Day 11

Mon. Sept. 26

Improving aphorisms
Capturing a moment

Homework

Featured

Due at midnight (11:59pm) on Sunday May 14 (China time)

Choose one of your three essays—the one you’re proudest of, or most interested in improving—and revise it into a complete, polished work that you could imagine being published in the Literary Atlas of DKU, or elsewhere.

➤ Tell me which essay you want to revise

By next class, please decide (at least tentatively) which of your essays you want to revise and submit as your final project.

Message me on WeChat and tell me which essay you think you’ll choose! This is particularly important if you think you might want to revise your character essay — if so, I will get you feedback on it as early as possible to give you more time to work.

As soon as you have a new version of your essay ready, feel free to make an appointment with me to read it. There’s no limit to the number of times we can meet, but note that it’s better not to wait to last minute to make an appointment! The closer we get to the deadline, the greater the chance that I may already be booked up and have to say no.

➤ Write a “postcard from the present”

Write a paragraph 4-6 sentences long that attempts to capture, as vividly as possible, a specific moment between now and next class. Imagine that your intended reader is yourself, ten years from now. What could you put down on paper to vividly transport yourself back into this moment — to make them feel “there”?

Upload this assignment to our SharePoint folder, to the subfolder titled “Postcards from the Present.”

➤ Revise another aphorism

Look over the aphorisms written by your classmates again—either the ones based on the Proverbs of Hell, or the aphorisms for their characters. Pick one you think could be better written, and improve it in some way. You could try to:

Make it sound better
Make the logic, image, or metaphor clearer
Make it more concise
Make it more specific and interesting — avoid cliche

Upload the original aphorism and your rewritten version in the same Word document to the folder “Improved aphorisms 2.”

➤ Revise a sentence from your work

Go back through your writing this session and find a sentence that is mostly abstract that you think could be improved. Rewrite it, trying to improve it in the same way that you improved the aphorism—make it sound better, make the logic or image or metaphor clearer, make it more concise, and/or avoid cliche.

Upload the original sentence and your rewritten sentence in the same Word document to the folder “Rewritten sentence from your work.”

Featured

Joe Brainard, "I Remember" (excerpts)

Excerpts from the book I Remember, in which painter and poet Joe Brainard recalls his childhood in a series of brief vignettes, each of which begins with the words “I Remember.”

➤ Read “I Remember,” come ready to share observations

Read “I Remember” by Joe Brainard. (This is an excerpt from a book, all of which consists of these “I remember” statements.) Come ready to share some observations about this reading. What do you notice? Pay particular attention to patterns, and to the connections between the fragments—how do they connect? (Do they?)

WOC190 Fall 2022 Session 1