Odysseus and Me: How did you do?

Nov 29 2007

Odysseus and Me: How did you do?

Published by Mr. Sheehy at 1:46 pm under Writing Assignments

You have made your arguments for why you and Odysseus are similar, and I think your essays amply address the question we posed for this unit: Is it possible for you to connect an ancient Greek epic to your lives in some sort of interesting way? The answer is yes, and you have done so by identifying the characteristics of the epic hero and relating them to your own lives, and you did so by examining the characteristics of the monsters and forming analogies between them and your own lives.

Now that you’ve received your essays back, I’d like you to look over them and write a short blog article about what you did well and what you can improve for next time. I’d also like you to address the things you said you needed to improve after the last essay (remember when we wrote a similar reflection?). I’ll write some specific guidelines for writing the reflection in a moment, but first I’d like to list a few things I thought were worth discussing as a group. They’re things we need to improve or things we would do well to learn:

With numbers under ten, spell them out – Don’t write 8, write eight.
Know the difference between have and of – Don’t write “I could of gone with you.” Write “I could have gone with you.”
Be careful about punctuation for quotes – know the rules we discussed in class.
Know what to do about long quotes – If the quotation reaches four lines, put it in its own paragraph, don’t use quotation marks, and indent the entire paragraph by a half inch on the left and right margins.
Many of your papers struggled at times with the “flow.” You may have had trouble with transitions, or maybe you got tangled trying to write a sentence that makes sense at times. You can improve at this by taking all your assignments seriously, even those on the blogs, because the more you write and think, the easier the process becomes. So to improve at this, try hard!

Okay, here are the instructions for writing this article. They’re copied directly from the reflection you wrote after the previous essays:

The first thing I want you to do is read over any comments I put on your essay and the scores you earned on the rubric. Figure out what went well and what went wrong. Then turn to your blog and write about it. Tell us where you did well and what you’ll need to improve for next time.

When you tell us what went well, quote from your essay. Consider putting your strongest paragraph right into your blog article (copy and paste!). If you do not have a full paragraph that was strong, give a line, like a topic sentence or an attention grabber, and explain to us why it is strong. Don’t cut this article too short. I realize the temptation is to jot two sentences and quit. I’d like to see 5-7 sentences of reflective writing and a quote from your essay.