A NOTE ON COMMUNICATIONS

This course in Freshman Composition asks that you write six formal papers, revise three of your choice again at the end of the course, and submit all nine in a portfolio.  A description of the portfolio and recommendations about revising will be provided at the appropriate time. The assignments listed as Communications are tested and tried writing assignments, but they are not compulsory--if you can invent an assignment of your choice which will be sufficiently demanding to replace the assignment I have provided, you can suggest it in consultation with me and, if I approve it, write a different paper.   The chief thing that I insist on is that the early papers focus on personal experience and narrative, the later papers on other people's experiences and/or ideas and analysis.

COMMUNICATION #1: AN ESSAY ON IDENTITY

Identity is the theme of the first paper you will write in this course, but that doesn't mean that the paper should be called "My Identity" or begin with a sentence like "The principal aspect of my identity that most people notice is my . . . "  Rather, identity is something that is established by the role you play in the stories you tell about your experiences in life, your memories of growing up, your interactions with other people, the events that were influences on the development of your character or had an impact on the ways you have lived your life.  By now you and your classmates have had at least eighteen years of living, of growing up, playing with other children, going to school, living in a community, being involved in activities ranging from working at a job to pursuing a hobby, from making and losing friends to having romances to experiencing adventures.  Identity is what you acquire virtually without realizing you've acquired it.

Write an essay focusing on an experience that was important to you, one which centers on a particular incident (or series of incidents) or on a particular activity or experience.  Make the reader understand the significance of this experience for you by showing your behavior through specific action and speech--dramatizing or narrating--rather than by declaring what your attitude was and making general references to it.  The incident(s) described should be detailed enough for the general reader that you don't need to provide an elaborate explanation in addition to your story telling.

The paper should be three to six pages long (750-1000 words) and follow the format described on the Course Procedures sheet.  The due date is listed on the Course Outline.

COMMUNICATION #2: AN ESSAY ON HERITAGE

         "Heritage" refers either to family history or community history, the stuff of the past from which all of us were somehow formed.  This assignment asks you to explore one aspect of your heritage, taken either from family history or community history.  You can use as your model the feature called "Michigan Memories", a column in The Detroit Free Press  which publishes contributions by readers about events and experiences in the lives of family members.  Usually the column is a retelling of a story about an ancestor, a parent, or a grandparent; often it is a reminiscence by an older person of something that happened in their youth.  Sometimes the stories are about coming to Michigan or growing up in Michigan or experiencing something that has gone out of style.  The point is to tell about some family experience that is in some way connected to Michigan.  In this assignment, of course, you can connect it to anyplace that is appropriate for you.

        The other direction it is possible to go in this assignment is toward community history.  This may involve describing the community in which you or your family live or grew up or narrating stories of incidents and occurrences that influence the lifestyle or the attitudes of people in your community.  In either case it will involve having specific information, examples, and details that reinforce your sense of this aspect of your heritage.

        The paper should be three to six pages long (750-1000 words) and follow the format described at this address:  http://www.chsbs.cmich.edu/Robert_Root/Eng101/Format.htm

        The due date is February 15.

Communication #3: Captioning the Culture

In an early journal entry in this course I asked you to take a photograph of your own, one that you reacted to strongly or one that made you think about what it showed or didn’t show, and write a journal entry about it.  I suggested that such a journal entry might lead to an essay on identity that grew out of captioning your own photographs.

                Now I want to return to the idea of captioning and get you to apply your analytical powers to the close “reading” of one, two, or three pictures you’ve chosen from the culture at large.  We will have examined some images in class—classic photographs, advertising images, website illustrations—and reacted to some advertising and illustrations in journal entries.  All these, as well as the personal captioning you did earlier, will be a way to prepare yourself for this paper.

                Locate one, two, or three images from the culture at large (magazines are a good place to look, perhaps the magazines you subscribe to or read or have available at home) to which you react emotionally, intellectually, artistically, or analytically.  You may pick them because they are illustrations advertising different brands of the same kind of product or different markets for the same brand or because you see a thematic link among the pictures (they are all about community or family or hostile relationships or political situations) or because they contrast with one another so strongly (one picture suggests the way we live now, the other the way we used to live).

                Write a paper in which you describe and analyze the contents and the attitude of one to three pictures, discussing why you selected those pictures to write about, what you see in them, how you react to them, and how they relate to one another.

                The paper will follow the usual guidelines: 3-5 pages (750-100 words), double-spaced, adhering to the final text format outlined at http://www.chsbs.cmich.edu/Robert_Root/Eng101/Format.htm.

Suggestions for This Paper:

                The nature of the paper will partly depend on the nature of the picture or pictures you decide to write about.  It may be possible to write about one picture, but it would have to be a picture that you end up analyzing in such depth that you take 3-5 pages to do it.  It’s more likely that you’ll write about two or three pictures.  In that case take advantage of these suggestions:

• Pick pictures that you react to strongly in some way—pictures that attract you or amuse you or annoy you or unsettle you.  Understanding your reactions to the pictures will lead you to closer, fuller analysis of what you’re seeing.
• Write about what you see in each picture as objectively as you can, with a minimum of interpretation at first.  This will ensure that your biases aren’t getting in the way of your vision.  It will also help to make sure you’re considering every thing in the picture when you make your interpretation.
• Expect to use the contents and moods of one picture as a guide to what to look for in another picture.  Comparing two or more objects very often helps you notice things that you might miss examining only one object.
• Don’t be surprised if you write this in segments that have to be shuffled around—perhaps you’ll write the description of one picture, then the description of another picture, perhaps the description of a third, then go back and forth among the pictures until the description is done, then work on interpretating the pictures based on your descriptions of them, then write the opening of the paper, the transitions among the sections, and the conclusion.  Unlike earlier papers where you could perhaps start at the beginning of a story and go chronologically to the end, or start at the beginning of a scene and go step by step to the end, here you will probably have to work on parts of the paper first and use insertion/deletion, cut and paste, and drag and drop techniques to complete the organization of the paper.
• Further strategies:  This would be a good occasion to write trial outlines from time to time to see where you’re going and, later, where you’ve gotten.  It would also be an occasion to simply write separate sections individually and then merge them later on.

Note: This assignment and Communication #5 are inspired by and derived from America 1900.  You can access the PBS website on the program at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/amex/1900/index.html.

        As a way of getting you started on the research and on the string-saving that will lead to the research paper,  you should compile an annotated bibliography of websites relating to the topic you've chosen.  A bibliography is simply a systematic listing of resources, usually books, articles, and documents, but also other forms of media as well.  An annotation is a description--sometimes simply informational, sometimes evaluative--of an entry in the bibliography.  In our case, the annotated internet bibliography you'll compile will inform readers of how to locate each website, what the website contains, and how useful it is for gathering information on your topic.  Often in research conducted in many disciplines, a research project begins with an annotated bibliography, which reviews and reports on the kinds and qualities of reference materials available..

        In order to do this bibliography you will have to browse the Internet following a specific topic, although it may be necessary first to investigate a general topic in order to narrow your focus to a more particular topic.  For example, to do a search of websites dealing with motion pictures in 1900 and after, you could start a web search of entertainment indexes on any web browser (for example, Yahoo, Lycos, Infoseek, Altavista) and perhaps narrow that down to film databases and indexes, then narrow that down to a specific kind of film (i. e., actualities, silent dramatic film, silent comedy), then narrow that down to an even more specific topic (i. e., significant early film directors).  At this point you would begin to browse sites connected to your specific topic, taking notes on them, possibly printing out samples of them to consult later.

As you do this research be certain of these things:

• Make sure you have the accurate title of the website, usually found on its home page or else in its designator at the top of the Netscape screen.
• Make sure you have the accurate virtual address of each website as well as each page in the website you cite or quote from.
• Make sure you examine each website thoroughly and report accurately on the contents of the website.
• Make sure you determine whether the website will be useful to someone researching your topic or not, and if it is useful, in what ways it is useful.

• The usual name, date, communication number, and draft status in the upper left hand corner, single-spaced
• The individual title, centered
• An introduction to the bibliography (about 150-200 words long), explaining what the reader can expect in the bibliography
• Individual entries, alphabetized by the site name, with the site name and virtual address first, starting at the left margin and hanging indented, then a blank line, then the entry on the website explaining its contents and evaluating its usefulness as a research tool.

Given the format you have to follow and the amount of white space that separates entries from one another and titles from entries, the paper should be from seven to ten pages long (1950-2600 words).  The due date is listed on the Course Outline.
 

         The entries that show up in your annotated bibliography should follow the format of the sample below.  If you want to have a better sense of how this entry was written, visit the website it describes and browse it for awhile, then read (or reread) the entry.  The identification of the site includes the author (where one is listed), the title, the virtual address, and the date that you visited the site.
 

Journal: The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau. <http://www.gsu.edu/~wwwhdt/ tocframe.html> (October 22, 1998)

This site is devoted to Henry D. Thoreau's journal, which he kept from 1837 to 1861.  It explains the context for the journal and discusses the ways that the Thoreau Edition, a scholarly publication of his works, was prepared for publication.  On the title page there are links to such aspects of the scholarly apparatus of the edition as Alterations, Textual Notes, Annotations, and Later Revisions.  There are also links to libraries which have the original volumes of the journal, to the Textual Center of the University of California, Santa Barbara, where the edition was prepared, and to its editors.  The website has an index on the left side as well as a table of contents page.  A major section of the site is devoted to phases of the journal, Early, Middle, and Late, and each phase is illustrated with images which include manuscript facsimiles.  There is another section on the Editorial Process, which includes an Image Archive, Glossary of Editorial Terms, and an Interactive Editing Demonstration.  There are also links to other sites on Thoreau and on scholarly editing.  This is a very interesting and informative site which gives a good background on the journal and also serves as a useful introduction to scholarly editing.

• As usual, the upper left hand corner of the first page should have your name, the date, the communication number, and the status of the draft singlespaced on four lines.
• As usual, the rest of the paper should be double-spaced.
• As usual, the title should be centered on the first page.
• The first page should have an introductory statement about your findings in the bibliography—something that says what you were researching and gives an overview of what you found, who it will be useful for, and how useful it will be.
• The individual bibliographical entries should begin with two spaces after the introduction.
• Each bibliographical entry should have a heading with a website title, a web address, and the date you consulted the page; the heading should be separated from the text by a double space.
• The text of each bibliographical entry should describe what can be found on the webpage you are discussing and how useful you found it to be or others would find it.
• There should be around a dozen entries total.
• You should spellcheck the whole bibliography and then read it through on paper for spelling and grammar errors, factual errors (in the title or web address), and text preparation problems you’ve had on past papers.
• You should check the virtual addresses you’ve typed in by typing them accurately into your internet browser program or clicking them (if they end up being blue on your screen, i.e. http://www.amazon.com) to see if they work.

        This communication lets you build upon the previous communication. With any luck and with diligence, you found a topic in America 1900 that led you to research the Internet in order to produce an annotated bibliography of web sites pertinent to your subject. You should have found a number of useful sites concerned with your topic and recorded their features in the annotated bibliography that was the focus of the last assignment.  Part of the purpose of that assignment was to help you find materials to work with in this assignment.

        If you completed Communication #4, you have already begun thinking about the subject of this paper and doing some of the research you need to do.  Using that bibliography as a foundation, try to adjust the subject of your research—perhaps make it more focused or more specific or more encompassing, depending on what you’ve learned so far about it—and add to the resources on the web new print resources in the library. Go through your existing bibliography, discard the entries that seem irrelevant or useless to you, and try to determine what further information you need.  Then go into the library and try to add to your resources by checking books, articles in periodicals, and media resources such as video and audio recordings. Try to work with the most recent references you can find and write a referenced paper that explains the current status of your topic.  Tell us what is known about this topic and what the current thinking is about it, give your own analysis or interpretation of the evidence you’ve found, and document thoroughly the places where you found your research.

        The paper should be 8-12 pages long, with internal documentation and a works cited page.  See the Note on Research Papers for specific guidance about preparing presentation texts and consult the course handbook as well.

        Communication #5 is a referenced communication; that is, in order to write the assignment you will have to research a specific question on a limited topic and document your research throughout the paper, using the documentation format for notes and references explained in the texts.  Obviously, the focus of the paper should be on your ability to understand what other people have written on a given topic and to synthesize (bring together) the ideas you discover into a discussion of the topic that both demonstrates your understanding of it and also reinforces your understanding other writers’ authority.

        The success of this paper will depend upon your ability to

• pick a fairly specific topic,
• locate source material,
• analyze and review your research, and then
• synthesize those sources into an overview of your understanding of the issue and the positions that have been taken on it, even when those positions are contradictory or conflicting.

• Are the sources documented internally (that is, in the text itself rather than with footnotes at the bottom of each page or endnotes following the text)?
• Are the documentations in parentheses (author and/or title where appropriate, page number)?
• Is it clear which citation in the Works Cited list is being documented?
• Does the final period come after the final parenthesis in short quotes and paraphrase citations?
• Does the final period come before the parentheses and at the end of the sentence in long, indented quotations?
• Are long quotations (longer than four lines) indented?
• Are long quotations double-spaced just like the rest of the paper?
• Is the Works Cited heading centered on the page?  Is each word capitalized? Is it lacking italics, boldface, quotation marks, underlining, as it should?
• Is each citation listed alphabetically by the last name of the author?
• Is the second line of each citation indented five spaces?  (On word processors this is usually achieved with a command for hanging indentation.)
• Is the punctuation in each citation (periods, commas, colons, parentheses, quotation marks, underlines) identical with the punctuation in the examples in the documentation guide?
• Does each citation use the appropriate format for the kind of citation it is (article in journal, article in magazine, review, chapter in book, etc.)?
• Is the Works Cited list double-spaced?

        In this assignment you get to write the paper of your choice.  It may be another personal experience, a memoir, another bibliography, another research paper, a critical review, anything at all that we haven't tried as long as it is some form of non-fiction (like the other papers in the course).  Look for a topic about which you have enough interest to want to develop a paper.  It may be a narrative (a story about an incident or occurence you particularly want to tell) or an analysis (an expression of an attitude you hold, feeling you have, conclusion you've reached, based on a specific event or series of events you've experienced or observed).  The only rules are to make it something you want to write and to keep it within the length of four-to-ten pages, double-spaced.
 
 

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