4.15 Work on Rhetorical analysis of publication venues; discussion craft essays; portfolios

Note:  the revised calendar for the rest of the term is posted here.

Rhetorical Analysis of Publication Venues
Your choices for publication venues are listed here.  If you have not yet signed up for a journal - send me an email with your choice ASAP.  A list of journals is on the link list to the bottom right of this link - or cruise around the internet for CNF journals.  Also - you can check out the choices that last semester's class picked for their reviews (listed at the bottom of this blog post).  You need to choose a journal not chosen by one of your classmates.  Once you send your choice (and if no one else has spoken for it) I will post your choice to the site.

Discussion of Craft Essays.
We spent some time talking about the very different paths through writing CNF taken by Pope and Stanton.  Pope was writing for a deadline, and she found her focus, researched it, developed it, revised it and polished it with a particular purpose in mind.  This is very much like "school" writing by a student invested in the work she is producing.  Our class discussion revealed that many students view this approach to writing as something they would do for a job application or essay, but way too much work for school.  And that the process for reviewing, workshopping, revising and polishing writing is more or less intuitive, and doesn't really need to be taught.  I dunno.  

Stanton's approach was more organic.  She began her writing for herself, and the original writing was not to develop a publication but to "know".  Her process was one of getting hold of the huge emotions associated with this piece and putting them into a voice that "worked" so that readers could feel that material.  She said that her final piece was very much the same as the original piece in terms of overall form and content, that the changes were to language, tone - the kinds of subtle revisions that make writing available to its audience.

The similarities in these two processes were their resort to readers (peer workshops, professional workshops, colleagues + family), the persistent re-thinking/re-imagining of the material, and a realization that the way they "felt" the material needed some translation to be available to readers.

Craft essays are a subgenre within CNF.  We read these specifically as a way to introduce the "process essay" which generally accompanies the senior seminar project for the writing option major.  You noted the moves in this genre - discussion of the "origin" of the idea, and a series of vignettes to describe how the piece developed from that idea into a fully realized composition.  These vignettes took different forms - sometimes describing the author's internal, felt relationship to the material, sometimes discussing writing process, sometimes presenting sections of text (later rejected or revised), sometimes assessing impediments or useful activities associated with the writing process.  So there you are.  You have a model, if you need it.

Portfolio
The model for the portfolio you will use to turn in your final project is posted to the right.  We will spend class time working on portoflios April 29.

See you next week!

For next week:
Blog 10: Rhetorical analysis of publication venue