Opening Activities Beginning of the Semester 1 Identify

Opening Activities

Beginning of the Semester 1. Identify a writing goal that you have for this semester (creating a stronger thesis, analyzing better, etc. ). 2. Brainstorm some ways to achieve that goal The Passion of Creation (late 19 th Century) by Leonid Pasternak

Top 10 Lists 0 Make a Top 10 list of your favorite movies or directors

The Anti-Bucket List 0 Make a list of 5 -10 things you never want to do

Biopoem Name Son/daughter of Lover of (3 things) Who feels (3 things) Who needs (3 things) Who fears (3 things) Who gives (3 things) Who would like to see (3 things) 0 Resident of 0 Last Name 0 0 0 0

Six-Word Memoirs: Examples 0 All things considered, I’m doing well. 0 The past is forgiven, not forgotten. 0 So the water’s deep. Man up. 0 Teach, grade, travel, speak, write: tired.

Food for Thought 0 Ernest Hemingway says that we only need to write “one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know. ” Let us take that idea and apply it to specific types of food. Compose the truest sentence you know about a certain type of food.

Quote of the Day 0 “I still remember the exact moment when I first understood…the purpose of a paragraph…I realized that a paragraph was a fence that held words. The words inside a paragraph worked together for a common purpose. They had some specific reason for being inside the same fence. ”—Sherman Alexie, “Superman and Me”

Quote of the Day 0“All oppression creates a state of war”—Simone de Beauvoir Philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and Author Jean-Paul Sartre

Two-Voice Poetry 0 Two-voice poetry is written for two people to perform 0 Two-voice poetry is usually written in two columns. 0 Sounds like a dialogue 0 Some of the lines should be read simultaneously

Two-Voice Poetry

Quote of the Day 0“A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. ” —Oscar Wilde

Quote of the Day 0“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. ”— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Quote of the Day 0 “Everything is life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy of creativity is self-doubt. ”—Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Quote of the Day 0“Believe nothing you hear, and only half of what you see. ”

Quote of the Day 0 If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature. ” —Charles Darwin, Life and Letters

Quote of the Day 0“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. ”— Mahatma Gandhi

Quote of the Day 0“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good. ”—John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Quote of the Day 0“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect. ”— Anais Nin

Quote of the Day 0 “Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little. ”— Playwright Tom Stoppard

Quote of the Day 0 “Read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. ”—William Faulkner

Quote of the Day 0 “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture, just get them to stop reading them. ”—Ray Bradbury

Quote of the Day 0 “We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories. ”— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

Quote of the Day 0 “Some books are to be tasted, others swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention, ” from Francis Bacon’s “Of Studies” (1597)

Quote of the Day 0 “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. ”—Ernest Hemingway

Quote of the Day 0 “Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop…the paper is spread with ink” —Honoré de Balzac

Quote of the Day 0“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog. ”—Mark Twain

Quote of the Day 0 Ambrose Bierce wrote that “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography. ”

Quote of the Day 0 In the preface to The Battle of the Books (1704), Jonathan Swift wrote, “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own. ”

Quote of the Day 0 “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind. ”—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Quote of the Day 0 “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear”— Nelson Mandela

Quote of the Day 0 “Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. ”—Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man

Quote of the Day 0“All that is gold does not glitter; not all those that wander are lost. ”—J. R. R. Tolkien

Quote of the Day 0“The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward. ”— Winston Churchill

Quote of the Day 0 Historian, Politician, and Writer John Dalberg-Acton is famous for having said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. ”

Quote of the Day 0 “Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs. ”— Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Quote of the Day 0 “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. ” —Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Quote of the Day 0“How dreadful it is when the right judges wrong!” —Playwright Sophocles

Quote of the Day 0 “Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost. ”— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Quote of the Day 0“Style means the right word. The rest matters little” —Jules Renard

End of the Semester 1. Identify a dream you have. Explain the dream and why it is important to you. 2. Consider what you need to do to make this dream come true. What steps can you take to make it happen? What help do you need? Where can you find that help?

Some Other Words of Wisdom