ENGL 104, Sections 572 & 873
MWF 1:50-2:40 & 3:00-3:50
Instructor: Kim Wells
Assignment: 300-500 words.
Due: Friday September 3.
Objectives:
Assignment: After reading "Death Valley" by Edward Abbey, answer question 1, 2 or 4 on page 44 of your textbook. The answer should be a typed essay that carefully considers the question you have chosen. This essay is a short one, but it will provide both of us with an idea of where your writing skills are right now. Be careful, think about your work-- remember, this is my first impression of your writing-- make it as good as possible!
You may refer to your handbook (WI), a dictionary, and a thesaurus. You should also annotate the Abbey piece before you write your essay in class so that you can refer to your annotations as you write.
When you summarize, paraphrase, or directly quote from Abbey, (and you should do a bit of all three), use MLA citation-- parenthetical notes-- to let your readers know who you are quoting and the source of the quote.
An example of a parenthetical quote:
In his essay, Abbey describes "life of a sparse but varied sort-- salt grass and pickleweed. . . far-spaced clumps of creaosote, saltbush, desert holly, brittlebush, and prickly poppy" (41). He continues to describe the life in the desert, implying that although there is "not much of anything," there is "a little of each" kind of life he describes (41).
Note that the quotations I used are carefully set apart from my own words, and where I left out part of the quote I used an ellipses. ( . . . ) Make sure your ellipses is properly punctuated with a space between each period. The page number where I found the information follows immediately, with the final sentence punctuation outside the parentheses.