Do a Dull Thing With Style

test

2010-10-27T23:46:00.001-04:00

When I was growing up, NIrvana (and Kurt Cobian) became popular (1991), thus ending the reign of hair metal. Right before that was going on, the Beastie Boys were becoming popular and Run DMC was collaborating with Areosmith (1985). These two events changed music forever and helped define my generation.

I also remember my brother picking me up at school. On the radio, America was attacking Iraq for invading Kuwait (1990), and a few years later, Bill Clinton was making news for more than being president.

My generation, wearing flannel and listening to "weird" music, was known as the "slacker generation". As Margot Hornblower describes my generation in a Time magazine article, we were: "lazy, listless baby busters who supposedly typified the new generation? Beavis and Butt-head were their icons; Beck's Loser was their song ("Savin' all your food stamps and burnin' down the trailer park"); Richard Linklater's Slacker, with its Austin, Texas, deadbeats, was their movie. This was the MTV generation: Net surfing, nihilistic nipple piercers whining about McJobs; latchkey legacies, fearful of commitment. Passive and powerless, they were content, it seemed, to party on in a Wayne's Netherworld, one with more antiheroes--Kurt Cobain, Dennis Rodman, the Menendez brothers--than role models. The label that stuck was from Douglas Coupland's 1991 novel, Generation X, a tale of languid youths musing over "mental ground zero--the location where one visualizes oneself during the dropping of the atomic bomb: frequently a shopping mall."

(Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,986481,00.html#ixzz13cb3eCGe)-- but you don't have to.

As you can see, there are lots of things that a generation is known by, so for this discussion post, write 500 words about what defines your generation. How have you personally been influenced by your generation's taste (for instance, I used to watch Beavis and Butthead, but I hated that movie "Slacker").

Survey

2010-10-11T21:07:00.001-04:00

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.

test

2010-10-05T13:14:00.001-04:00

Class,

As I have seen a few people now, I keep seeing people having trouble with their thesis. Remember that you need some "lens" to look at the ad. Are you looking at gender? socio-economic? how the family is portrayed? how masculinity is portrayed? is the ad using nostalgia?

Here is a sample, formulaic thesis that you can work off of:

"Between Time A and Time B, ___________ is a change in culture that occurred. As we can see from these two ads, __________ changed their advertising strategy to adapt to this change in culture in the following ways: ______________________________, for the following reasons____________________."

MLA handouts

2009-07-30T01:13:00.002-04:00

Here you go:

Revision Guidelines

2009-07-13T11:22:00.003-04:00

To get credit for revision, you must adhere to the following:

Revision Guidelines

You are allowed to revise two essays of your choice. You are not allowed to submit an essay that was not previously submitted – this is not a make-up assignment.

All revisions are due on Monday, August, 3. You are responsible for scheduling a conferencing appointment, or seeing me during office hours if you want to discuss your revisions.

Objective:

Revision, real revision, is perhaps the most important aspect of becoming a better writer. To improve as a writer, you must be willing to write in ways you have not written before, be willing to try new things, to take risks. Successful writers revise their work several times before they are comfortable that what they have written is the best work they can produce. The goal is to achieve the best possible written work you are capable of producing.

What is revision?

To be a revision, an essay must demonstrate significant change in global issues such as focus (what the paper is trying to accomplish), arrangement (how the paper is organized), or development (amount and relevance of detail and/or support for generalizations). If you haven’t actually changed the original essay, I will simply hand it back to you without other comments. Note: Simply correcting errors in spelling, punctuation, usage or grammar (though expected in a revision) does not count as revision because such corrections do not meet the above criteria.

Revising

To receive credit for revising an essay, you must do all of the following:

• highlight and explain any additions and/or changes that you made to your draft

• write a Reflective essay explaining your revisions; for example, you need to explain why and how you changed the essay’s focus. Why you rearranged, or added more information. Etc.

• submit only the original graded draft, the revised draft, a reflection essay, and the Rubric.

What We Should Have Done

2009-03-25T18:42:00.003-04:00

Here is all the material I was going to cover in class today:

Since today's class went wrong on my end, like I said in class, I will give you extra credit if (and only if) you complete the two worksheets above (use the third to help you complete the worksheets). They must be completed in FULL and CORRECTLY.

This is aside form the usual Center for Excellence in Writing tutoring that I give extra credit for.