Learning Log Unit 2

February 19, 2020 - “Personal Literacy and Academic Learning” - Marlena Stafford
1. Record two “golden quotes.”
a. “In the present age, to be literate means to be able to communicate through texts
in ways that help you meet your needs and the needs of others.”
i. This also means
b. “Personal literacies are the reading and writing practices individuals engage in
during activities of their own choice and for personal satisfaction or to meet
personal goals. Examples might include documenting your daily food intake with
a smartphone app, keeping a journal, creating a weight-training plan and tracking
your performance, or writing and playing music.”
i. Love the examples given, as they all make sense, and you have to be
literate for them.
2. Create a timeline mapping your reading or writing history. Include memorable moments
from birth to now that have helped shaped you as a reader or writer today.
a. Learning how to read.
i. My favorite book to read was a fact book about animals
b. Learning the basics of writing in elementary school.
i. I think I wrote my first (very) short story in first grade. Each of us got two
pages in a book that my teacher put together.
c. Reading tons of stories in 2nd grade
i. I remember reading books like Junie B. Jones.
d. Writing stories for class in 5th grade
i. I remember writing a story about a girl who had to make her way through
the woods
e. Having to learn what a 5 paragraph essay was and how to write it
f. Moving onto different types of essays, argumentative, informational, persuasive,
etc.
i. This was as soon as I hit middle school, in 6th grade.
g. Reading higher level books and articles
h. Moving onto learning more formats of writing, and how to write in college

February 21, 2020 - “You Will Never Believe What Happened: Stories We Tell” - Ron
Christiansen
1. Find two quotes from the text that answer this question: Why is storytelling so vital to our
lives? Copy the quotes.
a. “We all tell stories. For humor. For clarifying our view of the world. For asserting
our identity.”
b. “Telling stories is one way we use language as a resource to create and build
relationships.”
c. “We also use stories to communicate our values to others.”
 d. “So, yes, we all tell stories with a purpose. They are a form of action, of entering
and living in the world.”
2. Explain this quote: “If telling stories makes us human, reading stories seems to put us in
touch with our humanity.”
a. When reading and listening to stories we can identify with others and even
ourselves. This is a way of connecting people and their ideas and beliefs.

February 25, 2020 - “Is That a True Story?” - Ron Christiansen

1. Record two ”ah-hah” statements that will help you in this unit.
a. “We want stories to be true. My guess is what we actually want are stories that
speak to us, that speak to the human experience.”
b. “This idea of emotional truth is also important in nonfiction stories like memoirs.”
2. How is “truth” complicated?
a. There are many different ideas of truth. Actual true experiences, emotional truth,
etc. You can also think that you are being completely truthful and find out with the
more you learn that you weren’t actually factual, but does that still make you
truthful? You didn’t know the full story, so what can others expect that from you?

February 27, 2020 - “Adding the Storyteller's Tools to the Writer’s Toolbox” - Clint Johnson
1. Record a technique to help your writing from each of 5 tools that Johnson discusses in
his article:
a. The Power of Scene
i. “Write meaningful scenes, ​areas of intense focus where we describe
people, places, and actions in order to make a reader feel they have
witnessed something themselves.”
b. The Power of Experience
i. “Could this help a reader understand something that may be accurate
even if they have not experienced it themselves, making them more likely
to accept your claims?”
c. The Power of Sensory Detail
i. “To describe something using the senses not only gives an additional
texture of reality to the subject, but it can help memory.”
d. The Power of Voice
i. “Most good stories are about dramatic, interesting characters, people who
the author creates yet are not the author.”
e. The Power of Conflict
i. “You know that every good story is about conflict because conflict means
people care.”

March 2, 2020 - “6 Keys for Success” - Nikki Mantyla

1. Record techniques used by comedian Jerry Sienfeld to illustrate the concept “why some
ideas and others die”:
a. Simple
 i. Be simple in a response or story and, “We can’t always be brief, but we
can stay focused.”
b. Unexpected
i. “The human brain is programmed to dismiss what it already understands
but perk up when startled by something new.” Be the unexpected and say
the unexpected.
c. Concrete
i. “Masters of language also recognize that all external input comes in five
tangible forms: sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell.” Be able to
communicate to people through more than just words.
d. Credible
i. “Take advantage of any impressive sources.” If you aren’t credible
yourself, use someone who is and what they have to say.
e. Emotional
i. “Aim for the kind of vibe that best fits the audience and purpose, and find
effective ways to solicit those emotions.” You have to be able to
manipulate the emotion you’re writing about to get to the audience.
f. Story-Based
i. “Most crucially of all, tell a story. It’s one of the best ways to appeal to
emotion—and appeal to humans.”
g. Conclusion
i. End with a resonant quote.

March 5, 2020 - “Story as Rhetorical: We Can’t Escape The Story No Matter How Hard We Try”
- Ron Christiansen
1. Record three ironic statements from the essay.
a. “Unfortunately, rigor is often defined, unknowingly at times, as that which
students simply do not like: if students like a curriculum too much, we teachers,
looking in from the outside, may assume the instructor is just having fun and
really not teaching much at all.”
b. “Maybe stories are talked about less in writing classes because they are too fun.”
c. “A rhetorical analysis … now that sounds rigorous and academic. Personal
narrative . . . sounds squishy, personal, even wimpy.”
d. “That’s right . . . writing can be exhilarating and liberating when we see our
arguments through the lens of story.”
2. How is a story an argument?
a. We are still the ones writing it, and the ones putting our bias into it. We write
about what we want to, once again putting a sort of bias onto our writing which
leads to argument. Stories can have a bigger purpose behind them, they can
prove a point or teach a lesson, and that is how you can bring argument into your
story.
March 9, 2020 - “The Narrative Effect: Story as the Forward Frame” - Lisa Bickmore
1. How is a story “underlying all understanding”? Give five specific answers through your
reading.
a. “narratives are good to think with” They are another way to organize your
thoughts and information.
b. “narrative can be viewed under several profiles—as a cognitive structure or way
of making sense of experience, as a type of text, and as a resource for
communicative interaction” You have to sit down and think about what stories
really do.
c. “That argument situation gives meaning to his anecdotes—and it shapes how the
reader receives the anecdotes.” The problems in stories can be what sparks a
conversation and arguments in real life.
d. “Writers create the worlds of their stories by using sensory detail, but also by
evoking the narrator’s or other character’s states of mind.” They are able to give
us an even more about what it was really like through detail, leading to us
understanding better through our senses.
e. “Generally, the characters are represented as having minds and motives of their
own, and qualities of character and mind that help us understand them.”
Characters are a great way to get a story across to an audience because you can
make them as relatable as you need to.
2. What “ah-hah” moment did you formulate about your upcoming memoir/draft from this
essay? (Think “Big Picture”)
a. Don’t be scared to make it a story. Show a timeline, but be able to also show a
lesson or argument without having to come right out and say it.

March 11, 2020 - “Punctuation, Memes, and Choice” - Nikki Mantyla

1. What’s new to you?
a. She explained how a semicolon works, and before this I seriously had no clue
how to use them.
2. What’s interesting?
a. That punctuation isn’t black and white, you have multitudes of choices to use.
3. What finally makes sense?
a. The way she showed how we should use exclamation points and question marks
sparingly made it really prove her point and show the reader exactly what she is
talking about.

March 13, 2020 - “Peer Review” - Jim Beatty

a. “The least helpful thing you can do when peer reviewing is correct grammar and
typos.”
b. “The best writing comes out of a communal effort.”
1. Respond to these quotes in two separate paragraphs based on past experience.
a. I already know how to edit a paper. I know how to make it have good grammar,
and the right punctuation where it needs to be. Whenever I have people peer
review my papers,
b. I want feedback on organization, flow, the ideas in my essay. If I have myself
along with others look at my writing and give me feedback, I’m going to be able to
do the best writing possible for me.