This is our poem recitation day!
Your essay about your author is also due. Do NOT use the Pixar formula in this factual essay.
Basic Biography Info
A biography is a written account of a series of events that make up a person's life. Some of those events will probably be mundane, so you'll need to make your essay as interesting as possible!
Each biography should include important basic details. The first information you should gather in your research should include biographical details and facts. Remember to use trustworthy resources to ensure that your information is accurate.
Basic Detail Suggestions
- Date and place of birth and death
- Family information
- Lifetime accomplishments
- Major events of life
- Effects/impact on society, historical significance
While this information is necessary to your essay, these dry facts, on their own, don't really make a very good biography. Once you've found these basics, you'll want to dig a little deeper.
Start off with a great first sentence. It's a good idea to begin with a really interesting statement, a little-known fact, or really intriguing event.
You should avoid starting out with a standard but boring line like:
Meriwether Lewis was born in Virginia in 1774 and died in 1809.
Instead, try starting with something like this:
Late one afternoon in October, 1809, Meriwether Lewis arrived at a small log cabin nestled deep in the Tennessee Mountains. By sunrise on the following day, he was dead, having suffered gunshot wounds to the head and chest. Such a tragic and mysterious death in no way encapsulates the life of this explorer. His adventure began in 1774, on the day of his birth.
You'll have to make sure the beginning of each paragraph is motivating, but it should also be relevant. Now that you've created an impressive beginning, you'll want to continue the flow. Be sure to weave the interesting details in.
Examples of Interesting Details:
- Some people believed that Lewis and Clark would encounter elephants in the western wilderness, having misunderstood the woolly mammoth bones discovered in the United States.
- The expedition resulted in the discovery and description of 122 new animal species and subspecies.
- Lewis was a hypochondriac.
- His death is still an unsolved mystery. Although most historians agree that he committed suicide; others are convinced that he was murdered.
You can find interesting facts by consulting different sources. Include these in the appropriate paragraphs.
Fill the body paragraphs of your biography with material that gives insight into your subject's personality. Remember that each paragraph should have its own theme. In class, I suggested these ideas to help you start brainstorming:
* birth and childhood
* some important events that shaped this person's life, personality, and/or writing
* a simple analysis or explanation of your poem
* the later years and death of your poet
* what was happening during that time in history that had a direct or indirect effect on your author and his/her work.
* what the literary experts say about your author's poem(s)
* your personal interpretation of the poem
DO NOT WRITE AN INTRODUCTION AND CONCLUSION. We will compose those at a later date.
Questions to Consider in Your Biography:
- Was there something in your subject's childhood that shaped his/her personality?
- Was there a personality trait that drove him/her to succeed or impeded his progress?
- What adjectives would you use to describe him/her?
- What were some turning points in this life?
- What was his/her impact on history?
Be sure to use transitional phrases and words to link your paragraphs and make your composition paragraphs flow. It is normal for good writers to re-arrange their sentences to create a better paper.
As always, proofread your paper and check for errors. Remember to include a bibliography. There is no specific format required for your bibliography. Just MAKE SURE you include it and provide details. For example: "the Internet" is not specific enough! "Wikipedia" is not specific enough. Include the complete URL of any Internet site!
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VARSITY: 3 body paragraphs
JV: 3 body paragraphs
NOVICE: 3 body paragraphs
VARSITY INCLUDE in each paragraph:
All Dress ups in each paragraph
Openers 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 in each paragraph
2 Decorations in each paragraph
JV INCLUDE in each paragraph:
All Dress ups in each paragraph
Openers 2, 3, 5, and 6 in each paragraph
NOVICE INCLUDE in each paragraph:
All Dress ups in each paragraph
Opener 6 in each paragraph
One rough draft, KWOs, & checklist (w/ words written in) are always required with your final essay.
No banned words or contractions allowed.
Vocab must be highlighted in blue.
Staple at top left (be sure to catch ALL your pages in the staple).
TOP: Final Essay
rough draft
KWO (handwritten)
BOTTOM: Checklist (facing the same way as all the other papers)
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FIX-ITs Weeks 7 and 8
Week 7 (information you need to complete this FIX IT)
Subjects and Clause Identification
Subject (S)
Now that you have gotten good at finding nouns and verbs, it is time to learn about subjects, which are nouns or pronouns that perform a verb action. However, not all nouns and pronouns function as a subject.
A subject is not a part of speech. It is actually the function or job of some nouns and pronouns. Thus, saying that a noun is a subject identifies how it functions in that sentence.
The easiest way to identify subjects is to find the verb first and then ask,“Who or what is doing this action?” That is the subject. Since you are now identifying subject-verb pairs (S-V), mark subjects with a capital S and verbs with a capital V instead of vb.
The only nouns or pronouns you need to mark now are those that are the subject. Do not mark any noun or pronoun that is not a subject. Also, you do not need to mark the articles anymore.
Clauses
Since you will be identifying subjects, you can also find the clauses. A clause is a group of words that hang together and have a subject and a verb.
Some clauses are independent or main (MC for main clause) and can stand alone as sentences, whereas others are dependent and must be connected to a MC to be a sentence. A sentence can have more than one clause and thus more than one subject-verb pair.
To help you see the clauses in a sentence, place each clause within brackets [ ]. You will find that almost all the words in a sentence will end up in one of the clauses, even many prepositional phrases!
The upcoming comma rules will be much easier to understand if you can easily see the clauses in
a sentence.
Who-Which(S/w-w)
Interestingly, the who or which is usually the subject of its clause, so label that word as both a subject and who-which (S/w-w).
Week 7
robin hood escaped to sherwood forest, for he was now an outlaw on to/two/too
accounts
he had shot a deer that the king reserved for his own table, and, worse, he had slain a man, to/two/too
two hundred pounds would be lavishly rewarded to the man who delivered robin hood to the king
because the sheriff of nottingham was related to/two/too the slain forester, he had a vendetta to/two/too catch robin hood
Week 8 (information you need to complete this FIX IT)
Main and Dependent Clauses, Clause Starters, Lie versus Lay
Last week you learned how to identify the subject of a sentence by finding the verb, and you put square brackets around the clauses. This week you will learn how to tell the difference between two types of clauses: main and dependent. For each subject-verb pair, you will need to determine if it belongs to a main clause or a dependent clause. Use brackets [ ] to surround main clauses and parentheses ( ) to surround dependent clauses. Here is how you can tell.
Main Clause (MC)
A main clause is a clause that can stand alone as a sentence. Like all clauses, it must have a subject and a verb. Examples: [Robin Hood stood alone]. [His courageous men stood with him].
Main clauses usually start with a subject or with an article (a, an, the) and/or adjectives plus subject. Sometimes the subject-verb will beswitched. Examples: [There gathered around him displaced countrymen]. [Up rose his Merry Men].
If there is a prepositional phrase in the middle or at the end of the clause, include it in the clause. However, if the prepositional phrase comes at the beginning, do not include it. Examples: [Robin perched in the sycamore tree]. In the tree [Robin was safe].
To help you see the main clauses, label them MC.
Dependent Clause (DC)
A dependent clause cannot stand alone as a sentence. It looks like a main clause, but one or more words in front of it turn the main clause into something that leaves us hanging. Place the dependent clause in parentheses ( ) and label it DC.
A who-which clause is one example of a dependent clause. It cannot stand alone. Examples: (which displayed great courage) or (who sang like a bird).
Clause Starters (cl)
There is another list of words that can be used to start a dependent clause. The words are when, while, where, as, since, if, although. To help you remember the list, use the acronym www.asia
www.asia
Officially, these words are called subordinating conjunctions because they begin a subordinate clause, but you do not have to worry about the terminology. For now, just learn the list of words. There are more words that can be added to that list, but this is a good start.
Usage: lie/lay
It is important to learn when to use lay and when to use lie (in the sense of lying down, not telling a lie). You lie yourself down; you lay down an object. Thus, a character might lie down, but he will lay down his weapons. You can lie on the couch but lay your book on the table. It is tricky because the past tense of lie is lay, but the past tense of lay is laid.
Week 8
robin hood lay/laid in hiding in sherwood forest for one year as he adroitly prepared his
new life
while he was gaining valuable hunting skills, there/their/they’re gathered around him many others who were displaced, to/two/too
some men who were famished had shot deer in wintertime, when they could obtain
to/two/too little food for there/their/they’re families
although the foresters had discovered them in the act, they had narrowly escaped, thus
saving themselves
