Your prompt:
Write an essay on a subject from your study of the practice of empathy.
Each hyperlink in the prompt leads to the entirety of what you need to write this essay. It starts with the writing process post, which leads you to your writing guide:
The questions guide you through the modular elements of writing. Here is the second page:
This assignment builds on the NPR Podcast Challenge we started in early January:
You can continue to use the space to complete the challenge, and I’ll make that an ongoing option through the end of March. There is an opportunity here to do more than just a podcast, though. The five prompts provided by NPR could be used for discussion and essay-writing, too.
First, those prompts again:
Tell us a story about your school or community: about something that happened there — recently or in the past — that your audience should know about.
What is a moment in history that all students should learn about?
Show us both sides of a debate about an issue that’s important to you.
What do you want to change about the world? What’s a big change that students today will make in the future?
Explain something to us that kids understand and grown-ups don’t.
Answering these five questions has given you the subject and approach, at least, for five different essays. We will use the writing process(es) outlined here:
Your assignment is simple: Choose a prompt, and then write an essay in response to it.
You can use your peers for inspiration, by the way, since you can load the Google Form you completed, click on “See previous responses,” and read hundreds of potential approaches:
You have to add your own answers first, of course. If you’ve done that, you now have access to the anonymous suggestions of your peers.
Follow any further directions on Google Classroom, and ask questions below.
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.
Continue reading
Earlier this month, you were invited to read excerpts from Freakonomics:
The focus overall is on parenting, with the subject of names dominating an entire chapter. That is now our focus: the names we have and what we might write about them.
The prompt for this writing assignment is simple: Write an essay about your name. The trick is unpacking that prompt and finding an interesting approach to the subject.
To do this, we’ll us two tactics. First, a work-in-progress guide to writing built on makerspace principles. It’s roughly 90% complete, which means it will work for you:
It will also be shared in class. Following those steps will produce an essay.
The second tactic is to use the comment section of this post to share, discuss, critique, etc., your ideas. Focus on your approach. What is the interesting perspective you can bring to bear on the subject of your name? What questions can you ask and answer? What will interest a potential audience? And so on.
Post your (succinct) comments here, and we’ll let the interstitial mechanisms of the course take over. Follow Google Classroom for deadlines and other requirements.
Using your notes from last week, we are going to begin writing an essay. The post above should be familiar to you, and you should have responses to the prompts at the end of it. Those responses will inform our next steps, which start with finding an approach.
In Google Classroom, you’ll find the first part of this assignment, which is to break down and analyze four quotations. Here is the first, which comes from Piet Hein:
Art is solving problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved. The shaping of the question is part of the answer.
That echoes the second quotation to analyze, which is from Paul Graham, whose “Age of the Essay” tells us what writing should do (emphasis mine):
To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called “essais.” He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning “to try” and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
Figure out what? You don’t know yet. And so you can’t begin with a thesis, because you don’t have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn’t begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don’t take a position and defend it. You notice a door that’s ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what’s inside.
If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne’s great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That’s why I write them.
Next, you should look closely at this selection from Joan Didion’s “Why I Write,” which is about how she approaches essays and other writings:
It took me some years to discover what I was.
Which was a writer.
By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
Before we get to the last quotation, let’s talk about the fact that you already have a subject for the essay you will be writing. You have watched videos on empathy and blame, and you’ve thought about how those ideas connect to you, your school, and your life. You know the topic, or at least the possible topics; now you need to determine how to approach the work
This is going to be your approach, which is the first element of any piece of effective writing. You need an interesting question to ask or a unique perspective to explore. Paul Graham compares this, in “The Age of the Essay,” to a river finding its way to the sea; Virginia Woolf compares it to a “shock” that drives her to “put the severed parts together.” That’s the last quotation for you to analyze before working on your own approach:
I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me.
Each of these quotations offers you a way to look at how you approach your own essay. When you’ve finished that analysis, you can begin to write about your own approach. You aren’t quite writing the essay itself yet; instead, you are outlining and brainstorming and questioning things. Ask yourself:
Ask me questions and share any ideas you have below. Remember that Google Classroom has your formal assignments for the week.
Let’s spend the week experimenting with how you write the essay that follows that post. Look to Google Classroom for the formal assignment, and then start with this quotation from Piet Hein:
Art is solving problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved. The shaping of the question is part of the answer.
That echoes Paul Graham, whose “Age of the Essay” tells us what writing should do (emphasis mine):
To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called “essais.” He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning “to try” and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
Figure out what? You don’t know yet. And so you can’t begin with a thesis, because you don’t have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn’t begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don’t take a position and defend it. You notice a door that’s ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what’s inside.
If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne’s great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That’s why I write them.
And we’ll throw in Joan Didion’s “Why I Write,” too, which adds another perspective:
It took me some years to discover what I was.
Which was a writer.
By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
Right now, you have a subject for the essay you are writing. You have potential prompts and possible directions to take. You may have jumped into putting words on the page, and you may have only just finished reading that preparatory post1; regardless, you are at the relative start of the writing process.
Now you need a clear and precise approach to the subject at hand. You need an interesting question to ask or a unique perspective to explore. Paul Graham compares this, in “The Age of the Essay,” to a river finding its way to the sea; Virginia Woolf, in Moments of Being, compares it to a “shock” that drives her to “put the severed parts together”:
I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me.
Come up with your approach. What question will drive your process? What is your perspective as you begin? What’s interesting or inventive or curious about your thinking as you start writing? What are you trying to learn?
Ask me questions and share ideas below.
If you fall into the camp that hasn’t done the prep work, keep that to yourself until you’ve caught up, and recognize the danger of making poor choices over and over again: Eventually, you are what you do. ↩
The coffee is a crucial step.
At this point, you should have chosen an essay from the collection, One Hundred Great Essays, and gotten approval from your teachers to study that particular text. You should also have shared your choice through this Google Form and as part of a conversation on our Google+ Community. Before you move on, read through the comments on Google+. If you see a text that looks more interesting or engaging, you can still switch. After Friday, however, you really shouldn’t switch, because it will mean redoing a lot of work.
Now you begin the emulation-through-analysis process. Over the next few days, you need to analyze your chosen text and begin drafting your own essay. That starts with what the collection itself provides, which comes in two parts:
Here is an example of #1, from an essay called “Shooting an Elephant,” by George Orwell:
Click to enlarge.
In this introduction, you are given much of what you would need to emulate Orwell’s writing:
And so on. The introduction is essentially a rhetorical analysis of the essay, which means it is also a blueprint for emulation. Then you have the questions that come at the end:
Click to enlarge.
Depending on your chosen essay, these questions may or may not help. The last question is usually a prompt that you could use to emulate the author directly, so if you are feeling lost, use that question to get started. The other questions tend to ask you to look at particular choices the author makes, some of which you could emulate.
Your first assignment is to work your way through the introduction and concluding questions for your essay. We will review how to do this in class on Thursday, December 1; if you are absent, you will be able to sit with your teachers when you return to go over your essay and how these framing assignments help you analyze the text.
The next part of the writing process requires you to work together and with your teachers to learn the analysis tool known as SOAPSTONE:
Ignore all the mentions of the AP exam. This is the best guide to SOAPSTONE analysis and planning that you will find. The original College Board explanation is here, and you should read it, as well. Then you can:
We will review how to do this in class on Friday, December 2, and again on Monday, December 5; if you are absent, you will be able to sit with your teachers when you return to go over SOAPSTONE and apply it to your own work.
We will take as much time as necessary for these two Bishop Composition steps. The initial plan is to use December 1, 2, and 5 to work in class. If your teacher is with another student, you should post questions either here, in the comment section of this post, or on Google+:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/117716758051277289443
Posting good questions creates evidence for grade abatement, as does answering questions effectively.
Origin unknown (at least, unfound through a cursory Google search).
Update, Oct. 18: I’m giving you the corrections/exemplars guide for the Prose ETA questions. The normal assignment protocol — complete the work, check your answers, revise — may not be the most effective approach, and the stated purpose of this week’s lessons is to put you in charge of learning. You’ll find the “answer” key attached to your Google Classroom assignment, and I’ll stack printed copies on the bookshelf by our textbook.
The following is a version of this document. It has been reformatted for the website.
In 1946, George Orwell noted that
an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
Later, he summarizes this idea: “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” Our work isn’t so negative, though. We are focused on a feedback loop that builds strength in thinking through strength in writing. We listen to Orwell but invoke 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.
In here, 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.” Even non-literary assignments lose authenticity in the pursuit of academic emulation.
The path forward has you read what you write and write what you read. You must understand how an author writes in order to emulate her, not to produce the sort of analysis that a cursory search of Google would reveal. It’s the difference between applied and theoretical science.
So we arrive at emulation-through-analysis (ETA) work, which is designed to teach you how to answer analytical questions while you answer them. You should define new terms, look up new concepts, and enlist peers to help you. Getting the right answer is a goal; understanding how to use the strategy or technique is the goal. And the substructure is comprised, as always, of the universal skills of grade abatement, especially the three that most often lead to external artifacts:
Because you must know how to create in order to create. A makerspace requires granular expertise before experimentation and iteration will yield results. Otherwise, it’s just a sandbox.
Meanwhile, keep another idea from Orwell in mind:
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
The following ten questions deconstruct elements of an essay by Francine Prose. Copies are available in the classroom. Focus your response process on speed, clarity, and insight. Ask questions about the ETA process or these questions in particular in the comments.
The next two sections offer you more context for this assignment. Read both carefully.
These questions are an unusual test, in that they don’t test knowledge you’ve learned. They teach that knowledge through process of answering each question. You’re going to have to look up terms, define concepts, and collaborate. To be most effective, though, you should start with an inventory of the resources available to you in and out of the classroom.
Google, as ever, is your friend. And like some friends, Google doesn’t always know what it doesn’t know — it just acts like it has an answer. Certainly you could learn a lot by searching Google and Wikipedia. I will suggest, however, that there are two compelling reasons to use a textbook, instead:
There is an erstwhile textbook for this class. We have 32 copies of it sitting on the bookshelf in the corner of the room. It’s called The Language of Composition, and one of my favorite facts about it is that it was written in part by a former Brewster teacher, Larry Scanlon.
The opening chapters of the textbook walk you through the three appeals that are mentioned several times in these ETA questions. Whether you are versed in these Aristotelian appeals or not, the textbook is an excellent review. You’ll also glean a dozen more helpful strategies and techniques through those first few chapters.
You have probably guessed by now that this next week is as much about proving that you can utilize the resources of a space like ours to learn as it is about deconstructing and emulating Prose. Before we can start writing earnestly and frequently, you need a foundation. For some of you, it will be review; for others, it will be a crash course. Remember that I am here to help.
Good. You’ve gotten through this post, and with some luck, you feel a little more clarity than you did 30 minutes ago. You have one more test this week:
Eleven perspectives on Sisyphean High
Read that. I will read it, too, in order to update any sections that need updating. Then we’ll come together in mutual understanding — or we won’t, and I will know who hasn’t read by the way your ignorance undermines your choices and interactions over the next week.
Understand that the greatest strength of this course is its 100% transparency: If you want to know what to do and how it all works, you only need to read. When I direct you toward something specific to read, that should be an immediate priority. We learn by doing in here, but the explanatory and instructional posts are a prerequisite; trying to create something meaningful without that background would be like trying to use power tools without any safety precautions. You’re going to lose a limb.
On the subject of losing limbs: If I’m not convinced by the end of the first-quarter that you belong in this AP class, then you don’t belong in this AP class. Does that mean you’ll be kicked out? No, of course not. But you should emerge from a close reading of that “Occam’s Razor” essay with an understanding of what it does mean.