Open Letter Assignment

Formatting: Business Letter formatting, single-spaced, 1-inch margins, Times New Roman 12 pt. font  (-5 points for incorrect formatting)

Length: 150 word maximum for pitch and 750 word maximum for the op-ed organized into 2 – 3 solid paragraphs

Bibliographic Documentation: Evidence and sources should be consulted and referenced as appropriate for the selected publication; thorough in-text citation is generally sufficient for newspapers and magazines.

Overview

A writer’s motivation to compose a personal narrative is for her or himself: to remember, to reflect, to meditate, for catharsis; but a writer’s motivation is also to create an effect on her or his audience: to entertain, to educate, to move the reader. In our next unit, we will focus on a genre of essays with one clear intention: to persuade. We will work specifically with the ‘open letter’ genre. An open letter is written specifically toward an individual or finite group of people, but published to a large, indiscriminate audience. Therefore, you have two audiences for your open letter: the specific individual or group addressed and the larger reading public. Often an open letter is written to draw focus to the letter’s recipient, whether to publicly shame the recipient or to force her or him to action. As you prepare to compose your open letters, we will read several examples in the genre that employ a variety of tones and argumentation styles.

The Task

Your task is two-fold. The central task is to write the open letter, using the tools of argument we will learn in this unit to make an argument of your choice to the recipient of your choice. You will also research a suitable publication that would have an interest in your open letter. As far as what publication and recipient you choose, I leave it almost entirely to your discretion. My requirements are that 1) you enjoy reading the publication you write for; and 2) you care passionately about your argument.

Before you write for a publication though, you have to sell your idea to the publication you want to write for – you have to ‘pitch’ to the editor. Therefore, the other component of this assignment is to write a pitch letter to the editor of the publication you choose. In order to complete the task, you must: 1) Find the appropriate editor to pitch to (look on the publication website/first pages for the masthead); and 2) Tell the editor what you want to write about, why it’s timely, why their readership will care about your voice, and why you are the right person to write it; and 3) make it quick, 150 words. Editors are busy, so get right to the point.

Lyric Research Essay

Prose genres have been blurred all along…..The essay is, and has been, all over the map. There’s nothing you cannot do with it; no subject matter is forbidden, no structure is proscribed. You get to make up your own structure every time, a structure that arises from the materials and best contains them.

-Annie Dillard

Formatting: Single-spaced, one-inch margins, Times New Roman, 12 pt. font, the rough draft emailed to me as an attachment in either .doc, .docx, or .rtf format (-5 points for incorrect formatting)

Length: 4 – 5 pages single-spaced

Bibliographic Documentation: A Works Cited page is required in MLA format. You will need to reference a minimum of ten sources altogether, including primary and secondary sources.

Overview

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the definition of “lyric” pertains to or is adapted from the lyre. A lyric is meant to be sung, and is characteristic of song. “Lyric” is now used as the name for short poems that directly express the poet’s own thoughts and sentiments. “Essay”is the action or process of trying or testing.

Therefore, a lyric essay is exploratory. Your essay should be thought of as an attempt. I’m not asking for a report. Rather, I’d like you to delve into researching a topic that passionately interests you. You should start with a set of questions to guide you research, and you should end with a set of more sophisticated questions for further research and consideration. You’re trying to complicate your and your readers’ thinking about the subject.

A lyric essay is also inclusive. In your essay, you may include lists, poems, found materials, song lyrics, advertisements, correspondences, quotes from experts, family recipes, or whatever else might add to your overall argument or point or meditation.

And a lyric essay is factual. In my opinion, the most interesting research essays often incorporate verifiable facts about the world while at the same time eschewing the pretense of objectivity—hence the “lyric” in lyric essay. Make your essay a subjective attempt to better understand your topic, and show me this process on paper. I want an essay in which you look at yourself looking at texts and at the world these texts describe. This is only possible if you choose a topic that interests you.

To better explain the lyric research essay, I include here the words of Deborah Tall and John D’Agata, editor and associate editor for Lyric Essays.

With its Fall 1997 issue, Seneca Review began to publish what we’ve chosen to call the lyric essay. The recent burgeoning of creative nonfiction and the personal essay has yielded a fascinating sub-genre that straddles the essay and the lyric poem. These “poetic essays” or “essayistic poems” give primacy to artfulness over the conveying of information. They forsake narrative line, discursive logic, and the art of persuasion in favor of idiosyncratic meditation.

The lyric essay partakes of the poem in its density and shapeliness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language. It partakes of the essay in its weight, in its overt desire to engage with facts, melding its allegiance to the actual with its passion for imaginative form.

The lyric essay does not expound. It may merely mention. As Helen Vendler says of the lyric poem, “It depends on gaps…It is suggestive rather than exhaustive.” It might move by association, leaping from one path of thought to another by way of imagery or connotation, advancing by juxtaposition or sidewinding poetic logic. Generally it is short, concise, and punchy like a prose poem. But it may meander, making use of other genres when they serve its purpose: recombinant, it samples the techniques of fiction, drama, journalism, song, and film.

Given its genre mingling, the lyric essay often accretes by fragments, taking shape mosaically—its import visible only when one stands back and sees it whole. The stories it tells may be no more than metaphors. Or, story-less, it may spiral in on itself, circling the core of a single image or idea, without climax, without a paraphrasable theme. The lyric essay stalks its subject like quarry but is never content to merely explain or confess. It elucidates through the dance of its own delving.

Loyal to that original sense of essay as a test or a quest, an attempt at making sense, the lyric essay sets off on an uncharted course through interlocking webs of idea, circumstance, and language—a pursuit with no foreknown conclusion, an arrival that might still leave the writer questioning. While it is ruminative, it leaves pieces of experience undigested and tacit, inviting the reader’s participatory interpretation. Its voice, spoken from a privacy that we overhear and enter, has the intimacy we have come to expect in the personal essay. Yet in the lyric essay the voice is often more reticent, almost coy, aware of the compliment it pays the reader by dint of understatement.

What has pushed the essay so close to poetry? Perhaps we’re drawn to the lyric now because it seems less possible (and rewarding) to approach the world through the front door, through the myth of objectivity. The life span of a fact is shrinking; similitude often seems more revealing than verisimilitude. We turn to the artist to re-concoct meaning from the bombardments of experience, to shock, thrill, still the racket, and tether our attention.

We turn to the lyric essay—with its malleability, ingenuity, immediacy, complexity, and use of poetic language—to give us a fresh way to make music of the world. But we must be willing to go out on an artistic limb with these writers, keep our balance on their sometimes vertiginous byways. Anne Carson, in her essay on the lyric, “Why Did I Awake Lonely Among the Sleepers” (Published in Seneca Review Vol. XXVII, no. 2) quotes Paul Celan. What he says of the poem could well be said of the lyric essay: “The poem holds its ground on its own margin…. The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it.”

If the reader is willing to walk those margins, there are new worlds to be found.

The Task

You will fashion your own lyric research essay. We will read several such essays for class, and I will upload some examples onto e-learning. You’ll be graded on the following criteria:

Form/Content

How well does the form of the essay match its content? For example, in Priscilla Long’s “Genome Tome,” she uses twenty-three short sections to mirror the twenty-three pairs of human chromosomes. An essay about food might take on the form of a recipe; an essay about tennis might be a dialogue between two voices, mimicking the back-and-forth of tennis matches; an essay about poetry might be written in verse—you’ll find the form that best suits your subject.

Argument

Your thesis should be implied rather than specific. The essay should make an original statement about the subject, which is only possible after close research and careful consideration.

Research

Learn to seek out information that enables you to write. Make it apparent to me in your essay that you’ve done the research. How you incorporate that research into your lyric essay I leave to your interpretation.

MLA Works Cited

By the final draft, you are required to include ten sources, a mixture of primary and secondary research. Be creative! How could primary sources like songs, paintings, sculpture, architecture, poetry, political documents, and novels provide context? We will spend substantial class time discussing various venues for research and MLA Works Cited format.

Metacognitive Writing Log

In lieu of a reflection, you’ll provide me with this document, which will give me the dates and times of research and composition as well as a brief summary of the progress made in these sessions. Be honest and, if you prefer, informal. If you do all your research and writing in one day, then tell me so.

*Thanks to Keith Carver who gave me this assignment.

Ethos, Logos, and Pathos Prewrite

I will begin my persuasive writing unit with a day devoted to teaching ethos, pathos, and logos. On this day in class, I will ask them to begin thinking about ethos, logos, and pathos, without yet having the terms, by throwing this thinking exercise on the board.

Exercise

Pretend you are in a debate with someone over a controversial social or political issue. You strongly favor one side, and your opponent strongly favors the opposite. Now answer the following questions…

1)What credentials could your opponent have that would make you listen to him or her?

2)What facts or statistics could he or she provide that might sway your opinion?

3)What stories could he or she tell that would change your mind?

Answering “nothing” to the above questions doesn’t count!

*Thanks to Dani Ryskamp who gave me this prompt.

Poetry Analysis Exercise

Thanks to Emilia Phillips for this!

Emilia Phillips

Détail de la carte de Montréal de 1859 faisant ressortir Pointe Saint-Charles.
Class: Intro to Creative Writing
Genre: Poetry
Readings: A poetry packet featuring the poems listed below
Time: 30 minutes

Group 1: “Wherever My Dead Go When I’m Not Remembering Them” (Shapiro) and “In the Waiting Room” (Bishop)
Group 2: “Perpetually Attempting to Soar” (Ruefle) and “The Lovers of the Poor” (Brooks)
Group 3: “Your Wild Domesticated Inner Life” (Banias) and “Dorothy’s Trash:” (Johnson)
Group 4: “My Story in a Late Style of Fire” (Levis) and “The Day Lady Died” (O’Hara)
Group 5: “The Mare of Money” (Reeves) and “In Colorado My Father Scoured and Stacked Dishes” (Corral)
Group 6: “Scrabble with Matthews” (Wojahn) and “Ode to Browsing the Web” (Wicker)
Group 7: “The streetlamp above me darkens” (Faizullah) and “A Pornography” (Rekdal)
Group 8: “To a Fig Tree on 9th and Christian” (Gay) and “Animals Are Passing From…

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“Bluets” Exercise

A wonderful prompt by my friend Emilia Phillips

Emilia Phillips

“Dead City III (City on the Blue River III)” (1911) by Egon Schiele
Class: Writing Out of the Ordinary
Genre: Poetry/Nonfiction
Readings: Maggie Nelson’s Bluets
Time: 30 minutes

Identify one thing you have been obsessed with for quite some time.

Detail a direct encounter with that thing. Be as descriptive as possible.

Name the first person you can think of who is missing from your life.

Write down something you never told them. (A confession, an idea, a story, etcetera.)

Remind that person of something you did together. Tell the narrative.

Is there a connection between the thing and the person? Explain.

Write down the first thing and then write the next five words that come to your mind in an associative chain from one word to the next.

Now pick one of those things on the list and write about an encounter you had with that thing.

Repeat previous…

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Unfamiliar Genre Project or Creative Writing Assignment

Formatting: Single-spaced, one-inch margins, Times New Roman, 12 pt. font in e-learning Dropbox (-5 points for incorrect formatting)

Length: 1) One 2 – 3 page analytical research essay AND 2) One short story 3000 or more words long OR four poems of substantial length

Bibliographic Documentation: Include a Works Cited page and in-text parenthetic end note citation for both paraphrased and directly quoted material. You will want to cite and do a close reading of specific lines or passages in the three poems or two short stories you’ve chosen to analyze.

Overview

In work and in life, we are often called upon to decipher and produce in unfamiliar genres. Have you ever had to learn the interface and lingo of a new social media site? Have you produced a report for an internship, job, or class unlike any report you’d written before? Have you expanded your usual music or movie tastes into alternative genres? In the fourth unit, we’ll explore the thought process you undergo whenever you’re called upon to learn and produce in an unfamiliar genre.

For this class, we will purposefully limit ourselves to poetry and short stories. You will choose a poet or short story writer from a provided list to research and critique, and you will create a portfolio of your own original poetry OR a short story that incorporates formal influences you’ve analyzed in your poet or short story writer’s work. As a class, we will read and discuss different writers’ work in both poetry and short stories, identifying the unities and differences within the work, and thus isolating and analyzing specific conventions of each genre so that you will have the tools to imitate those conventions in your own writing.We will also explore larger concepts surrounding “genre,” including the boundaries and blurring between genres, the evolution of genre in the digital age, and critical influence over genre.

The Task

This project will consist of two parts: 1) an evaluation of your writer’s work and style and a brief biography, and 2) an original short story or a packet of original poetry.

Analytical Research Essay: 50 Points

For this component of the project, you will draft a 2 – 3 page essay that presents the following:

1. A brief, half-page biography of your writer
2. An evaluation of fiction or poetic conventions and style by analyzing two short stories or three poems written by your chosen writer

This paper should not focus entirely on your writer’s biography. Instead, this paper should devote the majority of time to a critical analysis and discussion of two short stories or three poems written by the poet. I will be looking for how well you dissect each story or poem, identify conventions your writer uses, and compare and contrast the stories or poems you’ve chosen. Essentially, this essay should be a very detailed and critical reading response. What makes your writer unique? How would you define your writer’s style? What conventions do they use? Identify those conventions by quoting certain lines or sentences. What themes or messages does your writer often employ? For complete credit in this area, you will need to cite and quote certain lines, images, and passages from the poems or stories you’ve chosen to discuss. MLA formatting is required for this essay, including in-text parenthetic citation and a Works Cited page. I am more interested in hearing your personal analysis and interpretation of the primary texts than research on the texts.

You will find books by all of the assigned writers available in Course Reserves. If you’d like to write about a poet or short story writer who’s not on the list, I’m more than happy to work with you—just come to me with your suggestion as soon as possible.

Creative Portfolio: 50 Points

For this component, students will be responsible for writing and compiling ONE original short story that is at least 3000 words long or FOUR original poems. Your portfolio MUST display conventions that you have made explicit in your critical analysis. I highly recommend that you are versatile in your use of conventions, rather than employing the same conventions in a formulaic fashion. If you choose poetry, two of your four poems should be explicit pastiches of your chosen poet’s style. I will grade this component on obvious, considerable effort, and your successful identification and application of convention. Push yourselves! I want to see poems of thirty lines or longer. To receive full credit in this area, you must share a portion of your short story or a couple of your poems out loud.

Last but not least: you will be using the research that you have already compiled for your Research Essay to inspire your poetry or short story. If you are writing a short story, then you will write a story from the perspective of a minor character or bystander to your historical event. Therefore, you will be writing a story in the first-person perspective or the limited third-person perspective. If you are writing poetry, then you will write a series of persona poems or poems that somehow incorporate your research in at least two of the poems. I have purposefully chosen my list of poets and short story writers to feature writers who use research to inform historical characterization.

Developing a Working Knowledge

I don’t want to dissuade my students from using Wikipedia for creating a basic working knowledge of their research essay subject. I find that setting aside thirty minutes in class to dive down the Wikipedia rabbit hole sets the groundwork for more specific keyword searches when we turn to more scholarly search engines and databases.

Exercise

Take the next thirty minutes to do a ‘Wikipedia hunt’ – look up your subject of interest, then follow the links at the bottom to related subjects. Write down new subjects you come across in your journal. Write down names and places pivotal to your subject. Look at the bibliographic information at the bottom of the Wikipedia page if you see any websites, articles, or books referenced that pique your interest.

Annotated Bibliography for Secondary Sources

Formatting: Single-spaced, one-inch margins, Times New Roman, 12 pt. font (-5 points for incorrect formatting)

Length: 2 – 3 pages single-spaced

Bibliographic Documentation: Include the Works Cited information for the source at the beginning of the annotated bibliography and in-text parenthetic end note citation for both paraphrased and directly quoted material.

The Task

To write a quality research paper, the first step is to take thorough notes on the sources you will use to support your thesis. You will compose three Annotated Bibliographies on credible secondary sources that summarize the theses and evidence your sources provide. You will focus on thinking critically about each source’s credibility, rather than reading with blind faith. It is helpful to choose your sources and write your Annotated Bibliographies with a research question in mind, but not an already-crafted thesis statement. Be open to the conclusions where your research takes you. Your annotated bibliographies will serve as the basis for your Review of the Literature assignment.

Please respond thoroughly in your annotated bibliographies to the following questions and tasks:

1) Who wrote the article? Where did they study and where do they work or teach now? What else have they written and where have they published? How extensive is their Works Cited? Basically, what is the author’s ethos?

2) Where did you find the source? If you found it in a periodical, what is the agenda and reputation of the journal or magazine? Is it peer-reviewed? If you found it in a book, what reviews did the book receive? Cite the reviews that you find on the book. If it’s a chapter in an anthology, what is the anthology’s agenda and organization, as found in the preface? How long ago was the source written and published? Is there any more recent scholarship that challenges the author’s thesis?

3) Summarize the source, focusing particularly on paraphrasing the author’s thesis statement and outlining the evidence the author uses to support his or her argument. Answer the following questions to guide your summary:

• What do you think is the thesis of the source? Paraphrase and/or directly quote it.
• At what point in the source did you identify the thesis?
• State in your own words what you think the author’s position is.
• Outline the structure of the source. If it is an article in a periodical, what are the topic sentences of the paragraphs? If it is a book, what are the chapter titles, and how is the book organized?
• What are the author’s justifications (readings, logic, evidence, etc.) for taking the positions that he or she does?
• List the main points of the source.
• List the types of supporting evidence given in the source.
• What do you think is the strongest evidence for the author’s position? Why?
• What do you think is the weakest evidence for the author’s position? Why?
• What do you find most compelling about the source?          
• After reading the paper, do you agree or disagree with the writer’s position? Why or why not?
• As a member of the intended audience, what questions would you have after reading the paper?

4) Pull out particularly insightful, evidential, or representative quotations and cite the page number. Be careful to choose quotations that are “un-paraphraseable,” meaning that you couldn’t say them as well in your own words. Analyze why you chose these particular quotations.

*Remember to include the source’s Works Cited entry at the top of the page!

Review of the Literature

Formatting: Single-spaced, 1 inch margins, Times New Roman, 12 pt. font, attached in an email to me in either .doc, .docx, or .rtf format (-5 points for incorrect formatting)

Length: 3 pages single-spaced

Bibliographic Documentation: Parenthetic in-text citations and works cited pages are required. You’ll need to reference a minimum of four sources.

Overview

A Review of the Literature is a research report that investigates a topic of inquiry by reviewing the scholarship that others have written on the topic. You’ll work from your Annotated Bibliographies to identify what is being said and what is not being said on the topic, and then you’ll draw specific conclusions with regard to your own research.

The Task

Your task for this assignment is to compose a Review of the Literature that addresses your chosen historical event. After reading primary and secondary scholarly sources from a variety of perspectives and summarizing those sources in Annotated Bibliographies, you will compare and contrast the authors’ theses and evidence. Then you will enter into the conversation as well. In essence, you’ll address the following questions: What are the different perspectives on this event? What have scholars said and not yet said about this event? Do my primary sources corroborate what my secondary sources have argued? What specific problems or questions do I find to be unresolved? What answers do I propose to remedy these questions, and why do I propose them?

Research Paper

Formatting: Single-spaced, one-inch margins, Times New Roman, 12 pt. font, the rough draft emailed to me as an attachment in either .doc, .docx, or .rtf format (-5 points for incorrect formatting)

Length: 3 – 4 pages single-spaced

Bibliographic Documentation: Parenthetic in-text citations and works cited pages are required. You’ll need to reference a minimum of four sources: three credible (a.k.a. peer-reviewed) secondary sources and one primary source.

Overview

In the third unit, we will build upon the persuasive techniques we learned in the second unit to write a piece of public writing for an academic audience. As burgeoning experts in your field of inquiry, you are part of the conversation: it’s your academic responsibility to be well-versed and up-to-date on the scholarship in your field. As such, you are also qualified to add your interpretation to the conversation. You will first focus on understanding the state of scholarship on your topic, then work to address holes in that scholarship with your own paper, thus working inductively. You’ll enter into the research essay with the spirit of inquiry, writing to discover rather than prove what you already know. As you prepare to compose our research essays, we’ll explore as a class different argumentation styles, uses of evidence, ways to access different sources, and the validity of personal opinion within academic writing.

The Task

Your task for this assignment is to compose a research essay on a specific historical event of your choosing. You will build your knowledge of the historical event by reading secondary sources about that event and primary sources like newspaper articles, crime reports, or interviews. To better engage with your reading, you will complete a series of premeditative writings: four Annotated Bibliographies and a Review of the Literature that brings those sources into conversation with one another. Working from your Review of the Literature, you will then construct a thesis and build an evidential argument in your research essay to persuade your audience of that thesis. My only requirements for your thesis are 1) that your thesis is sufficiently narrow to cover in 3 – 4 single-spaced pages; 2) that your thesis holds stake for some readers; 3) that your genre holds enough interest for you to think about it intensively for the second half of the semester; and 4) that your thesis is contestable (i.e. it has a valid counter-argument).