Essay II Due Date

The essay is due in class on Thursday, November 6. It should be formatted according to MLA guidelines and submitted in hard copy form (printed on paper). Don't forget to staple. The length requirement is 1200-1500 words.

Please contact me if you are having problems.

More Clarification

Some of the questions following Tuesday's class suggest a need for still more clarification on the assignment instructions.

The original instructions read as follows:

This assignment asks you to...examine a contemporary text, draw a suitably precise (and arguable) conclusion about it, and convincingly support that conclusion with specific examples.

These instructions are deliberately open ended in order to encourage original thinking about your topic (see the previous post). We want to eliminate the model of students providing a "correct" answer to an instructor question. Instead, you, the student, are the one posing the question.

Everyone has chosen a text. Your task now is to discover what matters to you about your text. If you feel lost without more structure, you might try the following steps, adapted from Section A of the handbook):

• Examine your text (see the guidelines on page 68).
• Sketch a brief outline.
• Write a brief summary.
• Identify as many subtopics as possible (you've done assignments to get you started on this). If you're having a hard time, do some online searching to see what others have written about in relation to your topic.
• Decide what subtopic(s) you care most about. What do you have to say about your topic? What aspects of the topic do you feel most strongly about? Is there some aspect of the topic you don't understand? Can you identify some misconception about your topic that you would like to correct?
•  Begin to form a working thesis. See the guidelines on pages 373 and 17 for some useful tips.

I hope this helps. Don't forget to see me if you're still feeling confused.

More on Essay II

There was some confusion during Thursday's class about the goals of essay two. To clarify, let's compare this assignment to typical writing assignments from other college courses.

In general, college writing assignments ask the student to examine a text and respond to some instructor-supplied question or prompt. For example, in a political science course, students might respond to the question, "What are the most significant differences between U.S. student protests against the Vietnam War and 2014's Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong?" Questions like this are intended to engage students in higher-order thinking (see the chart below), and rarely have a single correct answer.

© 2009, The Teaching Center, Washington University in St. Louis

Rather than answering "correctly," the most effective responses use the question as a point of departure and proceed to make some original claim about the topic. In the example above, a dozen or more significant differences might exist between the two protests. Answering the question depends not on which difference the writer chooses, but on how effectively she supports that choice.

Additionally, in writing Essay II, you are not responding to an instructor question. Instead you must formulate a question yourself--one whose answer reveals some significant insight into your chosen topic. This is more difficult, because the comfortable framework of the instructor-supplied question is removed. The hope here is that you will engage in more original thinking and focus less on simply providing the answer you think the instructor is looking for.

One word of caution: In rare cases, writing assignments will call for a simple recitation of facts without any interpretation. To determine the instructor's expectations, pay careful attention to the verbs used in the prompt. For example, consider the following verbs: "list," "explain," "discuss," "analyze," "argue," "predict," "compare," "contrast," "summarize," "challenge," and "refute"; all imply very different expectations of how much and what kind of original interpretation is appropriate. In general, however, err on the side of higher-order approaches, as opposed to mere summary or recitation.

Two Assignments

FOR THURSDAY 10/23:
Please submit to me the name of the text you have chosen for the subject of your essay. You don't need to know yet exactly what you're going to say about this text, but I want you to pick something and stick with it. Here are some examples of what you might give me (this doesn't need to be typed):

• The novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.
• John Oliver's September 7 segment on student debt.
• Apple's "Everything, Everywhere" iPhone 6 TV commercial.
• Roger Ebert's October 15, 1999 review of David Lynch's The Straight Story, "Cowboy Plays It Straight."
• Louis C.K.'s tweets about the Ebola epidemic.

Bring a copy of your text (if possible) to Thursday's class, along with whatever notes you have.

FOR TUESDAY 10/28:
Read the article "Big Box Stores Are Bad for Main Street" (p. 69) and the student textual analysis paper "Rethinking Big Box Stores" (pp. 75-76). Be sure to bring your handbook to class on this day for our discussion.

For Context:

In the instructions for Essay II, I use "The Films of David Lynch" as an example of a general topic. To give you a feel for Lynch's style, here is a preview for his film, Wild at Heart:

And here is the trailer for another Lynch film, The Straight Story:

For Tuesday

First, a reminder that we will not meet as a class on Thursday. Instead, be sure to spend a significant amount of time on background reading related to a potential essay topic. For Tuesday, please complete the following:

1. Choose a general topic you may want to write about.
2. Read broadly about this topic and skim as many texts related to your topic as possible. Your goal is to see what kinds of things others are writing about, and what kinds of claims they are making.
3. Select four of the texts that you find most interesting.
4. For each of these texts, list at least four possible subtopics (or, if you’re feeling ambitious, claims).

What you hand in might look something like this:

General topic: The films of David Lynch.

Possible texts:

1.   Wild at Heart
2.   Blue Velvet
3.   Mulholland Drive
4.   Lost Highway
5.   The Elephant Man
6.   Twin Peaks
7.   Walk Fire with Me
8.   New Yorker article about Lynch’s disagreements with ABC.
9.   Review of Blue Velvet
10.   Lynch’s performance in Louie

Most interesting texts and subtopics/claims:

1.      Wild at Heart

a.       The film’s violence

b.      The film’s Wizard of Oz imagery

c.       The film as a road movie

d.      The film’s role in Nicholas Cage’s career (claim: the film was the last artistic movie Nicholas Cage made).

2.      Blue Velvet

a.       Public outrage

b.      Dennis Hopper’s performance

c.       The film’s music

d.      References to American popular culture of the 1950’s (claim: the film helped spark the retro/nostalgia craze of the 1990s and 2000s).

3.      Twin Peaks

a.       Connections to the film Walk Fire with Me

b.      The film’s ending

c.       Lynch’s disputes with ABC

d.      The series’ influence on later television (Claim: The Sopranos and Breaking Bad would not have existed without Twin Peaks).

4.      The Elephant Man

a.       The film’s awards

b.      Costuming and makeup

c.       Lynch’s choice of black and white

d.      Parallels to the historical “Elephant Man” (Claim: Much of the film’s integrity and power comes from its historical accuracy).

What the kids are up to these days...

Essay Two: Textual Analysis

In Essay One we practiced the skills needed to describe a subject using specific details. This essay asks you use those kinds of details as examples in support of a focused claim about a topic.

For example, if you were describing Donald Trump, you might fill pages and pages with details about his business expertise, his reality TV career, his casinos, his personal life, his sense of style, his political opinions, or any number of related topics. But so what? Why are you providing this information? What claim (or conclusion) about Donald Trump are you trying to make?

You might argue that Trump is one of the truest examples of the American Dream. Or, instead, you might argue that the media mocks him unfairly. Or that the media gives him more attention than he deserves. Or that he is a financial genius, a bad role model, a good role model, a negative force in American politics, a good presidential candidate. You could argue almost anything, as long as you support your claims with convincing evidence.

This assignment asks you to do just that: examine a contemporary text, draw a suitably precise (and arguable) conclusion about it, and convincingly support that conclusion with specific examples.

For our purposes, a text is any act of public communication. This includes books, articles, stories, essays, magazines, speeches, films, newspapers, websites, songs, albums, television programs, online videos, podcasts, buildings, plays, paintings, poems, cartoons, illustrations, advertising messages, Twitter feeds, and many other types of messages.

Keep in mind that choosing a more general topic will require you to narrow your focus more. “The Film Career of David Lynch,” for example, is far broader than “The Impact of David Lynch’s Transcendental Meditation Experiences on the Opening Credits of Twin Peaks.” (Please note, also, that although the second example is quite specific, it is still only a topic. The job of the writer here will be to make a claim about this topic.)

We will discuss and practice these concepts in upcoming classes. Your job for the time being is to begin studying potential topics in order to identify precise subtopics about which you have something significant to say. I urge you to ask for feedback on potential topics.

Logistical information (i.e.: length, format, due date) will be announced.

Leonardo da Vinci Paragraph

We will examine the paragraph below in terms of its focus. Remember, a paragraph is a group of sentences that work together to make and support a single main idea.

Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 6, 1542, in the Republic of Florence. A good deal of controversy once existed about the identity of the subject of da Vinci's masterpiece, the Mona Lisa. For years, scholars wondered if da Vinci had based the image on his own facial features, on those of some secret lover, or on no one in particular. In recent years, however, the woman has been positively identified as Lisa Gherardini, a member of the Florentine middle class. In addition to his painting, da Vinci was also an engineer, sculptor, architect, anatomist, inventor, writer, and mathematician. Only about fifteen of da Vinci's paintings survive today, along with numerous notebooks, drawings, and diagrams. Although he made many important discoveries, he did not publish his findings, and his work had no direct impact on later science. Da Vinci was a vegetarian, and he had a habit of purchasing caged birds and releasing them. He worked in a variety of places, including Florence, Rome, Milan, Venice, and France. Along with fellow Ninja Turtles Michelangelo and Raphael, he is considered one of the most important figures of the Italian Renaissance.

Link to Reading Assignment

For Tuesday's class, please read this review of Guns N' Roses bassist Duff McKagan's memoir, It's So Easy (and Other Lies). We will discuss the review's paragraphing and its thesis; it will also serve as a useful model for the book review you are writing.

Be prepared to discuss the review in detail, and have a printed copy to refer to during that discussion. A quiz is likely.

Book Review Assignment Guidelines

The book review assignment will not be due until the final weeks of the course, but I would like to provide the guidelines now.

If you have not already chosen a book to read and review, you should do so soon. Don't feel pressured to pick something literary or highbrow, but do choose something age-appropriate. Harry Potter and Percy Jackson books are too juvenile. Books in the Hunger Games, Divergent, Fifty Shades of Grey, and Twilight series are borderline but acceptable. Most students choose novels, but this is not a requirement. See me if you aren't sure about a book's suitability.

On Tuesday we will discuss a sample book review that may be used as a model for the review you write. The most important guideline is that your review should do more than summarize. Instead, the review should articulate your honest reaction to the book. This might include answers to some (but not all) of the following questions:

• Was the book enjoyable? 
• Was the book believable?
• Was the book easy or difficult to read?
• Did the book challenge the way you think?
• Did it teach you anything new?
• What was the most/least interesting part of the book?

Be sure to provide specific examples from the text to support your claims about the book's enjoyability, believability, ease or difficulty, etc. Remember that your audience is a room full of people who might consider reading your book based on your review. What are the most important things those people need to know in order to decide whether reading the book was a worthwhile experience?  

Reviews should be 500-700 words and formatted according to MLA guidelines. On the day reviews are due, each student will give a short presentation introducing his or her book to the class. Presentations should cover the main points included in the written review. The due date will be announced.