Assignments for 26 August 2009

Revision: KSU Football

Please revise your football essays and bring the hard copy of this revision to class on Wednesday. Also, please also bring your original draft and the attached peer review form (for reference).

NOTE: Ultimately, when you submit revisions in this class, I will almost always ask you to submit the drafts as well. Since peer review activities are going to be assessed, you will always submit peer review forms with their accompanying drafts.

 

Revise your essay in the following areas: 4 opinionated thesis 4 effective, opinionated topic sentences 4 use the active voice most of the time 4 fix any pronoun inconsistencies 4 adhere to MLA Style formatting guidelines 4 select a specific approach for your intro and conclusion 4 refer to the KSU Athletic PowerPoint 4 reconsider any part of your argument, structure, and depth

Read

Please read chapter 2 in the Ramage, Bean, and Johnson text.

Please be sure that your edition matches the one that I am using:
the 8th edition (BRIEF edition).

If you have purchased the expanded version (instead of the brief edition), then you may still use it, but I would exchange it in the bookstore for the cheaper and smaller text.

Introductions and Conclusions

Please read the coursepacket document on intros and conclusions. Inside, you will find dozens of examples of effective (and ineffective) approaches to the beginnings and endings of your essays.

Today's Topics

Consensus: KSU Football

The following information comes from last Wednesday's group discussion regarding the best PRO and CON arguments:

The collected results from the class are as follows. The numbers to the left of the listings indicate how many groups included this item in their Top 3 lists for each side of the argument:

Here is last spring's version:

Argumentation Exercise: KSU Football PowerPoint

PowerPoint presentation

We examined several aspects of this presentation, including the following lessons:

AUDIENCE
The intended audience of this PowerPoint were potential financial donors to the program. But what is YOUR intended audience in your KSU football essay?

All academic writing should be written for the general public to consume. Always pretend that you are addressing a large crowd that has gathered to hear you speak. Do not write your essays to me personally. Therefore, write your essays in the THIRD PERSON.

CRITIQUE
The concept of being critical is not supposed to convey only negative criticism. A critique needs to also recognize the good. A health inspector writing the report needs to set high standards for food quality and preparation, so achieving a 100 rating in a restaurant really indicates an attention to detail that protects the consumer's health. But the score of 100 is just as critical as is 65.

We critiqued some positive and negative attributes of this presentation. Two critical items of interest pertain to the title, which implies the pursuit of excellence, soon followed by statements that stress how excellent KSU already is.

A second awkward argument appears on slide #26, which lists the benefits of having football at KSU. One is to "[a]ttract more male students."

Think about this. Would a football team increase the percentage of male students on campus? Also, why is increasing the male population a goal for the athletics program (or for KSU)? Is this not a sexist goal?

For your information, 63% of KSU students are female.

By the way, the University of Georgia has nearly an identical percentage ... and last I checked, they had a pretty darn good football team. Therefore, why would KSU's student population become more masculine if this is not occurring at UGA?

It likely won't.

So why is it a goal?

In addition, some of you may recall the SGA football survey from last fall that asked you two questions about your interest in bringing football to this campus. The results demonstrated a clear desire for football among the student body. What the survey did not share with you, however, are the real figures for student fees, which would exceed the survey's bubble choices significantly.

This survey, by the way, was completely flawed and not trustworthy because the sample size was small and voluntary. Legitimate surveys are done scientifically in order to perform random sampling.

So, why was this flawed survey allowed to circulate? Well, if 75% of the full-time KSU women indicate an interest in football, then KSU does not have to comply with Title IX restrictions (Title IX is a federal program from the 1970s that forces public schools to invest equal amounts of money and resources to female athletics programs as they do to the male sports).

Currently, KSU houses 9 female sports and 6 male sports.

When, and if, a team is started, students will have to contribute $3.5 million annually to maintain the program (= annual student fees and/or ticket sales, roughly totaling $1,500 per student per year).

If today KSU announced that football is coming, you would have to contribute to its making, but the team couldn't play until 2013 or 2014 ... long after you will have graduated.

Finally, football is almost a guaranteed debt. Very, very few football teams make any money at all. The ones that do are the biggest named programs that come from the largest conferences. They receive their money mainly through the bowl games and TV payouts. Since KSU will not be placed in the SEC in our lifetime, and likely will never play for a national championship in Division I, KSU is guaranteed to lose millions of dollars every year for the campus, forcing the school to look for alternate means of funding to pay off its debts.

Increase tuition? More student fees? You get the idea.

I am not against KSU football, but I am aware that the realities of starting a program in the next 15 years run counter to the desire for the team to take the field.

When thinking critically, ALWAYS ask yourself, "Who benefits from this?"

Active Voice and Verb Choice

I addressed using more action verbs than linking verbs to improve your overall sentence quality.

The very best way to improve your overall writing is to enhance your verb choice.  I stressed using active voice (using action verbs) over passive voice (using linking verbs, such as is, are, was, and were).  Please keep in mind that we MUST use linking verbs in our writing, but we must not overuse them or rely on them to state our opinions.

Use liking verbs when you need to associate one thing with something else, such as "Your room is a mess."  In this example "room" is being associated with its condition of messiness. 

These linking verbs usually can me mathematically presented as equal signs (=), since they make observations and match words with other ideas.  However, your strongest statements of opinions (thesis and topic sentences) should not contain linking verbs, since the purpose of these statements is to express opinions, not observations.  Yes, a sentence that contains a linking verb CAN communicate opinions, but not as clearly or as directly as with using an action verb.

Also, please distinguish between a linking verb and a helping verb.  A helping verb is paired with an action verb to indicate the tense or time frame of the idea, such as in the following example: "The economy is running out of money quickly."  The verb "is running" indicates the state of running continually, which differs from "will run," "have run," "should have run," etc.  Helping verbs are essential components of English grammar.

Passive voice causes three major writing problems:

1) It creates a stale (or "dead") feeling in the reader's mind because the subjects of the sentences are not actually doing anything.  The intended subjects receive the action rather than perform the action when students use passive verb choices.

2) Passive voice causes unnecessary wordiness to occur.  If you find yourself using lots of 2-4-letter words, or if your sentences contain large numbers of little words, you will find that replacing the sentence with action verbs makes your sentences more efficient and streamlined.  They will be more clear and direct with action verbs.

3) The use of too many passive verbs will lead to additional errors, particularly comma errors.  Using better verbs can solve many other problems in your writing.

Avoiding Expletives

One of the worst ways of beginning a sentence (and especially a paragraph) is to use an expletive.  An expletive is an "empty" word or phrase that is often used to casually introduce a thought:

"There are many people who agree with you." 

Notice that the phrase "There are" does not communicate a clear message to the reader.  The reader might ask himself, "Where is there?" and "Why are they plural?"  This sentence is better expressed without the expletive.  Rewrite it like this:

"Many people agree with you." 

Clarifying your pronoun usage can help you to reduce your wordiness and your distractions to the reader.  A well-written essay will be easy to read from top to bottom without the reader having to pause and figure out whether an error has occurred.  Pronoun errors are very easy for your professors to notice, and therefore some of the most distracting. Here is another example:

"It is obvious that Pittsburgh won Super Bowl XL." 

Notice that the phrase "It is" does not communicate a clear message to the reader.  The reader might ask himself, "It is what?" and "What is it that is existing here?"  This sentence is better expressed without the expletive.  Rewrite it like this:

"Pittsburgh won Super Bowl XL." 

Again, state a clear subject and action verb to enhance your writing. 

CAVEAT: Even if you change passive verbs into active ones, your choices might still fall flat.  All of us have either said or heard the following statement:

"I got out of bed today." 

While this seems benign enough, think about the verb in that sentence.  What is the definition of "got"?  Well, it's the past tense of "get," meaning that you are receiving something.  Therefore, what does the speaker receive in the following sentence: "I got out of bed today"?  I have no idea myself.  It's a phrase that we say, but it has no grammatical meaning. 

Say that you "leaped" out of bed, "slid" out of bed, "crawled" out of bed, "rolled" out of bed, etc.  Make your verbs into more powerful tools.

Peer Review

We exchanged our revised drafts that many students thought might be their final copy.

Here is the form that we used in class today: Peer Review #1

We will conduct a directed peer review several times this semester, so today was a sample run-through. If you missed today's class, then you can experience this activity another time.

I will evaluate your participation in the peer review activities. Read more about this in the peer review document from the online coursepacket.

Introductions and Conclusions

We examined another document that reviews effective and ineffective examples of introductions and conclusions.

Especially important is the explanation of ethos, pathos, and logos: three concepts from the Greek philosopher Aristotle in 500 BCE. Aristotle claimed that an argument is valid if the orator satisfies three rhetorical proofs.

Through the years, this process has become dumbed down and translated into the five-paragraph essay.

Please understand that the five-paragraph essay is an artificial and formulaic approach to writing that serves some structural purposes in middle school, but it becomes obsolete very soon. If you have been asked to write one of these in the past year, then please know that we need to move on from there now.

Set aside the three-part thesis and the need to group everything in clumps of threes. A good argument contains more than three subpoints anyway.

After reviewing these introduction and conclusion examples, modify your own intro and conclusion in the football paper in your final revision. Go into this modification with a plan -- set out on purpose to write the intro and conclusion a certain way. Here is one of the ways to be creative in an academic paper and to stamp your thumbprint on the conversation.

Remember, the purpose of an intro is not to repeat or summarize the body paragraph content; rather, the purpose is to engage the reader in a compelling way that suggests that the reader will be rewarded by pressing forward and reading the rest of your paper. Let's see what you can bring that expresses yourself and hooks the reader.

MLA Style

Remember, I have asked that you format your paper in MLA Style. In the online coursepacket, the document on MLA Style Formatting should be especially helpful.

MLA Style requires that eight facets of your page formatting be standardized. These are all explained in the link above. I even provide step-by-step directions for Word 2003. Word 2007 has reconfigured the menus, so use the Help feature in Word if you cannot locate something.

By the way, your computer will need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader in order to view the pdf files on this web site. If you need to install this program on your computer, just click the Adobe link and follow the instructions. This software is FREE and SAFE.

Download Adobe Acrobat Reader for free: