Week 4

    Good afternoon.  Hope your week is going great.  Today we will review the autobiographical essay and get to finishing the summary piece assigned last week by Cornelia Dean, "With Warming, Peril Underlies Road to Alaska."

Assignment #4 requires you to develop a topic implicit or explicit in the material from Dean's essay. Once you have summarized the piece (#3) using third person point of view, you are to follow interesting "leads" from it (i.e. related topics or themes),  and then, using three or four total sources, including images, if you wish, write a short report on the specific topic you've settled on.  I suggest gathering examples of climate change that have been documented in reputable publications and providing some commentary on what the changes portend, the responses of leaders and communities around the world to the threats and opportunities posed, etcetera.  This assignment is intended as a practice in using secondary source material, that is the reports and studies made by others (rather than your own "primary" studies or documentation of events such as the effects of climate change).  I have in mind a simple roundup of arresting examples to illustrate material changes underway and the critical thoughts of scientists and all those in a position to influence public opinion and action.  Check out this report:  http://www.npr.org/2012/07/25/157375957/massive-ice-melt-in-greenland-worries-scientists

    You are to write an essay of 450-500 words using multiple examples as evidence to support your general point (your thesis).  You will have to identify suitable texts and then selectively pull from them material that shows the nature or character of your subject and specifically supports your thesis point.  I want to see reference to the particular source material by title and author and the purposeful use of direct quotation where warranted.

We will practice referencing and quoting from various textual sources as needed.

We are practicing what is called "critical reading," which includes determining a source's relevance and reliability.  Is the material primary or secondary?  A photograph, for example, is a primary source.  A scientist's report on temperature variations as recorded in tree rings involves primary data collection in the field, and then the analysis of the date.  The published report, which you might use in your research, is a secondary source.We must ask, is the report based on reliable and relevant evidence, that of first-person experience and eye-witness observation and/or facts, examples, expert testimonials compiled by reliable others?  Is the evidence compelling, strong, complete, unbiased, up to date?  Avoid sources that present little evidence or little that is convincing or that is no longer timely.  You will use the Internet to pull together sources for this exercise, and clearly identify the sources you use in the essay text as you pull the essay together.  You will have to summarize or paraphrase source ideas, which means putting the ideas into your own words in brief or in about the same number of words as the original, and also quote directly, which means using the exact wording of the original passage and using quotation marks around the material.  The following list gives examples of suitable taglines to introduce quotations:

Deani writes, . . .

As Dean says,

According to another authority, author of . . .

Makari, the author of "In the Arcadian Woods," suggests a different view, claiming . . .

*Note:  Plagiarism is theft of another's work, whether inadvertent or not.  The following is one textbook example (The Brief Bedford Reader, 9th ed.) of plagiarism:

Original passage:  If we are collectively judged by how we treat immigrants–those who appear to be 'other' but will in a generation be 'us'–we are not in very good shape.

Paraphrase (plagiarised):  The author argues that if we are judged as a group by how we treat immigrants–those who seem to different but eventually will be the same–we are in bad shape.

A paraphrase or summary must express the original freshly; it is not enough to make superficial changes to the wording here and there.  Moreover, the syntax–sentence structure– should not mirror the original.

Summary (#3) is due today.  Essay 4 is due week 5.  

------------------Upcoming Assignments

A Report on an Event

Reviews and descriptions of cultural fare–of park attractions, films, art exhibits and fairs, live music shows, restaurants, bars, and clubs old and new, sporting events, lectures, book signings and discussions, community classes and workshops –serve to interest people in what’s going on about town and provide them a means to connect with the lives and activities of others.    Special events and regular or ongoing culture fare also provide an opportunity for you to do some first-hand reporting. The particulars of your subject and your takeway impressions and ideas, the degree of interest and engagement with the subject shown–these are central to the essay’s success.  Whether you are visiting a park, a beach, a museum, theater, restaraunt, etcetera–descriptions of the scene or environs, the activity, the individual artworks, performances, ambiance, food, service, etcetera will bring the piece to life and convey a you-are-there sensation to readers. But your readers will also learn about you, your view of the world and what matters, for the frame your create, the thesis idea controlling and unifying the work, will make for certain selections and emphases that reflect you the observer, your history, interests, tastes, etc.  

    We will talk more in class about how to put together an assignment of this kind. It is a species of primary research that goes hand in hand with background reading on whatever aspect of your subject requires exposition, background and context, to fully develop your thesis or main idea.  This essay will require you actually go somewhere in person and record material facts and observations before putting the piece together.  Your thesis tells you what to include, to emphasize, and what to ignore.  The essay should run a minimum of 5oo-6oo words, including introductory, body, and closing paragraphs, title, and clear references throughout.

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If you were to visit an exhibit, you would include the museum name, location, and featured artist(s), including the exhibit’s run dates.  Focus would necessarily be on some theme observed in one or more works or overall.  You would identify representative works (by title) and present a verbal description–medium, size, subject, form, and color–so that readers can "see" the work and understand the conclusions you draw from it.  If you were to visit a natural area, you might tie the visit in to some current news (a news "hook") or ongoing area of interest (natural history/studies, ecology, environmental justice, marine life, art) to create audience appeal, to lend purpose and weight to the piece.  Food culture is of great interest to many these days and offers many choices for primary research or "eye-witness" reports–green markets, restaraunts, bars, etcetera.

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The place or event essay (#5), in 500 words or more, is due week 7.

Workshop:  Find a photograph of some place or stake out a location for a fly report on a place.  Description may proceed like that of a still life painting or photograph in which a tableaux is created, all action removed or stopped.  It may also include the visible action, the dynamic flow of movement and sound and light going on without, and the observer's passing thoughts and feelings.

                                                In Amish Country

Note:  The film review is a separate assignment that we may agree to do, and that involves a trip to the Gateway theater.  We will decide today.

Week 3

  

Good Evening, class.  Hope you brought your narrative work!  It's Time to Share!:)

Review:  Narration, the primary organizational mode to be used in assignment #2,  pulls together the  basic elements of story:  character, with whatever history and personality and motivation allow for insight into the action and experience at the heart of the story; plot, the arranged action/events/scenes that show how a certain conflict arises and develops ; setting, which brings a clear sense of time and place and the force they exert;  narrative point of view, the perspective of the storyteller or narrator; and theme, the idea(s) put into play by all the elements together, whether of innocence, experience, youth, age, promise, loss, death . . . .

The reporter's basic questions are a shorthand means of remembering to get the essentials:

What happened?

Who was involved?

When?

Where?

Why did this happen?

How did it happen?

Short narratives may be structured chronologically,  they may begin in the middle of things, or they work from the end back toward the beginnings of the events in focus; they may even of course move back and forth, as if showing how memory itself refuses to play in strict chronology.  However you decide to structure your piece, it is a good idea to build into the fabric strong images in fairly simple, specific, concrete terms rather than with overly complicated, too general or abstract terms.  You want to pull the reader through the window of the letters and words on the page into the sensuous, three-dimensional world of life as we see, hear, smell, touch, feel, and  think about it.  

Example:

    Once on a Wednesday excursion when I was a little girl, my father bought me a beaded wire ball that I loved.  At a touch, I could collapse the toy into a flat coil between my palms, or pop it open to make a hollow sphere.  Rounded out, it resembled a tiny Earth, because its hinged wires traced the same pattern of intersecting circles that I had seen on the globe in my schoolroom–the thin black lines of latitude and longitude.  The few colored beads slid along the wire paths haphazardly, like ships on the high seas.

                                                Longitude, David Sobel

Another example, of the sight of a mustache:  A truly terrifying sight, a thick orange hedge that sprouted and flourished between his nose and his upper lip and ran clear across his face from the middle of one cheek to the middle of the other. . . . [It] was curled most splendidly upwards all the way along as though it had had a permanent wave put into it or possible curling tongs in the mornings over a tiny flame. . . . The only other way he could have achieved this effect, we boys decided, was by prolonged upward brushing with a hard toothbrush in front of the mirror every morning.

Special Effects:  Heighten the effect of seeing by making familiar ground or territory unfamiliar or interesting by shifting perspective–the extreme close up, the distance shot, the fragmentary but evocative particular that puts the whole, be it a place, person, or thing, in a strong light.  Use distinctive language in so far as possible, without making the whole too rich.

Names:  Be mindful of the power of names to particularize and connote ideas and images.  Huckleberry Finn, Scarlett O'Hara, Venus Williams; Kissimmee, Florida; Bountiful, Utah.  The names of people, places, and things can be intriguing and interesting sources of irony and word play.

Dialogue:  dialogue may help to advance the action, set a tone, illustrate character and key ideas or points.  as a form of action (see essay handouts).  It is a dramatic device and pulls readers into a virtual present.

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Refining the Draft Idea:  Writing teachers and textbooks often refer to the angle or hook or slant as a way of luring readers to the subject article or book.  Readers have different needs and tastes, of course, but there's nothing wrong with familiarizing yourself with the common types of bait that show up in titles  or headlines and lead paragraphs.  So here are a few:

*Adrenaline                          *Numbers

*Amazement                         *Promises

*Brand-New                         *Secrets

*Detailed                               *Sexy

*Funny                                  *Superlative

*Location                              *Combination

*Money

*Newsy

Workshop:   identify any slants used in the course of reading through today's New York Times or other source.  Actually, you might enjoy what is now a regular feature at the NYTimes- Modern Love-which features short personal narratives on romantic love. (http://nytimes.com/)

Ways of Beginning:

*Anecdotal or case history (to create a human interest appeal)

*Direct Address

*Factual

*Journalistic

*Mythic/Poetic

*Quotation

 *Thematic

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Review:  A composition of even a single paragraph must organize itself around an idea, stated or implied, which is the thesis or topic idea.  

What is a thesis?  A thesis is a single sentence statement of the point you intend to describe, explain, illustrate, argue or prove.  Where is the thesis to be found?  Typically, by convention, teachers ask that it appear by the last line of the opening paragraph.  It thus provides a focus and a clear direction and means of selection, for whatever does not in some way help to advance the thesis idea, may not belong in the essay at all.  When you and your readers know what your point is, you and they can follow the logic of your development, the order and arrangement of supporting topics and personal commentary.  It is a good idea to have a draft statement of your thesis in view so that you stay on point as you draft the essay.  Build key words into the thesis statement to provide you and readers references to what lies ahead.  A thesis controls to some extent what will appear in the essay and creates an obligation on your part to follow through on its promise, for it creates an expectation.  

Samples:  

Religion is no longer the uncontested center and ruler of human life because Protestantism, science, and capitalism have fundamentally altered our view of the world.

In their attempt to understand human nature, many novelists become excellent psychologists.

A good university education is one that is useful, fulfilling, and challenging.

Being a reporter means conducting interviews at odd hours and in strange places.


Trust is the foundation of all lasting relationships.

............

The common modes of organization include description, narration, illustration, cause/effect, definition, comparison/contrast, classification, and argument.  Let's look at the means by which Cornelia Dean organizes "With Warming, Peril Underlies Road to Alaska," an essay about the Alaskan highway, its history and current troubles.

URL:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/24/science/with-warming-peril-underlies-road-to-alaska.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1&src=dayp&pagewanted=al

Summary Exercise (#3):   summarize briefly the essay referenced above ( in 250-300 words) published in the New York Times:     Incorporate two or three direct quotations to support and illustrate.   Follow the format guidelines set forth and illustrated on the handout passed out in class.  As a followup, google "climate change" and find more writings and images that conjure the subject.  Bring these materials or URLs to class next week along with the simple summary.

Select material for quotation on the following bases:

1)        *the wording is particularly memorable, to the point, and not easily paraphrased

2)        * the passage expresses an author’s or expert’s direct opinion that you want to emphasize

3)        *the passage provides example of the range of perspective

4)        *the passage provides a constrasting or opposing view

Format quotations in the following manner:

       Brief quotations of no more than three lines should be worked into the text within the usual margins from left to right, and enclosed by quotation marks. Use a signal phrase or tagline to introduce them, followed by a colon or comma. 

       Longer passages, four lines and more, should be set off in block format, indented and aligned 10 spaces from the left margin, with no quotation marks but those that may be internal to the passage itself.

Examples:  "In the Arcadian Woods," by George Makari, a psychoanalyst, he reveals that it is no easy matter to diagnose the specific cause or source of an individual's anxiety, for it is a "quintessential mind-body phenomenon" with complex roots scientists have yet to unravel.  Since the 17th century, when the first modern medical descriptions of anxiety were recorded, the mystery has only deepened:

Anxiety disorders are now associated with complex epigenetic models, the transgenerational transmission of trauma, a neuroscience for fear conditioning, and even a pediatric infectious illness that triggers auto-immune mechanisms and results in obsessive compulsive disorder.  

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In a poem by Tony Hoagland called “The Best Moment of the Night,” he writes about an informal dinner party.  The human guests are gathered around a table and beneath it is a dog whose eager affection strikes a chord in the poet, creates a “moment”(line 1).  The dog, “down near the base of the butcher-block table/ just as the party was getting started” (lines 2-3) makes him understand something about his own isolation.  He seems lovelorn, and when that dog offers up its belly to be petted–“the vulnerable belly” (line 18)– he momentarily admires it, and is warmed by it, for the dog is still “panting, and alive, and seeking love”(line 19) in a way that he, as a human, can’t readily do in front of the gathered guests. 

and from “An Ocean of Plastic” (available on the web):

       Kitt Doucette describes the threat of plastic to all marine life, and perhaps human life, too: “Even small organisms like jellyfish, lanternfish and zooplankton have started to ingest tiny bits of plastic. These species, the very foundation of the oceanic food web, are becoming saturated with plastic, which may be passed further up the food chain.”  The fish we eat may contain the residues of these ingested plastic particles, and pose clear health risks. He explains, citing also the authority of a leading marine biologist:

[. . .] the chemical toxins concentrated in the [plastic] waste lodge themselves in the animals’ fatty tissues, accumulating at ever increasing levels the higher you go up the food chain. It isn’t clear yet if these chemicals are reaching humans, but PCB’s and DDT are know to disrupt reproduction in marine mammals. In humans they have been linked to liver damage, skin lesions, and cancer. “The possibility of more and more creatures ingesting plastics that contain concentrated pollutants is real and quite disturbing,” says Richard Thompson, a British marine biologist who has been studying microplastics for 20 years.

Use brackets [ ] around any material you add for the sake of clarity or any necessary

change to the original , such as a verb tense, a pronoun, or an ellipsis (to abbreviate the length of the passage). The source title, be it an article title in a magazine or newspaper or that of a website from which you have borrowed material, should be identified at the outset in your introduction or first use of the material. The year or date of such information should be recent, or otherwise noted.

*MLA citations and works cited will not be necessary for initial assignments.