May 2007 Archives
Fiction Workshop: ABC story
Exercise one, and I’m already struggling to complete a thought in the time allotted. It isn’t as much a story as an excerpt of one, or maybe an introduction.
I’ve worked from “H” to “G,” and my “K” sentence is 100 words long.
Fiction Workshop: ABC story- continue reading
Summer Semester: Day 1
(Apperently, they plan to keep us busy! Stay tuned, I’ll post the fiction assignment to when it’s done)
Fiction Workshop Assignment
Not all of these fiction exercises will be full-story assignments, but this first one is, just to get your feet wet. But don’t worry–it’s not a long story. In fact, it’s exactly 26 sentences long. And yes, there’s a reason for that–namely, that each sentence in the story has to start with a successive letter of the alphabet. Fun! You don’t have to start at A and go to Z–you can start somewhere else, say N, and wrap around to M, or whatever, but the letters must remain in alphabetical order. The trick with this assignment is to choose your sentences so well, to craft this story so carefully, that this artifical form fades away. (That means: don’t mess with sentence structure just to start every sentence with a gerund form, like: “Jumping into the puddle, Alice noticed her feet were getting wet. Killing the porch light, she fought through the darkness. Letting her breath out, she allowed herself to think she might be safe.” See? Boooo-ring.) Oh, and one more rule: one of the 26 sentences has to contain exactly 100 words. Even more fun!
Advanced Composition Assignment
Your assignment for Monday (June 4) is to write the first draft of a 750-1250 word exploratory essay concerning the possible reasons why a particular example of visual rhetoric is effective. In doing so you should consider possible cultural reasons (e.g., issues related to economic class, gender, race, sexual orientation, age in relation to the specific target audience for the example at hand). You might also want to focus on aesthetic issues as outlined in the reading on visual rhetoric in this week’s Lecture but you don’t need to focus on any technical aspects of visual rhetoric. Your essay doesn’t require outside research but does require the kind of thought evidenced in the sample essays found under Documents. Be sure to participate fully in the second Discussion this week as it is there that we will work out the details of your essay. You may not choose a painting as they too often lead to traditional art criticism essays instead of rhetorical analysis.
