Your first major assignment will be to find a work of literary journalism published within the past five years. This article cannot be one of the articles assigned in this class or from the LJ program's journal Kiosk. You will then write a short essay, closely analyzing a scene of roughly one page. Questions you might consider include:
o How does the author introduce the scene?
o Does the scene contribute to the building of suspense?
o Does it introduce crucial information in an artful manner? How?
o How does this scene contribute to the development of character in the story as a whole?
o What stylistic techniques does the author use?
o Does the author vary his or her sentence structure? Why?
o What kind of details does the author foreground? Why?
o What elements of craft are at work in this scene and to what purpose or effect do they work?
You must form a thesis about why you think the author has chosen to execute the scene this way. How do the author's choices for the scene further his or her goals for the piece?
Your goal is to produce a readable and persuasive analytic essay. You should do as much sentence-level close reading and critical analysis as possible, focused on the author's craft in writing this scene. Remember that you must be able to support your claims with textual evidence from the article. You may be asked to attach a photocopy of the article to your essay. Final Article (The Profile):
Assignments and Percentage Breakdown:
• Preliminary Scene
• Major Article Draft I
• Revised Major Article (Final Draft II)
Choose a subject (either a person, place, or thing) as the topic for a short profile. Part of the assignment will be to justify why this subject is story material. We will discuss how to shape a profile in class.
The first part of the assignment is to write a scene (2-3 pages), drawn from the research for your major article. Focus on one of your major characters and base your scene on information derived from interviewing and observing your subject. This scene should be something that you plan on using in your final project and should exhibit the kind of stylistic techniques you will be using. This cannot be a friend, UCI faculty member, roommate, family member, or fellow student.
In researching this scene, I want you to take a camera with you. You will take pictures that you will later use as a memory aid for reconstructing the details of your scene, in addition to your handwritten notes. Both photos and notes need to be turned in with the scene. The quality of the photographs won't affect your grade-the photos are a tool used to help you write better. You don't have to buy expensive camera equipment; a disposable camera or phone camera is fine.
The second part is based on a first, polished draft of this profile of 8-10 pages. This first draft should not be seen as a "rough" draft. Instead, it should be your best work. You'll get both oral and written feedback from your peers and from the instructor. The second part of your grade depends on your revision based on that feedback. You should expect to hand in two fully re-worked drafts of this piece. Writing is revision.
Critical Reading Responses and Research Logs 15%
Percentage Breakdown: 5% Critical Reading Responses; 10% Research Logs
You will be required to write a short critical reading response paper for each story we read in our literary journalism anthologies this quarter. This is will work out to be about two reading responses per week, or one per class. You will turn them in on Canvas each week.
For these reading response papers (1 page), you may pick out an element of craft (character, setting, scene, dialogue, tension, tone, narrative stance, point of view, etc.) and discuss how and why or to what effect and purpose the author uses the craft element in the story. You can compare the story to another story we've read. You can ask yourself what works well in the story and why? In short, this is your chance to show what you've learned from the reading and it should help prepare you to contribute to our class discussion. In order to facilitate these class discussions, as well as to help you read the texts more closely, you may also be asked to answer study questions or to bring in passages from the session's assigned reading.
In the second half of the quarter, you will submit weekly research logs to the class forum on Canvas. If you are having specific reporting concerns, you may also post these here, as well. While these are not formal papers, your entries should not be colloquial