Reflective Post Assignment

Write a blog post titled "My Writing: [Full name]" in which you reflect upon your writing process and your understanding of yourself as a researcher, literary critic, and academic writer as this has developed over the course of this class. Make specific reference to things you have tried (by assignment or personal experiment), and realizations you've made about the stages of writing or about your particular strengths or challenges as a writer.

Please link to specific blog posts from the semester that reflect your efforts at literary criticism or your efforts to understand and develop your writing process.

Include in your blog post an assessment of the social and online aspects of writing as you've been involved in peer critiques and online drafting during the semester. How has this helped you? What can you do to integrate either social or online aspects to your future writing assignments?

Keep this post to 300-400 words.

Playful Prewriting: 9 Suggestions

When writing about literature, there is a crucial creative period that occurs in that time after one has finished reading a literary work and before serious drafting takes place. I like to think of it as a time for "purposeful play."

This is when one has not committed oneself to a specific claim, and before systematic analysis and research take place. I suppose I'm discussing "prewriting," but that doesn't sound nearly as fun, and I think that this part of the process really should be.

Here are my suggestions for proceeding during this part of the writing process. My first and last suggestions are more seriously procedural, with all the middle ones being various options to try out.

Assignment: Analysis of Edson's Wit

My students have just had a review of various kinds of formal features one can identify in literary texts, in stage plays, and in films. We have also viewed the film, Wit (the adaptation of Margaret Edson's play). It is time to practice doing more prewriting, including the identification of formal elements, and the development of some tentative interpretive claims (working thesis statements).

This post will be in three parts: 1) a list of formal features; 2) an exploratory paragraph or two; and 3) a set of three working thesis statements. The third of these will be a revision of your post that you can only do after getting feedback from others. Therefore, there will be two deadlines: for the initial post, and the revision. Complete the initial post by Friday 2/12/16 at 5pm. Post your revision by 1pm on Tuesday, 2/16. We will be drawing upon these posts for an in-class activity.

Follow this procedure:

1. Create a list of formal features.
   Based on your notes from reading the written play and watching the film adaptation of Wit, create a numbered list of 10 formal elements you identified. These must include 1) formal textual elements; 2) elements of dramatic form (the performance of a play); and 3) elements of film.
2. Write an exploratory paragraph or two
   Consider this brainstorming. Do not write an essay in length or in form: keep this part under 300 words. Ideas do not have to be tightly coherent. Explore how you could combine some of these observations of form into potential themes for your paper (but stop short of making claims).
3. Post your blog post so that others can respond to it. 
4. Read and respond to three other students' posts.
   Specifically, suggest possible claims that they could make based on their list and exploratory thoughts. Name the type of claim you suggest ("I think you could turn this into a definition claim if you..." -- that sort of thing)
5. Return to your post, and append to it a third section, "Working Thesis Statements." You can only do this after you have received feedback from other students (and looked over the formal elements that others have written up). Compose three working thesis statements using the form we've already learned. Repost.

Assignment: Short Literary Analysis

I'd like my students to write a brief literary analysis comparing John Donne's "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" to "The Ecstasy" by following these steps:

1. Start a blog post here titled "Writing Plan and Record: [Your Name]." Use the label "writing plan and record 1" as well as "posted by [Your name]." The idea for this post is for you to narrate your process and to be more self aware of your writing. You'll be coming back to it a few times with updates, each of which should be short. Go ahead and post it, even though it is incomplete, then re-publish it after each time you update it.
2. Reread both "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" and "The Ecstasy"
3. Review formal elements identified in "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" by you and other class members from the "preliminary formal analysis" assignment. Focus especially on genre and language.
4. Write one short paragraph in your "Writing Plan and Record" blog post in which you make some observations about the poems so far and any possible direction you might go. Don't make this very long, and precede it with a day/time.
5. Practice listening for aural form (rhythm, rhyme, tone, alliteration, assonance, repetition) by listening to both poems read by Richard Burton: "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" (look for three files listed under the photo, and listen to the middle one--though any by him are okay); and "The Ecstasy." 
6. Add another short paragraph to your "Writing Plan and Record" post giving additional observations about aural form after having listened to both recordings. These don't have to be tightly connected to your prior observations. As before, precede it with a day/time.
7. Do prewriting for the essay. This could be marking up the poem, creating an outline, or whatever other kind of thinking-in-writing you'd like (see, for example, Nicole's use of a whiteboard in this post). 
8. Update your "Writing Plan and Record" with this prewriting -- either a photo of handwritten prewriting you've done, or a link to a Google Doc (make it publicly viewable) with your outline or preliminary written thoughts. Don't put the prewriting itself into the post, unless it's a photo. Link to it with something like "Here's the brainstorming and initial drafting I did." Again, precede this with the day/time. If you link to a document, don't use that document for the final, formal version of the paper (so that it's possible to preserve your earlier drafting stage).
9. Compose your literary analysis of 3-4 pages (750-1000 words). The paper should be thesis-driven, refer to formal elements, and should directly quote passages of both poems. No research is required, though you can draw upon general resources to help you with form. If you do make use of others' observations about form from their blog posts, please cite them and their blog post. Use MLA format for a formal paper. 
10. Make one last update to your "Writing Plan and Record Post" in which you indicate how long it took you to write the formal paper, and what worked well and/or what you remain concerned about. Be sure to post your blog post.
11. Read and comment on three other students' "Writing Plan and Record" posts before 2pm on Wednesday, January 20th.
12. Bring a printed copy of your paper to class on Wednesday, January 20th.

Assignment: Preliminary Formal Analysis

Identifying the formal elements present in a passage of literature is a fundamental step in literary analysis, and this is what I wish my students to practice. I want them to find form, though stop short of interpreting it, in what can be considered prewriting for a more complete analysis.

They are to do a close reading of Donne's "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," perhaps marking up their text (or even recopying it to slow down their reading). Then, they are to compose a bulleted list of observations of form (about 10 items) in the format modeled below.

The 10 items of form should be varied across different types of literary form. However, for this exercise I want all students to begin with the three elements of form recently reviewed in class: genre, narrator/persona, and setting. After that, they are free to select any aspects of form they can observe. (Consult my presentation on formal analysis of literature to get some ideas of the range of formal elements to be identified.)

For format, bold the formal element at the start of the bulleted item, followed by a brief sentence that includes a quotation, as in these examples analyzing a different text, Donne's "Meditation 17":

1. Genre / subgenre. As a "meditation," this is a prose genre of tentative, personal, sober reflection, as evident in the opening when the narrator repeats the words "perchance" and "I" and talks about illness: "Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that."
2. Narrator / persona. We can assume the narrator to be Donne himself, who was preoccupied with illness and death. In this meditation, the narrator sounds a bit brainy or academic as he is making or explaining an elaborate comparison: "...when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language he is making"; and at other times, the narrator sounds more personally involved: "any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind."

(and so on, making 10 in total)

Assignment: My Literary Life

Do you have a literary life?

Those who study English literature or the humanities typically do. Such a life goes beyond literacy, but it may not mean one is a professor or professional author. Having a literary life means one makes time to read and to write in order to enjoy, explore, understand, and express. It usually means having shelves of books, and a habit of rereading some of these and talking about books frequently. It usually means writing reflectively, and at times analytically, and not always within a classroom setting. It often involves memorizing and repeating to oneself (and others) favorite passages from plays, poems, and novels.

From one of my travel journals (India, 2004)

A literary life often involves an aspiration to write and to share or publish one's writing, whether formally or informally. I don't think it means being preoccupied with grammar and usage. But it always means a love of story and of ideas well expressed. A literary life means having a serious imagination -- enough so that we invest our minds and time in worlds of words, both those that others compose, and those that compose us as we write them.

I want my students to consider what constitutes their literary life, and to write a "personal literary essay" as described here and as modeled in this blog post. This can be anywhere from 500-1000 words. Rather than listing all the aspects of one's literary life, it may be best to focus on a telling anecdote or two, as the model post does.

Welcome to Studying John Donne

This blog is intended for students of Dr. Gideon Burton at Brigham Young University who are learning advanced writing about literature by studying the works of John Donne. The public is welcome to read and comment.