50%: A/A–; 50%: B/B+
Voice
Some Ideas to Begin With
From The Onion, 4 Copy Editors Killed in Ongoing AP Style, Chicago Manual Gang Violence
Here’s a piece written by an E110 student in 2018 that is (a) an interesting and well-written essay in itself, and (b) offers some useful examples of how to cite sources and acknowledge support.
The main point of citing sources in a critical essay is to allow your readers to go the moment in a text you are quoting or discussing, and thus to gain a sense of context for what you are saying.
Almost all citation styles ask you to identify four aspects of texts:
Beyond that, the differences between the various styles tend to come down to questions of typing: the order the elements come in, the punctuation between them, etc. You should thus feel free to use any citation style in this class that you you feel comfortable with. (I know that many high school AP English classes drill students in the MLA style.) But if you don’t feel committed to a particular style, I recommend Chicago—which is simple,spare, and used broadly throughout the humanities, social sciences, and journalism (and also not all that different from MLA).
With any citation style, you need to attend to the protocol for citing pieces (1) in the main body of your essay, and (2) in the list of references (or Works Cited) at its end.
In pairs: Read your partner’s text carefully. Every time they refer to or quote from another text, check to make sure they have both an in-text and end-of-text citation.
Please compose a note of acknowledgements in which you recognize and thank the people—classmates, friends, family members, TAs, Writing Center tutors, teachers, and others —who have helped you research, draft, revise, and polish your piece. This list of influences can go back as far as you feel is appropriate. It should certainly be more than a simple list of names. Say something about how various people have helped you as you thank them. Be gracious, generous. This is a space of celebration.
Read through your draft. Highlight with different colors:
Use your highlights as a kind of data base for the title of your piece. Create three possible titles:
We’ll have 15 minutes to talk together. This will be your main response to your work before you submit a revision for a letter grade. So you’ll want to make good use of this time.
Bring an annotated copy of the draft you want to develop an revise. By annotated, I mean you should mark, in ink and/or highlighter), where you plan to:
Please also jot down any questions you may have for me. If you want to actually begin to revise your piece, that’s fine—just mark your new version in a way that shows the changes you’ve made to it. And, if you’re unsure about what piece you want to revise, and you want to annotate two of them, that’s fine, too—although we’ll need to talk that much more efficiently and quickly.
The question I want to ask of each of these three excerpts is: Where does this language come from? I mean that in a very straightforward way: From Push? From the X3 author? From somewhere else? (Ideally, there should be a blend of all three sources.)
Steven Pinker, “A Linguist’s Guide to Quid Pro Quo“, New York Times, 10/07
On the last page of your X3, rank order your three pieces so far in terms of their potential to be developed into a full, polished essay. Include the following:
How would you punctuate the following lines from Bull Durham?
Go back through your X3. Find two places where you can make different uses of an M-Dash.Rewrite the sentences in pen. You don’t have to keep the new versions if you like the old ones better.
Pick one of the stories in the class book. What does it tell you about its author that adds to what you know from the narrative of the novel? (Extra points if you pick a writer other than Precious.)
Please read pp. 51–55 of Push. What does this scene from Precious, Lee Daniels’s 2009, film adaptation of Push, add to what’s on the page? What does it fail to get at?
E110: Seminar in Composition 