Week 6

Reflections  Welcome back to class. Hope you had a good weekend. Today we'll review use of summary and of quotation in writing about what others have written. We'll spend time on verb use, too.  A short "midterm" composition will be required of you after break. I'll give you the topics before break; that way, your brain will go to work while the rest of you is resting :). --------------- I do hope you brought the summary and response to Sandra Cisneros's story "Eleven," and a news article or story, as assigned.  Each counts towards your homework point.  A summary should provide a brief description of the content of the work in your own words, and some use of direct quotation to show the actual word-for-word text from which you've drawn.   Last week we read parts of "Eleven" to review its content and to look at the structure  Cisneros creates.  Summarize the situation she presents (through her fictional narrator, Rachel) and say what you think is most important, interesting, or relevant about the work. Summary alone  differs from an essay as it does not in itself advance any point, judgment, or evaluation of the subject text or topic. Encyclopedias, for example, contain a great many summary abstracts of topics.  Summary can provide the foundation and context to make larger claims or observations. We will review how to include title, author, and one or two quotations from the text to show some of the original. Several examples of the form appear below.  .......................... Summary/Response Checklist: Make sure that you identify the author’s name, the title of the article, essay, chapter and/or book from which the summary is drawn.  Reference these in your opening lines.  -----------------------------------------------------Summary/Response Sample Introductions In Brenda Peterson's essay "Bread Upon the Waters," she writes about the sense of belonging she  feels after living ten years along the shore of Puget Sound.  She "belongs" in a way she never felt before, as if the windy shore itself and the raucous seagulls who live there have possessed her heart and spirit.  She feeds them daily in what is to her a kind of ritual prayer, one she likens to those of the Hopi Indians, who "believe that our daily rituals and prayers literally keep this world spinning on its axis." The reader can understand that her daily excursions sustain and center her in important ways.    We all probably can remember a time when as a child our truth was denied or we felt belittled by the authority of some adult in charge of us.  In fact, no matter our age, being disbelieved or treated unfairly can shake us, and to stand up for ourselves be no easy thing either. In “Eleven,” a fictional story written by Sandra Cisneros, the narrator is an eleven-year-old girl named Rachel, and she speaks from the first-person point of view.  She tells of the day, her birthday no less, when a teacher insisted an ugly old red sweater that had long hung in the classroom’s closet belonged to her.  It did not. Rachel is pained by an inability to defend herself and the humiliating presence of the sweater, now on her desktop. She says she feels “sick inside, like the part of me that’s three wants to come out of my eyes,” and we understand she is on the verge of tears.  Her teacher's dominance is such that a little later she orders Rachel to put the hated sweater on.  "I wish I was invisible but I am not," she says. And then she does cry, for the humiliation, frustration, and misery are too great. The story is from Cisneros’s book Woman Hollering Creek, a collection of short stories set in Texas, not far from the Mexican border. In the play A Streetcar Named Desire, written by Tennessee Williams, the protagonist Blanche  Dubois is a Southern belle devastated by a cruel fate.  In the final scene, as she is being led away to an asylum, she says to the attendant doctor,  “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”  The line has become famous. The irony is that her only living relative is her sister, Stella, in whose home she had taken refuge, and Stella commits her rather than believe the true story she tells. -------------------------------- Homework:   If you have not yet, summarize the news or story you selected and present what you think of the news or story. In effect you are to build a short essay in which you carry a point, but you must summarize  to provide sufficient context for the reader to understand the story and the point you want to make regarding it.  In an essay, remember, the author has to make a point and support it with some evidence, whether of personal experience and/or documentary material.  Read Walk on By," by Brent Staples, in Mosaics.  Read/scan Mosaics chapter 9, all about the comparison/contrast mode of organization.  Next week in we will write essay 5 using this mode. -