Reading for Wednesday, 5/4

Please read this article, print it out, and bring it to Wednesday's class.

As you read, think of the article as an example of the kind of essay you're writing.  Try to identify the topic, the thesis, and the examples the essay uses to support its various claims. 

Assignment for Monday 5/2

Eventually, you will write a persuasive essay modeled on Anna Quindlen's "Uncle Sam and Aunt Samantha."  The first step in this process is to identify a suitably specific topic.  With this in mind, please bring the following to Monday's class:

I.  A general topic. Quindlen's is "Women and the U.S. Military."

II.  A minimum of five subtopics. Quindlen's is "Female selective service requirements."  Others might include "female grooming regulations during recruit training,"or "women's dietary needs in a combat environment."

III. A minimum of five arguable claims about your favorite subtopic.  (This is the topic you will write your essay about, so choose carefully.) You do not need to agree with every claim you list--in fact, you probably shouldn't.  Your goal here is to discover the kinds of things people might say about your subtopic.

Remember how claims differ from topics.  See the examples below:

Topics

1. Female selective service requirements
2. Female grooming regulations during recruit training
3. Women's dietary needs in a combat environment

Claims

1. Failure to require women to register for selective service is inconsistent with our nation's otherwise  progressive attitudes.
2. During recruit training, female recruits should conform to the same grooming standards as men.
3. Doubling the ratio of women on the battlefield would reduce the Army's food budget by 30%.

Please email me with any questions.  See you in class.

Manuscript Format Guidelines

We'll talk during Monday's class about what an academic paper should look like.  For this paper, you'll follow MLA guidelines, which are explained here:

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/

Certain classes will require you to use APA guidelines; these guidelines are also available at Purdue's OWL.

Below are a few common mistakes students make.  Be advised: you will lose points on your paper if you do not follow these instructions.

• Staple: Your pages should be attached with a single staple in the upper left corner.  I do not carry a stapler to class.  Please don't ask me.
• Title: Your paper needs one. A title does more than name the assignment.  For example, "Essay One" is unsuitable.  A title does more than name the topic.  For example, "My Grandmother's Kitchen" needs to do more. A title should create interest, and sum up the work in just a few words.  "Cinnamon Flavored Hair Dye" might be a good title for an essay that tells the story of a grandmother who mixed up her hair care products with her kitchen spices.
• Paragraph Spacing: As the guidelines state, your essay should be double spaced throughout.  No additional spacing should appear between paragraphs.  Warning: recent versions of Microsoft Word insert extra spacing as a default setting.  You will need to change this.

We'll talk more about these issues in class.

Essay One Instructions (will be discussed in class on 4/6)

English 151

Essay One

Skills involved:

·      Narration

·      Description

·      Paragraph Development

·      Paragraph Focus

This essay assignment is a modified version of what appears in Chapter One of How to Write Anything: In a 800-1000 word essay, narrate your experiences about a place—from the past or present—that show why this environment is an important part of your life.  You can introduce readers to characters you met there, thoughts or emotions the place evokes, or incidents that occurred in this setting.

Based on the two assignments you’ve completed so far, you should have 1) selected a place you want to write about, and 2) discovered a great deal of information about your place.

Your biggest challenge now is to select the most interesting and meaningful aspects of the place and/or story and use your specific example skills to develop two paragraphs into an entire essay.

The most important rhetorical skill needed for this assignment is the use of original and specific detail.  Work to identify the things that make your place unique; don’t just fill your pages with generic and obvious statements.  Consider the following examples:   

·   “A visitor to New York city can sample foods from around the world.”  This sentence, while true, is far too vague and doesn’t tell readers anything they don’t already know.

·   “New York is home to thousands of restaurants, serving everything from pizza, to sushi, to Indian food.”  This sentence is more specific, but it still states the obvious.   

·   “New York’s Chinatown has more than 200 restaurants, where you will find tastes from all over China: Cantonese, Szechuan, Shanghai, and Suzhou, as well as Vietnamese and Malaysian cooking.”  This sentence provides new and specific information.

Notice that the previous sentence limits its focus to Chinese cooking.  It doesn’t mention Greek, Italian, Indian, or Middle Eastern foods whatsoever.  You will need to similarly limit the focus of your essay.  One thousand words is simply not enough space to sufficiently explore a place’s history, people, architecture, traditions, economy, citizens, restaurants, and arts. (Note: just because my example focuses on an entire neighborhood doesn't mean you can't write about a more specific place.  For example, you might write about your cousin's treehouse or your grandmother's closet.)

This essay is due at the beginning of class on Wednesday, April 13.  Format and other mechanical guidelines will be discussed on Monday.

I am available to answer questions and to provide feedback on rough drafts.  Don’t hesitate to contact me.

Hands

by Jean Sprackland

She peels cod fillets off the slab,
dips them in batter, drops them
one by one into the storm of hot fat.
I watch her scrubbed hands,
elegant at the work,

and think of the hands of the midwife
stroking wet hair from my face as I sobbed and cursed,
calling me sweetheart and wheeling in more gas,
hauling out at last my slippery fish of a son.
He was all silence and milky blue. She took him away
and brought him back breathing,
wrapped in a white sheet. By then
I loved her like my own mother.

I stand here speechless in the steam and banter,
as she makes hospital corners of my hot paper parcel.

Link to poem: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2007/07/09/070709po_poem_sprackland#ixzz117D7Hha6

Assignment for 4/6

For Monday, you wrote a single paragraph using specific examples of the type we've been discussing in class.  These include: sensory details, names, facts and statistics, testimony, stories, and figurative language.  

Your task for Wednesday is to identify the two most important single ideas in this paragraph and develop each idea into a paragraph of its own.  Create these paragraphs as if they will appear together in the same essay--in other words, the audience should have some sense of how they are related to each other.  Don't forget, however, that each paragraph should express its own idea.

We'll discuss this idea in class.  Let me know if you have any questions.