Students today looked at the following Schaffer paragraph:

(1) School lunch at Beck can be gross. (2) For example, I got a piece of cold, slimy pizza the other day. (3) The cheese was falling off the pizza. (4) I absolutely didn’t want to eat it. (5) Another reason lunch is gross is the milk, which is sometimes lumpy and chunky. (6) When you open the milk, it stinks to high heaven. (7) Sometimes, it even looks like butter! (8) Finally, the chili can be so greasy that you see the grease floating. (9) There’s no way to eat it like that. (10) You have to strain it. (11) From these examples, it’s clear Beck’s school lunch can be nasty.

(This is a Schaffer paragraph students created years ago. Of course, we really have no idea what Beck lunch is like, but we know their cafeteria employees work hard to produce quality and nutritious food for their students — we were playing with a cliche here.)

We analyzed the paragraph to determine the following things:

• The TS is sentence 1.
• The CDs are sentences 2, 5, and 8.
• The CMs are sentences 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, and 10.
• The CS is sentence 11.

Further, we went on to analyze the effectiveness and determined the following things:

1. Chunk 2 (sentences 5-9) is the strongest chunk. It’s got the best CD (clearly a fact outside the writer’s head) and good strong commentary.
2. Chunk 1 is the weakest. The “cold” of the CD is just a tough subjective: what is cold to one person might not be to another. Additionally, the CM about the cheese sliding off the pizza has nothing to do with the CD.
3. Chunk 3 is of moderate quality.

We’ll be looking at other examples tomorrow, both at home and in elearning.

Homework

• English I Honors: 
  • make sure you complete any missing work;
  • be sure you take the survey every single day.