Notes/English 189

Angela Morales

October 24-28:

This week I began covering run-on sentences. I used the two slide shows that Chris has written and I found that they worked very well. In addition, we are working from the book and from handouts that I’ve typed up. Overall, I find the book exercises to be a little tougher than the sentences in the slides, though I don’t think the students were discouraged by them at all.

Monday October 24

Today we looked at part of the first slide show on run-on sentences. The lesson is a bit long, so I decided to break it up into two parts. I thought that the examples work wonderfully, although I made a few minor changes (Chris calls a semi-colon a “soft-period”; I changed it back to “semi-colon”). Still—the changes were minor, and I really liked the sheer number of examples. I feared that students would lose interest, but I kept reminding them that repetition is the key to understanding, and they stuck with it pretty nicely.

Wednesday October 26:

Today we covered the second part of the “Causes of Run-Ons.” I really like the thought that went into the lesson and how Chris was able to break down the problem into common causes and then offer solutions. Today we combined the slide-show with some book work. The book has some good editing exercises, but today we just practiced identifying which sentences are run-ons and which are complete sentences.

Friday October 28:

Today students took their weekly vocabulary quiz, and we began the second half of Chris’s slide-show on “How to Correct Run-Ons.” This slide-show seemed a little more complex and students seemed to have a little more trouble following along. Once again, I decided to break it up into two days. In general, students seemed a little slower at picking out the correct answers, and they didn’t always seem to understand the rationale behind their answers. Just one of those days, perhaps…