Spring Break Assignments

[Mrs. Sellers]

Week 25--March 15
• Process Analysis (PA) rough draft due Friday
• Timed Essay (from old AP exam) due Friday
• Voice Lessons—Imagery 11-15
• Multiple Choice (Passages 1 and 2 pp. 253-259) due Friday
• DQ due Wednesday; DQSR due Friday
• Read final ½ of Ella Minnow Pea

Week 26--March 22
• PA Peer Review due Wednesday
• Timed Essay (from old AP exam) due Friday
• Make Your Own Multiple Choice due Friday
• DQ: Initial response due Wednesday, student response due Friday


Week 27--March 29
• PA final due Wednesday
• Timed Essay (From old AP exam) due Friday
• Read Civil Disobedience
• Voice Lessons—Tone Lessons 11-15
• Optional Classics discussion questions on Dracula due by the last day of the month


The timed essay links are posted for all three weeks. If you are doing Week 27’s work, you do not have to have your classics questions posted by the spring break week.

PROCESS ANALYSIS ESSAY

This week, you get to write a Process Analysis (PA) essay. Basically, this is a “how-to” essay. This is our LAST ESSSAY OF THE YEAR!!! It’s a short essay.

http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/process.html http://www.ehow.com/how_4449636_write-p ... essay.html
http://grammar.about.com/od/developinge ... ocanal.htm


I’d like to highlight a few things about the paper. The audience is a very important factor in determining the outline of a PA paper. For the purposes of this paper, we will assume that your classmates are your audience. If you wish to write to a different audience, please write AUDIENCE: ______________ at the top of your paper. Fill in the blank with who your audience is intended to be. That will help everyone who reads or reviews your essay. You can address your audience personally (you do this…) or in the third person (one does this… or he does this….). Your essay could have a casual, funny tone or a serious tone.

Go to http://ftp.ccccd.edu/andrade/1301/examples.htm for three examples of more-seriously toned essays. But, feel free to make me laugh.

The next thing to determine (after you pick your topic) is whether your topic lends itself to a step-by-step explanation (how to do something) or a general overview (how something works or happens). For example, if you were writing about how brain surgery is performed, you would probably want to write a general overview. However, if you are writing about how one makes a table and inserts graphics into Microsoft Word, you would write a step-by-step. The difference is this: if someone could pick up your paper and, with no further instructions than your paper, go and do whatever you explained in your paper, then it is a step-by-step. If a person understands a process, but really couldn’t perform the process without further instruction/help, then it is a general overview.

Next, determine your purpose. Is it to help readers to be able to complete a specific task? It is to show how easy something that seems difficult really is? Is it to give an overview of a bigger process? Remember, essays must always have a purpose.

The two types of papers (step-by-step and overview) are organized in a similar, logical format. Your essay is fairly short in number of words, so you might not be able to follow all of these steps:
1. Overview
2. Special terms
3. Sequence of steps
4. Examples
5. Results

You may find that you combine several of these steps in one paragraph. Or, you may not have any examples, per say.

One important thing to point out, however, is that when you are describing your process, is that you can combine several smaller steps or eliminate some, or give special emphasis to some. For example, if you were talking about how to make a peanut butter sandwich, you would not have to say “take the lid off the peanut butter jar.” Duh. We’d better know that. Or, if you were giving an overview of brain surgery, you would not want to discuss sanitizing the instruments. We would assume they were sanitized. But, let’s say that you were talking about installing a ceiling fan. You might want to give special emphasis on making sure the power to the fixture is cut off and even how to make sure that it is.

How should you conclude your essay? This would be the fifth step, results.
1. How do you know it (your process) is done?
2. How do you know if it is good (done well)?

Those are two question you might want to answer in your conclusion.

Another thing to keep in mind when you are writing this essay is to use time markers (first, next, then, after, before, and the like).