Thanksgiving Extra credit

I feel that the most important and helpful thing I have learned in English so far would have to be the 5 part paragraph. Rewriting our To Kill a Mockingbird paper showed me how many different skills you have to master to be successful with this type if writing. I had no idea what embedding your quotes was and I had a hard time with that but after talking to you about it, I now understand. Also when I write papers for school I tend to be very wordy and write a little too much. When you are doing the 5 part paragraph you can't do that. You just need to get your point across plain and simple. I know that mastering how to write these will help me and all your other students to be better at writing because that is a strict format we must follow, but once we have less restrictions we will have masterpieces of writing. This is so important because writing is an everyday skill. Just like reading is. The better you are at it, the easier life will be. Who wants to be hire someone who can't write well. Having good writing skills is such a necessity and I thank you for helping us grow in that area of education.

"Knife"

In my group discussion of "The Knife"  one idea that was brought up that I didn't give a lot of thought to was the fact that he compared being a surgeon to a priest. A lot of people talked about the many ways these two comparisons made sense. Most of the time was spent talking about this one topic. A heated debate was started from this. Many knew ideas were formed and even Mrs. Gilman said she didn't think about some of these ideas. I'm glad this was brought up since it definitely helped me understand this essay better.
They mentioned that a priest saves people's lives by having them except God into their hearts and a surgeon saves people by performing surgery. This better helped me understand the meaning of him talking about how stressful his job is since he basically can end or save your life right then and there.

5 Part Paragraph

As I listened to the comments and the papers be read, I consistently noticed that many students did not embed their quotes. Most people thought they had but were confused on how to do it correctly. Another thing most people need to work on is not using plot summary in their commentary. Its hard to start out the quote and then have to think of something new to support it. Many of my peers need to choose topics that made it easy to find quotes that they could easily support. Also another big problem was using transition for the concluding sentence. It was like people almost forgot that they needed to have a transition at the end,  but if they would have reread it with the check list, they would have caught their error. When it comes to writing topic sentences, people need to think "okay, what am I trying to prove? does my topic sentence clearly show what that is?" If you answer those questions with a yes, your good to go. If not, you need go back and read your topic sentences over again and fix your mistake. When your writing your concrete detail, you need to introduce it with a little back round information so the audience knows what your about to say. Then before you use your quotes, set it up so it isn't awkward to read. Go back to that part of the story and start it off from there. Then when you are writing your commentary, you need to make sure it is all your own ideas. If it sounds like it came from the story, change it to your own thinking. That's the key to having good commentary. Also if your commentary makes sense and goes with explaining the quote.
I didn't get to read my paper. I do not know what I need to work on.