Paper Assignments

Paper #2: Close Reading

Terrence Hayes, “New York Poem” (course site)

Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”

Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Brooklyn Bridge”

Hart Crane, “To Brooklyn Bridge”

Charles Reznikoff, “[On Brooklyn Bridge I saw a man drop dead]” (course site)

Charles Reznikoff, from Autobiography: New York

Luc Sante, “Preface” (to Low Life) (course site)

Julia Alvarez, “Queen, 1963” (course site)

For this paper, select one of the texts listed above to be your central focus. You will need to perform a thorough close reading of this text—meaning that you will need to locate an argument that indicates why you are interested in or invested in that particular text and prove your argument purely through textual analysis.

A Few Close Reading Tips:

• Think of your thesis as some kind of assertion or argument about the meaning and function of the text. It must be something you can argue for and prove in your essay.
• Always use lots of evidence from the text. What specific words or phrases led you to have the ideas you express? Quote them.
• Analyze your evidence. If the work were self-evident you could just turn in the book or image as your proof. Literally thousands of people have had thousands of different ideas about the words or details you mention. Explain how you arrived at your ideas.
• Be aware of “poetic devices”—If you are working with a poem, you want to be sure to think about things like: a poem’s shape on the page, language used, repetition, rhythm, sound, meter, tone, voice, line breaks, etc.

Keep these additional formal things in mind as you work on your paper:

• Your explanation must be built around the actual text, and not around what you add to, or imagine should be part of, it.  In other words, you can only work with the material, or information, that the author gives you; you cannot add your own stuff to the text.
• Do not summarize.  We’ve all read these works, and we do not need to know what is in the text; we know.  Instead, analyze those parts that are useful to your explanation.
• Please work in the theme of the course in whatever way you find suitable (if at all).

Paper #2 Draft Cover Letter

Each time you hand in a draft or revision of an essay, you’ll attach a cover letter to the front.  For your Paper #2 Draft, please write a letter, addressed to your readers, in which you answer the following questions and address any other concerns that you have.  Think of your draft letter as an opportunity to request exactly the kind of feedback you need.  All cover letters should be typed and about one page long.

• What is your thesis?  What are you hoping to achieve in this paper?
• What are the biggest problems you are having at this point in the writing process?
• What idea or point do you feel you’ve made the most successfully?  Least successfully?
• What’s the number one question about your essay—its thesis, structure, use of evidence, persuasiveness, style, etc.—that you’d like your readers to answer for you?
• If you were going to start revising today, what three things would you focus on?  How would you begin?

Paper #2 FINAL Draft Cover Letter

Each time you hand in a draft or revision of an essay, you’ll attach a cover letter to the front.  For your Paper #2 Final Draft, please write a letter, addressed to your readers, in which you answer the following questions and address any other concerns that you have.  Think of your draft letter as an opportunity to share how you feel you have improved your paper.  All cover letters should be typed and about one page long.

• What is your thesis?  What are you hoping to achieve in this paper?
• What are some problems you faced when writing and how did you try to or succeed in resolving them?
• What idea or point do you feel you’ve made the most successfully?  Least successfully?
• Do you consider this draft to really be your “Final Draft?”  Why? Did you do anything while revising that could be described as a “re-seeing” of the paper?
• What grade do you think you deserve on this paper and why?

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Paper #1

“Here is New York” by E.B. White (handout)

Jacobs, “from The Death and Life of Great American Cities” (pages 811 to 815)

Alfred Kazin, from A Walker in the City (pages 731-737)

George Templeton Strong, from The Diaries (pages 191-240)

Henry David Thoreau, “Letters from Staten Island” (pages 65-73)

Riis, “The Down-Town Back-Alleys”

Anzia Yezierska, “The Lost Beautifulness” and “Soap and Water” (course site)

Fanny Fern, “Tyrants of the Shop” (pages 255-256)

In his “Introduction” to our text book, Writing New York, Phillip Lopate provides his readers with a list of “certain themes [that] recur obsessively in the literary record.” (XVIII—XIX) He also describes his decision-making process (regarding which texts to include in the book) as “New York had to be felt as a force, a character—to be engaged as a subject.” (XXI) For your first essay of the semester, I’d like for you to begin by selecting one of Lopate’s “certain themes” to use as your guide. But, really, this assignment is intended to offer you the space to write that piece you’ve always wanted to write. Of course, there is no escaping the reality that this is a piece of writing that will ultimately be graded, so I will give you a few constraints, but I won’t tell you specifically what you must write about.

Guidelines:

• Your essay should somehow focus on New York City (past or present)—you might pick a specific store, neighborhood, time period, pop cultural moment, etc. The theme you choose will help to narrow your focus, but remember, you cannot write a strong paper about “alienation”—you need to focus on the alienation in or of a specific space.
• You must be sure to quote from two of the texts we’ve read thus far this semester—remember, ideally, try to use one quote per paragraph!
• This essay needs to revolve around a specific and persuasive idea/argument/thesis. For example, if you choose to work with the idea of the “city’s contradictory faces of glamour and squalor,” you might then choose to write about how graffiti is a way for people in the city who do not necessarily own property to make their mark on property, although this mark might be read as both art and crime. And, you might use both Riis and Jacobs to support your argument.

• A weak thesis would be: Graffiti is a way for New Yorkers to leave their mark on the city.
• A strong thesis might be: Just as Jane Jacobs describes the chaos of her New York as not unlike a dance performance, I can’t help but think of my New York in visual terms—symbolized by the literal “writings on the wall” I pass by every day. I think of graffiti as a reminder that I am home—that the city that becomes increasingly unaffordable still offers those without property to make some mark on public space. The surveillance society we live in trains us to read these marks as bad, but in reality, they are the thought balloons of the city.

A few tips:

• Be clear and concise in your writing.  Keep in mind that you want your readers to both understand what you are saying, and to sympathize with your position.

• Remember—details and description are always more powerful than vague, general statements.

• Read your paper out loud ahead of time—do you hear any grammatical mistakes, any places where you seem to stumble over your own words?

• Remember to be as assertive as possible. You want your readers to agree with you by the end of the paper!

ROUGH DRAFT DUE: Monday, February 25, 2013 (3-5 pages typed, bring 3 COPIES to class)

FINAL DRAFT DUE: Monday, March 4, 2013 (3-5 pages typed, include all previous drafts and cover letters)

Paper #1 Draft Cover Letter

Each time you hand in a draft or revision of an essay, you’ll attach a cover letter to the front.  For your Paper #1 Draft, please write a letter, addressed to your readers, in which you answer the following questions and address any other concerns that you have.  Think of your draft letter as an opportunity to request exactly the kind of feedback you need.  All cover letters should be typed and about one page long.

• What is your thesis?  What are you hoping to achieve in this paper?
• What are the biggest problems you are having at this point in the writing process?
• What idea or point do you feel you’ve made the most successfully?  Least successfully?
• What’s the number one question about your essay—its thesis, structure, use of evidence, persuasiveness, style, etc.—that you’d like your readers to answer for you?
• If you were going to start revising today, what three things would you focus on?  How would you begin?

Paper #1 FINAL Draft Cover Letter

Each time you hand in a draft or revision of an essay, you’ll attach a cover letter to the front.  For your Paper #1 Final Draft, please write a letter, addressed to your readers, in which you answer the following questions and address any other concerns that you have.  Think of your draft letter as an opportunity to share how you feel you have improved your paper.  All cover letters should be typed and about one page long.

• What is your thesis?  What are you hoping to achieve in this paper?
• What are some problems you faced when writing and how did you try to or succeed in resolving them?
• What idea or point do you feel you’ve made the most successfully?  Least successfully?
• Do you consider this draft to really be your “Final Draft?”  Why? Did you do anything while revising that could be described as a “re-seeing” of the paper?
• What grade do you think you deserve on this paper and why?