for moon cake darlings
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