Spring 2010

#1:  Creative Non-fiction Essay

You’ll begin preparation for this paper by completing an Adventure Report, an assignment that will encourage you to stretch your boundaries in the non-written world.  Your Creative Non-Fiction Essay will be derived from the experience you choose for this activity.  The more engaging your experience, the better your writing will be. Don't forget the details. Don't just catalogue a series of events. The more sensory details you include, the more your reader will feel as though they are right there with you. Even the most grammatically correct writing falls flat if it doesn't come alive for the reader.  Make sure you consider carefully the implications of your narrative. One of the things that distinguishes creative non-fiction from other sorts of narrative writing is that you're not only telling a story but also reflecting upon it in some significant way. Don't just tack a moral on the end. Instead, try to insert your own reflections on the events of the story throughout, moving back and forth between the offering of vivid details and a discussion of why those details are important to you and your reader.  The final paper should be around 3-5 pages.

Part 1:  Adventure Report

This assignment will encourage you to stretch your boundaries in the non-written world; to explore the world in a writerly, playful way.  Henry David Thoreau writes, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”  As writers, it is our job to look.  To look unflinchingly.  To look creatively.  To look intentionally.  And to practice looking.

    To this end, you will complete an Adventure Report, of around 1-2 pages, which you will later expand into a Creative Non-fiction Essay. To complete this report, you must fashion a way to engage the world, whether through a hike, a conversation with a known writer, politician, or rhetorician, a spelunking trip, or other adventure (see examples below). Your report should include all relevant specifics about the adventure you chose, an account of the adventure itself, and how the adventure affected you. The practice itself is meant to get you to look at something you wouldn't normally look at. Look at yourself in a situation. Look at a person you've never met. Look, observe, engage, and report. That's what writers do.

    Here are some examples off the top of my head. Please feel free to add any you'd like, to run your ideas by me if you want to, and to go as far out on that limb (safely) as you wish. Note: As daring as this assignment could make you, adventure responsibly. Don't take up any activity that could result in harm (physical, psychological, emotional) to yourself or to another person. The point is not to break boundaries or taboos. The point is to play with extending your own boundaries.  Hence, the only rule is that you do something you’ve never done before.

Examples:

Spend a day confined to a wheelchair

Ride with a taxi driver for a day

Have tea with someone strange

Hike a mountain

Attend a cadaver lab

Teach elementary school kids for a few hours

Interview a writer

Spend an afternoon helping at a day care

Ride with a police officer for a day

Go trick-or-treating off-season

Bungee jump (safely?)

Tour a factory of some kind (candy, meat-packing, automotive, etc.)

Dress in drag

Take a road trip without a destination in mind

Spend a day blindfolded

Go someplace you’ve never been, and speak in an accent

Reading something you’ve written in a public forum

Try to focus on including as many sensory details in your description as possible.  I recommend working on your report as soon after your experience as possible so that it is fresh in your mind.  You might even take notes during the experience itself, as long as that doesn’t get in the way of having the experience.  You don’t have to worry about having an introductory paragraph, a conclusion, a thesis statement, etc., but try to revise your writing so that it is as polished as possible.  Send your 1-2 page Report to me via e-mail before the due date/time (Jesse.Stommel@colorado.edu).  Please just include your work in the body of an e-mail, rather than using an attachment.

Part 2:  Opening Paragraph

As you approach this part of your finished essay, you’ll want to start thinking about how you’ll adapt your adventure report into a creative non-fiction essay.  The main distinction here is that you’ll move from describing an experience to reflecting upon the social, political, personal, or philosophical issues the experience raises for you.  Creative non-fiction is all about tangents, allowing your personal experiences to inspire your own thinking about a topic.  For example, if you wrote about being blindfolded for a day, maybe your final paper will discuss that experience as a way of talking about how our culture tends to privilege sight over all the other senses.

    For this assignment, compose a draft of the opening paragraph for your finished essay.  There are many options for how you might begin.  Take a look at my notes on beginnings for some ideas.  The only rule for this assignment is that you don’t waste your first sentence.  Make sure it’s intentional, well-crafted, and that it forces us to keep reading.  We’ll be workshopping opening paragraphs as a group.  I’ll be choosing a few of your opening paragraphs for us to look at together, so be prepared to have some of your work discussed by the whole class.

Part 3:  Rough Draft

This will be a rough draft of your entire essay that you’ll have a chance to workshop with a small group of your peers.  Make sure your work has a title and that it is your best first stab at the creative non-fiction essay.  Shoot for around 3-5 pages, the suggested length of the final draft, but don’t worry if you have a little more or less than that at this stage.  You’ll be working in groups of 3-4, so please bring 4 copies of your work to class on the due date.

Part 4:  Final Draft

First, the main page of this course insists that writing is never done, never really finished, something I believe to be entirely true.  My hope is that you’ll find cause in your lives or academic careers to return to the works you do here.  So, by “final draft,” I mean the last draft you’ll submit for this class and not some all-mighty, be-all-end-all, perfect piece of writing.  Think polished, revised, something you’re content with.  You’ll e-mail the final draft to me at Jesse.Stommel@colorado.edu.  As usual, you are welcome to send an attachment, but please also cut and paste your work into the body of the e-mail.  Make sure your paper has a title, that you’ve incorporated the feedback you got during the peer review, and that you’ve proofread your work. 

Part 5:  Writer’s Letter

Along with the final draft of your paper, you’ll also submit what I am calling a “writer’s letter,” an informal letter that responds to, discusses or questions your experience so far in the class.  This is also a chance for you to write specifically about the paper you are submitting, how you feel about your process, what you think of the final results, what is working, what still needs work, etc.  You are welcome, though, to speak your mind about anything going on in class.  You have creative license in the letters, as well, and may respond in any style, voice, or genre that you find best suited to the task.  The letters are your chance to make the course content personal.  Since I will have already responded to your work at one or more stages before I receive the final draft, I will frame my comments to you as a response to this letter, so if there are particular things you’d like me to address about your paper, your writing, etc., this is the place to let me know.  The writer’s letter is due along with the final draft of your essay.  You can send this in a separate e-mail, or feel free to put it right at the top of the e-mail you send with your essay.

#2:  Literary Analysis Essay

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2. You’ll begin preparation for this paper by writing a close-analysis, which you’ll expand into a full analytical essay. You will offer a critical reading of one of the literary texts we’ve discussed in class by choosing a topic or theme that interests you and presenting an analysis of what the text is attempting to do with relation to that theme.  A “text” can be any of the films, essays, novels, poems, etc. that we’ve discussed during the course.  Here are some steps that might help if you're having trouble with how to approach your literary analysis paper. Think of a theme in the text that you are interested in (perhaps something that came up in the passage/shot you close-analyzed, perhaps something else). Then, find more passages/shots that relate to that theme.  Determine what you want to argue about the theme, i.e. “The Waste Land” is a poem about... and that theme gets taken up in order to...  Or, Donnie is a character obsessed with... and that leads him to...  You are also welcome to compare/contrast two different texts, i.e. While Walden touches on the subject of... in the following ways..., The Road approaches these same subjects differently...  Use close-analysis of specific passages/shots to support your argument.  The final paper should be of an adequate length to explore your critical reading fully, or around 4-6 pages.
   

Part 1:  Close-analysis

You will be doing a close-analysis assignment during this unit that prepares you for the sorts of analysis that you will include in your literary analysis paper.  Consider this a way to help you narrow in on a text/film you’d like to explore further, a chance to get your ideas flowing--a dry run, if you will.  Try to avoid just cutting and pasting this into your final paper.  However, if you write something you’re happy with for this, feel free to use it in your final essay--just make sure you figure out a cohesive way to incorporate it.

    For this assignment, you will either:  (1)  Write a close-analysis focusing on one short passage from any of the texts we’ve read this semester (The Road, “The Waste Land,” Walden, etc.).  In your work, you do not need to refer to anything outside the scope of the sentence(s) or line(s) you choose.  Depth and clarity is more important here than breadth or comprehensiveness.  However, if you want to draw connections between two or more passages, feel free, but don’t get bogged down and end up saying too little about too many things.  You can also use your analysis to make more far-reaching remarks about the text as a whole, but you don’t necessarily need to for this assignment.  While I would highly recommend that you revise (so your language is as clear as possible), this is not a formal essay, so don’t worry about having an introductory paragraph, thesis statement, etc.  Refer to the Close-reading notes if you get stuck.

    Or:  (2)  Choose a specific shot or frame from one of the films we’ve discussed (or will be discussing) and close-analyze it.  I recommend having the film on in front of you as you write, so you can be as specific and detailed in your analysis as possible.  Consider framing, lighting, camera angle or technique, props, performance, setting, sound, dialogue, symbolism, etc.  What meaning can you draw from the shot or scene?  Why is it so important to the film?  How does the shot/frame support or complicate your answers to the first set of questions.  If you are technically savvy, I encourage you to include an image of the frame you are working on along with your paper.  You can certainly look closely at several cells or a page from the graphic novel Watchmen for this option.

    Again, this does not have to be a formal essay.  Instead, dive right in and analyze.  You are welcome to choose something from earlier in the semester or even something that we have not discussed yet.  My main recommendation would be that you narrow your focus as much as possible.  The less you try to tackle, the more easily you’ll be able to navigate this assignment, I think.  Your close-analysis should be about 2 pages or 500 words.

Part 2:  Body Paragraph

By now, you should have gotten a good start on a draft of the literary analysis essay.  For this assignment, choose one of the body paragraphs you’ve composed for your finished essay.  We’ll be workshopping these paragraphs as a group.  I’ll be choosing a few of them for us to look at together, so be prepared to have some of your work discussed by the whole class.

Part 3:  Rough Draft

This will be a rough draft of your entire essay that you’ll have a chance to workshop with a small group of your peers.  Make sure your work has a title and that it is your best first stab at the literary analysis essay.  Shoot for around 4-6 pages, the suggested length of the final draft, but don’t worry if you have a little more or less than that at this stage.  You’ll be working in groups of 3, so please bring 3 copies of your work to class on the due date.

Part 4:  Final Draft

You’ll e-mail the final draft to me at Jesse.Stommel@colorado.edu.  As usual, you are welcome to send an attachment, but please also cut and paste your work into the body of the e-mail.  Make sure your paper has a title, that you’ve incorporated the feedback you got during the peer review, and that you’ve proofread your work. 

Part 5:  Writer’s Letter

Same as before, although this time you may also want to consider your progress from the first essay to this one.  Were you able to incorporate some of the creative stuff we discussed into your analytical writing.  This is a chance for you to write specifically about the paper you are submitting, how you feel about your process, what you think of the final results, what is working, what still needs work, etc.  Remember, though, you are also welcome to speak your mind about anything going on in class.  You have creative license in the letters, as well, and may respond in any style, voice, or genre that you find best suited to the task.  The letters are your chance to make the course content personal.  I will frame my comments to you as a response to this letter, so if there are particular things you’d like me to address about your paper, your writing, etc., this is the place to let me know.  The writer’s letter is due along with the final draft of your essay.  You can send this in a separate e-mail, or feel free to put it right at the top of the e-mail you send with your essay.

#3:  Illustrated Argumentative Essay

This paper will be the culmination of everything you've done in class thus far. The goal of this paper is to investigate one of the important subjects of this course.  Essentially, your paper should answer the overarching question of the course: what is it to be human?  However, you will approach this by choosing a specific facet or element of this topic that has arisen for you during the course of the semester.  You are welcome to incorporate literary analysis and personal anecdotes into this piece, but you will also move beyond that by incorporating research about your subject.  Toward this end, you will complete an Annotated Bibliography to reflect this research.  Your paper will have two components, a written component and a visual component.  The degree to which these two elements overlap is up to you.  Since this is an argumentative essay, you will want to make sure that both your written and visual elements clearly support and contribute to your argument.

    The Visual component can take any of a number of forms, including but not limited to graphic art, video, photography, Powerpoint, a web page, etc.  Words are very rarely divorced from images in our culture.  What we read is usually accompanied by images, whether it’s direct illustrations, advertisements, the cover of a book, other elements on the page (of a newspaper or web site), etc.  We’ll be talking quite a bit about the way that words and images are in conversation with one another, and this is what you’ll be reflecting in your work.  We’ll consider more examples and possibilities as the semester proceeds.  The other component of the final paper will be an argumentative paper.  The length of this paper depends, to some degree, on the nature of your visual work.  We’ll discuss this further as we begin working on this assignment.

    Feel free to develop your final paper from one of the other papers or worksheets you complete during the semester, broadening its scope or reinventing it in some significant way.  You may also collaborate on this paper, if you’d like, although make sure that each person in your group is at least somewhat involved in every aspect of the final product (i.e. don’t have one person just do the visual part and the other just do the written part).  This final paper takes the place of a final exam.

Part 1:  Annotated Bibliography

For this assignment, you will compile an annotated bibliography including around 4-6 sources relevant to your final essay (at least two of these should be sources that we have not looked at together in class).  In a conventional annotated bibliography, you would include the bibliographical reference (using a format such as MLA) and a short paragraph discussing how the source is (or will be) important to your work, perhaps including a brief summary and/or pulling out specific points that you find particularly meaningful or relevant.  You can include a quotation from the source if you want, but try to keep focused on your own ideas about how/why the sources are useful to your final essay.  The final essay isn’t a research paper, so how you end up using the various sources in your work will be up to you.  You can analyze them in your work, use them to support the points you make, as a model for the style of writing you do, or as inspiration for the visual component.  Feel free to think outside the box with regard to how your annotated bibliography looks.  If you decide to do something really unconventional with your final essay, your annotated bibliography may end up looking equally unconventional.  The main objective here is that you do some research and bring some outside sources into conversation with stuff (topics or texts) we’ve been examining and discussing this semester.

Part 2:  Final Essay

We won’t be workshopping this essay in the same way that we have the other ones.  Instead, you’ll have a chance to discuss your ideas with each other at various points, keeping the final product itself tucked away all the while.  Then, during the last week, you’ll display your project in class so that we can all read, examine, and interact with each other’s work.  Since the unveiling of this work will be more public, you won’t need to submit this project by e-mail in the usual way.

Rules for the final essay (because you know full well by now how I love rules):

    1.  It must make an argument, one that people will care about.

    2.  The argument must be supported with compelling textual and visual evidence.

    3.  Your work must investigate something relevant to one or more subjects/texts we’ve considered in class.

    4.  It must draw on, cite, or be inspired by other outside sources.

    5.  And here’s the tricky part:  It can’t be disposable.  The project you create must be something that doesn’t just take up space in the world.  It must be either reusable, recyclable, or a work of art that warrants keeping around and displaying.  It can also, of course, be digital, but if it is, you’ll need to bring or arrange for (with me) some method of displaying it to the class.

Part 3:  Final Writer’s Letter

Write a short evaluation of your performance in this class (about 1-page), addressing the following sorts of questions:  How many absences did you have?  How would you characterize the regularity and thoroughness of your work?  Were you prepared for each class?  Did you do all of the required assignments?  How would you characterize your overall effort, interest, commitment to the class?  Did your engagement increase or decrease as the semester went along?  Also, write a brief evaluation of the work you did for the final project.  Finally, what grade do you give yourself for the semester and why?  (Don't be overly modest, but don't be grandiose either—there should be a reasonable correlation between your answers to the previous questions and this one.  Ideally, I would give everyone the grade they give themselves, but I reserve the right to raise or lower grades as appropriate).