You should also use 12-point font double spaced and MLA format. You should also focus on a different class reading in each paper. Further, you need to make sure that you write at least one paper on each of the genres explored during the semester–in other words, short stories (fiction), poems, and plays (drama). The first part is a traditional college essay containing a thesis and both quoting from and discussing at least one class reading. There are two ways you could and both quoting from and discussing at least one class reading. There are two ways you could approach this task: You could make a point about that reading or readings; you could also use that reading or readings as evidence to support a point you’d like to make.
The second part is a section at the end on: a. how and why you decided to use a certain rhetorical mode (or a combination of rhetorical modes), and/or b. what modes you ended up seeing in operation once you looked back at what you had written. Basically, you want to explain your thought and writing processes here. What did choosing/using one or more mode end up doing for you as a writer? How did it help you to create the paper you wanted to write?
**THESE ARE THE STORIES WE READ THROUGHOUT THE SEMESTER***
Short Stories:
Toni Cade Bambara, “The Lesson”
Lynne Sharon Schwartz, “Over the Hill”: Over the HilL Full text.pdf
Literary theory of the week: “Psychoanalytic Criticism (1930s-present)” from Purdue OWL
Daniel Orozco, “Orientation”
Shirley Jackson, “My Life With R.H. Macy”
Material on rhetorical modes:
ISU Writing Program, Illinois State University: “A List of Rhetorical Strategies”
K.Hope, “Rhetorical Modes” (This is the working link for the more detailed list suggested by ISU.)
Gerald Grow, “Seven Types of Paragraph Development” (This is a smaller list, but it contains an extended example of each mode on it.)
Paintings on which to try out the above-described and discussed modes:
Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas
Kerry James Marshall, Souvenir I
Pablo Picasso, Girl before a Mirror
George Tooker, The Subway
Short Stories:
Gish Jen, “Who’s Irish?”
Grace Paley, “A Conversation With My Father”
Alice Walker, “Everyday Use” (Here’s the original version, which looks much better but which has no page numbers.)
Theory of the week: “Reader-Response Criticism (1960s-present)” from Purdue OWL
Short Stories:
Willa Cather, “Paul’s Case”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”
–a brief explanatory article by Gilman called “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper”
–an intro to the movie Gaslight, which has numerous similarities to “The Yellow Wallpaper,” is set in the same year, and is where the term “gaslighting” comes from:
Alissa Wilkinson, “What is gaslighting? The 1944 film Gaslight is the best explainer.”
Theory of the week: “Feminist Criticism (1960s-present)” from Purdue OWL
