Everything speaks.

–James Joyce

Good day to you all. I hope you had a nice weekend. Today we will work on a new assignment that involves working in pairs or small groups to create a portrait or profile of the other or others in the pair or group that you find yourself a part of. The purpose is to bring to readers a sense of the background, motivation, and personality of the students pursuing specific degrees or career goals, specific skills and interests here at AiFL. It will be a chance to exchange personal interests and ideas with others as you gather the information to present the individual(s) with whom you share class and common pursuits and perhaps personal concerns and lifestyles. I imagine the audience as perhaps students and others in the local community or at other colleges locally or nationally who would be interested to know the experiences, concerns, and interests of college students today and something of college life. So key will be eliciting from your subject individual(s) a sense of the background and personal aims they bring to their school pursuits, and to bring that information to life as you acquaint readers with the individual you have interviewed for the purpose of writing this profile.

We will cover in class how to structure this essay. In brief, it will involve framing your subject to support a certain thesis idea, which the life of your subject will illustrate. You will convey in the paragraph opening the essay something of the personality and personal impressions your subject makes in a face-to-face meeting as you work to advance the thesis idea. We want readers to feel they are meeting this individual in person; of course the impressions are those you have drawn in meeting and talking with your subject. The pairs or groups will be talking and exchanging information in an informal flow of give and take as you establish rapport and commonalities and differences. You will take notes on each other, specific background information, career goals, interests, concerns, etcetera, which later you will incorporate into the essay. You will unfold something of the life of your subject to illustrate a point about students or student life today. Your conclusion will bring the presentation back to the central idea, underscoring it, and providing final comments. You may want to incorporate direct quotation of one or another remark your subject has made, as well, to give some sense of the individual's actual speech or voice. Dialogue or direct quotation is a dramatic device and draws readers into the presence of your subject. You may use present or past tense overall. Bringing a sense of the subject individual's physical presence is a means of creating interest and imaginative appeal. Description of hair, eyes, gestures, clothing, in some brief but telling way will allow readers to actually "see" the subject person as they learn something of the story he or she embodies in the role of student.

We will also review punctuation of sentence clauses today and look at the proper use of adjectives in their various forms, and some usage guidelines involving comparisons, verbs, and idiomatic expressions.

A reminder: In two weeks we take the final, which is to be an in class essay of 350 words on a topic drawn from a list of topics. By week 1o, you should have submitted all rewrites or past due work, leaving nothing for week 11, except perhaps to retake the final should you not pass it week 10. There will be no rewrites or late work accepted after week 10.