Two weaknesses consistently appear in your papers and close readings (from Mini Project III).
HERE IS HOW TO RESOLVE THESE WEAKNESSES:
HOW DOES THIS TEXT SUPPORT MY CLAIM?
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WHAT I CAN'T CHANGE ABOUT THE COURSE: "It is a lot of work and it is definitely overwhelming, but it is a 4 unit class, so it was to be expected."
WHAT I MIGHT BE ABLE TO CHANGE ABOUT THE COURSE: PARTICIPATION Nearly everyone in the responses on the evaluations said they'd like to hear from more people and a greater variety of people in the class!! It is important to recognize that everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. Verbal, class participation comes naturally to some and is more difficult to others. It is also important to recognize that I can only meet all of you halfway. At the end of the day, everyone has to take responsibility for discussion. What I can commit to:
WHAT I CAN AND WILL CHANGE ABOUT THE COURSE " I would have also loved to interrogate my way of thinking or writing into the instructions."
"I would like to have more in class writing time.
Tuesday 2:00pm to 3:00pm
Tuesday 3:00pm to 4:00pm
Wednesday 3:45pm to 4:45pm
Reading for Wednesday is under Assignments.
Note to author: Remember, don’t be defensive. Be curious. Use the opportunity to ask questions. Note to evaluators: There is no need to fluff up the paper or be nice. Your classmates are stronger than you think. If you didn’t understand something, don’t pretend. Ask them to clarify! If something was confusing, ask them about it. You are their audience, and your mind working through their paper is very informative. You will spend around 15 minutes on each person:
Free write on your labor. You are welcome to consult your labor log on your phone or laptop if you need to. Reflect on the labor you put into the “draft”? How did you spend your time? What parts of the assignment did you find engaging? Disengaging? Was it easy to write for 300 minutes or difficult? How are you doing with academic labor overall? Are you starting to feel overwhelmed at this point in the semester? Just check in with yourself and with the class. . . . . . . . . PARTS OF AN INTRODUCTION: 1. Set up question/problem/tension
THESIS STATEMENTS: A thesis is essentially the answer to the research question that peaked your interest. It is the argument your paper is going to make, the story your paper is going to tell. Adapted from Writing Analytically: What a Good Working Thesis Does:
What a Bad Thesis Does?
HOW DO YOU DEVELOP A GOOD ARGUMENT?
Some Sample Introductions
Imagine you've just received the prompt for a timed essay. If you are not familiar with the timed essay, then imagine you've just taken home a prompt and are going to sit down and write a paper. Walk me through your writing process. What do you do first? What do you do second? How do you start your paper? What is your checklist for the intro, for the body, for the conclusion?
. . . . Now, let's think about storytelling and about analytical writing. How do you define each of these? What is a story? What is an analytical piece of writing? How are they similar? How are they different? . . . We often think of storytelling and analytical writing as two separate modes of writing— one being far more interesting than the other. It is useful, however, to think about how we can use one mode of writing to strengthen our skills in the other. It is more common to see modes of analytical writing in storytelling. In fact, you probably come across analyses in stories you read all the time. For example, think of a story that critiques social norms or society at large. Or, think about a story (if you’ve read Brothers Karamazov, then think about that) that takes a moment to meditate on a certain political or social situation. Often, in this moment, the storyteller switches into an analytical mode of thinking. In fact, a lot of strong characters in our favorite books are also very strong analytical thinkers. They know how to make meaning from their observations. They criticize their social spaces through analysis. You probably don’t even notice it happening anymore. However, we do not often think of how analytical writing is a form of storytelling. In reality, all analytical writing tells a story. The project of an analytical essay is to tell the story of how your mind went from a question to a complex, fascinating answer to that question. It tells the story of a mind at work. In order to tell a story, however, you must first know it. You cannot present us with a story about answering a question if you do not yet know the answer. Close reading helps you arrive at an answer to your question. You then must go back and replay what happened in your mind for yourself, and document that process. Your mind is the main character and the story is how it moved from a question to an answer. So, far we've just been focusing on how to read and how to formulate bits and pieces of writing on the reading. Over the next two weeks as you prepare for your first paper, we're going to walk through the various elements of a paper. But as you're working towards a paper, try to start thinking about it more as a story than an academic production/meditation on a "topic." Take a few minutes to get into the right headspace for the class. For five minutes, free write on The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Where are your thoughts right now? What have you been thinking about? Or, if you're there already, what do you think you want to write about eventually?
. . . . . . . . . Break into groups based on subject of interest: Erica & Changez Jim/Underwood Samson & Changez America/Pakistan & Changez You are going to split up into groups based on your current area of interest in the book. As a group, you are going to track how the relationship changes/grows/falls apart over the course of the chapters we've read. Do this by finding passages that point to the various points of the relationship and discuss what's going on in that passage. It doesn't need to be super methodical. Keep the conversation casual. Just use the references to help guide your conversation. Designate a notekeeper and make sure she/he keeps track of the references and bullet points your conclusions. Assign a notekeeper (who has a laptop) and use the following link: https://padlet.com/srajabzadeh/dhc2fgrl8q2o Spend five minutes reflecting on your labor journal: What has your experience of logging labor been like so far? Have the assigned labor times been too long, too short, or just right? . . Write about an engaging or rewarding labor experience? Why? What made it rewarding? Were you enjoying the assignment? Were you at your favorite cafe? Were you just in the right mindset? Had you just worked out? Write about a time when your labor was less engaging or rewarding? Why? What made it frustrating? Were you tired? Hungry? Was it loud in your dorm? . . . . . Last class we talked about literary details. Today we are going to continue thinking about details. Surprise! In fact, we will never stop obsessing over details. Today we’re going to learn more about how to read, how to gaze, how to observe. We are going to sharpen our observation skills by thinking about all the details we often fail to notice in a text, and later, in an image or object. In other words, we’re going to think about our assumptions and our expectations. We can make the act of observation richer and more dynamic if we interrogate our assumptions and embrace the strangeness, uncertainties, and contradictions in our material. Every object, every text, every image has qualities that make it strange. However, it is difficult for us to see the strangeness in texts, images, or forms we are familiar with. We come to the object with already-established assumptions, and that directs what we look for. Our first interaction with a text or object or image is to look for those details that validate our assumptions. For example, observe what happens in your mind when I present you with this: i am relieved when i see the feminine presence in a man’s eyes. it means he is a peace i do not have to bring to him. — ease Nayyirah Waheed, poem from Salt Most likely, you automatically registered this as a poem. And so, you began to read it or hear it as a poem. While you may have noticed the details that validated your assumption about this text being a poem-- the blank spaces, the broken sentences, and even the strange punctuation—you may not have thought much about them. After all, these are very common and familiar practices in what we understand a poem to be. However, why have you not paused to ask, “Is this even a poem? What makes this a poem?" Or even, "What are these blank spaces? Why are the sentences so strange? Are they even sentences? Why is the punctuation unconventional?” In fact, if you look back at the text now without assuming it is a poem, you may notice that this is actually a very strange piece of writing. It is in our nature as readers, thinkers, or just humans, to make sense of the unknown. If we notice a problem or contradiction in a work of literature or in an image, we try to solve it or reconcile it. In other words, we try to make everything that is strange about a text familiar as quickly as possible. The poet John Keats wrote in a letter, “Several things dovetailed in my mind, and at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” While focusing on details, your goal should be to get comfortable feeling uncomfortable. Get comfortable not having answers. We are all able to live in certainty; take this time to learn how to be “capable of being in uncertainties.” This is the whole point of the Humanities! Don’t rush to solve the problems the text produces. Inhabit Negative Capability. Engage with the problems as problems. Instead of considering, “How do I make the contradiction make sense in this text?” consider, “What kind of problem is the contradiction? What is the contradiction doing? How is the contradiction making it harder for me to understand [other aspects of the text]?” That final question is very important. Often, the answer to that question will yield your most fascinating analyses of the material. Sometimes, the answer to that question can become the argument of your paper.
Fascinating questions come from embracing uncertainty. Questions are literally the manifestation of uncertainty. And again, interesting papers stem from questions you find interesting. "Virtually all forms of description are implicitly analytical. When you choose what you take to be the three most telling details about your subject, you have selected significant parts and used them as a means of getting at what you take to be the character of the whole. This is what analysis does: it goes after an understanding of what something means, its nature, by zeroing in on the function of significant detail." - Writing Analytically, p. 7 Today's session is focused on details, details, details!! How do you notice and track details in a text or image? Why are they important? What can you do with them?
Whenever you are reading a text with the intention of analysis, it is important to remind yourself that "details matter." Every detail is a choice the author has made. Every detail serves a purpose. It is the job of an analytical writer to 1) understand the detail and 2) to understand what it is doing in the text. Why has the author chosen to tell us x about the character? How does that one detail contribute to our overall sense of the place, of the community, of the family, of the narrator? Not all the details you notice in a text will make it into a final paper. What ends up in a structured paper is an entirely different topic. Before you even begin thinking about your paper, you should just take time, read, notice, and observe. You will see that often, the more details you notice in a text, the more questions you have of the material. And as I've already said multiple times, and will continue to repeat over the course of the semester, interesting papers stem from interesting questions. A paper showcases your mind working through a question. So, a paper is only as strong and interesting as the question it is answering or addressing. You have most likely only written papers in response to questions that were already formed for you. But, it is very difficult to learn how to craft a paper organically if you are not also writing the question.
Here are a few points to keep in mind as you think more and more about developing analytical questions: 1) Questions should always be interesting (to you). If you're not interested in the question you're thinking about, then how do you expect yourself to write an interesting paper? You can’t expect your reader to be fascinated by something you’re not. 2) Stay away from yes-or-no questions. If the answer to a question is only one word, then there isn’t a point to reading and rereading. And, you just won’t have enough content to work with. 2) Stay away from questions that can be answered with a quick fact check. For example, a question like, "What city is Chengiz from?" will not help you construct a strong, analytical paper. Firstly, while it may take some digging, the answer is clear. Secondly, the answers to fact-based questions are often short. [Fact-based questions are crucial to contextualizing your argument.They just don't work well as the main question the paper is interested in answering.] 3) Make sure you can answer your question with the passages that are available to you. In other words, avoid hypothetical questions. For example, the question, "Would Chengiz have faced the same difficulties concerning assimilation if he were in a committed relationship with Erica?” sets you up for a very frustrating reading and writing process, because we just can’t answer the question. We will never know what his life would have been like. It’s interesting to think about and may help you develop your argument, but again it’s not a good question to base a paper on. Here are two examples of questions. These are questions that genuinely crossed my mind as I reread The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
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