Hi guys! Only ONE MORE WEEK before spring break! Also it's the last week of our setting unit, and it marks the exact halfway point of our semester. Once you turn in your final draft of the essay, you will officially be fifty percent of the way done with your Composition 2 course! Exciting stuff. In this blog post, I will cover:
Debriefing the First Drafts of the Setting and Context Research EssaysDebriefing is when I give general feedback to you guys. I wanted to start the week off pinpointing a few specific struggles that I saw more than once in our first drafts. These are things I want all of us to keep in mind as we develop our second drafts. So here we go:
Setting CreationThis week, we get to add to my other favorite thing to grade and teach—the creative piece of the class. Remember how the last week of Unit 1 you developed a main character? You gave them a name, a family, a job, and a place to live. Now we're really going to think about that place a little harder. These are the questions you'll be addressing in your Blackboard assignment. I recommend going back and rereading your Character Notes that you submitted and going from there. Remember, it is absolutely 100 percent okay to change up your setting.
Setting and Cultural Context Essay Final Draft RubricI will be assessing these elements that I looked at in your first drafts:
And I will also be assessing for:
Unit 2 PoetryWhen I'm designing our Units, I think of them visually. Kind of like an outline for a paper, I guess. If you really spend some time gazing intently at the calendar section of our syllabus, you will notice there is a kind of order to things, and the order is this:
Within those four weeks, each Unit is divided like so:
Everybody's brain is different, but I, personally, derive probably too much satisfaction from the symmetry of it all. Anyways, I want to give a little blog space to the poems from this Unit that we've looked at in class. They can also be found in the Readings folder in Blackboard (same goes for the Unit 1 poems we looked at). Just in case you ever desperately need to revisit one. We talked about how the very specific setting of the poem, a field of daffodils in the Lake District of England, helped the speaker of the poem redefine was solitude meant for him and awakened beauty in the still moments of his life long after he was no longer physically in the daffodil field. Then we talked just a little about Romanticism as a artistic and literary movement, and how one of its tenants was the celebration of beauty in nature. We looked at the lyrics of this song, noticed how they also seemed to celebrate nature, and picked up on a tone of nostalgia, wistfulness, also solitude, even sorrow. We checked out the explicit shout out to Wordsworth himself. Then we considered the cultural context and discussed how knowing that the song was written in the summer of 2020 when COVID lockdowns were in full swing changed or deepened or altered the meaning of the lyrics. These are the same skills you are focusing on in your papers, but at a bigger scale. This week we are going to look at a British ex-pat living in France. We are going to visit another cafe (just now realizing I definitely have a thing for European cafes and it shows). But instead of being presented as a haven, like in Hemingway's "Clean Well-Lighted Place," this cafe is basically a horror show. Where could this gruesomeness come from I wonder? How would it have been perceived differently by the original readers in 1914? (spoiler alert: war. again.) Nobody in this world is going to convince me that "Hotel California" isn't a 1970's glamor gothic reimagining of Stoker's "Dracula" and also Milton's "Paradise Lost," but I sure wish someone would try. Since that doesn't seem very likely, I'm going to tell you guys all about it, and we'll look especially at how the setting transforms the speaker. Songs are poems, turns out. Welcome to the last week of our first Unit! Also the first week where you will be doing some of your own creative work (I'm so excited!). This blog post covers:
Your Mini-Character BiosRemember how on the first day of class I said that we would be writing a short story together? Well, this week is the week that we begin. It will be a semester-long project, and this week you will begin creating your main character by filling out Mini-Bios that look like this: Mini-Bio for Key Characters Name: Age: Birthplace: Marital Status: Children and their ages: General Appearance: Living arrangements: Occupation, including name of employer/school if applicable: Degree of skill at occupation: Character's feelings about his occupation: Family background (whatever you think is important): The inspiration for your characters can come from all over—people in your life, other characters you've encountered in books and movies, and of course, that character we all know the best, ourselves. Pretty sure Hemingway based his main character in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" on himself. I might have already told you guys this, but I'm working on the second draft of a historical novel. As I've been revisiting and rewriting ALL 80,000 WORDS OF MY MANUSCRIPT (1,000 words doesn't seem so bad in comparison, right?), one of the things I've realized is that a very important supporting character is kind of flat. So I've been working on developing him. Here's an example of his mini-bio: My Example Mini-Bio: Name: Edward Connors Age and Birthday: 24 years old, born February 12, 1931 Birthplace: Leeds, England Marital Status: single (wink, wink) Children and their ages: No kids, but he has two older brothers who work in construction in Leeds General Appearance: Tall, dark hair, kind of lanky, pointy nose, always raising his eyes and wrinkling his forehead Living arrangements: During the archeological excavation season, Edward lives in the rooms at the British Archeological Society in Athens and travels to various dig sites throughout Greece. During the off-season, he lives back home in his parents' flat in Leeds and does drafting work for the local construction companies, especially the one that employs the rest of his family. Occupation, including name of employer/school if applicable: Edward graduated with a first-class degree in Architecture from Oxford University, with a specialization in ancient structures and historical engineering techniques. On the archeological digs in Greece, he works as a site architect to draft out and reconstruct ancient buildings from ruins left behind. Degree of skill at occupation: He's good, but he's gotten as far as he has mostly because of his charm and charisma. Character's feelings about his occupation: Edward wants to secure funding to run his own excavations. He's very ambitious for both money and prestige, and he feels unfairly trapped by the stigma associated with his lower class origins. He's got a chip on his shoulder. Family background (whatever you think is important): His whole family speaks in a heavy North England accent that Edward rinsed from his own speech at Oxford. Sometimes, when he's really angry or emotional, his vowels get elongated and his regional accent comes out. Edward really, really hates it when this happens. Strategies for Developing your First DraftsSo, you have the first drafts of your character analysis essays done and dusted. Now you just need to graft 500 more meaningful words onto the structure you've already built. Here are some of the ways you could go about doing this:
Expectations for Peer EditingThis week, we'll be working with our peer editors for the first time. Here are some guidelines and expectations for this:
Please remember: It is a privilege to be able to read another writer's work. In my experience, I learn at least as much from thinking about other people's work as I do when I think about my own work. You just might find the answer to a question you have in your classmate's essay. After all, it's really just another model text you can learn from. Also remember: The purpose of these editing sessions are to help build content and word count. As peer editors, we are mostly looking for opportunities for the writer to expand, as opposed to places where they forgot to put a comma or something. Here are some ways that editors can begin helpful conversations about the essay:
Rubric for the Final Draft of your Character Analysis EssaysYou are going to be assessed again on the same four elements from your first draft, which were:
This way, if you got dinged on one these areas, you will have an opportunity to look at your work again and strengthen it. You will also be assessed on one additional criteria, which is:
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