AP Lang, as Taught by Boromir

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Dr. Ayers

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Grammar, Punctuation, and Usage Tips

Posted on February 26, 2012 by Dr. Ayers

I’m going to add some links here based on what I see people doing in this term’s revised essays.

First up, Grammar Girl has some tips for how to use colons correctly in a sentence. Please read up on them.

Second, block quotes. This is different in MLA and APA, so you need to know which of those you mean to use.

Third, transitional words and phrases. Here’s a list of purposes and actual words and phrases that you can use to connect your ideas between the last paragraph and the next.

Fourth…

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Links to Recent Nonfiction

Posted on February 21, 2012 by Dr. Ayers

Here are some places you can go for lists of recent nonfiction:

New York Times Bestselling NF (Hardcover)

New York Times Bestselling NF (Paperback)

Kirkus Reviews’ Best NF of 2011 List

Salon.com’s Best NF of 2011 List

Wall Street Journal’s Best NF of 2011

Once you have a book chosen, you might try searching for your author on CSPAN’s BookTV site, which has a lot of interviews with nonfiction authors.

 

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More Good Reviews

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Dr. Ayers

These are all from the famed New York Review of Books:

It’s almost like I’m leading up to something here.

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A Few Book Review Essays

Posted on February 16, 2012 by Dr. Ayers

We’ll be getting to these soon, but if you want to beat me to the punch, or you just have the time now and you’re not sure you will later, feel free to read them. I’ll be trying to guide you toward reviews from Slate, the New York Times Sunday Book Review, the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. I’ve also included one from David Frum’s blog, and I might add some from other places.

Here’s Dan Kois at Slate, reviewing The Lifespan of a Fact, by Iowa Citian John D’Agata and Somewhere Elsian Jim Fingal. Interesting essay about the ethical responsibilities of a nonfiction author to be truthful.

Slate political columnist Dave Weigel reflects on the shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords, critiquing Tom Zoellner’s new book on the subject.

Mark O’Connor discusses an out-of-print book by Martin Amis: a guide to classic video games.

In the New Yorker, Rollo Romig ponders religion, government, and Simon Critchley’s new book The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology.

And here’s the one from former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum: a five-part (!) review of Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. That has been a controversial enough book that it’s worth including the New York Times review and the LA Times review as well… But Frum’s is an in-depth analysis and argument, and worth the time.

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William Hazlitt, “On the Want of Money”

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Dr. Ayers

Here is the full text of the essay we were discussing today. The excerpt used on the AP Language exam is the ninth paragraph, by my count (not including those one-line quotations). Here’s a quote from the first paragraph that might help illuminate things:

The want of money I here allude to is not altogether that such arises from absolute poverty – for where there is a downright absence of the common necessaries of life, this must be remedied by incessant hard labour, and the least we can receive in return is a supply of our daily wants – but that uncertain, casual, precarious mode of existence, in which the temptation to spend remains after the means are exhausted, the want of money joined with the hope and possibility of getting it, the intermediate state of difficulty and suspense between the last guinea or shilling and the next that we may have the good luck to encounter.

That last bit–“the intermediate state of difficulty and suspense between the last guinea or shilling and the next”–makes it pretty clear that he’s talking about the poor here, not just the middle class who would like to be holding a higher rung of the ladder.

Now obviously, you don’t have access to this when answering the prompt, so I’m not posting it for that purpose. But it might be reassuring to some of you that I’m not just throwing this out there as my opinion of what he might mean.

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Like AP Lang. Please.

Posted on February 12, 2012 by Dr. Ayers

No, not the class. It’s probably too late to convince you of that if you’re not already there. I mean on Facebook.

Why? What do you mean why? I’ll figure out what to do with it later. Now go.

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Rational Argument Flowchart

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Dr. Ayers

I saw this a while back, and thought it was brilliant. I want a poster of it for my classroom. But in the meantime, look at it here. If you’re wondering, Am I really taking part in a rational argument here? Is my argument really based on reason? run your argument through this flowchart. I got it from here, but I think it originates with this guy.

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James Sturm on The Avengers

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Dr. Ayers

Today’s piece of argumentation comes from Slate, where James Sturm is making the case that moviegoers who care about comics should eschew The Avengers this summer. His reasoning: because Marvel Comics has treated Jack Kirby, a longtime creator for Marvel who helped the company prosper, like dirt.

What makes this situation especially hard to stomach is that Marvel’s media empire was built on the backs of characters whose defining trait as superheroes is the willingness to fight for what is right. It takes a lot of corporate moxie to put Thor and Captain America on the big screen and have them battle for honor and justice when behind the scenes the parent company acts like a cold-blooded supervillain. As Stan Lee famously wrote, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

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Battling Bad Science

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Dr. Ayers

In 2nd hour on Friday, we watched this TED talk about how evidence from scientific studies can be distorted. Interesting, given our current focus on argument. Warning: dude talks fast.

 

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