Jane Lucas

Yesterday in class, I distributed copies of the recent National Public Radio feature “A Break from Your Smartphone Can Reboot Your Mood. Here’s How Long You Need.” Since your final essay and annotated bibliography will focus on one of the aspects of the course or one of the texts or authors we have studied, “A Break from Your Smartphone . . .” can serve as one of your five sources if you choose to research limiting screen time.

Read the news feature and compose a journal entry on it, if you haven’t done so already. Then look back at the feature and consider where it might lead you to an additional article that could serve as another source for you.

If you do choose to research limiting screen time and use “A Break from Your Smartphone . . .” as a source, you will likely include one or more indirect quotations in your essay and bibliography because the article’s author, journalist Allison Aubrey, quotes researchers. The examples that follow show how to present indirect quotations.

Indirect Quotation, Speaker/Writer Named in the Sentence

Noah Castelo, one of the study’s authors, observes, “‘It’s one of the first experiments that does provide causal evidence that reducing time spent on your phone has all these significant benefits'” (qtd. in Aubrey, par. 14).

Indirect Quotation, Speaker/Writer Not Named in the Sentence

One of the study’s authors observes, “‘It’s one of the first experiments that does provide causal evidence that reducing time spent on your phone has all these significant benefits'” (Castelo qtd. in Aubrey, par. 14).

The quotations in both examples begin and end with triple quotation marks to designate them as quotes within quotes (Castelo’s words quoted in Aubrey’s article).

The parenthetical citation in the first example does not include Noah Castelo’s last name because he is named in the sentence. The parenthetical citation in the second example does include his last name because he is not mentioned by name in the sentence.

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Bonus Points Opportunity

Students who post the correct response to the question below will earn five bonus points for their final Check, Please! assignment.

In the second paragraph of this blog post, I instructed you to read “A Break from Your Smartphone . . . ,” compose a journal entry on it, and consider where it might lead to an additional article that could serve as another source for you.

1. Go to the online version of the article, and find the embedded link in the fourth paragraph.
2. Click on that link and jot down the title of the article in your journal.
3. Compose a short blog comment, a minimum of one sentence, that includes the title of the article and identifies it as a possible source for research on limiting screen time.

Directions for Finding and Submitting Your Answer

1. To post your comment, click the title of the post, “ENG 1103: Looking Ahead to Your Final Essay and Annotated Bibliography,” then scroll down to the bottom of the post. There you will see the image of an airmail envelope with a white rectangular box for your comment.
2. Type your comment in the box and hit return. Voila! You have submitted your answer. I will make the comments visible before class on Monday, March 10.

Post your comment as a reply to this blog post by 9:00 a.m. on Monday, March 10.

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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 Scrabble blog posts. 

This morning in class you will compose a short reflective essay that documents the processes of planning, drafting, and revising your analysis. In your reflection, you will include at least one relevant quotation from Writing Analytically or from apter, or essay excerpt that serves as the subject of your analysis.

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?
• What relevant website did you include an embedded link to in your blog post? Why did you choose that site?

Sample Works Cited Entries

Junod, Tom. “The Falling Man.” Esquire, vol. 140, no. 3, Sept. 2003, pp. 176+. Gale Academic OneFileSelect, 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.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” California state University, Chico. https://www.csuchico.edu/iege/_assets/documents/susi-letter-from-birmingham-jail.pdf.

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

Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. “Late-Stage Editing and Revising: Some Tips.” Writing Analytically, 9th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2024. pp. 151-52.

Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. “On Keeping a Writer’s Notebook.” Writing Analytically, 9th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2024. pp. 157-58.

Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. “Putting X in Tension with Y.” Writing Analytically, 9th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2024. pp. 248-29.

Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. “The Thesis and the Writing Process.” Writing Analytically, 9th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2024. pp. 237-38.

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

In your reflective essay, introduce your quotation with a signal phrase and follow it with a parenthetical citation. Also include a work cited entry for the text that you quote, Writing Analytically or the essay, chapter, or essay excerpt that serves as the subject of your analysis.

Next Up

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

As you continue to revise your analysis, review the sample paragraphs that follow (from Monday’s class handout) and look to the recommended revisions as models for your own introduction and conclusion.

Introductory Paragraph, “Wait Means Never”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” is a speech of literature that was composed many years ago yet remains relevant. King’s words give insight into the life of an African American during the 1960s and symbolize the significance of taking action and standing up for what is right, justice for African Americans. In this particular letter, King speaks about how it’s easy for people who have never felt pain of being oppressed, discriminated against, and segregated to say the word “wait.” The letter goes further into detail about what “wait” truly means for an African American and specifically tackles the perspective of an American father who also has to explain to his children why the world is the way it is, yet that father does not quite know himself why people act in such a harsh manner. In this letter, Martin Luther King Jr. utilizes repetition, detail, vivid imagery, and sentence structure to deliver a message to not just one person, or even a hundred people, but the entire country that justice for African Americans cannot be a patient matter.

Revision

Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote “Letter from Birmingham Jail” while he was serving a sentence for participating in nonviolent protests in Alabama. His testimony was a response to the eight white clergymen who had drafted an open letter, earlier in 1963, that addressed King’s involvement in the civil rights movement and urged him to seek justice in the courts rather than in the streets. In his answer to the clergymen, King asserts that a Christianity that permits racial oppression and prejudice is immoral and stands in direct opposition to the teachings of the gospel. Though King’s letter draws on his 1956 sermon “Paul’s Letter to American Christians,” the hallmark of his epistolary essay is not the rhythmic cadences of his baritone voice, but instead its artful composition—particularly, its eleventh paragraph. With the repetition of the word “wait” and a series of dependent clauses, King encapsulates his testimony and delays the end of the letter’s longest sentence, creating a holding pattern that forces readers to experience their own wait.

Concluding Paragraph, Untitled Analysis

In conclusion, Helen Keller’s essay “The Day Language came into My Life” provides a deep understanding on the impact of language and education. Through Keller’s narrative, she allows readers to experience her transformation from isolation to connection. Along with this, readers can experience her feelings regarding silence to speech. Her essay serves as inspiration and motivation about limitless capabilities no matter the situation.

Revision

The end of Keller’s chapter offers readers a glimpse of the life she might have lived had Miss Sullivan not been able to reach her through sign language. Writing that “for the first time [she] longed for a new day to come” (par. 9), Keller reminds readers that every day before her discovery of language was a day of despair. More than one hundred years after the publication of her autobiography, her words endure as a testament of the vital role of language and continue to guide readers through her journey from darkness to a world that “quiver[ed] with life” (par. 8).

In addition to reviewing the sample revisions above, look back at the model analysis “The Strange Fruit of Sosnowiec.” Note how I turn from summary to commentary in the opening paragraph and end the introduction with my thesis statement. Then look back at the final paragraph and note how I bring the analysis full circle by (1) connecting the events recounted on page eighty-three of Maus to then-current (2021) events, (2) returning to the image of Mr. Zyberberg’s bowed head mentioned in the introduction, and (3) echoing the strange fruit in the title.

Also consider revisiting the blog posts devoted to the sample student analyses:

• “ENG 1103: Sample Keller Analysis Follow-Up“
• “ENG 1103: Sample King Analysis Follow-Up“

You may also find it helpful to review these sections of Writing Analytically:

• “Late-Stage Editing and Revising: Some Tips” (151-52).
• “The Thesis and the Writing Process” (237-38).

Next Up

In class on Wednesday, you will compose a short reflective essay on the processes of planning, drafting, and revising your analysis. As part of that assignment, you will integrate one relevant quotation from our textbook, Writing Analytically, or from the essay, essay excerpt, or chapter that serves as the subject of your analysis. Before Wednesday’s class, select a phrase, clause, or sentence and write it in your journal. Note how the idea it expresses is relevant to your reflection. Taking those steps will ensure that you can complete the assignment by the end of the class period.

This morning in class, after your Scrabble debriefing, we will examine the two sample student analyses that you read for class, and you will collaboratively assess them. Afterward, we will read and discuss my model analysis, “The Strange Fruit of Sosnowiec,” included below. 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.

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.

Work Cited

Spiegelman, Art. Maus I. Pantheon, 1986.

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Next Up

In class on Wednesday, you will compose a reflective essay that focuses on the processes of planning, drafting, and revising your analyses. In your reflection, you will include a minumum of one relevant quotation from Writing Analytically or from the essay, chapter, or essay excerpt that serves as the subject of your analysis. Before Wednesday’s class, identify the passage you plan to quote, and draft a sentence with it in your journal. That preparation will ensure that you have ample time to integrate the quotation into your reflection before the end of Wednesday’s class period.

With pen or pencil in hand, read your copy of the student analysis of “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Write notes in the margin and on the text itself, and afterward compose a brief journal entry that addresses both the content and the form of the essay. Remember that you are not required to complete this exercise until you return to campus after spring break, but completing it earlier offers you the opportunity to reflect again on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s letter in the last days of Black History Month.

Tomorrow I will publish a follow-up post with notes on the analysis.

In the picture above–and in the one in yesterday’s post–you can see some of my notes on the sample Keller analysis. Today’s blog post presents more detailed notes on the essay’s content and form.

Content

• The title isn’t actually a title; it’s a label that identifies the assignment as an analysis. The title should offer a window into the analysis with a reference to an aspect of Helen Keller’s chapter or an idea or image in it.
• Rather than beginning with a summary, the writer states that the chapter’s organization caught her eye. However, organization isn’t eye catching. What’s eye catching is perceived at a glance. What did catch the writer’s eye, and is that the real focus of the analysis?
• The first paragraph does not present the writer’s thesis or main claim.
• In the second and third paragraphs, the writer focuses on the idea of the chapter’s descriptiveness but doesn’t provide examples of its descriptiveness.
• The fourth paragraph quotes words that Miss Sullivan spells for Heller, but those particular details don’t support the writer’s claim about “mood and tone.” The writer does mention that Keller intentionally breaks her doll, but that detail is an obvious example of Keller’s anger and frustration. Mentioning that is not an act of analysis but rather an act of description.
• With the fifth paragraph, the writer turns to a key moment in the narrative, but the single word that the writer quotes does not directly support her point about the young Keller’s realization.
• In the sixth paragraph, the writer returns to the idea of organization and quotes two lines, but the writer does not address how those lines demonstrate the strength of the conclusion’s organization. Examining the choice and placement of the word “awakened” (Keller, par. 7) is one way that the writer might have forged a connection between the organization of Keller’s essay and her word choices.
• The final two paragraphs offer a general assessment of the chapter but the writer’s observations are primarily statements of the obvious. Applying Rosenwasser and Stephen’s “Seems to Be About X” strategy (104) is one strategy that may have moved the essay beyond description and into analysis.

Form

• Neither the running header nor the first-page information (in the upper left) is Times New Roman.
• The lines of the paragraphs are a space and half apart, rather than double spaced. Double spacing occurs only between the paragraphs.
• The writer incorrectly cites the quotation in the first paragraph. She identifies it as a line from the second paragraph but it’s actually a line from the third. Later in the essay she twice confuses the sixth and seventh paragraphs.
• The second paragraph includes an instance of passive voice. The line “hope is introduced when Heller meets her new teacher” should be rewritten in active voice as “Keller introduces hope when she meets her new teacher.”
• Three times in the essay, the writer refers to Keller’s teacher as “Ms. Sullivan” rather than “Miss Sullivan.” That inaccuracy and the misidentification of paragraphs indicate that writer has not carefully examined her subject, which is the primary aim of analysis.
• The writer repeatedly uses the word “this” in place of “that” or “the.” In formal prose, writers should use “this” only to refer to something at hand.
• The writer begins the final paragraph with the phrase “in conclusion,” which can be a useful signal in an oral presentation. However, readers can see when they have reached the final paragraph of a text. Rather than writing the empty phrase “in conclusion,” or some variation on it, the writer offer an insight about the chapter or an additional quotation from it. Other strategies for developing your conclusion include revisiting the thesis without stating it verbatim and pointing to the broader implications of the analysis. Those are more subtle ways to provide closure.

Work Cited

Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. “Seems to Be About X, But Could Also Be (Or is ‘Really’) About Y.” Writing Analytically, 9th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2024. pp. 104-7.