Falconer, Ian. The Competition. 2000. The New Yorker, 9 Oct. 2000. Copyright 2000 Condé Nast Publications, Inc.
Yesterday in class, we examined Ian Falconer’s The Competition, and as a collaborative exercise, you and two or three of your classmates composed a one-paragraph summary of the magazine cover, followed by a second paragraph that presented your close reading or analysis of The Competition.
Below are three sample paragraphs that I wrote as models for you. The first is a summary of Falconer’s cover. The second and third offer close readings of the magazine cover. Each integrates one of the two possible interpretations that the authors of Writing Analytically offer on page 89.
Summary
Ian Falconer’s mostly black-and-white New Yorker cover The Competition depicts four beauty pageant contestants, three of whom stand in stark contrast to Miss New York. Her dark hair, angular body, narrowed eyes, tightly pursed lips, and two-piece bathing suit set her apart from the nearly-identical blondes–Miss Georgia, Miss California, and Miss Florida–whose wide-open eyes and mouths and one-piece bathing suits are typical of pageant contestants.
Analyses
The contrast between the raven hair and eyes of Miss New York and the platinum-blonde and pale-eyed contestants from Georgia, California, and Florida in The New Yorker cover The Competition by Ian Falconer suggests what the authors of Writing Analytically present as the first of two possible interpretations: The cover “speak[s] to American history, in which New York has been the point of entry for generations of immigrants, the ‘dark’ (literally and figuratively) in the face of America’s blonde European legacy” (Rosenwasser and Stephen 89).
The self-satisfied expression of Miss New York in The New Yorker cover The Competition by Ian Falconer suggests what the authors of Writing Analytically present as the second of two possible interpretations: “[T]he magazine is . . . admitting , yes America, we do think that we’re cooloer and more individual and less plastic than the rest of you, but we also know that we shouldn’t be so smug about it” (Rosenwasser and Stephen 89).
Work Cited
Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. Chapter 3: “Interpretation: Moving from Observation to Implication.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 70-97.
As you continue to work on your final essay and annotated bibliography, review these samples as models for your own summaries and close readings of your sources.
This morning in class, as part of your blog response assignment, you will look for instances of the nine basic writing errors as you read your classmate’s literacy narrative.
The authors of your textbook, Writing Analytically, identify these as the nine basic writing errors:
Sentence Fragments
Comma splices and fused (run-on) sentences
Errors in subject-verb agreement
Shifts in sentence structure (faulty predication)
Errors in pronoun reference
Misplaced modifiers and dangling participles
Errors in using possessive apostrophes
Comma errors
Spelling/diction errors that interfere with meaning (341-59).
Next Up
You will turn to Writing Analytically again in class on Wednesday when you compose a reflection on your analysis. In your refelection, you will quote one relevant passage from the textbook, which may be a passage devoted to analysis (4-7), one devoted to writing longhand versus writing on a computer (124-25), or it may focus on one of the nine basic writing errors (341-59).
Work Cited
Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019.
This morning 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
“Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King, Jr.
“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” 95).
Next Wednesday, February 15, 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, Febraury 22. The hard deadline is Friday, February 24
Next Up
Friday marks your fifth Wordplay Day of the semester. To up your game and increase your word power, review the tips and tools on the Scrabble website as well as my blog posts devoted to the game.
Yesterday in class we turned to a piece of writing about football–not simply to read about a sport that’s on the minds of many of us but instead as an opportunity to explore how skillfully the writer Michael Lewis dramatizes a few seconds on the football field.
In the passage that follows, Lewis recounts the moments in the November 1985 Redskins-Giants football game leading up to the injury that ended quarterback Joe Theismann’s career. These are the words that begin Chapter 1 of The Blind Side, now widely regarded as a nonfiction masterpiece:
“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.
Along with the first paragraphs of The Blind Side, yesterday in class we examined the first paragraphs of Tom Junod’s essay “The Falling Man.”
Esquire writer Tom Junod begins “The Falling Man” with an uncharacteristically long paragraph to recreate on the page the lengthy vertical passage of the 9/11 victim immortalized in Richard Drew’s photograph.
If I were to write an analysis of the opening of “The Falling Man,” I would develop my essay with textual evidence–words and phrases throughout the first paragraph–to illustrate the linear movement of the unidentified man from the beginning of the first paragraph to its conclusion.
Unless you subscribe to Esquire, the magazine’s paywall will deny you access to the full text of the feature, but 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.
Next Up
In class on Wednesday you will begin planning and drafting your own close study, or analysis, of one of the pieces of writing we’ve examined in class: the opening paragraphs of Lewis’s “The Blind Side,” the opening paragraphs of Junod’s “The Falling Man,” David Sedaris’s “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” Helen Keller’s “The Day Language Came into My Life,” and Martin Luther King, Jr’s.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
As a model for your own literacy narratives, yesterday in class we continued to examine “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” originally published in Esquire magazine and later as the title essay in David Sedaris’s 2000 essay collection.
In groups of three and four, you and your classmates studied Sedaris’s essay with a focus on his use of scene and summary, figurative language, and hyperbole.
You observed at the beginning of the fourth paragraph how Sedaris shifts from the summary of the third paragraph to the first words that the unnamed teacher speaks to her students: “If you have not meimslsxp or lgpmurct by this time, then you should not be in this room Has everyone apzkiubjxow? Everyone? Good, we shall begin” (167).
Sedaris begins his use of figurative language early in the essay with a simile near the end of the second paragraph and a metaphor near the beginning of the third:
“[C]ausing me to feel not unlike Pa Kettle trapped backstage after a fashion show” (167).
“[E]verybody into the language pool, sink or swim” (167).
In the seventh paragraph, Sedaris uses hyperbole when he describes one of the two Polish Annas as a woman with “front teeth the size of tombstones” (168).
Continue to look for opportunities to use one or more of those elements in your own literacy narratives.
To read more of Sedaris’s essays, see the list of links under the heading Writing and Radio on his website.
In addition to studying Sedaris’s essay, examine Helen Keller’s “The Day Language Came into My Life,” and note her use of figurative lanaguage. Also observe how frequently she uses sensory detail, namely her sense of touch–not sights and sounds, because she was blind and deaf.
You can read more of Helen Keller’s autobiography, the full text in fact, here: The Story of My Life. “The Day Language Came into My Life” is Chapter Four.
Work Cited
Sedaris, David. “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Little, Brown, 2000. pp. 166-73.
Next Up
In class tomorrow, we will look at your blogs on the big screen. Your literacy narrative may not be posted to your blog yet (it may still be in progress), but your blog should be launched and linked to our class page. Afterward, you will compose short reflective essays on your literacy narratives.
In Wednesday’s class, before you begin drafting your literacy narrative, I will distribute copies of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Although I could ask you to listen to a recording of it, I ask that you to read it instead. King’s gift for oratory is well known, but for students of writing, closely examining his words on the page is a more pertinent exercise than listening to his voice.
What makes King’s letter an effective piece of writing? With that question in mind, consider these words in the eleventh paragraph: “Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait.’” Here King is addressing his initial audience, the eight white Birmingham-area clergymen who criticized his protest as “unwise and untimely.” He suggests to those men that waiting to act isn’t difficult when you yourself aren’t the victim of injustice, when you haven’t, in King’s words, “felt the stinging darts of segregation.” The sentence is notable not only for the contrast it illustrates between King’s reality and the lives of his readers but also for the words that King uses to show that contrast.
Consider King’s sentence and the paraphrase that follows:
Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.”
Maybe it is simple for people who have not experienced segregation to say, “Wait.”
King’s sentence is stronger than the paraphrase that follows it because of the “stinging darts.” Writing that someone has not “experienced segregation” is abstract. Readers do not feel the general experience in the second sentence, but they feel King’s “stinging darts.” Sensory details strengthen sentences by appealing to readers’ senses, and figurative language invigorates writing by making the unfamiliar familiar. King’s white readers have not been the victims of segregation, but his choice of words makes them feel the sting.
While King’s “stinging darts” sentence—a relatively short one—is laudable, the long, winding sentence that follows is nothing short of staggering.
It starts with these words: “But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim.” King presents those atrocities in an introductory dependent clause, one whose full meaning depends on an independent clause that follows. But rather than immediately turning to an independent clause to complete the thought, King expands the sentence with this series of dependent clauses:
when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters;
when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society;
when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people;
when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you;
when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”;
when your first name becomes “n—,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”;
when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments;
when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–
The independent clause that readers have been waiting for, the statement that completes the thought is this: “then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.” Those words could have immediately followed the first dependent clause, but instead King offers nine more dependent clauses, ten darts that sting his readers.
Ten dependent clauses connected by semicolons followed by a dash and an independent clause, a total of 316 words: That is not a structure I recommend for the sentences you write in English 111, but it’s a valuable model, nevertheless.
I hope that you, as citizens, will continue to study the words of his letter. As your writing teacher, I hope that you will return to the sentence that I have examined in detail here. Along with showing his readers why his nonviolent protests could not wait, that sentence of King’s demonstrates how to develop a piece of writing through the accumulation of detail—not just the when, but the when and when and when . . . .
Monday in class we examined Tetsuya Ishida’s painting Seedlings, which is one of the texts that you may address in your final reflection, which you began drafting in class on Wednesday. If you choose to include Seedlings, your works cited entry for the painting should follow this format:
Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. “Analysis Does More than Break a Subject into Its Parts.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 4-5.
—“Making an Interpretation: The Example of a New Yorker Cover. Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 84-89.
Today in class we read Stephen King’s short story “Strawberry Spring,” which was published in Ubris magazine in 1968 and included in King’s first short story collection, Night Shift (1978).
For the collaborative exercise that you completed after we read the story, I asked you to determine whether you could identify any details that indicate why the narrator may have murdered any of his victims. Although there is no indication that the narrator knew Gale Cermann or Adelle Parkins, he did know Ann Bray, which he reveals after he tells the readers that she was editor of the school newspaper: “In the hot, fierce bubblings of my freshman youth I hade submitted a column idea to the paper and asked for a date–turned down on both counts” (paragraph forty-one).
I also asked you to identify words and phrases that illustrate how the story is not only a horror story but also a commentary on war, the Vietnam War in particular, and the Vietnam era. Some of the words and phrases you may have identified include these:
(Ice) sculpture of Lyndon Johnson . . . “cried melted tears” (paragraph four)
Civil War cannons (paragraphs five and seventy-four)
The dove “lost its frozen feathers” (paragraph five)
The fog (paragraphs seven, twenty, twenty-nine, thirty-one, forty-three, forty-four, fifty-two, sixty-four, sixty-six, seventy, seventy-five, and seventy-six)
“[W]ho had been drafted” (paragraph thirty-two)
SDS (paragraph forty-eight)
Quagmire (paragraph fifty)
“[A] series of draft protests and a sit-in” (paragraph seventy)
In addition to those questions on your assignment sheet, I asked you to try to identify the two literary allusions in King’s story. The first is an allusion to J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy: “You half expected to see Gollum or Frodo or Sam go hurrying past” (paragraph five). The second is an allusion to a poem by Carl Sandburg, titled–perhaps unsurprisingly–“The Fog.”
This morning in class you will plan and draft a short midterm reflection essay that documents your work in the first weeks of the semester, focusing on what you consider your most significant work and the feature or features of the course that have benefited your development as a writer and a student. Features to consider include the following:
Planning, drafting, and revising your literacy narrative and your analysis
Keeping a journal
Completing Check, Please! assignments
Studying one of the readings examined class, including “Blogs vs. Term Papers,” “Skim Reading is the New Normal,” “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” “The Day that Language Came into My Life,” ‘Back Story” (from The Blind Side), “The Falling Man,” the sample literacy narrative and analysis, “Another Way with Words” and “On Its Face, Who Could Disagree with the Transformation?,” and The Competition, The New Yorker cover by Ian Falconer.
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 include in your reflective essay the following elements:
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 quotation or paraphrase from Writing Analytically and a quotation or paraphrase from one additional relevant source. Introduce your quotations/paraphrases with signal phrases and follow them with parenthetical citations where needed.
A conclusion that reiterates the thesis without restating it verbatim
MLA-style works cited entries for your sources
SAMPLE MLA WORKS CITED ENTRIES
Junod, Tom. “The Falling Man.” Esquire, vol. 140, no. 3, Sept. 2003, pp. 176+. Gale Academic OneFile Select, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/ A106423422/EAIM?u=hpu_main&sid=bookmark-EAIM&xid=ce48797f.
Keller, Helen. “The Day Language Came into My Life.” Chapter Four. The Story of My Life. ttps://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/keller/life/life.html.
Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. “Analysis Does More than Break a Subject into Its Parts.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 4-5.
—“Making an Interpretation: The Example of a New Yorker Cover. Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 84-89.
In class today you will plan and draft your analysis, which will focus on one of the articles or essays that we have studied in class: “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” “The Day that Language Came into My Life,” “Back Story” (from The Blind Side), “The Falling Man,” “Skim Reading is the New Normal,” or the essay that I will distribute today, “Scrabble is a Lousy Game.”
Many students find the transition from expressive writing, such as a literacy narrative, to analysis to be a difficult one, but as the authors of your textbook note, “[i]n practice though, the best versions of analysis and expressive writing can overlap a lot” (Rosenwasser and Stephen 7). They go on to observe that “[v]irtually all forms of description are implicitly analytical” (7).
“When you choose to take what you take to be the three most telling details about your subject, you have selected significant parts and used them as a means of getting at what you take to be the character as a whole. This is what analysis does: it goes after an understandingof what something means, its nature, by zeroing in on the function of significant detail.” (7)
As a starting point, you will read some of the passages in Writing Analytically devoted to analysis, including “Analysis Does More than Break a Subject into Its Parts,” 4-5; and “Distinguishing Analysis from Summary, Expressive Writing, and Argument,” 5-8.
After you read the pages in Writing Analytically devoted to analysis, you will review the articles and essays you’ve read, and read “Scrabble is a Lousy Game.” Determine which article or essay appeals to you most as a subject of analysis. Reread that article or essay and identify three or more elements that contribute to its effectiveness. Develop your analysis through a close examination of those elements.
Work Cited
Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019.
Jane Lucas 