Dante at the river Lethe in Purgatorio.
Our Approach to Writing
Our writing philosophy in this course is best expressed by Neil Postman:
Writing makes it possible and convenient to subject thought to a continuous and concentrated scrutiny. Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist — all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.
That quotation, along with an overview of what we’ll call emulation-through-analysis work, is in this PDF overview. As that document notes, we also pay attention to Paul Graham and his theory that essay-writing in school focuses on literary analysis through “a series of historical accidents,” with the end result that most school essays are “now three steps removed from real work.” (If you are an AP junior, by the way, you’ve already seen this stuff.)
Except when test prep is necessary, you will read what you write and write what you read. You must understand how an author writes in order to emulate her, of course, but we are focused on using what we read, not doing what David Foster Wallace described as “the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty.”
This essay, while focused in part on one particular quarter/class, explains more of what analysis means to us:
Find the River
Our focus early this week is on “The Age of the Essay,” which was written in 2004 by Paul Graham. You have a hard copy of this text — here it is in Google Drive — but it was originally published online:
Whichever version you read, do what seems most effective to you as you go. You don’t need to annotate the text, unless that’s what you would naturally do. You simply need to understand it. That is most often helped by interacting with the text, of course, and annotating is one way to do that.
At first, you should read this essay individually and silently. The reason: Sometimes you need to sit with your own thoughts, free of distraction, in order to find meaning. The collaborative chaos you create on most days is vital, and I think we will always be more inclined to spend our time that way than any other; it’s important, however, that you occasionally let silence into your life, especially while you read. It deepens the experience and allows you to get a bit more out of the text.
Look to Google Classroom for further instructions and any required assignments for this reading. After tackling Graham on your own, you should focus on the protégé effect, which we will define most often as proxy feedback. Read alone, and then talk to me and to each other.
One more thing: English 11R students began reading Graham last week; AP students will begin today, Monday, with a day to catch up. (That’s the burden of a college-level course.) You can and probably should work together, because the cross-pollination of ideas is a powerful part of collaboration.
