MbShea@PWP@English@UMCP

so bring digital copy all week.  Today:

• items here for class discussion
• revising away all it and its (an exercise for you to learn this technique
• revising away all there is/there are (also an exercise; go to the NOUN or NOUN phrase immediately)
• sentences patterns, reposting from below

  problem-solution frame

  PLUS journalism details of Who (Larry Coffman); When (early 1990s); and Where (Prince George's County, MD).  Building your ethos with his ethos and the reporter's eye for detail.

Sentence Patterns
Buffy and Sentences
Pitch the Verb



Wednesday:  we will curate links and remove the formal citation, relying on links and signal phrases for what we call natural language citation.  Have two additional links with really good visuals to include at the end of your revised memo.

Also:  that classifying paragraph?  We can deepen our writing practice for coherence by revising this large, baggy, "kitchen sink" paragraph with:

to class. We will start our revision work.  You can work a bit over the weekend, if you like. Take 30 minutes and revise some of your sentences according to the three handouts posted last week and discussed in class today (Friday).

Hint: you cannot do ALL the techniques all the time. Writing and revising requires a serious of judgements about sentence choices.  I want you to have ALL THE SENTENCE SKILZ.

By the way, we are totally team Oxford comma. So is Mike Pompeo.

SPECIFIES which information is from your cited source.  Classic writing problem: does the citation encompass the sentence, the paragraph?; if paragraph, the entire paragraph?

Also, signal phrases show your care in citation, your sophistication, and your wish to help the reader keep moving through your prose without distracting questions.

Signal phrases for the illustrating and evaluation paragraphs:

• According to the Prince George's County Bioretention Manual. . . 
• This large technical guide was written by Larry Coffman, who invented rain gardens in the early 1990s.  
• Allen Davis studies rain garden effectiveness and pioneered most of the evaluation techniques for bioretention.  His summary (four paged PDF posted at the University of Maryland) summarizes more than 25 years of research and findings.

To be clear:  use author-date parenthetical citations within the paragraphs AND list the APA bibliographic citation with referral links.

Now, onto the checklist. You will see here opening/closing sentences that actually form "bookend" paragraphs that rely on manners and common sense. To be discussed in class.

Bring your hard copy document to class on Wednesday OR ready to print out in class, to turn in for a grade.  Be prepared to earn more extra credit by editing a Wikipedia article with some detail that you now know.

GroupMe created by M and B. Join as an additional way to stay on top of class material.

Engl 390 on GroupMe. Join now to chat for free from your mobile phone, tablet or on the web. Share photos, locations and more!

Audience scenario for this memo: Here is Jane, our boss. She asked for the memo at the end of our last staff meeting. 

irst up! What is a memo?  

By the way, the OWL website at Purdue is a fabulous resource for writing. Memos also have a standard format:  See the image to the left.  Also, look at the email heading in your software.  This electronic message is based on the memo format.  Bonus question:  what is the difference, traditionally, between a memo and a letter.

Topic Sentences: A list of qualities for you to strive for

• Usually a short direct sentence (think announcement)
• Signals the topic in the paragraph (think preview)
• Hooks the reader by 1) raising a question or 2) provoking thought
• Can be placed anywhere, but early on in the paragraph is the best default strategy for most professional documents; in other words, at the beginning of the paragraph
• Contains an element of transition from the previous paragraph

Note:  topic sentences can be implied in tightly coherent prose (for now, leave this subtle technique to the professionals!)

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: 

Sentence Patterns
Buffy and Sentences
Pitch the Verb

And, on to paragraphs:

Paragraph Definition: think architectures

Paragraph Types

----

MONDAY!  Peer review in class, digital mode.  Hard copy due on Wednesday (weather flexible, I think. TBA).

Drilling down into the second stasis of DEFINITION.  Here are some patterns outlined in a short Google doc. Aristotle wrote about definitions as an act of categorization.  We will focus on this move today.

• short working definition
• classification and context para
• detailed CAUSAL definition (picks up stasis 3)
• evaluation paragraph (picks up stasis 4)

By the way, we can build a short, clear informational memo out of the ARRANGEMENT ordered above.  :)  Incidentally, this approach of short detail toward expanded detail is called the cognitive wedge. The cognitive wedge (my coinage) relies on the Given-New concept from Halliday (distinguished British cognitive linguist) and others.  You can skim this hypertext presentation.  What I want you to note is that:

• Given-New patterns reflect an awareness of human cognition
• good writers think carefully on what the audience knows and needs to know (MEMORY)
• Given-new is one of many choices that writers make, with our judgement a key to making choices.
• Hint: location in a document, paragraph, or sentence is strategic for writers and readers. 

Slides (Google) to guide how we write and rewrite this memo are here. You can preview this presentation if you like but we will look at them all week in class.

 (My scan of a Dover Clip Art Collection Science and Industry, 1998