Then react to the map. What can you say about this layout and
the tour you've set up? Why are those locations important to the
tour, to your life? What kinds of memories do these places evoke?
Try to record or indicate as many incidents and impressions you can in
about 25-30 minutes of writing.
Here's a simple way into thinking about who you are. Take out your wallet or billfold or empty your purse or fanny pack on the desk or table in front of you. What do you notice in the contents? What kinds of things do you carry with you? Itemize some of the contents and explain a little bit about what they are, where they came from, why you carry them around with you. Then speculate for a few minutes on what a stranger would surmise about you if he or she found your wallet or billfold where you dropped it accidentally and started going through it to see what could be learned about you. What would someone going through your wallet learn about you? Who would they think you are--not just your name and address but your personality, your character--in a word, your identity? Make these itemizations and speculations the basis for this journal entry.
We talked in class about captioning photographs in a brief essay or journal entry. I showed you some examples from the back page of Civilization Magazine, including a caption essay by Joyce Carol Oates in which she uses a picture of herself as a child and her mother to reflect on both the context of the photograph and the nature of photography's influence on memory; in another example Mark O'Donnell uses a photograph of himself and his twin brother as a jumping off place for a discussion of cloning and individuality. In another example I gave you a handout that showed you my own response to two family photographs of my own, in which I tried to remember the context for the photographs and explain the relationships among the people in the picture then and now.
Taking these examples as a starting point, browse through your own photographs
or personal pictures you remember particularly well, and write a journal
entry of your own as a similarly extended caption to the photo you select.
What does the photo tell you or another viewer? What does it make
you think about the context of the photo (the circumstances under which
it was taken) or the nature of photography as a cue to memory? Write
for 25-30 minutes on the caption and bring it and (if possible) your photograph
to share and hand in during class next time.
Most of you will have just finished a period of time in your home town; in some ways, you will have recently ended your life back home. Spend a few minutes thinking about the images and impressions you have of your hometown--the scenes that come immediately to mind, the people, the activities, the atmosphere. Who lives there? What are they like? What do they do with their work and play time? How do they interact with each other and the basic needs of their community? What are the major interests of the people in the community? What are the primary influences on their lives--socially, economically, politically?
Once you've given yourself some time to think, place yourself among them. What is your place in your hometown? How do you fit in among those people? Why do you fit in where you fit in? Why don't you fit in somewhere else? What scenes from your growing up and living in that place come to mind when you think about how you fit in? If you decided either to quit college and go home or to go home after graduating from college, what would your life in your hometown be like?
Consider these questions and let your speculations about the answers
occupy your time writing this journal entry.
Read the selections from The Detroit Free Press's "Michigan Memories"
feature handed out in class. The idea behind the department was to
draw upon stories that people tell in their families about their parents
and grandparents and ancestors and, in some cases, their own youth.
In most cases the stories that are told evoke a specific time and place,
often one that an accompanying photographs tends to capture or suggest.
What are the stories that your family tells? What can you think
of that is a story about the family past? work experiences? travel? moving
from place to place? adventures? What stories from your family can
you think of that remind you of a particular place in Michigan or a particular
era? (If you're not from Michigan, pick another place you know; if
you don't have a family, pick something out of your own life.)
In this journal entry try to recall as many of these kinds of stories
as you can. If you get stuck after a few, try to think about whatever
details you can add or where you could get more information on the stories
you have or more stories of the kind you've been reading. If you
still feel stuck, just write about what you know about your family history.
"Heritage" means "something that comes or belongs to one by reason
of birth." Thus, heritage means what is passed down from generation
to generation in families, the inheritance of those things possessed by
members of the family, whether they are family heirlooms (material objects)
or physical characteristics or personality traits. We all are the
heirs of the genes, the attitudes, the personalities of our ancestors and
predecessors. "In our family people have always . . . ," a
relative will begin and then remind us of stories of the behaviors and
actions of distant family members. Sometimes we are the heirs of
negative behaviors and actions, sometimes we have difficulty tracing our
heritage, but nevertheless, that is still part of our family heritage.
Heritage also has to do with what has been passed on by the community,
the society, the neighborhood or village. "In the Upper Peninsula,"
we say, "people have inherited the belief that . . ." or "the tendency
to . . . " Sometimes our heritage involves ways of seeing ourselves,
for good or bad, that others have trained us to accept. Sometimes
we don't understand our heritage (maybe never understand it) and only know
where we come from, what the family or community or neighborhood past was
like.
In this journal entry explore for twenty-five minutes in writing your
sense of family and community heritage, where you come from and what you
think its impact on you has been. Examine as many different aspects
of your heritage or as many
different heritages as you can, trying to think of specific examples
of people's behavior which reveal that heritage.
Between now and the next class you will be completing a revision of
Communication #1 and preparing to bring it to class for a session on text
preparation. Most of what you will be doing in class will involve
low level presentation text preparation, not much revision of language
or ideas, so the work-in-progress will be temporarily halted until after
I read it and react to it and return to you with suggestions for further
revision. In this journal entry write for about twenty to twenty-five
minutes about how you wrote this paper. What was the process by which
you went from initial idea to this draft? What did you spend the
most time doing on the work? What was most difficult for you?
What was easiest? What did you hope to achieve in telling this story
or explaining these circumstances? How well do you think you achieved
what you set out to achieve? If you were me, what would your reaction
be to what you’ve accomplished so far? What recommendations for further
revision would you make? Bring the journal entry to class and be
prepared to hand it in with the paper.
Take out your billfold or wallet, or empty the contents of your purse
on a table. Spread out the contents. What would a detective
learn from examining this evidence? What would she learn from reading
your driver’s license, your Chip Card, your credit cards, your memberships?
What would she find if she tried to figure out who you are, where you come
from, what your life is like, what your family is like, what they do and
have done for a living, what your community is like and what your place
or your family’s place in the community is? Trace the evidence backwards:
don’t just note that you have blue eyes but determine where the blue eyes
come from (or height or profile or name or place of residence). You’re
hunting for facts here, data, evidence—clues to your heritage. Write
as long as you can about the contents of your wallet.
By now you are supposed to have read the seven chapters of Wordsmithery
and completed your first Communication. The chapters are filled with
examples and advice about the composing process, including the chapter
assigned for today on "Wordsmiths at Work," discussing how some writers
have gotten through their work. Think about all this in connection
with your own writing on this paper. What did you do to compose Communication
#1? What steps did you follow? What strategies did you use?
Where'd the ideas come from? Why'd you organize the paper in the
way you did? What point or conclusion were you trying to get across
by the story you told? How does the way you went about writing this
paper compare with the ways people write in Wordsmithery?
What could you do differently on the next paper that might help you make
it a better paper than Communication #1? How good a paper is either
Communication #1 or Communication #2 compared to work you've done in the
past or work you're capable of doing? Be specific about why you think
that.
Having just completed your second Communication, review for yourself
how you went about writing it. What process did you follow?
How did you decide what went into it? How did you decide what to
leave out? How did you decide on the structure or organization?
Compare your composing here with your composing of your earlier paper.
What did you do that was similar, that was the kind of thing you usually
do? How was writing this paper different from writing the first paper?
Why? How would you compare the two as pieces of writing? Which
is a better piece? Why? Which do you like best? Why?
Select a picture from the advertisements offered (or from a self-selected
advertising image, if you weren’t in class) and write a journal entry in
which you examine what’s happening or what’s portrayed in the picture and
how you react to it. What do you suppose we are meant to understand
about the world being illustrated, the relationships among the people in
that world, the effect of the product being advertised on the nature of
that world and those relationships? Be specific in references to
items in the picture. Let your reflections of this image be the focus
of this journal entry.
In this journal entry you get a chance to explore the images of your
culture, both in the sense of the culture that surrounds you individually
in your daily life and the culture that surrounds us all through print
and visual media. When you think of images that are stuck in your
head--magazine advertisements, billboards, television commercials, illustrations
for articles, artistic photographs, paintings—what ones come to mind?
What products do those images endorse and how do you feel about the products?
What news photographs seem to stick in your mind and what events do those
photographs illustrate? What magazine covers do you remember?
Why? What billboards? Why? Reflect upon the images you respond
to in this journal entry.
Here’s the journal entry
to get you thinking about the way you composed Communication #3, the one
on examining one, two, or three images. This was a different kind
of assignment than the two before it, not narrative but expository, descriptive,
and analytical. How did you go about composing this one? What
steps did you follow? What difficulties did you face and how did
you overcome them? How would you compare this paper to the earlier
ones you’ve written? What do you think of your ability to closely
examine and analyze an image? Let your speculations on composing
this paper fill this journal entry and hand the journal entry in with Communication
#3.
Very soon now it will be
necessary to begin composing papers based primarily on research and other
sources than your own experience and memory. We’ll begin with research
on the internet, with everyone writing an annotated bibliography of websites
on a certain subject of your choice, drawn from the kinds of information
presented in the video, America 1900. Then you’ll write a
paper based on the bibliography, the websites, and other research in print
resources in the library.
As a way of getting started
write a journal entry exploring what you would be interested in researching.
The two research assignments ask you to explore some aspect of American
history or society in 1900 either as it was then, as it developed over
the century, or as it appears today, in 1999.
What are you interested
in researching? Be very specific about what you want to discover.
What do you know about the subject so far? What more do you want
to know about it? Why? Where will you get the information you
need? What kinds of information will you have to get? If you
have more than one potential research project, spend some time on developing
your thinking about that topic too, to help you decide which is the more
interesting, manageable, and fruitful line of inquiry.
What experience do you have
surfing the net? What sites have visited or what kinds of sites have
you been looking for? What do you notice about the websites you’ve
gone to so far? How useful do you feel they would be if you used
them for research?
Below, I’ve attached
the sample of an annotated bibliographical entry that accompanies your
assignment. For this journal entry, try writing one of your own.
By now you should be on the track of some topic that will serve as the
focus for this bibliography and for the research paper to follow.
Locate one website that seems particularly promising and write an annotation
of it that follows the format of the sample, gives details about what a
web browser would find there, and explains how useful you think the site
would be to someone visiting it for research. If you don’t think
that bibliographical entry goes very well, try a second one. By the
end of the class, make sure you’ve completed one entry and bring up any
questions you have about the form you’re working in.
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 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.
Use this journal entry as
a way of evaluating your progress on the bibliography. For twenty-five
minutes speculate about the nature of the websites you’ve been visiting.
What kinds of information are you finding? How informative are the
websites and how much are you learning about your subject? How much
of what you’re encountering is not very useful? In what ways isn’t
it useful? Give me some examples of sites you think are valuable
for anyone researching your topic and some examples of sites that you don’t
think are valuable. In either case be specific about why you think
they are valuable or not.
Now that you’ve reviewed
as many sites as you have, what do you think you want to find on a valuable
site? What features would a really useful site have? If you
were creating a website on this topic, what would you put on it?
Use your responses to these
questions as a means of exploring and evaluating your progress on the annotated
bibliography.
You've gotten back
the first three papers you've written in the course with my comments on
them and you've completed journal entries discussing how you wrote them
and text preparation sheets analyzing the problems that have surfaced in
the papers. In this journal entry, try to evaluate your writing so
far: what seem to be your strengths? your weaknesses? what
problems recur? what changes in the process of your composing would help
your writing? what text preparation difficulties need to be overcome?
How do you think the next three papers will go? Why? How are
you going to strengthen the weaknesses, bolster the strengths, solve the
problems, and overcome the difficulties? In other words, use this
journal entry to assess where you are in the course and what you have to
accomplish in order to either maintain or improve the quality of your work
by the end of the semester.
As you have in the
past, describe how you wrote Communication #4. What process
did you follow? How did you decide what went into it? How did
you decide what to leave out? How did you decide on the structure
or organization? Compare your composing here with your composing
of your earlier papers. What did you do that was similar, that was
the kind of thing you usually do? What did you do that was different,
unlike what you did in the earlier papers? What difficulties did
you find with annotating as a form of writing? with creating a bibliography
rather than a narrative or problem-solving paper? Hand this journal
entry in with the Annotated Bibliography.
Given what you’ve uncovered
in your annotated bibliography, what do you feel you know or have learned
about your topic. If you were writing a research paper on this topic,
what you write about? Be very specific in explaining what you think
you’d have to say about this topic based on what you’ve discovered on the
internet. Also explain what you think you’d have to learn about this
subject using other resources.
Use this journal entry as
an occasion to evaluate what you think about the Internet as a resource
for the topic you’re looking up. Take some time to go into the Park
Library database (http://www.lib.cmich.edu)
and, under Research Databases, check out your topic in FirstSearch and
General Reference Center Gold. These are indexes to printed material.
As you compare what you’ve found on the Internet with what you’ve located
in the printed material, does your picture of the topic change? If
so, how? How would you compare Internet and print resources on the
particular topic you’re investigating? What are the limits of what
you can find on the Internet? What would the Internet need to provide
to be a thoroughly valuable resource on the topic you’re researching?
If you choose to continue researching this topic, how necessary will it
be to go off the Internet and into book and periodical printed material?
Be specific in your references to what you’ve found and need to find.
Write at least twenty-five minutes on this journal entry.
In the middle of composing
this paper based on research take time out to review what you know.
In this journal entry tell me about the research you're doing, what you
hope to discover or learn or prove, how you're going about, what progress
you're making, what problems you're having and what you're doing to overcome
them. What changes, if any, in the way you write will you have to
make to write this paper? How do you think you're doing on it?
You're handing in the
referenced communication, the small research paper. How well did
it turn out? how satisfied with it are you? what did you go
through to compose this paper and how does it compare with the way you've
been composing the other papers in the course? what gave you the
most difficulty? how could you overcome that difficulty in the future?
what was the most pleasurable or the easiest part of this paper?
Why? Knowing that you'll undoubtedly have to do a number of research
papers over your college career, what advice would you give yourself about
writing them, given your experience with this paper?
You've gotten back Communications
1 through 5 and are just handing in Communication #6. Review the
first five papers by reading them through, consulting the comments in the
margins, considering the text preparation sheets for them, and assessing
how you feel about them as well as how well you did on them. What
could you do to revise these papers? Which needs the most revision?
what would you do to it if had the opportunity to improve it? Which
needs the least revision? Why? If you had to pick three of
the five papers you've written in the course to revise and hand in as a
portfolio of your best writing this semester, which ones would you pick?
Specifically, how would you revise each of them? what would be the
effect of your revisions? Be very specific.
The sixth paper is one you
composed on your own. You selected the topic, the approach, the attitude,
the execution, the preparation. How would you compare this paper
to your other papers? How well do you like this paper compared to
your earlier papers? What did you go through to write this paper?
Explain the process of composing Communication #6.
It is the final week of the course. Review your writing, now that you are handing in the revision of your final paper. What's good about your writing? What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? In what areas have you improved? In what areas do you need improvement?
Write a journal entry
summarizing how you would evaluate your own writing. What grade do
you think you ought to get on it at this point in the course? Why?
Is there anything you could have done to get a higher grade? What,
if there is? Why not, if there isn't? What do you need to do
to improve your writing beyond where it is now?
Note on Journals: At the end of the semester students are expected
to have completed Journal Entries 1-24 and to hand in Journals 1-24 in
a tan file folder. A complete listing of journal entries includes: