Your fifth and final Check, Please! assignment is due at the beginning of class next Wednesday, March 13. If you were absent on the day that I distributed the worksheet for the assignment, or you misplaced your copy, you should download and print a copy from Blackboard.
Although the assignment isn’t due until Wednesday, I encourage you to complete it before Monday’s class. In class on Monday, you will begin planning your group presentations on the Check, Please! lessons. Since you may be in the group that will deliver a presentation on lesson five, you will be able to devote more of your class time to planning if you have already completed the lesson.
Be sure to bring your worksheets for lessons one through four, so you will have the corresponding worksheet to refer to as you and your group members plan your presentation. Also, you may find it helpful to review the blog post that features my model assignment for the lesson:
Lesson One, January 23
Lesson Two, February 2
Lesson Three, February 16
Lesson Four, February 23
Next Friday, March 15, I will publish a blog post devoted to lesson five.
Next Up
In class on Monday, you and two or three of your classmates will begin planning for a short presentation on one of the five Check, Please! lessons. After your Scrabble debriefing at the beginning of class, you will receive your group assignments.
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.
This blog post features my version of the fourth Check, Please! assignment, which you submitted at the beginning of class on Wednesday. In preparation for submitting your worksheet for lesson five, review this post as well as the assignment notes that I posted on January 30.
Check, Please! Lesson Four
In the fourth lesson of the Check, Please!, Starter Course, Mike Caulfield, author of the course and a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, focuses his instruction on the third step in the four-step SIFT approach to determining the reliability of a source. Lesson four, “Find Trusted Coverage,” addresses these topics: (1) scanning Google News for relevant stories, (2) using known fact-checking sites, and (3) conducting a reverse-image search to find a relevant source for an image.
One of the concepts Caulfield introduces in lesson four is click restraint, which was given its name by Sam Wineberg, Professor of History and Education at Stanford, and Sarah McGrew, Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Maryland. Click Restraint is an activity that fact checkers practice regularly, but average people do not. Fact checkers resist the impulse to click on the first result, opting instead to scan multiple results to find one that combines trustworthiness and relevance.
Caulfield also considers the issue of false frames and offers as an example the miscaptioned photo of a young woman that circulated widely after the 2017 London Bridge attack. In the photo, the woman, who is wearing a hijab, is looking down at her phone as she walks past one of the victims lying by the side of the road, surrounded by members of the rescue team. Because the woman’s face is blurred, viewers of the miscaptioned picture cannot see the look of shock that is visible in her face in another image taken by the same photographer. Subsequently, her apparent lack of concern for the victim seems to confirm the caption in the infamous tweet.
Choosing a general search term over a specific one is a useful and unexpected tip Caulfield includes in his discussion of image searches. He explains that the benefit of such a bland term as “letter” or “photo” will prevent the confirmation bias that can lead to the proliferation of disinformation through false frames.
After spring break, on Monday, March 4, we will examine a model analysis, and you will begin planning your midterm reflection, which you will compose in class on Wednesday, March 6.
Last week I published a blog post that listed the first twenty-two playable four-letter words with three vowels. Knowing those words, and others with multiple vowels, proves useful when you’re faced with a rack of mostly, or all, vowels. Here’s a list of the remaining fourteen playable four-letter words with three vowels:
naoi: ancient temples (pl. of naos)
obia: form of sorcery practiced in the Caribbean (also obeah)
odea: concert halls (pl. of odeum)
ogee: an S-shaped molding
ohia: a Polynesian tree with bright flowers (also lehua)
olea: corrosive solutions (pl. of oleum)
olio: a miscellaneous collection
ouzo: a Turkish anise-flavored liquor
raia: a non-Muslim Turk (also rayah)
roue: a lecherous old man
toea: a currency in Papua, New Guinea
unai: a two-toed sloth (pl. unai; an ai is a three-toed sloth)
zoea: the larvae of some crustaceans
Next Up
When class resumes on March 4, we will examine a model literacy narrative, and you will begin planning the midterm reflection that you will compose in class on Wednesday, March 6.
This morning, after I collect your Check, Please! worksheets for lesson four, I will return your drafts, and you will have the remainder of the class period to begin revising your analyses on your laptops and tablets. Because next week is spring break, you will have two additional weeks to continue your revision work before you submit the assignment to Blackboard and publish it as a WordPress blog entry. The due date is Wednesday, March 6 (before class). The hard deadline is Friday, March 8 (before class). Directions for submitting your analysis are included on your assignment sheet and on the Blackboard submission site.
As you continue to revise analysis, consider visiting the Writing Center. If you do so, you will earn five bonus points for the assignment.
To schedule an appointment, visit https://highpoint.mywconline.com, email the Writing Center’s director, Professor Justin Cook, at jcook3@highpoint.edu, or scan the QR code below. To earn bonus points for your literacy narrative, consult with a Writing Center tutor no later than Thursday, February 8.
Parethetical Citations for Your Analysis
In your analysis, you will include parenthetical citations for quotations and paraphrases. Since you are writing a textual analysis, I recommend quoting rather than paraphrasing because the writer’s particular word choices are vital to the text’s overall effect. If your subject is one of the unpaginated texts (“Letter from Birmingham Jail,” “The Day Language Came into My Life,” or “The Falling Man”), your parenthetical citations will include the abbreviation par. for paragraph, followed by the paragraph number. If your subject is one of the paginated texts (“Me Talk Pretty One Day,” “Back Story,” or “The School”), your parenthetical citations will include the page number by itself.
Including the author’s last name as well would be redundant because you have established in your introduction that your essay focuses solely on a work by him or her. When you a writing a paper in which you cite multiple sources, you will need to include the author’s last name in the parenthetical citation to clarify which of your sources you are citing.
Here are some examples of how to use parenthetical citations in your analysis:
The nonsense words “meimslsxp” and “lgpdmurct” underscore his utter lack of comprehension in French class (167).
The line “‘like Aaron’s rod, with flowers’” alludes to Numbers 17.8 (par. 9).
He notes that in contrast to the Falling Man, the others who jumped appeared “confused, as though trying to swim down the side of a mountain” (par. 1).
He employs the “One Mississippi . . . Two Mississippi . . .” count to mark the seconds leading up to Joe Theismann’s career-ending injury (15).
With the words, “[I]s death that which gives meaning to life?,” the story shifts from realism to surrealism (10).
Works Cited Entries for Your Analysis
At the end of your analysis, you will include an MLA-style work cited entry. Refer to the models below.
Barthelme, Donald. “The School.” The Best American Short Stories 1975, edited by Martha Foley, Houghton Mifflin, 1975. pp. 8-11.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/ sites/mlk/files/letterfrombirmingham_wwcw_0.pdf.
Lewis, Michael. Chapter One: “Back Story.” The Blind Side. 2006. Norton, 2009, pp. 15-23.
Sedaris, David. “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Me Talk Pretty One Day. Little Brown, 2000. pp. 166-73.
Note that the sample work cited entries above do not have a hanging indent (because of the limitations of the blog platform), but your MLA-style work cited entries in your Word and PDF files should have a hanging indent. See the entries in my sample papers and on the citations handout that I will distibute in class this morning.
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website and review the blog posts devoted to Scrabble.
Yesterday in class we examined Donald Barthelme’s short story “The School,” and in groups of two, three, or four you addressed 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.”
Among the elements of Barthelme’s story that you considered yesterday are these:
the narrator and the narrative voice
conflict
narrative shift (Where does “The School” make an unexpected turn?)
Whether the subject of your analysis is 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 I 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 fourth 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. Because next week is spring break, you will have two additional weeks to continue revising. Your revision is due on Blackboard and on your WordPress blog Wednesday, March 6 (before clas). The hard deadline in Friday, March 8 (before class).
Last Monday in class, in addition to studying the first pages of “Back Story,” the opening chapter of Michael Lewis’s book The Blind Side, we examined the beginning of Tom Junod‘s essay “The Falling Man, published in Esquire magazine two years after 9-11. After we read the first paragraph, 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?
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, a length I advise you to avoid in your own writing paragraphs. Generally, one-hundred to one-hundred-and-fifty words is a suitable length. As a rule, you should begin a new paragraph whenyou 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.
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:
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.
Donald Barthelme’s “The School”
Today in class, we will read Donald Barthelme’s short story “The School,” and you and two or three of your classmates will collaboratively compose an assignment that addresses the story’s narrator, its conflicts, its narrative shift, and other elements you would examine if you chose–and some of you may–to write your analysis on the story. Tomorrow’s blog post will be devoted “The School.”
Next Up
At the beginning of class on Wednesday, I will collect your worksheets for the fourth lesson in the Check, Please! starter course. If you were absent the day that I distributed the worksheet or you misplaced your copy, you can download a copy from Blackboard and print it. After I collect your worksheets, I will return your analysis drafts with my comments, and you will have the remainder of the class period to begin revising on your laptops. Because spring break is next week, you will have an additional two weeks to work on your analysis before you post your revision to Blackboard and to your WordPress blog. The due date is Wednesday, March 6 (before class). The hard deadline is Friday, March 8 (before class).
Jane Lucas 