Content Objectives
Professor Jessica Brantley, Reading for Writing Strategy and Writer’s Workshop
Professor Jessica C. Brantley’s YNI seminar titled Reading for Writing: Modeling the Modern Essay has altered my old beliefs about nonfiction. In our modern times, nonfiction does not have to be “entirely” objective, impersonal, fact-based and “boring” to read. The seminar was modeled after Yale’s popular course, English 120. Participants read a large number of essays to serve as models of excellence, exploring how these writers crafted their personal experiences to create public argument. Participants also write a 1500-word essay according to a genre such as memoirs, profiles, cultural criticism, political argument, op-eds, and reviews. The heart of this seminar is using writer workshops for participants to critique each other’s writing. During each workshop, the writer will speak first and explain the writing experience in terms of inspiration, process, successes and difficulties. Each critic has the task to write a one-page letter addressed to the writer noting what works well, what could be improved, and suggestions for their final draft.
The Norton Reader: An Anthology of Nonfiction contains the majority of model essays read in this seminar. This anthology provides a variety of modern essays in the genres of personal memoirs and public arguments with depth and breadth from classic to contemporary authors.
Personal Memoirs (Part One of the Unit)
A memoir is an account of a personal experience based on the person’s life and past experiences. It is usually written in the first person. From The Norton Reader, I have selected the following personal narratives to serve as models for students to read and deconstruct:
Angelou, Maya. Graduation. 45-54.
Anzaldua, Gloria. How to Tame a Wild Tongue. 471-80.
Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home. 12-34.
Didion, Joan. On Going Home. 1-3.
Dillard, Annie. An American Childhood. 98-103.
Douglass, Frederick. Learning to Read. 404-408
Eighner, Lars. On Dumpster Diving. 55-64.
Franklin, Benjamin. Learning to Write. 484-487.
Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. In the Kitchen. 245-251.
Goode, JJ. Single-Handed Cooking. 280-283.
Hughes, Langston. Salvation. 947-949 Hurston, Zora Neale. How It Feels to Be Colored Me. 42-45.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. Tongue-Tied. 461-465
Lee, Change-rae. Coming Home Again. 3-11.
Mairs, Nancy. On Being a Cripple. 64-74.
Rodriguez, Richard. Aria. 465-471.
Thoreau, Henry David. Where I Lived, and What I Lived For. 967-975.
Tobin, Lad. Here Everything Is Possible. 286-295.
Walker, Alice. Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self. 74-80.
Welty, Eudora. One Writer’s Beginnings. 877-822
Public Arguments and Open Letters for CW (Part Two of the Unit)
From The Norton Reader, I have selected the following list of argumentative essays and open letters as models. Close reading of these mentor text will help students to articulate their own public points, and construct effective arguments as they write collaboratively:
Asimov, Issac. The Relativity of Wrong. 824-829.
Bird, Caroline. College is a Waste of Time and Money. 428-436.
Bissel, Tom. Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. 214-222.
Bolina, Jaswinder. Writing Like a White Guy: On Language, Race and Poetry. 496-505. Brooks, David. The Gender Gap at School. 390-392.
Carr, Nicholas. Is Google Making Us Stupid? 572-581.
Chief Seattle. Letter to President Pierce, 1855. 543-544.
Cunningham, Amy. Why Women Smile? 172-177.
Epstein, David. Sports Should Be Child’s Play. 393-396.
FitzGerald, Frances. Rewriting American History. 786-793.
Foer, Franklin. How Soccer Explains the American Culture War. 350-358.
Jefferson, Thomas et al. The Declaration of Independence. 773-779.
Keillor, Garrison. How to Write a Letter. 505-507.
King, Jr., Martin Luther. Letter from Birmingham Jail. 806-819.
King, Stephen. On Writing. 493-495.
Jones, Jeffrey Owen. The Man Who Wrote the Pledge of Allegiance. 793-796.
Petroski, Henry. Falling Down Is Part of Growing Up. 187-193.
Pilardi, Jo-Ann. Immigration Problem Is About Us, Not Them. 386-388.
Regan, Tom. The Case of Animal Rights. 670-680.
Singer, Peter. What Should a Billionaire Give–And What Should You? 640-651.
Staples, Brent. Why Colleges Shower Their Students with A’s. 388-390.
William Zinnser, On Writing Well
The book On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction is a modern writing guide written by William Zinnser, a Yale writing professor. It is often credited as a suitable companion work to the classic The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White. The book is divided into four major parts: Principles, Methods, Forms and Attitudes. This curriculum unit will focus on Zinnser’s concepts about: Writing About Yourself and the Sound of Your Voice.
Zinnser views nonfiction as literature and makes a potent argument that “good writing is good writing” no matter what form it takes and no matter what we call it.10 I would go further to add that good writing, fiction or nonfiction, has the aesthetic, ethical and intellectual merits to change how its readers see, experience and understand the world. Zinnser advocates young writers to write about themselves because writing nonfiction like memoirs enables beginner writers to write about what they know, what they can easily observe and quickly find out. He writes: “Go with what seems inevitable in your own heritage. Embrace it and it may lead you to eloquence.”11 Teachers have the ability as well as responsibility to motivate all writers, especially those who are struggling, to write no matter how they feel about their ability.
Memoirs can serve this purpose of getting students to write more freely and eloquently as they investigate about their own heritage, subjects that touch their own lives or experiences that they had lived. It is also crucial to have students understand that enjoyment, fear and confidence are inseparable with being a writer. Furthermore, memoir can support a student’s personal struggle to figure out what is the sound and effect of their voice as they write.12 Good writers make the readers feel that the writers enjoy writing and write for their readers, even when the writers don’t feel like writing.13 Beside teaching students to enjoy writing, teachers also need to motivate students to perverse when the writing gets difficult, when students are afraid of getting it all wrong, when students lose tracks of the purpose, or when students stop believing in the power of their voice. Memoirs can give students the opportunity to make sense of the world and to communicate their personal beliefs and values to impact themselves and people around them.
Virginia Woolf on Modern Essay and Author’s Craft
The question “What is a modern essay?” is an open-ended discussion. The following questions are important to consider and could help teachers and students to think critically as they come up with their own concept of what is a modern essay: Can a compelling argumentative essay or a personal memoir apply a sentimental-subjective attitude rather than a detached-objective point of view? An informal and democratic tone rather than a formal and authoritarian “know-it-all” voice? What about the idea of using the format of a poem such as Langston Hughes’ Will V-Day be Me Day Too as an open letter? What other un-restrained forms can students use to pursue their individual or collective version of the truth rather than be forced to use an expected organization of beginning, middle and end? Is essay short? If so, how short or how long? Can it be both serious and humorous? What do you write on? Paper, computer, on the wall, on the ground? Where do you write? In a room by yourself? In a public space like a cafe? On a shared Google Doc as a whole class?
In Modern Essay (1922), Virginia Woolf wrote that the essay “should give pleasure… It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last… A novel has a story, a poem rhyme; but what art can the essayist use in these short lengths of prose to sting us wide awake and fix us in a trance which is not sleep but rather an intensification of life – a basking, with every faculty alert, in the sun of pleasure?”14
Benjamin Franklin, Deconstructing Prose into Poem and Poem into Prose
If students are encouraged to write routinely with the freedom and intensity like that of Benjamin Franklin, their writing will improve significantly. At the age of sixteen, Franklin taught himself how to write better by copying the work of writers of his times. He read and re-read original texts, butchered the text with his own writing in the attempt to write similarly or better. Then he composed the prose into poetry and back again. Franklin explains his learning process of deconstructing the original text: “I also sometimes jumbled my Collections of Hints into Confusion, and after some Weeks, endeavor’d to reduce them into the best Order, before I began to form the full Sentences, and complete the Paper. This was to teach me Method in the Arrangement of Thoughts.”15 Most importantly, Franklin was obsessed and wrote religiously whenever he had a free moment.
Frederick Douglass, Learning How to Read and Write
Like Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass was obsessed with learning how to read and write. Douglass had the similar tenacity, creativity and determination as he taught himself how to read and write. He made learning a priority in improving who he was. Douglass learned how to form letters by watching ship’s carpenters write single letters on lumber; then he practiced forming the letters on fences, walls, and ground around the city.16 Douglass master’s wife, Mrs. Auld, did teach him the alphabet and a few words before her husband forbade her to continue. Douglass went to the street for private lessons; he would give bread to poor white boys in exchange for reading lessons and challenge them to see who can write better. When he was left alone in his master’s house, Douglass secretly wrote on his master’s son’s discarded copybooks.
At the age of twelve, Douglass read a book called The Columbian Orator, which contains a dialogue between a master and a slave.17 The master presents an argument for slavery, the slave refutes every point and eventually convinces his master to set him free. Douglass started to see reading and writing as a ticket out of slavery. In order to teach reading and writing effectively, allow students the similar kind of time, space, freedom and challenge to dissect and reconstruct their original essays as Douglass had done.
Nicholas Carr, Technology and Google Search
In his essay Is Google Making Us Stupid, Nicholas Carr explains how the Net has not only altered what we read, but how we read. This shift may have resulted in changing how we think. A by-product of this new way of thinking may also have created a new sense of who we are.18 We used to read books, but now we read hyperlinks of disassociated content at a frantic speed on our laptops, phones and other digital devices. We have become decoders of information rather than critical analysts of ideas. Similarly, writing suffers the double-edged sword of the convenient clicking of the “cut” and “paste” commands; we can obtain a motherlode of “useful and useless” information regardless if we can actually afford the time and energy to do the work to mentally digest it all.
How do you teach students to read and write an essay in our modern times? The internet has made plagiarism increasingly tempting for our students, yet how do we balance the commodification of intellectual property with the right to free access of information? If the way we read and write in the modern era is changing how we think, therefore who we are, then doesn’t it make sense that as teachers, we may want to change with the wave of this new phenomenon, as to how we teach our students how to read and write? I propose and advocate for teachers to slow down, and for students to hand write complex sentences in their notebooks, study these sentences carefully as models, reread them out loud multiple times, and re-organize the words to find new insights.
Description of the Constitutional Convention Essay Model for CW
The writer’s workshop can be modified and integrated with the collaborative writing process. For the public arguments, teachers will use a model akin to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where 55 delegates (representing 12 states except Rhode Island) gathered in Independence Hall to work on how to strengthen the national government.19 The delegates (later known as Founding Fathers and Framers of the Constitution) had two written documents to work with: The Articles of Confederation and the Declaration of Independence. George Washington presided over the Convention. Similarly, teachers may need to preside over the progress. Students will have their individual memoirs to work into public arguments as they debated over controversial topics. Our Founding Fathers argued over the issues of slavery, representation and taxes. Students may argue over current topics such as immigration, gun control, divorce rates, etc.
Who actually wrote the Constitution?20 In short, it was a collaboration. James Madison wrote the document that formed the model. The Framers were influenced by the writing of John Adams’ “Defense of the Constitution of the Government of the United States of America”, Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”, John Locke (1632-1704) of England and Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) of France. The delegates debated the pros and cons of each issue, proposed plans and compromises before they were able to complete a rough draft. A Committee of Style was appointed to create a final draft. The final document was signed by 39 of the 55 delegates, some had already left Philadelphia, and three delegates refused. The Convention took nearly 4 months of deliberation. Similarly, the class argumentative essay will require students to actively debate, plan, compromise and write in groups or as a whole class.
Comments: