This morning in class we will examine Donald Barthelme’s short story “The School,” and in groups of three or four you will address in writing some of the elements of the story that you might explore in an analysis. As I mentioned last week, if you find the prospect of analyzing “The School” more appealing than analyzing one of the texts we studied previously (“Me Talk Pretty One Day,” “The Day Language Came into My Life,” the opening of “The Falling Man,” “Back Story”), you are welcome to change the subject of your analysis to “The School.”

The elements of Barthelme’s story that you will consider this morning are these:

• the narrator and the narrative voice
• conflict
• narrative shift (Where does “The School” make an unexpected turn?)

Whether you analyze Bartheleme’s story or one of our earlier readings, you will begin your first paragraph with a summary of the text. Remember that a summary is an objective synopsis of a text’s key points. It should be written in third person and present tense. For example, if you choose to analyze “The School,” you might summarize it this way:

Donald Barthelme’s short story “The School” recounts a series of classroom lessons that end with the deaths of plants and animals–deaths that serve as a prelude to the unexplained death of a Korean orphan, followed by the senseless deaths of classmates and family members.

Notice that the summary above does not comment on the story in any way. What follows the summary will be the beginning of your commentary, or analysis, the thesis statement that offers your particular close reading, or interpretation, of the story. The passage below is the same as the one above, but at the end of it I have added a thesis statement in bold.

Donald Barthelme’s short story “The School” recounts a series of classroom lessons that end with the death of plants and animals–deaths that serve as a prelude to the death of a Korean orphan, followed by the deaths of classmates and family members. With conversational narration, accumulation of detail, and a shift in fictional mode, Barthelme deftly depicts the reality of the fleeting nature of life, even as the story itself veers from reality.

If were to continue to write the analysis that I began in the previous paragraph, I would follow that opening paragraph with body paragraphs that address each of the three story elements that I include in my thesis: (1) “conversational narration,” (2) “accumulation of detail,” and (3) shift in fictional mode.

Next Up

In class on Wednesday, after I collect your fifth Check, Please! assignments, I will return your handwritten analysis plans and drafts (with my notes), and you will have the remainder of the class period to devote to revising on your laptops and tablets. You will have an additional week to continue revising. Your revision is due on Blackboard and on your WordPress blog the morning of Wednesday, October 4. The hard deadline in Friday, October 6.

This morning, after I collect your fourth Check, Please! assignment, you will begin your analysis of one of the texts we have studied in class, which include these:

• The first paragraphs of “Back Story” by Michael Lewis
• “The Day Language Came into My Life” by Helen Keller
• The first paragraphs of “The Falling Man” by Tom Junod
• “Me Talk Pretty One Day” by David Sedaris

On Monday we will read a short story, “The School” by Donald Barthelme, which will serve as an additional option for your analysis. If you begin an analysis of one of the texts listed above and decide you would rather write about “The School,” you are welcome to change your focus.

As a starting point for your analysis planning, this morning you will read the pages in Writing Analytically devoted to analysis. Among the key points to keep in mind as you write are these:

• “One common denominator in all effective analytical writing is that it pays close attention to detail” (5).
• “In order to understand a subject, we need to discover what it is ‘made of,’ the particulars that contribute most strongly to the character of the whole” (5).
• “[A]sk not just ‘What is it made of?’ but also ‘How do these parts help me to understand the meaning of the subject as a whole?”’ (5).
• “Analytical writing is more concerned with arriving at an understanding of a subject than it is with either self-expression or changing readers’ views” (5).

Next Wednesday, September 27, I will return your handwritten drafts with notes, and you will have the class period to begin revising on your laptops and tablets. You will have an additional week to continue to revise. Your revisions are due on Blackboard and on your blogs on Wednesday, October 4. The hard deadline is Friday, October 6.

Next Up

Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review the posts on my blog devoted to Scrabble tips.

Today’s class will be devoted primarily to reading and responding to the blog post of one of your classmates’ literacy narratives. Elements to consider in your response include these:

• the title
• vivid details
• dialogue, the use of scene and/or summary

After you complete that assignment, you will begin reading the opening pages of “Back Story,” the first chapter of Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side, which dramatizes the moments in the November 1985 Redskins-Giants football game leading up to the injury that ended quarterback Joe Theismann’s career:

“From the snap of the ball to the snap of the first bone is closer to four seconds than to five. One Mississippi: The quarterback of the Washington Redskins, Joe Theismann, turns and hands the ball to running back John Riggins. He watches Riggins run two steps forward, turn, and flip the ball back to him. It’s what most people know as a “flea-flicker,” but the Redskins call it a “throw-back special.” Two Mississippi: Theismann searches for a receiver but instead sees Harry Carson coming straight at him. It’s a running down—the start of the second quarter, first and 10 at midfield, with the score tied 7–7—and the New York Giants’ linebacker has been so completely suckered by the fake that he’s deep in the Redskins’ backfield. Carson thinks he’s come to tackle Riggins but Riggins is long gone, so Carson just keeps running, toward Theismann. Three Mississippi: Carson now sees that Theismann has the ball. Theismann notices Carson coming straight at him, and so he has time to avoid him. He steps up and to the side and Carson flies right on by and out of the play. The play is now 3.5 seconds old. Until this moment it has been defined by what the quarterback can see. Now it–and he–is at the mercy of what he can’t see” (15).

What Theismann cannot see is Lawrence Taylor. A second later, as Taylor sacks Theismann, Taylor’s knee drives straight into Theismann’s lower right leg, leading to the “snap of the first bone” that Lewis mentions in the first sentence. He hooks the reader by linking the beginning of the play, “the snap of the ball” to the gruesome “snap of the first bone” that will follow. Lewis develops the paragraph using the common one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi method of marking seconds to present the events leading up to the compound fracture that ends Theisman’s career.

Lewis doesn’t dramatize the injury itself because his interest lies instead in the blind side that led to it and subsequently elevated the status and salary of the left tackle, the player who protects the quarterback’s blind side.

When you’re struggling to develop a piece of writing, reread the opening paragraph of The Blind Side. Study how Lewis dramatizes 3.5 seconds–yes, only 3.5 seconds–with 224 words.

Next Up

In class on Wednesday you will begin planning and drafting your analysis, which will focus on one of the texts that we have studied in class, including David Sedaris‘s “Me Talk Pretty One,” Helen Keller‘s “The Day Language Came into My Life,” Tom Junod‘s “The Falling Man,” and Michael Lewis‘s “Back Story.” If you have misplaced your copy of any of those or were absent the day that I distributed copies, you can download a copy from Blackboard and print it. Next Monday we will examine an additional text that may serve as the subject of your analysis. If it appeals to your more than the text you write about on Wednesday, you are welcome to change your subject to that latest addition to the readings.

Yesterday in class, in addition to studying my sample literacy narrative “A Bridge to Words,” we examined the opening paragraphs of Tom Junod‘s essay “The Falling Man, published in Esquire magazine two years after 9-11. When you wrote in your journal about the first two paragraphs of Junod’s essay, I asked you to consider these questions:

• The long first paragraph of Junod’s essay could be two or more paragraphs. If you were Junod, where might you have divided the paragraph? Why do think he chose not to divide it?
• Where does Junod employ similes?
• Though “The Falling Man” is not a literacy narrative, it is an excellent example of creative nonfiction. As you continue to revise your literacy narrative, what in Junod’s essay might prove useful to you as a model?

Junod might have started a second paragraph with the words “[i]n all the other pictures,” because there he shifts the focus from the Falling Man to the photographs of other people who jumped from the Twin Towers. An opportunity for a third paragraph comes with the words “[t]he man in the picture, by contrast” where Junod turns his attention back to the Falling Man. And he might have begun a fourth paragraph with “[s]ome people who look at the picture,” because there he shifts to viewers’ perceptions of the Falling Man.

The first paragraph is over four-hundred words long, longer than some of your literacy narratives will be. I advise you to avoid writing paragraphs of that length. Generally, one-hundred to one-hundred-and-fifty words is a suitable length. As a rule, you should begin a new paragraph when you present a new idea or point. If you have an extended idea that spans multiple paragraphs, each new point within that idea should have its own paragraph. But the first paragraph of “The Falling Man” is an exception. For Junod, choosing not to divide the first paragraph creates an unbroken movement that parallels the unbroken downward flight of his subject, the Falling Man. Outside of the photograph, “he drops and keeps dropping until he disappears.” With “disappears,” the last word of the paragraph,” the Falling Man disappears from the page, and Tom Junod turns to the photographer, whom we learn later in the essay is Richard Drew.

Junod’s use of figurative include these lines:

• “he departs from this earth like an arrow”
• “the towers . . .loom like colosssi”
• “they look confused, as though trying to swim down the side of a mountain”
• “as though he were a missile, a spear”

Unless you subscribe to Esquire, the magazine’s paywall will deny you  access to the full text of “The Falling Man”; but if you’re interested in reading it in full, you can access it through the HPU Library site by following these steps:

• Go to the HPU Library site.
• Under the heading “Search HPU Libraries . . . ,” click on the “Articles” tab.
• Under the “Articles” tab, type Tom Junod “Falling Man” Esquire in the search box and click “search.”
• On the next screen, you will see a brief summary of the article. Click “Access Online” to view the full article.

Next Up

Wednesday in class you will compose a short essay that reflects on the process of planning, drafting, and revising your literacy narrative. In addition to revisiting your own final narrative and the writing that led up to it, you will address one or more of the essays that you examined as models.