I thought I would give you a quick reminder of the homework assigned for tomorrow. You need to read up to page 536 of George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language". The essay has loads of fantastic vocabulary, so you will likely need to spend some solid time looking words up - try making a vocab list for this one. Also, attend to Orwell's fantastic phrasing and venomous attitude towards the "catalogue of swindles and perversions" which is destroying the language.
Of course, for the few of you who did not do last day's homework - choosing an AP style passage from one of the recent essays, and writing the 3 multiple choice questions and complete answers with an explanation for each - you should do that too. Finally, for those of you who did not complete the outline of Eric Liu's essay, I strongly advise you to do that too. The homework in this class really will contribute to your learning; and I hope I have demonstrated the need to read widely and well in order to write well. There is a clear and proven relationship between these two endeavors.
Regrettably, we will not be meeting on Tuesday next week, but here is some information to prepare you for the following class.
For Thursday:
- Please have your 10 multiple choice questions ready.
- There will be a quiz on logical fallacies. The following terms are fair game:
- equivocation
- slippery slope
- red herring
- straw man
- ad hominem
- non sequitur
- post hoc ergo propter hoc
- faulty dilemma
- bandwagon appeals
- begging the question
- faulty analogies
- hasty generalizations.
I leave you with these words from the essay, which I love: Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble.
Bonus marks to any student who is able to show up on Thursday with his / her own favorite quotation from this essay; of course, it would really be a bonus if you were to post the quotation into the blog as a comment!
Off to eat my beautiful dinner prepared by my husband - ladies take note!
"A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language... our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thought."
ReplyDeleteThis is my favorite quote :)
Nicole
"As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse."
ReplyDeleteYou girls rock - I'm waiting to see what the male members of the class have derived from the reading!
ReplyDelete"Since you don't know what fascism is, how can you struggle against fascism?"
ReplyDelete"But your are not obligated to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you - even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent - and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself." (Orwell differentiating between a scrupulous writer who goes through the trouble of questioning his writing and one who does not.)
ReplyDelete