UNIT II: Personal Essay / Lyric Essay (4 Weeks)
Week 5: What is the personal essay? / The self as a social actor
Weeks 6-7: The lyric essay / researching the “self”
Week 8: Revision work: developing the personal/lyric essay
Unit 2 Assignments: Select one piece of flash non-fiction from your Unit 1 portfolio and develop the piece into a personal or lyric essay, OR choose a new topic (6-8 pp.); separate reflective essay (2 pp.) Due Nov .2.
Objectives:
- Students will focus on a single “burning question,” and will compose one extended creative nonfiction essay that demonstrates increasing awareness and expertise in mobilizing elements of the craft of CNF, as well as attention to ethics, positionality, and awareness of their own ideological biases.
- Students will engage in brainstorming, writing, and revision exercises designed to help them interrogate and develop their topic, continue to take chances in their writing, forge connections across shorter pieces of writing, build transitions, deepen their perspectives and positions.
- Students will examine the role of history, culture, and systems of power and privilege in shaping their overall approach to the essay, as well as specific depictions, characterizations, and rhetorical choices in the essay.
- Students will read longer works of creative nonfiction and engage with a wide range of formal experiments in order to more broadly conceive of the possibilities for movement, structure, arrangement, and framing.
UNIT 2 ASSIGNMENT
WRT 114 / Unit 2 Assignment: Personal/Lyric Essay
Your second writing portfolio will showcase one polished personal or lyric essay (6-8 pp. double-spaced), and a critical reflection (approx. 2 pp. double-spaced). The essay and reflection are due on Oct. 30, and the assignment is worth 20% of your overall grade for the course. As with Unit 1, please submit your writing in a 2-pocket folder (or tightly bound in some other way).
I’d like you to begin this project by identifying a “burning question” that arose for you during Unit 1. You may begin with a piece of flash nonfiction that you submitted in the Unit 1 portfolio, or you may draw from a topic that’s been on your mind but hasn’t yet made its way into your writing. All of the writing you’ll do during this unit will revolve around an in-depth exploration of your burning question.
Here are some of the important creative elements I’ll be reading for when I collect your final draft, all of which we will have discussed in class:
- Success in establishing a pact with the reader through tone, context, setting, concision, ethical treatment of subject matter, and avoidance of pitfalls such as “revenge prose” and “therapist’s couch” writing.
- Control over shaping the narrative line through decisions in narrative content, form, and pacing (attention to horizontal and vertical movement are essential, even if your essay utilizes other forms of movement such as juxtaposition).
- Strong detail rendered through interesting language and well-crafted scenes.
- Lyricism: imagery, figurative language, avoidance of cliché, word choice that is innovative and precise, attention to phrasing, the rhythm of your sentences.
- A compelling narrative persona or voice that is engaging and authentic, and also mature and self-aware.
- Success in forging discovery about one’s subject through moments of reflection, analysis, and insight into one’s own experience and into the larger relevant culture or subculture.
- Thorough proof-reading that demonstrates the writer’s complete control over sentence structure, word choice, use of verb tenses, point of view, and use of punctuation to make the reader “hear it” the way you imagine the essay sounding.
Critical Reflection
Your critical reflection should be approximately 2 pp. in length. Please review your own pre-writing for this essay and reflect on crucial moments in the process of its development. Consider these questions, but don’t try to answer them all. Respond to the questions that speak most profoundly to your experience in composing this essay, or address other aspects of the composition and revision process:
- Discuss some quotes or key passages from our Unit 1 or 2 readings that influenced your thinking about how to craft your personal/lyric essay, how to represent yourself as a speaking self in the essay, and how to arrange your material into the final draft.
- How did you decide on a topic for this essay? What other topics did you consider, and what made you settle on your final selection?
- Discuss a moment in the composition or revision process when your thinking took a sharp turn.
- Describe your most significant discovery or intellectual breakthrough in composing/shaping this essay.
- What aspects of this essay are you most proud of?
- What are you still struggling with?
Grading Rubric:
- Success in establishing a pact with the reader through tone, context, setting, concision, ethical treatment of subject matter, and avoidance of pitfalls such as “revenge prose” and “therapist’s couch” writing
- Control over shaping the narrative line through decisions in narrative content, form, and pacing (attention to horizontal and vertical movement are essential, even if your essay utilizes other forms of movement such as juxtaposition)
- Strong detail rendered through interesting language and well-crafted scenes
- Lyricism: imagery, figurative language, avoidance of cliché, word choice that is innovative and precise, attention to phrasing, the rhythm of your sentences
- A compelling narrative persona or voice that is engaging and authentic, and also mature and self-aware
- Success in forging discovery about one’s subject through moments of reflection, analysis, and insight into one’s own experience and into the larger relevant culture or subculture
- Thorough proof-reading that demonstrates the writer’s complete control over sentence structure, word choice, use of verb tenses, point of view, and use of punctuation to make the reader “hear it” the way you imagine the essay sounding
- Thoughtfulness and care in composing critical reflection; explicit connections to course readings.
Tue. 10/27 Focus-Small group revision workshop
Objectives: Students will engage in writing and revision exercises designed to help them interrogate and develop their topic, continue to take chances in their writing, forge connections across shorter pieces of writing, build transitions, and deepen their perspectives and positions.
Aim: What is this essay really about, or what could it be about? Where in the essay would you like to see the writer delve deeper and provide more “vertical” movement or reflection on difficult/complicated parts of the story?
Engage and orient the reader by setting out a problem, situation, or observation and its significance, establishing one or multiple point(s) of view, and introducing a narrator and/or characters; create a smooth progression of experiences or events.
Use narrative techniques, such as dialogue, pacing, description, reflection, and multiple plot lines, to develop experiences, events, and/or characters.
Use a variety of techniques to sequence events so that they build on one another to create a coherent whole and build toward a particular tone and outcome (e.g., a sense of mystery, suspense, growth, or resolution).
Use precise words and phrases, telling details, and sensory language to convey a vivid picture of the experiences, events, setting, and/or characters.
Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone, including words with multiple meanings or language that is particularly fresh, engaging, or beautiful.
Do Now: Reading and unpacking-Sondra Perl and Mimi Schwartz, “Workshopping a Draft” (PDF); In small groups of 3, share your annotations from the reading. Which strategies resonate the most? Why? How? Share in class.
Acquisition: (Heuristic #4 )Strategies for Productive Workshopping
As Sondra Perl and Mimi Schwartz say in their book Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction, “There is no formula or sure-fire way to respond to [others’] writing. So much depends on the author’s intentions and needs, the dynamics of the writing group, the amount of time available, and the experience of participants” (93). However, Perl and Schwartz provide a number of useful tips and strategies for productive workshopping. Here are some suggestions…
- Appoint a time-keeper and make sure that everyone gets the SAME amount of time.
- Give the writer 30-60 seconds to introduce their piece and ask for any special feedback. If the writer wishes to use more time than that at the beginning of the workshop, it is their time to use, but the clock is ticking.
- Readers: do your best to actively imagine the experiences, characterizations, descriptions, and meanings at the heart of the essay, and reflect your experience of the piece back to the writer.
- Rather than bring your own aesthetic sensibilities to the workshop (“I like” or “I don’t like”), try to mirror back what you observe. Use key phrases like these:
- I notice that…
- I get the sense that…
- What I took away from this passage was…
- Here’s how I’m reading/understanding you when you say…
- In writing X, it seems like you’re trying to…
5. Be attentive to the writer’s strengths and purposes, and seek to nurture them. But don’t be afraid to challenge things the writer says, particularly if you think there’s an ideological bias in play. You could say something like, “I think it might be important to challenge X.”
6. Stay focused: be aware of where the conversation is going and what little time you have.
- Don’t waste time line-editing (grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc.).
- Avoid debates.
- Avoid long explanations or defenses of your creative choices.
- Avoid telling your own personal story that is like someone else’s.
7. The writer may ask or respond to questions, but writers should mostly be in listening mode while their pieces are being discussed. Again, the clock is ticking.
8. Give the writer 1-2 minutes at the end of the conversation to articulate their major take-aways.
9. Share your draft with two other members in your group online. Consider asking the following questions when proving feedback-
Meaning Making
Workshopping: Share your draft-in-progress in groups of three, and work to brainstorm ideas for additional scenes each person could compose. User the same questions from yesterday’s homework(see below). Share your prepared responses and written feedback.
- What is this essay really about, or what could it be about? Try answering this question in 3 different ways.
- Who are the main characters so far, and what do you know about them? Pinpoint places in the essay where the writer is providing strong character development, and other places where you want/need to know more the characters.
- What are you curious to know more about? Draft 3 questions for the writer.
- What additional scenes could the writer include in this essay to help illustrate some of the questions you raised in part c (above)?
- Where in the essay would you like to see the writer delve deeper and provide more “vertical” movement or reflection on difficult/complicated parts of the story?
Transfer: As a writer, what tips did I deem most useful about group workshoping a draft?
Homework: Use the feedback you received from your peers to continue working on or revising your essay.