Vocabulary for Unit Two

These are the vocabulary words for Unit 2.  Remember to incorporate at least two words into your Discussion Board.  Identify the words by using red text.

Benevolent         Reclamation          Dubious           Fabricated

Hypocrisy            Slander                 Astute              Ambiguous

Apathetic             Arbitrary

Discussion 2.1

In the article “Learning How to Code-Switch: Humbling, but Necessary,” Eric Deggans describes his experiences with code switching. For your next discussion board, you should describe your own experiences switching between different audiences, cultures or social groups.  How does your language and behavior change depending on the people you are around?  Have you ever had an experience in which your failure to adapt to a new situation caused problems?  Do you have difficultly maintaining your own identity when you are required to code switch?

Complete this discussion board with one initial response of at least 300 words and two replies of at least 100 words each. Be sure to include at least 2 vocabulary words from this unit. Identify these these words using red text.

 https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/04/10/176234171/learning-how-to-code-switch-humbling-but-necessary 

Writer’s notebook 2.1

Composing a Professional Email Message / Code Shifting

This Writer’s Notebook entry consists of two parts:

Part 1: Imagine that, due to an emergency, you were unable to attend class or complete an assignment. Write a text message or email to a friend telling him or her about the incident. Relate the incident in casual register language, using simple words, slang, jargon or dialect—the “insider language” that you speak among friends and the type of language McWhorter discusses in the video above. If you speak English as a second language, you may mix your two languages—even to the extent of using a few made-up or combination words. Let your sentences be incomplete, your grammar incorrect, your word choice colorful, even mildly offensive—just make us believe you might really write this way to your friend. In other words, keep it real.

Part 2: Using the same story you related above, now rewrite the incident as an email to your instructor in Formal Register English. Your goal is to maintain credibility with your instructor while asking for him or her to accept your excuse. You must carefully decide what details of the story you include and what details you leave out. Remember, communicating with your instructor should be done in formal register, and you should use the conventions of professional communication.  You will also need to include your name, course and section number, just as if you were sending a “real” message to me.  

Complete both parts of this assignment in the same document.  

writer’s notebook 2.2

After reading Malcolm X’s text above, think about the audience and purpose he has for writing. To whom does he seem to be speaking? For what purpose does he relate his story about learning to read? After you’ve thought about it, write a response that shows what you think his audience and purpose are and why you think the way you do. Be sure to provide support for your thinking by using examples from the text. Minimum length: 300 words. 

“Learning to Read”

“Learning to Read” excerpt from The Autobiography of Malcolm X

MALCOLM X

Born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925, Malcolm X was one of the most articulate and powerful leaders of black America during the 1960s. A street hustler convicted of robbery in 1946, he spent seven years in prison, where he educated himself and became a disciple of Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam. In the days of the civil rights movement, Malcolm X emerged as the leading spokesman for black separatism, a philosophy that urged black Americans to cut political, social, and economic ties with the white community. After a pilgrimage to Mecca, the capital of the Muslim world, in 1964, he became an orthodox Muslim, adopted the Muslim name El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, and distanced himself from the teachings of the black Muslims. He was assassinated in1965. In the following excerpt from his autobiography (1965), coauthored with Alex Haley and published the year of his death, Malcolm X describes his self-education.

Excerpt beings here:

  It was because of my letters that I happened to stumble upon starting to acquire some kind of a homemade education.

 I became increasingly frustrated at not being able to express what I wanted to convey in letters that I wrote, especially those to Mr. Elijah Muhammad. In the street, I had been the most articulate hustler out there. I had commanded attention when I said something. But now, trying to write simple English, I not only wasn’t articulate, I wasn’t even functional. How would I sound writing in slang, the way 1 would say it, something such as, “Look, daddy, let me pull your coat about a cat, Elijah Muhammad—”

Many who today hear me somewhere in person, or on television, or those who read something I’ve said, will think I went to school far beyond the eighth grade. This impression is due entirely to my prison studies.

It had really begun back in the Charlestown Prison, when Bimbi first made me feel envy of his stock of knowledge. Bimbi had always taken charge of any conversations he was in, and I had tried to emulate him. But every book I picked up had few sentences which didn’t contain anywhere from one to nearly all of the words that might as well have been in Chinese. When I just skipped those words, of course, I really ended up with little idea of what the book said. So I had come to the Norfolk Prison Colony still going through only book-reading motions. Pretty soon, I would have quit even these motions, unless I had received the motivation that I did.

I saw that the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary—to study, to learn some words. I was lucky enough to reason also that I should try to improve my penmanship. It was sad. I couldn’t even write in a straight line. It was both ideas together that moved me to request a dictionary along with some tablets and pencils from the Norfolk Prison Colony school.

I spent two days just riffling uncertainly through the dictionary’s pages. I’d never realized so many words existed! I didn’t know which words I needed to learn. Finally, just to start some kind of action, I began copying.

In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet everything printed on that first page, down to the punctuation marks.

I believe it took me a day. Then, aloud, I read back, to myself, everything I’d written on the tablet. Over and over, aloud, to myself, I read my own handwriting.

I woke up the next morning, thinking about those words—immensely proud to realize that not only had I written so much at one time, but I’d written words that I never knew were in the world. Moreover, with a little effort, I also could remember what many of these words meant. I reviewed the words whose meanings I didn’t remember. Funny thing, from the dictionary first page right now, that “aardvark” springs to my mind. The dictionary had a picture of it, a long-tailed, long-eared, burrowing African mammal, which lives off termites caught by sticking out its tongue as an anteater does for ants.

I was so fascinated that I went on—I copied the dictionary’s next page. And the same experience came when I studied that. With every succeeding page, I also learned of people and places and events from history. Actually the dictionary is like a miniature encyclopedia. Finally the dictionary’s A section had filled a whole tablet—and I went on into the B’s. That was the way I started copying what eventually became the entire dictionary. It went a lot faster after so much practice helped me to pick up handwriting speed. Between what I wrote in my tablet, and writing letters, during the rest of my time in prison I would guess I wrote a million words.

I suppose it was inevitable that as my word-base broadened, I could for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading on my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of books with a wedge. Between Mr. Muhammad’s teachings, my correspondence, my visitors—usually Ella and Reginald—and my reading of books, months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.

The Norfolk Prison Colony’s library was in the school building. A variety of classes was taught there by instructors who came from such places as Harvard and Boston universities. The weekly debates between inmate teams were also held in the school building. You would be astonished to know how worked up convict debaters and audiences would get over subjects like “Should Babies Be Fed Milk?”

Available on the prison library’s shelves were books on just about every general subject. Much of the big private collection that Parkhurst had willed to the prison was still in crates and boxes in the back of the library—thousands of old books. Some of them looked ancient: covers faded; old-time parchment-looking binding. Parkhurst, I’ve mentioned, seemed to have been principally interested in history and religion. He had the money and the special interest to have a lot of books that you wouldn’t have in general circulation. Any college library would have been lucky to get that collection.

As you can imagine, especially in a prison where there was heavy emphasis on rehabilitation, an inmate was smiled upon if he demonstrated an unusually intense interest in books. There was a sizable number of well-read inmates, especially the popular debaters, Some were said by many to be practically walking encyclopedias.         

They were almost celebrities. No university would ask any student to devour literature as I did when this new world opened to me, of being able to read and understand.

I read more in my room than in the library itself. An inmate who was known to read a lot could check out more than the permitted maximum number of books. I preferred reading in the total isolation of my own room.

When I had progressed to really serious reading, every night at about ten P.M. I would be outraged with the “lights out.” It always seemed to catch me right in the middle of something engrossing.

Fortunately, right outside my door was a corridor light that cast a glow into my room. The glow was enough to read by, once my eyes adjusted to it. So when “lights out” came, I would sit on the floor where I could continue reading in that glow.

At one-hour intervals the night guards paced past every room. Each time I heard the approaching footsteps, I jumped into bed and feigned sleep. And as soon as the guard passed, I got back out of bed onto the floor area of that light-glow, where I would read for another fifty-eight minutes—until the guard approached again. That went on until three or four every morning. Three or four hours of sleep a night was enough for me. Often in the years in the streets I had slept less than that.

 The teachings of Mr. Muhammad stressed how history had been “whitened”—when white men had written history books, the black man simply had been left out…I never will forget how shocked I was when I began reading about slavery’s total horror. It made such an impact upon me that it later became one of my favorite subjects when I became a minister of Mr. Muhammad’s. The world’s most monstrous crime, the sin and the blood on the white man’s hands, are almost impossible to believe…I read descriptions of atrocities, saw those illustrations of black slave women tied up and flogged with whips; of black mothers watching their babies being dragged off, never to be seen by their mothers again; of dogs after slaves, and of the fugitive slave catchers, evil white men with whips and clubs and chains and guns…

Book after book showed me how the white man had brought upon the world’s black, brown, red, and yellow peoples every variety of the sufferings of exploitation. I saw how since the sixteenth century, the so-called “Christian trader” white man began to ply the seas in his lust for Asian and African empires, and plunder, and power. I read, I saw, how the white man never has gone among the non-white peoples bearing the Cross in the true manner and spirit of Christ’s teachings—meek, humble, and Christlike…

 I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I certainly wasn’t seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, “What’s your alma mater?” I told him, “Books.” You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I’m not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.

Vocabulary for Unit 3

These are the vocabulary words for this unit.  Remember to incorporate them into your Discussion Board in this unit.

Conviction          Impression          Misconception           Perspective

Profound            Inherent              Inveterate                  Amenable

Impinge              Subversion         Aesthetic

Writer’s notebook 3.1

 Now that you know a little about active reading, it’s time for some practice. Open the attached file and read the instructions at the top of the page. In short, you will be asked to annotate a text and upload the annotated text to the writer’s notebook. 

Writer’s notebook 3.2

For this Writer’s Notebook, follow these instructions to write a summary of an article:

Look ahead to the instructions for the major essay that concludes this unit, the “Summary / Response” essay.  For that essay, you will be asked to choose an article from the “Readings” folder in this unit. (Find the Readings folder just under this description.) Preview each of those articles and choose one that you want to write about for the summary / response essay. Then, read the article carefully, focusing on the skills you learned from the lessons in this unit. Once you have a good idea of what the article says, practice summarizing the article in this Writer’s Notebook entry. 

As you summarize, keep a few things in mind. First, make sure that you clearly identify the title and author of the source article.  Second, make sure you are accurately conveying the main ideas from the source article.  Don’t put words in the author’s mouth or misrepresent the ideas from the article.  Finally,  as you are summarizing, practice integrating quotations as well.  Look for sentences or phrases that are particularly striking to quote directly in your summary.

While the length of your summary will depend, in part, on the length of the article you have chosen, for this assignment your submission should be at least 300 words.  

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGWO1ldEhtQ 

Discussion 3.1

After reading the items in the folder above related to Beyoncé, please respond to both parts below:

Part 1: When you first read Berlatsky’s article, what was your reaction? Were you able to find his main argument? What aspects of his argument did you agree with or disagree with?

Part 2: After reading the two example essays, did your perspective about the article change? Did you see aspects of the article that you didn’t notice before? Do you agree with the responses from either of the example essays?

Complete this discussion board with one initial response of at least 300 words and two replies of at least 100 words each. Be sure to include two vocabulary words highlighted in red.