J—
Reading Journals: I enjoyed reading your reflection because I too feel like, across class, some switch got flipped and people all of a sudden just got how the genre works. Of course, I’m sure that part of it was the readings on the genre that you have here, but I think that what happened was this moment of connection between the reading experience of the essays so far in the semester with that framework. Your reflection shows how you are responding as a human reader and as a critical, professional reader. Loved that line-the connection between art and academia. I think that’s a great way to think of an essay.
Revision/Enhanced Notes: I’m a tough editor. That’s the truth. But it’s a tough kind of love; it’s a faith that my students are smart and good writers and able to move past being fragile. So I appreciated the honesty of your own reflection. I liked how you talked through your revision process here. Learning a useful revision process is actually a big deal. I don’t think most student writers really have such a thing. It is also true that not every revision is a successful revision—and that’s part of the process too. So, on my end, I have to reward the effort at revision even if it isn’t as successful as it might be.
I do think that, on a certain level, the connections between your paragraphs are clearer in this revision. I also feel like you slowed yourself down a bit and explained what you meant more. Not everywhere, but in enough places that I felt like I understood better what you were trying to do. I actually think this is a much more successful piece. You frontload what you are going to argue in the opening few paragraphs then pull back to explain it in depth. I think that if I had one more revision out of you, I’d say that you probably don’t need as much of what you write to prove that he disdains burial practices as a way of critiquing our quest for some sort of immortality. And, also, I would encourage you to build as Browne does. He starts with small jabs and then, as he gets to the Egyptians, he goes full on after practices. You are starting to do this simply by moving things around. I know you feel conflicted about this revision, but it shows both effort and success. Read it again. I think you’ll see it more with some time away.
Second Enhanced: To start, this writing is filled with a kind of authority that your first paper didn’t have—you understand the genre better and, therefore, understand how to critique the genre better. I love, of course, the tight focus on the opening paragraphs, the role punctuation plays in this essay. I like the pull back to talk about arriving abstractly. I think you move effectively between summarizing the parts of the essay we need to understand and then talking about how it conveys this feeling of discomfort—the author is asking us to be uncomfortable with our arrivals, uncomfortable with the end of things—as if the end of things is possible. The last paragraph is particularly sharp analysis in how it brings many ideas together.
I think you are sort of hard on yourself about the 3.5. I think I said in class that I know that I under-taught the assignment and caused you needless anxiety. I also think you’ve got to give yourself some credit for taking on the risk of doing this project and, also, to remember that you haven’t spent four years writing personal essays. You’ve spent four years writing literary analysis.
And, so, after all your hate in that reflection, how lovely was that opening? It’s a nice, clear, lovely voice that talks about you and your father and walking up to the house. A personal voice can be straightforward without being flowers and poetry. I think that when you start to describe Dickinson it gets a little over the top “stands head and shoulders above the rest through the legions of vastly complex poetry.” That’s quite a lot. So that’s the place—the places—to work on voice. Saying a version of that without sounding like you are saying it using a megaphone on a darkened stage. LOVE the dollhouse image. I see the awkwardness of your moves between the analysis of her writing and your personal stuff. It’s not as bad as you think, but it is the place to push with the essay. I think that what you want to do is say what you are saying about her poetry, but to not say it in the same voice you’d say it in an academic paper. You want more of a reflective tone. I think that the other thing to think about in this piece is what you are saying about yourself. I get what you are saying about Dickinson, but a personal essay is about your own journey, your own story. Ultimately, what does understanding Dickinson as not wearing her little house tell a reader about you the author.
I think there is enough in this essay that you might consider it for your final project. And I wouldn’t suggest that if I thought this was a mess.
There is no way I couldn’t give a student as enthusiastic and eager to learn and as invested as you have been anything other than an A. And, as a general rule, people who save animals rank with me.
B—
It gives me great pleasure to write this midterm letter to you. Crowley and I routinely wonder where you’ve been. I know that I would have welcomed the chance to work with you on an ATP, which is to say that I have been so impressed with both your energy for the work of this kind of writing and for your skill as a reader of it. And I see this first in this portfolio in your reflection letter. I appreciated your discussion of truth versus fact, your discussion of the way research shapes the essay, how it appears, where it appears; and your discussion of form. All of which leads you to talk about what it requires of readers, which is my favorite part.
Charade Revision is a much tighter essay than it’s first appearance. It is better primarily because you gave up trying to tell me all of the things you could have told me about the essay, and instead focused on what was most important to say in relation to your thesis. I think that the essay gets better and better as it goes on, particularly in terms of those transitions from one related idea to the next. I’m not going to lie, I still think that opening paragraph needs work. You’ve got three ideas: the piece is about escapism and decay; they (presumably both—though you only talk about decay) manifest in “decay created by Elizabeth and Kendra” (I’m a little lost at what that means honestly); and Kendra and Elizabeth exist as parallel figures. Again I ask, how are those last two sentences connected. Of course they are, but it would be easier on the reader if that was explained better. It’s something about the dueling images of decay and escaping that decay (right—that’s what they are actually trying to do?) that shed light on each woman’s relationship to both escape and decay. See what I mean?
I think your second set of reader’s notes are also strong with, again, the exception of the opening paragraph. In that paragraph you suggest that you are going to write about how EW-Y’s piece is in direct response to a poem, and yet hardly any of what you write here is about that poem or how EW-Y’s piece is in response to it. You are mainly talking about how the author conceptualizes her relationship to her first language—scientifically, philosophically, instinctually, culturally, socially. The Milosz poem is just one way she tries to make her point. In that way, your opening paragraph might work better as a closing paragraph. As with Charade, your thinking and reading of the essay is smart and on point, but the way you present it via an opening paragraph makes the reading muddled.
Reader’s Notes: Charade was one of the earliest essays we read in our class, and, unlike a lot of your classmates, you immediately treated it as a text with form and shape and purpose put there by an author in control of her narrative. You see that in your reflection here—and, honestly, in all of your reading. That’s much to your credit. You understood that this genre doesn’t just happen like a diary entry—as too many of your classmates did. You are already identifying the features of the genre: role of research, the intimate voice, structure, etc.
I feel privileged to get to read your 3.5 experiment and want to suggest that this turn into your final project. My comments here are meant to get you to think about this as your final project and less as the culminating writing from the first half of the semester. Before I do that, I want to say that, unfortunately, I understand your perspective from a very personal place. My mother suffered with early onset. It’s a particularly cruel, brutal disease. She died in 2012. So my goal is to help you tell this story the way you most want to tell it. And I hope it ends up in a place where you want to publish it. I have two immediate suggestions for you as you think about moving the piece forward. What we have in front of us is the essential arc of the story here—and remember, you are not turning you and your family into characters. You are ultimately in charge of how they are presented to a reader. Your father’s illness; what the illness actually looks like in real life; and, finally, what you most want people to know about what it means to live with this disease as a family. Your point, that there is a lot of life that happens between diagnosis and the images of Alzheimer’s we think of when we hear the word, is a valid one that needs to be made clear.
As I read your piece, you have almost all narration. This is what happens in a first draft, particularly for new writers in the genre. You have no scenes. You want to think about how you can sometimes slow down and expand a moment, an illustrative example, of your larger concept. So cover less, but with cover that with detail and emphasis. Secondly, thinking about the role research plays, there are obvious and easy ways to tell people what this disease is—and how it is different than 90 year old senility. There are also some cultural moments that could add a richness to the piece—there was a great piece on, I think, like CNN many years ago where Sandra Day O’Connor allowed her family to be interviewed about her husband, who suffers from Alzheimer’s. They allowed him to become the person he was at that moment. There is also a great PBS documentary, the name of which escapes me. Bringing in other stories alongside your own would be useful. I would encourage you to think about these two things, do some writing, and then let’s see where you are at in our conference.
This letter is plenty long. You’ve been a great student to work with.
S—
It’s a real pleasure to write this letter to you. I know you are a fiction writer, but you have developed, in the short space of 8 weeks, a nonfiction voice. It’s everywhere in evidence, from your reader’s notes, to your more formal writing, to your reflections in this very portfolio.
Reader’s Notes: So, as I said, your voice in your reflection turns this short reflective piece into a mini-essay about essays unto itself. Not a requirement of the assignment, but certainly appreciated. The “gut” and Gutkind moment was not lost on me—nor was your last line. When I wasn’t dazzled by your writing, I was impressed with the depth of the journey you identify here. I like how you critique your own initial reading of Charade and use it as a point of departure to identify what you’ve learned and when in the semester you’ve learned it. In truth, your experience of discovery was what I had hoped would happen in class. So it was validating in that sense as well. You have become, in a very short span of time, an excellent reader of the genre. This reflection and the representative work included here are evidence.
Enhanced Revision: I appreciate that you wrestled with two of my most major suggestions for revision. It meant that you thought about them, why I suggested them. I did suggest them out of a desire to make the connections you were trying to make easier for a reader to understand. I did not understand your coin moment until you explained it in your reflection and thought, as I read, how much I would have liked that explanation to appear in the actual paper—a version of which did. I still think the paragraph switch up would make it an easier reading experience—just because Browne wrote in one way doesn’t mean you’ve got to analyze it that way. But point taken. Most of all, I appreciate the time and energy you gave to the revision.
Second Enhanced: So, this is the theme of this letter, you are shedding your academic voice and embracing a different beast. This entire piece is really beautifully written and a pleasure to read. And You see this in the opening of your second set of enhanced notes. I am charmed by the opening. But I am more impressed with your deft summary of Rushdy’s project. I am not sure I agree with your argument though. I struggled to know if you were referring to readers as folks akin to the TV show hosts talked about in the opening or if you were talking about Rushdy. I think it’s a tough argument to make that he has only a fleeting relationship with guilt and remorse—the three volumes and the essay itself would seem to not support that. Us as readers, maybe. The analysis of what actually happens in the essay feels solid—but also would contradict your thesis if it is about Rushdy’s relationship to the events. I felt I understood what you were trying to get me to see on page four. I can’t agree, but I see it. I don’t know that an essay can cure apathy. That’s seems like quite a charge for anyone or any text, but OK.
3.5: On a scale of Thomas Browne to David Sedaris. Very funny Ms. Ramsey. Your reflection in and of itself was worth the read. This is really and excellent example of a hybrid essay—an essay of ideas that is also a personal essay. You’ve learned so quickly the moves an essayist makes—that personal voice that aims to say big and important things. I think you’ve said you intend to turn this into your final essay, and I hope that is true. Certainly it is with that in mind that I give you feedback. I enjoy the creepy dream opening, though I do not immediately feel the connection between that scene and the move to talk about the Star Wars. I do think, also, that we readers need a few sentences explaining what you mean about sci-fi table top games. I appreciate the D&D reference, but could use just a bit more. Once suggestions I have is for your to play with organization. I also wonder—I’m not sure about this—if there is something to develop here about the very idea of getting to create your own world. It’s sort of a if I could have anything in the world that I wanted. . . type deal. This is one and a half spaced, and the opening page and a half reads long. There is a lot of explanation of worlds until we get to your central question. I wonder if this could be streamlined a bit and/or for some of your philosophizing could happen between your worlds versus David’s world. Because after what feels like a quirky and approachable opening, we land in Freud. I wonder what the effect would be to ground your world building with Freud. In fact, that’s a chief consideration throughout the piece. You’ve got your paper in neat chunks, what would happen if they are less neat.
There is a shift when you get to the example of not crossing the street. That’s not about being part of a one or not as I read it. It’s about not wanting to trouble people. Can you make me understand how it’s about being part of a one or not?
Your last paragraph works for me until the last line—which seems to go in a different direction. Also, I think the extensive world-building opening deserves a revisit here. That works both in terms of style and purpose. How is our Star Wars girl doing after considering Freud, Macbeth, and Dante? What if they all went out for a bite, water bottles in hand?
Another thing I notice is that you never name names—the name of your Star Wars character who resists being of the one. Your Christian music singer guy. Description without naming details.
I can’t wait for the revision.
You are an excellent student, there doesn’t need to be anything else to say.