Today in class, we will examine Ian Falconer’s New Yorker magazine cover The Competition and a second visual text: Tetsuya Ishida’s painting Seedlings. Following our in-class study of Falconer’s and Ishida’s artwork, you will choose one of the two visual texts to serve as the subject of a writing exercise–a paragraph of summary and a second paragraph of commentary–as practice in your ongoing annotation work.
Examining Ian Falconer’s magazine cover and a second visual text, which you will receive a copy of in class, offers you both a break from long written articles and additional practice in summarizing and analyzing.
If the style of Ian Falconer’s New Yorker cover seems familiar to you, it may be because you encountered his work when you were a child. His book Olivia, published in 2000, received the 2001 Caldecott Medal, an award the Association for Library Service to Children bestows upon the book they deem the best children’s picture book of the year. Falconer followed Olivia with several sequels, including Olivia Saves the Circus and Olivia Helps with Christmas.
Last Thursday’s Bonus
Kudos to Jermaine Cain, Ewan Paterson, and Sierra Welch for providing the correct answer to Thursday’s question regarding the citation generators on the HPU Libraries site and the JSTOR page for “The Ethics of Laughter.”
The citation generator on the HPU Libraries site offers only the publication information for “The Ethics of Laughter” because a searcher viewing it there has not accessed a copy of the article through a database. Only on the JSTOR page will the citation generator offer the complete bibliographic information required for the article accessed through JSTOR.
Though the citation generated on the JSTOR page offers the complete bibliographic information, it still requires editing. The authors’ names should not be in all caps, and the entry lacks a hanging indent.
For examples, see the bibliographic entries for sources accessed from databases in my sample bibliography and the model entry on the MLA Style Center site.
Next Up
At the beginning of class on Wednesday, we will revisit The Competition and Seedlings, and you will have the remainder of the period to devote to your ongoing research and writing. In class, you will receive a handout that outlines your options, including, but not limited to, locating additional sources and revising annotations.
Bonus Assignment
Ian Falconer’s The Competition–and more than thirty other covers drawn by him–were featured on the front of The New Yorker, a magazine where two pieces of writing you’ve studied this semester were first published. Which two are they? If you have taken notes on all your readings, well, your response should be swift.
Directions
- Determine which two previous class readings originally appeared in the pages of The New Yorker.
- Compose a comment of one complete sentence or more that names the authors of both texts and presents the titles in quotation marks.
- Post your comment as a reply to this blog entry no later than 5 p.m. tomorrow, Tuesday, March 31. (To post your comment, click on the post’s title, and scroll down to the bottom of the page. You will then see the image of an airmail envelope with a leave comment option.)
I will approve your comments (make them visible) after tomorrow’s deadline.
Jane Lucas 