Tuesday, January 22, 2019

Monday, January 21, 2019

Letters to the Editor for Our WP1 Unit

In this first WP1 unit, we're going to be creating Letters to the Editor ("LTEs") from different perspectives.  To most effectively accomplish that, I want us to practice two crucial skills: "deconstructing genres" and "determining rhetorical situations," which you can apply to all of your writing assignments (beyond ENG 015!).   

To help us get started with all of this, though, let's find some LTEs to analyze.  The following links can help you do that:

  • the Bucks County Courier Times has Letters to the Editor -- just make sure to search for them
  • Montgomery News/Media
  • the Intelligencer, which is a relatively small publication in the area
  • the Daily Pennsylvanian (the "DP"), which is a student-run publication at UPenn!
  • Lancaster Online (Lancaster is a rural area 2 hours outside of Philadelphia)
  • The Philadelphia Inquirer has a section for LTEs, although it doesn't seem like they update them regularly
  • although it isn't quite "local," the Washington Post -- one of the country's most reputable journalistic outlets -- 
  • similarly, the New York Times also publishes Letters to the Editor 
Also, don't forget that Wikipedia can be a great "presearch" tool (think: pre research), so it's worth checking out this Wikipedia entry on Letters to the Editor.  

The Rhetorical Situation



Tuesday, January 15, 2019

Horror Movies! More Practice with Genre and Conventions

Scenario: all of a sudden, you're sitting in the middle of a movie theater, watching a horror movie.  How do you know you're watching a horror movie?  What features/things about this movie make it a horror movie?

 After you jot down your predictions, let's put our hypotheses to the test!

The Shining



Psycho



It



Paranormal Activity


Monday, January 7, 2019