ENG 134WI Writing-to-Learn #3 Assignment Sheet PDF

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ENG 134WI Dr. Harding Writing-to-Learn Exercise #3 Overview Once again, this writing-to-learn assignment invites you to explore ideas raised in class discussion or reading, rephrase course content in your own words, make tentative connections, hypothesize, inventory what you know, and even try out new interpretations. Objectives This writing project invites you to: 1. Discover new ideas and grasp new concepts related to the course material; 2. Use writing as a tool for deepening your understanding of literature’s relationship to history, culture, and aesthetics; 3. Foster discovery and enrich understanding as opposed to producing a formal, research-based product. Basic Requirements  500-600 word personal/reflection essay (approx. 2-pages, typed, double-spaced, 12-font.  A hard copy due in class on Thursday, December 1; upload electronic version to Blackboard by 11:59 PM.  No outside sources (research) required. Prompt Pick any ONE of the stories below (“Assigned Readings 1-7”) and write a personal essay in which you reflect on how the reading has helped shape your understanding of the issues raised, how you have perhaps changed as a person and/or how your life has been affected or impacted by the narrative. Feel free to share personal experiences to help clarify and support your point of view, but focus on the story consistently throughout your essay. Ask yourself, “What is the meaning of this story for me?” In this type of writing, your purpose of course is to engage the reader with more than just a re-telling of a story. By definition your essay will be personal and subjective, but it must maintain a “reasonable” tone and be cohesively organized. Assigned Readings 1. Plot: William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily” Faulkner’s most famous, most popular, and most anthologized short story, “A Rose for Emily” evokes the terms Southern gothic and grotesque, two types of literature in which the general tone is one of gloom, terror, and understated violence. The story focuses on the mysterious life of Emily Grierson, grounding a personal conflict at the heart of her southern identity. It’s impossible to forget the conclusion’s grim surprise.

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2. Character: Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” “Bartleby the Scrivener” is simply one of the most absorbing and moving novellas ever. Set in the mid-nineteenth-century New York City’s Wall Street, it remains Herman Melville's most prescient story: what if a young man caught up in the rat race of commerce finally just said, “I would prefer not to”? The tale is one of the final works of fiction published by Melville before, slipping into despair over the continuing critical dismissal of his work after Moby-Dick, he abandoned publishing fiction. 3. Setting: Ernest Hemingway, “Soldier’s Home” Taken from the classic collection of short stories entitled In Our Time (1925), “Soldier’s Home” takes place in a small town in Oklahoma, far removed in space and time from the battlefields of World War I. The war, however, is never distant from the protagonist’s mind as he struggles to come home again. 4. Symbolism: Ralph Ellison, “Battle Royal” Ralph Ellison gained his reputation as a writer on the strength of his only published novel, Invisible Man (1952), a story about a young black man who moves from the South to the North and discovers what it means to be black in America. Originally published in 1947 as a short story, “Battle Royal” became the first chapter of Invisible Man. In the course of the narrative the narrator is blindfolded and thrown into a boxing ring for the amusement of a group of tuxedo-clad white men. Beaten and bloodied, he is then forced to deliver a speech about the importance of meekness and education to African Americans. 5. Point of View: John Updike, “A&P,” Maggie Mitchell, “It Would Be Different If” & June Spence, “Missing Women” These stories variously explore the ways in which writers artfully use point of view to determine what we know about the characters and events. In “A& P” three teenage girls, wearing only their bathing suits, walk into an A&P grocery store in a small New England town. Sammy, a young man working the checkout line, watches them closely. What happens next changes the course of his life. Maggie Mitchell’s “It Would Be Different If,” written in the first person point of view, focuses on a narrator who imagines her boyfriend, Jeff, coming into the hair salon where she works, but the voice telling the story is that of a rejected young woman. The “Missing Women” in June Spence’s story are a mother, her daughter, and the daughter's friend who abruptly disappear one night in early summer. At first, the town pulls together in a search effort, until, as time passes, the women disappear from collective memory as well. Told in the third person plural, as if by the whole town itself, the story's tone veers from satiric to menacing. 6. Theme: Stephen Crane, “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” concerns the efforts of a town marshal bringing his new bride to the “frontier” town of Yellow Sky Texas, at a time when the Old West is

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being slowly but inevitably civilized. At the climax of the story—the confrontation between Marshal Potter and Scratchy Wilson—the stereotypical and seemingly inevitable gunfight, a staple feature of Westerns, is averted, and the reader senses that all such gunplay is a thing of the past, that in fact Crane is describing the “end of an era.” 6. Case Study: James Joyce’s “Eveline” In his collection of short stories entitled Dubliners (1914), Irish writer James Joyce attempted “to write a chapter of the moral history of my country.” Comprising fifteen short stories about ordinary Dubliners struggling with the demands of everyday life (what Joyce terms “paralysis”) in turn-of-the-century Dublin, the characters often find themselves on the brink of discovering something, such as loss of innocence, shame, failure, loneliness, or death. Joyce called these moments “epiphanies”—a sudden realization brought about by way of speech, gesture, or emotion. In “Eveline,” we are introduced to a 19-year old sales associate who works a menial job to support her family yet dreams of leaving Ireland after her mother’s death. When given the chance to escape with her lover, Frank, however, she turns it down, unable to let go of her past. 7. Combining the Elements of Fiction: Raymond Carver, “Popular Mechanics” & Susan Minot, “Lust” Taken from Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), “Popular Mechanics” is a (very) short story recounted in the third person by an unnamed narrator. The tone of this “bare” story is one of anger and aggression, complemented as it is by themes of separation, conflict, and struggle. Susan Minot’s short story, “Lust,” narrated in the first person, is a series of fifteen short vignettes that describe the narrator’s sexual encounters with boys. In this story Minot creates an interesting discussion of the imbalance of power between males and females in regards to sex. Boys’ sexual desire completely dominates the narrator; by extension, girls are compelled by other girls as well as boys to acquiesce to that desire. Writing Process Draft your response using the guidelines below. Introduction 1. You may wish to include a “hook” that captures the reader’s attention, tells the reader what your personal essay is about, and why he/she should read your personal essay. The hook can be a personal anecdote, question, quotation, controversial statement, or fact and/or statistic. 2. Your introduction also needs to introduce your personal experience or topic in relation to the poem/prose work under consideration, and how it is important to you—set the scene, in other words. 3. Thesis Statement: The thesis of a narrative essay plays a slightly different role than that of an argument or expository essay. A narrative thesis can begin the events of the story: “I see a lot of myself in James Joyce’s “Eveline.” The choice before Eveline is a difficult one: to create a new life for herself far from home or to stay in Dublin and turn away from her dreams. . . . ”; offer a moral or political lesson learned: “I’ve never really considered the short story as having a

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political or social function before . . . ”; or identify a theme that connects the personal essay to a universal experience: “The theme of Susan Minot’s story “Lust” is by no means a new one, but the story nonetheless has forced me to reevaluate my own conflicted notions about . . .” Body Paragraphs 1. “Show, Don’t Tell”: This section of the essay includes details and descriptions that help the reader understand your experience. Think about using all five senses —not just the sense of sight—to add details about what you heard, saw, and felt as you reflect on the poem or prose you are analyzing. For example, “Owen’s poem ‘Strange Meeting’ left me feeling numb. Reading about how the killer stands his ground as he questions the dead soldier . . . ” provides more information about what the writer sees and feels than, “Owen’s poem “Strange Meeting” does a fantastic job as a war poem.” 2. Supporting Evidence: In a personal narrative, your experience acts as the evidence that proves your thesis. But in this case you also need to show your experience and feelings are informed by the poem or prose piece you are analyzing. In other words, don’t forget to reference the primary text. You can include the following in the body: narrative, anecdote, thoughts, feelings, opinion, or scene building. Body paragraphs will explain the problems or the issue, state the facts to provide evidence (and perhaps possible solutions). Whether you write a personal narrative or a personal opinion piece, each paragraph should include:  A topic sentence that introduces the paragraph.  Support for the topic sentence. Each supporting sentence must relate to the topic sentence.  Transitional words between sentence and paragraphs. Conclusion 1. The conclusion of a personal narrative or opinion piece should include some reflection or analysis of the significance of the experience to the writer. In other words, it should answer the question “So what?” This makes your personal experience relevant to your reader. 2. What have you learned from the experience of the text in question or the personal meaning of the experience? What lesson did you learn? How has what happened to you affected your life now? Your personal experience must provide a universal truth. That is why including the lesson that you learned or the insight you gained is important. The universal truth allows your readers to learn from your experience. Your conclusion may also include your recommendations, judgment, prediction, warning, final opinion or final thought. The key is to leave your reader with one final point to ponder. Summary: Structure In summary, your reflection essay should begin with a hook that inspires your reader to read your essay, introduce your topic—the author and poem and/or prose text you have chosen to examine—and present a main point (thesis). In the middle, tell your story or

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provide support for your views on the author/topic. You can expand on your personal essay with evidence, action, dialogue, scene-building, and so forth. In your conclusion, you reveal the lesson that you have learned from the experience or make your final, important point. First Person vs. Third Person Use first person perspective (“I”) in relation to other narrative modes (“we’ and/or “our’) is used carefully throughout essay. The argument is sensitive to changes in tense in relation to reporting and reflecting (for example, present tense when reflecting on events; past tense when recounting events).

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