Friday, October 9 - Sunday, October 11

HAPPY WEEKEND! You have reached the end of Week 7! The Week 7 Read and Respond assignment (blog commenting) is available now, and so is the Week 7 Internet assignment (Storybook commenting), along with the remaining Week 7 assignments that are due on Friday or on Saturday or Sunday - please make sure you get started on those assignments soon. Friday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Thursday.

Storybook Stack. I'm still working my way through the large stack of Storybook assignments that people have turned in. I've read and replied to all the Week 6 assignments turned in on time, but if you turned in a late Week 6 assignment, or an early assignment for Week 7 or 8, it may still be in the stack. My goal is to get comments back to everyone by the end of the day Friday for assignments turned in before Friday at noon. If you want to check and make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here.

Writing Center. For those of you who are finding it difficult to proofread your own writing, the Writing Center is the place to go for help. Whether you are struggling with the overall organization of your writing (finding a focus, working with paragraphs), or whether you have questions about writing mechanics (especially punctuation), the tutors at the Writing Center can help. For hours and services, visit the Writing Center website. The Writing Center is there to help with the writing assignments you have in this class, as well as any writing assignments you will have in your other classes, too.

Extra credit Grammar Quizzes. By now you are probably starting to get a sense of what aspects of English writing are the most difficult for you. Often, people have a really hard time with punctuation, which is understandable, since you do not have to use punctuation when you speak - only when you write. There are some Grammar Quizzes which you can do for extra credit to get some practice with commas, apostrophes, and other kinds of punctuation problems, along with homonyms and tricky spelling problems. You can find out more about the Grammar Quizzes here, and I'd really recommend them as a good way to get extra credit and review the rules of written English. As the semester goes on, I will expect your Storybook assignments to be written in English which is correctly spelled and correctly punctuated, so if you know you are having trouble with that, maybe these review quizzes can help!

Saturday, October 10: R.K. Narayan. Saturday, October 10, is the birthday of the Indian novelist R.K. Narayan, who was born in 1906 and who died in 2001. This name is familiar to those of you in the Indian Epics class, since you are reading Narayan's versions of both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Narayan was one of the most famous Indian novelists who wrote in English, and he was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature more than once, although he did not win the award. You can find out more about Narayan's life and work in this Wikipedia article. The image montage below is from an article celebrating the centenary of Narayan's birth: 100 years of RK Narayan, The Master Storyteller.