Writing Assignments and Course Projects
Response Papers
Literacy Narrative
Interpretive Letters
Academic Essays
In-Class Presentation
Book Review
Annotated Bibliography
Research Paper
E-Journal Issue
Response papers are a step in the process of gaining a little power of the texts we read, over your own writing process, and over the conventions of academic writing. Writing response papers gives you an opportunity to begin to explore your interests at some length, and they are excellent preliminary writing: the ideas that you explore in your response papers can be developed at greater length in the essays that you write for the course, or in the literacy narrative.
These papers are both formal and informal: there is a length requirement, they will be handed in for a grade, and I will respond to your writing; yet they are not meant to be polished arguments and can be long, focused freewrites if that works for you. These papers are short, no more than two double-spaced pages, therefore you must be concise; that is, you have room to explore your topic, but you shouldn't wander (too far) away from it. Give your writing some kind of organization, so that your reader can locate and follow your point with relative ease. The act of writing your response paper should be an effort to make some meaning out of the reading, and the class discussions related to that reading.
Try to make your own investment in the texts you read, and the texts you write. I will write along with you, and you will have access to my response papers via WebCT. You may use my writing as a model, as a foil, or as a prompt to write about a particular topic. Notice: I reserve the option to assign a specific topic or genre for some of the response paper assignments.
I choose to focus this assignment on literacy because this is an English class, and reading and writing are the fundamental activities in the course. But I also choose literacy for other reasons, among them are: language use is at the heart of what it means to be human; literacy, in its many forms, often works as a gateway to acceptance, success, and sometimes even life- that is to say, all language use is in some way political and has social consequences; reading and writing (English class) is an experience common to everyone who goes to school in this country, yet everyone has vastly different experiences, and by focusing on literacy from a narrative perspective we can begin to understand the ways that our abilities to read and write have real consequences in the world.
Throughout the course of the semester you will write several drafts of this project. Consider it to be an ongoing assignment, one that will not really be finished even when the semester is over. You will spend time thinking back to your experiences with language, reading, and writing.
Some questions that your writing will seek to answer are: Do you like to read? Why or why not? What about writing? What was your favorite thing to read? What do you like to write? What was the role of literacy at home? At school? How have your past experiences influenced your current attitudes about language, reading, and writing? What changes in your attitudes about literacy can you identify have occurred in your lifetime? In what ways has the work you are doing in this course affected your thinking about language? What is the role of literacy in your career plan? These are just some examples of questions that can get you started on writing; ultimately the best questions will be your own.
This assignment has no fixed length. You will write as much as you need to write to present as complex and interesting a picture that you can of yourself and your experiences and attitudes as they relate to your language use. This assignment can be as experimental or as traditional as you would like it to be. That is to say, you can present the material in as innovative or as standard a form of narrative as you wish. Remember, while you are essentially unlimited in form, you are in some ways limited in content. A good literacy narrative does more than tell a story; it also puts that story into a larger perspective, and brings together past, present, and future.
Interpretive Letters
Interpretive letters are in a sense response papers, but with a creative, literary twist. The important feature of these writing assignments is the relationship between writer and audience. Letters are a form of direct personal address, and therefore these assignments ask you to create or adopt a particular persona and to address your writing to someone specific, taking into account that particular persona as well. For example, you might take on the role of a character in one of the novels and write a letter to another character. As another example, you will write a letter to somebody else in the class, or the instructor.
In these letters you should focus on some aspect of the book and use your writing as an act of interpretation, as a way to get at the "deeper meanings" in the literature. You may take on the persona of a character for the purpose of exploring that character further. You may write a letter that addresses a theme or issue that the novel presents, either directly or implicitly, as a means to highlight that issue, or as a means to argue with it.
We will use some class time to read letters out loud to each other, and there may be some cases where I will ask half of the class to take on a specific persona, and half of the class to take on another, for the purpose of presenting a dramatic interpretation. Reading letters in class will also be a way to begin discussion.
Letters are a less formal kind of writing than essays, one that we are all very familiar with, and rather than writing to the teacher, you will write to each other. These writing assignments will serve to prompt our class discussions, to supplement our class discussions, to give you a method of addressing the novels that is more "creative," and, perhaps more important, they will ask you to step outside of your own personal perspective and try to understand the views of others. Additionally, these assignments will serve as preparatory writing for the more formal essays that you will write for each novel.
Academic Essays
This will be (almost) the most formal piece of writing that you will create in response to the books that you read this semester. These essays have very specific features: they are carefully constructed arguments which support, by presenting relevant and acceptable evidence, a thesis statement.
You are probably familiar with the notion that literature is open to interpretation. Such an essay works to create and to communicate in writing, your particular "read" of a piece of literature. In other words, your thesis statement should be a straightforward claim about how you might read a novel, or part of a novel, a particular character, the author's use of language, and so on. This claim is your own claim, but it must be substantiated by the text, typically by providing evidence in the form of direct quotations.
Writing a thesis statement is a lot like forming a hypothesis in an investigation. As you gather bits and pieces of information from your reading and from class discussion, these clues make it possible for you to begin to get a picture of what's going on, or what might be going on. Once you have formed your hypothesis or interpretation, any other information that you collect in your investigation begins to take on meaning in relation to your hypothesis. In other words, the thesis statement can operate as a lens (a way to focus) on something. Often, our hypotheses are difficult to substantiate, and must be altered, or thrown out altogether. Your task when writing these essays is to manipulate the available evidence in such a way as to build an argument (a case) that proves your hypothesis.
These essays pick up where the interpretive letters and response papers leave off. In your letters you will have explored alternative points of view in an effort to focus in on interesting and important aspects of the novel. Where a letter may be formal or informal in tone or language, the conventions of academic writing call for a sustained level of relatively formal language use throughout the essay. However, be careful of trying to sound "educated." Use language that you are familiar and comfortable with.
In the essays, your job is to offer your own perspective, not the teacher's. This type of essay is one that is often referred to when English teachers ask you to write an "essay" on a piece of literature. I call them academic essays because their features (thesis statement, structure/organization, rules of logic, formal register, rules of evidence) are common to most of the essays that teachers in other disciplines assign.
We will discuss what constitutes evidence, how to write a thesis statement, and what argumentative structures look like. We will also discuss how to use other writing you have done in the course to help you write these essays. Some of the readings we do in class will help you learn about academic writing.
Your essays should be 4-5 double-spaced pages in length. You will be surprised at how little space 4-5 pages actually is! It is best to think of the first draft of your essays as a "get it down on paper " draft; that is, give your essay your best shot when you write it. Then bring it into class and read it to your peers, listen carefully to their responses. Consider the feedback that they give you and that I give you. Then think about how you will change your paper before you submit it as a final draft. Construct a revision plan. Part of the grade you receive on each essay will be based on your efforts at revision. You will be required to write one of these essays for each of the required book length pieces on the syllabus.
In Class Presentation
As I outlined briefly in the section describing the book review assignment, the in-class presentation is a very short (5-10) oral presentation in which you will do at least two things: first, tell the class which novel your reading, and second, tell the class how you plan to review the book. For the second part of the assignment, think about these things: who do you imagine your audience to be, and how will you shape your review to fit that audience? What is your relationship to the audience (educator, purveyor of what's hip, salesperson)? What is your relationship to the text? All of these considerations will affect the content, tone, and style of your writing. For your presentation, you should be able to cover these questions. You are free to execute your presentation in any way you choose. I will be looking for content, mainly, so don't get too flashy or involved. You won't have time to put together a highly polished presentation, and that's not what the assignment asks for. It asks you to share with the class what you're reading, and it requires you to be thinking enough about your review to be able to answer the above questions in your talk.
Book Review
Each of you will write a book review of a book of your choice. In addition to the three books that are required reading for the course, you will have the opportunity to choose another your own and write about it - differently than you are required to do for the other novels. The book review is very different from the academic essay, though it may share some of its features (a brief plot summary, for example). The audience for the academic essay is typically construed to be the teacher, another academic, or a well-educated individual who has some prior experience with the novel you are writing about. Book reviews are often enough published in academic journals, which have academics as their audience, and can thus be very much like academic essays. However, we are most familiar with the kind of book reviews that appear in magazines or newspapers, which define their audiences and their purposes for publishing quite differently than academic scholars.
What I am asking you to do in this assignment is address an audience made up a wide variety of individuals - much like a book reviewer for a magazine or newspaper. In the academic essay you argue for a particular interpretation within the confines of the conventions of academic writing. For this assignment, you must take on more the role of the pop or mass media book reviewer. In the book review, the writer can take a step back from a strictly academic approach and begin to address the place of the novel in relation to others like it, or in relation to what's current in culture and society (music, art, etc.). And there is more room for personal taste and colorful language. In other words, book reviews typically make no attempt to be scholarly and objective. Like the academic essay, book reviews require some form of substantiation of the point of view put forth by the author. But the rules are a little different.
During the course of the semester, as we read our books we will also read book reviews. The book reviews that we read will become voices in our conversations about the books we read, and contribute to our process of making sense out of them. Just as important, the book reviews we read can be used as models for the book reviews that you are required to write. So when we read book reviews, we won't just be looking at what is said, but we will closely examine their textual features as a way to better understand how to write them. Perhaps you may like a particular book review writer's style, and want to emulate that style. Perhaps you enjoy the attitude the book reviewer takes toward the book, or toward the audience, and you will want to imitate that.
For this class, book reviews should be short, no more than two double-spaced pages. Again, the length of the piece comes with its own particular challenges. You will have more than a week to read your novel of choice and produce a book review. I will ask you to give a very brief presentation to the rest of the class about your book. The presentations are a way to get you thinking about how you will write to your audience about your book, and to inform the whole class of what you are working on. You should plan on taking 5-10 minutes of class time to present your intentions for writing, and your chosen book, to the class.
Annotated Bibliography
The annotated bibliography is like a works cited page: a series of formal citations is given, and then following each citation, a paragraph provides a detailed yet compact summary of the important components of the source.
Annotated bibliographies are extremely helpful for when conducting research. They provide a list of sources that are relevant to the research topic, and at the same time they offer a brief view of what each source contains, thus making your research paper easier. For example, if when you are writing a research paper and you want to discuss how other scholars have written on your topic, your annotated bibliography provides you with a quick reference guide.
For this assignment, you are to seek out 4 scholarly essays that are relevant to the book that you want to deal with in the final research paper. Your final annotated bibliography should contain 4 sources, each cited correctly according to MLA style (more about that in class) and summarized as powerfully and succinctly as you can. Your summaries for each source should be no longer than 250-500 words (the size of a somewhat long single-spaced paragraph).
The purpose of this assignment is for you to research the novel you wish to concentrate on for the research paper, look at a variety of writings about that novel, come to an understanding of what each article is about, summarize it, and then use those writings to help you write your research paper. This assignment is meant to be a stepping-stone between the academic essay you will have already written, and the research paper that you are going to write. The research paper will demand that you move from writing an essay expressing your own perspective and incorporating textual evidence from the text to creating an essay which expresses your own perspective, takes into account evidence from the novel, and evidence taken from the writings of scholars and academics.
In the research paper, you will situate your own perspective of the novel within the scholarly conversation that is already ongoing regarding the novel. It is therefore of the utmost importance that you choose relevant texts as the sources for your annotated bibliography; these sources will become important to your writing and thinking process. We will discuss how to go about finding sources at the time the annotated bibliography assignment will be given.
Perhaps your research will move you to shift, modify, solidify, or even abandon your previous perspective. Perhaps you will disagree with what one of your sources says about your chosen novel; you can argue against that perspective and simultaneously make a case for your own. The annotated bibliography requires you to become aware of and take into account the perspective of literary critics, and will initiate the process of situating your own voice among the voices of others.
Research Paper
This assignment is the final individual writing project for the course. Your task in this assignment is to choose one of the academic essays you've already written and extend your analysis, taking into account your research efforts. Or you may choose to write your research paper on the book you chose for your book review.
The purpose of this assignment is for you to construct a reading of your chosen novel in which your perspective appears in conversation with the perspectives of those authors whose work you discover in your research process. In the process of conducting research you will see that there is no single "correct" interpretation of a piece of literature. Rather, scholars offer their readings of literature to a community of other scholars, and in this way a conversation is formed. Each perspective in some way takes into account previous scholarship and simultaneously invites a future response. This is how the body of knowledge surrounding a text is created. Your research paper will be your effort to place yourself in some relation to the ongoing conversation.
Entering the conversation requires an awareness of the writing conventions at play in the scholarly community. The reading that you will do for the annotated bibliography part of this assignment will provide you with a first-hand look at these conventions: how scholars bring together a number of voices, including their own, to construct a piece of literary scholarship, the style appropriate to academic writing, etc.
The writing that you will produce over the course of the semester is meant to familiarize you with some of these conventions. The interpretive letters will inform your academic essays. Your response papers will give you experience reading academic literature, and building and understanding arguments in a more formal way. The academic essays will be the foundation upon which you will construct your research paper. Writing a book review and an annotated bibliography will help you with your summarizing skills. The research paper builds on everything that you will have learned about reading and writing in English Studies by giving you hands-on experience in producing a piece of literary scholarship.
This assignment should be 6-8 double-spaced pages in length. We will spend class time engaged in peer review of your research paper drafts, and you will have more than a week to revise your first draft and create your final draft.
Electronic Journal
The final writing project for the semester is a group project. As a class, we will create a single -issue electronic literary journal which we will link to the course website. We will need to set up an editorial board which will review submissions, make choices about which submissions will be published, and provide pointed and detailed feedback to submitting authors. We will need to decide what the "theme" of the issue will be. Someone will write an introductory "From the Editors" piece, and someone will write an afterward. We will need to design a cover.
Where will these submissions come from? Who are the authors? You are. Each of you will be required to submit two pieces of writing that you produced during the course of the semester, and one of these two pieces will be published in the journal. Ideally, all genres of writing in the course will be represented in the journal: we will have a few book reviews, a few response papers, some interpretive letters, some academic essays, situation papers, and some annotated bibliographies. The purpose of this assignment is to present your writing to the reading public and to represent your work to others. Another purpose of this assignment is to learn a little about web authoring. This assignment also demands that you revisit, rework, and revise a piece of writing that you've already written and turn it into a publishable text.
As a class, we must therefore decide what our publishing standards will be. In any event, you will no longer be writing for your teacher, you will be writing for yourselves, for each other, and for your readers. The assignment places a high emphasis on collaborative work, imagination and creativity, revision, and audience awareness. And it should be fun: we can make it look any way we like. You will receive a grade for your collaborative work, and everyone must share the burden of work for production of this journal.
Note: this assignment description is currently in ideal form. That is, this description outlines the way I would like to see the journal come to life. It is a potentially reachable goal, but one that is not easily reached. Therefore, let's play it by ear and see what we can do with it according to how everything else goes in the class. Again, much of the responsibility for how the journal turns out will rely on your level of commitment to it.
