This morning we will review a sample final essay and annotated bibliography, and you will have the remainder of the class period to conduct additional research and compose additional portions of your final essay or annotated bibliography. Tasks to undertake include these:
Using the HPU Libraries databases to locate additional sources.
If the subject of your final essay/annotated bibliography has a Wikipedia page, locating that page, scrolling down to the list of references, and identifying one that might serve as one of your sources.
Using Google Scholar to locate potential sources.
Composing an annotation for one of your sources.
Reviewing the sources you have gathered and noting what similarities and differences you can identify among them. Those similarities and differences may serve as material for your essay or your commentaries.
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.
The best way to develop your skills as a writer is to write; the second best way is to study the prose of masterful writers. You will engage in those two practices simultaneously if you select one of the authors we’ve studied as the subject of your final essay and annotated bibliography. The majority of you have chosen instead to focus on one of the aspects of the course, namely playing Scrabble, writing longhand, or limiting screen time. To encourage you to take on a more intellectually rigorous exercise, I will award you 2.5 bonus points if you focus on the writing of one of our authors: Donald Barthleme, Roy Peter Clark, Tom Junod, Helen Keller, Stephen King, Michael Lewis, or David Sedaris. If you choose to write about one of those authors and consult with a Writing Center tutor, you will earn a total of 7.5 bonus points.
If, for example, you wrote about David Sedaris’s writing, your sources would consist of “Me Talk Pretty one Day,” a student interview about his writing, a secondary source–such as a study of his prose–and two additional essays by Sedaris. Only the first bibliographic entry for Sedaris would include his credentials. Including them in all three would be redundant. Below is a sample annotated bibliographic entry for a study of Sedaris’s writing, an anlaysis that’s available through the HPU Libraries’ databases.
In “The Ethics of Laughter: David Sedaris and the Humor Memoir,” Kylie Cardell and Victoria Kuttainen examine essays in three of Sedaris’s collections—Naked (1998), Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2008), and Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Wicked Bestiary (2010)–as examples of real-life humor that veers from the truth, what Sedaris himself has described as “‘realish’” writing (qtd. in Cardell and Kuttainen, par. 1). Cardell and Kuttainen identify that gray area that Sedaris’s essays inhabit as “ethically hazardous territory” (par. 2).
Kylie Cardell is Senior Lecturer in English at Flinders University, South Australia, and author of Dear World: Contemporary Uses of the Diary, as well as editor (with Kate Douglas) of Telling Tales: Autobiographies of Childhood and Youth. Victoria Kuttainen is Senior Lecturer in English and Writing at James Cook University in North Queensland, Australia and the author of Unsettling Stories: Settler Postcolonialism and the Short Story Composite. Cardell’s and Kuttainen’s study of Sedaris’s writing offers insight into the role of artistic license in his essays, in particular how his humor blurs the line between fact and fiction and how that unclear division prompts questions regarding the ethics of embellishment—or otherwise altering the truth—in memoir.
Next Up
In class tomorrow, we will review a sample final essay and annotated bibliography, and you will have additional time to devote to researching and writing for your own final essay and annotated bibliography. Details and instructions TBA.
Tomorrow morning, before you begin your initial work on your final essay and annotated bibliography, we will revisit Stephen King‘s “Strawberry Spring” and discuss the answers to your collaborative exercise on the story.
For that exercise, 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, Adelle Parkins, or Marsha Curran, 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 had submitted a column idea to the paper and asked for a date–turned down on both counts” (275).
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” (269)
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” (269). The second is an allusion to a poem by Carl Sandburg, titled–perhaps unsurprisingly–“The Fog” (272).
Next Up
In class tomorrow, you will complete an exercise as part of your initial work on your final essay and annotated bibliography. Details TBA.
Today in class we will 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 will complete after we read the story, I will ask you to determine whether you can 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 Cerman, Adelle Parkins, or Marsha Curran, he did know Ann Bray.
I will also ask 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.
Lastly, I will ask you to try to identify the two literary allusions in King’s story. We will address these questions near the end of class today or at the beginning of class on Wednesday, and I will post the answers on my blog.
Next Up
We will review “Strawberry Spring” at the beginning of Wednesday’s class, and you will have the remainder of the period to begin your initial work for your final essay and annotated bibliography.
Rosenwaser, David and Jill Stephen. Chapter 7: “Finding an Evolving a Thesis.” Writing Analytically, 9th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2024. pp. 234-78.
As you prepare to begin revising your analysis, read the section of Writing Analytically devoted to composing thesis statements (247-52). Also review the opening paragraph of my analysis of Art Spiegelman’sMaus and my sample opening for a possible analysis of Donald Bartheleme’s “The School,” both of which follow.
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 authors of Writing Analytically note that “a productive thesis statement usually contains tension, the balance of this against that” (Rosenwasser and Stephen 248). Reread the thesis above (in bold) and consider the instances of “this against that”: larger panel and smaller one, complexity and simplicity, connection and separation.
Now consider the “this against that” in the sample opening for a possible analysis of Donald Bartheleme’s “The School,”
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.
The sample opening paragraph above lacks the detail of the first paragraph of my Maus analysis because it’s the draft of an introduction for a paper I haven’t written. Completing a draft would enable me to develop the introduction and refine my thesis statement. That said, the introduction already has an instance of “this against that”: the reality of life depicted and the veering from reality with the shift in fictional mode.
Citing Others’ Ideas
If your analysis includes any ideas drawn from my remarks, which I subsequently posted as class notes on my blog, you should cite the blog post as you would any other online source.
Example: Dr. Lucas notes, “For Junod, choosing not to divide the first paragraph creates an unbroken movement that parallels the unbroken flight of his subject” (par. 3).
Tomorrow I will return your drafts with my notes, and you will have the class period to begin revising on your laptops. Because next week is fall break, you will have two additional weeks to continue your revision work. The due date is Wednesday, October 16 (before class). The hard deadline is Friday, October 18.
Today in class, after I collect your worksheets for lesson four of Check, Please! 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. Among the elements of Barthelme’s story that you will considered 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
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 tips.
Today’s class will be devoted primarily to reading and responding to the blog post of one of your classmates’ literacy narratives. Elements you will consider in your response included these:
the title
vivid details
dialogue, the use of scene and/or summary
You should also identify one or more of the “Nine Basic Writing Errors” (see Writing Analytically, 423-44), and address that error in your response. If you cannot identify one, include a sentence in your response that quotes a sentence of your peer’s and explains what makes it effective.
Before you begin that assignment, we will examine 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 line of the chapter. 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 opening 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. Observe how Lewis dramatizes 3.5 seconds–yes, only 3.5 seconds–with about two-hundred words.
Next Up
In class on Wednesday, after you submit your worksheets for the fourth lesson of Check, Please!, we will examine Donald Barthelme’s short story “The School.” You do not need to print a copy of “The School”; you will receive a copy in class.
Yesterday in class, before you composed your reflective essays on your literacy narratives, 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 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:
The second half of this blog post features my version of the third Check, Please! assignment, which you submitted at the beginning of class on Wednesday. In preparation for submitting your worksheet for lesson four, review this post as well as the assignment notes that I posted on September 3.
Sample Assignment
In the third 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, continues his instruction on the second step in four-step SIFT approach to determining the reliability of a source. Lesson three, “Further Investigation” covers these topics: (1) Just add Wikipedia for names and organizations, (2) Google Scholar searches for verifying expertise, (3) Google News searches for information about organizations and individuals, (4) the nature of state media and how to identify it, and (5) the difference between bias and agenda.
One of the most instructive parts of lesson three focuses on two news stories about MH17, Malyasia Airlines Flight 17, a passenger flight scheduled to land in Kuala Lumpur that was shot down over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014. While the second story, a television news segment, appears to present detailed investigative reporting challenging the conclusion of the Dutch Safety Board and Dutch-led joint investigation team–the conclusion that Russia was to blame–a quick just-add-Wikipedia check reveals that RT (formerly Russia Today) is a Russian state-controlled international TV network, a government propaganda tool rather than a source of fair and balanced news. The first video, the one produced by Business Insider, a financial and business news site, delivers accurate coverage of MH17.
Another notable segment of “Further Investigation” addresses the important distinction between “bias” and “agenda.” There, Caulfield observes that “[p]ersonal bias has real impacts. But bias isn’t agenda, and it’s agenda that should be your primary concern for quick checks,” adding that “[b]ias is about how people see things; agenda is about what a news or research organization is set up to do.”
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 tips.
Hillaire Belloc’s “Rebecca,” illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen
Today in class, after our virtual class visit with Roy Peter Clark, we will examine the model literacy narrative “A Bridge to Words,” which appears below, and you and two or three of your classmates will collaboratively compose a piece of writing that addresses one of these elements of the essay:
concrete details
figurative language
scene (see paragraphs two through five)
the adult retrospective narrator
the writer as a child
As you continue to revise, consider the role of those elements your own literacy narrative, and ask yourself what changes may enhance them.
A Bridge to Words
To a small child, the pages of a newspaper are enormous. Looking far back through the years, I see myself, not yet school age, trying to hold up those long, thin sheets of newsprint, only to find myself draped in them, as if covered by a shroud. But of course, back then, my inability to hold a newspaper properly was of little consequence. Even if I could have turned the pages as gracefully as my parents did, I couldn’t decipher the black marks on the page; thus, my family’s ritual reading of the newspaper separated them from me. As the youngest and the only one who couldn’t read, I was left alone on the perimeter to observe. My family’s world of written words was impenetrable; I could only look over their shoulders and try to imagine the places where all those black marks on the page had carried them—these people, my kin, who had clearly forgotten that I was in the room.
My sister, who was three years older, had her very own news source: The Mini Page, a four-page miniature paper that arrived at our house as an insert in the Sunday edition. While our parents sat in their easy chairs poring over the state and local news, my sister, Jo, perched at the drop-front desk and occupied herself with articles, puzzles, and connect-the-dots.
Finally, one Sunday, someone noticed me on the margin and led me into our family’s reading circle. Whether it was one of my parents or my sister, I don’t know. I remember only the gesture and the words: someone handing me the Sunday comics and saying, “You can read part of the funny pages, too. You can read Henry.”
I took the giant page and laid it flat in the middle of the oval, braided rug on the floor of the den. Once I situated the page, I lay on top of it with my eyes just inches above the panels of the comic strip. To my parents, my prone position was a source of amusement, but for me it was simply a practical solution. How else was someone so small supposed to manage such a large piece of paper?
As I lay on the floor and looked at the comic strip’s panels, I realized what the voice had meant. I could “read” Henry, the comic with the bald boy in a red shirt, because it consisted entirely of pictures. In between panels of Henry walking, there were panels of him standing still, scratching his hairless head. I didn’t find Henry funny at all. I wondered how that pale forerunner of Charlie Brown had earned a prime spot in the funnies. Still, I was glad he was there. He was the bridge that led me to the written word.
Reading the wordless comic strip Henry for the first time was the beginning of a years-long habit of stretching out on the floor with newspapers and large books—not thick ones but ones that were tall and wide, among them one of my childhood favorites: The Golden Book of Fun and Nonsense. My sister and I spent hours lying on our bedroom floor, the pink shag carpet tickling our legs as we delighted in the antics of Rebecca, the mischievous title character of one of the poems.
Carl Thomas Anderson’s comic strip character Henry
“Rebecca”—which my sister read to me before I could read it myself—introduced me to the word “abhors,” the very sound of which appealed to me. Sometimes before Jo had finished reading the opening lines, my uncontrollable giggles collided with her perfect mock-serious delivery. As the last word in the first line, “abhors” serves as a lead-in to an enjambment: the continuation of a sentence or clause in a line break. It would be years before I learned the term “enjambment,” but I was immediately swept away by its effect in the opening lines: “A trick that everyone abhors/ In Little Girls is Slamming Doors” (Belloc 61). The first line lured me into the second one, and so on and so on. I was drawn both to the individual word “abhors”—with its side-by-side “b” and “h,” rare in English—and the way the words joined, like links in a chain, to yank me giggling through Rebecca’s cautionary tale:
It happened that a marble bust Of Abraham was standing just Above the door this little lamb Had carefully prepared to slam, And down it came! It knocked her flat! It laid her out! She looked like that.
Her funeral sermon (which was long And followed by a sacred song) Mentioned her virtues, it is true, But dwelt upon her vices too, And showed the dreadful end of one Who goes and slams the door for fun. (61)
Why these particular early memories visit me now, I don’t know. Perhaps rereading Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus with my students has roused the wordless Henry and the word-filled Golden Book of Fun and Nonsense from the corner of my brain where they’ve slumbered. The former wakes and stretches out in my mind as a bridge to the latter: a spot in the world of words I’ve inhabited ever since.
At the beginning of class on Wednesday, you will submit your worksheet for the third lesson in the Check, Please! course. After that, you will compose a reflective essay on your literacy narrative.
Your reflective essay assignment requires you to include a minimum of one relevant quotation from our textbook, Writing Analytically. To prepare for that portion of the assignment, read the sections titled “Keeping a Writer’s Notebook” (157-58) and “Writing from the Life: The Personal Essay” (161-68). Make note in your journal of any phrases or sentences that speak to your experience of planning, drafting, and/or revising your literacy narrative. Remember to bring your textbook to class.
Today, along with returning to our study of Sedaris’s “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” we will examine “The Day Language Came into My Life,” the first pages of Chapter Four of Helen Keller’s autobiography, The Story of My Life.
One of the aspects of Sedaris’s essay that you examined last Wednesday was his movement from summary to scene. The first of those occurs with these words of his teacher’s: “If you have not meimslsxp or lpgpdmurct by this time, then you should not be in this room” (167).
You also identified Sedaris’s hyperbole “front teeth the size of tombstones” (168), and his use of metaphors and similes, including these:
“not unlike Pa Kettle trapped backstage at a fashion show” (167).
“everybody into the language pool, sink or swim” (167).
“like a translation of one of those Playmate of the Month data sheets” (168).
Together, Sedaris’s essay and Keller’s chapter excerpt demonstrate two vastly different ways to present a literacy narrative. “Me Talk Pretty One Day” offers a quirky look at the challenges of learning French from a sarcastic, soul-crushing instructor. Keller’s story poignantly recounts learning to make meaning through the sign language of her teacher, Annie Sullivan, learning that certain finger positions mean “water” for those who cannot hear it, and for others, like her, who can neither see nor hear it.
Sedaris, David. “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Me Talk Pretty One Day. Little Brown, 2000. pp. 166-73.
. . . Sample Student Essays
Today in class we will examine two literacy narratives written in a previous semester. After you read and annotate the essays, you and two or three of your classmates will collaboratively compose a short assessment of each narrative.
In each assessement, consider whether the essay focuses on one of the following options for topics:
a memory of a reading or writing assignment that you recall vividly
someone who helped you learn to read or write
a writing-related school event that you found humorous or embarrassing
a particular type of writing that you found (or still find) especially difficult or challenging
a memento that represents an important moment in your development as a reader or writer
Also determine whether each essay fulfills the requirements listed below.
a well-told story
vivid detail
some indication of the narrative’s significance
a minimum of 600 words
After you have composed your assessment, you will review the grade criteria listed below, and assign a letter grade to each narrative.
An A literacy narrative complies with all of the assignment guidelines: it presents a well-told story, includes vivid details, and conveys the story’s significance in a way that demonstrates a depth of understanding. An A literacy narrative is also well organized and relatively free of surface errors.
A B literacy narrative complies with all of the assignment guidelines but may convey the significance of the story in a superficial way, may have issues with organization, or may be flawed by surface errors.
A C literacy narrative complies with most but not all of the assignment guidelines and may also be flawed by issues of organization and/or surface errors.
A D literacy narrative complies with only a few of the assignment guidelines and may also be flawed by issues of organization and/or surface errors.
An F literacy narrative fails to comply with most or all of the assignment guidelines and may also be flawed by substantial issues of organization and/or surface errors.
Next Up
On Wednesday you will continue work on your own literacy narratives. At the beginning of class, after I collect your second Check, Please! worksheets, I will return your rough drafts with my notes, and you will have the remainder of the class period to revise on your laptops. You will have an additional week to continue revising before posting your literacy narrative to Blackboard and to your WordPress blog. The due date is Wednesday, September 11 (before class); the hard deadline is Friday, September 13 (before class).
Jane Lucas 