Blog #4

Weekly Blog due Monday, Oct. 3rd by 11:59pm.
Task 1: Summarize and Respond to an Academic Article
On Blackboard, you’ll find an article entitled “The Place of World Englishes in Composition” by Suresh Canagarajah.  Read the section entitled “The Implications of Globalizing English” (bottom of p. 587 to the top of page 594) for this blog response. For the written portion of your blog, do three things: 1) summarize the major points of this section of the article (assume your audience is someone who hasn’t read the article, so make this section fairly in-depth), 2) comment on what you learned, 3) discuss why this information may be important to consider for a middle school/high school Language Arts class.  Think not just about who your students may be, but who they will communicate with in the future and what kinds of texts they may read.  Canagarajah is framing this article for the college classroom, so we’ll need to adjust this for our target audience.   Remember: I told you in class that this article is written in “high theory,” so you may need to read the section a few times to understand what he’s saying (in other words, no complaining on your blog that it was difficult to understand!).

Length: About 500-750 words.

Task 2: Incorporate the Pattern(s)-of-the-Week

Pattern 1: A complex sentence (independent clause and dependent clause joined by a subordinating conjunction).  For this pattern, try to include your dependent clause in the middle, like this: Beth, although she does loads of homework each night, is sadly still behind in her courses [complex sentence with the dependent clause after the main subject; the placement of the dependent clause here introduces you to “Beth” and her effort before stating the main problem in the rest of the independent clause].  Pay attention to where this “in-the-middle” clause works well and where it would make more sense either before or after the independent clause.

Pattern 2: Asides set off by dashes or parentheses.  EX: My family (to my irritation) insists we do x this weekend [an aside set off by parentheses; I used parentheses to whisper, yet acknowledge that I was irritated—but didn't use dashes as I did not want to unduly emphasize my irritation].  Notice how this is not a complex sentence because “to my irritation” doesn’t have a subject-verb hookup required of a clause. 

Pattern 3: Intentional use of SRTOL for an academic purpose.  Here’s an example from Canagarajah: “Therefore, I am tempted to ask in Babu English, ‘Honored Sirs and Madams, I humbly beseech you, which language am I a native of?’” (p.589).  Notice how Canagarajah uses both of his own languages, “Standard” English and Babu English—both of which he is clearly an expert in—in this example and lets the reader know what he’s up to.  If you use this pattern, don’t “adopt” or use a language variety that you wouldn’t claim as your own.  But do feel free to interpret SRTOL broadly here.  For example, incorporating more “informal” language, textspeak, swear words (!), etc. would be fine—if done with a rhetorical purpose (don’t just swear for the heck of it).

P.S. Remember: Don't confuse dashes with hyphens!  A dash—at least most of the time—is longer and has no spaces around it.  A hyphen is a create-a-new-word piece of punctuation, and is much shorter than the dash (but still with no spaces around it).  You unfortunately can't substitute the two.

Task 3: Respond to Two Blogs | Explain the Grammar
Respond to two students’ posts by 11:59pm on Wednesday, Oct. 5th. In your response, you’ll do three things: 1) respond to the content of the author’s post, 2) comment on how effectively the author incorporated the pattern(s) (this is the place where you practice explaining the grammar to someone else, even if they got the pattern right), and 3) suggest another place in the text where the author might effectively experiment with the pattern(s). Be sure to write out your suggestion in your response, not just suggest it in general terms.

This time, respond to the two students who are in the third & fourth spot below you on the list. And as always, if someone is a bit late in posting their blog, just go to the next person on the list.