Don't forget about tomorrow's vocabulary test!

Independent Reading Book Check Today!

Write a bibliographic entry of your book following MLA guidelines. Here's a link to a page with examples.

Address each of the following areas about your book.  Shape your answers based on the information you have about your book at this moment.  You might not have an answer to every question.

• Author: Who is the author? What else has s/he written? Has this author won any awards? What is the author’s typical style?
• Genre: What type of book is this: fiction, nonfiction, romance, poetry, youth fiction, etc.? Who is the intended audience for this work? What is the purpose of the work?
• Title: Where does the title fit in? How is it applied in the work? Does it adequately encapsulate the message of the text? Is it interesting? Uninteresting?
• Preface/Introduction/Table of Contents: Does the author provide any revealing information about the text in the preface/introduction? Does a “guest author” provide the introduction? What judgments or preconceptions do the author and/or “guest author” provide? How is the book arranged: sections, chapters?
• Book Jacket/Cover/Printing: Book jackets are like mini-reviews. Does the book jacket provide any interesting details or spark your interest in some way? Are there pictures, maps, or graphs? Do the binding, page cut, or typescript contribute or take away from the work?

Why did you select this book?

We will begin the Rhetorical Précis today.  You should have a light blue handout that you will keep permanently in your binder for future reference.  We will begin shaping a precis for Small Bite 1 and 2.  You should have some notes already to help you get it started.

This type of writing provides a condensed statement of the text’s main point (the
summary part), followed by brief statements about the text’s rhetorical elements: the
author’s purpose, methods and intended audience (the analysis part).

· Sentence #1: Name of author, genre and title of work (date in parentheses)… a
rhetorically accurate VERB (such as “claims,” “argues,” “suggests,” “asserts,”
etc.)…a THAT clause containing the main idea or thesis statement of the work.
· Sentence #2: A section-by-section explanation of what the author is doing (verb)
and how he/she is doing it (methods)
· Sentence #3: A statement of the author’s apparent purpose, followed by an “IN
ORDER TO” phrase.
· Sentence #4: A description of the intended audience and/or the relationship the
author establishes with the audience.

from the work of Margaret Woodworth