Thursday, January 17, 2008

Thursday's class

Review
Today, everyone signed up for debate slots. If you were absent, please e-mail me, and I'll send you the sign-up sheet. I'll post the debate schedule here by Saturday.

Then we looked at the robbery descriptions. (My own version is here.) A few things I pointed out were:
  1. Stay consistent with your tense (it can be past or present, but don't jump between them).
  2. Organise your description logically.
  3. Avoid fancy vocabulary (like brandish) when you're not sure what it means. Either look it up, or use a simpler word.
  4. Watch out for sentence fragments ("frag"; more info and exercises here, here, or here)
  5. Also watch out for subject-verb agreement errors ("SVA"; see here, here, or here)
  6. Finally, make sure you've got your apostrophes in the right places.
Homework
  • Follow the instructions in this post.
  • Next Thursday, we'll be debating college tuition costs. In preparation, check out the Rae Report pp 18-24, with a focus on the last two pages. Also, have a look at a number of relevant links from the website of the Canadian Federation of Students.

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