1. Some people did work that was outstanding! CONGRATS!
2. Some people obviously procrastinated; the quality of their work was disappointing.
3. Spend time with the reader's notebooks. You had the opportunity to work together on those, yet some people turned in work that wasn't complete. These will be MOST helpful for you to review for the AP test.
4. Convention says that you use the last name of writers when talking about their work.
5. Literary analysis is correctly written in present tense.
6. Commas and periods go inside closing quotation marks unless you want to do it wrong or are in Britain.
7. Poem titles are correctly punctuated with quotation marks--not underlined or in italics.
8. Plays and novels are correctly punctuated with italics is you are word processing; underlined if you are typing or writing longhand you work.
9. Be sure that you think about the literature you analyze. Some of the themes that were presented in class lacked depth. Some students wrote about those themes without thinking critically about them. Of course happiness is important. Of course people only die once. Think, people, and think CRITICALLY!
10. The expectation is that work is word processed and not written long hand.
11. If you say you learned nothing this trimester, why did you waste your time?
12. If you have no goals, you won't fail to meet them--you'll probably just fail to learn. Which is unfortunate, but it's out of my circle of influence.
13. Read aloud what you write. I read this several time: "the author who wrote the poem"! What you want to say is "the poet"!
14. My favorite oops: "Stopping by Woods on a Sunday Evening" by Robert Frost. I think had you read it again, you would have caught it.
15. Writing these into your notebook rather than running them off will help you remember them better!
