Category: Writing Resources

From a 2024 overhaul of the most-accessed writing-specific posts for students, especially seniors.

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The Age of the Essay, Updated

  By Writing Resources

Finding the River

Camille Corot's "Interrupted Reading" (1870)

Camille Corot’s “Interrupted Reading” (1870)

Here is Paul Graham’s “The Age of the Essay” as posted to his website: http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html.

Read this carefully. You aren’t required to annotate the text, except that annotation helps you to understand it. Annotating is one way to build understanding. Another is to collaborate on an interrupted reading of the text.

Interrupted reading is what it sounds like: You read a bit, discuss or write about what you’ve read, and then read more. That’s closer to what real-world reading looks like, and it invites others into the discussion. For that purpose, you’ll be given a copy with numbered paragraphs: Paul Graham’s “The Age of the Essay” (Reformatted).

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Writing Process: Reader’s Response

  By Writing Resources

A Reader’s Response

This is a writing guide for a reader-response essay, which is also called a reader’s response. This kind of essay draws on reader-response criticism, a school of literary theory that prioritizes the individual’s experience of a text.

This can be done with any text, so you may have been assigned one (e.g., The Bean Trees) or allowed to choose one. You must obviously start by reading the text closely. Most other requirements are explained through this guide or fall naturally under the auspices of our course. You will use our writing process to produce the essay, and you will rely on grade abatement to monitor your process.

You’ll also, as always, need to read the instructions and feedback given to you even more carefully and closely than the subject of your reader-response writing. This is the backbone of our course. It will always matter most that you learn to explore a post like this, since that skill will translate to your close reading of a novel; the reverse is not always true.

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The Writing Process

  By Writing Resources

This is a post on the history and efficacy of the writing process as taught in the Humanities makerspace. We always start with Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death:

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.

All instructional posts, printable handouts, worksheets, etc., are kept here: http://sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?page_id=4661.

For easy reference, this is the most recent version of the writing guide that is explored and explained below: https://tinyurl.com/sisyphus-writes.

Read on for the exploration and explanation of writing in a makerspace.
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The End of the Writing Process

  By Writing Resources

You’ve finished the writing process. What’s next?

First of all, you should have a lot of stuff to work with — notes, drafts, final copies, reflections, metacognitive responses, etc., all related to the prompt.

Here is an example from a Google Classroom unit in September of 2018:

This was a two-week writing process that started in class with handwritten responses to a pair of prompts. Then there were two typed revision steps, some optional metacognitive writing, and plenty of notes and feedback. The goal was a second revision that combined the original two responses into a coherent essay.

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