APPRECIATION 

 "Bullitt" - a poem by Perri Pagonis

INTRODUCTION: What it's all about. 

SOME REALLY CRUDE BASICS 
What is a college paper? / Format and length / Timing counts / How Much Work do I have to do? 

CHOOSING A TOPIC AND TELLING YOUR STORY 
K.I.S.S. / Brainstorming / Why Must we fight? / Daring Dissent / Swindler’s List / Finding Patterns: Comparisons and Contrasts / Freeing the Slaves / End with a Bang / Before Plunging in 

IN THE BEGINNING: Pulling your creation out of the void 
Do I really need an outline? / What’s in a title? / The Topic paragraph / Topic Sentences / Keep the flow going / Sentences and Paragraphs / Be Specific 

CHOOSING A VOICE 
Whom must you pretend to be? / Faking Other Voices / Sin Boldly! / Dialogue / Voices to Avoid / Dissing the Prof / Imagining your Audience/ Ungrammatical Voices / Breezy or Pompous? 

PLAIN STYLE AMERICAN POPULISM 
Yankee Doodle’s Macaroni / McMurphy’s “average asshole” / The all-American con-man / Postmodern Language / Empowering or Cowering / PC Patty / Business and other Jargon 

CHOOSING WORDS 
Piss and Urine / Being Niggardly about the Paddy Wagon / Snobs and Slobs / Cliches / Say what you mean & mean what you say / Sexist Language / Past and Present / Poetic Prose 

ARGUING YOUR CASE 
If it fits… / No Right or Wrong / Battle Tactics / VGs, AEs, and OAs / Show what you Know / Keep Your Argument Grounded/ Refute! Reply! Fight Back!

HOW TO LOSE YOUR CASE 
Circular Reasoning / Just say no to “just” / Post Hoc, Propter Hoc/ Ad hominem / False Choices / Non Sequiters / Teleological false assumptions / Blaming the Victim / Emotionally Logical

FOR INSTANCE: 2 EXAMPLES 
“Robert Frost: Gentle New England Satanist” / “Women are like Boxcars” 

LITERARY GAMES 
The “Deep Inner meaning” Debate / Searching for Symbols / Texts in Context / Cynics and Essentialists / RaceGenderClass / Theory Sluts / Analyze Don’t Moralize 

THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 
What’s the dif? / Free to be? Free at all? / Nature and Nurture / Praise and Blame / Cause and Effect/ Constructed Snobs and Essential Slobs 

GRAMMATICAL HORRORS 
ONW-Omit Needless Words / NAS-Not a sentence / MM –Misplaced Modifer / A Problem with parallelism / a=they? / AWK-awkward / OOG–beyond AWK / BB-back to back / Typo-Typographical Errors / SP–Spelling / WW-Wrong Word 

SOME REALLY STUPID MISTAKES 
Its, it’s, its’, The Possessive / The Split Infinitive / “Hopefully” and other controversies / Adjective or adverb? / Prepositions and Their Pronouns / Fewer and less / Who and whom / Unclear referents / I, me, mine / Subjunctive Dreams / Plurals / Hyphens / Must of alot 

“PUNCT’UATION!?!” 
Clueless High School Teachers / Commas / Semicolons / Colons / Quotation Marks / Parentheses( ), Brackets [], and dashes -- 

CITING SOURCES SUCCESSFULLY 
MLA Style / APA Style / Citing Cyberspace 

A SAMPLE QUIZ WITH COMMENTS 

CONCLUDING SERMON

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