Category: Reading

Today in class you will plan and draft a short final reflective essay that documents your work in the second half of the semester, focusing on what you consider your most significant work and the feature or features of the course that have proven most beneficial to your development as a writer and a student. Features to consider include the following:

• Planning, drafting, and revising your final essay and annotated bibliography. Since you recently composed a reflection on this assignment, it should not be the main focus of your final reflection.
• Keeping a journal
• Delivering your group presentation on one of the lessons in the Check, Please! course
• Studying one of the readings examined in the second half of the semester, including “The Case for Writing Longhand,” “Skim Reading is the New Normal,” “Strawberry Spring,” the excerpt from On Writing, or the sample final essay and annotated bibliography.
• 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 or a relevant quotation from one of the texts that we have studied in class. Introduce your quotation with a signal phrase and follow it with a parenthetical citation. 
• A conclusion that revisits the thesis without restating it verbatim
• An MLA-style works cited entry for your source

Sample MLA Works Cited Entries

Bahr, Sarah. “The Case for Writing Longhand.” New York Times, Jan 21, 2022. ProQuest, https://libproxy.highpoint.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/case-writing-longhand/docview/2621453011/se-2. 

Kay, Jonathan. “Scrabble is a Lousy Game.” The Wall Street Journal, 4 Oct. 2018. ProQuest, https://libproxy.highpoint.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com /newspapers/scrabble-is-lousy-game-why-would-anyone-play/docview/2116081665/se-2?accountid=11411.

King, Stephen. “Strawberry Spring.” Night Shift. 1978. Anchor, 2011. pp. 268-82.

—. “Toolbox.” On Writing. 2000. Pocket Books, 2001. pp. 123-24.

Lucas, Jane. “ENG 1103: Sample Final Essay and Annotated Bibliography—’Scrabble . . .’” Jane Lucas, 8 Nov. 2023, https://janelucas.com/2023/11/08/eng-1103-sample-final-essay-and-annotated-bibliography-scrabble/.

Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. “Integrating Quotations.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 231-33.

—. Chapter Twelve: “Nine Basic Writing Errors and How to Fix Them.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 341-68.

—. “Writing on Computers vs. Writing on Paper.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 124-25.

Wolf, Maryanne. “Skim Reading is the New Normal. The Effect on Society is Profound.” The Guardian, 25 Aug. 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/skim-reading-new-normal-maryanne-wolf.

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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,

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 and integrated your interpretation with a quotation from one of the textbook authors’ two interpretations.

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 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 cooler 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.

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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.

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If the style of Ian Falconer’s New Yorker cover seems familiar to you, it may be because you encountered his work when you were a child. His book Olivia, published in 2000, received the 2001 Caldecott Medal, an award the Association for Library Service bestows upon the book they deem the best children’s picture book of the year. Falconer followed Olivia with several sequels, including Olivia Saves the Circus and Olivia Helps with Christmas.

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Next Up

Tomorrow, after we review your annotation exercise on The Competition, we will examine my sample final essay and annotated bibliography, and you will have the remainder of the period to devote to your ongoing work on your own final essay and annotated bibliography.

Today in class, we will examine Ian Falconer’s New Yorker magazine cover The Competition, and as practice in your ongoing process of annotating sources, you and two or three of your classmates, will compose a one-paragraph summary of the cover, followed by a second paragraph that presents your commentary (or close reading or analysis) of The Competition.

In your second paragraph, your commentary, incorporate a quotation from one of the interpretations of the cover presented on page 89, and follow your quotation with a parenthetical citation. The two interpretations offered by the textbook’s authors appear below.

In Writing Analytically, David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen note that “[a]t its most serious, The New Yorker cover may speak 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 northern European legacy” (89).

Also, in Writing Analytically, David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen observe that “we might find ourselves wishing to leaven this dark reading with comic overtones–that the magazine is . . . admitting, yes America, we do think that we’re cooler and more individual and less plastic than the rest of you, but we also know that we shouldn’t be so smug about it” (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.

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Next Up

At the beginning of class on Wednesday we will review your annotations on “The Competition,” and you will have the remainder of the period to devote to your ongoing writing and research for your final essay and annotated bibliography.

To offer you a second sample analysis, I have posted the essay that follows, one that I wrote as a model for my English literature students in 2020. “Rockin’ the Boat: Iron Maiden’s Metal Mariner” examines a heavy metal reimagining of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798, 1817).

Rockin the Boat: Iron Maiden’s Metal Mariner

A sailor kills a bird of good omen, his destructive act dooms his shipmates and curses him with retelling the tale over and over: So the story of the Ancient Mariner goes. Yet those plot details convey neither the epic nature of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem nor its influence on later writers. Only the poem itself places readers fully in the imaginative realm of the tale, but its late eighteenth-century diction creates a gulf between the poem and contemporary readers. Consequently, one of the challenges of introducing “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” to millennial students is bridging that gulf. Iron Maiden’s adaptation offers one solution. By eliminating the shifts in the narrative voice and updating the story with contemporary language, their heavy-metal version draws listeners into the story with emphatic rhythms that capture the spirit of the original lines.

Archaic words, such as “stoppeth” (line 2), have a way of stopping readers in their tracks, calling attention to their temporal distance from the poem. Along with the distancing effect of the language, the shifts from one speaker to another can pose problems for twenty-first century readers. Although the Mariner tells his own story, the first words that he speaks are in the fifth stanza. The four stanzas that precede his first words are voiced alternately by an unnamed narrator and the wedding guest who becomes the Mariner’s captive audience. In prose such shifts are easily navigated with paragraphing and dialogue tags. Most poems, however, lack such signals, and their absence in Coleridge’s poem compounds its difficulty. Not only are some of the words obstacles, it’s not always clear who is speaking them.

Iron Maiden’s adaptation eliminates those issues with updated diction and a consistent narrative voice. Rather than shifting speakers, Iron Maiden’s version presents the tale sung by a single storyteller, not the sailor himself, but a narrator who tells listeners to “[h]ear the rime of the ancient mariner” (1). Those first words of the song, penned by lead singer Bruce Dickinson, form an imperative sentence: a command with the understood subject “you”—“[You] hear the rime . . . ” (1). I am master and commander of this story, Dickinson seems to say, and you will hear it now. Such is the power of the imperative. Rather than leaving the reader questioning, as Coleridge’s first stanzas may, Iron Maiden’s song speaks directly to listeners, taking hold of them with the pull of a powerful tide, drawing them out to sea to witness the Mariner as he kills the albatross and seals his fate.

The nature of that fate, that the Mariner must tell his tale over and over, is effectively emphasized by the song’s repetition. The recurrence of the words “on and on,” which first appear to underscore the length of the voyage (17, 18) are repeated in the last line: “And the tale goes on and on and on” (89). That ending may be more fitting than the original. The “sadder and wiser” (624) listener at the end of Coleridge’s poem also appears in the last verse of the song. But by returning to the retelling of the story, the song’s ending shifts the focus from the wedding guest who hears the story only once to the teller who must tell it over and over.

Making the Mariner’s story more accessible through song is valuable not only as an introduction to the poem but also as a starting point for understanding its influence on later English writers, including Mary Shelley, the second-generation Romantic who featured both images and lines from the poem in her novel Frankenstein. Coleridge’s poem was one of Shelley’s favorites, one that she first encountered as a child when the poet recited it in her father’s study (Karbeiner xiii). Iron Maiden’s version captures the spirit of what Mary Shelley, Coleridge’s fan girl, heard: the epic ballad of an eighteenth-century rock star.

Works Cited

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The Norton Anthology of British Literature: The Romantic Period. 10th ed. Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor. W. W. Norton, 2017. pp. 448-64.. EMI, 1984.

Iron Maiden. “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Power Slave. EMI, 1984.

Karbeiner, Karen. Introduction: “Cursed Tellers, Compelling Tales—The Endurance of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. 1818, 1831. Barnes and Noble, 2003.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Next Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Next Up

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