Details about daily assignments will be posted here and announced at class on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Check the website as you prepare for each upcoming class period. See the schedule posted in the syllabus for the tentative course outline.

Assigned November 18
Remember that we won’t have class this Friday, November 20. You may use the extra time to work on your Field Notebook with your group. For Monday, November 23: The final draft of your second Show & Tell essay is due. Bring it along, and be ready for workshops led by Cora & Emily and Sarah & Laura.

Assigned November 16
For Wednesday, November 18: Read pp. 223-232 from Kolln Ch. 10, "Choosing Stylistic Variations." Bring blank copies of the texts for your Field Notebooks.

Assigned November 13
Read pp. 210-222 from Kolln Ch. 10, "Choosing Stylistic Variations." Complete Exercise 38.

Assigned November 11
For Friday, November 13: Read pp. 194-209 from Kolln Ch. 9, “Choosing Adjectivals” and complete exercises 35a & 36.

Assigned November 9
For Wednesday, November 11: Read pp. 185-194 from Kolln Ch. 9, “Choosing Adjectivals” and complete exercises 32-34.

Assigned November 6
For Monday, November 9:

1) In your field notebook, highlight and label the instances where your author opens sentences with an adverbial. Be sure to identify the type of adverbial used in each case.

Assigned November 4
For Friday, November 6: The first draft of your second Show & Tell essay is due. Bring it along and be ready for workshops led by Reuben & Beth and by Cacey & Shena.

Assigned November 2
For Wednesday, November 4: Read pp. 165-171 from Kolln Ch. 8, “Choosing Adverbials.” Complete the group discussion questions on pp. 163-164, as well as exercises 27 & 28.

Assigned October 28
For Friday, October 30: Finish your Field Notebook entry on verbs. Also, read pp. 149-163 from Kolln Ch. 8, “Choosing Adverbials,” and complete exercises 25 & 26.

Assigned October 26
For Wednesday, October 28: Read pp. 144-148 from Kolln Ch. 7, “Choosing Verbs.” Complete exercises 23. Bring to class the copy of your mentor text that you will use for your field notebook entry on verbs.

Assigned October 23
For Monday, October 26: Read pp. 137-142 from Kolln Ch. 7, “Choosing Verbs.” Complete exercises 20-22. (Type.)

Assigned October 21
For Friday, October 21: Please bring your copy of Crespo’s “Our Transnational Anthem.” Also, r ead pp. 129-136 from Kolln Ch. 7, “Choosing Verbs.” Use what you learn from the reading and from studying the verb conjugation handout (also available on Courses@Dordt) in order to create your own chart showing the active voice and passive voice conjugations for all forms of one verb.

Assigned October 19
For Wednesday, October 21: Study, study, study! Test 1 is on Wednesday; a study guide was provided at class last week. Be sure to read Samuelson’s “The Sad Fate of the Comma” with a grammarian’s eye. Some of the test questions will ask you to comment on Samuelson’s use of grammar and his ideas about grammar.

Assigned October 16
For Monday, October 19: Read Crespo, “Our Transnational Anthem” (coursepack). Prepare for class discussion by making margin notes that trace the author’s main arguments and his underlying assumptions about language.

Assigned October 14
For Friday, October 16: Get ready for grammar rants!

1. Review the pet peeves essay you wrote. Be ready to discuss why this “peeve” is bothersome to you.
2. Read the Dear Abby column from April 9, 2002: “Good Grammar is Sweet Music to Any Language Lover’s Ears.”
3. Talk with someone from a different demographic (e.g., from another generation or region) and ask about her/his grammar pet peeves: what are they, and why does your interviewee find them so annoying?
4. Find, read, and bring to class a published grammar rant—that is, a published complaint about bad grammar or about grammar pet peeves. Web sources are fine.
5. Revise and polish your first Show & Tell Essay, applying what we have learned over the past few weeks about rhythm and voice.

Assigned October 12
For Wednesday, October 14: The final draft of your first Show & Tell essay is due. Bring it along and be ready for workshops to be led by Emily & Jane and by Julie & Autumn.

Assigned October 9
For Monday, October 12:

• Read pp. 118-128 from Kolln Ch. 6, “The Writer’s Voice.” Do exercises 17 and 18 in your notes (not to hand in).
• Field notebook entry on voice: Mark and label the strongest instances where your writer shapes his/her voice through tone and diction.

Assigned October 7
For Friday, October 9:

• Field notebook entry on rhythm: Mark and label instances where your author plays with sentence rhythm through the use of clefts and expletives, commas with conjunctive adverbs, and power words.
• Read pp. 107-117 from Kolln Ch. 6, “The Writer’s Voice.” Type and print your answers to exercises 16.

Assigned October 5
For Wednesday, October 7:

1. Find a grammar handbook that gives advice on it-clefts, what-clefts, and there-transformations. (Hint: In some handbooks, you may need to look in sections on “needless words,” “problems in sentence style,” or “weak constructions.” Sections on editing at the word or phrase level are also likely to contain advice on these constructions. Note also that the there-transformation is sometimes labeled as an expletive.) In writing (typed)

• Explain how the handbook’s advice compares/contrasts with the advice given by Kolln.
• Evaluate the advice from both Kolln and the handbook author.
• Write your own handbook entry about it-clefts, what-clefts, and there-transformations: share advice about when to use and avoid them, and provide examples that illustrate your guidelines.

2. Edit your guidelines so that you use Kolln’s power words effectively. Mark and label one rhythmically effective use of each of the following: modifiers that convey strong emotion or superlative quality; correlative conjunctions; adverbials of emphasis; and the word only.

Assigned September 30
For Monday, October 5: Read pp. 99-106 from Kolln Ch. 5, “Sentence Rhythm” and prepare for discussion and activities. Complete Ex. 15 #6-8.

Assigned September 28
For Wednesday, September 30:

• For your Field Notebook, mark and label instances where your author creates cohesion with the use of repetition, the known-new contract, metadiscourse, and parallelism.
• Read pp. 89-98 from Kolln Ch. 5, “Sentence Rhythm.” Complete Ex. 15 #1-5.

Assigned September 25
For Monday, September 28: The first draft of your Show and Tell essay is due. Bring them along and be ready for the workshops to be led by Nathan & Dustin and by Hope & Rebecca.

Assigned September 23
For Friday, September 25:

• Read carefully pp. 80-84 and skim pp. 85-88 from Kolln Ch. 4, “Cohesion.”
• On the handout provided, write a poem that is parallel in structure either to “This is Just to Say” or to “A Writing Kind of Day.”
• Read the instructions for the Show & Tell essays (see handout) and list possible topics for your first short essay. Note that the first draft will be due on Monday, September 28—which is also the date for the workshops to be led by Nathan & Dustin and by Hope & Rebecca.

Assigned September 21
For Wednesday, September 23:

• Mark up two pages from President Obama’s September 17 speech on health insurance reform, showing with your annotations how he uses the known-new contract. Prepare to discuss your findings.
• Read pp. 72-80 (top) from Kolln Ch. 4, “Cohesion.” Type and print your answers for Exercise 12.

Assigned September 18
For Monday, September 21:

• Experiment with coordination in your pet peeves piece: follow the Coordination Workout instructions. Print your essay to hand in.
• Read pp. 63-72 from Kolln Ch. 4, “Cohesion.” Type and print your answers for Exercise 11.

Assigned September 16
For Friday, September 18:

1. Read pp. 50-62 from Kolln Ch. 3, “Coordination,” making note of questions and observations that you have. Type your answers for Exercises 9 & 10.
2. Field notebook: in a fresh copy of one of your mentor texts, highlight and label compound sentences that are built in some way other than the comma-plus-conjunction construction. Use another highlighter color to mark examples of parallel structure, and label them “P.S.”

Assigned September 14
For Wednesday, September 16:

• Read pp. 37-50 from Kolln Ch. 3, “Coordination,” making note of questions and observations that you have. Type your answers (full sentences) for Exercises 7 & 8.
• Bring an electronic copy of your pet peeves essay to class.

Assigned September 11
For Monday, September 14:

• Prepare for a quiz on the sentence patterns. You will be asked to write out the sentence pattern “formulas” from memory, to provide sample sentences (originals—not from the book) and to label the required slots.
• Read Schuster, “A Fresh Look at Sentence Fragments” (coursepack). In the margins, write a name for each type of fragment that he identifies.
• Field notebook: on a copy of one of your mentor texts (or excerpts), highlight all fragments, and bring the copy to class. No fragments? Double check, and then bring your highlight-free copy to class.

Assigned September 9
For Friday, September 11:

• Write a short, creative essay (500 words) about grammar pet peeves—yours, someone else’s, or both. You are welcome to use a tone and style similar to that in Tuttle’s “What a Croc of Shoes.” We’ll use your essay as fodder for discussion later; for now, it will give us a writing sample to work with as we apply grammar lessons.
• Get caught up with your Field Notebook work; by Friday, you should have completed pages for Kolln Ch. 1 & 2.

Leaders for Grammar in the Wild Workshops 1 & 2, we’ll be ready for your presentations!

Assigned September 7
For Wednesday, September 9:

1. Read Kolln Ch. 13, “Punctuation.” Prepare to discuss how suntax, prosody, and semantics can help us distinguish between required and optional punctuation.
2. In your notes, include your answers to the group discussion questions and to Exercise 45. (For the latter, highlight the spots where you had punctuation questions.)
3. For your field notebook: IF you are in charge of the pages and commentary for Ch. 1 or 2, bring your pages and a draft of your commentary to class so that we can look at your examples as we discuss traits of effective commentaries.

Assigned September 4
For Monday, September 7:

1. Read Kolln Ch. 2, “The Basic Sentence Patterns in Prose.” In your notes for yourself, include your answers to the group discussion questions. (Handwritten is fine.)
2. Bring materials to work on Exercise 6 (p. 35) in class—a sample of your own writing AND a sample of a similar type of writing written by a professional. (For example, if bring a persuasive essay that you wrote, also bring a published persuasive essay done by a professional. The exercise will be more relevant if you find a close match, but don’t obsess if you can’t find the perfect sample. Bring one of yours and one professional piece!)

Assigned September 2
For Friday, September 4:

1. Read pp. 20-26 from Kolln Ch. 1, “The Structure of Sentences.” Complete exercise 4.
2. Field Notebook: On a photocopy of one of your mentor texts (or excerpts), mark the required sentence slots for 10 consecutive sentences. If you notice a pattern in the type of sentence(s) used by the author, look to see if a variety of other patterns are used elsewhere in the piece.
3. Review the sentence patterns for a quiz on Sept. 14. Make sure that you can supply an original example for each type of sentence.

Assigned August 31
For Wednesday, September 2:

1. Read pp. 5-20 from Kolln Ch. 1, “The Structure of Sentences,” and complete exercises 1, 2, and 3a. For exercises 2 & 3a, label the sentence slots in the same way that Kolln does on pp. 17-18. Some notes about this process:

• Answers to odd-numbered problems are in the back of the book.
• For all exercises, type out the full sentences, though you may handwrite lines, labels, and other markup.
• Start memorizing the sentence patterns (pp. 17 & 18) for a quiz on Sept. 14.
• Note that grammatical terms can vary from one book or author to the next. It may be helpful for you to keep a list of equivalent terms (e.g., “headword noun” = “simple subject”).
• Write down any questions you have so that you’ll remember them for class.

2. Create your field notebook research team and e-mail me your proposal by 8 am Tuesday (see step 1 of the instructions). [Yes, this is later than the original due date.]

3. Find your share of the mentor texts to be used along with your field notebook (see step 2 of the instructions), and create MLA works cited entries for those texts. Remember that from now on, you should always have photocopies of one of the mentor texts (or excerpts) with you at class.

Assigned August 28
For Monday, August 31:

1. Read (actively!) the following texts. What differing definitions of grammar are presented? What motivates people to use each of these definitions? Watch for connections and contradictions across the readings.
   • Kolln & Funk, “The Study of Grammar” (coursepack or Courses@Dordt)
   • Kolln, Rhetorical Grammar front matter—table of contents, preface, & introduction
2. Create your field notebook research team and e-mail me your proposal by 5 pm Monday (see step 1 of the instructions). Start looking for mentor texts for step 2.
3. Find a partner for your Grammar in the Wild workshop. Check the available dates (see the schedule in the Course Documents section of the website) and either e-mail me or sign up at class on Monday.

Assigned August 26
For Friday, August 28:

1. Read Ray, “The Craft of Writing” (coursepack or Courses@Dordt) to gain more insight about what it means to approach grammar as a resource or as a tool for crafting writing. As always, read actively: mark it up and make it your own! Add your margin notes about ideas that you find especially interesting, insightful, debatable, or questionable. Also add annotations about the connections and questions you have as you read.
2. Try Ray’s approach to careful reading. Read Luscombe, “Ann Arbor Kills Its Newspaper—To Save It” (handout). Choose 5 notable aspects of Luscombe’s use of grammar. Write a description for each: name the technique (use the technical name if you know it), provide an example(s), and explain the effect that the writer achieves by using this technique.
3. Review the syllabus and read the instructions for the Field Notebook and Grammar in the Wild Workshop assignments (see handouts).