Morning! Just a heads-up: there's a cold front coming this evening. Friday and Saturday are supposed to be lovely. We should all consider breaking up with our computers (temporarily) and going outside. My brother whose lives in Austin and I started this thing where we identify different trees around us. I'm going to be on the hunt for a Chinquapin oak. Please remember, you need a copy of The Blind Assassin by Monday. In this blog, I'll discuss:
The Importance of ShiftsAs we read The Blind Assassin (or anything else), I'd like us to start training our brains to focus in on the shifts. What I mean when I say shifts is:
Poetry is a good place to start looking for shifts. Language is typically so dense in poems, that each line has the ability to overturn all the expectations built in the preceding lines. Novels are also a good place to look for shifts, especially shifts in the how the character relates to the events of a story. Think about how the internal shifts in the main character of "Bloodchild" affected his decisions, which in turn affected the events of the plot. We get to see these shifts operating on a wider, richer scale in a novel, so be on the look-out for them. Writing Workshops: On Selecting a Piece of Writing to ShareI think I've said this already to you all, but having the dedicated eyes of an invested reader of your work is a precious thing. Starting on Monday, we should all have at least three sets of eyes looking at and thinking about our written words. You get to choose what to share with your fellow workshoppers. You an choose to discuss some of your analytical writing from class, a college essay, a piece of writing from another class, or a creative piece you've written. Here's some things to consider as you decide:
Debriefing DJ's: More on ClaimsTime to add to our growing list of pointers on claims. Here are a few more things to consider:
1. Steer away from long quotes in the claim. The place for long quotes is in the body of the text, not in the claim. Student Example: In her poem “Pilgrimage,” Natasha Tretheway uses the metaphor “Here, the Mississippi carved its mud-dark path, a graveyard for skeletons of sunken ships,” to compare the Mississippi river to a graveyard in order to display its dark history in connection to the violence and fatalities of the Civil War. Stronger revised claim: In her poem "Pilgrimage," Natasha Tretheway uses metaphor to compare the Mississippi river to a graveyard in order to display its dark history in connection to the violence and fatalities of the Civil War. 2. Try to stay away from pronouns in a claim. Also demonstrative adjectives. Remember when I said that every word in the claim has to hold weight, has to do work? Pronouns don't hold enough meaning. The don't do enough work. Student Example: In Natasha Trethewey’s “Pilgrimage” she is using this metaphor to symbolize how they are on ground that claimed the lives of hundreds of men, and annually relive it. The meaning of this claim is completely obscured by vague language, courtesy of pronouns and demonstrative adjectives. Let's end by looking at another example of a super-awesome student claim: In his poem “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”, Robert Frost makes use of repetition in the final two lines of the poem to put emphasis on the theme of persistence and dictating the pace of one’s life instead of allowing life to run you over. Comments are closed.
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AuthorI'm a Houston high school teacher. Welcome to my adapted, socially-distanced, quarantined AP English Literature and Composition classroom. Archives
May 2021
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