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First period completed working on point of view and voice by adding an awareness of how word choice affects voice. We rewrote the following excerpts from Nightjohn from different perspectives:

Two times a day at the wooden trough – that’s how we eat. Mornings they pour buttermilk down the trough and we dip cornbread in it and sometimes pieces of pork fat. We take turns on a calabash gourd for a dipper to get all the milk out except the little ones don’t always get much of a turn and have to lick the bottom of the trough when its done. (29)

Students had the following choice of character/perspective:

• Driver’s perspective
• Children’s perspective

We then reexamined our writing to see if it really sounded like a slave driver or a child in slavery, noting and altering words that did not create the desired voice.

Second and sixth periods finished up looking at word choice and voice, finishing our charts from yesterday. We explored slang, informal, and formal synonyms and looked at how those choices carry certain implications.

Homework

• Fourth period: use the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) guide for documenting electronic sources to create citations for the resources you used in creating the mythology presentation. Print it out when you’re done (or simply write it by hand) and bring it to class Friday.