Brainstorming for Draft 1. The middle section of class was devoted to workshopping your ideas for your first draft (check out the assignment sheet to the right). I moved from group to group and checked in on the "compelling stories" and "concepts" (emphasized in Lott's definition) and it sounds like you have great material and some good reflections on the "aboutness" of these stories. I'm looking forward to reading the drafts. I hope to get to the blogs to comment on the brainstorming sometime before the weekend- just in case my comments might be useful.
Segmented essays. We spent the rest of the class talking about segmented essays, We looked at Robert Root's classification of the different kinds of segmented essays (p.328). As you noted when you tried to apply his categories to the sample essays we read - the categories can overlap, and naming the kind of segmentation used by an essay is not so important as understanding how writers use the gaps between the segments (the white space, headings, etc that make a separation between sections that is slightly more pronounced than the separation between paragraphs).
You then worked in groups to identify how Schwartz, Pope, and Kahn used segments (each in a different way) as part of their meaning-making process. As you noted, the segmentation in the essays ADDED an additional layer of meaning that wouldn't have been there or would have been less forceful without the divisions between the segments. Our discussion was very rushed but I felt you did a great job of thinking about the role played by segments in each of the pieces we disucssed.
The Kahn group did not get a chance to report -but they did a great job in their group talk. Kahn uses a kind of accumulation. She tells different parts of the story associated with the man in the hospital room, before the operation, during the operation, and after (which is a kind of narrative sequence) but the "feeling" of what organ harvesting does - the progressive de-humanization of the body - accumulates. While she does not come out and directly state that organ donation is wrong - the concluding sentences of each of her 3 sections posed an ever-less-hopeful picture of the practice.
As the group reported (good job!) Schwartz used 6 sections to show the changing relationships to family history of the narrator and her father. In the first section, the daughter was fully American with little or no connection (and some resentment) to Rindheim, which her father held up as an idyllic past. During the trip to Germany, as the family moves from the town, to the Synagogue (now church) to the graveyard, the father remembers the reality of the Holocaust and lets go the romanticized vision of his past so much so that in the final segment he has joined a golf club. In contrast, the daughter slowly realizes that the town she so resented in childhood was the home to generations of her family - that somehow she belonged to it and it belonged to her. It is as if, segment by segment, the father and daughter move into new relationships with their pasts and America. They do not exactly trade places - but there is a kind of growth for both - which takes them to new variations of one another's former beliefs.
As reported by the Pope group, Teacher Training matched up with multiple patterns from Root's classification. She used 8 pairs of 2 segments to show what she learned about being a teacher from an experience with an "unfavorite" teacher. The idea of "training" is only in the title, and it is built into (implied) into the essay through the structure.
Extra observation: We noted that titles were extremely important for setting up the focus of these essays.
For next class:
Read: McPhee, p.
128, "Search for Marvin Gardens"
Blog 3: Draft Long essay 1
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