Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Wednesday, November 4

Today, you began class by quickly reviewing the "quotation tools" that we discussed on Monday -- ellipses and brackets. You then returned to the quotation notes sheet you'd filled out on Monday and used either, or both, of these tools to alter a piece of evidence supporting the claim "Skittles are better than M&M's." Your alterations were effective and made the evidence much more streamlined, although we also discussed the drawbacks of altering a piece of evidence too much -- chiefly, that the presence of multiple ellipses and brackets makes the audience suspect that important information is being left out, which undermines your argument.

Subsequently, you altered a second piece of evidence, but this time in ways that violated the standards we'd discussed on Monday -- just to see what it felt like. Your revised evidence was uniformly twisted and warped from its original state.

Finally, we gave you copies of the "Adam and Eve" story, and began reading it, in preparation for an evidence-finding exercise next Monday.

For homework, continue working on your Animal Farm projects, which are due on November 18.