WRITING NATURE:
DISCOURSES OF ECOLOGY
ASSIGNMENT: A draft of the leap-of-faith essay.
In the various parts of this assignment -- as you have examined and analyzed the image you chose, your personal associations with it, and its broader implications -- you have probably considered several compelling ideas. One of your most important jobs in the draft of the essay is to identify and explore one particularly intriguing central idea that the image has stimulated you to think about. Through your exploration of this idea, the goal is to articulate your environmental ethic, or an important aspect of it.
In contemplating your central idea, consider explicitly the values that you see the image suggesting and that have animated your response to it. Consider your own personal values in the context of broadly held ones. By "values" we mean those cultural attitudes, religious beliefs, moral ideals and/or social dispositions that we bring to our "reading" of any text, whether that text is verbal or visual. Consider how such values are expressed in your image and how your values may be related to it.
Another of your jobs in constructing this draft (afterall. this is the Leap-of-Faith essay) is to consider the image in relation to at least three additional texts -- or four in all, including your original image. Two of these texts should be written, and two of these "texts" should be visual or multimedia. The written sources may include any of the readings (including the films) that you have encountered in this course so far -- or, for that matter, anything on our syllabus. For one of the two written texts, you may consider a text outside our course reading, in the form of a newspaper or magazine article, book, or internet site. Your additional visual "text" may be a photograph (published or personal), a painting, a drawing, an advertisement, a poster, a flyer, a film still, a video clip, a web page capture, a map, a graph, a chart whatever, as long as it is clearly and directly relevant to the development of your idea. You may use up to six outside sources, written and/or visual, but no more than that, total.
In constructing your draft, it is fine to cut and paste in parts of your writing in the earlier exercises, but you will of course want to edit, cut out material that distracts from your central idea, and generate new material in order to connect and relate excerpts from your earlier writings.
In the essay itself, describe and analyze the original visual image and include personal narrative elements to whatever extent you think necessary to establish the idea you want to discuss. You do not have to begin your essay with a discussion of the image, or with narration, although you may do so. Nor are you required to treat description and analysis of the visual image, or personal narrative, at any set length or in any particular way. The topic of this essay and your approach to the idea that you want to discuss will lead you to decide where and how the image and your personal experience will fit in.
Please include with your draft, as well as your revised essay, digitalized reproductions of the images that you work with. Integrate these images into your text (as you would quotations from written texts) and cite them accurately (as you would quotations and paraphrased points from written texts).
Finally, remember to include a works cited page in correct MLA format, accounting for all texts you cite in your essay, whether these are visual or written. In your essay, when you quote, quote accurately and use quotation marks correctly, and clearly cite references to texts with parenthetical citations. (Refer to A Pocket Syle Manual, Online!, and the appendix on research writing in Writing Nature for correct MLA form.)
A complete draft of the essay is due in class on Thursday, January 23, when you will all sign up for conferences and drafts with peer review partners. Please bring two copies of your draft to class on the 23rd -- one for me and one for your peer review partner.
Conferences, in which we will discuss these drafts, will be on Friday and Monday, January 24, and 27. You will probably want to bring an extra copy of your draft with you to your conference. Please complete a written peer review (see peer review questions for this essay) of your partner's draft before your conference.
The revision of the essay will be due in class on Friday, January 31, by 3 p.m. at my office.
Please see "Presentation of Written Work" in the course syllabus for specifications on formatting written work for this class.
A draft is just that: a draft -- a work in progress.
Imperfection and awkwardness never surprises me at the draft stage. Drafts are meant for revision! This draft should be a complete effort, with a beginning, middle, and end, but I do not expect a perfectly constructed or particularly polished piece of writing. In fact, you have much more important business to attend to here. In and through the process of writing this draft you should
figure out what your central idea is, what purpose you have in writing, and what impact you want to have on your reader, and begin to tailor your writing strategies and style to these;
plot out -- although you will no doubt sometimes plod through -- organizational strategy, including experiments in opening and closing your essay and linking one idea with the next as you move from paragraph to paragraph;
practice a variety of rhetorical strategies -- description, narration, analysis, use of outside source material to illuminate your text -- attempting to keep to one coherent and natural voice (that is, your own) as you move from one to another;
reach an honest and warranted conclusion (is a relatively low or relatively high level of generalization warranted?) as you begin to articulate your thesis;
experiment with what to include (and elaborate upon?) and what to leave out (or give passing reference to?);
determine which outside texts, written and visual, might serve you -- and where, and how, and why -- as you explore this compelling idea;
take risks in conceptualizing, organizing, and articulating an essay that only you could write!