Daily Schedule: Introduction
Week 1
Monday, May 22Read syllabus, Course Purpose, Policies, and Workshopping Requirements.
Familiarize yourself with the course website. Review grammar
Discuss register and rhetorical figures (tropes and schemes)
Introduce: Copy and Compose: "Basic Sentences" and "Stylistic Sentences." |
Tuesday, May 23Print, read, and notate:
McKee's "Structure and Meaning" from his book Story, which you will find in our Dropbox. Begin your annotated bibliography for the course by creating a citation of this chapter from McKee's book. Summarize McKee's argument in the first paragraph, and then speculate in the second paragraph:
While reading McKee, think about movies (or perhaps novels/short stories) you think are good and try to identify why you made such a judgment. What evaluative criteria do you already have when judging writing? How similar/different are your criteria from McKee's? To answer this question you will need to summarize McKee's argument and crystallize the key terms and their meaning (for instance, McKee's key terms include: aesthetic emotion, structure, premise, controlling idea, dialectic, etc.).
David Mamet's "Countercultural Architecture and Dramatic Structure." On Directing.
Write out the key terms each writer uses to evaluate good writing. Come up with your own examples to practice.
Come to class with at least two different artifacts in mind that you can evaluate using McKee's method, now assisted by Mamet. |
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Wednesday, May 24
Print, read, and notate:
Butler "Cinema of the Mind." Landon "Building Great Sentences" Harris "Writing With Style and Clarity" (Balance)
For Thursday's class you will need to draft your first mini-analysis using McKee's method (supplemented by Butler and Mamet), showing how the structure of the text produces aesthetic emotion in the audience.
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Recommended reading:
Williams' Lessons 1 and 2 from the book Style.
Strunk. The Elements of Style. 1918. Please focus on "The Elementary Principles of Composition." |
Thursday, May 25
Workshop your mini-analysis 1, employing McKee's method as primary, but with Butler and Mamet to assist.
The workshop guide for the McKee mini-analysis is in the Dropbox folder "Important Documents." Bring a clean rubric for your peers to evaluate your mini-analysis--also available in the Dropbox folder "Important Documents." |
Required reading:
Harris "Writing With Style and Clarity" (Emphasis) Holcomb and Killingsworth Performing Prose, chapter 3: "Convention and Deviation." We will be using chapters from Holcomb and Killingsworth to develop distinctions to use in workshopping and in your rhetorically adapting to the genre of writing analyses.
I recommend reading Holcomb's and Killingsworth's inestimable "Grammar Guide," and to review it often!
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Week 2
Monday, May 29
No class--Memorial Day
Tuesday, May 30You must print, read, and notate the following text to bring to class:
Jane Gallop’s “Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters.” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. Fall 2000. 7-17. Susan White's "Split Skins." In many ways, Gallop's article will play a central role in this course because it introduces and distinguishes a method of close-reading I will be expecting you to practice throughout the semester. Hint: what shows up if you evaluate her text using the method she presents? Holcomb and Killingsworth Performing Prose, chapter 4: "Distinction: From Voice to Footing."
Harris "Writing With Style and Clarity" (Transition) |
For further study:
For a few mini-units of evaluation, I will be recommending texts for further reading and research. For this mini-unit on close-reading, I highly recommend reading Sharon Crowley's book A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction, and especially chapter 3, "Deconstructing Writing Pedagogy." Jonathan Culler's "Story and Discourse," from his book The Pursuit of Signs. Also read Naomi Klein's excellent book No Logo. |
Wednesday, May 31Copy and Compose: "Basic Sentences" and "Stylistic Sentences"
Harris "Writing With Style and Clarity" (Clarity) Read:
Chapters 3 and 7 from John Berger's Ways of Seeing. You can watch Berger's BBC documentary, especially Ways of Seeing episode 2 and episode 4. These episodes correspond with chapters 3 and 7. Compare Berger's argument concerning advertising with two excellent documentaries produced by the PBS series Frontline: The Merchants of Cool and The Persuaders |
For Thursday's class you will need to draft your second mini-analysis using Gallop's method of close reading (supplemented with White and Berger), showing how surprising elements of the text challenge dominant and commonplace ways of evaluating the text.
The workshop guide for the Gallop mini-analysis is in the Dropbox folder "Important Documents." Review: Copy and Compose" "Basic Paragraphs" and "Stylistic Paragraphs"
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Thursday, June 1Workshop second mini-analysis.
Bring a clean rubric for your peers to evaluate your mini-analysis--also available in the Dropbox folder "Important Documents." |
Required Reading: Holcomb and Killingsworth Performing Prose, chapter 5: "The Rhetorical Tradition."
Harris "Writing With Style and Clarity" (Syntax) |
Course Links |
Daily Schedule:
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