Category: Writing

As one of the preliminary steps in your research and writing process, you will conduct a short personal interview that will serve as one of the sources for your project. If you decide that you do not want to use the interview that you conduct today, you are welcome to include another one in your project. Keep in mind, however, that the interview you include in your project must be conducted with a student currently enrolled in section 20 or 21, and the subject of the interview must be the subject of your project.

Questions to Ask Your Interviewee Include the Following:

1. What experience, if any, did you have with the subject (the reading or the aspect of the course) before you encountered it in English 1103?
2. Has it changed your perspective on reading and/or writing? If so, how?
3. Will you continue to pursue the subject (read more work by the author, continue the classroom practice or activity) after the conclusion of the semester?

Introducing an Interview Quotation

After you conduct your interview, compose on the worksheet provided a sentence in which you introduce a quotation with a signal phrase, such as “According to First Name Last Name,” or “First Name Last Name notes or observes or points out that . . . .” Your quotation will not be followed by a parenthetical citation because it is a form of oral communication (without page or paragraph numbers).

Composing a Work Cited Entry for Your Interview

Follow your quotation with a work cited entry that follows this format:

Work Cited

Last Name, First Name. Interview. Conducted by First Name Last Name. Day Month Year.

Note that your work cited entry should include a hanging indent.

The complete final essay and annotated bibliography assignment is included below.

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Final Essay and Annotated Bibliography Assignment

OVERVIEW

An annotated bibliography is a list of sources on a subject that includes a summary of each source. Some bibliographies include additional information, such as the authors’ credentials. That is the type of bibliography that you will compose along with your final essay for the course.

KEY FEATURES

• An introductory essay of three or more paragraphs that (1) presents the subject of your bibliography, and (2) addresses your purpose for compiling it. In other words: What drives your research? What interests you about the subject, and what question/s do you seek to answer about your subject?
• A complete MLA-style bibliographic entry for each source.
• A one-paragraph summary of each source followed by a shorter second paragraph that presents the writer’s credentials and addresses the purpose that the source might serve in a larger project. Would it serve as a point of comparison or contrast to another source? Would it support or challenge an idea presented in another source? Is it a secondary source that sheds light on the meaning of a primary source? The last question pertains primarily to bibliographies that focus on one of the writers studied in the course.

PRELIMINARY WORK—What to Complete in Class Today

Personal Interview

Your final essay and annotated bibliography will focus on one of the authors we have studied or one of elements of the course, including (1) blogging in the classroom, (2) limiting screen time, (3) writing longhand, and (4) playing Scrabble. As a starting point, you will conduct a short personal interview that will serve as one of the sources for your project. If you decide that you do not want to use the interview that you conduct today, you are welcome to include another one in your project. Keep in mind, however, that the interview you include in your project must be conducted with a student currently enrolled in section 20 or 21, and the subject of the interview must be the subject of your project.

Questions to ask your interviewee include the following:

1. What experience, if any, did you have with the subject (the reading or the aspect of the course) before you encountered it in English 1103?
2. Has it changed your perspective on reading and/or writing? If so, how?
3. Will you continue to pursue the subject (read more work by the author, continue the classroom practice or activity) after the conclusion of the semester?

After you conduct your interview, compose on the worksheet provided a sentence in which you introduce a quotation with a signal phrase, such as “According to First Name Last Name,” or “First Name Last Name notes or observes or points out that . . . .” Your quotation will not be followed by a parenthetical citation because it is a form of oral communication (without page or paragraph numbers).

Follow your quotation with a work cited entry in this format:

Work Cited*

Last Name, First Name. Interview. Conducted by First Name Last Name. Day Month Year.

*Note that you will use the header annotated bibliography, not works cited, in your final essay and annotated bibliography.

Annotated Bibliographic Entry

After you complete your personal interview, compose an annotated bibliographic entry for the text that serves as the starting point for your project. (See the list below.) Your annotated bibliographic entry consists of three parts: (1) the MLA-style work cited entry, as shown below, (2) a one-paragraph summary, and (3) a paragraph of commentary—see the third bullet point under the heading KEY FEATURES.

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. 

Barthelme, Donald. “The School.” The Best American Short Stories 1975, edited by Martha Foley, Houghton Mifflin, 1975. pp. 8-11.

Junod, Tom. “The Falling Man.” Esquire, vol. 140, no. 3, Sept. 2003, pp. 176+. Gale Academic OneFile Select, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A106423422/EAIM?u=hpu_main&sid=bookmark-EAIM&xid=ce48797f.

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.

Keller, Helen. “The Day Language Came into My Life.” Chapter Four. The Story of My Life. https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/keller/life/life.html.

Lewis, Michael. Chapter One: “Back Story.” The Blind Side. 2006. Norton, 2009. pp.15-16.

Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. “Writing on Computers vs. Writing on Paper.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 124-25.

Sedaris, David. “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Me Talk Pretty One Day. Little, Brown, 2000. 166-73.

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.

ASSIGNMENT DIRECTIONS

1. Begin by conducting a short personal interview and an annotated bibliographic entry for the appropriate source listed above, or on page two (the one that focuses on your subject), and complete the worksheet provided. For more information. See the paragraphs under the header PRELIMINARY WORK—What to Complete in Class Today.
2. Use the HPU Libraries site, https://www.highpoint.edu/library/, and Google Scholar to locate a minimum of three additional reliable and relevant print sources (articles, essays, and/or books) devoted to the same subject. Compose your summaries and commentaries in complete sentences, introduce any quotations with signal phrases, and include parenthetical citations where needed. Your bibliography must include five sources, four of which must be print. (Your personal interview is a nonprint source.) If you wish to include an additional non-print source, such as a video, you may include that as a sixth source.
3. After you have composed your annotated bibliographic entries, write an introductory essay that (1) presents the subject of your bibliography, and (2) addresses your purpose for compiling it. In other words: What drives your research? What question do you seek to answer about your subject? Also, (3) What larger project might develop from your bibliography? Would it be a project for a course in psychology, science, education, or another discipline? Address all five of your sources in your essay, and quote at least two of them.

Note: Though your introductory essay will precede your annotated bibliography, you will compose it last because you will need to re-read and summarize your sources before you will know how to address them in your essay.

DIRECTIONS FOR RESEARCHING, DRAFTING, REVISING, AND SUBMITTING

1. Devote today’s class primarily to conducting a personal interview and composing an annotated bibliographic entry for the text that serves as a starting point for your research. You will have two additional Wednesdays to work in class on your final essay and annotated bibliography before you post your revision to Blackboard and to your WordPress blog.
2. Before class on the due date: Post a copy of your revision to Blackboard and to your blog. In your blog post, omit the first-page information included in your file submitted to Blackboard (your name, professor’s name, course and section, and date). Add to your blog post an image that documents some part of your writing process away from the screen, such as the summary of your source in your journal, today’s worksheet, or a page of your draft. Also add an embedded link to a relevant web site. Even though your work for this assignment will take place primarily in front of the screen, your writing process still involves putting pen to paper, and photographic documentation of that on your blog is a requirement of the assignment.

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Next Up

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

This morning in class you will plan and draft a short midterm reflection essay that documents your work in the first half of the semester, focusing on what you consider your most significant achievements and the feature or features of the course that have benefited your development as a writer and a student. Features to consider include the following:

• Planning, drafting, and revising your literacy narrative or your analysis
• Keeping a journal
• Completing Check, Please! assignments
• Studying one of the readings examined class, including “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” “The Day that Language Came into My Life,” “Back Story” (from The Blind Side), “The Falling Man,” “The School,” the sample literacy narrative (“A Bridge to Words”), or one of the sample analyses
• 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

Focus on two, three, or four features of the course (but no more than four), and 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 Works Cited Entries

Bartheleme, Donald. “The School.” The Best American Short Stories 1975, edited by Martha Foley, Houghton Mifflin, 1975. pp.8-11.

Junod, Tom. “The Falling Man.” Esquire, vol. 140, no. 3, Sept. 2003, pp. 176+. Gale Academic OneFile Select, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A106423422/EAIM?u=hpu_main&sid=bookmark-EAIM&xid=ce48797f.

Keller, Helen. “The Day Language Came into My Life.” Chapter Four. The Story of My Life. https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/keller/life/life.html.

Lewis, Michael. Chapter One: “Back Story.” The Blind Side. 2006. Norton, 2009. pp.15-16.

Lucas, Jane. “A Bridge to Words.” Jane Lucas, 11 Sept. 2023, https://janelucas.com/2023/09/11/eng-1103-a-bridge-to-words/.

—. “Rockin’ the Boat: Iron Maiden’s Metal Mariner.” Jane Lucas, 3 Oct. 2023, https://janelucas.com/2023/10/03/eng-1103-rockin-the-boat-iron-maidens-metal-mariner/.

—. “The Strange Fruit of Sosnowiec.” Jane Lucas, 2 Oct. 2023, https://janelucas.com/2023/10/02/eng-1103-the-strange-fruit-of-sosnowiec/.

Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. “Analysis Does More than Break a Subject into Its Parts.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 4-5.

—. “Distinguishing Analysis from Summary, Expressive Writing, and Argument.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 5-8.

—. “Integrating Quotations.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 231-33.

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

Sedaris, David. “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Me Talk Pretty One Day. Little, Brown, 2000. 166-73.

Next Up

Wednesday’s class will be devoted to planning and preparing for your group presentations on the Check, Please! course. At the beginning of the class period, you will receive your group assignments, including which of the five lessons will be the focus of your presentation.

This morning in class you will plan and draft a short reflective essay that documents your writing process and includes at least one relevant quotation from one of the sections of Writing Analytically devoted to analysis.

Sample Works Cited Entries for Writing Analytically

Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. “Analysis Does More than Break a Subject into Its Parts.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 4-5.

—. “Distinguishing Analysis from Summary, Expressive Writing, and Argument.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 5-8.

Questions to Consider in Your Reflection

• What aspect of the writing seemed the most challenging? Choosing your topic? Deciding which text would serve as your subject? Determining your thesis? Identifying details to support your claims? Organizing the body of the essay? Composing the conclusion? Why did that aspect of the writing seem the most challenging?
• Did the subject of your analysis change? If so, what was your original subject, and what did you change it to?
• What do you consider the strongest element of your analysis?
• At what point in the process did you decide on a title? Did you change the title during the writing process? If so, what was the original title?
• What image that documents part of your writing process away from the screen did you include in your blog post? Why did you choose that particular image?

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Up Next

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

The analysis that follows is one that I wrote as a model for my students in 2021. As you read it, note how I turn from summary to thesis (in bold) in the first paragraph. Also note how the paragraphs that follow offer support for the thesis with concrete details from the comic’s panels.

Since concluding paragraphs can be particularly difficult to write without repeating the introduction, today’s group work will include a close look at strategies for conclusions.

The Strange Fruit of Sosnowiec

In Chapter 4 of Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus, he depicts his father Vladek’s account of the hangings of four Jewish merchants in Sosnowiec, Poland. Vladek and his wife, Anja, learn from Anja’s father, Mr. Zylberberg, that the Nazis have arrested his friend Nahum Cohn and his son. With his head bowed in sorrow, Mr. Zylberberg says to Anja and Vladek, “The Germans intend to make an example of them!” (83). That image of Mr. Zylberberg speaking with Vladek and Anja overlays the larger panel that dominates the page, one that depicts the horror that Mr. Zylberberg anticipates: the murder of his friend Nahum Cohn, Cohn’s son, and two other Jewish merchants. That haunting panel and the smaller ones that frame it illustrate the complexity of Spiegelman’s seemingly simple composition. His rendering of the panels of the living in conjunction with the fragmented panels of the hanged merchants simultaneously conveys connection and separation: both the grieving survivors’ ties to the dead and the hanged men’s objectification at the hands of the Nazis.

The placement of the overlaying panel not only hides part of the horror behind it, but it also connects Vladek’s father-in-law to one of the victims. Mr. Zylberberg’s head and torso appear directly above the suspended legs and feet of one of the hanged men, creating an image that merges the two.

Spiegelman further emphasizes the mourners’ identification with the hanged men by extending two of the nooses’ ropes upward to the smaller panel above them, linking the living to the dead. Additionally, Spiegelman underscores the link with Vladek’s line of narration at the bottom of the smaller panel: “I did much business with Cohn!” (83). The word “with” appears directly above the rope, punctuating the connection between both Nahum Cohn and his friend Mr. Zylberberg and Zylberberg’s son-in-law, Vladek.

While the panels of the hangings yoke the living to the dead, Spiegelman’s presentation of the hanged men in fragments also objectifies them. The final panels on the page depict only their shoes and part of their pant legs suspended above the onlookers, images that may evoke in some readers thoughts of the last remnants of the Jews who stepped barefoot into the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Whether the hanged men’s shoes call to mind those mountains of leather left behind by the Jews, the separation of their lower legs and feet from the rest of their bodies turns them into something less than human—not people, but mere parts. Thus, Spiegelman creates a picture of the hangings that illustrates both the mourners’ identification with the victims and the Nazis’ perception of the Jews as less than human: the malignant ideology that the artist has pinpointed “at the very heart of the killing project.”

Spiegelman’s transformation of the Nazi propaganda portrayals of Jews as rats remains an astounding achievement thirty-five years after the publication of the first volume of Maus. But seeing the hanged merchants in Modrzejowska Street in the midst of the George Floyd murder trial in Minneapolis and less than three months after the January 6 Capitol riot reminds readers that the panels of Spiegelman’s memoir have grown more prescient. The nooses evoke images of Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee on George Floyd’s neck, the January 6 chants to hang the Vice President, and a T-shirt glimpsed in the Capitol crowd, one with a Nazi eagle below the acronym “6MWE” (Six Million Wasn’t Enough), a reference to the numbers of Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust. Our heads are bowed in sorrow with Mr. Zylberberg’s. The strange fruit of our past, both distant and recent, should seem far stranger.

Works Cited

Spiegelman, Art. Maus I. Pantheon, 1986.

—. “Why Mice?” Interview by Hillary Chute. The New York Review of Books, 20 Oct. 2011, https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2011/10/20/why-mice/.

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After we examine “The Strange Fruit of Sosnowiec,” you and two or three of your classmates will collaborate on an exercise that asks you to consider an example of the connections and separations that I address in my thesis. The exercise will also ask you to explore the conclusion strategies that I employ in the final paragraph.

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Next Up

In class on Wednesday, you will compose a short reflective essay on your analysis. In your reflection, you will be required to include at least one relevant quotation from a section of Writing Analytically devoted to analysis: “Analysis Does More than Break a Subject into Its Parts” (4-5) or “Distinguishing Analysis from Summary, Expresive Writing, and Argument” (5-8).

This morning, after I collect your final Check, Please! worksheets, I will return your drafts, and you will have the remainder of the class period to begin revising your analyses on your laptops. You will have an additional week to continue your revision work before you submit the assignment to Blackboard and publish it as a WordPress blog entry. The due date is next Wednesday, October 4 (before class). The hard deadline is 10:30 a.m. on Friday, October 6. Directions for submitting your analyses are included on your assignment sheet and on the Blackboard submission site.

Parenthetical Citations

In your analysis, you will include parenthetical citations for quotations and paraphrases. Since you are writing a textual analysis, I recommend quoting rather than paraphrasing because the writer’s particular word choices are vital to the text’s overall effect. If your subject is one of the unpaginated texts (“Me Talk Pretty One Day,” “The Day Language Came into My Life,” or “The Falling Man”), your parenthetical citations will include the abbreviation par. for paragraph, followed by the paragraph number. If your subject is one of the paginated texts (“Back Story” or “The School”), your parenthetical citations will include the page number by itself. Including the author’s last name as well would be redundant because you have established in your introduction that your essay focuses solely on a work by him or her.

Here are some examples of how to use parenthetical citations in your analysis:

• The nonsense words “meimslsxp” and “lgpdmurct” underscore his utter lack of comprehension in French class (par. 2).
• The line “‘like Aaron’s rod, with flowers'” is a biblical allusion to Numbers 17.8 (par. 9).
• He notes that in contrast to the Falling Man, the others who jumped appeared “confused, as though trying to swim down the side of a mountain” (par. 1).
• He employs the “One Mississippi . . . Two Mississippi . . .” count to mark the seconds leading up to Joe Theismann’s career-ending injury (15).
• With the words, “is death that which gives meaning to life?,” the story shifts from realism to surrealism (10).

Work Cited Entry

At the end of your analysis, you will include an MLA-style work cited entry. Refer to the models below.

Barthelme, Donald. “The School.” The Best American Short Stories 1975, edited by Martha Foley, Houghton Mifflin, 1975. pp. 8-11.

Junod, Tom. “The Falling Man.” Junod, Tom. “The Falling Man.” Esquire, vol. 140, no. 3, Sept. 2003, pp. 176+. Gale Academic OneFile Select, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A106423422/EAIM?u=hpu_main&sid=bookmark-EAIM&xid=ce48797f.

Keller, Helen. “The Day that Language Came into My Life.” The Story of My Life. https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/keller/life/life.html.

Lewis, Michael. Chapter One: “Back Story.” The Blind Side. 2006. Norton, 2009, pp. 15-23.

Sedaris, David. “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Me Talk Pretty One Day. Little Brown, 2000. pp. 166-73.

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As you continue to revise your analysis, consider visiting the Writing Center. If you do so, you will earn five bonus points for the assignment.

To schedule an appointment, visit https://highpoint.mywconline.com, email the Writing Center’s director, Professor Justin Cook, at jcook3@highpoint.edu, or scan the QR code below. To earn bonus points for your analysis, consult with a Writing Center tutor no later than Thursday, October 5.

I recommend taking a copy of the text that serves as the subject of your analysis (“Me Talk Pretty One Day,” “The Day Language Came into My Life,” “The Falling Man,” “Back Story,” or “The School”) to your Writing Center appointment.

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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 posts on my blog devoted to Scrabble tips.

Now that you have revised your literacy narrative, consider submitting it for publication. Although posting a public blog entry is referred to as publishing, it does not have the prestige associated with publishing your work in a peer-reviewed journal.

High Point University no longer publishes its own student journal, but there are many national undergraduate magazines you can submit to, including the one listed on the CUR (Council on Undergraduate Research) website.

If you are interested in looking beyond publications specifically for undergrads, Poets and Writers magazine’s site features a page where you can search for publications by the genre’s they publish (creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry), subgenre (speculative fiction, young adult, etc.) and reading period (the time when the journal accepts submissions).

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.