1. Journal Questions 112 – Summer 2005

2. May 16 th  Describe your experiences in 111. Who was your professor? What did you learn? What was the most useful activity or type of writing you did? What didn’t you learn that you wish you had learned? What do you want to know more about that you began to explore in 111 but couldn’t follow through with? If you could take 111 over again, would you do anything differently? What motivated you to perform well (or not) in your English 111 class?  How are you expecting 112 to be different from 111?  What are your strengths as a writer? Weaknesses? If you could leave this class with one skill or one piece of new knowledge, what would you like it to be?  What do you need to motivate you as a writer? Describe the teacher from your past who was the best motivator.

3. May 17 th  When have you written summaries before? What’s easy about them? What’s difficult? After today’s lecture on summarizing, what questions do you still have?  What did you notice about the summaries you read in your small groups this morning? How were the summaries the same? What distinguished one from another?  How much quoting should a summary contain? When/What should a summary quote?  For what purpose are summaries useful? Where/when in your life do you summarize things for people? How do you know when someone who is summarizing something for you is doing a bad or a good job?  What do you think will be hard or easy about summarizing Shakespeare’s play? What do you think you’ll focus on thematically? If you had to produce an outline of the play’s events that you would include in your summary, what would it look like right now?

4. May 18 th  Why is it important to present a rational, balanced attitude in your response? Can you tell a story about a response you’ve read or heard to an event or situation that was biased in some way? How did it damage the responder’s credibility?  Which responses in your small groups were most forceful or effective? Why? What did you learn about composing your own response from listening to the group responses?  What will your response to The Tempest focus on? Explaining, Problem Solving? Evaluating? Arguing with the critics? How will your response affect the “shape” of your summary? What biases do you have to watch out for as you respond to the play? What aspects of your own thinking could prevent you from establishing a balanced, credible narrative voice for your summary and response?

5. May 19 th  In what ways have the theoretical texts we’ve looked at over the past two days affected your response to The Tempest?  How will you incorporate these readings into your response to the play? Which will you use to support your own response? Which might you argue against in your response? Do you believe that referring to these texts will improve the strength of your argument/ response in some way? Why or why not?  What is the difference between your response to the play today and your response to it after we finished reading it on Tuesday?  What do you anticipate struggling with over the week- end as you write your first essay for the class? What questions can I answer for you right now that will help you with those struggles?  If other questions arise as you work on the paper, please feel free to e-mail me for help. I’ll be most likely to respond if I get your e-mail by Friday afternoon.

6. May 23 th  Which questions from the discussion guides did you find most compelling? Why? What issues didn’t get addressed in class today that you think are important to The Heart of Darkness?  What did you learn about our library’s resources that you didn’t know? What did you know that I didn’t touch on, that you could share with the rest of us? What questions do you still have?  Which paper did you think was the best? Why? What did all the papers have in common, besides the topic? What did you learn about summary/response papers from listening to your classmates read?  What was hardest about writing this essay? What was easiest? If you could do your own paper over again, is there anything you would change? What? Why? What questions do you still have about this type of writing?

7. May 24th  What literature discussion questions most provoked your interest today? Why? Did any of the questions take up a position you particularly agreed with or disagreed with?  What is the most difficult thing about taking up a position? What is the easiest? How is tone important to this assignment?  Which paper did you think was the best? Why? What did all the papers have in common, besides the topic? What did you learn about summary/response papers from listening to your classmates read?

8. May 25 th 1. What position will you take on The Heart of Darkness. How have Haugh, Guerard, Achebe, Harris, Singh, and Sarvan affected your position on the novel? What other knowledge do you have that is affecting your thinking about the text so far? 2. What did you learn from the small group activity this morning on position drafts? What were the significant strengths you discovered in each other’s essays? What are some weaknesses you noticed? Write about how you felt as you listened to people read and discuss their work. 3. Where else in your academic career have you learned about plagiarism? What techniques have you used in the past to avoid plagiarizing your sources? Has the information and the practice today clarified anything about plagiarism for you? What are you still interested in learning about/practicing in order to avoid plagiarism?

9. May 25 th 1. What did you learn from the small group activity this morning on position drafts? What were the significant strengths you discovered in each other’s essays? What are some weaknesses you noticed? Write about how you felt as you listened to people read and discuss their work. 2. Where else in your academic career have you learned about plagiarism? What techniques have you used in the past to avoid plagiarizing your sources? Has the information and the practice today clarified anything about plagiarism for you? What are you still interested in learning about/practicing in order to avoid plagiarism?

10. Paper Grades  A= good idea, coherent, very few distracting mechanical errors  B = good idea, coherent, but rather more mechanical errors than there should be or, good idea executed with very few mechanical errors, but lacking in coherence  C = good idea, but lacking in coherence and sprinkled with distracting mechanical errors  D = Where’s the effort and thought here?  F = I found the source you copied and you’re sunk, or a really, really loud repetition of D.

11. May 26 th 1. What has frustrated you about working with documentation styles in the past? What questions do you still have about MLA style? How can I help you to answer them? 2. Have you ever used titles in this way, to generate ideas about writing? Do you think this will work for you? 3. What did you discover about introductions and conclusions to research papers this morning? What introductory strategy seems most interesting to you? What would you most want to avoid in your intro? Which concluding strategy did you admire? What do you want to avoid most in your conclusion? 4. Why are these two parts of the paper so important? Think about books/essays/stories you’ve read. What’s your favorite intro/conclusion. Why? 5. Any thing you want to say about my assessment or comments on your essay? 6. How did this morning’s discussion of the critics shape your thoughts about Conrad’s novel?

12. May 31st What topics from Blum seemed most interesting to you? If you had to chose a research topic today, what would it be? What new information did you get from the librarian? Which database do you like the best? Which do you expect to be most useful to you in your upcoming research paper? How do you feel about your Heart of Darkness essay? What is best about it? What would you still work on if you could? What’s not right that you don’t know how to fix? As you listened to your classmates read their essays this morning, what impressed you? What did you appreciate the most? What bugged you?

13. June 1 nd  Describe research projects you’ve worked on in the past. What’s your favorite part of a research project? Your least favorite part?  What did you do at the library today? What are you thinking of writing about? What research question have you formulated? What databases/research tools did you use today? What did you find?  How can I help you with your research? What do you need to know more about?  How are you recording/organizing the research materials you’ve found? What’s your strategy for keeping information available, fresh, useful?  What did you think of my suggestions for formulating research questions? Do you have a technique of your own for formulating questions that you could share with us?

14. June 2nd  When you think about the conventions of research papers that we talked about this morning, (surveying the field, comparison/contrast, process, analysis, evaluation), which one seems most likely to be a model you’d choose to work with for the assignment due in a couple of weeks? Why?  Have you ever written a prospectus before? What do you think of the genre? What do you expect to be difficult about the task? How can I help?  What problems, issues are you having with the bibliography? What help do you need?

15. June 6th  What intros/conclusions did you like? How did combining them to form new intros/conclusions work? How do you feel about collaborative writing? Is it harder? Easier? Better in quality or worse, than conventional, individual compositions?  What do expect to be difficult about writing a prospectus? What do you need to do before you can do that? How will you accomplish what you need to accomplish by Monday?  How are you keeping track of the sources you’ve referenced? Any questions about formatting bibliographical entries? How can I help?

16. June 6 th  Which prospectus was your favorite? Which ones needed to work harder to catch your attention?  What suggestions do you have for specific class members about their work that you didn’t get to say in class? What would you like me to pass on to anyone?  Have you thought about what you’ll need to do to turn this prospectus into a paper? What’s missing? How does the prospectus point towards organization? Can you label the parts of your paper? Do you want to consider subtitles? What might you subtitle the different sections?

17. June 7th  How was the workshop helpful to you?  When you listened to other people talk about where they were with their draft and the progress they made or the struggles they encountered today, did you have any comments or suggestions you wanted to make that you didn’t get to share in class?  Whose process do you admire most so far?  List two things you’ve learned about writing research papers from your peers.

18. June 8th  What did you accomplish in the library this morning?  How was the conference useful to you?  How has your essay evolved since yesterday? What feedback has been the most useful to you? What sources are you finding most helpful?  What do you have left to work on for your paper? How will you accomplish that over night?  Do you have a works cited page? Have you properly documented the citations in your text?  If you have any questions about any of these formal issues of writing papers, please ask them now. Tomorrow will be too late.

19. Last Day – June 9th  As you listened to people read their essays today, what was your response? Which ones did you like? Which ones did you find uninteresting? Why?  Describe how your paper has developed from the day you first formulated your research question last week. What have been the major steps in your process?  How has the course been most useful to you? What could I have done better?  Look at the syllabus. Have we met the goals I articulated there for the course? Which ones do I need to work harder to achieve next time I teach the course?  What’s the most valuable thing you’ve learned? What do you wish you’d done differently?  What were the internal and external motivators for you during the course? What prompted you to work hard, to think carefully, to stay with it? What other type of motivation would have been useful to you?