Blog 10: Some EC

I took out a small portion of an essay I recently wrote. Its about the book, Goddess for Hire, and the main character's new found identity of a reincarnated goddess. (drum roll please......)

Her unconventional career choice (her “job” to defeat world evils as the reincarnated goddess, Kali) is what makes this novel an alternative, or revised, rendition of the chick-lit novel. Its time-consuming and challenging qualities make being a goddess a true job. [Possessive pronoun: its]

Most people would probably visualize a woman character in a chick-lit to be focused on her job, probably in business, or retail, or fashion. Compared to the rest of her family, Maya’s dreams and aspirations are much different than theirs; who are all doctors. [Possessive pronoun: theirs AND who] Maya on the other hand, gives a whole new experience for chick-lit readers. [Simple sentence] Unlike the common business-woman seen in many of these novels, Maya embraced a career that has never been seen before: a reincarnated goddess, whose job is to defeat all the evil in the world. [Possessive pronoun: whose] Whom does Maya reincarnate into? The Hindu goddess, Kali. [Use of whom] Maya is seen in the majority of the book focusing on her powerful skills and learning how to “call the goddess within.” She considered this being her full-time job, and worried that getting a “real” job would interfere with her goddess’ duties. [An apostrophe to show possession on a singular noun ending in –s] Maya and her mom often fought about Maya’s future, and this put tension on their relationship. [Compound sentence] When her mom apologized about her ultimatum of getting a job or moving out, Maya contemplated what she would do in the real-world and was searching for her interests: “Shopping? What about fighting malevolence? Sure, there was some job satisfaction, but…” (p. 207). [Complex sentence] In this passage, she is expressing her fears that embracing her goddess powers would not suffice as a career path.

At the end of the book, all of Maya’s peers and family and community members accept her goddess duties as a full-time position. [Series of 3 items without commas and strung together with ands] In my own opinion (which may be different from yours), it is clear Maya has embraced this career path of being a reincarnated goddess. [Possessive pronoun: yours] Singh has done a great job with this book in making it different from most of the other chick-lit novels.

Blog 9: Pretending to be a big football fan

Don’t get me wrong; I like football and I love the Cougs, but I’m not one of those super-fans who obsess over each and every game, but I needed something to write about (something different that wasn’t “my goals” or “Dora” or anything else we have done in class), and I could not think of anything until I ran into an interesting article about the Cougar football game that one of my friends on Facebook shared; it was about Mike Leach, the Cougar football coach, and how the Oregon coach was bad-mouthing him even though we (the Cougs) were the losing team. [One-sentence paragraph]

The Oregon coach commented on Mike Leach saying he was “low class” and that continuing to pass the ball was “total B.S.” We lost the game by 24 points; how does that make Leach classless? [Rhetorical question] Oregon’s coach was just that— classless. [Dash to emphasize the last element of a sentence] There was no question going in to the game if the Cougars were a better team than Oregon. [Use of than] The Cougs were expected to lose, and were expected to lose by a lot. However they did lose, they kept the score closer than anyone thought they would [Use of however] I guess that was one positive that came out of the game. If the Oregon coach didn’t like what Coach Leach was doing then he should have stopped it. [Use of then]. The Cougars set records for completions and passes attempted and they still lost the game. [Simple sentence with compounded verbs connected with ands]

In my personal opinion, I don’t think the Cougs did anything wrong; what do you think they should have done? [Real question] Keeping the score differential decently low with the #2 team in the nation, the Oregon Ducks, the Cougars (who aren’t necessarily the best football team) are slowly starting to show improvement under the coaching of Mike Leach. Unfortunately, they still lost. [Long sentence followed by short sentence]

Maybe we’ll get them next time
Also, maybe I should become a sports editor (ha ha, only kidding). 

Blog 8- Apple Picking and Appositives

Okay…so I am having a hard time including these POWs in my previous blog posts, and I thought I would change it up and write about my fun weekend of apple picking from a couple weekends ago; It’s easier for me to start from scratch anyway. 

Last weekend (not this Dad’s Weekend, but the one before), my roommate and I dragged our boyfriends along to Bishop’s Apple Orchard to pick apples and make homemade apple cider. [Appositive punctuated with parenthesis] I shouldn’t say we dragged them because I think they wanted to go in the first place, and they really enjoyed themselves as well. ANYWAY…we drove to the orchard, and with three large bags in hand we were ready to pick some apples. The best and ripest apples— the ones on the very top of the tree— were no feat for my roommate, willing and adventurous, to climb up and get. [Appositive punctuated with dashes AND adjectives out of order]. We weren’t sure how many apples we actually needed to pick to make 3 gallons of cider, so we picked and picked until we had all of our bags full of apples.

Once we thought we had enough apples to make cider, we went down to the place that had the apple-cider-making-machines: a shed [Appositive punctuated with a colon].  It was really cool because we had to provide our own gallon jugs as well as pick our own apples; it felt so authentic.The apple-cider-making-machine (dubbed by me), was this tall, wooden thing. It’s hard to explain, but I added a picture in case you needed a visual. We had to put the apples into a grinder, and then had to grind them all into tiny little pieces. After they were grounded up, the apple pieces were ready to be juiced. The grounds of the apples were in a mesh bag that was inside of a barrel. We put the lid on the barrel and pushed it down as far as we could, and before we knew it, three gallons of cider were trickling out of it.

After spinning the wheel of the grinder for so long, all of our arms were exhausted, and we were ready for our reward of freshly juiced cider. [Past participle phrase]. I have to tell you, this cider was the best cider I have ever had. We paid, said our “thank you’s” to the family who ran the orchard, and headed back home. Of course we were all hungry, so we stopped for lunch at Cougar Country, the best burger place in Pullman, and gorged ourselves with a delicious lunch after a fun day of apple picking. [Appositive punctuated with commas].