Final Essay Assignment

Please respond to the following topic with an essay of 600 words or more. You will be given class time to write and revise this assignment before you turn it in. However, you will not have the opportunity to receive comments and do a later revision.

Topic: What did you learn about writing this semester?

In order to complete this essay, you must use some kind of textual or experiential reference points: for example, any of our readings, class discussions, and exercises, or any of the writing assignments you did for this class. However, you are not restricted to materials from this class: maybe you learned more about writing from another class, another experience, something you read or had to do elsewhere. That's fine with me -- I just want to know what you learned.

Similarly, how you approach the question is up to you. You may discuss big abstract ideas related to writing (“I learned that writing is/can be…”) or smaller, more practical concerns (“I learned how to…”) or more personal insights (“I learned that my strongest/weakest skill is…”).  You may focus on a single point or discuss several related points. 

Naturally, I ask that you use your best writing and critical thinking skills for this assignment. :D

Research Assignment: Tuesday 11/4

Remember that we meet for the first hour of Tuesday's class in the library classroom -- just inside the library, room E101. We'll be working with an academic librarian, who will introduce us to some of the tools on offer at the library and instruct us in how to use those tools.

As a part of that session, I've prepared the following short research assignment.

Library Research Assignment

This assignment might seem a little strange, at first glance, but it relates directly to your reading for Thursday's class, and it will also give you an overview of some key resources you'll need for the next paper. We'll have a little time to work on this assignment in class after our research session. The finished assignment is due on your blog before class next Tuesday (11/11).

1. Locate three resources related to a single kind of animal -- for example, a bat, a whale, a fox, a crow, a poodle, or a goat. These sources should be: a literary work (story, poem, nonfiction literary essay); a scientific resource (paper or literature survey, popular science article, reference work); and a print source of any kind (book or reference work). Your research should be restricted to library databases and the library catalog -- no web sources!

2. Within your sources, find three ideas, facts, or quotations that fit together thematically. For example, you might choose two facts about bat wings (scientific resource, print source) and a brief description of bats flying from a poem or short story (literary work); obviously the theme here is flight. Or you might choose a fact about the audible range of whale songs (scientific resource), two sentences describing the sound of whale song from a novel (literary work), and a second fact about whale communication from a reference article on sea life (print source); the theme here is whale communication or whale song.

3. On your blog, create a numbered list of your three ideas, facts, and quotations. After each one, give the author's name, the title of the essay, paper, or literary work, the name of the publication (if it's from a reference work, magazine, or journal), publisher's name and place of publication, the date, and the page numbers. (We'll talk about formal systems of citation as we work on the next essay -- for now, just giving the information in this order is good enough.)

4. Write a short paragraph in which you explain your choices. What theme did you have in mind? Why do these three items fit together, in your opinion? Do you see any differences in how these items approach the theme? Explain the differences. Finally, and most importantly, a moment of creative interpretation: If your theme were a symbol for something -- if it stood for an emotion, a common experience, or an idea about the world -- what would its meaning be?

Here's a nosy koala bear to help you get started:

In-Class Work: Thursday 10/30

We'll begin today's class with a brief check in: I'll ask each person in the class to talk a little bit about the work they've done so far for our "Unpacking a Quotation" paper. This will give me a chance to check your progress, but it will also give you the opportunity to hear from your classmates and learn from their choices and considerations. I'll give you a little bit of time at the beginning of class to prepare some notes before you have to talk.

Instructions

1. Read the quotation you've chosen.

2. Briefly explain why you chose this quotation:

• What question or theme or argument are you concerned with?
• What about the language of this quotation makes it interesting or useful to you?
• Try to give us some insight into a particular word or phrase that you find important

Feel free to ask questions of your classmates, offer your own insights about what they're working on, or make connections between your work and theirs.

Oh, and if you're feeling stressed out at mid-semester, here's a cat video to help you through:

In-Class Work: Tuesday, 10/28

During today's class, we'll engage in some supervised prewriting. The point of today's class is to generate ideas and gather materials that will help you write your essay -- not to start writing the essay itself! Today's class is all about choosing quotations and taking notes.

"Unpacking a Quotation": Prewriting

You don't have to do these steps in order. Begin where you think it makes the most sense to begin. Just be sure to cover all of these steps before you're done.

1. Decide what you want to say about the story -- what angle your interpretation will follow. You may base your work on our previous questions or pursue an interpretation of your own, one we haven't discussed in class. If you don't know what you want to say yet, go to step three.

2. Locate all of the passages in the story that relate to your interpretation. You'll choose your main quotation from this list, but you might need to use one of the other passages from this list to help explain your main quotation or develop your ideas.

3. Choose a passage to focus on. This should be a key passage in your understanding of the story -- a moment when something changes or when something becomes clear to you. This should be a passage that you find exciting, a passage that makes you feel something. Be sure to choose a passage that is long enough to support your discussion, but short enough that it won't overwhelm you -- about 2-4 sentences, depending on their length and complexity.

4. Begin "unpacking" your main quotation. Look for the words and phrases that seem most interesting, intriguing, or poignant. Use freewriting or make some informal notes to explore what these words and phrases mean; consider the denotative meaning and the connotative meaning. (You may find it useful to use the Oxford English Dictionary.) Explore how these words and phrases make you feel, and why.

The choices you make and the notes you generate today will help you to write your paper, Keep in mind, though, that none of this is "set in stone." There is still time to change your mind as you work or to do more prewriting.

"Unpacking a Quotation" Assignment

During today's class, we read and analyzed a sample of student writing that will be our model for the next assignment. (If you were absent on Thursday, please see me for a copy of the sample essay.) Our objective was to discover how this piece of writing was put together, and what kinds of things this student did in the piece, so that we could understand the model and establish a set of tools for our own essays. Here's what we came up with:

Unpacking a Quotation

1. The essay should begin with a quotation. The quotation needs to be a bit long, so you have enough to talk about. Choose a passage that you think is very important -- a key moment in your interpretation of the story.

2. Give the reader some context for the quotation. Don't forget to mention the author and title of the work. But more importantly: What is happening in the story when this passage occurs? Why is this passage important? What does it tell us? What changes at this moment, or what is revealed? Notice that the student who wrote our model essay connects her passage to the narrative arc of the story (what has happened, what will happen) and also to her own interpretation of the story (the governess is cray cray.)

3. Focus on one or more phrases in your quotation and explain them in detail. Notice how much the student who wrote our model essay has to say about the phrase "some one." Use other words and phrases from the passage to help with your explanation -- in our model essay, the student also quotes "the face" and "present to" in order to develop her ideas about the phrase "some one."

4. Ask yourself questions about the words and phrases the author chose to use in this passage. Look for contradictions and problems ("some one" vs. "the face"). Look for phrases that seem to agree with each other or support each other ("he" and "the face"). Think about what each of these words and phrases mean, and what they contribute to the meaning and the emotional tone of the passage.

5. Quote and paraphrase selectively from other parts of the story in order to help you unpack your main quotation.

6. Return to the same words and phrases several times in your essay to get more out of them, or approach them from different perspectives. Notice that the student who wrote our model essay introduces the phrase "kind light" at the end of her third paragraph, but then returns to it and gives it a slightly different interpretation at the beginning of her fourth paragraph.

Here's the basic assignment: Choose a significant quotation from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" and unpack that quotation, using it to explain your interpretation of the story. Your argument may be based on the questions we previously addressed in class, or it may be based on a question or topic of your own that you wish to explore. Length: about 500 words, or two pages typed and double-spaced. Due date: please post the essay to your class blog before next Tuesday's class (11/4)

In-Class Work: Tuesday, 10/21

We'll spend today's class working on a blog post related to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper." This is a low-stakes, exploratory assignment, but it relates to our next major assignment.

Instructions: Choose one of the following questions, draft a short response (two or more paragraphs) in Google Docs, and post it to your blog. Your response should make significant (but selective) use of quotation and paraphrase, following up on our in-class work with quotation and Edgar Allan Poe.

Questions:
1.  Is this a ghost story?
2. Explain the relationship between the narrator and her husband, John. How does this relationship affect the narrator?
3. What do you find striking about the narrator's descriptions of the wallpaper? Isolate and discuss a key element of her descriptions.

If you finish early, spend some time reading and commenting what your classmates have posted on their blogs.

The Yellow Wallpaper

For our next assignment, we're going to be reading Charlotte Perkins Gilman's spooky short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper." You can find a link to scans of the original 1892 New England Magazine publication of the story here. Please read the story before our next class meeting (Th 10/16); we'll discuss the story in class, but you need to be familiar with it already to participate in the discussion. We'll use our quotation and paraphrase skills to write about the story for our next essay.

In case you're curious, the scans of Gilman's story come from an exhibition called "The Literature of Prescription," available at the U.S. National Library of Medicine website.