Class Notes/English 189
Angela Morales
Class Overview: Lesson 23: Identifying Run-Ons
In today’s lecture, students are shown many examples of run-on sentences. The lesson places heavy emphasis on students’ ability to identify subjects and verbs. In addition, students are introduced to comma splices and warned not to get carried away adding comments where they may not be needed. According to the lesson, run-ons are often formed when students are writing a series of sentences using personal and demonstrative pronouns. The lesson is nicely focused on teaching students how to fix run ons using only periods and semicolons.
Observations:
The slide show was long and well-developed. Though today’s lesson contained quite a bit of information, students seemed engaged throughout.
After watching this lesson, I’ve been thinking about the critical importance of visual cues. This lesson contains many of the same “cues” we’ve seen in other slide shows, such as red arrows and blue circles. These small but potent additions really guide students’ learning and thinking. A few times during this slideshow I did feel that some of the visual cues were a little distracting or confusing. Here’s a very minor example:
Missing in action
[red arrow here]
In this case, the students were presented with a sentence fragment and a red arrow pointing to the place where missing information (in this case, subject and verb). After that, a corrected sentence appears, but the missing information is added at the end of the fragment:
Missing in action, the soldier did not come home with his unit.
In this case, it might be good to revise the slide with two arrows pointing to either side of the fragment, allowing students to see that a subject and verb can be anywhere in the sentence.
This is such a minor example, but it really helps me to see the pedagogical significance of every little detail!