Austin Woerner's Memory Palace
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WOC190 Spring 2023 Session 3

Day 11

Mon. Feb. 20

  • Improving aphorisms

  • Capturing a moment

Homework

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WOC190 - Final project
WOC190 - Final project

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.”

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Joe Brainard, "I Remember" (excerpts)
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?)

➤ Improve a sentence in your writing

Following on our discussion about improving aphorisms, go back into your writing (maybe your Essay 3?) and find one abstract sentence you think could be improved — a sentence using language that is vague, or ambiguous, or cliched, or overly wordy. (See if you can find a sentence that uses mostly abstract language — these tend to be the ones that have these kinds of problems!) Improve that sentence in the way we did our aphorisms: make it more concise, make it sound better, make it more memorable or more vivid, make the logic of the metaphor make more sense… Post the original sentence and the improved sentence together in the folder “Improve a sentence from your work” on SharePoint.

Austin Woerner