Sentence Fragments
No main verb
Fragment
An essay with a clear thesis and organization.
Corrected
An essay with a clear thesis and organization has a stronger probability of succeeding.
Fragment
An education system based on standardized tests with no flexible interpretation of those tests
Corrected
An education system based on standardized tests with no flexible interpretation of those tests will inevitably discriminate against non-native speakers.
No main subject
Fragment
With too much emphasis on standardized tests targeting upper class Anglo students
Corrected
With too much emphasis on standardized tests targeting upper class Anglo students, No Child Left Behind remains a form of discrimination.
Fragment
With my fish tacos overloaded with mango salsa and Manchego cheese
Correct
With my fish tacos overloaded with mango salsa and Manchego cheese, they fell apart upon the first bite.
Fragment
Until you learn to not overload your fish tacos
Correct
Until you learn to not overload your fish tacos, your tacos will fall apart.
Sentence Fragment Exercises
After each sentence, write C for complete or F for fragment sentence. If the sentence is a fragment, correct it so that it is a complete sentence.
One. While hovering over the complexity of a formidable math problem and wondering if he had time to solve the problem before his girlfriend called him to complain about the horrible birthday present he bought her.
Two. In spite of the boyfriend’s growing discontent for his girlfriend, a churlish woman prone to tantrums and grand bouts of petulance.
Three. My BMW 5 series, a serious entry into the luxury car market.
Four. Overcome with nausea from eating ten bowls of angel hair pasta slathered in pine nut garlic pesto.
Five. Winding quickly but safely up the treacherous Palos Verdes hills in the shrouded mist of a lazy June morning, I realized that my BMW gave me feelings of completeness and fulfillment.
Six. To attempt to grasp the profound ignorance of those who deny the compelling truths of science in favor of their pseudo-intellectual ideas about “dangerous” vaccines and the “myths” of global warming.
Seven. The girlfriend whom I lavished with exotic gifts from afar.
Eight. When my cravings for pesto pizza, babaganoush, and triple chocolate cake overcome me during my bouts of acute anxiety.
Nine. Inclined to stop watching sports in the face of my girlfriend’s insistence that I pay more attention to her, I am throwing away my TV.
Ten. At the dance club where I espy my girlfriend flirting with a stranger by the soda machine festooned with party balloons and tinsel.
Eleven. The BMW speeding ahead of me and winding into the misty hills.
Twelve. Before you convert to the religion of veganism in order to impress your vegan girlfriend.
Thirteen. Summoning all my strength to resist the giant chocolate fudge cake sweating on the plate before me.
All Your Essay Options for Third Typed Essay Due 10-21-15
One. In a 4-page essay with 3 sources, support, refute, or complicate Kristof's argument in "Prudence Or Cruelty?" that in spite of the food stamp abuses cited by opponents of the food stamp program, providing food stamps for the poor is moral and economic imperative over the long term. Be sure to have a counterargument and rebuttal section at the end of your essay.
Two. In a 4-page essay with 3 sources, support, refute, or complicate the notion that eating meat is morally defensible in the context of evolution and biology and that ethical objections to meat eating are not born of eating meat but the abuses that result in the factory farming of animals. Be sure to have a counterargument-refutation section.
Three. Addressing Francine Prose's "The Wages of Sin," write a 4-page essay with 3 sources that supports, refutes, or complicates the notion that overeating is not an illness but a moral flaw and a vice.
Four. In a 4-page essay with 3 sources, develop a thesis that addresses the claim that Francine Prose and Caroline Knapp are criticizing cultural norms about eating that in truth are not normal at all but pathological and that these norms create a toxic eating environment in our culture.
Five. Both McMillan and Kristof (172) use their examinations of public attitudes toward food as a platform to argue for specific changes in our official food policy. In a 4-page essay with 3 sources, develop a thesis that explains how these recommendations compare. Can you imagine Kristof citing points McMillan raises here as evidence or support for the argument he makes about food stamps? If so, how specifically?
Six. Both Dolnick and Francine Prose address the mythical narrative of obesity and overeating by deconstructing the myth. In a 4-page essay with 3 sources, develop a thesis that analyzes how Dolnick and Prose deconstruct the myth of fatness.
Seven. Write a personal essay in which you either support or refute Kohn’s argument about grading, using anecdotes from your experience as a student. Do you view grading in a negative or positive light? Why or why not? Make sure to structure your argument by addressing Kohn’s multiple points directly.
Break Down the Prompt into Its Parts
Convert the questions in the assignment into sentences.
Follow instructions
I agree (disagree) with Kohn because . . .
Eight. Kohn writes about the need to move a school “from a grade orientation to a learning orientation” (pp. 239, 243). What do you think he means? How, according to Kohn, does grading make it harder to focus on learning? Write an essay in which you discuss the characteristics of these two orientations. Do you think it’s possible to have an educational system that emphasizes both?
Break Down the Assignment into Your Own Words
We're asked in the prompt to explain, perhaps in one sentence, what Kohn means when he says we must move from a grade to a learning orientation. Clearly, a grading orientation for Kohn excludes learning. We have to explain why Kohn believes this and then explain whether or not we agree with him.
Nine. This essay asks you to think about the relationship between blue- and white-collar work. Write an essay in which you compare the particular rules, scripts, roles, and norms that teach us how to think about each of these two categories. How is each type of work typically defined? What tasks, skills, or abilities are we told each conventionally involves? And, perhaps most important, how are we taught to value these types of work differently? In your view, are these value distinctions fair? Accurate? How or how not?
Explanation Part in Your Intro
Write an essay in which you compare the particular rules, scripts, roles, and norms that teach us how to think about each of these two categories. How is each type of work typically defined? What tasks, skills, or abilities are we told each conventionally involves? And, perhaps most important, how are we taught to value these types of work differently?
Argument Part in Your Thesis
In your view, are these value distinctions fair? Accurate? How or how not?
Ten. According to Rizga, the primary factor responsible for designating a school as "failing" is our current reliance upon standardized tests. Write an essay in which you evaluate the validity or usefulness of using standardized tests to rank the performance of schools. Do such tests offer a fair, accurate, or helpful measure of a school's performance or not? How? If you were charged with revamping the system for evaluating school performance, what kind of standardized test (if any) would you utilize? Why?
Sample Thesis:
We need to get rid of standardized tests and replace them with a variety of assignments that measure Student Learning Outcomes because ______________, ___________, _____________, and ____________________.
While I concede that standardized testing has made some educational improvements in terms of bridging the gap between performing and non-performing schools, the current practice of standardized testing must be eliminated because _____________, _____________, ______________, and __________________.
Although standardized tests are imperfect and still need fine-tuning, they are a necessary tool for improving public school education evidenced by _____________, _____________, ____________, and _______________.
Eleven. At the heart of the problems around contemporary schooling, argues Gatto, is its compulsory nature. Think back on your experiences in school. How much of what typically defined your role was compulsory? What are some of the scripts (for how to act, talk, even think) that were required? Write an essay that argues in favor of or against the validity of implementing these particular requirements. What educational goals did they seem designed to accomplish, and were they worth it?
Twelve. From very different perspectives, Kozol and Mike Rose invite readers to take a closer look at the way cultural stereotypes about different jobs can influence how we define legitimate or valid intelligence. Write an essay in which you identify and assess how these writers’ respective commentaries compare. How does each understand the connection between work and learning? What sort of conclusions or critique does each offer? And which do you find more convincing or compelling? Why?
Key words and passages
Identify and assess how these writers’ respective commentaries compare.
How does each understand the connection between work and learning?
What sort of conclusions or critique does each offer? And which do you find more convincing or compelling? Why?
Sample Responses
Support of the Authors
Rose, Gatto and Kozol are allies in the battle against economic class warfare, which perpetuates the divisions between the lower and upper classes evidenced by _____________, ________________, ________________, and __________________.
Refutation of the Authors
Rose and Kozol are shrill liberals whose attempts to bridge the gap between the poorer working classes and the more affluent classes prove misguided when we consider that Rose is guilty of glorifying blue-collar work and making it attractive to those who should aspire to greater career goals; Kozol is guilty of dismissing vocational training in low-income schools that are giving students options that they otherwise would not have; both are guilty of intrusive and unrealistic social engineering and economic redistribution.
Thirteen. Race and class, hooks argues, are the unspoken norms that structure everyday college life, the invisible scripts that set the boundaries around what different types of students are encouraged or allowed to expect from school. Write an essay in which you analyze how hooks makes this argument. How does she present her own experience as a student as an example? What unspoken (or spoken) scripts about schooling, education, race, or class does hooks expose in her writing?
Breaking down the assignment:
What are the “unspoken norms” or “invisible scripts” of race and class that pervade college life?
The unspoken belief system, if you will, is that people of white privilege, evidenced by their high-earning power and emulation of an upper class code, enjoy a world of entitlement. On the other hand, it’s also scripted that people of the lower classes are loathsome and only deserving of contempt and society’s spoiled leftovers, not the fresh fruit enjoyed by the rich.
Write an essay in which you show how Hooks makes the argument that invisible scripts set boundaries for students.
Hooks shows that professors teach their students how to enjoy the upper-class club, to deny their lower-class family roots because those roots are contemptuous and shameful.
Hooks further explains how college education is not just a specialization in a certain field; it’s an indoctrination into the superiority of the educated, privileged class and how working class and more modest backgrounds are not even worthy of consideration; therefore, these modest backgrounds should be shunned; in other words, we should become dead to our poor past.
Hooks argues becoming dead to our past is immoral because we become indoctrinated into the worldview of the privileged vs. the non-privileged, the haves vs. the have-nots and such an indoctrination in Hook’s view is immoral and antithetical to the true humanitarian teachings that should be part of college life.
Hooks shows how students of modest means who don’t aspire to be uppity are disregarded and dismissed as invisible.
You need to drink the privileged class Kool-Aid if you want to succeed in college and in the work world, Hooks is arguing.
Sample Essay Response That Agrees with Bell Hooks
College should be a place that champions the humanitarian spirit, embracing the struggle of those who suffer under the weight of the elites, the privileged class. However, as Bell Hooks convincingly argues, college perpetuates class and sometimes racial elitism, tacitly scorning the working-class while adulating the privileged elites evidenced by the professor’s indoctrination of the students to act and be privileged, the pressures to disown one’s working-class family and community, and the rich students’ contempt for the poorer students.
Sample Essay Response That Disagrees with Bell Hooks
While I sympathize with Bell Hooks and would defend her against anyone, teacher, student, or otherwise, who would discriminate against her on the basis of her race or economic class, I find that her condemnation of the elitism she identifies at college to be misguided. The role of the college should be to teach students to lift themselves up from their lower class and into a more privileged class. That’s the point of going to college, to go from a lower station to a higher station in life. Secondly, having these ambitions doesn’t make us anti-humanitarian or contemptuous of the lower classes. We simply want to work toward a place of more privilege. That’s normal human nature that addresses the Darwinian, often brutal realities we face in this world. Bell Hooks has the luxury as someone who makes hundreds of thousand of dollars a year to decry the privileged class, but she needs to face the fact that she belongs to that privileged class and she worked hard to get there. Finally, Bell Hooks does a disservice if she doesn’t tell students from the working class the hard truth about succeeding at college, which is that to be successful we must disavow ourselves of our tribalistic past, even if it means separating ourselves from our working-class parents and community, even if our abandoning that family and community, as Bell Hooks herself did, gives us shame and guilt, because that separation is essential for becoming reborn as an empowered member of the privileged class who is now in a position to help our family in ways we never were before.
Response That Refutes the Above
The refutation of Bell Hooks under the claim that we must sell our souls to the devil in order to be successful is a grotesque absurdity misinformed by the blind ambition of class privilege, a convenient worship of Darwinian self-centeredness, and a failure to acknowledge that we can enjoy the joining the privileged ranks without disavowing our past identity, family, and community.
Response to the Above Refutation
I never claimed we should sell our soul to the devil and engage in Darwinian self-centeredness. My argument, contrary to the one misconstrued above, is that to embrace the new life of college, its ideas, its knowledge, its new identity, and yes the privileges that come with higher learning, we must go through the excruciating process of dying to our old self, the very self that was raised in our working-class homes and communities and that this process of dying and being reborn again is the very process that Bell Hooks admits to going through in order to become the success she is today.
Fourteen. In a 1,000-word essay with a minimum of 3 sources, support, defend, or complicate the notion that Hooks, Kozol, Rose, and Gatto make a convincing case that education is class biased in a way that is harmful to the working class and reinforces class inequality. You might consult Dana Goldstein's YouTube presentation.
How to cite a YouTube video and other electronic sources on Purdue Owl.
McMahon Grammar Exercises: Pronoun Errors
Confusing subject with object
Please give the chocolate to Randy and (I, me).
Between you and (I, me), the fat cats have all the cheese while the rest of us fight for the crumbs.
Subject-pronoun agreement
A person who doesn't plan ahead finds they cannot go to the big party.
Consistent point of view
When one ponders the state of education, we can't help wonder why you are lagging in critical thinking skills and one has to ask if there need to be improvements in this regard. Therefore, a person taking a critical thinking class should be prepared when they are asked to identify logical fallacies and other elements of critical thinking.
Rewrite each sentence below so that you’ve corrected the pronoun errors.
One. Between you and I, there are too many all-you-can-eat buffets mushrooming over southern California because a person thinks they’re getting a good deal when we can eat endless plates of food for a mere ten dollars.
Two. When children grow up eating at buffets, they expand their bellies and sometimes you find you cannot get “full” no matter how much we eat.
Three. As thousands of children gorged on pastrami at HomeTown Buffet, you could tell we would have to address the needs of a lot of sick children.
Four. Although I like the idea of eating all I want, you can sense that there is danger in this unlimited eating mentality that can escort us down the path of gluttony and predispose you to diabetes.
Five. When a customer feels he’s getting all the food they want, you know we can increase your business.
Six. If a student studies the correct MLA format, you can expect academic success.
Seven. It’s not easy for instructors to keep their students’ attention for a three-hour lecture. He or she must mix up the class-time with lecture, discussion, and in-class exercises.
Eight. It is good for a student to read the assigned text at least three times. When they do, they develop better reading comprehension.
Nine. The instructor gave the essays back to Bob and I.
Ten. We must find meaning to overcome the existential vacuum. Otherwise, you will descend into a rabbit hole of despair and they will find themselves behaving in all manners of self-destruction.
"We're Teaching Our Kids Wrong," excerpted from Susan Engel's The End of the Rainbow
“Everything You’ve Heard about Failing Schools Is Wrong” by Kristina Rizga (252)
One. How is Maria denigrated at school?
Classmates call her derogatory names and stigmatize her because of her lack of English skills.
I have a Turkish friend who complained that Americans thought he was stupid because of his accent, as if an accent, or not, is a sign of intelligence.
The real issue isn't intelligence. An accent presses the buttons of the close-minded tribalist who's afraid of Los Otros.
Therefore, a lack of English speaking and writing makes student in the essay an outsider, La Otra. She's not a member of the tribe. The tribalists (people who only accept their "own kind") won't accept her because her lack of English skills suggest she's not a member of the privileged club.
Her math teacher addresses Maria and the other students as dummies.
Nothing like having a teacher who has contempt for her students. This creates a stigma or a permanent dark cloud over the person.
We could argue it is criminal for a math teacher to stigmatize Maria and others because lowered expectations have harmful (deleterious) effects on students.
Patronization
In the administrative office a middle-aged woman who thinks she’s being sympathetic tells Maria that she shouldn’t worry about struggling in high school since “Latinas usually don’t finish high school. . . . They go to work or raise kids.”
Nothing like having a counselor or an administrative official rely on stereotypes for an "analysis" of the student.
We have lowered expectations and racism ushering a girl into the lower economic and social classes, and this degradation is reinforced by standardized tests that cater to the upper classes.
Two. What is the source of Maria’s academic frustration?
She begins to do well in high school; however, her state exams for going to college are too low. These are standardized tests mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act.
NCLB was based on good intentions: to raise expectations for all students, especially disadvantaged ones, but it actually punishes them.
Each state spends over a billion dollars on standardized testing, which comes to about $65 a student. This is a huge money grab for companies who want to be part of the test.
NCLB was supposed to be the savior, offering concrete metrics to measure student performance in the face of wishy-washy bureaucrats, and it was championed in a movie Waiting for Superman. Many have dismissed this film as propaganda for charter schools as we read in The Washington Post.
Three. What is Rizga’s thesis?
Rizga’s thesis or purpose is to criticize NCLB by showing the many ways it has changed instruction for the worse.
Students might know bullet points for NCLB but be ignorant of everything else; in other words, NCLB is too narrow in its instruction objectives.
The overemphasis on test performance has resulted in cheating.
There is class bias in the standardized tests so that the tests are more understood by middle and upper classes than lower classes.
There is a tendency to make the standardized test the be all and end all of education. We’ve turned it into a panacea or a cure-all when in fact its godfather Robert Glaser warns that it’s incomplete and imperfect (260).
In a school where English is the second language, NCLB scores will be lower and this will give an inaccurate metric of the school’s quality.
A former supporter of LNCB is now a critic as heard on NPR.
The top education system in the world is in Finland. They don't use standardized testing.
We should also consider the profit motive of standardized testing.
Eight Strikes Against Standardized Tests
No Profit Left Behind in Politico
Here is a defense of NCLB from NYT.
Writing Prompt from Page 270
According to Rizga, the primary factor responsible for designating a school as "failing" is our current reliance upon standardized tests. Write an essay in which you evaluate the validity or usefulness of using standardized tests to rank the performance of schools. Do such tests offer a fair, accurate, or helpful measure of a school's performance or not? How? If you were charged with revamping the system for evaluating school performance, what kind of standardized test (if any) would you utilize? Why?
Sample Thesis:
We need to get rid of standardized tests and replace them with a variety of assignments that measure Student Learning Outcomes because ______________, ___________, _____________, and ____________________.
While I concede that standardized testing has made some educational improvements in terms of bridging the gap between performing and non-performing schools, the current practice of standardized testing must be eliminated because _____________, _____________, ______________, and __________________.
Although standardized tests are imperfect and still need fine-tuning, they are a necessary tool for improving public school education evidenced by _____________, _____________, ____________, and _______________.
“Against School” by John Taylor Gatto (271)
Here is the essay online.
One. In the essay’s opening, we see that boredom is synonym for all sorts of horrible things. Give a list of things boredom stands for.
Learned helplessness
Resentment or mutual loathing (everyone blames everyone else for the problems at school)
Recurring cycles of futility, which brings up Einstein’s definition of insanity
Monotony
Lethargy, the fatigue and enervation from being mired in a problem with no apparent solution for so long
Lowered expectations
Dysfunction, settling into the idea that “this is how it is” and “nothing can be done,” so I’ll just “ride this out.”
Two. Who does Gatto blame?
All of us. We are all responsible, according to Gatto’s grandfather, to entertain and amuse ourselves.
We have all been responsible for the apathy and tolerance to brain-dead mediocrity.
Three. For Gatto, what is the difference between education and forced schooling?
He argues that “mass compulsory schooling” is not associated with success if we look at history.
The goals of “mass compulsory schooling” were defined, we read during 1905 and 1915 and they focused on the following:
One. To make good people.
Two. To make good citizens.
Three. To make each person his or her personal best.
For Gatto and H.L. Mencken who Gatto quotes, education is a form of indoctrination in which we brainwash students to fit with the system, be mediocre, and conform into the same type of safe person. This conformity is to the model of the mindless consumer who is obedient to marketing and advertising in order to insure a robust economy.
We further read that schools base their operations on indoctrination, not critical thinking.
Obedience to authority, conformity to norms, learning the “correct” social role, labeling the students according to perceived rank (tag the “unfit”; promote the desirables), pass on elite power to younger generation of the elite and to hell with the rest of them (276).
In contrast, a teacher serves his students well if he gives them critical thinking skills:
Learn how to think for yourself by establishing informed or considered opinions, not habitual or peer-driven ones.
Learn how to read critically.
Learn the difference between causation and correlation.
Identify logical fallacies.
Grow and flourish as you become an adult and independent thinker.
Writing Prompt from Page 279
At the heart of the problems around contemporary schooling, argues Gatto, is its compulsory nature. Think back on your experiences in school. How much of what typically defined your role was compulsory? What are some of the scripts (for how to act, talk, even think) that were required? Write an essay that argues in favor of or against the validity of implementing these particular requirements. What educational goals did they seem designed to accomplish, and were they worth it?
Your Essay Must Have a Thesis Statement That Is the Engine of Your Essay's Body Paragraphs
A thesis statement is an assertion that can be demonstrated with logic, reasoning, and examples.
We read in US & World News Report that, "Among millennials ages 25 to 32, earnings for college-degree holders are $17,500 greater than for those with high school diplomas only, a new study finds."
The above is not a thesis; it is a fact. We could use such a fact or study to support a thesis.
A thesis from the above would look like this:
While college costs are punitive and oppressive, especially to those with modest financial means, going to college for most people is worth its steep investment when we consider gains in lifetime income, networking with diverse populations, developing literacy, and creating a legacy of higher income for future generations.
Thesis statements or claims go under four different categories:
One. Claims about solutions or policies: The claim argues for a certain solution or policy change:
America's War on Drugs should be abolished and replaced with drug rehab.
Two. Claims of cause and effect: These claims argue that a person, thing, policy or event caused another event or thing to occur.
Social media has turned our generation into a bunch of narcissistic solipsists with limited attention spans, an inflated sense of self-importance, and a shrinking degree of empathy.
Three. Claims of value: These claims argue how important something is on the Importance Scale and determine its proportion to other things.
Global warming poses a far greater threat to our safety than does terrorism.
Four. Claims of definition. These claims argue that we must re-define a common and inaccurate assumption.
In America the notion of "self-esteem," so commonly taught in schools, is in reality a cult of narcissism. While real self-esteem teaches self-confidence, discipline, and accountability, the fake American brand of self-esteem is about celebrating the low expectations of mediocrity, and this results in narcissism, vanity, and sloth.
Sample Thesis
John Taylor Gatto accurately diagnoses the corruption of school by pointing out that it is not designed to educate us to be our better selves; rather, public education is about indoctrinating us to be malleable slaves to mediocrity and conformity evidenced by _____________, _____________, _____________, and ______________.