journ
Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Part II or all the way to the end
In your weekly journals, you will be practicing and improving your close reading skills and your critical thinking skills. More specifically, you will be “finding” passages in the texts we are reading and trying to make sense of them. These passages could be confusing, odd, funny, powerful, important, or related to something, personally meaningful, relevant in some context, etc. Once you have chosen three passages, you will practice your writing skills by clearly articulating your thoughts in at least 100 words of commentary per passage (quote not included). Your commentaries may be:
-explanations of what you did not understand about the passage and why;
-your opinions about positions, perspectives, characters, or events, etc. that the passage speaks to;
-big or small questions that the passage raises for you;
-descriptions of why the passage is comical, sad, strange, moving, or insightful;
-just any expression of your own views regarding the passage in relation to yourself, other texts, current events, particular problems, etc.
In other words, this assignment is very open. Using your annotations, you will three quotes from our text to reflect on, copy the quotes with citations, and write a short (100 words) commentary for each quote. These assignments are worth two points each, and they are always due Wednesday night: You may submit your reading journals up to two days late for partial credit; however, no submissions will be accepted after the two-day grace period. The assignment will be assessed a) in terms of how well chosen the quotes how, how accurately you have copied them, and whether your citations are correct; as well as b) whether your content is thoughtful, well-written, clear, and faithful to the text.
Requirements:
One of the three quotes must come from the beginning, one from the middle, and one from the end of the reading assignment. For our purposes, the beginning is the first third, the middle the second third, and the end the last third.
Your quotes must be cited properly with an in-text citation. This means that you must provide the page number in parentheses after your quote, which must be placed in quotation marks. Note: Do not mention the page number in your sentence. Example for a quote from the Dao: “The greatest of rulers is but a shadowy presence” (17). You will lose points if I find that you are citing from the wrong edition or otherwise citing improperly.
The quotes must be full sentences and reproduced correctly.
The quotes are not included in the 100 word requirement for the commentaries! You will lose points if you do not meet the required number of words, so do a word count (or just write more).
Important: You will not be receiving individual grades for every journal entry. Instead, you will collect all your entries in a portfolio and submit that to me at the end of the semester. I am going to assign a grade for your reading journal as a whole. If you would like to discuss your reading journal at any point throughout the semester, you need to come and see me or Kirsten during office hours; we will be glad to give you feedback on how you are doing.
Portfolio: Collect all 13 weekly entries in one document, and submit that to me on BB by the end of the semester (last day of class). You are not allowed to make any changes or revisions to your entries; you must submit them as they were when you originally posted them on BB. Again, no revisions allowed! You should save all your journal entries in a document or in separate documents in a folder on your computer, so you have everything in one place. Alternatively, you should be able to copy and paste all your journal entries from BB into Word at the end. Write a short preface (min. 250 words) for your portfolio where you explain in what ways the reading journal helped you learn in this class. Additional directions to follow!
