For those of you interested in Twitter

In today's New York Times, a fascinating series of short responses to an essay by Malcolm Gladwell in the current issue of The New Yorker.

How to use the semicolon -- a comic treatment

This is a brilliant explanation of how to use a semicolon properly.

Enjoy!

The Purdue Online Writing Lab

One of the best and most comprehensive online resources for student writers is the Purdue Online Writing Lab. Here is the link. You can find help with almost every aspect of essay writing there, from generating thesis statements to quotation and citation.

No blog comments due this week

Just work steadily on your essays! Email me directly if you have questions or need help!

Assignments, weeks 5-6

Essay #1 due dates:


Proposal (one paragraph): Thursday, 9/16

First draft (full draft): Thursday, 9/23

Final draft (must be typed and double-spaced): Tuesday, 10/5

For those of you who found Carr to be an alarmist

There's a new book out by Nick Bilton that appears to argue against Carr's "Google is making us stupid" position pretty forcefully.

I'm looking forward to reading it myself ... in print. ;-)

On Grafton (your comments, please)

In his essay, "Future Reading," Anthony Grafton argues that the utopian project to digitize all of the documents of human history, including books, will fail. It will fail, he says, in part because of corporate financial decisions. Google, Amazon and the rest are limited in what they can scan by copyright. Furthermore, they don't plan to offer images of early printed books. They won't be scanning documents from poor societies. "Poverty," he writes, "is embodied in lack of print as well as in lack of food."

Finally, this would-be universal library is "closed to those without access or money" -- those who can't afford computers, or subscriptions to the online databases. Unlike the New York Public Library, which serves all of the people, the Internet only serves those who can afford it.

What do you make of this economic argument? Do you think that Grafton is wrong -- that we can achieve an "infotopia"?

On Carr and Sullivan (your comments, please)

Nicholas Carr is worried. Very, very worried. In his essay, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Carr observes that his and others' ability to concentrate -- to read and think deeply and at length -- has been damaged by his heavy use of the Internet. He argues that the very medium of the Internet -- the way it works, and the way it demands that we use it -- is responsible for this damage. According to Carr, the digital era has decreased our mental capacity, and this is a bad thing, socially speaking.

Andrew Sullivan, on the other hand, thinks the Internet has been a hugely liberating force for writers. While he makes a point of discussing blogging's disadvantages (especially when compared with the professional standards of print journalism), he celebrates blogging's immediacy -- the ways in which the new medium allows all sorts of people to "write out loud."

Which writer do you agree with, Carr or Sullivan? Or both? Or neither? And why? Do you think there's anything that their arguments overlook or just plain get wrong?

I'm eager to hear what you think.

Short response #1 (memoir) assignment

While discussing the Frederick Douglass essay, we noted that his narrative participates in the reflective mode, in which the writer offers a detailed account of a past experience, as well as observations about that experience’s greater significance.

I would like you to respond to Douglass’s reflective essay by writing one of your own. This is a relatively short and ungraded piece (you will simply receive “credit” or “no credit”), so feel free to stretch yourself a bit as a writer. Take this as your one and only opportunity to write creative non-fiction in this course.

To write this short essay of about 3 pages (double-spaced), you must:
-- choose an experience you feel is worth recounting
-- consider the larger significance of the experience—ideally, beyond your own, individual life
-- decide which details are worth relating to the reader, and which can be passed over quickly or omitted
-- write a first draft of the essay, concentrating your energies on getting it down on paper/onscreen
-- revise that draft, making sure you have firmly linked the particular experience you describe to the larger significance
-- edit for diction and sentence clarity

Due date: Thursday, 9/16, hard copy, in class

On Hampl's "The Dark Art of Description" (on which you shall comment)

Hampl suggests that contemporary autobiographical writing rarely describes extreme circumstances; rather, recent memoirs tend to be "the story of perception" -- that is, they are more concerned with how their narrators experienced more or less ordinary events, than with the events themselves. So the matter of which details the writer chooses to present becomes very important. Description becomes key--maybe even more important than plot.

While making this argument about the importance of description, Hampl quotes the writer Vladimir Nabokov: "Caress the detail, the divine detail." (If you don't know who Nabokov is, read one of his books. You can thank me later.) 

So: What does it mean to "caress" a detail? To make it "divine"? If you have ever noticed a writer (or a filmmaker, or a visual artist, for that matter) doing this, tell us about it briefly.