MbShea@PWP@English@UMCP

Wednesday information:  Some links to help you are in this post.

We will meet in GoogleMeet at this link at two times; attend the one that you can.

• 10 AM
• 12 NOON (outside our regular class times but this time was widely requested.

We will take notes and I will POST THEM here later in the day. This means that for those not attending, you can gather a bit of information about these F2F sessions.  Ask questions on GroupMe, too.  And, recall that those who answer, we really appreciate this work. Labor grading policies also cover this type of activity, even if I do not know specifically who helps out.  

Simultaneosly, I will have a google doc OHitS/AMA open but will be most active there at

• 9AM
• 11AM 

Because 10AM is the first GoogleMeet session.  You can post your questions there and I will scurry to answer.

All of these resources should help you learn within the Memo 2 assignment (this is my most central goal) and revise the document into a good document for an A.

ON WEDNESDAY, in the sessions, we will need to decide if we have one or two additional peer editing sessions. TB Discussed.  The final draft for a grade is due before April 1. All of April is devoted to your article review assignment. Then, we are done. BEFORE FINALS.

Today's language lesson concerns empty subjects.  Let's NOT use them in sentences, though they are quite common and come to us from spoken English.

Empty subjects (DRAFT) HANDOUT.

Take-away for Memo 2: Now, you have an additional tool about strong sentences. Please, focus particularly on your sentences as you open and close a paragraph or document section. Readers are cognitively primed to pay attention in this "high value real estate" locations.   A good approach is to write short, clear direct sentences at the beginning and ends of paragraphs.  Why in these positions?  The brain is attending carefully to

• the topic sentence position, where the main idea of the paragraph is announced
• in the transition position BETWEEN the two paragraphs.  On Friday, we will look closely at two types of transition strategies: tight and loose.  In tight transitions, you repeat a word or phrase at the end of one paragraph and the beginning of the other paragraph.  In loose transitions, you invoke meaning between these two paragraphs with similar or related concepts.

Meet up on Google Docs on Wednesday's OHits/AMA.

Mini lesson today on transitions between paragraphs: how to achieve cognitive flow in the text for readers to experience.

First, begin by looking at this OWL PURDUE exhibit on useful meta discourse transition words and phrases. Meta discouse works to weave all types of content together.  However, for the best cognitive flow, we also need to link the content.  Tight and loose transtions strategies help us connect content within a document.  Back to paragraphs and the specific locations with paragraphs where transition craft works:  

• look at the last sentence of each paragraph; 
• then, look at the first sentence in the next paragraph.

Do you see connection between content, including a reasonable pivot or shift to new information?  The paragraphs, although they stand alone in topic and content, should CONNECT or TRANSITION with the surrounding paragraphs.   This is how to achieve that important quality of FLOW.

Paragraph check: Ask

• What is the paragraph doing in the document?  What type of paragraph serves this purpose? For example, a narrative paragraph can tell a brief story or present a case or example.  An illustrative paragraph – cousin to descriptive paragraphs - paints a picture.
  
• Is the paragraph cohesive?  Does the content “hang” together?  Do the sentence choices achieve cohesion?  Look at the transition words and phrases in the OWL link above.  You can use them to achieve cohesion and flow between sentences. This focus is called local coherence, which is key to achieving flow.
  

Finally, paragraphs do not truly stand alone in most documents. Paragraphs combine to provide coherent content in a document for a reader.  Ask this:  do the paragraphs fit and support the arrangement or structure of the document?  Focus on transitions between paragraphs, which help with cohesion in the document.  Local coherence (within a paragraph) + global coherence (between paragraphs and within a document) create overall flow.

Cheap! Way To achieve cohesion between paragraphs try "chaining" by transitions. Place the  topic of the next paragraph in the last sentence of the preceding paragraph. The first sentence of the new paragraph must include that topic also. Doing this knits or binds the paragraphs to each other.  Here is how a math person would say this: 

Let ParaA be the preceding paragraph. 

Let ParaB be the following paragraph.  

Let T be the topic that should appear in both paragraphs.  

We will limit our discussion now to two sentences: 

•  
  • the last sentence of ParaA and the 
  • first sentence of ParaB. 

In reality, ParaA and ParaB exist in a document with an arrangement of many paragraphs (why I focus on arrangements in these memo assignments).

ParaA relates to ParaB through the last sentence of ParaA AND SIMULTANEOUSLY through the first sentence of ParaB. The relating elements is a topic, T;  T can be a repeated word or a phrase.  Some variation on T makes for good style.  Now, let's look at two real world documents that show two types of T: tight transitions and loose transitions. See the difference between tight and loose?

tight transitions pivot on specific words and identical or nearly identical phrases; while

loose transitions pivot with reasonable word/phrase/concept substitutions.