For your formal writing, you will choose one of these three options. You will see that each of them is partly a revision of something you wrote for an informal writing and partly an extension of that initial writing. You are welcome to write on any of these three topics, but you need to make sure there is not a great deal of overlap between your formal writing choice and your Wiki Entry assignment. You likely scored well on your informal writing, and you also likely received written feedback on it (in fact, you may want to favor the informal writings that got more detailed feedback from me for revision into a formal writing). That written feedback, available in the Blackboard gradebook (and in the most useful form if you submitted a doc or pdf that I commented on directly) should guide you first to make sure you’ve done all you can with your initial informal writing. If something could have been better before, this is your chance to revise it. Formal writing differs from informal writing in that it conforms to all the standards of academic writing that you learned in English 101 and 102. That means following MLA format, developing ideas in stout paragraphs with meaningful breaks, and directing readers to follow your argument through meaningful transitions. It also means having a central thesis that responds to the prompt, then supporting that claim with a series of related claims about literary texts which you develop through analysis of literary evidence. Nuts and Bolts The initial draft of your formal writing is due Thursday, July 20. The final draft of your formal writing is due Thursday, July 27. Between the first draft and the final draft, you will receive written feedback from me intended to guide your revision process. Prompts You will choose one of these three to do. You will not do all three of these. 1. When an author lavishes attention on something seemingly unimportant, you should pay close attention. For instance, in “The Guest,” Camus pays more attention to the landscape than you might expect an author of a philosophical tale to do. Look at the paragraph that starts “For some time” on 183. What thematic resonance do you detect in this description of the landscape? If this is more than a beautiful description, what else is it? This informal writing is asking you to use the skills of close reading to connect the descriptive language applied to the landscape in this passage to the larger themes of Camus’s “The Guest.” You need to make a claim that responds to a common view of the story. You are writing for an audience that is not sure these details matter at all, so you’re writing back to a common view that would say something like “this story has lots of pointless details about landscape, and it would be better if Camus just deleted those parts.” You need to support your claim, which is a response to that common view, with observations of detail from Camus’s story. Formal transition To your close reading of Camus, which you will revise according to feedback you received from me on informal writing one, you will add Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” You are now writing about both stories for the same kind of skeptical audience you wrote for the first time around. You need to make a claim about the importance of descriptive language dedicated to setting, and that thesis needs to allow you to address the different ways in which Camus and Gogol use descriptions of settings in their stories to express their larger themes. Your paper needs to closely read descriptions of settings in both stories, and it needs to compare and/or contrast them in order to provide a synthesis that convinces your skeptical reader that setting imagery is important in both of these stories. 2. When you wrote about “Young Goodman Brown” in informal writing three, one element you addressed was the ambiguity the story explores as it opens gaps between Brown’s experience and what the narrator implies must actually be the case. One instance of that is when the narrator describes the fellow-traveler’s staff wriggling like a snake but then says, “This, of course, must have been an ocular deception, assisted by the uncertain light” (529). For your informal writing, you explained the effect of that instance of ambiguity and at least one other instance in the story. Formal transition In addition to revising your take on “Young Goodman Brown,” you will select one other story from our readings this semester in which the author put you in a position where you had to hesitate or question the accuracy of impressions or sensations reported by the characters. Now that you have two stories to work with, you will compare and contrast how they establish that ambiguity and what you think it ultimately means. Your paper will need a thesis statement that will prove something to readers that they didn’t know before about how and why ambiguity works in “Young Goodman Brown” and your second chosen story. 3. In informal writing five, you applied Frank O’Connor’s idea of the little man and the submerged community to Jones and Gogol. Formal transition Choose two stories other than those by Jones and Gogol in which the little man or the submerged population is present. Demonstrate that aspect of the story with reference to O’Connor’s concepts and show how it works there. Choose one more story in which the little man or the submerged population is NOT present. For that story, demonstrate how a more traditional hero is at its center. Your formal writing needs to have a thesis that synthesizes what you’ve found by considering these two stories that work with O’Connor’s ideas and one that works against it.
