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.