Getting started
Considering the introduction to the course
As I said at the beginning, what I want to do first is make sure that people have a real opportunity to understand what I'm trying to do and how I'm trying to do it in this section of English 1006. We'll spend a good part of today's class meeting considering questions that have been raised on the forum, and others that may arise during the discussion.
A second assignment
In order to begin exploring the ways in which written language works, we're going to need some examples to consider. In order to make it clear that we can use a wide range of real examples as objects of study, I'm going to do what I'll do fairly regularly in this course: invite you to find some examples, and choose one, or a few, to focus our attention on. To begin with, I want to attend to a fairly common kind of language, one that allows us to look at a number of different ways language is constructed. For this, a really useful source is reporting of current events, especially current events that are controversial (non-controversial ones, like traffic accidents and announcements of public policies, work as well but usually most people find them much less interesting).