You’ve received questions from a second reader and me regarding your essay.
1. Address one of them to re-open your essay.
In this draft of 2 double spaced pages, you want to state the overarching problem of the essay.
The “problem” in the personal or creative essay addresses the centralizing subject of the essay. The centralizing subject gestures to answer an overarching question. The problem is a design of your own making that works to open a subject to many possibilities. Possibilities that are controllable, and most important, “writable.” This kind of writing differs from critical writing that gestures to “prove” a point, or journalistic writing which moves to report on something. You are looking to open a discussion, plant a topic—possibly one your audience has never considered—in its consciousness.
“Writablity” is key here. The problem must contain at least one aspect that can be described as a physical gesture.
For example, in the case of Didion ‘s essay “In Bed” the larger subject may be migraine, but the centralizing element is her ability to cope with pain. “Migraine” she later describes as “imagin[ed]”, “pain” is relative to the individual to the sufferer. In both cases, they cannot be made visible to a reader. The essay is immediately viable when it begins, “Three, four, sometimes five times a month, I spend the day in bed with a migraine headache, insensible to the world around me. Almost every day of every month, between these attacks, I feel the sudden irrational irritation and the flush of blood into the cerebral arteries which tell me that migraine is on its way, and I take certain drugs to avert its arrival.” She physically puts herself in bed in front of the reader because “Bed” is a place to which the reader can relate. “Migraine” too is a place, but the reader may or may not have ever been there. Even if the reader also suffers from migraine, clearly the reader’s place and the author’s place are not the same.
Getting to the centralizing element from the subject of your essay may be as easy as asking your self a series of questions that start with one of the questions that your second reader or I asked:
What are you saying about migraine?
Why is it important that an audience here about something so personal?
(Don’t kid yourself; there are no universal themes)
Continue asking yourself questions to get to affect that tells the story.
Or:
You may want to make a list of one-word associations to get to it.
To get to “bed” as a relatable gesture, Didion may have tracked her own actions from the onset of migraine to the place that she ended up, or until she got to bed.
2. Use one of the sources that you placed on your bibliography to prove your point.
Didion suffers migraines therefore she is the source at the begining of the essay.
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Writing Assignment 2 (Due 3/30) Gathering Evidence 1
Take a look at your essay in its current state, and ask yourself if it "does" what you want it to "do".
Does it call on its audience to end world hunger, does it compel your readership to take a closer look at shorter hemline for next season?
Does it "do"...well...whatever?
An audience needs to have as significant a representation of itself as well as your view. You are only as persuasive as your ability to guide readers through territory with which they are familiar as well as ground that you are founding.
The world, therefore, becomes the culling field by which you bring proofs to your argument. To prepare proofs of your argument you will need to prepare an annotated bibliography of at least 10 sources.
"What is an annotated bibliography; how do I prepare one?":
http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/research/skill28.htm
Because this is an English class, you will use MLA style.
Two of your sources must be books.
Your other sources can be magazine articles, websites, television transcripts, or any combination of “print” materials.
Does it call on its audience to end world hunger, does it compel your readership to take a closer look at shorter hemline for next season?
Does it "do"...well...whatever?
An audience needs to have as significant a representation of itself as well as your view. You are only as persuasive as your ability to guide readers through territory with which they are familiar as well as ground that you are founding.
The world, therefore, becomes the culling field by which you bring proofs to your argument. To prepare proofs of your argument you will need to prepare an annotated bibliography of at least 10 sources.
"What is an annotated bibliography; how do I prepare one?":
http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/research/skill28.htm
Because this is an English class, you will use MLA style.
Two of your sources must be books.
Your other sources can be magazine articles, websites, television transcripts, or any combination of “print” materials.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Writing Assignment 1 (Due at the beginning of class 3/26.)
“Singing Exercise”
Take the theme or the subject that you would like to work with first.
Give it a “moment”. By a “moment” I am suggesting that themes and subjects are large and at times unwieldy.
For example, if you want to write about the reaction in the Midwest to the current War in the Middle East, you may want to narrow your subject down to moment every teenaged man, despite the suspension of the draft, is required to sign up for selective service, or the moment while reading the paper or watching the news, you first recognized that people fighting in the war were so close to your age that it could be you, a brother, a sister, someone you know.
Give the moment a song or set it to music.
In this exercise you are examining the intersection between the song and the moment. In a four-paged, STAPLED, double-spaced, single-sided essay written in a twelve-point “serf-ed” font that you will make two copies of and bring with you to class on Monday (3/26) your objective is to bring the “moment” and your audience vis-à-vis popular culture.
The example that I give in class was an essay that I am writing about “The Death of the American Imagination”. To make it a manageable subject on which to write, I started to think about the ways in which “we think of things imagined.” I began to think about what we think about when we think about the word “imagine”. And John Lennon’s song came to mind.
I looked up the words on the Internet and began to analyze them a bit. While reading them I realized that we, as a culture, tend to misread the song as an anthem of world peace, love and understanding, and that Lennon only applied one directive in the song, which was “imagine.”
And I began to write an essay based on why I think that we misread and misappropriate the song based on its lyrics.
It is titled: “John Lennon’s Imagine: A Close Reading on the Twenty-Seventh Year, Three-Month-and-Thirty-Eighth-Day Anniversary of the Singer’s Death.”
And I opened with this paragraph:
15 March 2007.
We are asked, to “Imagine there's no heaven,” told, “It's easy if [we] try,” and asked to imagine, “no hell below us/ Above us only sky”. And where we have assumed Lennon’s lyrics an anthem of peace and love as we appropriate them for everything from weddings, to funerals, to demonstrations promoting the war in Iraq, and peace rallies, in our enthusiasm to consummate our rituals and promote our agendum, we rush past the implicit directive in the title of the song. Too busy, too much in a hurry to get to and actuate are own personal and political notions of “peace”—our own constructs of what a world in harmony with itself would look like—that we ignore the single instruction in the song, which is to “imagine”.
This is merely an example. There are many ways in which that you might want to approach this project. It may be a simple way of just getting started writing what you really are after.
FAQ:
Q: Do I have to incorporate the lyrics into my essay?
A: No. It worked for me this time, but it might not work for me the next time. This is merely away to get into writing about your subject while engaging both a research technique and a close reading of the culture surrounding the subject that interests you. You are asking how do we as a culture think about your topic; what cultural devices are in places that allow you to engage an audience.
Q: Does this have to be a “perfect” essay?
A: Absolutely not. However, spelling, grammar and punctuation count. You are learning as much about your thought processes as well as you are thinking about what interests you. You are making the process of writing the tool by which you do your thinking.
Take the theme or the subject that you would like to work with first.
Give it a “moment”. By a “moment” I am suggesting that themes and subjects are large and at times unwieldy.
For example, if you want to write about the reaction in the Midwest to the current War in the Middle East, you may want to narrow your subject down to moment every teenaged man, despite the suspension of the draft, is required to sign up for selective service, or the moment while reading the paper or watching the news, you first recognized that people fighting in the war were so close to your age that it could be you, a brother, a sister, someone you know.
Give the moment a song or set it to music.
In this exercise you are examining the intersection between the song and the moment. In a four-paged, STAPLED, double-spaced, single-sided essay written in a twelve-point “serf-ed” font that you will make two copies of and bring with you to class on Monday (3/26) your objective is to bring the “moment” and your audience vis-à-vis popular culture.
The example that I give in class was an essay that I am writing about “The Death of the American Imagination”. To make it a manageable subject on which to write, I started to think about the ways in which “we think of things imagined.” I began to think about what we think about when we think about the word “imagine”. And John Lennon’s song came to mind.
I looked up the words on the Internet and began to analyze them a bit. While reading them I realized that we, as a culture, tend to misread the song as an anthem of world peace, love and understanding, and that Lennon only applied one directive in the song, which was “imagine.”
And I began to write an essay based on why I think that we misread and misappropriate the song based on its lyrics.
It is titled: “John Lennon’s Imagine: A Close Reading on the Twenty-Seventh Year, Three-Month-and-Thirty-Eighth-Day Anniversary of the Singer’s Death.”
And I opened with this paragraph:
15 March 2007.
We are asked, to “Imagine there's no heaven,” told, “It's easy if [we] try,” and asked to imagine, “no hell below us/ Above us only sky”. And where we have assumed Lennon’s lyrics an anthem of peace and love as we appropriate them for everything from weddings, to funerals, to demonstrations promoting the war in Iraq, and peace rallies, in our enthusiasm to consummate our rituals and promote our agendum, we rush past the implicit directive in the title of the song. Too busy, too much in a hurry to get to and actuate are own personal and political notions of “peace”—our own constructs of what a world in harmony with itself would look like—that we ignore the single instruction in the song, which is to “imagine”.
This is merely an example. There are many ways in which that you might want to approach this project. It may be a simple way of just getting started writing what you really are after.
FAQ:
Q: Do I have to incorporate the lyrics into my essay?
A: No. It worked for me this time, but it might not work for me the next time. This is merely away to get into writing about your subject while engaging both a research technique and a close reading of the culture surrounding the subject that interests you. You are asking how do we as a culture think about your topic; what cultural devices are in places that allow you to engage an audience.
Q: Does this have to be a “perfect” essay?
A: Absolutely not. However, spelling, grammar and punctuation count. You are learning as much about your thought processes as well as you are thinking about what interests you. You are making the process of writing the tool by which you do your thinking.
Reading Assignment 1(Due at the beginning of class 3/26.)
Joan Didion’s essay “In Bed” which you will find at the following web address:
http://www.wits.ac.za/humanities/lls/holistic/didion1.htm
http://www.wits.ac.za/humanities/lls/holistic/didion1.htm
Required Texts
Conley, Dillard, ed.s Modern American Memoirs (ISBN 0060927631)
http://www.amazon.com/Modern-American-Memoirs-Cort-Conley/dp/0060927631/ref=sr_11_1/002-1651691-6280012?ie=UTF8&qid=1174935899&sr=11-1
Zinsser, editor The Art and Craft of Memoir (ISBN 0395901502)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0395901502/ref=pd_luc_mri/002-1651691-6280012?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance
http://www.amazon.com/Modern-American-Memoirs-Cort-Conley/dp/0060927631/ref=sr_11_1/002-1651691-6280012?ie=UTF8&qid=1174935899&sr=11-1
Zinsser, editor The Art and Craft of Memoir (ISBN 0395901502)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0395901502/ref=pd_luc_mri/002-1651691-6280012?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance
Course Requirements
I. 2-Essays of no less than 10 pages.
II. 1-Complete Revisions.
III. 16-Peer Reviews.
IV. 8-Weekly Writing Assignments.
V. 2-Workshops.
VI. 3-Conferences.
VII. Regular Attendance, Assigned Reading and Class Participation.
II. 1-Complete Revisions.
III. 16-Peer Reviews.
IV. 8-Weekly Writing Assignments.
V. 2-Workshops.
VI. 3-Conferences.
VII. Regular Attendance, Assigned Reading and Class Participation.
Course Descprition
Of the baby born, of the fire down the street, of the new idea bursting to get out of us, we invent the narratives that allow us to navigate the world. The reading, writing and discussions in this seminar examine how life becomes “tellable” gesture. Through the analysis of memoir and the processing of memory, we will apply the techniques of journalistic research toward finding intersections between culture and self towards the realization of creative and as well as informative writing projects.
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