Advanced Expository Writing
ENG 50104/06 – Writing About History II
Reading:
Writing:
- Bring a 250 word response to today’s reading with you to class.
3/31 – Writing About History I
Reading:
Writing:
- Bring a 250 word response to today’s reading with you to class.
3/24 – Introduction to Project Four
Reading:
Writing:
- Bring a 250 word response to today’s reading with you to class.
3/3 – Ethics of the Interview & Audio Exposition
Readings:
- “Forewards and Afterwards” (KiT 62-64)
- “Frame” (KiT 65-67)
- “Tape Recording” (KiT 145-147)
- “Reporting for Narrative” (TTS 24-28)
- “To Tape or Not to Tape” (TTS 28-30)
- “Interviewing” (TTS 30-33)
- “The Psychological Interview” (TTS 34-35)
Listenings:
2/24 – Being About It: Autobiographical Nonfiction II
Readings:
- “Family Members as Characters” (KiT 59-61)
- “Getting Inside Characters’ Heads” (KiT 68-69)
- “The Lyric Essay” (KiT 95-96)
- “Montage Writing” (KiT 103-108)
- “Navel-Gazing” (KiT 113-118)
- “The Roots of Memoir” (KiT 138-139)
- “No Shell, Just a Ghost“
- “The 46-Year-Old, First-Time Smoker“
- “Arachnophilia” (on BB)
- “The Pain Scale” (BCN 65-84)
- “Consumption” (BCN 57-64)
- “Full Gospel” (BCN 85-87)
- “Trapeze Lessons” (BCN 105-115)
- “Six Degrees of Lois Weinberg” (NKNF 62-85)
02/17 – In It: Autobiographical Nonfiction I
Readings:
- “The I” (KiT 79-81)
- “The Memoir Craze” (KiT 97-99)
- “Truth” (KiT 148-149)
- “Use of Imagination” (KiT 150-152)
- “The Vagaries of Memory” (KiT 153-155)
- “Whose Story to Tell” (KiT 156-158)
- “The Personal Essay and the First-Person Character” (TTS 78-81)
- “First Person Singular” (TTS 81-83)
- “The Line Between Fact and Fiction” (TTS 164-169)
- “Ethics in Personal Writing” (TTS 184-187)
- “Taking Liberties” (TTS 187-189)
- “Crazy Things Seem Normal, Normal Things Seem Crazy” (NKNF 198-211)
- “The Hostess Diaries” (NKNF 362-373)
- “Fortune’s Smile” (NKNF 412-452)
- “66 Signs…” (BCN 238-246)
- “Chores” (BCN 44-52)
- “The Truth About Cops and Dogs” (BCN 88-101)
- “The Rationality Project“
- “Mississippi Drift” (on BB)
Writing:
Much like last week (for those of you who did not submit your intro’s for the workshop), this week I’m asking you to write a response focused on your “favorite” of this week’s (non-technique oriented) readings; your response should reference what you found particularly compelling about that piece. Also like last time, you need not post them before class this time around – simply bring the response with you to class.
02/10 – Writing People, Events, Phenomena
Readings:
- “Facts” (KiT 53-55)
- “Fact-Checking”(KiT 56-58)
- “Psychoanalzying Characters” (KiT 126-129)
- “Quotation Marks” (KiT 130-132)
- “Profiles” (TTS 66-69)
- “The Ladder of Abstraction” (TTS 70)
- “Every Profile is an Epic Story” (TTS 71-73)
- “The Limits of Profiles” (TTS 73-74)
- “Writing Complicated Stories” (TTS 145-148)
- “How I Get to the Point” (TTS 148-149)
- “The Emotional Core of the Story” (TTS 149-154)
- “The Cipher in Room 214″ (BCN 1-12)
- “Notes on Frey” (BCN 116-132)
- “Wild Flavor” (BCN 247-270)
- “Host” (NKNF 212-270)
- “Tales of the Tyrant” (NKNF 271-313)
- “Regarding the Torture of Others“
- “What Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know He Knows About Abu Ghraib“
- “Falling Man“
Writing:
Those of you who are having your rough drafts for Project One intro’s workshopped for next week should drop e-mail those intro’s to me as word doc, RTF or PDF before 9 AM on Tuesday – I’ll print copies for the class. Those of you who are not submitting your intro’s should write a response focused on your “favorite” of this week’s (non-technique oriented) readings that references what you found particularly compelling about that piece. You need not post them before class this time around – simply bring the response with you to class.
02/03 – Writing Places
Readings:
- “Travel Writing” (TTS 74-78)
- “Writing About History” (TTS 86-88)
- “Adventures in History” (TTS 88-89)
- “Details Matter” (TTS 128-129)
- “Setting the Scene” (TTS 136-139)
- “Guiding the Reader” (KiT 70-71)
- “History into Nonfiction Narrative” (KiT 74-78)
- “Metaphor” (KiT 100-102)
- “Reflection” (KiT 136-137)
- “Detroit Arcadia” (on BB)
- “Downtown Time Capsule
- “For Keeps: The Christian C. Sanderson Museum” (on BB)
- “The Lost Twin“
- “No-Man’s Land“
- “Selling Sex in Honeymoon Heaven“
Writing:
- Once again I’m asking you to drop a comment on these readings before 9 AM on Monday. Once again I’m also interested in your general response to the readings as well as how you can relate the “technique” pieces to the longer expository works. This time, however, I also want you to choose a passage each from two different “writing about places” works (the last six listed above) that you found particularly compelling. Reproduce (or identify in some other way) these passages and explain why you thought they were of a particularly high quality.
01/27 – “Going Native”
Houskeeping:
- Are You Keeping it Real Yet?
- People Page – and two week head-start
- A second look at our first project
- A volunteer for next week
Readings:
- “Finding Good Topics: A Writer’s Questions” (TTS 20-22)
- “Finding Good Topics: An Editor’s Questions (TTS 22-24)
- “Participatory Reporting” (TTS 35-39)
- “Being There” (TTS 39-45)
- “Gunkholing: Finding a Story” (KiT 72-73)
- “Immersion” (KiT 82-84)
- “Reconstruction of Events” (KiT 133-135)
- “Subjectivity” (KiT 142-144)
- “Writer’s Responsibility to Subjects” (KiT 159-162)
- “What is the Future of Diagnostic Medicine?” (BCN 220-231)
- “The American Man, Age Ten” (NKNF 144-159)
- “Among the Thugs” (NKNF 160-197)
- “My Republican Journey” (NKNF 374-388) Read the rest of this entry »
