Announcements Your synthesis essay is now due Monday, November 7. Unit Test on Thursday – study your literary devices! Know your TPCASTT! Review essay writing! The marking period ends on Friday, November 4th. Office Hours – Monday – Thursday from 4-5PM and/or by appointment. If you want to retake the literary devices test before the marking period ends, you must do so Thursday after school.

Reflecting On The Literary Essay The Good Organization seemed okay. People attempted to use more sophisticated vocabulary. People used transition. Thesis statements were pretty good. The Bad Far too many fundamental mistakes. No evidence of careful proofreading and revision. The Ugly Major grammatical issues. Lack of clear and well-developed thinking.

What Mr. Hew Plans To Do… I am going to teach you the absolute basics in grammar and build you up. Parts of speech and up… Mr. Hew will mandate students to attend office hours and get the remedial help they need before they go to college and waste thousands of dollars on information you should have learned. I will not accept your essays until there is tons of evidence that you have read through your writing and went through multiple revisions.

Revising/Editing Your Body Paragraphs (5 Minutes) You are reading with laser vision and ripping apart the paper. What capitalization, punctuation, grammar, or spelling mistakes do you find? What words, phrases, sentences sound awkward or simply don’t make any sense at all? Do your body paragraphs seem organized? Is there a topic sentence, evidence, and a great amount of analysis that isn’t obvious? Is the writing clear and specific? Do you understand exactly what your partner is saying?

11th Grade American Literature AIM: How do we develop a counterargument for our synthesis essay? (November 1, 2011)

Objective(s) and Standards SWBAT develop a body paragraph that takes into account counterarguments and argues against them.

What is a Counterargument? A counterargument is an argument that is made that goes against your thesis statement. Mr. Hew’s Thesis Statement: I believe the American Dream does still exist today, but it may take generations for it to be realized, if at all, because of racial, economic, and educational obstacles that severely limit the opportunities of immigrants, minorities, and lower-class citizens. What would the counterargument be?

The Counterarguments might be… This is absolutely not true. America is a place that is equal and everyone has an opportunity to achieve the American Dream no matter the color of their skin or the social class. The American Dream is dead. With the recession and all the problems that America is facing with fewer jobs, failing education, and they war on terror, the American Dream has been put to sleep.

Find a Quote or Person Would Disagree With Your Thesis Statement… Barack Obama, in his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote address, stated, “Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all mean are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Take the Counterargument and Explain Why It Is Wrong… Obama states that the American Dream is alive and he is the living embodiment of this. How can we argue against this?

Your Turn… Write down your thesis statement. Who might argue against it? What might they say? Find a quote or another source of evidence in which the counterargument is captured. Take the counterargument and explain why it could be true, but it’s not true because... Why does your argument (or thesis statement) make better sense?