Mr. Womack:

Go to the website at www.actstudent.org

Also, www.collegeboard.com

Great article!

What do you guys think? Did Davis overreact?

I love this:

“I think those high school kids shouldn’t have been on his property,” Lynch said. “But in this country, life is valued over property, and if someone is fleeing your property or on your property but not threatening you, you’re not allowed to just shoot them.”

We will talk about rhetorical fallacies later, but this is a big one. His argument is that while the “kids shouldn’t have been on his property”, he should not have shot them because “life is valued over property.” He is applying his argument to one side only. It is reported in the article that Davis (the shooter) said,

“In a situation like that, you assume the worst-case scenario if you’re going to protect your family from a possible home invasion and murder.”

The Judge who made the top statement has redirected the intent from “protecting . . . family” to protecting property. Certainly shooting teens is a bad thing (apparently shooting a “pretty blonde high school cheerleader” is especially heinous; note the pathetic introduction and epithet), but was he unstable and shooting at whatever moved, or protecting his family? Was the amount of violence warranted? What do you guys think?

Guidelines for final poetry project:

Paper

• Two full pages
• Compare/contrast the tone of Rudyard Kipling’s “If” with the tone of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
• Standard essay format (typed, Times New Roman, 12 pt font, double-spaced, 1″ margins, header, title). After the amount of formatting “fudges” on the last paper, I will not accept anything that does not follow these guidelines. Better to have a shorter paper than have to turn it in late.

Poetry

Choose three of the following options (you may pick an option twice, but you cannot do one option three times):

• Four haiku (three lines with 5,7,5 syllabic pattern)
• One Cinquain (five lines with 2,4,6,8,2 syllabic pattern; no rhyme scheme)
• One (other Cinquain) (five lines of any length with ababb)
• One free-verse poem

If you wish to write and perform a song, you may substitute original music and lyrics for the other poems. If you wish to write a song for existing music, you must write one other type of poem.

Please email me with any questions.

Fantastic class today, people! We will continue in that vein tomorrow, discussing the articles you brought that we didn’t get to today, and discussing the Soto article. I made this neat chart for our rhetorical vocabulary, so it will hopefully make more sense:
I will explain tomorrow, but basically, the techniques are made up of various devices (both rhetorical and literary), and can be used to appeal to the audience’s logic, emotions, or judgment of the speaker. If you want to look up anything unfamiliar on the chart, that would be a good thing. More discussion, less lecture.

How’s the article coming? Is it everything you hoped for and more? If you missed class today, here is a copy of the article we’re reading. Mark it for rhetorical devices, interesting parts, etc., and we’ll discuss tomorrow. Here’s a copy if you missed class.

Tomorrow (Tuesday, August 21), we will begin a discussion on the poetry analysis paper. The final project for this unit will consist of a short (2 page) paper comparing and contrasting two poems, and a creative piece (a complete song, a set of haiku, a sonnet, two songs without music, three free-verse poems). We will discuss the assignment more thoroughly in class, but the entire project will be five pages long. A rough draft will be due Friday (essay outline and solid ideas for each poem), and the final product will be due on Monday. We will begin About a Boy at that time.

Here is the list of basic poetic devices from the board today. We will begin writing on our poetry soon, so please look over the list for any terms you do not already know.

• Simile- comparing two things using “like” or “as”
• Metaphor- comparing two things without using “like” or “as”
• Personification- a type of metaphor, in which a non-human thing is given human characteristics
• Analogy- an extended comparison
• Assonance- rhyming or repetition amongst vowel sounds
• Alliteration- rhyming or repetition amongst consonant sounds
• Onomatopoeia- words that sound like the sound being described
• Poetic Meter
• Iambic- unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable
• Trochaic- stressed followed by unstressed
• Anapestic- two unstressed followed by one stressed
• Dactylic- stressed followed by two unstressed

[This post was WinsomeWiki’d on 5 Jul. 2009]