You are about to write a formal Letter of Complaint. You’re becoming more and more an adult and will be responsible for change in your society. This assignment asks you to pick a topic that you think needs some adjustment or change made and write a persuasive and informed letter to someone specific in a position to create that change.
Examples of social change topics other students have written about include:
Writing to the Town of Kenaston to argue against their ban of certain dog breeds
Writing to the Saskatchewan Minister of Highways to complain with detailed points the poor upkeep of Highway 11.
Writing to the Sask Minister of Land about the maintenance of neighbours changing water routes that affect other people.
Writing to the Minister of Health (Federal) or Sask Premier to convince them to allow better access to reproductive health centers, like for abortions or the Plan B Pill
Write to the School Division to argue for different use of staffing at your school.
Write to your School Division to argue for/against neutral bathrooms being added to the schools.
Write to your school Principal about the school dress code. Or to the School Community Council about it, asking for change.
Write to your Principal or School Division asking for better maintenance of the school’s field and/or ball diamond.
Write to your Principal or School Division asking for funding/development of outdoor seating in the courtyard, like added permanent seating and shade sails.
Write to your Principal to argue against the Hat Rule in school.
Big Note or Warning: If you pick a topic you feel emotionally strong about, what some students fall into doing is write a venting letter about it. If it isn’t grounded in logic, reasoned, or convincing points it may likely do poorly, marks-wise. Write without emotional passion and your recipient may be more inclined to take seriously your concerns.
You’re working to develop the analytical essay after reading a novel independently. Here are a few of the supports available to you to hopefully help you with that.
Sample Essay – Waldner written – A Monster Calls essay. I used the same paragraph outlines to develop an essay too. See if this helps you.
Sometimes, when you’re speaking to the public, it can enhance their understanding and acceptance of your topic and message if you develop a visual presentation to accompany your live speech. It doesn’t have to include a lot of details, but just a few well-selected images or a brief video that supports your topic and message can help to enhance your presentation.
It helps your audience retain more of your message.
It helps you divert some of their attention from you to your presentation.
If you’re someone less comfortable, as well, with speaking in front of others, the visual you develop will draw much of your listener’s attention, taking the focus off of you.
There are examples in the handout below of poor and better choices in developing the visual presentation to accompany your speech.
There are also instructions included for how to embed/attach the media source you will pick to accentuate your presentation.
Feedback from previous student samples:
Be consistent when using capital letters in your title and headings. (If you use some capital letters in the phrase, be consistent.)
Missing an End slide will cost you marks.
Develop a Conclusion Slide before your End slide. (It will match your conclusion paragraph in your speech and round off your presentation, instead of ending abruptly.
Use the space of each slide. Avoid leaving lots of empty space.
Your speech focus is on explaining the WHY of your choice. Avoid waiting until the last or second-last slide of your visual presentation to explain the Why of your choice.
Avoid selecting vague image choices. These can be generic “Equality” or “Difference” images as opposed to images that directly relate to visual or non-visual minorities.
Avoid pasting your URL link into your slide as text. It should be able to Open when you click on it in the presentation.
Check your slide template for small things that can accidentally be left in your presentation. A text box you’ve overlooked. Extra lines, etc.
Make sure each slide has headings or phrases along with your images. These phrases help focus the viewer on what your message focus is in that part of the speech.
Create an interesting title to your presentation. Avoid using your assignment title as your presentation title.
Aim to make your text style, size, font choices consistent throughout your presentation.
Design your slides so that there is some consistency between design features between slides.
A title slide and an end slide aren’t really attached to your speech. They book-end it. Slides that support your paragraphs in your speech are the middle of your presentation. That means there should be more than 1-3 slides as middle.
Make sure you select your media sample for your presentation that is specific enough to your focus; some have used very generic media sources.
Avoid using paragraphs or whole sentences in your slides. Visual presentations are not for sentences.
If you create a pattern in your presentation, maintain that pattern. (Ex: Explanation slide of visual minority, samples page of visual minority, examples in media; Explanation slide of non-visual minority, samples page of non-vis, examples in media.)
Spell-check your work in your presentation.
Body Language During Speaking:
Also, if you haven’t stood up in front of a group to give a presentation before or for a while, you may forget some of the elements of that to consider like:
eye contact with your audience – what nature looks like
how to hold your body in a relaxed way, vs awkward tight way
gestures that are natural-looking vs tense
movement on your feet – not shifting weight back and forth a lot out of nervousness
To help you recognize uncomfortable body language vs comfortable, you’ll watch two speakers deliver their messages. They both talked about very personal topics, so should have both been as nervous as the other, but one displays that discomfort more than the other. You’ll maybe recognize these differences as you watch.
Pros and Cons of being either a Visual or Non-visual Minority in society (*developed by a previous group of students)
Non-visual: when there is a quality of your being that people cannot visually recognize or notice, but that might cause some people to see or treat you differently. (Ex: religion not including features that are visually noticeable (like being Jewish), sexual orientation (could be same-sex oriented without people knowing your personal feelings/attractions), mental disability, race (some people may be of a race group without distinguishing features, like fair-skinned Metis)
pros:
if your minority identity is hidden, you can’t be discriminated against so easily
you could choose to hide the part of your identity you fear people wouldn’t accept, and feel a sense of being safe
if you eventually choose to reveal your whole self to others, that acceptance, if gained, means so much more
you have a chance to build up relationships that you may not otherwise have if they knew some private qualities of yourself (like a Jewish faith or same-sex attraction)
it is your choice to disclose parts of yourself – you have some control of who knows and when they know
it could free you to be yourself openly among others without people judging you
cons:
you’d maybe always have a worry that it would be discovered; you’d have the hurt and lose after and existing relationships may change
you wouldn’t ever really know if you were truly accepted, if those around you didn’t know a private part of your identity
you would always be withholding or protecting a part of yourself from others
there is the fear of that discovery moment, repeated over and over again throughout your life, if you kept part of yourself from others
your potential membership in a community of people you have things in common with would potentially be hidden; you wouldn’t get to know people who could support you because you wouldn’t know of each other
could hear insults related to your identity from those around, maybe even friends, without them knowing it hurts you (ex: David hearing his friends make Jew jokes)
over time, it could become a toxic environment you’re in, where you silently endure and struggle with your sense of acceptance
could end up perpetually hiding part of your true identity; repressing it (same-sex identity)
Visual minority: when there is a quality of your identity that can visually be recognized (and potentially judged in society) Examples: sex ( male or female), physical or mental disability (blindness, wheel chair-bound), religion (with religious clothing like a nicab or turban), race (some people of a different racial group may be recognized while others may not, depending on their features)
pros:
if your quality if visual, people around you would likely know they’re targetting you with insults, rather than make jokes that relate to you without them knowing it
you may accept yourself sooner – live life being yourself, your whole self
first impressions made would filter out the people you would want in your life or not; they either accept you or not
people would see you as you are, so if someone doesn’t accept you there wasn’t an attachment making it more disappointing a loss
you would be able to be part of a group or community of people who share your qualities (ex: community of believers in the same religion)
Cons:
people may think they know you, based on assumptions or stereotypes (face criticism or harsh treatment, like targetted comments to hurt you)
you don’t have a choice to hide parts of yourself from those who would be unaccepting of you. (Ex: “Shopping While Black” behaviour – negative bias of shop workers towards people shopping based on prejudice)
you might have a hard time developing relationships, because people may judge you or you might feel self-conscious that they might be less accepting
you might feel/face exclusion, feeling left out of groups
may have a greater sense of of isolation, feeling on the outside
there’s the mental process a child has to go through when discovering or slowly understanding why people may see them differently, despite of who they actually are
If you pursue post-secondary education, the odds are you’ll have to develop a piece of writing that requires in-text citations and a Works Cited page. Here are some resources to use as a guide for that:
With more and more scholarly work being posted on the Internet, you may have to cite research you have completed in virtual environments. While many sources on the Internet should not be used for scholarly work (reference the OWL’s Evaluating Sources of Information resource), some Web sources are perfectly acceptable for research. When creating in-text citations for electronic, film, or Internet sources, remember that your citation must reference the source in your Works Cited.
Sometimes writers are confused with how to craft parenthetical citations for electronic sources because of the absence of page numbers, but often, these sorts of entries do not require a page number in the parenthetical citation. For electronic and Internet sources, follow the following guidelines:
Include in the text the first item that appears in the Work Cited entry that corresponds to the citation (e.g. author name, article name, website name, film name).
You do not need to give paragraph numbers or page numbers based on your Web browser’s print preview function.
Unless you must list the Web site name in the signal phrase in order to get the reader to the appropriate entry, do not include URLs in-text. Only provide partial URLs such as when the name of the site includes, for example, a domain name, like CNN.com or Forbes.com as opposed to writing out http://www.cnn.com or http://www.forbes.com.
Begin your Works Cited page on a separate page at the end of your research paper. It should have the same one-inch margins and last name, page number header as the rest of your paper.
Label the page Works Cited (do not italicize the words Works Cited or put them in quotation marks) and center the words Works Cited at the top of the page.
Double space all citations, but do not skip spaces between entries.
Indent the second and subsequent lines of citations by 0.5 inches to create a hanging indent.
List page numbers of sources efficiently, when needed. If you refer to a journal article that appeared on pages 225 through 250, list the page numbers on your Works Cited page as 225-250. Note that MLA style uses a hyphen in a span of pages.
If you’re citing an article or a publication that was originally issued in print form but that you retrieved from an online database, you should type the online database name in italics. You do not need to provide subscription information in addition to the database name.
Easybib Citation Maker: this website can be helpful for easily making your Works Cited page.
There are a lot of cool books on the shelves of the bookcase at the back of the room. Most are separated to fit their best course or genre that they relate to, but it can be deceiving, since many overlap and fit a number of high school ELA courses.
To help you see what your options are and decide, I’ve created online shelves in GoodReads. At the link below, you can skim through and read summaries to every book on my shelf and get a sense of its topic, rather than judging by colour.
To begin our look at Macbeth, we considered the possible influences for our choices:
Fault: we make our own decisions, exert free will, so we alone are responsible for successes or failures
Fate: timing of events/sequencing can be all it takes to set up a circumstance that leads to our downfall – could it be just coincidence or destiny that leads us to success or failure?
Influence: people that surround us has differing levels of influence on us. Those who are more persuasive can be quite impacting, so could it be less our success/failure and more someone else’s at times?
To start the play, it’s helpful to have a basic overview of what the play is about and who the players are. This summary cartoon does a great job of that. Watch up to about six minutes in. That leaves the ending/tragedies that unfold still to be discovered as we read/perform the play.
There’s also the continued conspiracy theory that Shakespeare isn’t the sole author of all he’s credited for writing. An interesting film/documentary was made looking into that possibility.
