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.
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