To mark the end of the first week of our windiest month, this Scrabble post features playable wind-related words. If your rack contains the right letters, spelling these words will be a breeze.
bayamo: a strong wind found in Cuba
bhut: a warm, dry wind in India (also bhoot)
bise: a cold, dry wind, found especially blowing from the northeast in Switzerland (also bize)
blaw: to blow
bleb: a blister (an extremely intense or severe wind)
bora: a cold wind in lowland regions
brr: used to indicate feeling cold (also brrr)
bura: a violent Eurasian windstorm (also buran)
chinook: a warm wind that flows off the east side of the Rockies; or a type of Pacific Northwest salmon named after the Chinook people)
fon: a warm dry wind that blows down off some mountains (also fohn and foehn)
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website. Also review the posts on my blog devoted to Scrabble tips, including this one.
This morning in class, you will plan and draft a short midterm reflective essay that documents your work in the first half of the semester, focusing on your analysis and one or two other assignments or aspects of the course that have contributed to your development as a writer and a student. In addition to your analysis, assignments and aspects of the course to consider include the following:
Keeping a journal
Completing Check, Please! assignments
Studying one of the readings examined class, including “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” “The Day that Language Came into My Life,” “Back Story” (from The Blind Side), “The Falling Man,” “The School,” the sample literacy narrative (“A Bridge to Words”), or the sample analysis (“The Strange Fruit of Sosnowiec”)
Reading and editing samples of student writing
Writing for an online audience beyond the classroom/creating and maintaining a WordPress blog
Collaborating with your classmates on in-class writing assignments
Playing Scrabble/Collaborating with your teammates on Wordplay Day
Writing longhand
Limiting screen time
Include in your reflective essay the following elements:
A title that offers a window into your reflection
An opening paragraph that introduces your focus and presents your thesis
Body paragraphs that offer concrete details from your work to support your thesis.
A relevant quotation from Writing Analytically. Introduce your quotation with a signal phrase and follow it with a parenthetical citation. In addition to quoting a relevant passage from Writing Analytically, you may quote one of the texts that we have studied in class.
A conclusion that revisits the thesis without restating it verbatim
An MLA-style works cited entry for your source or sources
Sample MLA Style Works Cited Entries
Bartheleme, Donald. “The School.” The Best American Short Stories 1975, edited by Martha Foley, Houghton Mifflin, 1975. pp.8-11.
Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. “Analysis and Argument.” Writing Analytically, 9th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 7-8.
—. “Analysis and Everyday Life: More Than Breaking a Subject into Its Parts.” Writing Analytically, 9th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2024. pp. 6-7.
—. “Integrating Quotations into Your Paper.” Writing Analytically, 9th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 343-46.
—. “The Idea of the Paragraph.” Writing Analytically, 9th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 307-313.
Sedaris, David. “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Me Talk Pretty One Day. Little, Brown, 2000. 166-73.
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website. Also review the posts on my blog devoted to Scrabble tips.
Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. Writing Analytically, 9th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019.
Revising Your Analysis
As you continue to revise your analysis, review “The Strange Fruit of Sosnowiec” and consider the elements of the essay that we examined in class on Monday: the thesis, the examples of connections and separations that I offer as support for my thesis, and conclusion strategies that I employ in the final paragraph.
Additional Citations
You are not required to cite any text other than the essay, essay excerpt, or chapter excerpt that serves as your subject, but if you include any ideas from my class notes, you should name me in sentence and include a parenthetical citation and a work cited entry for the blog post in which the idea appears. In class on Monday, I distributed a handout with samples of additional citations and am including them here as well:
Example
Dr. Jane Lucas observes that “choosing not to divide the first paragraph creates an unbroken movement that parallels the unbroken downward flight of his [Junod’s] subject, the Falling Man” (par. 3).
In class on Wednesday, you will plan and compose a midterm reflection that documents your work in the first half of the semester, focusing on your analysis and one or two other assignments or aspects of the course that have contributed to your development as a writer and a student. In addition to reflecting on your analysis, you may reflect on one or two of the following:
Keeping a journal
Completing Check, Please! assignments
Studying one of the readings examined class, including “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” “The Day that Language Came into My Life,” “Back Story” (from The Blind Side), “The Falling Man,” “The School,” the sample literacy narrative (“A Bridge to Words”), or the sample analysis “The Strange Fruit of Sosnowiec”
Writing for an online audience beyond the classroom/creating and maintaining a WordPress blog
Collaborating with your classmates on in-class writing assignments
Playing Scrabble/collaborating with your teammates on Wordplay Day
Writing longhand
Limiting screen time
You will be required to include a relevant quotation from Writing Analytically. To prepare for that element of the reflection, review the sections of the textbook listed below, and select a relevant sentence, clause, or phrase to quote.
Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. “Analysis and Argument.” Writing Analytically, 9th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 7-8.
—. “Analysis and Everyday Life: More Than Breaking a Subject into Its Parts.” Writing Analytically, 9th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2024. pp. 6-7.
—. “Integrating Quotations into Your Paper.” Writing Analytically, 9th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 343-46.
—. “The Idea of the Paragraph.” Writing Analytically, 9th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 307-313.
Next Up
In class on Wednesday, you will compose your midterm reflection. (See the notes above.) Wednesday, March 6 (before class) is also the due date for your analysis; the hard deadline is Friday, March 8 (before class). Review the assignment submission requirements, and be sure to post your analysis both as a Word or PDF file to Blackboard and as a blog entry on your WordPress site.
The analysis that follows is one that I wrote as a model for my students in 2021. As you read it, note how I turn from summary to thesis (in bold) in the first paragraph. Also note how the paragraphs that follow offer support for the thesis with concrete details from the comic’s panels.
Since concluding paragraphs can be particularly difficult to write without repeating the introduction, today’s group work will include a close look at strategies for conclusions.
The Strange Fruit of Sosnowiec
In Chapter 4 of Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus, he depicts his father Vladek’s account of the hangings of four Jewish merchants in Sosnowiec, Poland. Vladek and his wife, Anja, learn from Anja’s father, Mr. Zylberberg, that the Nazis have arrested his friend Nahum Cohn and his son. With his head bowed in sorrow, Mr. Zylberberg says to Anja and Vladek, “The Germans intend to make an example of them!” (83). That image of Mr. Zylberberg speaking with Vladek and Anja overlays the larger panel that dominates the page, one that depicts the horror that Mr. Zylberberg anticipates: the murder of his friend Nahum Cohn, Cohn’s son, and two other Jewish merchants. That haunting panel and the smaller ones that frame it illustrate the complexity of Spiegelman’s seemingly simple composition. His rendering of the panels of the living in conjunction with the fragmented panels of the hanged merchants simultaneously conveys connection and separation: both the grieving survivors’ ties to the dead and the hanged men’s objectification at the hands of the Nazis.
The placement of the overlaying panel not only hides part of the horror behind it, but it also connects Vladek’s father-in-law to one of the victims. Mr. Zylberberg’s head and torso appear directly above the suspended legs and feet of one of the hanged men, creating an image that merges the two.
Spiegelman further emphasizes the mourners’ identification with the hanged men by extending two of the nooses’ ropes upward to the smaller panel above them, linking the living to the dead. Additionally, Spiegelman underscores the link with Vladek’s line of narration at the bottom of the smaller panel: “I did much business with Cohn!” (83). The word “with” appears directly above the rope, punctuating the connection between both Nahum Cohn and his friend Mr. Zylberberg and Zylberberg’s son-in-law, Vladek.
While the panels of the hangings yoke the living to the dead, Spiegelman’s presentation of the hanged men in fragments also objectifies them. The final panels on the page depict only their shoes and part of their pant legs suspended above the onlookers, images that may evoke in some readers thoughts of the last remnants of the Jews who stepped barefoot into the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
Whether the hanged men’s shoes call to mind those mountains of leather left behind by the Jews, the separation of their lower legs and feet from the rest of their bodies turns them into something less than human—not people, but mere parts. Thus, Spiegelman creates a picture of the hangings that illustrates both the mourners’ identification with the victims and the Nazis’ perception of the Jews as less than human: the malignant ideology that the artist has pinpointed “at the very heart of the killing project.”
Spiegelman, Art. Maus 1. Pantheon, 1986, p. 83.
Spiegelman’s transformation of the Nazi propaganda portrayals of Jews as rats remains an astounding achievement thirty-five years after the publication of the first volume of Maus. But seeing the hanged merchants in Modrzejowska Street in the midst of the George Floyd murder trial in Minneapolis and less than three months after the January 6 Capitol riot reminds readers that the panels of Spiegelman’s memoir have grown more prescient. The nooses evoke images of Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee on George Floyd’s neck, the January 6 chants to hang the Vice President, and a T-shirt glimpsed in the Capitol crowd, one with a Nazi eagle below the acronym “6MWE” (Six Million Wasn’t Enough), a reference to the numbers of Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust. Our heads are bowed in sorrow with Mr. Zylberberg’s. The strange fruit of our past, both distant and recent, should seem far stranger.
After we examine “The Strange Fruit of Sosnowiec,” you and two or three of your classmates will collaborate on an exercise that asks you to consider an example of the connections and separations that I address in my thesis. The exercise will also ask you to explore the conclusion strategies that I employ in the final paragraph.
Next Up
In class on Wednesday, you will compose a reflective essay that focuses on your work over the first half of the semester. In your reflection, you will be required address your analysis and one or two other assignments or aspects of the course that have contributed to your development as a writer and a student. You will also be required to include at least one relevant quotation from a section of Writing Analytically devoted to analysis.
Jane Lucas 