03.12 - Section 01 Discussion, Objectivity and Subjectivity

In the first half of class today, we had a discussion around the first section of reading logs that people have completed for today. This was an informal discussion which allowed us to begin developing an understanding of who McCandless seems to have been as a person.

Discussion questions available here.

Next, we began looking at the idea of objective perspectives and subjective perspectives in non-fiction texts. For this work we defined objective and subjective as follows:

Objective - Perspectives that consist of neutral/unbiased observation.

Subjective - Perspective that consists of personal opinion and judgments.

To practice with expressing these ideas, everyone watched the following video and then responded to the questions below.

In your writer's journal:

1 - Describe this video objectively in four sentences.

2 - Describe this video subjectively in four sentences.

After everyone had a chance to respond to this prompt, people shared their responses with a partner. Then, several people shared their objective and subjective descriptions. This allowed us to discuss the difference between objective writing and subjective writing and how readers respond to it.

In general, we noted that subjective writing was a bit more interesting to read/hear because it had more "flavor" or emotion. We will be working more with these ideas tomorrow as we take a look at a non-fiction piece which mixes objective and subjective perspectives.

Homework:

Read to page 69 in Into the Wild for Friday.
Into the Wild Reading Schedule

Begin work on your third log for Into the Wild (there will be twenty minutes in class tomorrow to work on this as well).
Into the Wild Reading Logs