Tag: Helen Keller

Posted in English 1103, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: More Thoughts on Further Study

Posted on by janemlucas

Tuesday’s blog post includes a sample annotated bibliographic entry for a research project devoted to David Sedaris’s writing. Today’s post features a second sample, one for a study of Helen Keller’s prose. As you continue to compile your own bibliography, look to this sample and Tuesday’s sample as models. Also refer to the samples in the model paper that I distributed in class yesterday and posted to Blackboard.

Note that the sample below lacks the indentations that will appear in the entries in your MS Word and PDF files. The first section of the bibliographic entry, the publication information, will have a hanging indent. The first lines of the summary and commentary paragraphs that follow will be indented five spaces or one-half inch.

Sample Annotated Bibliographic Entry

Werner, Marta L. “Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan: Writing Otherwise.” Textual Cultures, vol. 5, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1-45. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2979/tex.2010.5.1.1. Accessed 7 Nov. 2024.

In “Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan: Writing Otherwise,” Marta L. Werner traces the evolution of Keller’s writing from the words she first spelled with her fingers to the typewritten narratives she later produced. Werner observes that the typewriter enabled Keller “to translate the private tactile language of finger spelling into the public, visual code of print” (14).

Werner is a professor of English and the Svalgic Chair in Textual Studies at Loyola University Chicago. She is the author of several book-length studies of Emily Dickinson’s and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writing, most recently The Master Hours of Emily Dickinson (2021). “Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan: Writing Otherwise” illuminates the differences between Keller’s early and later modes of writing and demonstrates how the latter gave her private world a public life. In Werner’s words, “without a typewriter, it seems entirely possible that she would not have become an autobiographer” (16).

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.

Posted in English 1103, Reading, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: Model Literacy Narratives

Posted on by janemlucas

As a model for your own literacy narratives, today in class we will examine “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” originally published in Esquire magazine and later as the title essay in David Sedaris’ 2000 essay collection.

After we read  Sedaris’ essay, you will collaborate in groups of four to complete an exercise that involves exploring these aspects of his writing:

  • Shifts from summary to scene and vice versa
  • Figurative language
  • Hyperbole
  • Vivid detail

I will also ask you to consider what elements are the strongest aspects of the essay and whether “Me Talk Pretty One Day” has given you any ideas for developing your own narrative. Time permitting, we will also read Helen Keller’s essay “The Day Language Came into My Life.”

To read more of Sedaris’ essays, see the list of links under the heading Writing and Radio on his website. You can read more of Helen Keller’s autobiography, the full text in fact, here: The Story of My Life. “The Day Language Came into My Life” is Chapter Four.

Next Up

For Wednesday you should read Keller’s essay (if you don’t have time to read it in class today), and compose a short summary of both her essay and Sedaris.’ Aim for a minimum of fifty words each.

Keep Keller’s and Sedaris’ essays in your pocket portfolio and continue to look to them as models as you revise your literacy narrative. You will receive your draft with my notes at the beginning of Wednesday’s class, and you will have the class period to continue to revise. You will have an additional week to devote to your essay before you post it. It is due (on Blackboard and on your WordPress blog) before class the morning of Wednesday, September 14; the hard deadline is the morning of Friday, September 16.