Now that you have completed your literacy narrative, your first major paper assignment for the course, begin thinking about which essay, chapter, or chapter excerpt you have read (“Me Talk Pretty One Day,” “The Day Language Came into My Life,” “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” the excerpt from To Kill a Mockingbird) that might serve as the subject of your second major writing assignment. Before you draft your analysis on February 11, we will study three additional texts that may serve as your subject, but you should begin thinking about which one we’ve studied so far that you may want to explore further.
Review “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” “The Day Language Came into My Life,” “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and the excerpt from To Kill a Mockingbird, and ask yourself these questions:
Of the four texts, which one has the most striking details, or details that have lingered in my mind the most?
Do I want to explore those details further, to consider what they imply, and how they relate to the rest of the text?
Record your answers in your journal, and ask yourself those questions again when we study “The School,” “Back Story,” and the opening paragraphs of “The Falling Man.”
In a Word . . .
In the Coming Soon notes below, I mention that your short reading for Monday (part of which is pictured above) serves as a prelude to both Monday’s in-class writing and your upcoming analysis. Those words about words may guide you to your subject: the text you will revisit for closer study.
For Monday, read these short sections of Writing Analytically: “Focus on Individual Words and Sentences” (48-49) and “Words Matter” (49-50). Those word-focused readings serve as a prelude to Monday’s in-class writing assignment and the analytical writing you will produce for your second major paper assignment.
In class on Monday, you will read a designated classmate’s literacy narrative on his or her blog, and compose a response that you will submit as a comment on the writer’s post. Bring your laptop to class, and also be sure to bring Writing Analytically and your journal with your completed exercise on “Amanda Petrusich on Katy Grannan’s Photograph of Taylor Swift” or an assigned reading of your choice. Do not remove the exercise from your journal before class. I will not collect the assignment; I may simply conduct a check for it while you and your classmates are working on your blog exercise.
The paragraphs that follow include detailed but not comprehensive notes on the two sample narratives that you read and evaluated yesterday. Look to these notes as a guide for editing your own literacy narrative.
“Creativity is Key”: Notes on Content
The essay is not a narrative. The writer mentions his experience writing a Southern gothic story, and he briefly recounts writing about his training for track and field and international football (soccer), but the writer offers very few details. Focusing on one of those experiences and recreating one or more moments from it would transform the essay into a narrative and develop it into one that meets the six hundred-word minimum requirement.
“Creativity is Key”: Notes on Form
Form is less important than content, but easily avoidable errors of form may prevent readers from appreciating the content of your narrative. Creating a compelling story is hard work; proofreading isn’t. If you don’t get the easy part right, readers may stop reading.
The writer changes the font of the body of the paper to Times New Roman but does not change the font of the running header, which should also be Times New Roman.
The writer incorrectly adds an extra space between the first-page course information (in the upper left) and between the title and the first line of the essay. MLA-style manuscripts are double-spaced. Note that later, the writer also incorrectly adds space between the paragraphs.
The title should be typed in twelve-point font, which is the font size that should be used throughout the document.
The title should not appear in boldface.
The title should be centered.
In MLA style, all major words in a title, including the final one, are capitalized (“key” should be “Key).
The second “sentence” of the second paragraph is a fragment because the meaning of “one being my senior year . . .” is dependent upon the clause that ends the previous sentence. See Writing Analytically, page 426-29.
The comma between “all” and “matter” is a comma splice. See Writing Analytically, 429.
“[R]eal life” should be hyphenated (as real-life) when it functions as a compound modifier. Ditto for “open minded” and “four to five.”
Errors of letter case–upper rather than lower, or vice versa–are mistakes of mechanics that are prevalent in the second paragraph. Track, Field, defensive back, and Athlete should all begin with a lowercase letter.
“[F]elt like” should be “felt as if.” In comparisons, use “like” before a noun and “as if” before a clause.
“I’m a writer that” should be “I’m a writer who.” The correct relative pronoun for a person is “who,” not “that.”
“The Journey of the Greatest Story”: Notes on Content
“The Journey of the Greatest Story” is a well-told narrative, but one with a glaring omission: Kate Chopin’s words. The writer claims that the last sentence of The Awakening affected her profoundly, but the absence of those words may lead readers to question the writer’s reliability. If Chopin’s words were so memorable, why aren’t they on the page? Near the end of the narrative, the writer states that she “can still recall key details from the story” (par. 4), but provides no examples. The only detail the writer mentions is Edna Pontelier’s suicide by drowning, which is a well-known fact about the novel.
The writer may have chosen to withhold Chopin’s last sentence from her introductory paragraph because she wanted to focus instead on what followed: the “loud slam of the book as he [the teacher] shut it” (par.1). Still, the writer could have included it later. For example, when she writes about the feelings the novel evokes, she might have included a sentence such as this:
I kept thinking about the last sentence: “There was a hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air” (Chopin, ch. 39).
Quoting The Awakening doesn’t require having a copy of the novel at hand. The complete text is available on Project Gutenberg. The parenthetical citation in the example above follows the format for an unpaginated online book (author’s last name, chapter abbreviation, and chapter number). The MLA work cited entry for the book appears below. Note that in a manuscript, the entry would have a hanging indent, which means the first line would be flush left and any subsequent lines would be indented five spaces or one-half inch.
“The Journey of the Greatest Story”: Notes on Form
The Awakening (pars. 2, 4) should be italicized rather than underlined. In the process of composing her draft longhand, the writer learned that titles of book-length works are underlined in handwritten documents, and she mistakenly applied that rule to her typed revision.
The word as should not precede “the final sentence” (par. 1), because it is used improperly there. As offers comparison, shows reason, or introduces a clause. Here are two ways the writer could revise the sentence:
I still remember the moment the final sentence of the story slipped from my teacher’s mouth, and the loud slam of the book as he shut it.
I still remember the final sentence of the story slipping from my teacher’s mouth, and the loud slamming of the book as he shut it.
The second example above is more direct because the writer doesn’t tell the reader it’s a moment. Instead, she lets the moment happen. The strike-throughs indicate that “of the story” (par. 1) is an unnecessary phrase. The writer has already established that The Awakening is her subject. Also, if specifying the book is necessary at any point, it should be referred to as a novel, not a story.
The writer describes Edna Pontelier as “submerging as death grew upon her” (par. 2), but growing indicates a rise, while submersion indicates a lowering. Grew should be replaced with engulfed.
The writer incorrectly uses hyphens to set off the appositive “-the author-” (par. 2). Here are two ways the writer could correct the presentation of the appositive and edit the passage for brevity:
I yearned for more pages to materialize to clarify the ending, or to have a chat with Kate Chopin–the author–so she could relieve my frustration by explaining the conclusion. Instead, I just sat and pondered those aggravating feelings.
I yearned for more pages to materialize to clarify the ending, or to have a chat with Kate Chopin, the author, so she could relieve my frustration by explaining the conclusion. Instead, I just sat and pondered those aggravating feelings.
An appositive can be set off by em dashes or commas, but commas are preferable for short appostives, so the second correction above is recommended.
The line “having me read this class” (par. 3) is not what the writer intended. The words shoud be having me enroll in the course or having me read Chopin’s novel.
When the writer responds to her teacher, she should begin a new paragraph because the speaker changes from him to her, with her words, “Have a nice day” (par. 3).
Years are an exception to MLA’s numbers rule regarding words and figures. 2025 should be written as 2025, not “twenty-twenty-five” (par. 4).
Posting to Blackboard
Log in to Blackboard and select the course site for ENG 1108.03, then scroll down to Literacy Narrative Submission Site.
Click LiteracyNarrative Submission Site. On the next page, click the black rectangle on the lower right, labeled View instructions.
The next page is where you will submit your literacy narrative file as an MS Word document or PDF. Click on the paperclip icon, and attach your file as you would an email attachment.
An important posting note: Be sure to click the gray rectangle labeled Submit, on the lower right. If you click Save and Close, your file will be saved to Blackboard, but it will not be submitted and will not be accessible to me. To submit your file, you must click Submit.
If you follow the steps above, voila! You have submitted your literacy narrative to Blackboard.
Posting to WordPress
Log in to WordPress, and you will see a home page similar to the one below. Hover over +New in the upper left of the screen, and click Post. You can also add a post by scrolling down the left menu to Posts (beside the pushpin icon) and selecting Add Post.
On the next page, type your literacy narrative title in the Add title line and hit return. Then copy and paste the text of your narrative from your MS Word file into the space below the title. On a PC, copy and paste with control + c, control + v; on a Mac, copy and paste with command + c, command + v.
After you have pasted the text, it will appear as single-spaced, block-style paragraphs. Do not indent. Your file posted to Blackboard should follow MLA formatting guidelines, including paragraph indentations, but WordPress posts are easier to manage if you keep the default paragraph settings. To add your required image between the title and the first paragraph, hover below the title, and a + will appear.
Click the +, and a menu will pop up with various options for add-ins. If Image is not among them, click Browse all.
Scroll down, and under the heading Media, click Image.
After you select Image, click Upload to add your picture. Do not post an AI-generated image or a stock photo from the Web. The image in your blog post should be a picture you took yourself that documents part of your writing process away from the screen. Note that the blog image you see below, and in Monday’s post, is a collage that includes snippets of my handwritten draft. Your image may be of your writing alone, or it may include other elements, as mine does.
Your image should now be centered on the page. If it isn’t, you can use the Align feature (shown above) to center it. If you would like the picture to be rounded, click on the picture, then click the half-black, half-white circle on the right (shown below). Then select the Rounded option.
Optional: To make the first letter of the first word of your literacy narrative a drop cap (or monogram), place the cursor on the first paragraph, and click Topography in the menu on the right (see the image below).
In the pull-down menu, click Drop cap, and a toggle switch will appear (see below). Click the toggle switch, and you will have a drop cap at the beginning of your narrative.
To add the required embedded link, open a new tab and go to the page you want to link to your post. Copy the address and return to the draft of your blog post. Highlight the word or phrase where you want to embed the link, and a link option will appear (see below).
Click the link icon, and a box will appear (see below).
Paste the address into the box, hit enter, or return, and the link will be embedded.
Save your draft (by clicking Save draft in blue in the upper right). Once you have finalized your post, click Publish. After you have published a post, you can still make changes. To do that, simply return to your dashboard, scroll down to Posts, click All Posts, then click edit under the post you want to edit (see below).
Next Up
In class on Wednesday, you will compose a short reflective essay focusing on the process of planning, drafting, and revising your literacy narrative. If you are still in the process of completing your essay on Wednesday (since you have until Friday morning’s hard deadline to post it), your reflection will address your work in progress.
Before class, read “On Keeping a Writer’s Notebook” (157-58) and “Writing from Life: The Personal Essay” (161-64). Those sections of the textbook, Writing Analytically, serve as companion pieces to your writing thus far in English 1103, and reading and taking notes on those sections will prepare you to compose the reflective essay you will write in class on Wednesday.
After you have read and taken notes on “On Keeping a Writer’s Notebook” and “Writing from Life: The Personal Essay,” choose a phrase, clause, or sentence relevant to your writing process and draft in your journal a short passage that connects that quotation to your writing. That passage will serve as part of your reflection. Detailed instructions for composing your reflection and including your chosen quotation will be included on the assignment handout that I distribute on Wednesday. Remember to bring your textbook to class.
Hillaire Belloc’s “Rebecca,” illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen
Today, in place of our in-person class, you will read and evaluate two student literacy narratives: “Creativity is Key” and “The Journey of the Greatest Story.” You will also read my model literacy narrative, “A Bridge to Words,” which appears below as a model for your own blog post.
Directions for writing and posting your evaluations of the student literacy narratives are included in the second half of this post, below the notes on “A Bridge to Words.”
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. 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.
Continuing Your Revisions, Notes on “A Bridge to Words”
As you revise your literacy narrative, look back at “A Bridge to Words” and note the elements listed below.
Appositives
Scene
Figurative language
Gaps in memory/what the narrator doesn’t know
The story’s significance, how the writer conveys it subtly
The sections that follow focus on the elements listed above, ones you should aim to include as you continue to revise your own literacy narrative.
Appositives
Using an appositive–a group of words that renames or defines a noun or noun phrase–not only helps you develop your writing but also enables readers to better relate to your writing through the specifics that the appostives offer. Examine each of the four passages below, and note how each appositive expands on the ideas presented in the noun, the noun phrase, or the noun clause that precedes it.
Early in the essay, I write that “[m]y 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 (par. 2).
I incude another appositive to specify the gesture and the words of a family member: “I remember only the gesture and the words: someone handing me the Sunday comics and saying, “You can read part of the funny page, too. You can read Henry” (par. 3).
When I turn to an appositive again, I do so define a term that may be unfamiliar to some readers: “As the last word in the first line, ‘abhors’ serves as the lead-in to an enjambment: the continuation of a sentence or clause in a line break” (par. 7).
Lastly, I fashion an appostive in the conclusion to convey the significance of the memories I have recounted: “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” (par. 8).
Scene
With the words, “[f]inally, one Sunday,” I shift from summary to scene for the first time (par. 3). The previous paragraphs describe the reading ritual that occurred every Sunday.
Figurative Language
Instances of figurative language in the narrative include “as if covered by a shroud” (par. 1), “like links in a chain” (par. 7), and an extended metaphor in the conclusion, where I personify the comic strip Henry and The Golden Book of Fun and Nonsense, depicting them as slumbering in my brain:
“Perhaps rereading Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus with my students has aroused 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” (par. 8).
Directions for Writing and Posting Your Evaluations
After you have read and written notes on the two student literacy narratives, review the requirements and grade criteria on your literacy narrative assignment sheet. (Your draft is attached to that handout, and an additional copy is posted in the Major Paper Assignments folder on Blackboard.)
Determine a grade for each of the two literacy narratives, and compose a response of two or more complete sentences that includes (1) the complete title of each student literacy narrative, (2) the letter grades for each, and (3) a brief explanation of why each narrative merits the grade you assigned. Post your comment as a reply to this blog post by 11:50 a.m. today, Monday, January 26.
To post your comment, click the title of the post, “ENG 1103: Model Literacy Narrative, ‘A Bridge to Words . . . ,'” then scroll down to the bottom of the post. There you will see the image of an airmail envelope with a box for your comment. Type your comment in the box and click Comment.
I will make your evaluations visible after the 11:50 a.m. deadline.
Posting Your Literacy Narrative to Blackboard and WordPress
If we had met in person today, in the second half class, I would have taken you through the steps of posting your literacy narrative to Blackboard and WordPress. Tomorrow’s post will include step-by-step instructions. In the meantime, consider watching these YouTube videos on submitting an assignment to Blackboard and publishing a post on WordPress.
Next Up
In class on Wednesday, you will compose a short reflective essay focusing on the process of planning, drafting, and revising your literacy narrative. If you are still in the process of completing your essay on Wednesday (since you have until Friday morning’s hard deadline to post it), your reflection will address your work in progress. Bring your copy of the textbook, Writing Analytically, to class.
Before class, read “On Keeping a Writer’s Notebook” (157-58) and “Writing from Life: The Personal Essay” (161-64). Those sections of the textbook serve as companion pieces to your writing thus far in English 1103, and reading and taking notes on those sections will prepare you to compose part of the reflective essay you will write in class on Wednesday.
After you have read and taken notes on “On Keeping a Writer’s Notebook” and “Writing from Life: The Personal Essay,” choose a phrase, clause, or sentence relevant to your writing process and draft in your journal a short passage that connects that quotation to your writing. That passage will serve as part of your reflection. Detailed instructions for composing your reflection and including your chosen quotation will be included on the handout that I distribute on Wednesday.
Yesterday before you you began your revision work, we examined a page (pictured above) from Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. That page from the first chapter serves as a valuable model for three narrative elements: summary, scene, and dialogue–at least two of which will figure in your literacy narrative.
The first paragraph of the passage summarizes the characters’ circumstances, designating the “summertime boundaries” (12) within which the narrator, Jean Louise, “Scout,” Finch, and her older brother, Jem, may play outdoors. The short one-sentence paragraph that follows continues the summary, informing readers that the summer Scout has just summarized is the one in which Dill (Charles Baker Harris) first visits Maycomb, Alabama.
With the first words of the next paragraph, “[e]arly one morning,” Scout shifts from summary to scene (12). All of the remaining paragraphs except the final one continue the scene with dialogue. Scout returns to summary with the words “Dill was from Meridian” (12).
Note that Harper Lee begins a new paragraph whenever the speaker changes. Also note that every line of dialogue does not include a dialogue tag, such as “he said” or “she said.” If a passage of dialogue includes only two speakers, none of the paragraphs require dialogue tags after the speakers’ first lines because the start of a new paragraph signals to the reader that the other person is speaking. If a dialogue includes three or more speakers–such as Scout’s conversation with Jem and Dill–occasional tags are essential.
Lessons in Punctuation
The excerpt from To Kill a Mockingbird also demonstrates how to use a variety of punctuation marks, including em dashes, hyphens, and commas.
Harper Lee uses em dashes to set off “Miss Rachel’s rat terrier was expecting” (12) from the rest of the sentence because it is nonessential. It adds details, but the sentence can function without them. An em dash is used before and after phrases that are nonessential. Note that there is no space before or after the dash, which is made with two strikes of the hyphen key.
Jem asks if Dill is “four-and-a-half”? Hyphens appear between those words because multiple-word numbers are hyphenated.
Near the end of the excerpt, “Mississippi” and “Miss Rachel” (12) are both set off by commas because those details are nonessential. Commas are used to set off single words and short phrases of nonessentials the way that em dashes are used to set off longer units of words.
Work Cited
Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. Lippincott, 1960. p. 12.
Congratulations to Davis Smith for winning a copy of Helen Keller’s autobiography, The Story of My Life, in yesterday’s raffle.
As you prepare to revise your literacy narrative, look back at Helen Keller’s “The Day Language Came into My Life,” the fourth chapter of her autobiography, The Story of My Life, and consider how you can employ some of the same elements in your revision.
Keller draws on her sense of touch to render her world to us because she cannot see or hear. She writes of the warmth of the sun “on her upturned face” (par. 2) as she depicts herself waiting for the arrival of her teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan. Aim to use relevant sensory details in your own literacy narrative.
In the conclusion, Keller writes, “I learned a great many words that day. I do not remember what they all were; but I do know that mother, father, sister, teacher were among them” (par. 9). In writing those words, Keller makes both what she doesn’t remember and what she does remember part of her story. You may not remember all the details of a memory from your childhood, but the details you do remember will render your narrative more vividly. And if there’s something you don’t remember, that uncertainty–as Keller demonstrates–can be on the page, too.
She spells out the words that her teacher spells for her by forming each letter one at a time in Keller’s hand. If you are writing about learning to spell words, let the reader see that on the page as Keller lets her reader see: “‘w-a-t-e-r’ is water” (par. 6).
In “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” David Sedaris does not spell out the French words he is learning to speak, but he does include nonsense words, such as “meimslsxp” (167), to convey his lack of understanding. If you are writing about learning a second language, consider following Sedaris’ lead and using nonsense words–not his but ones of your own making–to convey your initial confusion. Also, try including one or more words of the language itself. Remember that words you write that are not English words–nonsense words included–are italicized. For more details on Sedaris’s essay, see the January 13 class notes.
Work Cited
Keller, Helen. “The Day Language Came Into My Life.” https://janelucasdotcom. files.wordpress.com/2025/08/a0461-3.thedaylanguagecameintomylife_keller.pdf.
Sedaris, David. “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Me Talk Pretty One Day. Little Brown, 2000. pp. 166-73.
Pop Quiz
Rather than listing the answers to the questions on last Friday’s quiz, I have followed each question below with a note regarding where to find the answer. By finding the answers yourself, you will learn more than you would from simply reading them in a list.
In “The Day Language Came into My Life,” Helen Keller recounts what happened on that day, three months before she turned seven. Name one detail from that day that is notable for Keller’s rendering of it. See your copy of “The Day Language Came into My Life.”
How is a dead metaphor different from a cliché? (Briefly explain the two.) See the class notes for January 13.
What is the style used for formatting files and documenting sources in papers for courses in English and many other courses in the humanities (philosophy, classics, religious studies, art history, and foreign languages)? See the January 15 class notes.
Name one of the formatting requirements for the style you will use for your papers in English 1103. See the class notes for January 15.
What have you learned about writing from the annotations on your introductory reflection or on one of your Monday or Wednesday group exercises? Briefly note the rule or guideline. See your introductory reflection and your Monday and Wednesday group exercises.
Be sure to write notes in your journal on all of your readings, including the notes posted on my blog. Before each class begins, take out your journal and review your notes. That will increase your knowledge of what you read and ensure that you will earn high grades on your pop quizzes.
Next Up
Tomorrow, you will continue working on your own literacy narratives. After the Scrabble debriefing and our discussion of “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” 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, January 28, before class; the hard deadline is Friday, January 30, before class.
To honor Martin Luther King, Jr., today, I am asking you to you engage in a close study of his epistolary essay “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: “Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait” (par. 11). Here King is addressing his initial audience, the eight white Birmingham-area clergymen who criticized his protest as “unwise and untimely” (par. 1). 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” (par. 11). 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”–(par. 11).
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” (par. 11). 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 1103, 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 . . . .
In class on Wednesday, we will examine a passage from “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and another prose excerpt before you begin planning and drafting your literacy narrative.
Postscript
This morning, I wrote letters of thanks to the twenty-six local men and women who participated in the 1960 High Point Sit-ins. What a pleasure it was to discover that one of the other volunteer letter writers was former student Annika Brown, now a junior accounting major!
Biographers don’t usually offer readers more than a glimpse of their subjects’ bookshelves, but Robert Redford’s biographer, Michael Feeney Callan, who is also a novelist and poet, lingers over the books he read—some of which helped shape his vision as an actor and director.
Nothing could calm the restless Redford as a student at Brentwood Elementary until “one teacher’s passionate reading from Farmer Boy and Little House on the Prairie finally got him interested in books” (26). Soon after, his father, Charlie, began the midweek routine of driving Redford and his mother, Martha, to the Santa Monica Public Library. In Redford’s words, “‘I couldn’t wait for Wednesdays, to go through the doors of that library . . . . I’d make straight for Perseus, Zeus, and The Odyssey. Even when I couldn’t read, I’d pick out a word, “Perseus,” and conjure the story from the illustrations”’(qtd. in Callan 26).
When Redford was attending Colorado University, his mother died from complications of septicemia. Less than two years later, his paternal grandmother, Lena, died. For comfort, Redford pored over the novels of Thomas Wolfe, Sinclair Lewis, and Thomas Mann, all of which “struck chords that would surface later in his work” (52), but it was in the pages of Henry Miller’s Nights of Love and Laughter—loaned to him by a classmate who recommended it—where Redford first encountered the frank examination of the world that he had sought in the pages of books. In his words, “‘Yes, he [Miller] talked about hunger and anger and sexual voracity. But it was all in the spirit of saying, “Let’s be honest about human beings.” It was frank, direct human communication, and that was a rare commodity in my life’” (qtd. in Callan 54).
At twenty-two—after dropping out of Colorado University and studying art sporadically in Europe—Redford enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Art. There, as an exercise in vocal assessment, an instructor asked the new students to prepare a favorite song to showcase their voices. One of Redford’s classmates, Ginny Burns, recalled that rather than performing the required song, “in a smoldering voice [he] dove into Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven,’ which he claimed appropriate because it was lyrical. He didn’t merely recite it. He hollered it like an opera, jumping from one window ledge to the next, caroming around the room” (qtd. in Callan 70).
Redford’s passion for Poe’s words didn’t extend to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s—not yet. When he first read The Great Gatsby at Colorado University, he thought it was overrated: “It seemed florid. But when I went back to it, I saw it was something extraordinary, the depiction of human obsessions, and I felt some great screen work could come from it. I found it tantalizing” (qtd. in Callan 250).
The admiration he developed for Fitzgerald’s prose and his close study of it are apparent in his reaction to producer Robert Evans’s initial refusal to consider him for the role of Jay Gatsby because he was a blond. Redford said, “‘I began to think that Evans never read the book. Sure, he liked the idea of doing a Fitzgerald, but he didn’t know the text. Nowhere in it does Fitzgerald say Gatsby’s hair is dark. He says, “His hair was freshly barbered and smoothed back, and his skin was pulled tight over his face.” That’s it. That’s the description”’ (qtd. in Callan 249).
Similarly, Redford’s careful examination of the novel is evident in his observation of a detail that gave him “a hook on which to hang his personal Gatsby” (253). He noticed that “‘Fitzgerald wrote that Jay Gatsby was awkward when he said “old sport”—it didn’t come out of his mouth easily . . . . There’s a whole encyclopedia right there, and it’s from there I started to build up my own version’” (qtd. in Callan 253).
His biographer’s chronicle of Redford’s love of the written word may lead some readers to ask why he didn’t become a writer—but he was one, in fact. Though he never published, he maintained diaries and notebooks throughout his life. And Michael Ritchie, who directed him in Downhill Racer, observed, ‘He was really an author. His writing credit wasn’t on Downhill or Jeremiah Johnson but he was really an author as much as David Rayfiel, or even [James] Salter’” (qtd. in Callan 220). Rayfiel himself agreed, noting, “‘He had a writer’s eye and ear more than any actor I ever worked with’” (qtd. in Callan 271).
When Hume Cronyn asked Redford how he wanted Sundance to be remembered in one hundred years, Redford replied, “‘Like Walden Pond’” (qtd. in Callan 374). It’s a testament to Redford’s life as a reader that his answer didn’t refer to the film character for whom his writers’ colony and non-profit are named, but instead to the wooded haven he discovered in the pages of Henry David Thoreau.
Work Cited
Callan, Michael. Feeney. Robert Redford: The Biography. 2011. Vintage, 2012.
This morning at the beginning of class, we will examine the literacy narrative that you read for today, “The Day Language Came into My Life,” which is the fourth chapter of Helen Keller’s autobiography, The Story of My Life.
Together, Sedaris‘s essay and Keller’s chapter 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 of the world through sign language.
After we discuss Keller’s chapter, you will begin planning and drafting your first essay assignment, a literacy narrative: an account of a learning experience involving reading, writing, or learning to speak a language.
Directions
Begin by asking yourself this question: What were some of my most formative experiences as a reader, a writer, or a language learner? Freewrite on those, then choose one to bring to life. Your aim is to recreate your experience on the page and reflect on its significance. Your focus may be any one of the following:
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) challenging
A memento that represents an important moment in your development as a reader or writer
Learning a second language
Your literacy narrative should be a well-told story that includes these elements:
Vivid detail
Some indication of the narrative’s significance
A minimum of 600 words
A title that offers a window into your essay (It should not be titled “Literacy Narrative.”)
Detailed instructions are included in the assignment handout that you will receive in class today. An additional copy is posted on Blackboard in the Major Paper Assignments folder.
Yesterday in class, you wrote about David Sedaris‘s use of similes, metaphors, and hyperboles. The list that follows illustrates the wide variety of figurative language that you identified in “Me Talk Pretty One Day.”
David Sedaris employs a simile when he describes himself as “not unlike Pa Kettle trapped backstage at a fashion show” (167).
Sedaris fashions a metaphor with the words “everybody into the language pool, sink or swim” (167).
The essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day” features the metaphorical hyperbole “front teeth the size of tombstones” (Sedaris 168).
David Sedaris uses a simile when he writes that one classmate’s introduction sounds “like a translation of one of those Playmate of the Month data sheets” (168).
The author of “Me Talk Pretty One Day” turns to hyperbole when he writes, “The teacher killed some time accusing the Yugoslavian girl of masterminding a program of genocide” (Sedaris 169), and again when he notes that he and his classmates “learned to dodge chalk” (170).
Similarly, Sedaris uses hyperbole to emphasize his teacher’s reaction, which “led [him] to believe that these mistakes were capital crimes in the country of France” (170).
David Sedaris fashions a metaphor when he describes his dread, writing, “My fear and discomfort crept beyond the borders of the classroom and accompanied me out onto the wide Boulevard” (171).
Sedaris’ teacher insults him with a simile when she remarks, “‘Everyday spent with you is like having a cesarean section'” (172).
The bulleted sentences above follow the format that you should follow in your group exercises and other writing assignments that require quotations. These are the specific guidelines to remember:
The answer should be a minimum of one sentence. It need not be a long sentence, but it should include concrete detail.
The sentence should not begin with a quotation. Though journalists, fiction writers, and memoirists sometimes begin sentences with quotations, in academic writing, quotations are introduced with signal phrases.
Do not foreground the paragraph or page number in a sentence. The most important feature of the sentence is the writer’s particular use of words. The page or paragraph number follows in the parenthetical citation.
Dead Metaphors
Some of you identified “killed some time” (169) as a metaphor, but it’s actually a dead metaphor, one so familiar that it’s lost its meaning. Killing time and running for office have become synonymous with the actions they once compared. A dead metaphor is not the same as one that has become a cliché: a predictable or overly familiar expression. Avoid clichés like the plague, which I just failed to do for the sake of illustration. (Avoid . . . like the plague is textbook cliché.)
Memorable Words
One group cited the use of nonsense words, such as “meimslsxp” (167), as an effective way to convey Sedaris’s utter lack of understanding of his French teacher’s speech.
Another noted the fitting choice of “intoxicating” (173) to describe the feeling Sedaris experienced when he finally began to understand French.
Work Cited
Sedaris, David. “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Me Talk Pretty One Day. Little Brown, 2000. pp. 166-73.
“What’s in a Name” Follow-Up
Friday’s blog entry offered a bonus assignment credit to any student who posted a response identifying the classmates whose names are also common nouns, which makes them playable Scrabble words.
The playable names of your classmates appear below in bold, followed by the definitions in parentheses.
Nick (to make a shallow cut) Beeker
Aidan Berlin (a type of carriage)
Jermaine Cain (a tax paid in produce or livestock, also kain)
Zach Dick (a detective)
Tommy (a loaf of bread) McHugh
Davis Smith (a worker in metals)
Dylan Virga (wisps of precipitation evaporating before reaching ground)
Sierra (a mountain range) Welch (to fail to pay a debt, also welsh)
Kudos to Nick Beeker, Aidan Berlin, Jermain Cain, Nicole Marin, Sophia Marin, and Sierra Welch for identifying your classmates’ names that are playable words. For their efforts, they will receive a bonus assignment credit in the short assignments and participation category
I will offer additional bonus assignments, so be on the lookout for those. Reading all the notes that I post for you here, on my blog, will ensure that you don’t miss those opportunities.
Congratulations to Aidan Berlin for winning a copy of The Santaland Diaries in yesterday’s raffle.
Next Up
In class tomorrow, you will begin drafting your first major writing assignment longhand. The assignment, a literacy narrative, is an account of a learning experience involving reading, writing, or learning to speak a language. As part of your prewriting process, look back at “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and consider how you might incorporate into your own essay some of the same elements that David Sedaris includes in his. Repeat the process with Helen Keller’s “The Day Language Came into My Life.”
This final Scrabble post of the semester features the names of authors and characters that are playable words. Learning these will not only increase your word power and up your game, it will also broaden your knowledge of literature. If you haven’t read some of classics listed here, I encourage you to check them out.
eyre: a long journey (the last name of of the title character in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, 1847)
dickens: a devil (Charles Dickens, 1812-1870)
fagin: a person, usually an adult, who instructs others, usually children, in crime (from a character of that type in Dickens’ Oliver Twist, 1838)
holden: the past participle of hold (Holden Caulfield, the protagonist in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, 1951)
huckleberry: a berry like a blueberry (the first name of the title character in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Hucklebery Finn, 1884)
oedipal: describing libidinal feelings of a child toward the parent of the opposite sex (from the title character in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, c. 429 B.C.)
quixote: a quixotic, or extremely idealistic person; also quixotry, a quixotic action or thought (the title character in Michael de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Part I: 1605, Part II: 1615)
Note that “huckleberry” and “quixote” could not be the first two words played in a Scrabble game because “huckleberry” is more than seven letters long. However, “huckleberry” and “quixote” could constitute the first three plays. The first two plays could be “berry” and “quixote,” and the third play could add “huckle” to “berry.”
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, including this one.
Jane Lucas 