George Bilgere, "Bus Boy"

Today, a big leap forward to the practice of writing with authority about language. We have two exercises to complete today, and you have a choice: (a) read the explanations and follow the directions for both exercises on your own, or (b) doing exercise #1 with me and #2 on your own. I recommend option (b) if you think you work better with things explained out loud in a small group, or if you feel uncomfortable with the style of analysis we started with the "Art of" project. No more than eight people can sit in on this, though.

Here are the exercises. Both refer to documents that are saved on our class Notes page at the HHS site.

(1) EXERCISE #1: Read the document entitled "Observation Guide: Diction" and then complete simple exercise it describes on the document entitled "Sample analysis: Diction." Save your results to your network folder.

(2) EXERCISE #2: Select one of the two prose excerpts on the handout provided today and compose a complete, but brief, close-reading analysis of its diction, saving the paragraph as a word file and posting it to your blog as a post with the title "Practice Diction Analysis." (10 pts)