Welcome, Writing Students in WRIT1 and WRINT!

Greetings, all 四應外一 students (in the Basic English Writing class) and students in the Intermediate Writing class. I'm Dr. Chris O'Brien.
This is the home blog for our class 5511, 初級寫作（一）, or Basic Writing I, nicknamed WRIT1, and the Intermediate Writing class, nicknamed WRINT, in your own Google Group nickname and elsewhere.

During the first week of this semester, you should do several things.

1. Send me your information from my homepage (www.yuntech.edu.tw/~oshuhua/)
2. Join up to my Google Group from the same homepage, reading my special instructions and using the right kind of "nickname": WRIT1, underscore, then your English name, underscore, and then the last 3 digits of your student number, like this: WRIT1_Nelly_063. All email you send me should use this nickname in the subject line, please.
3. Set up a free blog on Blogspot (www.blogger.com)--please do not use a blog service where everything is written in Chinese, as I don't read Chinese.

• Please do not have music playing on the blog, and let me see the text of your posts when I view the page with your blog (some services such as "yam.com" or "wretch" break these rules a lot, so please avoid them. Life's too short to keep turning off your music or search separate pages just to see what you wrote.)
  
• Also, please set up your blog so that anyone can comment; sometimes in the past people had me beg for permission just to give them instructive comments--what a drag! Path from Blogger: Dashboard > Settings > Comments > Who can comment? USE "ANYONE"

4. Please respond to this post (in other words, comment) and give me your Group nickname and the address of your blog.

• You should get started writing during the first week of classes.
  
• Please use ""WRIT1" as a tag or label for each of the posts on your own blog that you want me to grade, so I can see them all together, apart from any personal posts that I should ignore.
  
• You should write three times a week or more every week for this semester.
  
• Please remember that this is practice for college writing, so please use good grammar and spelling, and use paragraphs. Please use a spell-checker and grammar checker before you post.
  

• Remember that the goal is to practice writing carefully and correctly, frequently! I won't grade more than one post per day, so don't bother "scatterposting," that is, posting twelve times in one day, as some students have actually tried to do before!
  

I'll update this post as the semester approaches. Have fun writing!

Chris O'Brien

Your Blogs: a change in requirements. . .a nice change!

Hi, my dear students. I wanted to make sure you all know that I'm requiring several fewer weeks of your blogs.
Originally, I wanted you to write all the way to the final week of the semester (the 18th week), but now I'm only grading you up to the end of week 14: June 3rd.
That in effect means that I'll give you only two grades:

1. all the weeks from the second week of classes until the first due date you had on the Google calendar, (this first period has already passed) and
2. all the weeks from the week beginning with the first due date until the last day of the last week of required blogging, which is June 3rd: this coming Sunday.

• Please just make sure that in that second period you have at least three entries per week, average. Please recall also that the goal is to write frequently, not just to write three times for each week. Some students have been writing up to six entries on a single day, and I don't count the extras. They should be written all (or nearly so) on different dates! If you write too few times one week, write more frequently the following week, but don't just write two weeks' worth of entries all on one day. That is not really meaningful practice, and most of these entries are not worth your time or mine.
  
• If on June 3rd you still don't have enough entries, however, I'll give you another week to catch up.
  
• I won't count any entries after June 10th for your grade, so catch up this week or suffer the consequences!
  

Don't forget, also, that this coming Tuesday you should have a full draft of your essays with a title, citations, and a Works Cited page (a separate page!) in place. We'll be doing some group work next week and you'll be helping each other to spot any sort of mistakes and making suggestions, etc.

Please try a diamante and/or a haiku for next Tuesday if you want bonus points from that. That might help some of you who didn't have such a good blog grade first time around. Further, recall that you can get extra points at any time by fixing George Bush's broken English (a new bad English quote each time you refresh this blog's front page!). Help yourself to get a good grade, and have fun doing it! C'mon, try!

Sincerely,

The Sideburned Instructor

An Everyday Problem

Hi, folks. I want to remind you that "everyday" is an adjective, not an adverb. Here's a quote from one student's blog:

I hope I can see and chat with them everyday.

That should be, "I wish I could see them and chat with them every day." This is because "see" is not a transitive verb, but "chat with" is a transitive verb phrase; the "with" doesn't go with both verbs, only with one of them, so they need to be separated. Also, the "everyday" is fixed, changed to "every day" as it should be.

By 4/23 (yesterday), everyone should have had 24 blog entries--eight full weeks. Sadly, most students did not keep up with that schedule of 3 blog posts per week by the end of their first grading periods, so that cost them many points. Please keep up.

I still see lots and lots of errors in your blogs, though fewer than at first. Take care to avoid comma splices, and please also use the correct word forms; don't use a noun when the sentence calls for an adjective, for instance.

Everyone needs to get going on the mid-term assignment, due at the beginning of class next week--see the Yuntech homepage.
They must be free of grammar errors to pass. Please, go beyond elementary-school level grammar errors and start writing like college students, if you aren't doing so already. I would be ashamed to let anybody pass this class who cannot do that, and I'm not willing to do that or feel that way. Boost yourselves up and get ready to be high level English writers. I am aware that you studied essays and paragraphs and stuff last semester, but unfortunately the class seems to have had but little effect on your writing, so we're stuck in first gear till you can show me you can write even a basic paragraph without childish errors. Sorry to scold, but being an English major means that you are ABLE to use English at near-professional levels already. Some students in DAFL are not even near middle school levels!

Nobody got any bonus points for the Shakespeare's birthday bonus opportunity! Why not??
Chris

Funny Or Die: The Landlord » Gwarm

Funny Or Die: The Landlord » Gwarm

I don't know how they did this, but it's great to find someone who can understand this kind of talk. Was she trained, or what? Impressive attempt. Let's try something longer next. . .the next Star Trek movie, perhaps.

Do not attempt to write like this! Bushisms come to the Paperhood

I am now including a quote (which will change each time you reload the page) by temporary leader of the USA, George W. Bush, former cheerleader and brander for the "ΔΚΕ" fraternity. I do so in order to give you access to a mind that cannot use English at reasonably proficient "native speaker" levels (he grew up in Texas, a place stereotyped as one of many areas of the USA where standard English is not always heard) and you can practice analysis of bad English so that you can become better at self-editing. The quotes are found in the left-hand column of this blog.
I don't have an opinion about how intelligent he actually is (I'm lying), but at any rate his poor speaking skills give him the appearance of a dolt.
This is most unfortunate, as the President is, to a large extent, the "packaging" of a country for the time he's in office, and he is doing little to improve the nation's prestige, at least as far as his public speaking record goes.
Anyhow, I hope these quotes will both amuse and instruct you! For bonus points any time, just respond to this message or send me email that includes the quote and your interpretation of what's wrong with it--what he meant to say, and what his actual quote means (not all quotes will be quite suitable for this treatment; he just spouts utter nonsense sometimes).
Chris

New Google Service!

For your information, I'll mention this free new service from Google. I hope everything will come out all right for this new and exciting "underground" project.

Gratefulness

Hey there students,
Just wanted to thank you for being so good about checking your homepage at Yuntech. Check out the counter at the bottom of the page! Whoa!
Sincerely,
Chris

New Bonus Opportunity for Shakespeare's Birthday!

Check out my homepage's calendar to make sure when the birthday is. . . . . hee hee!

There is an amazing array of sort-of dumb stuff available here at a fellow Blogspot blog. I used the most recent post to create one of my own .

Now it's your turn! Find one of the generators that creates a picture with text of your own for bonus points. Make it clever and creative--funny if you can. Have fun. Make more than one. See which ones are your faves.

1. When you have done it, please first post your creation on your own blog.
   
2. Then comment on this post and include YOUR post's web address so I can find it quickly and easily.
   

• I want to choose the best 5 creations--you can enter this as often as you wish, though I know you don't have unlimited time for this foolishness.

Of course, any bad English will disqualify your entry, unless it's bad for a Reason.
So anyway, my dear students. . .have at thee! I hope you enjoy this.


Chris

Bonus Opportunity for WRIT2 Students--March 26th

I feel at loose ends today, and so I thought I could pick up my spirits by getting some free points into your grade. If you'd like a bonus, please write a paragraph about what you usually do when you need to do homework, but find it hard to concentrate. How do you get your mind focused, and get the work done on time? Or, if you prefer, how do you manage to take a break and make yourself feel fresher when you have too much homework to do? Do you have any suggestions for me? I am bogged down by my dissertation and two textbooks, both due on April 16th. Help me, and help yourself!
Please do check your grammar, spelling, and punctuation; however, you do not need to write formally. Be as casual and relaxed in your writing as you wish. Post your responses to this question as a comment to THIS POST--not email or a paper response!--by noon on Monday, March 26th for credit.

Thanks! I'll be talking about your "corporal punishment" essays and working with you on your textbooks. See you soon.

Chris O'Brien

Common errors in your early posts

Hi class.
The most common problems I'm seeing in the blogs of groups 1-3 so far are:
Paragraphs having too few sentences, generally only one! There must be at least 3 sentences in a proper paragraph. That means that you shouldn't hit "return" after typing only one sentence.
Also, there is plenty of sloppy grammar, such as:

• Subject/verb agreement
• Tenses mixed together
• missing articles (OMG!)

PLUS, problems with punctuation and with spelling. Really--for English majors, you have a lot of catching up to do--that means lots of extra reading that you need to take responsibility for. Without enough input, you cannot have good output. So--READ! Especially, please read your own writing before you post it. Many of these errors are, I sincerely hope, careless mistakes that you could really have fixed by yourselves. If not. . . well, let me just say that this is not the level of writing that I should be seeing in pre-professional English users. You have got to improve your ability with DAILY practice. . .and I mean quality practice.

Please don't forget your writing homework, posted at my Yuntech page. Give it to me printed or written on paper at the beginning of class, or you will not be graded. Don't fail through carelessness.
Some people, such as student 001, have written NOTHING yet, as far as I can find. Remember that the assignment is to write at LEAST three times every week. That means EVERY week, folks.
See you all tomorrow. Take care and get a good sleep.
By the way, I finished the full draft of my dissertation on Saturday!
Chris